English Language Learners

Ice Girl

09:44

@DamkerngT. Hi

Anonymous

15:29

@snailboat Thanks for some input. I have checked Merriam Websters also. Yet I didn't find such example sentences. Though that doesn't mean in AmE we don't construct this way. But still, is there any possibility of AmE and BrE difference regarding this matter? — Man_From_India 13 mins ago

Anonymous

I suppose it wouldn't help much if I left a comment saying "I have no idea whatsoever" :-)

StoneyB

15:44

@snailboat I'll upvote it if you do!

Anonymous

When you don't live in a country that speaks one language, it is difficult to learn something in that language if it doesn't make sense to you. I feel like, If I can "explain" a phrase, I have a power over it. For me it is important to know, for example, that "at large" has a French origin "au large", meaning 'at liberty'. If I know it, more chances the phrase will stick to me. — Graduate 14 mins ago

Anonymous

I like learning etymology, too!

Anonymous

But there's an awful lot of idioms that people don't really have good etymologies for

Anonymous

So sometimes you just have to accept you're going to have to learn something as a unit!

Anonymous

(Or make up some kind of false etymology or mnemonic to make it make sense in your head...?)

StoneyB

16:12

@snailboat Moreover, the etymology does not determine or explain the meaning: it is merely an historical account of how the meaning arose.

Anonymous

Oh, yes, that would be our old friend, the etymological fallacy!

Anonymous

But it helpful to understand how a phrase came to have the meaning it does, sometimes :-)

Anonymous

I often find etymology to be easier to remember than an arbitrary mnemonic

Anonymous

It's easier to get something to stick in my brain if I can convince myself that it's true!

StoneyB

Oh, yes indeed. Robert Graves says somewhere that he always wrote with the OED at his elbow to ensure that he made the most of his words.

user62015

16:59

Hello Stoney!

I want to ask something and I am on a mobile so please forgive me for any typo mistake.

I am reading Men With Brooms. And I read a sentence which does not make sence to me so I need your help on it.

"Gordon was about to walk away from the Impala when he saw it stop and his son get out. So it was real the boy had come."

But I think it should be

StoneyB

@user62015 Keep going - I'm with you so far!

user62015

"Gordon was about to walk away from the Impala when he saw it stops* and his son gets* out"

Thanks.

I am done and I hope I made it clear to you so you may help me easily.

StoneyB

17:17

Ah ... No; see, hear and other perception verbs permit complement clauses headed by infinitive verbs unmarked with to. "I saw him shoot." "I heard him sing my favorite song." This is hard to discern because only one English verb, be, has a distinctive infinitive form; in all other English verbs the infinitive is the same as the 'plain' form used for simple present (except in 3d person singular) and for imperatives.

user62015

I am going through your response. Thanks for it

Thanks. It is new to me! I have no idea about it. Could you please give me the topic headline which I can search on the internet. As I understand it is hard for you to make me understand as I dont have basic knowledge of the topic. So I think if I get basic knowledge then it will be easy for you to make me you to make me understand. And it will be easy for me as well.

StoneyB

17:56

Some terms that might turn up useful discussion are "infinitive" "catenative verb" and "complementation".

user116848

18:54

hi

user116848

@DamkerngT. Hi Damk. How is it going?

user116848

You should totally watch "22 Jump street". It is worth it. It has good comedy in it.

user116848

Al least I enjoyed it! :D

user116848

22 Jump Street

22 Jump Street is a 2014 American action comedy film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, produced by and starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, and written by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman. It is the sequel to the 2012 film 21 Jump Street, based on the television series of the same name. The film was released on June 13, 2014, by Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film received generally positive reviews, and has earned over $326 million at the box office. A third film is in development, with Lord and Miller acting as producers. == Plot == Following their...

user116848

I also watched its earlier version. It was okay. I think this one is much better.

user116848

19:04

So. whenever I clear my browser's history etc. and log in here again on SE, the ping settings go back to "when mentioned" with sound. I don't know why is that.

Damkerng T.

20:59

@Arrowfar A nice movie. I enjoyed watching it, too!

@Arrowfar Oh, I didn't know about the other version or versions.

Freddy

Hi guys

Damkerng T.

@Arrowfar I guess they save the settings in cookies.

@Freddy Hi!

I just came in here a few moments ago! What a coincidence!

Freddy

At last exams r over :-)

Damkerng T.

Hooray!

Sounds like you were doing well.

Freddy

Yup

Damkerng T.

21:01

I'm glad to hear that!

Freddy

It's 2:30 am over here

Damkerng T.

It's 4 a.m. here.

0

Q: forgo -- meaning?

Here the author is comparing two image compression formats, namely, the JPEG format and the GIF format: The moral of this tale is that more often than not, you’ll want to retain as much photographic realism in your inline images as possible, and you’ll forgo a little extra file size for that ...

meaning

Freddy

It mean let go, isn't it?

Damkerng T.

Another interesting question. I guess the OP is reading a book and got so many questions because of the author's writing style. I remember I searched for more info on the book for a bit, and found that the author is a well-known designer living in the UK. His hometown is likely to be Nottinghill (or Notting Hill, I'm not sure).

It should mean that, but if you read the passage, I think it would be rather clear that the author meant "allow".

Freddy

Yup

Damkerng T.

21:10

It sounds like the author didn't really write the book; to me, it feels like he was talking and have someone else transcribe his talk and convert it into the book.

Freddy

Or it might be literally translated by computer

Damkerng T.

After I found him on YouTube, I think we can trust that he's a native speaker.

Let me see if I can find him again. (I should be able to!)

Here is the book: books.google.com/books?id=k0zFcsFA8g8C&pg=PA94

Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional. By Simon Collison

Here is the video I found earlier: vimeo.com/99034648

Freddy

colly.com/comments/gtis-byrjun

Check out this

Damkerng T.

Oh, I was wrong about his home town. It's Nottingham, not Notting Hill.

Freddy

Ok then writer is correct

But why OP is confused then

Damkerng T.

21:17

@Freddy Wait, correct about what?

Freddy

Sorry, I misunderstand

It's rellay difficult to chat with mobile

Damkerng T.

nods -- I understand that perfectly! I feel the same when I'm on my iPad.

Freddy

I think there should app for chat

Damkerng T.

I've seen a meta post about SE app, but never tried it yet. I don't know if it includes the chat.

An app for SE chats would be nice.

Freddy

I don't know for mobile but in my computer once I installed stack applet but it didn't worked

Anonymous

21:30

@Arrowfar Because the settings are stored in cookies, and your browser clears your cookies automatically whenever you clear your history

Anonymous

@Snailboat: I said that I'd like to hear a restrictive clause starting with which that is intoned differently than a non-restrictive one. You mentioned Nunberg. I'm a native speaker & studied philology (OE, ME, ModE, etc) for five years in grad school, and happen to disagree with his view that "writing is language". IMO writing is a system of communication whose success depends on its ability to encode many of the features of natural language and its ability to augment it with new capabilities: e.g. we can hear a statement (unrecorded) only once but read its written version many times. — TRomano 2 hours ago

Anonymous

Now that they've told us all about their qualifications for no particular reason . . . Well, nothing would come of it anyway since I've already bowed out of the discussion over there

Anonymous

I mean, I like chatting, but we're supposed to avoid extended discussion in comments

Anonymous

So I'm typing stuff over here instead :-)

Anonymous

I don't think they're going to ask their question on ELL

Damkerng T.

21:34

@snailboat I don't think that will happen on ELU either.

Anonymous

It should happen somewhere, but instead we've got a lengthy comment discussion.

Damkerng T.

Nunberg and I fundamentally disagree. — TRomano 11 hours ago

I think that's loud and clear, as a message.

Anonymous

He can disagree with Nunberg.

Anonymous

It happens that his disagreement isn't actually relevant to the discussion

Anonymous

Except as an aside

Damkerng T.

21:38

"none of this has anything to do with prescriptivism" is absolutely true.

Anonymous

It also has nothing to do with punctuation not "creating" grammar

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Aw, Martha's comment got crowded out

Anonymous

@TRomano: um, including or omitting the comma totally changes the meaning of the sentence. How is that "nothing to do with the language"? — Martha 2 days ago

Anonymous

I think this deserves another upvote :-)

Damkerng T.

21:40

I voted it up!

Anonymous

Yay!

Anonymous

Maybe I could post the question

Anonymous

Oops, it might be a duplicate:

Anonymous

7

Q: Intonation difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses

He had four sons who became doctors. He had four sons, who became doctors. Is there any difference in intonation between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses?

grammar clauses commas prosody

Damkerng T.

I guess they went so far as to redefine what language is. :P

Writing is not language, or so they seem to say.

@snailboat +1

Anonymous

21:44

@DamkerngT. Yeah, people say that sometimes. I'm not convinced.

Anonymous

I'm not prepared to write a real answer to this question at the moment, but I think the "embed an audio player" feature request could be very helpful here. — snailboat Mar 14 '13 at 14:22

Damkerng T.

I up(ed) that too!

Anonymous

That never happened, though. :-(

Damkerng T.

How difficult would embedding a sound clip or a video clip to a stack be?

I'm sure they can overcome all technical difficulties.

Anonymous

They don't want to host it themselves.

Anonymous

21:47

But that's okay. They've already implemented it for other sites.

Anonymous

Unfortunately, SE is full of special cases.

Anonymous

8

A: Can an embedded audio player be added to Audio.SE and Music.SE?

A generic "convert any link that ends in .mp3 to something playable" is not going to work; for purely technical reasons: To have a nice in-page player, you need one of two things: Use the HTML5 <audio> tag Use Flash. Unfortunately, neither of these will work. Even if you say "okay, ignore peo...

Damkerng T.

I wish they would allow us to post links to YouTube or SoundCloud and have some cute little player in-place.

Anonymous

They do! At least on those two sites. They support only SoundCloud, though

Damkerng T.

Having only SoundCould is better than nothing!

Considering that it was from three years ago, I think this may not be as relevant as it was:

> Unfortunately, neither of these will work. Even if you say "okay, ignore people with browsers that don't support <audio>", you still have the problem that each browser supports a different range of formats. Some browsers support MP3, some support Ogg Vorbis, some support WAV files – but not a single format is common to all browsers. So point 1. is out.

(The mentioned "point 1" is "Use the HTML5 <audio> tag".)

Oh, a bounty!

Anonymous

21:58

@DamkerngT. Well, the question already existed, so instead of asking my own, I just put a bounty on it to draw some attention

Damkerng T.

And an uncommon figure of bounty at that!

Anonymous

I wanted to keep my reputation at 18000 :-)

Damkerng T.

Oh, that's why. :-)

Anonymous

22:47

I have a headache again today. I find myself making more typos than usual.

Damkerng T.

23:00

I hope your headache will fade away soon.

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English Language Learners