English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:22 AM

> Undergraduates who live on [MIT] campus must begin packing and moving out of their residences by this Saturday, March 14. This also applies to students in our FSILGs. You will be required to leave by noon on Tuesday, March 17. For first-years, sophomores and juniors: Please pack your belongings and make plans to travel home or to another location off-campus as if you do not expect to return here until the fall semester.

1:49 AM

@RegDwigнt Yeah, just watched that. Interesting, pretty much what I expected, the typical smartest-guy-in-the-room-MBA-rapes-company-to-squeeze-out-every-last-nickel American failure story.

anongoodnurse

2:21 AM

@tchrist - Keeping an eye on Colorado. The state is doing pretty well. We're (in PA) also doing pretty well, only one or two new cases a day. Fingers crossed.

@Mitch - 'Ello! No, it's my butterfly keyboard, a well known problem wit Macbook Pro's, thoug this is te first one that's ad the problem...

And no, I didn't spill coffee or wine or melted ice cream on my keyboard. It's wacky wit h's and spaces and caps sometimes.

Saw your image. Before going into te OR, we used to do a 10 minute scrub wit a bristled brush. It urt like hell at first. But it makes a 20 second hand wash seem so minor an inconvenience.

Hoping you're doing well.

3:53 AM

@Cerberus Thank you! I never knew that

4:58 AM

@CowperKettle It's probably not very common in English.

Do we need the word Statement in Tax Return Statement, or would Tax Return also stand for "the document submitted to the tax authority"?

Or is "Tax Return" merely the process performed to produce a Tax Return Statement?

In Russian, we call the document a Tax Declaration

5:17 AM

> La era de la mascarilla

Es difícil entender la ola global de pánico causada por el coronavirus. La enfermedad ha puesto al desnudo la fragilidad de un mundo interconectado e interdependiente. Si acaso hay alguna lección, es que la globalización nos hace a todos vulnerables: estamos más cerca del caos de lo que los poderosos pensaban.

nytimes.com/es/2020/03/10/espanol/opinion/…

^^^ I don't think it has an English translation, but it's worth a read if you can, @Robusto, if for no other reason that that it will make you wonder about things. @terdon will be able to read it no problem.

> más cerca...de?

"we're closer to chaos than what the powerful were thinking."

We are much closer to chaos than the powerful thought?

Right.

Yes.

So de = than?

5:20 AM

Imperfect, not preterite.

I would have expected que.

But I don't know Spanish.

You have to say "than what"

"lo que" is "what".

So is de "than" or not?

If not, where is than?

Only here. :)

Okay.

Most odd.

5:21 AM

it's a closer to X than to Y thing.

> Si cada invierno nos informaran en tiempo real de los atendidos (490.000), hospitalizados (35.300), ingresados en UVI (2.500) y fallecidos (6.300) por gripe en España, viviríamos aterrorizados.

There'd still have to be a than.

But I have seen Iberian languages use que where it felt wrong to me, albeit informally, so the other way around was only to be expected, I suppose.

I have to go to bed now, adios!

> Me costó menos de lo que había imaginado.

It cost me less than (what) I had expected.

It's how you make those kinds of comparatives.

You can think of más/menos-de as more than and less than, I suppose.

At least in these examples.

But sometimes "than" is indeed "que", as you had expected.

> Él es mucho mayor que yo.

He's a lot older than I (am).

My God, it's tomorrowing.

I just don't like where that's going.

Today Gov Polis declared a statewide emergency. More cases, of course.

@Robusto Bet you're doubly glad you left Boston now.

@anongoodnurse Yes, PA doesn't have it too too awfully bad yet. But I don't think we'll all be returning to the mothership there for my company's summer picnic and company meeting this year.

And we can be certain it's actually worse than that because of the limitations of testing.

I don't care for the second derivative. Again.

The change of the change is itself increasing.

(last column)

The Times said we passed the thousand mark this evening.

That's about 10x per week for two weeks.

7:50 AM

The worldwide image is less scary:

To be clear, that's not an overall drop in total numbers; it's a drop in growth. The aforementioned second derivative.

.

And I think I can offer my condolences on Trump's second term now. The joke's on noöone.

Anonymous

Hi, I'm a non-native English speaker. Could someone tell me the meaning of the highlighted (bold) part: "Scholars may sign up as early as possible but it is advised to enroll with GP&A within 31 days before the DS-2019 start date, in case that there are visa processing delays at the US embassy." Say the start date is 1st July. Are they advising to enroll after (say) 1st June or before 1st June.

8:15 AM

@SanchayanDutta Within X before Y means during the period (X) that leads up to Y.

Within X of Y means during the period (X) that starts with Y.

Anonymous

9:25 AM

@Færd Sorry, I don't understand this either. Could you simply address the question in my previous message?

Anonymous

Otherwise, an example using some real values would be helpful.

@SanchayanDutta In your example, it means before June 1st.

Anonymous

9:41 AM

@Færd Thank you, that makes it clear. :)

9:52 AM

Can I say "Power-of-attorneys are transmitted to the counterparty", or should I always add the word "documents" if I mean that the certificates (on paper) are transmitted?

10:59 AM

@CowperKettle Isn't the plural powers of attorney?

Unless there's something idiomatic in Legalese, it should be.

Although in that case, I would expect you want the singular anyway.

And no, you don't want documents unless you want to say that the documents were transmitted and not the powers those documents confer.

Gigili

12:04 PM

@Mitch Haha, not funny.

I like your answer to that question @Mitch, especially the part about coding theory which inspired me to learn more about it.

With that said, I did vote to close!

Bad situation.

2:21 PM

@tchrist I didn't need a translation, just the occasional dictionary lookup. So far there the average age for mortality appears to be mid-eighties.

As for Massachusetts, my son says there's a lot of weirdness going on, universities closing, etc., but so far he's not been too bothered. Traffic has improved somewhat.

As for here, our state has no known cases at this point.

Me, I'm still sick and not riding.

I never knew it would be so hard to take it easy. ^_^

3:23 PM

Funnily enough, one of the words I had to look up was tuit. My guess was that it involved teaching. I couldn't find it in the dictionary, so I tried Google Translate and found it means "tweet" ... /facepalm.

First word that popped in my mind seeing that was tweet.

I mean good for you. You don't seem to be wasting your time there much.

3:41 PM

@Færd Yeah, I don't follow Twitter at all. The s/n ratio is way too low.

True. And it's hostile noise.

I sometimes use it to catch up with old friends tho. We can have debates about issues there, use the medium as a chatroom.

I also avoid Facebook. I deleted my account several years ago.

I don't need any digital rectal exams of my data.

Haha. Don't you use WhatsApp tho?

Nope.

Good.

But Google is not a lot more trustworthy than FB.

3:48 PM

Google is bad enough. And getting worse.

Jinx

Jinx!

I jinxed you first. So you owe me a coke.

Double jinx!

Now you owe me two cokes /nod

I just sent them. Wait for arrival.

OK

When Google decided to take "Don't be evil" out of their mission statement, it sent a strong signal that the bean-counters and MBA pukes had taken over.

I don't suppose they ever had that policy?

3:51 PM

Well, at least they paid it lip service. What does it say that they decided to ditch even the lip service?

It says a lot.

They'd have a revolution on their hands if they ever did anything at Facebook levels, i think. I mean from the engineers who work for them. But that's probably wishful thinking on my part.

> I think it was 2007, I was already researching this topic and I was at a conference with a bunch of Google people. Over lunch I was sitting with some other Google executives and I asked the question, “How do I opt out of Google Earth?” All of a sudden, the whole room goes silent.

> Marissa Mayer, [a Google vice president at the time], was sitting at a different table, but she turned around and looked at me and said “Shoshana, do you really want to get in the way of organizing and making accessible the world’s information?” It took me a few minutes to realize she was reciting the Google mission statement.

theintercept.com/2019/02/02/…

Heh.

Germany doesn't allow Google Street View. They just said nope, can't help ya.

Haha nice

But who knows if they are not indeed being spied on.

3:57 PM

I found that out when I tried to use Google Maps to figure out where I used to live when I worked in Frankfurt. But no can do.

@Færd I think it's safe to assume we're all being spied on, all the time.

Yeah that makes me feel so safe.

As an individual, I have little to hide from Google.

Unless it goes around and sells my emails to my government.

Me either. But it's creepy that they know where I am, where I've been, and where I'm going.

@Færd Your government probably has your entire internet record, including things you say in this chat (unless you're using something like Tor, which is probably not allowed where you are).

@Robusto But when you add up all those data, you could sell it to corporations and they could manipulate the population to gain profit on a scale that was formerly impossible.

Well, yeah.

@Robusto I don't say things that are too sensitive in this chat.

I'm not that important a person after all.

4:00 PM

Not at the moment.

But if I want to keep something hidden, there are ways.

@Robusto Haha and hopefully not ever

True.

These days they go bragging on state TV that we hacked into so-and-so's Instagram account and these messages were exchanged between these individuals.

This actor, for example, sent a message that was disrespectful to the regime or to our values or whatnot.

Why brag about that? Either that's mere bravado or it's a ham-handed attempt to intimidate the populace.

See the lip service that we get

It's meant to be intimidating

4:04 PM

Yeah, but intimidation always leads to unrest.

And to satisfy the vindictive urges of the ever-shrinking base that the regime has

You would hope there was a vicious cycle there when they oppressed the unrest with more intimidation.

They have not been beaten so far.

It's a bit more complicated.

This is what comes of minority rule.

It's also what this country seems headed toward.

Got a phone call

Talk to you later

cya

@terdon Yes, I meant exactly "documents". Thank you!

4:26 PM

@Robusto How else would you spell it than tuit? :) Spanish is WYSIWYG after all.

4:50 PM

@tchrist Thank you for that. One of the few rational pieces I've read lately.

seems like a reputable source of stats

@tchrist True. But when you're reading along sometimes you don't intuit strange words like that. My brain pronounced it for me as "too-eat" not "tweet" ... when it gets down to syllables, all bets are off.

@skullpatrol More cheer for chat today, huh?

gotta try to keep up with the flood of info

that includes all the propaganda.

@tchrist: I just got off the phone with my son after getting his initial impressions in a text. He now says it's totally fucked in MA. ALL the biotechs (of which his employer is one) are having all but critical lab staff working from home. Apparently a single Biogen conference was the critical link, because nobody knew about the virus until everyone had gone home from there.

@skullpatrol Gotta keep up on the propaganda. How else we gonna run a news organization?

true

the world population section of that link is kinda interesting.

5:03 PM

Oh, btw, @tchrist, when the translation process slows down to the syllable level, I have a hard time in any language. Take Japanese katakana for example.

Nov 2 '18 at 18:26, by Robusto

The problem with katakana is that it's all too often used for gairaigo, foreign loan words, which means they're used on words which are already filtered through Japanese misapprehension and mispronunciation.

So puzzling out words from syllables can be problematic.

@skullpatrol I thought it was all world.

there is a world population growth section also

@Robusto When you see "u" + another vowel in Spanish, that's "always" going to be a semivowel /w/ at the start, so a rising diphthong, and the next vowel is the nucleus. fuimos, buitre are both [wi]. The weird exception is muy which is [uj] not [wi]. There are no minimal pairs.

@skullpatrol There's still a big problem with the reporting, since it remains unclear what is covid and what isn't. These numbers only reflect what has been tested.

agreed

Spanish phonotactics forbid -t in the syllable coda, so tuit would be pronounced like English twee by most native speakers.

Catalan doesn't mind it, though.

5:09 PM

Yeah, and as I get more adept I'll be recognizing such cues faster.

The rules are super different in Portuguese, though. So the famosísima cidade of Coimbra has [wi] not [oj].

More like queen than coin.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I'll be suppressing my English interpolations better. ^_^

@tchrist Makes sense.

I'm glad I deleted my tweeter app :-)

I can't think of another [uj] word in Spanish besides muy. It's an odd sound.

In Portuguese, I believe only muito alone has that diphthong. They use it for both Spanish muy and mucho alike. And it's a nasal diphthong there, too.

See, if it's a word I already know, I already know it in its totality, including pronunciation. If I don't know it my mind will run through what it does know about words that look like that, etc. It's like when I try to translate from English and I don't know a word in the target language. My mind will nevertheless give me the German word and the Japanese word when obviously neither will do in Spanish.

5:13 PM

@Robusto Yeah, you have to "hear" it not "see" it.

If seeing sends you down the wrong rules-kettle.

It's all about exposure over time.

Yeah.

@CowperKettle Mark?

Yes

5:16 PM

@Robusto when was this Biogen conference? I have two family members working for them, one of whom is in Boston.

Russian jokes.

@tchrist There's the exclamation "uy" or however that'd be written. basically a muy without the m.

@terdon ¡huy huy huy!

Yeah, the u is the nucleus there.

Ah, yes! Jujui has the same sound.

What the hell.

5:18 PM

Fluir?

Not quite, I think.

@Robusto why Mark?

@CowperKettle I think that one requires an explanation.

> Posible origen de la palabra «Jujuy»: en la obra Marta Riquelme, Guillermo Enrique Hudson (también conocido como William Henry Hudson, 1841-1922)dice: «El kakuy es un ave que frecuenta los bosques (...) Kakuy era el antiguo nombre de ese territorio, que los primeros exploradores deletrearon por error 'Jujuy', nombre corrupto que por fin le había quedado».

@skullpatrol Because ? reads as "question mark" ...

Lol

5:20 PM

@tchrist huh

How'd you go from a jota to a k sound though? Seems odd.

Bach > Bak

fluir in the preterite is fluí.

@tchrist Ah, true.

@tchrist Indeed it is. So there's another [uj] word.

fluyo in the present doesn't really have a diphthong there in the first syllable.

@terdon No, it has two syllables.

flu.'i

not flwi, which you can't say :)

@CowperKettle WTF is a мелофон?

fluyo is 'flu.jo more than 'flui.o

5:22 PM

@tchrist Ah yes, you're right. It's the emphasis on the final i.

yes

You just have to "know" most of these. They don't distinguish them in writing.

And "yo fui" isn't quite it either is it?

fui is fwi

not fuj

yeah

Think of cuyo.

Spanish wants open syllables wheresoever possible, so cu is the first syllable and the second is yo

Just as Latin cui was also two syllables.

those also cuius and the rest.

oh hm

huir has two syllables, but I think so does huiré.

But is it really wi-'re not uj-'re? Brain hurts. These may blend.

That might be [uj] there in huiría and such. That or it still has hiatus.

And such hiatal separations are hard to preserve in normal speech.

trisyllabic u.i.'re seems like it would lose something of its syllable boundary

5:31 PM

I don't think I'd say huiré with the sound of muy. The opening "ou" sound of huir is different.

Certainly huir is u.'ir

Not wir.

They used to write fuí with an accent mark.

yo que sé

silabas.net/index-es.php?p=huir%C3%A9

> ¿Cuántas sílabas tiene huiré? 2 sílabas
Es una palabra aguda (o también denominada oxítona).
■ Contiene un diptongo homogéneo ui. En este caso concreto con "ui", el diptongo es homogéneo porque se juntan dos vocales débiles (i, u) diferentes ("ii" y "uu" son hiatos simples, no son diptongos homogéneos). Ejemplos de diptongo homogéneo: ciu-dad, bui-tre, muy.

> Estos diptongos, llamados diptongos homogéneos, están formados por la unión de las dos vocales cerradas (i, u):1

[ju] como en ciudad
[wi] como en buitre
[ui̯] como en muy
[iu̯] como en viuda

Diptongo

Un diptongo es una cadena sonora que consiste en la articulación de dos vocales, una a continuación de la otra,[1] sin interrupción y produciéndose una transición suave en las frecuencias sonoras que caracterizan los timbres de cada una de las dos vocales. Fonológicamente dos vocales articuladas de esa manera forman parte de la misma sílaba. En un diptongo los formantes acústicos tienen una transición suave desde un punto del área vocálica a otro, lo que les da su naturaleza de diptongos. Esto corresponde a una articulación en que la lengua se mueve entre distintos puntos durante la emisión del…

> Cuando concurren dos vocales cerradas (en cuyo caso siempre hay diptongo ortográfico, no necesariamente en la lengua hablada): sólo llevan tilde si corresponde ésta según las reglas de acentuación generales (que distinguen entre esdrújulas, llanas y agudas y monosílabos -que no llevan tilde como regla general-).
Ejemplos: atribuí; distribuido, atribuir, muy, fui.

> La palabra huir es formalmente tanto un monosílabo como un bisílabo para la RAE, pero en el norte de España se pronuncia de forma muy generalizada en dos sílabas *hu-ír (bisílaba).

E igualmente el vocablo, rehuir, que formalmente puede ser tanto un bisílabo como un trisílabo para la RAE, se suele pronunciar en tres (por lo menos en el norte de España): *re-hu-ír. La RAE no ve la necesidad de la tilde, por entender que todas esas pronunciaciones son válidas y que debe regir un principio de economía (con la idea de no llenar de tildes antiestéticas un texto).

See, I told you that that word was a problem.:)

Sigh.

> En castellano se pueden formar 14 diptongos diferentes combinando las vocales abiertas con las cerradas, las cerradas con las abiertas y las cerradas entre sí: ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou, ui, iu, ia, ua, ie, ue, io, uo.

The problem is that you have two closed vowels, u and i.

So it's not clear which of those is the nucleus, or if there's hiatus.

> Según algunos fonólogos[¿quién?], solo los diptongos decrecientes —es decir, los formados por vocal fuerte + vocal débil, como en aire, neutro, etc.— son diptongos verdaderos, ya que las secuencias de vocal débil + vocal fuerte, como ocurre en agua, bueno, nieve, etc. se consideran, fonéticamente, grupos de una consonante seguida de una vocal, puesto que las vocales débiles pronunciadas como [j] y [w] en los diptongos crecientes son consideradas como consonantes.

That's how English treats those.

If it starts with a semivowel, that doesn't have to be in the rime.

So queen can rhyme not merely with ween but also with seen, which is a bit odd but it's how we hear it for rhyming.

Cute can rhyme with toot not just with Yute.

And butte /bjut/ can rhyme with coot /kut/ not just with cute /kjut/. Whatever.

> En latín clásico sólo existían tres diptongos decrecientes AU, AE~Æ, OE~Œ [au̯, ae̯, oe̯] en palabras nativas y en préstamos griegos se daban también EU, EI (Eurōpa, Eirenē).

> En latín arcaico habrían existido seis diptongos decrecientes /*ai, *au, *ei, *eu, *oi, *ou/ aunque muchos de estos monoptongaron: /*eu, *ou/ > /ū/ (*leuks > lūx 'luz',*louksna > lūna 'luna'), mientras que otros sufrieron abertura del elemento semivocálico /*ai, *oi/ > [ae̯, oe̯].

> Incluso se encuentran algunos casos de /*oi/ monoptongado en /ū/ (*oinos > ūnus 'uno', *poinicos > pūnicus 'púnico, cartaginés' junto a *poinī > pœnī 'fenicios, cartagineses').

5:47 PM

@tchrist huh, yes. That's how I learned it, two syllables. And I learned in Catalunya.

@terdon It is to me, too, because my Spanish is from the north as well.

> Sin embargo, la pérdida de diferencia de la distinción fonológia entre vocales largas y breves que se dio en el protorromance, hizo aparecer nuevos diptongos en las lenguas romances (ver reducción y estabilización del vocalismo tónico), esto se dio fundamentalmente en sílabas tónicas. A diferencia del español, muchas lenguas romances carecen de diptongos crecientes, existiendo sólo diptongos decrecientes.

So dio there in that sentence has only one syllable in Spanish.

yep

"existiendo sólo diptongos decrecientes" is weird.

Gerunds aren't supposed to have subjects in Spanish.

But it's very natural.

Hm.

> Una misma secuencia de vocal cerrada átona + vocal abierta + vocal cerrada átona puede pronunciarse, en unas palabras, formando parte de la misma sílaba, esto es, como un triptongo y, en otras, en dos sílabas diferentes, es decir, como un hiato seguido de un diptongo, o viceversa;
así, la secuencia iei se pronuncia como triptongo en la palabra cambiéis [cam - biéis] y como hiato + diptongo en confiéis [con - fi - éis], al menos en España y en los países americanos en los que la tendencia antihiática es menos fuerte.

I'm sure I say [con - fi - éis] without thinking about it.

But that's because of confiar feeling like it needs it that way.

Italy is sure in trouble, and getting much worse very fast.

There are to be some way for the rest of us not to follow in those same footsteps. There just has to be.

6:14 PM

Still, if Italy is the worst we get, well, it could be far, far uglier.

7:44 PM

@terdon Like this much uglier? When pressed by lawmakers for an estimate of eventual fatalities in the U.S., Fauci said it will be “totally dependent upon how we respond to it. I can’t give you a number,” he said. “I can’t give you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond. If we’re complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.”

Yes.

I'm not saying we shouldn't take protective measures, we absolutely should. But we should also bear in mind that the actual numbers are not that terrifying. Not yet, anyway. And given what we know about the disease, and current medical practice, they probably will never be anything of the scale of the Spanish Flu or the Black Death.

Which isn't to say we should be complacent, like your Orange in Chief. Only that we shouldn't go all out full paranoia either.

If 70% of the people get it, the healthcare system will collapse and people will die who shoudln't.

8:15 PM

Yes, that's my main fear, indeed. Although it does seem like the majority of those who get it don't need hospitalization. Which is the bright side. The less bright side, of course, is that even a small minority can represent huge numbers.

Yes, only about 20% require hospitalization to keep them alive. The other 80% have infections whose effects range anywhere from a yucky cold to the nastiest flu in your personal memory. Remember that in the technical clinical context of COVID-19, "mild" just means you won't die without hospitalization. It does not mean what the layman thinks "mild" means.

The States have only about 8% of the hospital capacity they'll need for the 5% who'll need respirators. Italy is making life-and-death triage decisions right now about who gets an ICU room or a respirator. They don't have enough to save everyone, so they're prioritizing and giving them to those most likely to be saved and live for many more years. So if both a 25yo and an 85yo both need that respirator and you only have one of them, they'll try to save the 25yo.

It's a resource-starvation issue.

That's why delaying is the most important thing right now.

Mitch

@Gigili My first thought was "That's not how language works!" and presses the close button hard. But I think it is a legitimate question. Maybe the question is sophomoric if that's the right word? It shows they are thinking in one direction but not thinking far enough? I'm not sure what they could do to address the close reason ('do research').

You have to flatten out the giant statistical bulge and move parts of it into the future.

Mitch

8:33 PM

On a brighter note, the huge continuous hurricane that is The Great Red spot on Jupiter is slowly shrinking and may have shrunk to nothing within a hundred years or so.

Sorry, 'may shrink'. I'm speaking from 1) the future, and 2) another universe where I haven't checked already if the spot in your universe has gone away.

Mitch

8:57 PM

On a much larger scale, you'll also be glad to know that the Andromeda Galaxy will be much longer off, in ~4 billion years. Somehow I had it in my head that it was 4 -million- years. Which I feel like we can almost just touch.

But really that's more of my problem than yours.

> By this time, the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies should be underway. Although this could result in the Solar System being ejected from the newly combined galaxy, it is considered unlikely to have any adverse effect on the Sun or its planets.

Student404Mus

9:36 PM

hello

@Mitch Which form is correct, to say "The dragon has born" or "The dragon had born"?