English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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Cerberus

3:10 AM

@JBis Well done!

Robusto

3:30 AM

9 hours later…

Færd

1:00 PM

Wow I just met a Swiss family and to me it was as if they spoke German with a Farsi accent!

They rolled the Rs, for instance: Werr bist du?.

@RegDwigнt Yeah deceivers everywhere.

@RegDwigнt I think maybe the price of goat meat is higher than beef, but a whole big cow sure is much more expensive than a goat, at least here.

Cerberus

1:31 PM

@Færd Haha, yes, that's southern German.

As in Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland (though the last has far more other deviations from standard Hochdeutsch).

2 hours later…

tchrist

3:22 PM

Q: What does this symbol mean?

The image might be rotated. Maybe related to Christianity. I already tried google reverse image search and combed though some of the most relevant symbol lists.

@Cerberus I don’t imagine you’ve ever come upon that sort of symbol in medieval Latin or Greek palaeography? The asker is looking for a more appropriate SE site for me to migrate the question question to than ELU.

tchrist

3:37 PM

I've gone and tried to rustle up the Japanese mods to see if they'll take the question.

1 hour later…

Mitch

4:52 PM

@tchrist It looks like upside down Chinese/Kanji, but if you turn it over it doesn't look like anything..

tchrist

5:13 PM

A: Are these PPs or non-finite clauses – or something else entirely?

Those are all prepositional phrases (PPs). They consist of a preposition followed by a noun phrase (NP). The thing that’s special is that these NPs are infinitive clauses, a form of nonfinite verb phrase. Both infinitive clauses and gerund clauses are nonfinite verb clauses that can serve as NP...

tchrist

5:33 PM

@Hannah Can you think of any preposition that isn't for or to which can accept not only a gerund clause but also an infinitive clause? I cannot. We may have to wait for John Lawler to shed us some light on this, or Greg Lee or BillJ, or Shoe or Nohat, or even Araucaria (although the last of those has funny ideas about prepositions to start with :). — tchrist ♦ 6 mins ago

Cerberus

6:26 PM

@tchrist Hmm it doesn't look familiar to me at all.

If it is made from Latin letters, it looks like a kind of monogram, like a signature.

You know, of this type, but cruder.

But, Japanese, yeah, why not.

Robusto

7:16 PM

@tchrist It's almost Japanese, but looks very crude. A couple of radicals are suggested, but it doesn't really deliver on either. That's not to say it couldn't be someone's calligraphic rendering, but if so it looks way too careful for that. Maybe some primitive ur character.

tchrist

Thanks.

Robusto

In any case, I don't recognize it from the jouyou kanji (常用漢字), which are the regular-use characters (around 2200 in number).

The closest I could come to that was this: 長 (long, superior, etc.). But that's clearly not it.

4 hours later…