Hey, look:

@DamkerngT. Sept is seven.

Which you know from English words like September

From Latin septem

Well, it exists, but it's obsolete as a way of counting

Soixante-dix is used instead

Apparently octante was used at one point as well (for 80)

I still haven't used the French SE, either!

Or Spanish or Chinese

I mean, I haven't posted on them. But they seem to occasionally come in handy just reading :-)

Ah, I think some of them have English, too

Gilles' answer talks about two systems in conflict: The Roman system of tens, and the Gallic system of twenties. In the middle ages, they said things like twenty-and-ten (30), two-twenties (40), two-twenties-and-ten (50), and three-twenties (60)!

So eventually they settled into the modern system, where 10 20 30 40 50 60 and 90 are counted as the Romans did, as in Spanish, while 70 and 80 trace back to the Gallic system of twenties

@DamkerngT. That is ungrammatical

Copper Kettle's comments are good. First, afraid doesn't take an interrogative content clause as a complement, while unsure does. Second, call doesn't take an as-preposition phrase as a complement―removing as would fix things. Third, example should be plural.

That would make it grammatical but not 100% idiomatic

Computers have had lots of non-8-bit bytes historically. Some still do.

Hee

That should be zeroth!

Proofreading can be pretty hard work

What do you need help with?

It's too difficult for me because I can't tell precisely what you mean

@CopperKettle Don't worry, it's hard for native speakers, too :-)

@CopperKettle That's pretty good!

Thing is, I'm not sure "secondary level" means "the second grade"

(I don't know what "secondary level" means, but I guessed something like American "high school" or "junior high")

Me too

@JavaFan First, you need spaces after your commas. Second, you can't have spaces before your commas. Third, :- is archaic as punctuation. Fourth, you should capitalize the beginning of a sentence. Fifth, the meaning of "secondary level" is unclear to me. Sixth, enjoy is transitive and needs an object; it's probably the wrong verb here. Seventh, "by exchanging jokes" is grammatical but unnatural. ...

Eighth, "making a lot of movement" is grammatical but unnatural. Ninth, you need a space before a left parenthesis. Tenth, you can't put a space after a right parenthesis. Eleventh, you have a comma splice following secondary level; in other words, this looks like two sentences joined together with a comma. ...

Twelfth, period should probably be countable and modified by something (what period? Perhaps during class instead?). Thirteenth, at the period of sport is ungrammatical and unnatural.

Figuring out how to rephrase these things is difficult because I don't know precisely what all of it means

Could mean "during P.E." or "in sports classes" or something else, I suppose

Of course, people in different countries use different terms for these things. I'm only really familiar with American terms

That doesn't mean you have to use American terms like "P.E.". It's just that that's all I know :-)

Interesting!

In Japanese, it's tai-iku, which is a calque of "physical education"

@JavaFan Dunno. I'm an American English speaker

(Dunno = informal "I don't know")

Oh, we also call it "gym class" here in the US

Probably!

Sometimes "gym class" is just "gym", if I've successfully persuaded my brain to recall something from that long ago :-)

(My brain doesn't always cooperate when I ask it to remember stuff.)

I spilled water in my keyboard earlier, by the way. It seems to have survived the ordeal!

I feel very lucky :-)

Oops, I wrote comments when I meant to write commas

See, I have to proofread my own proofreading :-)

In my case, they're often more like brainos.

I thin kso ← typo

I managed to get a typo from your typo box before they ran out! :-)

The weirdest thing about by exchanging jokes is the preposition by

I said by exchanging jokes was grammatical but unnatural

I thought exchanging jokes sounded okay in Copper Kettle's version

@DamkerngT. Just if is possible but probably less frequent, and it might be a bit different in meaning

I don't know, I feel like just if might be possible with a relevance protasis, conversationally

"..., just if you need some help" meaning something like "I'm just saying this in case you need some help"

I don't see any corpus examples like that though

Looks like three sentences.

These are better constructed than your earlier sentence

So it's much easier to proofread

"the Netherlands"

And it's all understandable

@DamkerngT. There'd probably be a pause in speech after just

At least, the way I'm imagining it

@JavaFan It was better the other way

@JavaFan Earlier, you wrote "My favourite country in the world is [the] Netherlands[.]"

That sounded better

"[The] best country [in the world] [in] my opinion in the world is [the] Netherlands[.]"

See, this takes more fixing.

@DamkerngT. Fare thee well, O robot!

@DamkerngT. That seems good. I'm having trouble coming up with a way of preserving the noise meaning in an idiomatic way in English

I think I might understand the sentiment there because I think people might say something similar in Japanese

Oh, true.

See, I'm editing your messages without even asking now.

We got a spare copy of Martin 1975 and sent it in to be scanned (which destroys the book)

So I'm sitting here with my remaining paper copy and a PDF editor adding a table of contents to the scan

Oh, my, it works!

This is my first time editing a PDF. :-)

It's exciting to have an electronic copy, though.

Although in general I like paper better

I like flipping through pages

I like the smell of a lot of books.

Martin 1975 smells like old library book, though.

I don't really know how to describe book smells.

Unless they're musty (yecch!)

Preciously musty? Is that a contradiction in terms?

Like "It was delightfully moldy"

Which may not be a contradiction in terms to a mycologist, but to the average Jane on the street, it seems unlikely :-)

Come on Martin, write some shorter chapter titles

Chapter one: "Sentence construction: nuclear sentences (predicates) and expanded sentences (simplexes); sentence conversions."

This chapter is six pages long

I'm typing it :-)

Good ol' data entry.

ファイト、おぉぉ！！

Wow, this table of contents is longer than I remembered.

Today I learned: I'm remarkably bad at typing desideratives.

I made five different typos on that word in the last five minutes.

It's used a lot in linguistics

A lot of terms in here are unlikely to show up outside of linguistics, like transitivity sets, genitivization, relexicalized nuclei, propredication, quasi-desiderative predicates, cathexis, semantic skewing, nuclear focus, donatory verbs, intransitive putative, epithematization, concurrent-concessive, quasi-restrictives, multiparous sentences, derived pseudo-causatives, etc.

@DamkerngT. Hee

That is a funny post

@DamkerngT. I like that much better

Detonatory verbs, ahoy!

It's like donate.

A donatory verb is a verb of giving.

They're a special subclass in Japanese

It would be, yes, if we had special reason to talk about it as a class in English

In Japanese, donatory verbs can be used as subsidiaries to "give" actions to other people, which is often referred to as granting favors

Like, in tasukete kurete arigatō, the verb kureru is a donatory verb

But it follows the -te form of tasukeru "help"

What's more, kureru has deictic reference, as many donatory verbs do in Japanese; it tells you that the favor is being received by the speaker (or someone the speaker more closely aligns with than other entities in the relevant pragmatic context, that is to say, in the speaker's "in-group")

So there's no need to say something like watashi "I" in this sentence, because kureru already tells you who's doing the receiving.

たすけてくれてありがとう "Thanks for your help!"

The English is missing part of the meaning that くれる implies

But it would be unnatural to include it in English

The central members of the class of donatory verbs are the outgoing yaru, ageru, sasi-ageru 'give to out-group', and the ingoing kureru, kudasaru 'give to the in-group' (which always includes 'me')

Yeah.

Morau is also relevant here, although it doesn't have the exact same set of characteristics as the verb above

@DamkerngT. Genki ni natte kudasai doesn't correspond entirely literally to "Please get well soon"

Here, we have the -te form of a verb, and the polite subsidiary kudasaru in its command form kudasai

You are politely asking for the favor of them getting well

At least, literally speaking.

The listener

As I said above, verbs in this group have deictic reference

There is no need to say who is receiving the favor (the speaker) nor who is granting it (the listener)

Kudasai is rather grammaticalized

It doesn't really literally mean "give" here, although native speakers are of course aware of its meaning

You can think of it as a special form which is rather similar to please

But it's not really the same thing.

@DamkerngT. There are ways to make wishes in Japanese, like 〜〜ますように

And that sort of wish would often be made invoking a higher power of some sort

The 〜〜てください type of sentence doesn't really have that feeling to it

There is a less polite version. Since くださる is the polite form of くれる, you can use the imperative of the latter instead, and say まってくれ！　"Wait!"

(Note: くれる has an irregular imperative, くれ)

(It's one of less than a couple dozen irregular verbs in Japanese)

And in Japanese, colloquial imperatives are often made by omitting ください or くれ entirely: まって！ "Wait!"

Although まって doesn't have an imperative form, it has the force of one (through the omitted ください or くれ)

@DamkerngT. Well, it's one of a number of forms that's common in speech, but keep in mind it's somewhat informal / colloquial

And the geminate /tt/ is very important there:

まて /mat-e/ is the actual imperative form of まつ /mat-u/ 'wait'

まって /mat-te kure / sounds less like an order

(It's easy for learners to mix up まって and まて)

You'll also hear a colloquial "urgent" imperative on TV (and in real life): まった, sometimes doubled as まった、まった

ちょとまった！

A very curious form, using the past tense as an imperative! :-)

There are lots of imperative constructions in Japanese

If I kept going, we wouldn't even be halfway done :-)

Yeah, giving a complete list probably wouldn't be very helpful.

I just like talking, I guess :-)

What a pain it must have been to write a book this large without a computer!

I like some of Martin's terms.

@DamkerngT. Patience

Like, facilitatives and propensives

My fingers want to type *multiparious, but it's multiparous

Martin has really long section titles.

13.1.3. Existential, locative, and possessive adnominalizations; epithemes extruded from multiparous sentences. ←　Spell check is underlining three of these as non-words

You know what I find interesting?

In general, Japanese native speakers romanize things all sorts of different ways. They often have no particular preference.

After all, the way it's really spelled in their minds is with kana and kanji.

But learners of Japanese are often very insistent about having a single right way to romanize stuff.

And they hate all the other ways.

@DamkerngT. Oh yeah? :-)

There are official government standards for how to romanize stuff in Japanese, but most people just ignore them.

Hee

The circumlocutionary potential!

Circumlocution is used metaphorically, like when we say "a roundabout way of saying things"

It's the opposite of "getting straight to the point"

All spatial metaphors

Here, potential is used in its grammatical sense

Compare the morphological potential -e, as in ik-e-ru "can go"

What Martin calls the circumlocutionary potential is the construction koto ga dekiru, as in ik-u koto ga deki-ru "can go"

Literally close to "am capable of going"

In many cases, Japanese speakers prefer morphological potential forms

They aren't actually 100% equivalent to the periphrastic ("circumlocutionary") potential semantically

But that's a long story.

Both my own personal copy of Martin and the one we had scanned are the 1975 editions

They aren't terribly different, I think, but there are a few typos in this edition

At one point I boggled at dentential nominalizations for a moment

I thought Martin had invented dententiality

No, I just mean that both copies are from 1975

The next edition was in 1988

But it was largely a reprint

I don't know how we judge wordhood.

In case seems like it's a single word.

It's inseparable. You can't really pause between the parts or insert anything.

No variation is permitted.

But we write it as two words.

Of course, we're all aware of the words in and case.

@DamkerngT. Uh-huh?

Oh, a calque?

Part of me feels bad that I don't know all the words in this table of contents.