English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Anonymous

1:07 AM

Hello, land of (removed)

Cerberus

I see you!

Anonymous

Oh!

Cerberus

1:21 AM

I don't believe snails have very keen eye sight?

Anonymous

@Cerberus They can tell which direction is brighter!

Anonymous

Mostly they use their eyes by bumping into stuff with them.

Anonymous

If your eye hits a wall, you know a wall is there.

Anonymous

If you ever watch them crawl, they're kind of like little zeppelins

Cerberus

Hehe.

That is one way of navigation, I suppose.

Anonymous

1:33 AM

I found a video of a snail being nature's zeppelin.

Anonymous

►

Robusto

1:47 AM

Where's the ambiguity? In the men's (or women's) room? — Robusto 24 secs ago

Cerberus

Nice snail.

Anonymous

Hey.

Anonymous

0

A: "The childrens' blankets" or "The children's blankets"

Well, childrens isn't a word, so it's still children's. Just one more ambiguity in the English language.

Anonymous

I feel like you should be able to make a plural childrens in the right context.

Anonymous

The many childrens of the north?

Cerberus

1:49 AM

Meh.

Anonymous

I can't figure out a good example, though.

Anonymous

1

A: Pronunciation of "banal" in British English?

I'm a Brit and I say b'narl. Not rhyming with canal (short 'a's), nor banorl (all), and definitely never rhyming with anal. Unfortunately I've no sound on my machine at the moment so I can't listen to Ledda's links. How does this site pronounce it?

Anonymous

This site is exciting!

Anonymous

B'narl sounds Lovecraftian.

Cerberus

►

This woman says proboskis.

Anonymous

1:53 AM

Hah

Cerberus

And you can see the thread of the harpoon, I believe.

Anonymous

What a good snail

Cerberus

Quite.

Anonymous

I wanted to type land-mollusk again, but it was a marine snail.

Cerberus

Very.

Anonymous

2:00 AM

Where are the sky-mollusks?

Cerberus

They escaped to the stars. One day they will return.

To find as and with sky-harpoons bind us.

Anonymous

Poor snailies. One of them was rasping at its own shell :-( And there's plenty of calcium to eat!

Anonymous

I put the snail on the calcium, but it crawled off.

Cerberus

That's odd.

Why would it do that?

Anonymous

2:16 AM

I don't know. Their shells have calcium, so sometimes if they can't find any calcium in their environment they'll rasp at their own shells

Cerberus

So they are like Ouroboroi.

Anonymous

Cerberus

Aww.

Cute as a cone!

Anonymous

I came up with an example for childrens', but it's pretty bad.

Anonymous

> And the many childrens of the peoples of the north gave birth to childrens of their own; and those childrens' childrens each became peoples in their own right, with their own cultures and traditions not quite like those of the others.

Anonymous

2:30 AM

But it's enough to convince me that it's possible to use childrens' in English. Probably someone else could do a better job of it :-)

Cerberus

Umm...

I'm not sure I am familiar with this "childrens". What is it supposed to mean?

Anonymous

It's like peoples.

Anonymous

Multiple populations of children.

Cerberus

But...

Anonymous

But!

Cerberus

2:31 AM

Yes, but.

Anonymous

It's like the many fishes of the Mississippi

Cerberus

Hah.

And the many snailses?

Anonymous

Hey, them there's different. You can't stick -s on something that already has an -s. Well, you can, but

Anonymous

I feel it's different from adding -s to a non- -s plural

Anonymous

I suppose you can pluralize anything if you really want to.

Anonymous

2:35 AM

1

Q: What does “the us’es” mean?

What is the meaning of us’es in this passage below? The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all ri...

pronouns

Anonymous

9

A: Can I use the word "milks" when discussing KINDS of milk

This is an example of a well-established countification process for (some) mass nouns. Below is a minor elaboration of the last comment on the answer linked above. It's an ordinary example of how efficient language is in using resourses. Why waste a perfectly good plural suffix when it can b...

Anonymous

Those are both interesting and not 100% relevant but not 100% irrelevant, either.

Anonymous

Aww, I'm going to have to give up on childrens.

Anonymous

I can't find any attested uses of childrens to mean multiple groups of children. I can only find examples of it as a nonstandard plural of child.

Anonymous

Well, I could always be the first. I could start a trend.

Anonymous

2:44 AM

Speaking of which, one of my friends wants to start adopting the Japanese names for Phillips-head and flat-head screwdrivers in English.

Anonymous

In Japanese, they're called "plus" and "minus".

Anonymous

He's trying to start a trend too. Us trendsetter types, we've got our work cut out for us.

Cerberus

@snailboat I don't see why...

Anonymous

@Cerberus Because! Adding -s to something that has -s already feels silly.

Cerberus

And adding it to geese or children does not?

Anonymous

2:47 AM

It's easier to reanalyze children as a mass noun because it doesn't have -s

Cerberus

@snailboat Don't we also say buses and losses?

Anonymous

Bus and loss end in s, they don't end in -s

Mitch

'fair dinkums'

Cerberus

Uhh...

Mitch

los-s. there, now it does.

Anonymous

2:49 AM

Thank you.

Cerberus

@snailboat What does that mean? The hyphen merely indicates that the letter occurs after and attached to something else.

Anonymous

@Cerberus I am using -s to refer to the plural suffix

Cerberus

Mitch to the rescues!

Anonymous

How would you like for me to refer to it?

Cerberus

As such.

(It is not correct to say bus does not end on -s.)

But, sure, I get your (non-serious) point.

Anonymous

2:50 AM

I was using - to mean "there is a morpheme boundary here", and the combination of - with s to refer to a particular morpheme

Anonymous

My apologies for any confusion!

Anonymous

I do like plus and minus drivers, though.

Mitch

'wasps' is often pronounced with a geminate 's'

dropping the p

my new punk band name

Cerberus

I would use a hyphen to indicate a morpheme barrier inside a word, but not so much when you're only giving a suffix.

@Mitch Children often say weps instead of wesp in Dutch.

Mitch

so is the prular marker in English a morpheme? so then wasps is pronounced 'was-s'?

ha ha oops. prular -> plural

Cerberus

2:57 AM

Yes, it is a morpheme.

But using hyphens to mark morpheme boundaries is not extremely formal.

It's more like an ad-hoc aid.

Anonymous

Well, the hyphen does get called on for that duty fairly often.

Cerberus

Yes.

But morphemes often cannot be distinguished.

Anonymous

Can you explain why you just said that?

Mitch

why are any languages analytic or agglutinative? we all slur so much it might as well be inflections and infixes and such.

Cerberus

1. It's often very hard to decide which morphemes to pick if they are no longer or not fully productive.

Mitch

3:04 AM

@Cerberus English kids say pasketti for speghetti

Cerberus

In he-s-i-t-a-t-e, I could distinguish this many morphemes, or just one. Or something in between.

Mitch

if they're idiots.

Cerberus

Haha, yes, I have heard that.

Mitch

it's made up TV stuff.

Cerberus

2. The boundaries of moprheme can cut through letters or be discontinuous.

Mitch

3:06 AM

in semitic maybe. Discontinuous in IE?

Cerberus

Sure.

Mitch

wait the -boundaries- can be discontinuous?

Anonymous

@Mitch Is it really?

Mitch

not the morphemes themselves?

@snailboat There's no science here. I've only ever heard it on TV. But.

Cerberus

In ep-hemeral, you could say the h belong to the first morpheme. And in Greek, ph is one letter, so you can't even put the hyphen where you might want it.

In Greek bal-lô "I throw", the second l is really a gemination of the l in bal- due to the disappearance of a -y- suffix that came after the l.

In tu-n-kh-an-ô, the first n is an infix inside the morpheme tukh-.

And the a is really a vocalisation of the suffix -n- (the second *n) under influence of the preceding consonant: should it count as part of the suffix?

Mitch

3:13 AM

No Dutch or ENglish or Latin examples?

Cerberus

It's easier for me for Greek, because I know a bit more about Greek historical morphology.

In English, the -e- in men could be said to be morphemic, since it indicates the plural, as it did from the beginning (I think).

So should we write m-a-n, m-e-n?

You could say we should.

Mitch

ablaut is a a morpheme? (Or is that plural an umlaut?)

Cerberus

I believe it is umlaut.

Mitch

It's both right. sort like how tragedies are often travesties too.

Cerberus

Right.

So it kind of depends on the purpose of your example.

Mitch

3:17 AM

OK then..strong verbs in Germanic all are infixed morpheming.

Anonymous

Man, men, mens, menses. Oops

Cerberus

3. We often only hyphenate that part of the word which concerns us, so not all morpheme boundaries, even where they are clear.

So I could write impossi-ble, avail-able if the morpheme under consideration is -(a)ble.*

If the boundary between im- and -possible is not relevant.

It saves a lot of time if you don't have to look up every single morpheme boundary!

*) My analysis of -(a)ble could be wrong here.

Anonymous

@Cerberus Thank you for elaborating!

Cerberus

Yay!

I see my typing was very sloppy, though.

Anonymous

It gives me some food for thought, since I have to make decisions about what constitutes a morpheme in the grammar I am (sort of) writing. There are a lot of instances in modern Japanese where units are treated as monomorphemic although historically they certainly were not

Cerberus

3:30 AM

Oh, well.

Anonymous

I was already on board with point 3

Cerberus

@snailboat Ahah!

I didn't know you were writing a grammar.

Anonymous

@Cerberus One that is mostly wrong, at the moment

Anonymous

So it's not terribly useful.