English Language Learners - 2015-01-21

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12:03 AM

Let's say I want to put a "do" to emphasize my statement, as in "You shouldn't fly there; if you do fly there though, do not forget to take the camera with you.", but I want to do so in a formal letter where I cannot make the word bold or larger. Is it still acceptable to just write it there, or should the emphasizing "do" never appear in formal writing at all?

Anonymous

@mathh Oh, that's a tough question! You could ask it on the main site

Anonymous

A formal rephrasing might be: "If you do so nonetheless, ..."

Anonymous

I can't answer your question off the top of my head

Anonymous

But you might well be right that emphatic polarity do is more characteristic of informal English

Anonymous

You don't actually need to emphasize it with italics, though.

Anonymous

12:12 AM

Your example would be understandable as an example of emphatic polarity without any visual marking

Anonymous

@Ilan To be honest, before I saw the video, I would have imagined that they'd lay eggs!

Anonymous

I guess I don't really understand how they reproduce―

Anonymous

Oh, they do lay eggs?

Anonymous

And then the male keeps the eggs in an egg pouch

I'm also thinking whether it is alright to write "X has its advantages".

Anonymous

12:18 AM

I'm going to have to rewatch that video :-)

Anonymous

@mathh It's perfectly grammatical, but it's rather vague

Anonymous

(Of course, that's fine if you're being deliberately vague! :-)

2:16 AM

@DamkerngT., see my message under chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/19629517#19629517. :)

Can anyone tell me, is there a way to create a bounty of 1000 points or more?

bbl

Anonymous

3:06 AM

No, you can't, but in my experience the bounty # doesn't matter too much

10:22 AM

2

Q: "A law decreased what schools had been permitted" vs. "are permitted"

Can you please tell me which of the following sentences is correct? A law passed in 2006 decreased the amount of chlorine that schools had been permitted to add to drinking water. A law passed in 2006 decreased the amount of chlorine that schools are permitted to add to drinking water.

present-tense past-perfect

I'd say: "A law passed in 2006 decreased the amount of chlorine that schools were permitted to add to drinking water." — Peter Shor yesterday

A good example for showing that tenses shift focuses and implications.

Dec 30 '14 at 16:02, by Damkerng T.

A random thought: Events do not force the tenses. Tenses reflect how the speakers see the events.

1 hour later…

11:28 AM

@CoolHandLouis Nice example!

5 hours later…

4:47 PM

@snailboat I did not understand from the footage how exactly the male seahorses give birth to their babies...

5:21 PM

@Adam Hello

5 hours later…

10:00 PM

Could you please answer if the phrase "time scope" can replace "time period" @snailboat @DamkerngT. Thanks in advance!!

Anonymous

Time period is a common collocation. Time scope is not, and it's likely to sound less natural in most contexts

Anonymous

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Anonymous

It's not ungrammatical or altogether impossible, mind you

@snailboat thanks for the answer :)

can you suggest any other expression for "time period"?

Anonymous

Can you give an example sentence?

Anonymous

10:12 PM

Usually it doesn't make sense to talk about phrases as being completely interchangeable

Anonymous

Although there are usually plenty of ways to rephrase things that make sense

Time scope sounds like the author's mind was focused on "scope" of something (maybe a project) and there might be a lot of different "scopes" in the document, and "time scope" is one of them.

Hello @snailboat!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. That makes sense. It could work in a context in which scope was a common term

I feel like I miss chatting here, lately. :-)

hm

As I regularly start these months.... I have a dream... excuse me, I have a graph

10:18 PM

You dreamed in graph?!?

In order to describe the graph I should write an overview sentence in which I cannot use the words from task description...

Anonymous

In that case, it might be best to look for a longer way to say something with simple words, rather than to come up with a drop-in replacement

hm

user image

so I have a time period of 7 years

I cannot use "period" all the time

I am looking for synonymous phrase

Anonymous

The graph shows the change in [...] from 1996 to 2002. ← I didn't use the word "period"

Anonymous

Simply "time" would work, if you want:

Anonymous

10:21 PM

During this time, ...

yes, me too, but later I have to say something about time interval

oh! INTERVAL

my god!

Anonymous

Yeah, if you want, that's one possible word

Anonymous

It's not really necessary, though

I have just found it in my memory

Oh, the word "period" is forbidden?

10:22 PM

@DamkerngT. word repetition is forbidden

Anonymous

That's silly.

(Sounds like some kind of "Guess the Word".)

Anonymous

Why don't they just test you to see how your English is?

it decrease the score because of "lack of vocab@

why? thousand of people want to move from one country to another... they provide some standard for all these people

that's it :)

How can one write a 150-word text with 150 unique words?

10:24 PM

not all words should be unique

:))

Anonymous

@Ilan Well, that's not why

but interval instead of period sound pretty well for me

Anonymous

It sounds passable to me

And I would rather say "they set" than "they provide".

Anonymous

As in, there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd be unlikely to say it myself

10:25 PM

yes

Anonymous

Rarely does anything good come from playing the synonym game

even native speaker can have difficulties on their writing task 1

Anonymous

Well, sure, but that's because it's testing things other than English

@snailboat you are right, but from discussion I can gather some important things

If what you're telling us is true, I don't think their test is even about academic English.

10:29 PM

hm

probably I miss something, but I read a lot of materials

International English Language Testing System

The International English Language Testing System, or IELTS /ˈaɪ.ɛlts/, is an international standardised test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers. It is jointly managed by Cambridge English Language Assessment, the British Council and IDP Education Pvt Ltd, and was established in 1989. IELTS is one of the two major English-language tests in the world, the other being the TOEFL. There are two versions of the IELTS: the Academic Version and the General Training Version: The Academic Version is intended for those who want to enroll in universities and other...

It might be true that not all native speakers could do well in their test. Still, I think most post-high-school students (or maybe most sophomores) would do really, really well.

This leaves me two alternatives: either you get some kind of misconception about the test, or the test is ridiculous.

(And I think the latter is unlikely.)

if we take the graph I placed - for all the items there were 4 time periods, so I prefer to find some synonym for time period

Finding synonyms is easy, Google is very good for this.

there are a lot of sources saying to avoid repetitions

dcielts.com/ielts-writing/cohesion-and-avoiding-repetition

this is one of them (I know that they mean slightly different things, but still it is relevant)

But imho, finding synonyms is missing the point.

10:35 PM

@DamkerngT. probably

I don't know another way to improve my writing

If you write naturally, unreasonable repetitions will be reduced automatically.

I ask you as a very advanced user though

naturally? even if will leave in London for 40 years I would not write naturally....

:)

Sorry. My browser just crashed again!

@Ilan I don't think it will take that long.

I need "natural" writing just in 1 month :))))

One month is probably too short.

10:39 PM

we kidding here!

:) thanks for the help guys! c u

One big flaw I found about my own English in the past is that my English is constructional. It doesn't flow well, but it's good enough to communicate what I mean. It even looks good in trivial academic writing because the tenses in academic writing tend to be simpler, and I was able to get by by always using the article the when in doubt.

And that was a really, really bad English.

Try out that lang-8 site, @Ilan. One woman there did 100 posts in quite a short time (she is from Tyumen) and her English improved from almost zero to a quite readable level. lang-8.com/1003120

nods -- I haven't tried lang-8 as much as I want to.

One needs to write something interesting there though, or really help others daily, otherwise one's posts would get little attention. By interesting I mean anything but the chunks of commercialeze I dump there. Your own thoughts, observations, short stories.

@Ilan - if there's some topic that interests you, you might try writing a Wikipedia article in English. Why not? There might be thousands of good Wiki articles yet untranslated to English. You might post the chunks for proofreading at lang-8 parallel to your translation process.

@CopperKettle Is it because lang-8 that I was able to see only 9 posts on Lisa's page?

I switched to Lisa's home and it says "101 Entries Written".

10:52 PM

@DamkerngT. - yes, she hides the majority of her posts. They are "lang-8 users only" or "friends only"

Ahh

I was just wondering about when she made her first post, and what her first post is like.

For instance, there are Russian Wikipedia articles for "history of Yekaterinburg", about Kossacks on the Urals etc. I would find it a pleasure to put them in English, cause I love history.

Anonymous

I've only made 20 posts!

Anonymous

But I've made 127 corrections

@CopperKettle @Ilan Actually, that's a very good idea! Most of Wikipedia pages have the tone of academic writing.

@snailboat Nice!

10:54 PM

@snailboat You corrected japanese folks learning English? Great, I too made numerous corrections in Japanese Russian- and English-learners' posts (0:

Anonymous

@CopperKettle I correct anyone's posts, but it mostly ends up being Japanese speakers'

Anonymous

My baby snail is almost big enough to live with her parents! :-)

Yay!

Yay!

@snailboat Why small snails cannot live with their parents?

Anonymous

In this case, the baby would be able to escape through the gap between the lid and the cage proper

Anonymous

10:57 PM

In general they can live with adults, but sometimes they might nibble on the parents' shells to get calcium, which is undesirable. When the size difference is big enough, they don't recognize other snails as snails

oh

don't parents nurture them?

@DamkerngT. - found Lissa's first post, it's dated September 9

lang-8.com/1003120/journals/…

An adult snail seeing baby snails: "What cute moveable calcium blobs!"

@CopperKettle That's very recently!

Anonymous

user image

Oh, I just realized that I don't know what dialect of English Wikipedia uses!

Anonymous

It doesn't use a specific dialect

11:00 PM

@snailboat Where are the snails?

Anonymous

Mostly Standard American English, but it's not consistent

There's some quite bad English in some Wikipedia pages

Anonymous

That picture is supposed to show the gap the baby could escape from

@snailboat Ahh

Anonymous

user image

Anonymous

11:00 PM

You can see the snails near the top / top-right in that picture

I think I haven't noticed whether Wikipedia uses "color" or "colour".

Anonymous

In that picture the cage is messy (as it often is! Snails are messy creatures!)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It doesn't use a consistent version of English

nods

Anonymous

Generally people stick with whatever other people used first in a given article

11:02 PM

This practise just caught my eyes:

> The Academic Version is intended for those who want to enroll in universities and other institutions of higher education and for professionals such as medical doctors and nurses who want to study or practise in an English-speaking country.

I like the idea of Citizendium, the stricter version of Wikipedia

@CopperKettle First time I've ever heard it!

@DamkerngT. Then there's also Scholarpedia, with good quality articles too

scholarpedia.org/article/Neurogenesis

@snailboat The cage looks larger than I thought, I think!

@CopperKettle Ah, I've visited that site before.

I wonder if we could say "You help me so!" (meaning habitually)

Anonymous

11:07 PM

@CopperKettle I suppose

"You so help me!" looks outlandish for some reason..

Anonymous

So in your first example seems possible but not really natural these days, while so in your second example seems distinctly odd

I proposed to Lissa the sentence "You've been such a great help"

If so is referring back to something previously mentioned or implied in "You help me so", I think.

@snailboat I felt so too. (I so felt too)

Anonymous

11:08 PM

@CopperKettle You can't use so the second way

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It didn't seem that way

@snailboat Thank you! I feel it. I'm just musing as to why.. (0:

@snailboat Oh, does "You help me so" mean "You help me so much"? -- confused

@DamkerngT. Yes, it means "so much", emphatically.

1

Q: Why how 'old' are you, not how 'young' are you?

English (the language) always gives an impression of being positive. For example, when little kids are making mistake, it will refer to as 'being creative' instead of 'being incorrect'. So as my title, isn't it the opposite? I assume asking how "old" is not very polite, so I usually avoid it a...

(My idea about this so is it always implies a back reference, and this back reference sometimes means something close to "truly".)

Hmmph.

11:13 PM

@DamkerngT. It's not always a back reference, it's often an "adverb" of.. hm.. intensification..

Anonymous

@CopperKettle Markedness.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It doesn't, though

Thanks, @snailboat!

Anonymous

If you have to invent what it refers to, then it doesn't really make sense to call it referential

I don't know, maybe it's technically not a back reference, but even when I think of it as "truly", it's still a back reference to what is implied to me.

Anonymous

11:14 PM

Otherwise you could call everything referential.

Anonymous

@CopperKettle So has been an intensifier for over a thousand years

(I feel this in "I love you so", which gives me a different feeling from "I love you so much", though the meanings are very similar.)

So bashful when I spied her,
So pretty, so ashamed !
So hidden in her leaflets,
Lest anybody find

en.wikisource.org/wiki/So_bashful_when_I_spied_her!

("I love you so much" ~ "I'm so in love with you.")

A lot of so's would approx. mean "very" when being used in front of adj.

@snailboat Maybe, to me, it's something like dummy-it. (How about dummy-referential?! :-)

Anonymous

> 14. a. In affirmative clauses, tending to become a mere intensive without comparative force, and sometimes emphasized in speaking and writing.

Anonymous

11:20 PM

The OED traces that sense back to Beowulf

nods

nods

I usually take "You shouldn't worry so." as "You shouldn't worry that much."

Anonymous

Etymologically, it meant "to that (previously mentioned) extent"

Anonymous

But it became a mere intensifier long ago, and now it is frequently used both with and without reference

11:23 PM

like так in Russian, it also a double-use word

(So, you see, I read is as: there are two senses of it, one is kind of referring back, that, the other intensifies, much.)

Anonymous

6

A: What is markedness?

An example, though probably not a very good one, is "lioness" vs. "lion". "Lion" can refer to either male or female lions, whereas "lioness" refers to only female lions. In this example "lioness" is marked and "lion" is unmarked. This is because "lion" is the more general term. Another example i...

"I'm not that rich." <-- I guess that this that is used for markedness, too.

Anonymous

That's not what markedness refers to

> So marked vs. unmarked means that two terms with opposite meaning are asymmetrical in their meaning, and that one of them is more general and dominant.

Now I'm confused even more.

Anonymous

11:26 PM

That's one possible use of the term

Anonymous

Copper Kettle brought up old versus young

@snailboat Yes, and just found a good answer in the post you referenced!

Oh, I thought you meant it for so.

Anonymous

No, it's not relevant to our discussion of so

Ahh... Got it. Now it makes sense.

Anonymous

11:27 PM

Sorry, I could have pinged Copper Kettle with it, and that would have been less confusing, but I wasn't sure it would onebox then

I think I'm the one who should say sorry! I was confusing myself! Sorry!

Anonymous

Pity upvotes make me sad, a little bit

Anonymous

When people upvote very bad answers, it takes longer for the automatic answer block to kick in.

I share the same feeling!

Anonymous

(You have to get a lot of downvotes before the system automatically blocks you―many regularly bad contributors never hit the block)

11:31 PM

1

Q: Using which twice in a row

I am new to reading fantasy and fiction books. I am writing one which is called Fable & Coins that is about a merchant called Yohan who is heading through a city called Yarren, where a rite has been set up on it for the past 2 days. I think this sentence has a structure like this: I am...

grammar adjectives

> I am writing [x] which is called [y] which is [z] ....`

Maybe the fear of repetition is everywhere!

Anonymous

It's a very good question

Oh, but the example sentence doesn't have two which is's!

Anonymous

They think that one which has been replaced by that

It's [... which is ... that is ... who is ..., where ...].

Anonymous

Presumably

11:34 PM

nods

Anonymous

Good point, though!

I guess it's not a crime to string which-es, just a stylistic lapse

Anonymous

They should clarify that point

Anonymous

I wasn't paying close enough attention to the example until you pointed it out

Anonymous

> I am writing one ~~which is~~ called Fable & Coins ~~that is~~ about a merchant called Yohan ...

Anonymous

11:36 PM

You could make the sentence shorter, even, if you wanted :-)

Indeed!

Anonymous

I just used the word point over and over.

Anonymous

Point, point, point.

Pointed!

(I think if I dropped which is, I might keep that is, or probably rephrased it to which is.)

I'm not disappointed, as long as your pointings are to the point (0:

Anonymous

11:38 PM

French pont is potential false friend for English point

Anonymous

It means 'bridge'!

ah, "pontifex maximus"

I know DuPont!

(Is that relevant? It's a popular brand for paint here. :-)

Anonymous

I think it is! :-)

Ahh

11:40 PM

In Greek "pontus" means "sea"

Eύξεινος Πόντος = Black Sea ("Hospitable sea" in Greek)

Anonymous

It's punct you want to look for (as in punctus) for 'point'

Anonymous

As in English punctual

The word pontus makes me think of Pocahontas, and Ponyo!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Ponyo! :-)

@snailboat Ah, things start to make sense.

11:42 PM

@snailboat Russian language has пункт too, a borrowing from Dutch

@snailboat Ponyo and the sea!

Anonymous

Punkt!

..or from Lating directly, I'm not sure

Wait, it's Blaupunkt, right!?

Anonymous

Blue point!

11:43 PM

@snailboat Yes. When someone has some strange trait in his character, its punktik (diminutive suffix)

Like "She has a punktik about wearing green"

@CopperKettle Does it also suggest the sense of "small point"?

@DamkerngT. No, in Russian the most used meaning for punkt is.. hm.. say, item (in a list)

Oh!

Anonymous

Like a bullet point?

@snailboat Yes!

"The program of our conference contains 10 punkts"

11:47 PM

10 points!

Anonymous

There are situations in which certain English speakers will shout out "ten points!"

Anonymous

But rather different from what we're discussing :-)

punktir is for "dotted line"

I'm not sure if I can guess it right. (I guess it's 10 out of 10.)

"Ten points" in Google Images brings up millions of boots.

Anonymous

11:48 PM

That's weird.

Anonymous

If you change it to "10 points", it's totally different!

Is it a brand name?

Could be

A-ha! I was quite close!

Anonymous

A Swedish shoe company!

Anonymous

11:50 PM

This is truly a weird image search.

There are also mock images of Hermione with "10 points to Gryffindor"

:-)

(0:

Anonymous

user image

Combinatorial, again!

Anonymous

11:53 PM

How is star defined?

They say "5 pointed stars". I guess any shapes.

I guess the most common form of the solution would be having a set of 5-point combinations where all the possible points are on the same circle.

Anonymous

I guess we'd want to start by saying no three points are collinear

Anonymous

Otherwise we'd run into problems :-)

Indeed!

Anonymous

If we start with your idea and put all the points on a circle, let's say, evenly spaced?

11:58 PM

I think it doesn't have to be evenly spaced.

Anonymous

Probably not.

Anonymous

They probably don't have to be on a circle, either.

nods -- Circle is probably the optimal shape the points lie on.

Anonymous

15

A: What is a Wyrm in D&D?

"Wyrm" (and its variant spelling "worm") is a common but old synonym for "dragon" in English. It's not originally a D&D or RPG term, but it's seen more often in fantasy RPGs (and fantasy literature) than everyday English because archaic words lend games a more fantasy feel.

Anonymous

Wyrm!

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