English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Q: Is there a term for noises which CAN'T be written as normal text?

7:36 AM

Hard to give examples, as if I'm able to do it, I won't be asking this, but consider some sounds made by the tongue. I'm giving examples of sounds which CAN be written to give you an idea: Dog growling - Grrrrr Sneezing - Aaccchhhhoooo I need a word for sounds which can't be written.

1 hour later…

Q: What is a single word for a "shared experience"

8:43 AM

I'm talking about a large group experience. Depression for example is felt by millions, it's a shared experience that most of us can understand, but I'd like one word to describe the understanding we can feel for what ever the shared experience is because we've all experienced it. Empathetic, pre...

single-word-requests

2 hours later…

Educ

11:09 AM

Hi everyone

Educ

11:25 AM

Please someone correct me : " the professor says that we will have vocabulary as part of exam from that book "

"you will find the attached book of vocabulary as part of exam "

1 hour later…

Tonepoet

12:46 PM

@Educ If I was writing it, I'd prefer:

"The professor says that we will have vocabulary from that book as a part of the exam."

"The attached book of vocabulary will be part of the exam"

Also, do you really mean book, or would booklet be a better word?

Q: What is a phrasal noun more or less synonymous to "relic", particularly used with the word "colonial"?

1:07 PM

I encountered this world a while back on Quora, but really cannot remember what is was, which is terribly bugging me. It is used to mean something that has been present or practiced since a certain period in the past, and is perhaps now anachronistic. To reiterate, it was a phrasal noun (that is...

single-word-requests synonyms

1 hour later…

Færd

2:35 PM

@Cerberus Well, I would say FDR's accent bears several strong hallmarks of the mainstream British accent (received pronunciation or whatever it's called) and lacks a few others. Some of his words ring clearly British to my ear, though I can't pinpoint every dsitinguishing quality. Examples of those hallmarks are the British r (that you might say is not peculiar to Britain, but still), how he says after, emperor, etc.

And one of the important features that it lacks is the British əʊ in solicitation and a couple other words that have this diphthong and I forget them now. He says them with a clear oʊ.

So overall, it sounds like an American attempting consciously and with some effort at a British accent, and frankly, to me that's uglier than any other "natural" American or British accent that I know.

This subjective opinion aside, I think other Amercian and British users of this room would support me on my impression of FDR's accent.

(by British r I meant non-rhotic)

1 hour later…

A: Non-finite clause complementation of complex transitive verbs

3:50 PM

The last couple days have seen questions by learners struggling over the same confusion: not understanding the underlying syntax that allows a non-finite verb phrase to take a subject.

They made Jane be nice to me.
All I need is for Jane to be nice to me.
Jane being nice to me was all I wanted.
The real goal here is Jane being nice to me.
For Jane to be nice to you, you're going to have to make some changes first.

It's true that most non-finite verb clauses in English lack a subject, so those are the ones they see first.

Seeing is believing.
To see is to believe.

These are all probably Asians, though, so we can't blame their syntactic confusion on some underlying Germanic or Romance bias.

Romance is particularly averse to giving subjects to infinitives or gerunds; of the major languages in that group, only Portuguese alone allows infinitives to have a subject.

And this is an innovation in that language, not something that began in Latin, which is why the others don't have it.

I feel like all these recent questions should have some sort of identifying tag or canonical answer, but I haven't found either. At least, not for sure.

Quirk et al is a good grammar but weak, I think, on complex sentences. What we're looking at in all of these examples is the remains of deceased clauses. Of the four sentences, two: I saw her leave the room I heard someone shouting are examples of special constructions that are limited to ...

That one's pretty good.

Maybe we should use that as the canonical.

But nonfinite-clause-complementation looks much too long for a tag.

Oh my goodness, it just let me make it!

I can rename the tag later once a better wording occurs to me. The important thing for now is to group those questions.

Perhaps the non-native confusion derives from using any sort of verb clauses in non-verbal slots.

A: "I hate Jill singing those songs." = "I hate Jill when she is singing those songs."?

4:52 PM

This musing was trigger because I answered two rather similar questions in less than a day.

The two following sentences are equivalent: I hate for Jill to sing those songs. I hate Jill singing those songs. The subject of both sentences is I. The verb of both sentences is the transitive verb hate. Both sentences use a non-finite verb clause as the direct object of hate, and both of ...

A: "I have you returning the car."

Yes, we have such a structure, and yes, it is grammatically sound. It is not causative. Non-finite verb clauses with oblique subjects I have you returning the car on August 14th here at the airport. He has me returning the car on August 14th here at the airport. This is the same gr...

2 hours later…

NVZ

7:03 PM

@MetaEd Sure. But what if you start singing that turkey voice song? ;)

Weird russian singer - Chum Drum Bedrum

►

oh, and the dance... it's out of this world!

single-word-requests nouns

7:26 PM

Q: Scientific word for soul

I'm looking for a scientific word for 'soul'. Something that carries it's materialistic elements (the is word used in non-dualistic contexts).

1 hour later…

M.A.R.

8:37 PM

@Feeds poltergeist

1 hour later…

9:42 PM

@tchrist I'm shocked at the lack of ...how to say it... actual knowledge on the 'morning ablutions' question.

@Mitch Never underestimate the power of illiteracy.

Ablutions is terribly rare by itself. It's either a stormy petrel (the only kind of ablution is a morning one) and the phrase is a military one (it's the label the military in the UK uses (and possibly the US) for an assigned time to do 'that stuff')

Always shun bloots.

or its a religious term, for ritual washing like a (christian) baptism, (jewish) mikvah bath, or some islamic thing which I can't remember. not to mention all the extra-abrahamic versions of ritual washing.

by lack of knowledge I don't mean that nobody knows what 'ablution' means. My point is that that is entirely understandable, but no one (rather actually few) gets that it is just rare.

I had actually thought that 'morning ablutions' was some strange turn of words, some nonce phrase, from some 18th c author that somehow caught on and repeated. But a simple google search tells me that it is mostly a military usage. Can't tell where it was first used.

Mid-Atlantic accent

The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously acquired accent of English, intended to blend together the "standard" speech of both American English and British Received Pronunciation. Spoken mostly in the early 20th century, it is not a vernacular American accent native to any location, but rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, an affected set of speech patterns whose "chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The accent is, therefore, best associated with the American upper class, theater, and film industry of...

FDR is supposedly a classic version of this. On hearing the clip you gave, it is only mildly non-rhotic (which is very accentuated in BrE). Other than that, he sounds very General American English to me. He's just speaking formally and clearly, n contrast with say the the actors on Nickelodeon. Mostly the same accent, or at least closer to each other than to any in the UK.

@Færd no prob

@Færd You're not entirely wrong, his accent is maybe midway between mid-Atlantic and Cape Cod. I.e. there are lots of other Americans with much stronger mid-Atlantic/American-posh accents, like Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant (they have the noticeable and very British trap-bath split, but FDR does not.

1 hour later…