English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Susan

12:11 AM

Hi, Jasper. You asked me a quetion...

oh, I'm so silly; I thought you were here. I see you're not. I'll come back again.

Mitch

12:34 AM

@Cerberus Oh. Duh. Yeah.

@Cerberus But there are fewer of them.

Mitch

12:51 AM

@Cerberus I will grant you that French verbs are pretty different. But really the big diference, if you remove the finite set of grammatical markers, is the vocabulary. Much of the French vocabulary is mostly transparent. In contrast, German vocabulary is, from formal to basic, opaque. Basic vocab can be decoded knowing some phonological rules but anything more complicated is inscrutable.

Cerberus

1:31 AM

@Mitch Are there really? And does that make reading easier?

@Mitch It all depends on what your goal is, I suppose. If you want to learn basic conversation, I think German should be easier for an Englishman.

For advancing from basic French to reading academic articles, perhaps French is easier.

@Metool Hello! No, it is wrong.

"Councilman Simmons" is not an apposition, so there shouldn't be two comma's around it; the first comma only serves to separate the appositional phrase at the beginning from the rest of the sentence.

Metool

Many thanks.

Cerberus

1:48 AM

Grammar is fun haha.

Mitch

@Cerberus There are fewer used. 'a' and 'de' are the most used and confused and confusing, the rest are pretty narrowly prescribed.

@Cerberus Hm...maybe...OK I'll go with that and your following claim.

@Cerberus Grammar is useless. You could get the same results stringing together some nouns and smashing your fist on the table for emphasis.

Cerberus

@Mitch Hmm never thought about it that way, but I see what you mean. On the other hand, you can confuse à with dans, de with par...

@Mitch Why don't you try that next time, then!

@Mitch But anyway, I think German prepositions resemble English prepositions more. In Berlin = in Berlin...

Auf = on, so auf dem Tisch = on the table.

And nobody can ever decide between de and à, ever!

And is it à la table, or sur la table?

À Paris, or dans Paris?

Robusto

2:31 AM

►

@Cerberus I think it's à Paris.

@Cerberus Mais je suis en Afrique, n'est-ce pas?

tchrist

@Robusto Depends on the corpus.

Yes.

You are always "at" a city or small island, and "in" a country or continent or very big island.

Robusto

Makes sense.

@tchrist Any thoughts on American?

tchrist

It’s probably longer than I imagine.

Do you know the answer?

Bonaparte died at Santa Helena, not in Sicily.

I’m not saying that's right for English.

Just French, and such.

Robusto

@tchrist I was thinking 32 characters would put a name into at least the 80th percentile.

tchrist

You must have a practical reason for this.

Robusto

2:43 AM

Thomas Mallory Glendan-Muttonly III

tchrist

Wow, bat signal at 13.

Robusto

@tchrist Of course. String field to accommodate all but the most idiotically long names.

tchrist

Pick one of the three good numbers in computer science, and be done with it.

Robusto

@tchrist You could be talking about Bruce Wayne's bar mitzvah, I suppose.

@tchrist I already chose 32.

tchrist

32 is not amongst the Holy Numeric Trinity.

Which are 0, 1, and as many as I damned well please.

Anything else is subacceptable.

Stupid toy databases.

It’s like the age-old haggle about the answer to "Would you have sex with that person for $100,000,000?"

Robusto

2:48 AM

Not about databases. If it was, I'd just use a varchar.

It's about how long an input ought to be to show most full names.

tchrist

Oh.

That’s different.

Don’t truncate.

Cut out the middle as need be.

Thomas Mall...Muttonly III

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto An input field on a web form?

Robusto

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Something like that.

tchrist

I don’t know what "truncating the middle" is called.

Robusto

Antitmesis?

tchrist

2:50 AM

Well, sure.

It’s much better than truncating the end.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto Most such fields allow text much longer than can be displayed. I usually just go with whatever field length looks good in the context where the field is displayed.

tchrist

Because we have little-endian names in English.

If you truncate the end, you lose the most important part.

Robusto

One little, two little, three little-Endians.

Yes, but you don't know where the beginning of the end may be.

tchrist

Sure you do.

Robusto

Apu Nahasapeemapetilon

Apu ... peemapetilon?

Apu Na ... petilon?

tchrist

2:55 AM

And if her name is Susannah Rosanna-Danna Santa-María-de-la-Pasión Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, you still have an algorithm.

You also have a whacko.

Robusto

I got into an argument with a QA person who fancies himself an arbiter of design.

tchrist

That’s not his job.

Robusto

Tell me about it.

Closet product manager, I guess.

tchrist

Gods.

I am so tired of people bucking for management by being worthless blowhards.

Opinions are their only work-product.

Robusto

But they do love to monopolize meetings.

Especially when others have useful work they could be doing.

tchrist

2:58 AM

meeting <<= 2;

Robusto

Truncating in the middle might be called telescoping.

@tchrist: Actually, ellipsis might very well do.

tchrist

That’s kinda what I was thinking.

Robusto

Or maybe ecthlipsis.

tchrist

Or if it has to be lopsided, maybe an analemma.

j/k

Robusto

Multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
Mult'ill'et terris iactatus et alto

tchrist

3:06 AM

The scribes were lazy.

Robusto

rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/E/ecthlipsis.htm

tchrist

Ask @Cerb.

Scribes had all these now-inscrutable shortcuts for everything.

Robusto

Well, I suppose if one had to illuminate manuscripts by candlelight, one took what shortcuts one could. Especially to make shit fit on a page.

Actually, this might be a good place for syncope as well.

tchrist

Natural light was always the best for that sort of work.

JSBձոգչ

3:46 AM

0

A: How do definitions of words imbue meaning?

Languages are not formal logic systems, and words do not derive their meanings from the definitions in dictionaries. If they did, then your argument would mean something, but as it is what you have is an amusing but pointless exercise. Words derive their meanings from their shared usage in a lin...