English Language Learners

StoneyB

01:22

@snailboat Historically, however, "a" is a reduced form of "an"; one might equally argue that there is only one form, "an", whose final assimilates to any following consonant.

Mistu4u

03:54

@snailboat I came to know a lot about using "a" and "an". Thanks to point out. I never knew using "a" or "an" depends on phonetics and it's a general rule.

I thought dependance on phonetics was some special rule!

Anonymous

05:12

@StoneyB Right, the rule I presented is purely synchronic. (I feel like I should credit the linguist who came up with it, but I've forgotten who!)

Anonymous

In this case, I favor the diachronic analysis personally because it's simpler: the way I presented it doesn't answer the question "Why is n inserted, as opposed to some other sound?"

Anonymous

I just thought it would be useful here because I think glottal consonants are inserted to prevent hiatus :-)

Mistu4u

07:02

Meta time. Reviews guys!

2

Q: October 2013 Question Spotlight Nominations

So lately we've been discussing how to encourage more ELL participation, and StoneyB brought up the fact that, while we can easily reward answers with bounties, there's not much beyond voting that we can do to reward truly excellent questions. Well, that's about to change! I'm excited to introdu...

Anonymous

16:56

@Mistu4u You know, a lot of the time in English I'd say something like Let's hope! or I hope that's right.

Anonymous

And in Japanese, it gets translated to inoru, a verb that means "to pray"

Anonymous

And if I want to express myself idiomatically in Japanese, I have to say pray more often than I would in English

Anonymous

You just said Let's pray so!, which got me thinking. I don't say that phrase much because I'm not particularly religious, but I wonder how many English speakers do

Anonymous

@Mistu4u It's actually really basic, just like the blog post outlines. It's all based on sounds.

Anonymous

I'm glad you found the blog helpful!

Anonymous

16:59

Although I can't recall ever having seen you use a or an in the wrong spot :-)

Mistu4u

2

Q: Can we use "to" with a noun?

I found this statement, The paper presents an automatic approach to reconstruction of 3D objects from point cloud data. But I feel like this is wrong as I learned with to "should be infinitive". Now I am confused. Can anyone clarify this.

grammar grammaticality sentence-construction

What is the role of "to" here? Is it a linking preposition here?

Anonymous

It's the head of a preposition phrase (to reconstruction of 3D objects). It's licensed by its head, the noun approach (all complements are licensed by their heads). It takes the noun phrase reconstruction of 3D objects as a complement.

Mistu4u

@snailboat "head of a prepositional phrase"- Is it a technical term?

Anonymous

I wrote this tag wiki about it. It might be too technical though.

Anonymous

ell.stackexchange.com/tags/prepositional-phrase/info

Mistu4u

17:15

I got more confused after editing my answer according to StoneyB's comment who cliamed "to" is not being used as infinitive here, however in BBC's link I found out "noun+to-infinitive" construction is possible. So how can I know if the "to" is playing the infinitive role or not!

Anonymous

In the grammar put forth in CGEL, I believe the term "infinitival construction" is used

Anonymous

The particle to plus a verb in "plain form"

Anonymous

It consists of those two parts.

Anonymous

To can't be part of an infinitival construction unless it is followed by a verb in plain form.

Anonymous

Reconstruction is not a verb in plain form

Anonymous

17:20

Reconstruct is

Anonymous

However, as I said before, all complements must be licensed by their heads

Anonymous

What this means is that certain words only allow certain kinds of complements.

Anonymous

StoneyB has said that the noun approach "requires its complement to be headed with the preposition to"

Anonymous

That is an example of licensing.

Anonymous

Hmm. Did I manage to answer your question anywhere in there? My brain isn't working very well.

Anonymous

17:23

I should note that historically, etymologically the to in an infinitival construction was the preposition to. It's the same word historically.

Anonymous

But in modern English it's essentially a different word.

Anonymous

Even though they both look the same

Mistu4u

@snailboat To a great extent I guess. But sadly my mom is calling loudly for the dinner :-D I must go now. I will come and might disturb you after finishing it. :-)

Mistu4u

17:52

Pretty well, thank you @snailboat for making the things clear. :-)

@snailboat "Pray" came to my mind because (after your comment I thought deeply and discovered that) I am a theist and not sort of always taking God's name but I believe in God heartily.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I actually use a fair amount of religious language even though I'm not religious. Part of it is just how English is commonly used

Anonymous

Ah! I think I know why your statement stuck out to me.

Mistu4u

Why?

Anonymous

I think people say pray followed by a subordinate clause like: "Let's pray [that] it is so." "Let's pray that he does" "which I pray that he does not" "I pray you're right"

Anonymous

I don't think people often say "Let's pray so"

Anonymous

18:00

I think I naturally wanted to change pray to hope not because it's religious, but because we often follow "Let's hope" with "so"

Anonymous

But it took me a while to figure that out.

Anonymous

I have around 400,000 lines of text that I've written on my computer

Anonymous

So if I want to figure out what I actually say, I can query that.

Anonymous

And it looks like I do say pray on a fairly regular basis.

Mistu4u

Isn't "Lets pray so" a contracted form of "Let's pray [that] it is so"?

Anonymous

18:02

So does have the ability to substitute for a clause, but for some reason I think that is rare.

Mistu4u

I see.

Anonymous

"I hope so" is over a hundred times more common than "I pray so"

Anonymous

according to Google books Ngram Viewer

Anonymous

While "I hope" is only ten times more common than "I pray"

Anonymous

18:23

1

Q: It is expected that.................?

How can I translate the sequent sentence in an impersonal form? And why? "Young people are expected to be polite to the elderly" "It is expected that young people are polite / would be polite / were polite / be polite ..."

grammar

Anonymous

Are you familiar with "an impersonal form"? I suppose I understand what it's saying, but I've never heard of that before

Anonymous

Impersonal verb

In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "It rains", rain is an impersonal verb and the pronoun it does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject. In the active voice, impersonal verbs can be used to express operation of nature, mental distress, and acts with no reference to the do-er. Impersonal verbs are also called weather verbs because they frequently appear in the context of weather description. Valency Impersonal verbs appear on...

Anonymous

Ah, impersonal constructions are in CGEL

Mistu4u

@snailboat No I am not. But I got the meaning.

Anonymous

Yeah, I think I understood from context

Anonymous

18:38

I have a lot to learn about English grammar, to tell the truth

Mistu4u

Every body learns something now and then and it's fairly certain nobody can master a subject upto 100% perfection. Even Newton admitted through out his entire life he could not do anything except just picking up some pebbles in the beach of knowledge. (He definitely was very meek, despite that........)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I wish I had a reference like CGEL for Japanese.

Anonymous

There are giant tomes on Japanese grammar, but they're even more expensive and harder to find.

Anonymous

I have a couple dozen books on Japanese grammar, but nothing nearly as comprehensive or representing a single modern approach

Mistu4u

@snailboat I have no idea about Japanese language except it has more than 1000 letters perhaps!

Anonymous

18:43

Oh, that is true.

Anonymous

It's still true now that you've edited it. :-)

Anonymous

Although some people would say it's not the Japanese language that has letters. They would say a language consists of sounds and is spoken

Anonymous

And a blind speaker of Japanese can be just as fluent as one who can read

Mistu4u

@snailboat :-D I imagine Japanese is harder to be learned even for a Japanese child than learning English for an English child!

Anonymous

(Actually, in one way they have it easier: the Japanese equivalent of Braille is based on sounds alone, and doesn't have thousands of characters to memorize.)

Anonymous

18:45

@Mistu4u They do spend years learning all those characters.

Anonymous

They're supposed to learn about 2250 characters by the time they finish junior high school

Anonymous

But by that time, they'll have spent more than nine years working at it.

Anonymous

Some people argue that this is a lot of time wasted, and switching to a simpler script would be better for everyone--native speakers and learners alike

Mistu4u

@snailboat What's a "junior high school"? 1st standard to 5th standard, I guess!

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Here in the US, I would say: first you have preschool, then kindergarten, then grades 1-6. Sometimes kindergarten is lumped in with that, so we say K-6, and this is grade school (elementary school, primary school, grammar school).

Anonymous

18:49

Then grades 7-8 are junior high or middle school. But it varies; sometimes a middle school is 6-8 or 7-9.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Well, I was just kidding, but it is expected that in mother tongue only a child can learn something easily.

Anonymous

In Japan, junior high is 7-9.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Oh, it's definitely hard. It takes a lot of time in school for Japanese children to learn the writing system.

Anonymous

Thousands of hours.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Very Strange!

Anonymous

18:51

In a sense, it's like a native speaker of English learning arbitrary spellings. Some people are good at it and pick it up effortlessly, and others work hard at it, but the job is never really complete

Anonymous

There are always things you won't know how to spell.

Anonymous

And in Japanese, there are always more characters you don't know, even if you're a native speaker.

Mistu4u

So how many letters are really there in Japanese?

Has there been a proper census yet?

:-P

Anonymous

There are about 100 basic characters which represent sound only.

Anonymous

On top of that are the characters borrowed from the Chinese, known to the Japanese as kanji

Anonymous

18:54

Theoretically, any character from Chinese could be used in Japanese, and there are roughly 50,000 of those by some estimates. But the majority of those are duplicates and variant forms, and characters used only in rare names

Mistu4u

Ah! That's why they look same!

Anonymous

In a large corpus-based study funded by the government, they found only about 8000 characters in use

Anonymous

Large character dictionaries tend to have around 20,000; medium-size character dictionaries tend to have around 8000

Anonymous

But speakers of Japanese don't know that many.

Mistu4u

@snailboat So that means a 50year old Japanese person can see a word in Japanese and even can't identify it!

Anonymous

18:56

It's estimated that college-educated native speakers can recognize between 3500-4000 characters on average

Anonymous

The number they can write is generally smaller.

Anonymous

They require that Japanese students learn about 2250, but some of those characters are relatively useless, often included on the list for only political reasons, and they'll learn plenty of characters not on that list, particularly because they're used in names

Mistu4u

How many letters could you cram?

Anonymous

If you learn the 3500 most common characters, you'll be able to read 99.9% of what you come across in Japanese publications.

Anonymous

I know about 2800

Mistu4u

18:59

@snailboat That's a LOTTTTTTTTTTT

Anonymous

Haha! But I've been learning for fifteen years.

Anonymous

Although I'm still not very good at Japanese, I've had plenty of time to learn to read the characters.

Anonymous

Think about it. How many days are there in 15 years? Around 5500, so... if you were to learn just one character per day, you could be well past that 3500 mark. (In theory.)

Mistu4u

Can you write too? (I think it needs a painting hand to draw those letters)

Anonymous

Yes, but I can't write quite that many.

Anonymous

19:00

Like most people, I can't write as many as I can recognize

Anonymous

I actually have a Japanese brush and ink to practice calligraphy :-)

Mistu4u

This perseverance of your's is commendable!

Anonymous

But that doesn't mean I'm good at it. Calligraphy is an art, and I haven't put enough work into it to get any good at it.

Anonymous

I do write a lot, though. I take notes on paper.

Anonymous

It's my belief that writing on paper helps you form memory much more strongly than taking notes on a computer.

Anonymous

19:02

And that's particularly true of writing Chinese characters, I think.

Anonymous

I know that every time I've tried to learn characters without writing them on paper, I've had a much harder time remembering them.

Mistu4u

Very very true! In fact, I used to retain a "Stock-of-Words" notebook in English, but reading that again and again did not help me; instead I always took writing exercises and injected those words intentionally and magically I could commit those words to memory much easily.

Anonymous

You know, I think I have heard of impersonal constructions before.

Anonymous

That's the funny thing about memory--at least mine--it's not very good! ;-)

Anonymous

I can learn something, then learn it again, then learn it again.

Mistu4u

19:08

@snailboat ................and never forget it again, I suppose! :-)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Well, you know what they say: third time's the charm!

Mistu4u

Yes... it's prevalent in our sayings too!

Anonymous

Oh, really? I didn't realize!

Mistu4u

I don't know how it happens, but most of the proverbs in Bengali/Hindi (they don't differ much) have exact translations in English!

Anonymous

Interesting! I wonder if they're related

Mistu4u

19:14

@snailboat Maybe it's the effect of colonial age.

Anonymous

There's a Japanese idiom, 一石二鳥 (isseki nichō), which means to kill two birds with one stone (literally: one stone, two birds)

Anonymous

It turns out it's a translation of the English idiom, historically!

Mistu4u

"1 dhile 2 pakhi mara"- Exact proverb in Bengali

:-)

Anonymous

Neat!

Anonymous

You'll notice the Japanese idiom looks like that, too. See the characters 一 and 二? Those are 1 and 2

Mistu4u

19:16

In Hindi it is "1 tir se 2 sikar" meaning "Killing 2 birds, By 1 arrow"

@snailboat So 9 means 9 horizontal lines?

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Only the first three numbers look like that. 一二三

Mistu4u

Okay.

Anonymous

I think that historically there were further characters along that pattern, but the modern characters ended up different. 一二三四五六七八九十

Anonymous

Kind of reminds me of Roman numerals. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Anonymous

Historically, though, there were times when IV was usually written IIII instead

Anonymous

19:20

And so, some clocks say IIII instead of IV

Anonymous

Mistu4u

@snailboat Oh My God! They are so hard to distinguish and honestly they look like prehistoric pictures drawn on the stones by the cavemen! (I don't know what the writing is called)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Those are the characters for 1 through 10

Anonymous

Some Chinese characters are significantly more complicated. For example, 鬱

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Let's see... You may mean cuneiform

Anonymous

19:23

Many people say they're reminded of Egyptian hieroglyphics

Mistu4u

Very complicated. :-/

Anonymous

Did I guess the word you intended yet?

Mistu4u

@snailboat hieroglyphics is a better option really.

Anonymous

(by "prehistoric pictures drawn on the stones by the cavemen")

Mistu4u

Cuneiform can work too.

How about obelisk?

Anonymous

19:27

@Mistu4u An obelisk is not a form of writing, but a tall stone pillar.

Anonymous

Obelisk

An obelisk (from Greek ὀβελίσκος - obeliskos, diminutive of ὀβελός - obelos, "spit, nail, pointed pillar") is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape at the top. Like Egyptian pyramids, whose shape is thought to be representative of the descending rays of the sun, an obelisk is said to resemble a petrified ray of the sun-disk. A pair of obelisks usually stood in front of a pylon. Ancient obelisks were often monolithic, whereas most modern obelisks are made of several stones and can have interior spaces. The term stele (plural: stelae) is generall...

Anonymous

But they may have writing on them.

Mistu4u

Ah! I mixed it.

Okay...good night @snailboat. I gotta bid you Good night now. Bye!

Cerberus

22:52

@snailboat Although an obelisk can also be a written symbol/sign...

Dagger (typography)

A dagger, or obelisk, , is a typographical symbol or glyph. The term "obelisk" derives from Greek (obeliskos), which means "little obelus"; from (obelos) meaning "roasting spit". It was originally represented by the ÷ symbol and was first used by the Ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts. A double dagger or diesis, , is a variant with two handles. History The dagger symbol originated from a variant of the obelus (plural: obeli), originally depicted by a plain line (-) or a line with one or two dots (÷). It represented an iron roasting spit, a dart, or the sharp ...

Anonymous

@Cerberus Oh! I didn't know that.

Anonymous

What's funny is that any time I ever need to type that symbol, I google for "dagger typography" and copy and paste it from Wikipedia :-)

Anonymous

So I've seen that page quite a few times!

Anonymous

But I've apparently never read it :-)

Cerberus

Haha.

Maybe some naughty dog has just added that bit to Wikipedia...

(I actually often copy-paste symbols from Wikipedia too.)

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English Language Learners