English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2013-01-12 (page 2 of 4)

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6:00 AM

And he was right at least in that.

It is a Catholic story.

That is what it is.

> Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

> He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English.

Nice.

user image

35 mins ago, by tchrist

> I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it. —Lord Dunsany

responds very loudly in Latin

You will never “get over” what you are become.

Nor foresee it.

6:08 AM

God should.

You are not God.

It is an astonishing thing, I know.

Demigod.

And I can still respond loudly in Latin.

You remain at your core who you are, who you were, all the while as your body corrupts, fails. It all seems a mistake, and you resist believing it. To your last day.

I will believe what works.

Now I need a short sleep or I will asleep here and now.

Go then. Rest.

6:13 AM

Or perhaps I should just go to bed, it's 7:13.

Dream not too foul a dream.

I shan't.

It will all be balrogs and dragons, as usual.

Night!

But don't the failings of Eru and the Valar bother you?

The failing of the world bothers me.

6:15 AM

@tchrist A great house.

I cannot deny it.

And I cannot condone it.

Middle Earth, you mean?

It is Dunsany Castle.

No, all our worlds.

@tchrist I know.

@tchrist But our world is improving. Less and less violence over time in Europe.

With a home like that, how could he not write as he wrote?

6:16 AM

And better and better healthcare.

You think so. You hope so.

It isn’t enough.

It is better than the alternative.

It isn’t enough.

Don't romanticise history.

And it is fragile.

I don’t. To the contrary.

It is not that fragile.

Don’t romanticize the future.

6:17 AM

Progress has been steady for a thousand years.

Tell that to the Holocaust.

Only some small ripples have disturbed the pattern.

A small ripple.

Even the Holocaust is a ripple.

People have been killed since the dawn of time.

The 20 million dead, again and then again, were . . . not a ripple to those they touched.

6:19 AM

But a ripple to history.

History is irrelevant to an individual life.

Man is invariant.

And vice versa.

Man can be, has been kneaded into shape.

Man’s nature does not change. He descends into brutality at every chance.

And society has changed to prevent this.

Society cannot change man’s nature.

6:20 AM

Europe is at peace now. More so than it has been over the past 1000 years.

I am so tired of the bombs, the mass-murders. It will never end.

Society can steer man's nature.

The massacres.

There is no answer for them.

There have always been massacres.

We all but destroyed the Neanderthals.

Etc.

Unclear.

Very very unclear.

6:22 AM

Take the Assyrians then, or the Huns, or the Mongols...

There are lots of dead people.

And the world is now extremely peaceful. More so than it has ever been.

No major wars.

When was the last time that happened?

There isn't even any serious threat of a major war.

1 hour later…

user19161

7:25 AM

@cornbreadninja I didn't get that ping because I wasn't in the room then and also I am now Jason Bourne.

8:07 AM

Hello people.

I managed to stay awake. Aren't you proud?

8:38 AM

In ‘The Better Angels Of Our Nature’, Steven Pinker argues that people have become less, not more, violent over the centuries.

8:57 AM

@BarrieEngland Historians agree—depending on how you define and measure this violence, of course.

9:12 AM

Hi @Gustavo, I see you hang here too.

user19161

Everyone, I am back to steelblue, no worries.

user19161

12:19 PM

@BarrieEngland It is rare of you to visit this chat!

Good morning.

user19161

@Noah Hi! I am sitting in your ark now, waiting for it to take off.

@JasonBourne Do I know you?

You seem to have changed names.

user19161

@Noah Yes, I am JL.

user19161

@Noah How can you not recognise my blue square?

12:24 PM

Umm, How did you get into my ark?

user19161

But be careful, someone might impersonate me to get a seat on that ark.

12:44 PM

I do. I was just playing... ouch, what is the word?

12:54 PM

Hey guys... Is you in I thank you dative or accusative?

@Em1 Dative, I guess.

@Noah This is my guess,too. I said you can see this more clearly in I thank her but then someone said that I see her would be accusative. And I really don't know if her is accusative and dative.

And I don't find any dictionary where this information is included. Oxford and Merriam Webster, Macmillan at least doesn't.

1:37 PM

If you is dative, then there must be an I thank you something sentence.

@tchrist I thank you for mentioning this hint. - I thank you for your comment. - ... - I think you is indeed dative.

You were thanked by me.

I can flip it.

Sounds like a direct object to me, since I can make a passive.

The "for" prepositional phrase is not related.

The dative/accusative distinction is a somewhat artificial one in modern English, anyway. We have direct and indirect objects, but there is no inflectional distinction there. And sometimes we just have objects.

So... you mean it's accusative?

You are letting German color your interpretation of English grammar.

I mean it is its direct object, yes. Otherwise I could not make a passive.

English has SVO. When you make O was Ved by S, it is a passive.

If it were dative you'd say I thank to you?

1:45 PM

I really don't like that word.

I thank you something.

Which word do you mean?

Dative.

:)

If you want you to mean an indirect object, you have to have a direct object.

I think dative and accusative aren't used that much in English as in German.

1:46 PM

Aren’t used much because they don’t make sense.

I think so.

Subject Bitransitive-Verb Indirect-Object Direct-Object.

Now go fill in the slots.

If it is not a bitransitive verb, then it is not an indirect object. QED.

OK. But I'm still not sure. Is you now direct or indirect object?

I just said.

Indirect objects occur only with bitransitive verbs.

I just read :)

1:48 PM

If you want you to be indirect, show me the direct.

Now is the question: Where can I look up if a word is bi-transitive?

In a dictionary.

OK. I lied :D I just didn't read it all the times.

You don’t have to look it up. Just say it.

If it is bitransitive, you will be able to form a sentence along this model:
Subject Bitransitive-Verb Indirect-Object Direct-Object.

I thank you the book sounds ugly. It is not bi-transitive ;)

1:51 PM

Exactly.

And therefore. . . .

It is transitive and it is follow by a direct object

Right.

Which is what I consider as accusative.

Why do you like that word?

Because it's the way I learned in school.

1:52 PM

Properly, it applies only to case inflections.

If I can ask with wen oder was in German it's accusative. Wem is dative. I never handled direct and indirect objects. ;)

English has oblique case in pronouns. In nouns, it does not.

And the oblique (or object) case for pronouns makes no distinction between direct and indirect.

Or objects of the preposition, for that matter.

There is only oblique/object case, and only in pronouns.

All else is lipstick on a pig.

Wer/wen/wem/wes is a full set of four different inflections. You won’t get that in English, although you do get three out of four in the case of who/whom/whose.

With nouns, you get only subject case and genitive, and even the genitive may be periphrastic not inflectional. Plus the Saxon genitive is an affix that applies to the entire noun phrase: the Queen of England’s lands.

Notice it is the Queen’s lands, but the apostrophe goes further on down the phrase.

This does not map to the German genitive model.

It is therefore often better just to call it a possessive.

That said, we call it the Saxon genitive, but I do not know why.

I just can't follow you any more...

Well, I will let you lead for a while then.

I will do.. Just one further question you raised

When talking about who/whom/whose I just wondered. What is the colloquial/idomatic way of phrasing the question if you want to know who someone thanked.

2:00 PM

Whoja thank?

At least, that’s what it sounds like.

Who ya thank? you mean?

No.

:(

Who’d’ya thank?

The d+y affricates into j.

Who do you thank

2:01 PM

Who did you thank?

Damn, Right :D

Pray tell me, kind sir, whom did you have the honor of thanking on that storied occasion?

Wtf...

My brain is shutting down.

I don’t know what you want.

I'm just happy that this sentence you just wrote is identically to German. :)

2:03 PM

Which one?

Whoja thank?

Or the prayer?

No... whom did you have the honor of

It is surpassingly formal.

Not only in English.

It is very very hard to have whom in sentence-initial position in English. It sounds like you are a courtier.

I'm pretty sure most native English will not able to use whom correctly, right?

2:05 PM

Probably.

But using who for whom is only stigmatized as the object of a preposition.

In other places, no one notices.

That is not the person whom you called yesterday, was it?

That is not the person who you said had called yesterday, was it?

Both those are correct. Good luck explaining why.

At least, in a way that a native speaker can internalize.

It is best just to use who all the way through than risk using whom where who is called for.

As German I had said "who you called yesterday" ;)

Because it stands out as pretentious.

It is a common, and painful, hypercorrection in the semi-educated classes.

It is not "who you called yesterday"; it must be "whom you called yesterday".

But it is "who you told me called yesterday".

Because I told you he called yesterday.

You can swap in he/him for who/whom to find the right case.

It is not "I told you him called yesterday".

All else follows from that observation.

Oh.. wait...

he = who and him = whom

Of course.

But he is correct and thus who is correct

2:12 PM

Where?

And so... who you called

No, you called he is incorrect.

You called him.

What????

You cannot call he, only him.

Yes..

But "I told you he called yesterday"

2:13 PM

Yes.

And this is the guy who called yesterday

And this was your initial sentence, wasn't it?

That is not the person whom you called yesterday.

Ahh...I just swapped the words.

The person who called you but whom you called :D

That is not the person who you said you thought called yesterday.

That is not the person whom you said you thought you called yesterday.

hahaha :)

2:15 PM

Few native speakers never get tangled up by that sort of thing in rapid conversation when they can’t work that out.

Nice. If we havn't had the conversation I wouldn't understand a word.

Because most do not realize that they even "need" to do so.

Which word?

All words.

I mean the almost identical sentences.

That is not the person whose mother you thought called yesterday.

As happened just two minutes ago where I swapped the word order just because I thought you were writing the other way round ;)

2:17 PM

That is not the person whose mother you said you thought you called yesterday.

With whose, you don’t care.

You needn’t think ahead. With who/whom, you do.

The most asinine error is by speakers who think that it is "I will give it to *whomever is ready"

But since him cannot be ready, it is ungrammatical.

In that case my German feeling would be correct. I'd go with whoever although German uses wem. But it though just sounds ugly in English with m to my ears.

They do not understand that just because a word is next to another, that this need not govern its case.

It is the larger syntactic structure that matters.

It is "to (whoever is read)". The object of the preposition is not whoever; it is the entire clause.

This is clear to me.

And the case of the relative pronoun is governed by its role in that clause.

Not just because of the "to" that comes immediately previous. That is immaterial.

I’ll give it to whomever is ready.

I’ll give it to whoever you think is ready.

I’ll give to whomever you told me you found ready.

This is the stuff that drives men mad.

And thus the case system’s death knell has long ago been sounded.

Spell check. Haven't you done any typos?

2:24 PM

Where?

Knell?

Where?

You just said some lines previously that in the first sentence the M is wrong

Oh, I do not believe I have made any errors in my who/whom(-ever) assignments, no.

Which is the maddening bit.

The most asinine error is by speakers who think that it is "I will give it to *whomever is ready" != I’ll give it to whomever is ready.

Oh wait.

You are right.

I was building up slightly variant sentences that flipped the case.

Too many edits.

:D

2:26 PM

Somewhere I have a sample of a dozen of these.

I'll give it to whoever deserves it.
I'll give it to whomever I please.
I'll give it to whoever I think deserves it.
I'll give it to whoever you said is getting it.
I'll give it to whomever you want me to give it to.

I'll give it to whoever is most deserving.
I'll give it to whomever I found most deserving.
I'll give it to whomever you said you had found most deserving.

OK. Stop :D

Ok, stopping at 8/12.

And I still haven’t dusted off whosever.

Nor whoever’s.

As I ever and anon am wont to do.

And whoever's does have two meanings.

Whoever’s is a contraction.

Whosever is in the genitive.

Oh.. and I just got another question... Different topic, but...

In German I had started the sentence with "Wobei whoever's does have two meanings". I'm looking for the English word in that case. I think it could be which. Let me think about how to explain the meaning of the word...

2:35 PM

Whereby?

Whereby... yeah..

This is the verbatim translation.

Is this idomatic English?

Sounds only slightly lawyerly.

> where, whereabout, whereabouts, whereafter, whereanent, whereas, whereat, whereaway, whereby, wherefore, wherefrom, wherein, whereinsoever, whereinto, whereness, whereof, whereon, whereout, whereso, wheresoever, wheresomever, wherethrough, wheretill, whereto, wheretoever, whereunder, whereuntil, whereunto, whereup, whereupon, wherever, wherewith, wherewithal.

Another example, I say: "I like the ... whatever" And while saying it, I think about it and am not sure anymore. Then I could say: "??? I'm not sure; perhaps I don't like it"

Do you mean: "by which I mean"?

No, I don't think so.

Or yes?

No!

I just checked some google entries. I don't think I mean this.

2:39 PM

It doesn’t quite seem like “oh and by the way. . . .”

No. It isn't.

I want to tell the opposite.

You mean it follows from?

Yes, but while thinking about it, No.

There is "by which" or "whereby", if so.

No, that's not what I meant.

2:40 PM

Then I do not understand what you meant.

Oh, if I add phrases and archaic forms, there are lots more where- words to choose from:

where, whereabout, whereabouts, whereafter, whereafterward, whereagainst, whereagainst, wherealong,
whereamong(st, wherenigh, whereover, whereround, wherewithout, whereanent, whereas, whereat,
whereaway, wherebole, whereby, where did you spring from?, where-ever, wherefore, whereforth,
wherefro, where —— from?, where —— to?, wherefrom, where has it got to, to get there, to get
nowhere, not to get anywhere, to get somewhere, wherehen, wherein, whereinne, whereinsoever,
whereintill, whereinto, where it’s (he’s, she’s) at, wheremid, whereness, wherenigh, whereof,

"But thinking about it, ..." "When pondering on the subject, ..."

... I come to another conclusion than just said.

And now a one-word idiomatic saying.

No, whereby does not fit there.

Not sure there is one.

Yeah. And I'm looking for which word is fittin.

In German I use wobei.

> "Ich finde das gut. Wobei... Eigentlich doch nicht"

Whence would get you talked about.

> "I like it. But... Actually not."

2:43 PM

"Now that I think about it"

Yep. But shorter :D

Those words are all short ones.

If there's none this would also be an answer.

Then just say "thinking about it".

OK.

2:44 PM

"Upon further reflection"

But probably whereas does fit in some contexts.

> Some of the studies show positive results, whereas others do not.

Which is not thinking about it but means contrast.

I think you will see that whereas was in my list of where- words. :)

I haven't examine those words.

Most people would just say while for whereas in casual conversation, as opposed to in formal writing.

I can't look up twenty words at once.

2:47 PM

All the where+prep words sounds a bit lawyerly.

I do indeed use while often but I always feel a bit strange when I recognized that I used that word since I thought it were wrong.

Anyway. Gotta go. Thank you for all the help and explanations. .)

> here, hereabout, hereabouts, hereafore, hereafter, hereafterward, hereat, hereaway, hereaways, herebefore, hereby, herefor, hereforth, herefrom, herein, hereintil, hereof, hereon, hereout, hereover, herethrough, hereto, heretobefore, heretofore, heretoforetime, hereunder, hereunto, hereupon, herewith, herewithal.

More weasel words.

You’re welcome.

Bye.

> else, elsehow, elsewards, elsewhat, elsewhen, elsewhence, elsewhere, elsewhither, elsewho, elsewise.

> other, othertime, otherward, otherwards, otherways, otherwhence, otherwhere, otherwheres, otherwhile, otherwhiles, other whither, otherwise, otherwiseness, otherworldish, otherworldliness, otherworldly, other-worldness.

> allwhither, anywhither, elsewhither, everywhither, nowhither, nowhitherwards, otherwhither, owhither, somewhither, to-whither, whither, whitherer, whithering, whither-out, whitherso, whithersoever, whithersum, whitherto, whitherward, whitherwards.

user image

Nip of autumn in the air, I’d say.

3:11 PM

1

A: Did the "We shall fight on the beaches" speech mainly use words from Old English? If so, why?

If you won't accept the authority of Robert Lacey, then I'm afraid nothing anyone here could say will persuade you. Short of an analysis of each of the ~53 unique words in the text—more work than is warranted for a question on this site, surely—no one will be able to tell you authoritatively if t...

My flea is biting again.

Whereas another poster who derives his answer from mine and then proceeds on conjecture from there receives no down vote.

Not I, said the fly.

user image

Although I think I did do things to some of your ancient posts late last night.

I didn't say it was you.

I know.

I dunno, is Kris around? :)

The answer is yes.

hums

Aye.

Anyway, I don't see downvotes to any ancient posts of mine. Just recent ones.

I didn’t say I downvoted. I remember commenting. I often vote on things I comment on, but not always. I do not remember.

3:20 PM

But circumstantial evidence would make Kris a person of interest in the matter, yes.

That is the person whose review-queue actions correlate most highly with my own, but in a reverse sense.

So we think oppositely.

Or he's your proxy.

"Proxy"?

Sock?

Or bellwether?

No, proxy server. Yes, sock puppet. And I'm kidding.

That would be a waste.

Never had a sock. Seems sick.

3:21 PM

Kidding is never a waste. It amuses me, at least.

If someone’s ego, and involvement, is so tied up with the site that they go creating socks to masquerade as people they are not for purposes of deception, then this strikes me as a sort of mental disorder.

Which is why I have no mercy for those whose accounts get boxed for voting irregularities. They’re sick puppies — in the puppetry sense.

What would be the point of creating a sock puppet? Why not just lie about your SAT scores, or anything else, for that matter? Some people are pathological liars.

I have met such scum. I have not enjoyed it.

9

A: What is a single word for a person who, as a habit, exaggerates a lot when relating information?

This kind of behavior actually is a recognized psychiatric disorder. Such a person is known as a pathological liar, a compulsive liar, or a mythomaniac. See this definition of pseudologia fantastica.

"Politician"

3:34 PM

Definitely a synonym.

When everything they say depends on whom they’re saying it to, they might as well be called pathological liars.

Q: What’s 2+2? A: Who wants to know?

Sep 14 '12 at 12:15, by ΜετάEd

2 + 2 = 5, for large values of 2.

Jan 27 '12 at 22:31, by MetaEd

2 + 2 = 5, for large values of 2.

At least I'm consistent.

@tchrist Descends into brutality, and ascends to charity. A strange creature, man.

This not strictly English, but I would to see if anyone can help. I am downloading a font, and I've a choice -- "Latin" and "Western Languages" glyphs. Does "Western Languages" there imply "Latin-Extended" or is it something else altogether? What are those "Western Languages"? Any ideas?

3:50 PM

Lame.

By Latin, they probably mean ISO-8859-1, maybe ISO-8859-15, glyphs.

By Western European, they probably mean extensive diacritics.

It is a lame non-distinction, because all Western European languages use the Latin script.

Greek and Cyrillic are not Western European.

Hmm... it's confusing. Anyway, no big deal. Thanks

It is not your fault.

:)

The blame rests clearly on the dummy who said such a ridiculous thing.

A “Pan-European” font will have full Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic as used in all modern and historical texts written in those scripts. That is the kind you want.

This does not include the various ancient scripts used in European regions, but that is ok.

I think it's more straightforward to download the font from Google

3:56 PM

Not sure what any of that means.

@tchrist google.com/webfonts

Those are gross.

@tchrist Change the filter to "Popularity"

There are good ones, but many are very bad, I agree :)

Change the filter to "Garamond".

:-)

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Jan '1312

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

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