English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2019-10-10

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4:35 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted website in body (99): How do you describe this sweater? by susu on english.SE

8 hours later…

1:04 PM

Hey everyone. I'm wondering if there's some place I can find a parallel text of some Old English prose.

I found this great parallel text of Beowulf, but that's poetry. heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html

Poetry is a lot harder to read than prose. :D

2 hours later…

2:49 PM

@TannerSwett Does it have to be parallel? How about an Old English version and a separate modern English version?

Way Back machine of an Old English Bible

Genesis

3:05 PM

@Mitch Well, parallel would be much, much easier to use.

I'm also looking for something where the Modern English is a translation of the Old English, rather than both texts being independent translations of something else.

Of course, I can always just take a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and copy and paste it into some kind of parallel format.

@TannerSwett I'm just trying to solve the problem of making it easy to see OE and ModE text that is close to meaning the same thing. I'm sure there are interlinear or side-by-side versions of OE/ModE texts (and the Christian Bible is the most likely target) but from pre-internet paper days (ie 'books'). Just takes some persistent googling.

If you find anything please post a link.

There are lots of translations of Beowulf that don't try to make poetry out of it but try to preserve meaning. (poetry is artifice and having the translation also be artful may introduce a lot of inaccurate translation instances (favoring a rhyme or meter over meaning) so that you get the gist better, but the individual pieces of the original may not be recombined in ways you expect.

I just started my search by looking at wiki for extant OE texts, then googled for translations. There are lots of Beowulf translations.

4:13 PM

But more importantly...

> Took the shell off my racing snail this weekend ....

Thought it might speed him up....

If anything, it made him more sluggish.

And also:

> Cute animal rhymes to say farewell:

8. In a while, crocodile
7. Toodle loo, kangaroo
6. Ciao for now, jersey cow
5. Why you still here, white-tailed deer
4. Just piss off, gypsy moth
3. Go to hell, red gazelle
2. Kiss my hole, woodland vole
1. Off you fuck, crested duck

4 hours later…

marcellothearcane

8:03 PM

I sometimes pronounce the 'l' of 'cancel' with the close-mid back rounded vowel, ⟨o⟩ — marcellothearcane 26 secs ago

Does anyone else?

@Mitch that escalated somewhat

8:30 PM

@marcellothearcane I'm not sure what that sounds like.

Is it like Cockney?

8:52 PM

Say, do most languages (or at least most Indo-European languages) have a distinction between countable and uncountable nouns?

I've never noticed if, say, Spanish and Polish make the distinction.

In English, one test for the distinction is whether or not the word "a" is used in an indefinite reference using the singular noun: we say "I have an apple" but "I have ∅ milk."

Alternatively, "I have some milk" (and usually not "I have some apple").

Polish doesn't have articles; it's just "Mam jabłko" and "Mam mleko."

You can specifically say that you have one apple: "Mam jedno jabłko." I don't know if you can say "Mam jedno mleko."

@TannerSwett Latin does not have articles, and I don't think it has the distinction.

Dutch and German are the same as English.

Ancient Greek has only definite articles.

And I don't believe you can express that distinction in Greek the way you can in English.

But, another sign is that a mass noun cannot be pluralised.

And this sign is present in Latin and Greek, at least to some extent.

But I don't think that counts; it is more like a semantic thing than a syntactic one (just as in English).

9:21 PM

@Cerberus Cattle is a mass noun, and you’re right: it cannot be pluralized, or rather, further pluralized. :)

marcellothearcane

9:37 PM

@Cerberus Instead of ending 'cancel' with the tip of your tongue on the back of your teeth, I sometimes end with a mouth shaped like the 'w' syllable.

@tchrist Indeed not!

@marcellothearcane I'm trying to say it.

All I can think of is Cockey, but I don't know.

marcellothearcane

Not cockney

Less nasal on the 'can' part

I do it for castle, mantle, parcel, Portugal, tunnel, etc

I'm from Southern Britain if that helps. 'ampshire with a Surrey-ish accent.

10:03 PM

@Cerberus: Interestingly, the game paints Alkibiades as something of a drunken, sybaritic reveler, which I don't think he was, entirely.

@Robusto Mmm not that I know, but I know little about him.

Plato.

The Sicilian expedition (right?).

@marcellothearcane OK, well, do record your voice and post it as a question!

10:20 PM

@Robusto By the way, although you own the room, you cannot edit your chat messages after 2 minutes, can you?

@Cerberus That's correct. He can only Trash them, not edit or delete.

I think.

@tchrist Oh, trash?

Is that were lines are move to a separate room or something?

yeah

He can only move to public rooms. We can move to private rooms.

OK.

I have never done that.

That's because we're all fair-spoken angels here.

Or, perhaps, we know better than to worry about things that aren't worth worrying about. It's been a long time since someone has been disruptive.

2

Room owners can't fix PII revelations. We can move them to private trash rooms.

It is almost never right to purge history though. Only super duper rarely.

Because it makes it too hard to trace what happened.

Whenever there's a big problem, you need to preserve the record.

I'm speaking broadly. There have been counter-examples, but those are ones decided upon by the CM team or higher management.

10:35 PM

@tchrist Oh, yes. Indeed.

@tchrist I do that when someone's privacy would be violated.

I wonder wonder, though, whether the history is actually purged.

@Cerberus Yes, but not for entire conversations, right? Move the converstation to a mod-only trash room. PII can certainly be expunged from the record.

Can SE not dig it up?

@Cerberus Yes and no.

It actually is purged from the database.

@tchrist No, only to remove a name or address.

To restore, you would have to go through the so-called "bin logs" from the DB server. Those are not preserved very long, so you couldn't do it from last year and possibly not even from yesterday.

The db admin operational parameters are completely unknown, and of course apt to vary over time. I know of no actual example of this having been done. It has been suggested by one of the CMs that this is far too much trouble to bother with.

The bin logs contain all a log of all the database transactions themselves.

These are massive, and I have no idea how they're structured here, what the rotation or retention policies are.

10:41 PM

I see.

You know much.

Very few moderator actions are functionally irreversible, but this is close to being so in practice.

Any sort of merge is also a royal PITA to undo. It requires dedicated ad-hoc dev code.

So you have to get some dev to write custom db code to fix it. I say dev, but there are CMs who know how (like Shog) and devs who were once CMs (like Anna).

OK.

Merging of tags, merging of questions, merging of users: all so hard to reverse that you really, really don't want to have to do so, or rather, ask that it be undone.

Ah.

Once upon a time we could merge users, but to quote the obvious CM, "mistakes were made" and so it is now a CM-only operation.

Because of the dev-pain fixing it caused.

10:49 PM

Ah. Oh. Hmm.

That's why we always ask the "suspected" duplicate user to contact the team via the contact link to merge accounts.

This never, or nearly never, comes up on slow sites like the language sites. It comes up on the higher-traffic sites, though.

1. We might be wrong. 2. The CM Team is a lot more careful about everything than we are. 3. Only they can do it now.

How many sites do you moderate?

Just two.

OK.

It happens often enough on ELU, meaning from time to time.

I don't recall it ever having happened on the other site.

It was 80 here yesterday, the last kiss of summer. Last night winter came and we lost nearly 60 degrees, and the snow moved in.

Tonight it may be 14–16.

Unthinkably brutal, a night from two months in the future come upon us.

Somewhere between the 15 of winter and the 80 of summer, you would think that the Continuity Theorem would prove that autumn must have occurred, but the seasons are not rational.

It can only prove that that temperature occurred; but season, who can say? :)

10:58 PM

@tchrist How typical of you.

I don't know how much that is in real numbers, but it is a high number!

Some years we go six weeks more until the first frost.

And it may be mild, not bitter like this one.

Todat I was explaining to my pupils how they can convert K into C and the reverse.

I can't imagine how difficult that must be for users of F.

I'm so 110% okay with restricting hateful or disrespectful speech. I don't treat people that way externally. What's more, that's not how I feel about anyone internally. I don't use hateful speech in private. But what a tangled web we weave when we attempt to compel speech, define for others what is or isn't natural speech for them, and mandate the addition of new words to others' vocabulary. It's Orwellian. I wouldn't micromanage a small child's word patterns this way. How could anyone imagine that this would go over well? What an epic disaster. — Scott Hannen 4 hours ago

People aren't happy.

The fear of Centigrade must not get in the way of epic progress marching ever closer to the Eschaton of our discontent.

Hmm aren't you conexing things too far apart?

Converting between F and C is easy because it requires only rationals. But C and K works differently.

Then again, the conversion is only ever so precise as 0 kelvins is something we know only with finite precision.

I have responded to Mr Hannen. If only it were new vocabulary, this would be easy. But it is not. It's new grammar. That's very very hard.

11:29 PM

@Cerberus All science is more difficult for us users of the Imperial system.

@tchrist I don't often convert between F and C, but it is never easy...

@DavidM At least you have an Empress!

The only thing we do at all correctly is measuring weight instead of mass. Pounds are more equivalent to Newtons than to kilos.

@tchrist Who?

@Cerberus Nah, we chucked her back in 1776. The Canadians still do, though. But, they're mostly SI there . . .

@DavidM But they're not easy to calculate with then the situation becomes a bit more complex.

11:32 PM

@Cerberus The Scott Hannen comment you've cited. I have also responded simililarly to one of Gilles’s two posts on that "question".

@DavidM Ah, OK. But apparently you've still kept her measurements!

@tchrist Ah, that.

@DavidM How many newtons in a pound?

@Cerberus Absolutely correct. But, mass is misleading compared to weight.

And is that pre or post digestion?

@tchrist 4.44822

Don't ask me how many slugs to a kilo, though

11:33 PM

Then I'm in trouble.

The box is nearly empty.

Like Umberto, I don't give a figo secco about that, so whatever.

1 slug = 14.594

kilos

You know what we haven't discussed in enough detail: SE's new approach to pronouns.

@DavidM I'm not entirely sure what you mean.

@DavidM Bleeh.

-251

Q: Official FAQ on gender pronouns and Code of Conduct changes

We expect today’s changes to the Code of Conduct to generate a lot of questions. We’ve tried to anticipate some of the most common questions people may have here, and we’ll be adding to this list as more questions come up. Q1: What are personal pronouns, and why are they relevant to the Code of ...

discussion faq featured code-of-conduct announcements

@DavidM Myanmar.

Not a great score.

US, some parts of Canada, Myanmar

@DavidM We haven't discussed in enough detail how PEOPLE ARE WRONG ABOUT RHOTICITY IN INDIAN ENGLISH

11:46 PM

@Mitch I have no frame of reference on that. But, I'm nearly certain that Indian English varies from state to state based upon the base language that the people speak . . .

@Mitch Always a good idea to model yourselves on Myanmar

@DavidM Oh sure

In the sense that is a reasonable possibility but not necessary.

Most of the Indian accents I hear in media are non-rhotic (which I expect are most likely Hindi L1)

@Cerberus I hope you knew I was kidding. I'm sick of hearing about it.

I"M HELPING BY CHANGING THE DISCUSSION.

I DON"T THINK I"M APPRECIATED ENOUGH FOR THAT.

@DavidM I did.

Everyone is sick of it.

@Mitch I hear a lot of Gujarati accents. Their rhoticity varies.

11:50 PM

@Mitch Oops! You used I.

The perpendicular pronoun.

I'm reading a paper right now that says that it varies. A lot. Some patterns. But the point is that it varies and that means many are non-rhotic.

@Cerberus There's a parallel one?

@Mitch I'm sure will be a parallel neo-one.

I think that from now on my preferred pronoun is the Royal We.

-y pronoun is '-'. - like it a lot. Join - in using it more often.

--'ll have a blast.

@Mitch We approve.

11:53 PM

What's nice is that it records dual 1st person easily

--- all can appreciate that.

I just realized that we should have all along converted English to PRO-drop.

don't need any pronouns at all.

know what I mean?

@Cerberus Correct.

And Alkibiades was the one pushing the Sicilian expedition, which went tits up, and he was condemned in absentia, whereupon he fled to Sparta, where he promptly began banging some Spartan general's wife, etc.

Curiously, he was condemned for, among other things, the vandalization of the herms, in which he was later thought to have had no part.

@DavidM For which person?

@Cerberus For me

@Mitch Love it.

Although '' pronoun shall be '.

@Cerberus I've moved on.

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