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1:03 AM
Greetings to the English Language and Usage people.
 
Greetings!
Where are they?
 
Is there a question that you have regarding the proper use and capitalization of "I" on its own?
I need to borrow a link to that if you know of such a question that has an answer on your site, in order to have a meta post on Ask Ubuntu closed irrefutably, in counter to someone who is arguing the improper usage of "I" and "I've", and I am assuming they are a non-English speaker who needs education about the proper use.
 
The rule is too simple to state: "capitalise I".
 
@Cerberus You and I both may know this, however to non-English speakers, they may not know of this.
Or, they may not understand why, in which case I said they should slap themselves for being silly check this site for answers.
 
Heh.
8
A: Should 'I' be capitalized or in lower case?

ThursagenOne of the capitalization rules is, to capitalize the letter "I" when referring to yourself, so it must be capitalized: In English, the nominative form of the singular first-person pronoun, "I", is normally capitalized, along with all its contractions (I'll, I'm, etc.). So, it would be: ...

 
1:10 AM
@ThomasW. Or check the English Language Learners site.
 
@KitFox Links tend to be helpful, as some of us who almost never visit an English Language site may not know of such sites. :)
 
@KitFox Thank you. :)
... I should send 99% of the people I talk to online to that site to ask questions to learn about the English language, since they have a "fail" level of understanding of the English Language...
 
Haha.
Bring it on!
 
"Hi. Need help. Ubuntu don't boot. How fix?"
^-- That is an example of the "fail"-levels of English usage I see on a daily basis.
In case you were curious, @Cerberus.
 
1:22 AM
Wow, that's pretty good.
 
But it remains horribly "fail".
 
Considering some of what we see. That's actually understandable.
 
Getting them to understand what I ask them to do is equally hard. This is why I point people to the Local teams for Ubuntu, so native speakers of their languages can help them. Saves me parsing their fail-english.
 
Good plan. Speaking of parsing... goes to check query
 
@KitFox Understandable, yes. Helpful in the long run when they can't understand what a techie is asking them to do, on the other hand, it is not.
heh.
 
1:25 AM
Eeeee! I finally got it to work.
 
@KitFox congrats.
What is it that you were querying/parsing?
 
bows with a flourish
I am parsing strings in a table in an Oracle DB.
They were not stored in a handy way, so I ended up replacing all the <br>s with : and then using regex_substr to fetch me each token.
The union of these sets will be the basis for further parsing.
Hooray.
 
Eww. OracleDB.
shuns @KitFox for using proprietary, closed-source technologies
Free, Open Source Software is superior to closed-source equivalent technologies.
(I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. xD)
 
Well. So what do you use?
Not that it matters, since I don't choose it.
 
@ThomasW. Lovely.
 
1:34 AM
@KitFox MySQL, or PostgreSQL, personally. Although I do have an Oracle 10g XE server running locally for my SQL course stuff.
 
Yeah, I've used those.
I like Postgre. MySQL I felt was kind of meh. SQL Server has been the easiest to use by far.
Oracle does not make me happy, but it does have this nice regex thingy that I don't remember having as a feature in MSSQL.
 
You'll forgive me for condemning you to F/OSS Hell. Because MS SQL Server is more evil than Oracle is.
 
Well, have you used it much?
 
it's actually more resource-intensive.
had to when I worked with the state.
 
So?
 
1:39 AM
'twas hell from a management perspective >.<
 
It performs significantly better than any other DB engine I have used.
 
at least Oracle has straight-forward permissions flags you can set, with Microsoft they're a little more complicated
shrugs
 
Ergo, it can have all the resources it wants.
 
To each their own, but being an Ubuntu guy, it's implied I support free and open source software more.
 
Well, and like I said, it's not like I have a choice anyway.
 
1:40 AM
True.
 
I certainly wouldn't have chosen Oracle.
 
I was able to get by with MySQL for most of the coursework I did on my Database Structure course I had to take, but meh.
 
I didn't much like it.
 
The course primarily lectured us on SQL code
so the specific DB system used was irrelevant.
 
It was sufficient for running queries, but it felt wobbly, like it wouldn't hold up under heavy use.
 
1:42 AM
so long as the code was correct (and commented accordingly when certain datatypes were changed to adapt to the varying differences between Oracle and MySQL), I got credit.
 
@ThomasW. Well, kinda. It comes in different flavors, but I guess if you were just covering the basics...
 
@KitFox indeed.
For that one course, though, the DB system used was irrelevant and I was given an OK to use MySQL by the instructor, so long as I added comments where necessary to identify differing datatypes.
 
Makes sense. Very understanding of your instructor.
 
He did make a note after day 2 of the course, when I brought it up in email, and he said "As long as your SQL is correct, and you identify where data types were changed in order to adapt to the software you're using, you can use any other database software."
whether MySQL, Postgre, MSSQL, or anything else.
The key thing he wanted was the database system output for the problems after each line we gave SQL, so we end up turning in 30 pages of terminal output by the time we're done with a project.
But the key points of SQL are still all the same, INSERT INTO database.table_name ... and such
Oh, I just noticed my "Eww. OracleDB." comment got a star. xD
anyways, I'll leave you be, I don't wish to bog down the English Language and Usage home channel with technical talk :)
 
We do it all the time. Many of us are coders.
Ah, crap. Stupid, stupid. Strings already have colons in them.
tries a pipe instead
 
1:57 AM
this made me cry :(
 
@KitFox Well, then. I'll just lurk here. And occasionally comment on how Open Source Technologies are superior to Closed Source.
 
I know where you live. shakes fist grumpily
Oh. I meant your chat home. You want to get all creepy, we can do that.
gets out data mining toolset
cracks knuckles
Oi! Give that back.
 
xD
anyways, back in a minute maybe, need to get some nginx diffs ready for inclusion into Ubuntu :/
 
No explain how I have 70 rows where I ought to have 16.
 
@kalina :,(
 
2:04 AM
@KitFox Some base-64 confusion.
 
Speed kills
 
Yes, but at least it does so quickly.
 
A slow death is worse.
 
Is it? Have you tried them both?
 
Most of them take about 70 years.
 
2:07 AM
Supposedly I have four rows that contain three instances of <br>. So if I break them into tokens, I should have 16 pieces, right? Or have i lost my mind somehow?
 
Depends.
Probably.
 
grumbles, shakes fist
 
my face won't stop leaking, I must be emotionally unstable from falling asleep at my PC instead of in my comfy bed
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's cool to see that the "top 10 paid apps" for Android are mostly actually useful productivity apps, and ones that could never exist on Apple's limited platform:
Whereas Apple's "top 10 paid apps" are mostly games, so apps don't increase the productivity of IOS much:
 
Well, because Apple games are better than Android ones, is all.
 
2:14 AM
9
Q: How can a proton be converted to a neutron via positron emission and yet gain mass?

user118899The mass of a neutron is greater than mass of a proton so how is it possible in positron emission for a proton to form a neutron and a positron?

 
@Cerberus regardless of this list, I actually don't have a "primary use" for either of my android devices
at least games actually get released for ios
rather than just annouced
 
@KitFox want to see why I want to occasionally strangle non-English speakers?
 
@KitFox Hardly: all or almost all of those games are also on Android.
@kalina The games in that list mostly also exist for Android.
 
@Cerberus Deus Ex: The Fall
 
Yeah, but they suck on Android. Fruit Ninja is awesomer on the iPad.
 
2:16 AM
Minecraft, Temple Run, Angry Birds, Plague Inc.—those exist for Android.
I think I even have Plague Inc.
 
or Ridge Racer Slipstream for that matter
 
@ThomasW. You can share if it makes you feel better.
 
@Cerberus doesn't matter, the ones I want got announced for a simultaneous release and then never happened
 
@KitFox This is the person who I had to give an English lesson to via Ask Ubuntu Meta...
 
I'm talking about proper games
not angry birds
 
2:17 AM
@kalina Possibly, but those games aren't even in the list.
 
@ThomasW. downvotes
 
@KitFox and FIVE MINUTES after we had already established this on meta there with the English Language links...
:/
 
@kalina But that is not relevant for these lists.
 
@kalina yes, downvote the user.
 
2:17 AM
@Cerberus my comment wasn't made in reference to the lists
 
@ThomasW. That's fantastic! I love it.
 
also...
 
@kalina Mine were!
 
in Ask Ubuntu General Room, 3 mins ago, by Braiam
I should call @kityfox to teach someone english D:
gives @KitFox a new task :P
 
@ThomasW. I just rejected two vandalism edit proposals myself.
 
2:19 AM
@ThomasW. No, I meant... nevermind
 
@tchrist this person has done two or more of those edits... AFTER we already established the proper use of English language in meta.
@kalina :)
 
@ThomasW. Vandalism.
Flag him for a moderatrix to sit on him.
@ThomasW. That would be English language?
 
@tchrist Just about, yeah.
@tchrist anything else you want to complain about while I'm typing from my phone?
 
I was just getting to that.
Just a second, my typewriter’s ringing.
 
@ThomasW. I looove how you misunderstood him, and he you.
Where exactly are you seeing this? In English, if i is its own word, it must be capitalized. Example: "i am a person" is wrong, but "I am a person" is right. We'd need more specifics for what you're commenting on. — Thomas W. 1 hour ago
I see them mostly after commas. — nixveloper 1 hour ago
 
2:23 AM
@Cerberus meh.
@Cerberus His image screenshot though pointed out the issue, and his edits confirmed he doesn't listen.
 
maybe he has a short term memory issue?
 
Oh, this is embarassing. I was referring to that. My native language being italian never capitalizes "i" (io) after a comma, and i thought it was the same in english. Thank you for the clarification, I just learned something new. — nixveloper 1 hour ago
 
!!summon 201
 
He made that other edit after this comment?
 
@Cerberus Yes. And AFTER he accepted my answer about how it's called "Proper English Language Usage"
... and that they were doing it wrong.
 
2:27 AM
That is absurd. Are you sure that isn't some glitch?
The edit was approved by someone at the time it says on the page, but he actually made the edit earlier?
I presume someone with low rep like him can't make an edit without approval?
 
what's his rep?
 
True, the 2k rep requirement still exists
@kalina < 100
 
<2000 requires the queue
 
indeed.
 
except against your own posts
 
2:30 AM
@kalina my point is that he's failing even after he's already acknowledged proper english on Meta.
 
users will be users
 
LOL xD
@nixveloper Let's actually follow what you learned here, and NOT propose de-capitalization edits, mmkay? If you do, you are gonna have them rejected and you could get banned from editing briefly... — Thomas W. 7 mins ago
lol that's what's like being high, sorry. — nixveloper 2 mins ago
I propose a new language. — nixveloper 55 secs ago
This has made my day.
 
oh right, he's high
yeah that will make you forget things you've just been told
 
He should be banned for 24 hours solely on principle because of that comment. xD
 
nothing wrong with being high
I do my best work when I'm high
 
2:32 AM
heh
 
some people smoke cigarettes to destress
some people drink alcohol to fall over
some people smoke weed to phase out the world around them
 
 
2 hours later…
4:06 AM
I think almost 60% of people who studied abroad (in English speaking countries) still have bad English skill. They pretty much wasted their time. They have no interest and motivation about it
^_^....
 
@EnglishMaster at least people in India give it an effort, since they're all the tech support people nowadays >.>
but yes, your point still stands.
 
People ask me "How long does it take for an average person to improve their Engrish?!" "How did you learn it?!" But I feel defensive about telling them "You must be motivated and interested" because most of them will think it's a unrealistic and stupid response.
So I usually tell them "Oh boy, you should go and read XXX textbook!" "Go abroad!"
 
5:07 AM
Sorry?
 
 
4 hours later…
8:40 AM
Morning.
OMG I said "morning" and it actually is morning.
 
@Cerberus Evening. :)
 
Good evening.
 
Good morning.
 
You are in Thailand, I believe?
 
Yes, in Bangkok.
 
8:45 AM
What time is it?
 
15:43
 
Ah!
I knew it, so not evening yet.
 
I think it's kinda fuzzy area between afternoon and evening.
 
6 hours' difference.
Really?
Here the evening begins at 6.
 
Ah, I see.
Thai usually think of evening since 5.
 
8:46 AM
Interesting.
 
(So they can leave their offices.)
 
Heh.
Is this an old, traditional notion?
 
Ah, I think some even left since 4:30. :-)
 
I have no idea how old our current division of the day is.
(Although morning has always been until noon, 12 o' clock.)
 
Of course.
 
8:48 AM
What kind of hours were traditionally used in Thailand?
 
What do you mean? in Thai language?
Morning is different to different people.
To some, morning can begin as soon as 3.
To most, it usually starts from 6 am.
Then the morning goes up until noon.
Then afternoon from after 12 to some time around 5 pm.
 
Was the day traditionally divided into 12 hours?
I mean a thousand years ago.
 
Modern Thai uses the same international time system.
 
But I want to know about traditional!!
 
Thousand years ago was more interesting.
 
8:52 AM
Now we're talking.
 
It's different in different regions.
 
Ah OK.
 
Usually, we tell time by counting number of times we hit something.
Like a gong, or a drum.
And we use the sound as our time unit. Make sense?
For example, we call midnight [noon-night].
 
Sure, that makes sense.
 
And we call 1 am, [tee-one]. The [tee] is the sound we hit a sort of drum.
And then we have [tee-two] [tee-three] ... [tee-five].
 
8:54 AM
So was the day divided into twelve tees?
Or ten? A hundred?
 
Nope, it's a little complicated.
Each tee means one hour.
But when it's 6 am, we use another device.
 
(The hour is also indicated by how many times the church bells are rung in Europe.)
 
And it sounds [mong].
 
Ah.
 
So it becomes [mong-six] [mong-seven], and so on.
 
8:56 AM
How many in total?
 
[mong-eleven]
Because when it's noon we simply call it [noon].
 
So...twelve in total?
 
(But the one who responsible for hitting will hit the thing twelve times.)
@Cerberus Yes
 
And it was always twelve, in all regions, a thousand years ago?
 
And it will be reset, so 1 pm is [afternoon-one-mong].
 
8:57 AM
yawns loudly
mornin'
 
@Cerberus I'm not sure if it went back that far.
But several hundred years ago, yes.
@kalina Good morning.
 
But I'm sure Thailand had a kind of hours two thousand years ago, as your civilisation is old.
 
Please insert caffeine to continue
 
inserts caffeine Which part of the body?
 
@Cerberus Our script (Thai script) was about 700 years ago, iirc.
 
8:59 AM
puts caffeine pills in nose
> The earliest literature of the Thai people was written in Chinese till the influence of Sanskrit and Pali from India.
 
Hmm.. our first king took his reign on (I need to do some calculation) ...
the year 1279
He invented the Thai script.
At that time, I think Sanskrit and Pali hadn't much influenced the language yet.
Out words were mostly one syllable, just like Chinese.
Pho Khun Ram Khamhaeng (; ca. 1237/1247 – 1298) was the third king of the Phra Ruang dynasty, ruling the Sukhothai Kingdom (a forerunner of the modern kingdom of Thailand) from 1278–1298, during its most prosperous era. He is credited with the creation of the Thai alphabet and the firm establishment of Theravada Buddhism as the state religion of the kingdom. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on his role, however, noting that much of the information relating to his rule may have been fabricated in the 19th century in order to legitimize the Siamese state in the face of colonial threa...
He was the third in Phra Ruang dynasty.
And the most important one in the kingdom establishment.
 
@Cerberus o.o
 
Right.
So it appears your culture is a old mixture of Chinese (or Sino-Tibetan) and Indian.
 
@Cerberus Exactly
We're in the midway between the two great cultures.
I would say that we've many layers in our language.
At the core, it's very close to Chinese (or Sino-Tibetan).
 
I knew that!
So it seems most likely that you used hours similar to Chinese.
 
9:09 AM
I think it's likely.
I remember when I was young my teachers must have mentioned something about telling time with water, maybe sun too. (I wasn't a very good student.)
@Cerberus This wiki page might provide more details.
The six-hour clock is a traditional timekeeping system used in Thai and formerly Lao language and Khmer language, alongside the official 24-hour clock. Like the other common systems, it counts twenty-four hours in a day, but divides the day into four quarters, counting six hours in each. The hours in each quarter (with the exception of the sixth hour in each quarter) are told with period-designating words or phrases, which are: *... mong chao (, ) for the first half of daytime (07:00 to 12:59) *Bai ... mong (, ) for the latter half of daytime (13:00 to 18:59) *... thum (, ) for the first ha...
 
Heh.
> Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal temporal hours: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night time units from sunset to sunrise.
 
That's Japanese.
I think Thai and Laos uses [tee] (transcribed as [ti] in the wiki page), [mong] and [thum].
But it was codified similarly to its present form only in 1901.
Though it can be traced back to the Ayutthaya Kingdom (previous dynasty), which took the period of 1351 to 1767.
I'm sure that Westerners had some influences too.
 
9:24 AM
@DamkerngT. Yes, that was a random quotation from another article I was reading.
 
I see.
 
@DamkerngT. I have just read that. So that leaves me wondering what was used before that time.
That's really nice.
 
Oh, I've seen that one.
It's not photoshop'ed.
 
> The head of Buddha in Wat Mahathat
I know.
 
Yes
It sounds like you've been in Thailand before, yes?
@Cerberus Tracing things back to the time before a couple of hundred years ago here is very difficult.
 
9:48 AM
@DamkerngT. Alas, no. Why?
 
@Cerberus You mentioned Wat Mahathat.
(It's rare to find people mentioned Thai relics.)
 
Ah. Well, I merely stumbled upon it on Wikipedia.
It looked cool.
As do the reliquary towers.
Too bad the Burmese sacked the city.
 
@Cerberus Things in the past are things in the past. :)
 
If only we could get back certain things from the past!
 
Yes. Sometimes I missed them too.
 
10:00 AM
I'm going to try and sleep for another hour or two now.
I wish you a good evening.
 
Sleep well.
 
Thanks!
 
Thank you. Good evening to you too!
See you again.
 
disappears with the sound of a tee or mong
 
A town in Michigan in America, called Hell, has just frozen over
 
10:23 AM
in The DMZ, Oct 25 '13 at 13:13, by kalina
hell can't freeze over until my death
I guess I died
 
Do you have any references to back up your question? — Mari-Lou A Sep 1 '13 at 12:51
What question? Isn't that an answer?
 
yes it is
no I don't know why
flag it as obsolete if you want
might get rejected though
 
It's not that important anyway
Just wanted to make sure I'm not short-sighted or something
@kalina So from now on, the idiom is of no use? That's sad
 
Who knows
 
10:40 AM
They can discuss until hell freezes over
 
11:38 AM
@Mitch I assume so, I don't recall.
 
So. Let me find a list of 100+ questions for Kalina to fix today.
 
e before i except during pie
 
when someone signs a post off with a name I habitually check if it's the same as their account name.
 
@MattЭллен I never do that just to be controversial.
Too bad nobody notices!
 
11:43 AM
:D
only 47 posts on Arqade have "thanks in advance" in them
I suppose we only have 21
 
some of ours are genuine questions
 
and atleast 3 of those are in a question about the phrase "thanks in advance"
 
"Can “thanks in advance” be considered rude?"
 
Don't check out our alots.
24 hours ago, by RegDwigнt
I am so jelly of @kalina right now. Our site will never be rid of alots. Because our questions are about them.
 
This is an accepted answer:
0
A: What's the best term for "geographical level"?

sprugmanThanks for all the suggestions. I wound up sticking with "Geo Level" for the moment.

 
11:47 AM
@Hugo Anything can be considered rude. Anything at all. Even your mother. You daffodil.
 
Says the hippo made of lego!
 
@MattЭллен you take that back, you Angela Merkel.
 
@RegDwigнt In the style of @StealthMountain, I once made a Twitter bot that replied to people 'I think you meant "a lot"'. The replies were hilarious, a mix of apologies and mostly swearing. It lasted two weeks before being suspended.
 
Over the ashes of my cold dead hands, you banana strudel sundae.
 
@MattЭллен making it a not accepted question.
 
11:50 AM
The replies were very much like these: twitter.com/StealthMountain/favorites
 
Ugh. It asks me to log in.
I thought Twitter was a public website?
 
me too.
 
stupid websites
should be public
 
"A lot" has nothing to do with grammar or nazis.
I like black spelling. Who's racist now?
Sorry, I meant whose racist, of course.
 
those were replies to "I think you mean sneak peek", but again, neither grammar or nazi related
 
11:53 AM
Some of my best friends use colourful language
 
@Hugo though one of these replies is very valid, I concede.
"i think you need to shut the fuck up" should be sent out in reply to all tweets.
 
I am curious as to what a "lil fuck boi" is. Some kind of boy who doesn't fuck very often, perhaps?
not to be a semantics bigot or anything
 
Yeah, homogot is better.
 
maybe I'll become a polygot
 

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