English Language Learners

Anonymous

00:01

44

A: Do you really answer “How do you do?” with “How do you do?”

You are absolutely correct. "How do you do" is an old fashioned introduction and is an obsolete synonym of "hello", and consequently the proper response is "how do you do?". Mr Darlington: How do you do, Mrs Windermere? Mrs Windermere: How do you do, Mr Darlington? This exchange is exa...

Anonymous

I think I have, somewhere in the back of my mind, the knowledge that you respond to "How do you do?" with "How do you do?"

Anonymous

But since I've never had a chance to practice it, I don't know what would happen if, say, a year from now, someone actually said it to me :-)

Anonymous

When this conversation is, perhaps, long forgotten

Damkerng T.

Ah, Howdy!

Anonymous

Some people do say that! :-)

Anonymous

00:04

Not around here, though.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I can't figure out which vowels are noticeable.

Anonymous

Like, at 0:18?

Damkerng T.

Maybe only the part after everything is getting cold.

@snailboat I can't tell it! Her vowels stay in the range of AmE to my ear.

I didn't know that J.J. Abrams was in the audition himself. But when I think about it, it makes sense.

Anonymous

Hey, he can't spend all his time writing theme songs.

Damkerng T.

Hah! :-)

Anonymous

00:15

I guess these days it would be more topical if I said:

Anonymous

Hey, he can't spend all his time adding lens flares.

Damkerng T.

Oh, I like those lens flares!

+1 @DamkerngT. Thank you effusively! Please feel free to unite all your comments into an answer, for which I'll merrily upvote! — Law Area 51 Proposal - Commit 50 mins ago

Umm... but I didn't really want to post an answer to that question!

Anonymous

I didn't notice any excess of lens flares.

Anonymous

But everyone drew my attention to them. He's famous for his lens flares, it seems.

Damkerng T.

Hehe! He used it even more often in Fringe!

Anonymous

00:23

Ah! Is that a movie?

Damkerng T.

It's a series. Kinda like Lost plus The X-Files.

Anonymous

I haven't seen it yet.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat They use an isolation tank similar to one in Altered States. I think Altered States is probably the first sci-fi movie I've ever watched.

Anonymous

0

A: 'fewer' vs 'lesser' with plural noun phrases

Few does not specify quantity but cardinality.

Damkerng T.

Fewer vs. lesser again!

Anonymous

00:27

What exactly does this mean?

Damkerng T.

I think he suggests that fewer is only used with countable things.

Like, fewer water or fewer amount of water doesn't really work.

Anonymous

Oh, I failed to understand because quantity includes countable things in my mind

Damkerng T.

I suppose!

I guess it's because of cardinality that makes me read quantity that way.

Anonymous

I understand what he wrote now that you explained, though

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I think I was misled by the OP's title. Fewer is supposed to be less's buddy. (Not lesser's.)

Anonymous

00:34

When I think of cardinality, in my mind it's contrasted with ordinality

Damkerng T.

His answer is probably not the best way to phrase it.

Oh, LawA51P also sent his comments to @StoneyB as well!

My crisis with negatives continues to plague me: ell.stackexchange.com/q/51371/8712 — Law Area 51 Proposal - Commit 2 hours ago

@LawArea51Proposal-Commit CGEL has an entire chapter on negation which is well worth reading. But allow me to ask: do you have difficulty following texts of this sort in French? — StoneyB 17 mins ago

That's curious!

Anonymous

00:52

Oh, CGEL's chapter on negation is tough for me.

Anonymous

I'm always amazed how different scope of negation is in different languages

Anonymous

It's complicated in Japanese, too. But in general, negation has a much narrower scope in Japanese

Damkerng T.

I almost forgot, it's the Red Carpet time!

infinitesimal

Hip hip hooray :-)

Damkerng T.

I wonder if anyone will say "Me either" again this year. :-)

Anonymous

00:56

What's that?

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Celebs show up on the red carpet at the front of Oscars.

infinitesimal

Academy Awards

Anonymous

Ahh

Anonymous

I've never watched one of those before

infinitesimal

I think there's a chatroom set up for those interested.

Anonymous

00:58

@DamkerngT. In English, you can say "I was not born in 1920." Like, me, for example. I was born in the 80s. So for me, the statement is true.

Anonymous

In Japanese, though, #私は１９２０年に生まれなかった doesn't make sense.

Damkerng T.

Eh?

Anonymous

The negative has scope over only the verb

Anonymous

Not over the year

Anonymous

So it's like saying that in 1920, not being born is something you did

Anonymous

01:01

It doesn't really make sense :-)

Damkerng T.

That's confusing!

infinitesimal

:/

Damkerng T.

Not being born is something you did. -- I will remember that. Looks useful when I want to confuse someone. :P

Anonymous

So instead, you'd want to nominalize the clause and negate it with a copula: 私は　[　１９２０年に生まれた　]-の　ではない。

Anonymous

Or use a cleft: [ 私が生まれた ]-のは　１９２０年ではない。

Anonymous

01:06

In the former, you're turning the entire predicate １９２０年に生まれた 'was born in 1920' into a nominal (basically, a noun) using の, and then you're negating it: "It is not the case that I was born in 1920"

Anonymous

In the latter, the cleft presupposes that you were born, and the variable is the year in which you were born; you negate the variable: "It is not in 1920 that I was born"

Damkerng T.

Both sound like cleft sentences to me!

Oh, I just noticed something in Oscars, about the uptalk!

Anonymous

If you look at the structure in Japanese: watasi-wa [ 1920-nen-ni umareta ]-no de-wa nai, you can see it's not a cleft

infinitesimal

What are "up talks" @DamkerngT.?

Anonymous

Look up "high rising terminal" @infinitesimal

Damkerng T.

01:12

Oh, yes. The uptalk in Oscars. I just noticed that uptalk speakers don't always talk uptalk-like! They will use downstep to end their paragraphs!

infinitesimal

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

That^?

Damkerng T.

Yes!

infinitesimal

hmmm ...

Have you been watching the cricket?

Damkerng T.

I'm sorry. I haven't.

I don't know how to watch cricket games. :-)

(Not to mention playing it.)

infinitesimal

icic

Damkerng T.

01:19

Lady Gaga is in white today!

infinitesimal

Interesting colour choice

Damkerng T.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is nominated this year!

infinitesimal

The Sreening Room chatroom is having an Oscars event.

Damkerng T.

looking...

infinitesimal

The Screening Room

“We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselv...

Anonymous

02:12

I watched the Oscars just now for about thirty seconds

Anonymous

That was the cheesiest speech I've heard in a long time :-)

Anonymous

It makes me less ashamed of some of my cheesier writing by comparison

Anonymous

Maybe if I watched this sort of thing more often, I'd realize that there's a time and a place for cheese, and this is it

infinitesimal

Context is king :)

You know what goes good with cheesy remarks?

Catija

02:33

Wine-ing?

infinitesimal

You got it!

Btw Welcome :-)

Catija

:D Just popping back and forth. :)

infinitesimal

Cool

Ben Kovitz

03:21

Back. (Made it to school, finally got some work done.)

@Catija BTW, in my own experience, I have only heard "highway robbery" used as an absurd, metaphorical exaggeration.

Anonymous

Nonetheless, it's used literally sometimes

Ben Kovitz

Yes, of course. I was saying earlier that mentioning usage frequencies and citing dictionary definitions is misleading with regard to the absurdity or metaphoricalness of the expression. Native speakers understand that saying "highway robbery" for charging a high price is metaphorical, while they understanding "gouging" for the same meaning as literal. By I think trying to spell all this stuff out is hopeless.

Anonymous

Misleading how?

Ben Kovitz

Actually, I think in my own in-person conversations, I have only heard "highway robbery" said as a joke to make fun of people who accuse people who charge high prices of "highway robbery".

Misleading, because saying "This usage occurs x% blah blah" suggests that the way to think about these things is by taking measurements like that, or that it's a matter of "correctness". The thing about the expression is that it's absurd, it's metaphorical, it's (sometimes) humorous, it calls up images of "The Highwayman", etc. Fluent speakers are in on that. You really learn the meaning when you're in on it, too.

Anonymous

03:36

I don't think it's misleading to point out that it's mainly used figuratively, but is still used literally occasionally

Ben Kovitz

That's not so bad. What's really misleading is to say that it's literal because a dictionary lists it as one sense of the phrase.

Anonymous

That's just a failure to understand what literal means.

Ben Kovitz

Well, words and phrases do shift from being used metaphorically to taking on the metaphorical meaning as their literal meaning. For example, "gouging" literally means charging an unconscionably high price when you've got someone in a tough spot; it doesn't bring to mind (er, this is hard to put into words) sticking something into something and forcing material out to form a groove.

But "highway robbery" still does bring up echoes of Robin Hood.

Anonymous

Literal-figurative is a false dichotomy.

Ben Kovitz

Yeah, the distinction is not so crisp.

But I do think it's clear that "buxom", which once meant "pliable", has lost all metaphorical connection with that, and now means something like plump, jolly, and female.

This happens all the time. It may yet happen to "highway robbery". But it hasn't yet.

Trying to spell out this out explicitly, with the idea that a learner will memorize, seems to me like a hopeless idea.

Anonymous

03:48

Hey, I got the generalist badge on ELU! I don't think I've gotten one of those before :-)

Ben Kovitz

What is the generalist badge?

Anonymous

english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/14/…

Anonymous

No one has it on ELL, probably because there aren't enough tags that meet the minimum requirements

Ben Kovitz

Impressive. I hadn't even heard of it before. Congratulations!

Anonymous

But on a site like ELU, it's probably relatively easy to get.

Ben Kovitz

03:51

Actually, I'll bet "gouging" still brings to mind the older, literal meaning a little bit, just as "upload" and "download" retain their spatial associations even as they have non-spatial literal meanings regarding computers.

Anonymous

It's hard to say on any of those accounts. The null hypothesis is that we all conceptualize them differently

Ben Kovitz

But economics glossaries will contain "price gouging" but not "highway robbery". That's the distinction I'm trying to get at.

Well, I consider the null hypothesis to be undoubtedly true. The question is how differently, and what sorts of expectations you can reasonably have about how your listener conceptualizes them, what sorts of speech communities and traditions use the term for what purposes, etc. It's a big, messy, complex thing--which is why I don't like to see usage frequencies quoted to "settle" matters like this.

For example, "highway robbery" brings to my mind the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I'm sure I'm in a minority there. My own memory of the poem is extremely vague. But I do think that "highway robbery" brings to most native speakers' minds something like the atmosphere of that poem, even if they've never heard of it, because I figure that this sort of thing percolates through the culture.

Whoa, I just looked it up:

Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

Anonymous

You can use > quote markdown in chat

Ben Kovitz

Oh, excellent. I'll try it again:

> Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

Catija

@BenKovitz I take it you've never seen Anne of Green Gables? The title character recites it at one point.

Ben Kovitz

04:04

@Catija Nope! I think I'm undernourished in regard to this kind of thing.

@Catija And yet, the overtones and associations and connotations have somehow percolated to me. So I figure something similar has percolated to most native speakers in mainstream society.

@Catija BTW, I had a terrible thought with regard to explaining "highway robbery". I think if it were left to me (which happily it is not), I would refrain entirely from explaining it to someone who asked about "robbery", in order not to deprive them of the experience of "getting it" when they encounter it in actual usage. It would be like explaining a joke--before the person has even heard it.

Catija

HA HA.

Anonymous

For me, there's nothing to get. I understand "That's highway robbery!" as something like "That's an exorbitant price, and I'm indignant about it!" The phrase is too hackneyed for it to really register for me

Catija

Same, @snailboat I never think of the original meaning.

Ben Kovitz

It's certainly hackneyed. I and everyone I know only uses it as a joke, to make fun of people who would actually try to equate charging a high price with robbing someone on a dark road at musket-point.

Anonymous

So, from my point there's very little value in talking about the associated imagery, since there isn't any

Ben Kovitz

04:13

Hmm, I doubt that there isn't any imagery. You might not focus on it, but it's there, unless you're really not clued in to the whole Robin Hood / highway robber thing that explains it. It's like the way "price gouging" still activates a kind of imagination of shocking violence even though that term has taken on the meaning so literally that you'll find it in economics glossaries.

Catija

But terms like gouge out your eyes are still in regular use.

Anonymous

It would never have occurred to me to associate the phrase with Robin Hood

Ben Kovitz

Yes, and so is "robbery". But I don't think a fact like that can decide a question like this. You just have to have a sense, from vast experience, of what kinds of associations are floating around in the culture, how strongly, among what groups, used for what purposes, etc.

Anonymous

I'm not really sure what use it serves to speculate about what sorts of associations other speakers might have

Anonymous

Usage and meaning seem to be the two most useful things

Ben Kovitz

04:16

The use is communication. You have to speculate about what associations other people have in order to communicate with them.

Anonymous

So you think if you called something "highway robbery", though I share none of your associations, we'd fail to communicate as a result?

Ben Kovitz

Meaning is the associations people have! Usage is the patterns that you can expect other people to be familiar with, to varying degrees. There's no use of language without speculation.

Anonymous

I'm referring of course to the associations you're speculating about, not the actual meaning the phrase carries in common usage

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Of course not. Did you follow what I was saying about how these things vary from person to person, there are different speech communities, different traditions, stuff percolates through the culture, etc.?

If you didn't have any of the "masked man with a musket" associations, certainly you'd miss certain associations that I'd be trying to evoke by saying the phrase.

For example, if I say it, I'll probably say it in a certain exaggerated tone of voice, trying to echo people who say it in a serious attempt to equate charging high prices with highway robbery. If you haven't been exposed to people who say it that way, you won't know who I'm mocking.

New EFL learners, of course, are going to be clued in to a lot fewer of these kinds of associations.

None of this is news to anyone, though, right?

Catija

@BenKovitz But robbery is not the whole phrase... highway robbery is the phrase. The literal use of highway robbery is not in use to nearly the degree that the literal use of gouge is.

Ben Kovitz

04:27

@Catija Sure. I'm just saying that a factor like that can't decide a question like this. You learn what's common knowledge, mostly common knowledge, sort of common knowledge, etc. through very complex experience that gives you an idea of what you can reasonably expect words to trigger in other people's minds, what they can expect you to expect you can trigger, etc.

@Catija Also, "gouging"has taken on a new, genuinely literal meaning. That's why you can find it in economics textbooks, but you won't find "highway robbery" there.

@Catija And yet, the association with a certain kind of violent motion is still evoked by the phrase "price gouging" (less so among economists and policymakers who use it constantly, of course).

Catija

But the term in that case is generally price gouging... and it just gets shortened to gouging.

Ben Kovitz

@Catija Yes. In context, you can use "gouging" to mean charging high prices when other people are in a tough spot. Out of context, you have to say "price gouging". It's sort of like "ATM machine". Adding "machine" clarifies it. Making an educated guess about whether the clarifying word is needed depends on vast amounts of experience. It can't be explained with simple rules and definitions that a person could memorize and apply consciously.

I'm worried that I'm belaboring the obvious here. Am I?

Catija

ATM machine is not clarification. It's incorrect. It's redundant to say Machine, not clarifying.

Anonymous

@Catija Redundancy is not by definition incorrect.

Anonymous

Redundancy is a natural part of language.

Anonymous

04:32

It is true that some people object to ATM machine.

Catija

And PIN Number....

Anonymous

It is nonetheless natural English.

Ben Kovitz

@Catija Hmm. Maybe what I'm saying here is not common knowledge after all. You never know for sure until you test the speculation. :)

@Catija Consider the psychological pressure that makes people want to add "machine" after "ATM" even though technically it's redundant.

It's because out of context, ATM doesn't evoke much of anything in people's minds. It's not like LBJ or FDR or IBM. So, a common and very effective strategy is to tack on a generic term--to provide the missing context. It doesn't matter if the generic term is technically included in the acronym.

Anonymous

That depends on the person, of course. Many people are comfortable with just ATM.

Ben Kovitz

Without an acronym, people following the same principle when they say "price gouging".

Catija

04:36

I never feel the urge to say ATM machine or PIN number.

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Of course. It depends on context, it varies from person to person, etc. I'm explaining why people do add "machine", "price", "number", etc. This doesn't apply to people who don't (of course).

Anonymous

Another possible explanation: They've heard other people say ATM machine, so they say it too.

Anonymous

Seems at least as plausible to me

Ben Kovitz

The same pressure is even stronger for adding "number" to PIN: when you say it, it sounds like "pin"! "I forgot my pin." What does that mean?

@snailboat Yes, certainly, that is another factor, another pressure. Decisions about word choices are shaped by many, many factors simultaneously. I don't think it's even possible to catalog them all.

@snailboat Is this a new idea? I mean, do we really disagree about any of this?

Anonymous

No, presumably the redundancy either serves a purpose now or served a purpose at one point for some speakers who use it

Ben Kovitz

04:42

@Catija I'm kind of surprised that you don't feel that urge. I get the impression from your ELL posts that you write empathically and with common sense, that you're aware of the possibility for misunderstanding, incomprehension, and ambiguity, and you thoughtfully adjust to that constantly. Well, everyone does, but you seem in the higher percentiles. :)

Anonymous

I don't think that's a particularly controversial assertion

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Sorry, there are too many sentences flying around, and I can't tell what your last "No" and "that" refer to.

Anonymous

You asked me a question in the line immediately preceding my response

Catija

@snailboat This is my thought. I think most people do it out of habit, not thinking about it being repetitive.

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Actually, I asked two questions. I'm having a hard time understanding how your "No..." sentence answers either one. (There you go, you make guesses about how people will make sense of what you say, usually it works pretty well, sometimes it doesn't, and then you clarify.)

@Catija Well, there's a reason why the habit started, there's a reason why arguments that "number" is redundant don't have much effect, and there's a reason why the habit persists even in the face of the ever-present pressure to shorten phrases to remove redundancy.

Anonymous

04:48

That pressure, to be fair, is relatively mild

Catija

@BenKovitz I use different tone in writing, and specifically here, than I do IRL. I know that the people I'm talking to are here for clarification and the last thing I want to do is confuse them more. When I speak IRL with other native speakers, I don't necessarily follow that style.

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Sorry, I don't follow your "that" again.

Anonymous

Anyway, sorry, I'm not feeling well and I'm multi-tasking, and I'm not particularly enthused about the discussion at the moment, so I may not be putting much effort into it

Anonymous

@BenKovitz Okay, I'll explicitly resolve my antecedents for you.

Ben Kovitz

@Catija Why, when you speak IRL with other native speakers, do you adopt a different style? Why not the same style for everyone?

Anonymous

04:50

[The ever-present pressure to shorten phrases to remove redundancy], to be fair, is relatively mild.

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat I understand. No problem. Can you let me know if you really disagree with what I'm saying, or if I'm just pointing out obvious things that you (like me) take as common sense?

Anonymous

@BenKovitz Well, you've said any number of things.

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Regarding "the ever-present pressure": yes, I agree. My main point is that there are many simultaneous pressures, and a bunch of them keep the phrase with the redundant word alive.

Anonymous

Starting from the beginning, my thought is this: You suspect people think about things the way you do, which is natural, human nature―we all do that―but in fact, I think, everyone thinks about things in different ways

Anonymous

We tend to have a core of solid common ground

Catija

04:52

@BenKovitz Because it's exhausting and, when I type here, I have time to think and edit. I don't have that time or freedom when I'm speaking aloud.

Anonymous

And that is what tends to get most reliably communicated

Anonymous

I think the common ground is smaller than you suspect it is

Anonymous

You lost me when you started putting men with muskets in my head

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat I mean the idea that you make reasonable guesses, based on many, many simultaneous factors, about what associations your words will trigger in other people's minds as you choose your words. There isn't one simple factor, like "dictionary says X means Y, X means Y, end of story." Meaning is complex, messy, varies from person to person, etc.

Anonymous

It makes me wonder: am I the odd one out? Are you? I doubt either of us knows, since probably neither of us has really ventured to find out

Anonymous

04:55

@BenKovitz Well, the only person I've encountered who believes that about dictionaries is meatie

Anonymous

Nov 20 '14 at 20:59, by CopperKettle

I wondered if meatie isn't some AI project to learn the semantics of English

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Sorry, it was wrong of me to resort to violence. That never produces genuine, heartfelt agreement, anyway. ;)

meatie thinks that??

Catija

@BenKovitz From what you've said I'm guessing you speak multiple languages? You've gone through the process of learning a language?

Anonymous

@BenKovitz Almost all of meatie's questions look like this:

Anonymous

"I found this usage. But I can't find it in dictionaries. So is the usage wrong?"

Anonymous

04:59

1

Q: 'Pay $100 To Agent' or 'Pay Agent $100'

I have a question about the usage of "pay": He paid the agent $100. He paid $100 to the agent. Is the second pattern nonstandard? I don't seem to be able to find it in dictionaries.

Ben Kovitz

Well, I have encountered people who claim to believe that about dictionaries. But I think they're giving in to another pressure: the pressure to have a clear, unambiguous way to settle debates. The obvious facts that words' meanings are subtle and vary and people implicitly ask others to bend them to fit new contexts and dictionaries are just a few people's very terse attempts at summarizing all that stuff conflict with the need to "win" arguments.

Anonymous

Here meatie discovers the dative alternation, and for some reason expects it to be listed in dictionaries

Ben Kovitz

@Catija Sadly, I have never gotten fluent with another language. I've spent some time with Mandarin and Italian, though, and right now I'm learning Latin as an experiment. (Plus a wee bit of Russian.)

Catija

@snailboat There was a question like that earlier...

This one: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/51348/…

Ben Kovitz

BTW, the "ATM machine" phenomenon positively dominates Mandarin. The pressures that necessitate it are fairly strong in English, but enormously strong in Mandarin.

It would take a while to explain, but it's only a slight exaggeration to say that every syllable in Mandarin is like PIN. So, when necessary to avoid ambiguity, people tack on a second syllable, which carries the generic meaning. The two-syllable combinations function as "words", but you can often drop the second syllable.

I have indeed occasionally encountered foreigners arguing that some common native usage is "wrong" because it doesn't agree with what they read in a dictionary or were taught in their ESL class.

(Mostly Russians.)

Anonymous

05:05

Oh, you encounter all sorts of ignorance about language among speakers of all languages

Ben Kovitz

It amazes me, since I think it's just common sense that words are messy and "stretchable". But the situation may be different in other languages.

Anonymous

@BenKovitz Old Chinese was almost a monosyllabic language

Ben Kovitz

But I can also empathize with the desire for a foreign language to be crisp and regular and uniform. That would make it so much easier to learn! English seems almost consciously designed to frustrate that hope.

Anonymous

Mandarin has largely disyllabified because it has much simpler phonology, which means far fewer syllables are distinguished, and because its vocabulary has grown through compounding

Ben Kovitz

A Hungarian friend told me that he was shocked to discover that other languages have different accents. He tells me that in Hungary, there are no dialects or regional accents. The grammar is almost perfectly regular, too (or so he says).

Anonymous

05:09

Well, that's false.

Anonymous

Hungarian dialects

The dialects of the Hungarian language identified by Ethnologue are: Great Hungarian Plain, West Danube, Danube-Tisza (territories between the two rivers), King's Pass Hungarian (Pass in Apuseni Mountains), Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people, and they therefore preserved a dialect...

Anonymous

But it's not surprising to hear people believe false things about their own languages.

Anonymous

→ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_verbs#Irregular_verbs

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Haa!! I will point him to that page.

He did tell me that there are some irregularities. But the way he told it to me, the great majority of verbs are regular and follow a single declension.

Yup, the main pressure for the "PIN number" phenomenon in Mandarin is the amazing paucity of syllables (together with the fact that every individual syllable carries meaning, and almost every one of them can function as a word).

Anonymous

By the way, nouns decline; verbs conjugate.

Ben Kovitz

05:13

Oops, I meant conjugation.

Anonymous

You can use the term "inflect" as a catch-all

Ben Kovitz

(I was asking a Russian friend about Russian declensions recently, and had to spend quite a while getting the concept across.)

Anonymous

I think my body is adjusting its core temperature, I feel really cold

Ben Kovitz

I didn't mean inflections, I meant distinct patterns of conjugation, like the -are, -ere, and -ire verbs of Italian.

@snailboat Changing the topic completely, have you ever looked into Latin hexameter poetry?

Anonymous

I'm no good with poetry

Anonymous

05:17

But!

Anonymous

I did sign up for the Poetry proposal:

Anonymous

32

Poetry

Proposed Q&A site for poets, critics, and scholars seeking insight and understanding of poems and their authors

Currently in definition.

Anonymous

Though it looks like it won't meet its requirements in time

Ben Kovitz

That's a shame. I'm sure the topic has plenty of material and plenty of people to support an SE site.

Anonymous

I personally use inflection whenever I can and ignore the other terms, because it saves me the trouble of making unnecessary theoretical judgments about word classes

Ben Kovitz

05:22

Sounds like a good idea. I started shying away from inflection when one friend thought I meant variations in intonation. Of course that's another sense of the word, but she hadn't heard of the grammatical sense. And there you go--this sort of experience affects judgements about what's common knowledge and what's not. But I probably shied away too much.

Actually, "conjugation" is troublesome, since it means both the form indicating a specific combination of tense, person, number, mood, etc. and a pattern of those forms, but I think most commonly is used for the former. Doesn't declension have the same ambiguity? But I hear first declension, second declension, etc. much more often than I hear declension used to refer to the form for a specific combination of case, number, etc.

Anonymous

06:15

@BenKovitz Well, to be honest, you're going to have trouble using almost any grammatical term if you expect random people to understand you

Anonymous

Even simple ones

Ben Kovitz

@snailboat Definitely. She was smart and educated, so I expected her to know. We even dated some. If a random person on the street didn't know the word "inflection", that wouldn't have surprised me.

Anonymous

For example, people talk about constructions as tenses ("the passive tense"), moods as tenses ("the subjunctive tense"), etc. Everything's a tense, 'cause tense is one of the grammatical words people know, though most people don't know what it is specifically

Anonymous

Likewise, semantics, the study of meaning; people say things like "that's just semantics", which if taken literally suggests meaning is somehow unimportant―clearly they're using some ill-defined folk definition of semantics

Anonymous

Or how about verbs, nouns, and adjectives?

Anonymous

06:19

"Faith is a verb" presupposes a definition of verb that makes no sense

Anonymous

Most educated speakers of English are educated in topics other than linguistics

Ben Kovitz

Indeed I don't trust people to know what verbs, nouns, and adjectives are, though I expect them to be somewhere not too far.

Most people think of 'noun' and 'verb' as defined by their meaning (roughly, nouns -> things, verbs -> actions), which is reasonable but wrong. But that explains what people mean by statements like "Faith is a verb" or Buckminster Fuller's "I seem to be a verb." They mean that these things that you might think of as static are really actions.

Anonymous

Yes, "Faith is a verb" is understandable because we can figure out what people think verb means, even if that definition is useless when it comes to describing language

Anonymous

And grammar is taken to be "every rule I learned in school, including stuff about punctuation and spelling"

Ben Kovitz

I think you have to understand that words often have a specialist's meaning and a popular meaning. And specialists often get snippy, calling the popular meaning "wrong" even though it's perfectly serviceable for the uses it's ordinarily put to. But in this case, the popular understanding is just wrong.

Anonymous

06:26

Well, more to the point, the popular definitions of these terms are mostly not useful

Ben Kovitz

Interestingly, though, the popular meaning of "verb" does line up with the specialist's meaning. When you ask nonspecialists to identify the verb in the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", they choose "jumped". What's wrong is the theory they believe about verbs.

Anonymous

Well, only kindasorta.

Anonymous

You'll find that people really do fail to identify basic parts of speech if you ask them.

Ben Kovitz

I think "that's just semantics" is fine, actually. They mean a pretty important and deep insight: which word you choose to represent your meaning is not to be confused with the substance of your meaning.

Indeed they do, but they get it right in simple sentences like that. They're basically on track, just not precise and not ready to deal with complex or tricky cases.

BTW, interestingly, I have often found it difficult to get across the fact that what makes a word a verb is how it fits into a sentence and not its meaning. Even with very educated, smart people. Last summer, talking with a college professor in comp sci interested in making computer models of the kinds of messy flexibility we're talking about, he just couldn't get the idea that words for actions, like "action", can be nouns.

Anonymous

That's 'cause the semantic essence theory is so entrenched. We teach people from a young age that verbs are "doing words"

Anonymous

06:32

And most people never really confront that idea and test it to see if it's true

Ben Kovitz

It's a weird phenomenon: they don't disagree with the proposition about verbs being distinguished by their role in a sentence, they don't even address it. The idea doesn't seem to find any place to fit in their minds.

Yup! The amazing thing is how easy it is to test the idea and see that it's false.

Anonymous

itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000932.html

Anonymous

Of course, you have to challenge that sort of assumption to learn a foreign language

Anonymous

In Japanese, for example, suki 'like; love' is a type of adjective

Ben Kovitz

Yeah, John Stewart, along with a lot of people, is using words for parts of speech to categorize concepts (or kinds of things) rather than words.

But if you think about it, that's actually a reasonable, typical thing to do in language: to bend a "nearby" word to fit a meaning where you don't already have a word, and trust that a reasonable, cooperative listener will follow you. There is a word for what John Stewart is looking for, entity, but that's far from clear and doesn't come readily to mind. So, noun wins.

BTW, the last chapter of my Latin book is excerpts from a 4th-century book by the grammarian Donatus. Donatus defines a verb as "a part of speech with tense and person, without case, meaning doing something, being done to, or neither of those."

Anonymous

06:42

It'd be a good definition if you added something like "typically" before "meaning"

Ben Kovitz

Yeah, it's weird to have that "or neither". Sort of broadens the definition, huh?

But it sounds like he did not fall for the "semantic essence theory".

Anonymous

Hmm, what was the original definition?

Ben Kovitz

Actually, maybe in Latin there is a connotation that if you say "or neither", you mean the first two are typical. Come to think of it, that's how we'd interpret it in English.

You want the definition in Latin?

Anonymous

> ... pars orationis cum tempore et persona sine casu aut agere aliquid, aut pati, aut neutrum significans

Ben Kovitz

That's it.

Wow, how did you find it so fast?

Anonymous

06:47

I'm sorry, I'm not feeling very well, my brain isn't working well enough to keep chatting this evening

Anonymous

I'm going to go get some rest. Have a good night!

Ben Kovitz

Good night!

Hanaa

07:39

Hello all! :)

abdelaziz maroc

10:51

hello @Hanaa

Damkerng T.

12:23

Question of the day: In what dialect that can not means cannot?

(Using can not for cannot always looks like a typo to me, in case you might be curious. And can not means something different.)

@snailboat Get well soon.

(Sorry about earlier this morning (last night in the US), I was katnapped! -- My cat kidnapped me, and soon I had a nice catnap.)

To my wonder, all the answers appear to be indifferent to The brown bears found on .... I think I will stick to either The brown bears are found on ... or The brown bears can be found on ... myself, though. — Damkerng T. 22 secs ago

Hanaa

12:39

Hello all !

Damkerng T.

Hi, @Hanaa!

Hanaa

Snow again here

Damkerng T.

Aww... Keep yourself warm.

Hanaa

Yes

I miss the beautiful spring

Damkerng T.

When will the spring come over there?

Hanaa

12:43

In March

Damkerng T.

Ah, that's real soon!

Hanaa

One week left

Yes

You certainly discussed a lot of topics that i didn't attend

:(

Damkerng T.

You can read the chat log any time!

It's always there. Isn't it good? :-)

Hanaa

Yes

MARamezani

Hi guys!

Damkerng T.

12:51

Hi, welcome back!

MARamezani

I didn't mean to be out.

It has heavily snowed here, and we got electricity failures.

Damkerng T.

Oh!

MARamezani

I barely managed to connect to the internet

and that was because I didn't wanna lose the streak I had about fanatic.

;)

Damkerng T.

lol

MARamezani

Anything interesting I missed? (on ELL itself, not chat)

Damkerng T.

12:57

I'm not sure about your taste, so... :-)

MARamezani

Hmm, let me put it this way: Were there any 20-votes questions lately?

I really don't feel like reading the script. :)

Damkerng T.

@MARamezani That's rare. Can we try a 20-view question instead?

MARamezani

In two minutes, yes.

Damkerng T.

1

Q: Question about meaning of "single" in this sentence

Room rates are pitched at £69 for a single. Source: pitch - Definition from Longman English Dictionary Online Which of the following is correct? The price of just one room is set to only £69 and not more. The price of one person in a room is only £69. So the price of two individuals for ...

word-meaning

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