@Vit: I'm going to browse the true CGEL next week then; the English department of the uni library is a hundred meters from my house. I wonder what I shall find! Any recommendations as to convincing evangelical materials?
Hello all, I don't expect anywhere is here, but I thought you'd all like to know I'm still annoyed with the duplicate message formatting, so I stepped it up a notch.
When a question is closed as a duplicate, the duplicate question is selected (by the users who vote to close) and then a link to it is attached automatically to the top of the message as a blockquote.
Part of the site design at English.SE includes a style for blockquotes that emphasizes their "...
The blockquote HTML tag is often used for things that are not literally quotations—for example, in duplicate question notices—so the giant quotation mark is quite often incorrect or misleading.
Since fixing duplicate question notices to not be (erroneously, imho) tagged as "blockquotes" is clear...
@nohat — Yeah, I definiinitely agree about the closed-question announcement. Side note, "anywhere is here"; by definition, it is probably where you are too. =)
I am Urdu speaker and want to learn English. Problem is that I got confuse when I Express my words in English. Please suggest me any book so that I'll be able to ask the questions and answers on different communities.
I hope you understand what I want to say.
When the wine is bubbling, start mixing in the cheese. Once it is melted (keep stirring), you mix cornstarch and Kirschwasser (cherry liqueur) in my secret proportions and stir that in. Then you take fresh nutmeg berries, grind them in a mortar and pestle, and sprinkle on the top. Use dried French bread, mushrooms, and apple cubes for dunkers.
Here we have a difference between sources: the New Oxford American Dictionary reports faerie (and faery) as “late 16th century (introduced by Spenser): pseudoarchaic variant of fairy”. On the other hand, etymonline has “ supernatural kingdom, "Elfland," by late 14th century, from Old French”.
At...
I welcome comments, because I was amazed (also, it was early morning for me at the time)
@Fx — It binds the cheese to the wine. The way flour and butter cooked into a roux bind to broth. Hey, you're French, right? I thought all you people knew about cooking. Sheesh.
cornstarch is only used in France for: (a) lazy cooks who can't get their temperature right (it's easier than regular flour for roux); (b) people intolerant to wheat
I have some in my cupboard, but if my mother were to find out that I sometimes use it when I'm in a haste, I'd get heavily frowned upon :)
The Germanic languages that I'm familiar with all use a prefix similar to ge- on past participles:
German: Ich habe mir den Fuß gebrochen.
Dutch: Ik heb mijn voet gebroken.
But English doesn't do this at all:
English: I've broken my foot.
Where did this prefix come from? Did Engl...
Most of my work went into taking a screenshot of the almost-completed answer with GIMP before killing the browser, and then typing that stuff from the screenshot again.
As others have noted, fairy is the standard modern spelling, and faerie is a pseudo-archaism.
However, in some contexts there is now a semantic distinction between the two spellings! In particular, fairy tales and the associated idea of fairies typically refer to the genre of folk stories printe...
@Kosmonaut It was a source of much hilarity to us as children (growing up in the south of England) when my sister asked my father how to spell "furry", and he (from Liverpool) responded by asking, "Do you mean furry like a teddy bear, or a furry that grants wishes?"
@JSBangs: About the ash: duh. I'm hip deep in coding right now so of course the obvious C&P answer was just a shade too obvious for me. Thanks for fixing it first, though.
The idea with the Dutch/German construction is that it would be redundant to refer to the same person twice, which is why the article steps in where one would normally expect the possessive adjective. Referring to the same person twice where there would be only one possible interpretation anyway is a bit ugly in Dutch. I think it is, too, in English—just in different circumstances.
@RegDwight so it sounds like i was wrong. i was assuming that the use of mir in my original example was a generally productive syntactic pattern, like the romanian pattern. but based on what you've said here, i think it's a special case, in which case i would say that brechen is ditransitive
The problem seems to be that it is impossible to say when something is a complement as opposed to an adjunct: the line is often blurred. Unless you have some magical definition...
That verb is a nightmare... It can be intransitive, too. Spaghetti brechen leicht (spaghetti easily break). And don't try that with people... Ich breche (I vomit).
And then there's the usual German nightmare of having Das Flugzeug bricht auseinander (The plane falls apart), or Ich brach zusammen (I collapsed), where the verb is not brechen, but rather auseinanderbrechen and zusammenbrechen, respectively.
You're standing in front of a ticket vending machine and it says "The ticket is printing". Is that correct or should it be "The ticket is being printed"?
EDIT:
If both are correct, which one should be preferred or is more common?
The thing is, there are literally zillions of verbs in German that work like that. You can't just say that all of them aren't really intransitive, that it's all just middle constructions.
@RegDwight I started having a conversation about the middle construction with my (syntactician) office mate. After a while, he said "f**k knows. f**k them." But yes, if my logic is correct then die Vase zerbricht is also a middle.
He swears a lot.
According to some of the stuff we read, middles seem to be specific to general statements. So actually, it should be die Vase zerbricht leicht in order to be a middle. But I don't understand why it must be that (if it really must).
@Kosmonaut, @Reg: I think it is merely a lexical choice of definition, at least in the Germanic languages, where there is no difference in form: do we say "to break" has two different meanings, one transitive and the other intransitive, with different thematic roles, that we note as sub-entries in the dictionary? Or do we say that this intransitive sense is a regular derivative of the transitive verb and do not note it is a secondary sense of the verb? In my opinion, it doesn't really matter.
@Cerberus Right, it sort of doesn't matter. The only place it really would matter is if you would then predict that the two versions of e.g. "break" will not be able to semantically drift from each other
ergative is really a very different thing which doesn't exist at all in english, for all practical purposes, so it has nothing to do with the present discussion
Yes, maybe. I guess my point is that it is sure to be the same "eat" — everything you predict about the act and result of "eat" is what you would predict in a middle construction
Like if soup eats like a meal, then that means someone puts soup to their mouth, it is ingested into someone's body, there might be some chewing if there are chunks, and so on
Same as the soup is eaten
Basically no extra semantics and no less semantics.
Anyway, I don't know how I always end up putting myself in these syntax conversations :)
I always find it interesting to a point and then it starts to annoy me.
What about this: the so-called middle construction is a bit unusual; that is why it is uncommon to add it on top of a metaphor, which is already a bit unusual itself, i.e. both require some extra thinking, which quickly adds up (hah, middle!).
Well metaphors can become so common that they hardly feel like metaphors any more; but they still retain the sometimes very different set of arguments they took when they "split off" from the old, regular argument structure of the old/basic verb.
Yeah, who knows; and it is only a definition anyway. Note that this middle construction exists in nearly all (IE) languages I know, even in Greek, which even has a special middle voice with its own endings (there are pairs like "break" that can be transitive and intransitive both in the active voice).
Yeah. It is probably that language is always under pressure to be more efficient; and when there is no intransitive use of a verb that would make sense, why not use it in a new sense if it can save words?
Leg-o = I say; leg-o-mai = I say for myself; I say myself; I am (being) said; e-leg-o-mên = same as previous but in the past; eip-o-mên = I said myself or for myself (but not "I was said"); e-lekh-thê-n = I was was said.
lekh-thê-s-ô = I will be said (if I remember correctly)
Well the verb lego isn't great for summarizing conjugation and the meaning of the different tenses. I should have picked a different verb that is more intuitive.
@Cerberus i know greek, but i can't figure out what you're trying to demonstrate here. is it the fact that the passive and middle have fallen together in many tenses?
Oh I was just trying to explain that the passive has the same suffix for all persons, and a personal ending that comes after it, whereas middle has no such suffix, but, on the other hand, it does have endings that are exclusive to it, though they do not resemble each other very much.
The endings that come after the passive suffix are the same as those in the active voice.
o-n, e-s, e-t (I think it was -et, and the t at the end always diappears in Greek while lengthening the preceding vowel), o-men, e-te, o-n (the 3rd plural has -n and -san and -(ou)si(n)).
Fun fact: the athematic active present endings mi, s, si, men, te, si(n?) are cognates of the athematic active past endings I gave above (n, s, [t/void], men, te, san), and also of the thematic present endings o (vocalised nasal), s, [t/void], men, te, (ou)si(n?).
I suspect that the middle endings were formed by adding some suffix before or after the present endings, but I'm not sure. There certainly is a relation.
Three more examples @Kosmonaut. You sit in your room doing nothing when all of a sudden ein Balken bricht und fällt Dir auf den Kopf. There is no agent doing the breaking. Or you are riding a bicycle when suddenly die Gabel bricht, or der Sattel bricht ab. In English, you would just say that the saddle fell off. As in, there wasn't anybody falling it off. It just fell off, period. Intransitive.
And the third example, when someone's telling you a sad story and his Stimme bricht. He is not breaking his voice on purpose. (In fact, quite the opposite, he probably tries to prevent it from breaking, but he just can't help it.)
And you can even have a participle. Someone speaks mit brechender Stimme. The voice is not being broken; it is doing the breaking.
I am Urdu speaker and want to learn English. Problem is that I got confuse when I Express my words in English. Please suggest me any book so that I'll be able to ask the questions and answers on different communities.
I hope you understand what I want to say.
You're standing in front of a ticket vending machine and it says "The ticket is printing". Is that correct or should it be "The ticket is being printed"?
EDIT:
If both are correct, which one should be preferred or is more common?
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…