English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-09-11

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12:27 AM

My friends in Los Álamos got snow, too.

They always get snow. Way up in the mountains.

1:26 AM

@M.A.R. Yes, and Novaya Gazeta is especially un-censored.

There is also The New Times, which received a fine of 22 million rubles, aimed at closing the media. Russian people donated money to repay the fine.

And there are Russian-language media based in other countries but available over the Internet, like Meduza

2 hours later…

3:21 AM

> Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,

1 hour later…

4:31 AM

> The notification and the agreement shall be sent by registered mail with return receipt requested, or in electronic form to the email address indicated in the application, in two copies signed by an authorized person of the competent institution.

How do I indicate that this "authorized person" is part of the "competent institution"?

It seems to me that "person of institution" is a bit awkward.

Maybe it should be "an authorized employee of the competent institution"?

Or "authorized member of the competent institution"?

Or "authorized representative of the competent institution"?

5:28 AM

@CowperKettle How about designee? The person may be a lawyer, a member of the board, or whatever. I think representative works well also.

6:27 AM

@M.A.R. Kuhn's book is a classic in its field. I've been meaning to read it, tho I think I'm familiar with the main points it wants to make.

@M.A.R. It's beautiful... and sad.

It's a nice story: edition.cnn.com/2013/08/09/us/california-stolen-goods-returned/…

7:16 AM

@Færd you are. It's again the sort of book that organizes your thoughts into coherence. It doesn't say anything totally new

At least not until Section 4

Matt E. Эллен

8:08 AM

@FaheemMitha I said I'd tell you the name of the book with a good proof of how NFA are equivalent to regex, and that's it.

@Xanne Thank you!

> On Introduction of changes to the Rules for organization and conduct of inspections of medicinal product manufacturers for compliance with Good Manufacturing Practice requirements

Can we say "inspection for compliance", I wonder. Ah, according to Google we can

8:31 AM

@MattE.Эллен Ok.

8:47 AM

@Færd Further evidence that people who engage in petty crime are poorly educated.

8:59 AM

I wonder if it's okay to go jogging if I have a cold.

9:15 AM

Daniel Mark Lewin (Hebrew: דניאל "דני" מארק לוין‎; May 14, 1970 – September 11, 2001), sometimes spelled Levin, was an American–Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded internet company Akamai Technologies. A passenger on board American Airlines Flight 11, it is believed that Lewin was stabbed by one of the hijackers of that flight, and was the first person murdered during the course of the attacks. == Early life == Lewin was born May 14, 1970 in Denver, Colorado, and moved to Israel with his parents at age 14 and was raised in Israel. == Career == Lewin served for four years in the...

The first victim of 9/11

Turns out he was a cofounder of Akamai

1 hour later…

10:23 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link following arrow in body, potentially bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in title, shortened url in body (144): What are the benefits of buying a house in your wife’s name? by Housing buddha on english.SE

10:40 AM

0

Q: Meaning of "in-line hemophilia programs"

From a CV, posted in a chat by a fellow translator (English to Russian): Clinical lead for the hemophilia gene therapy programs and in-line hemophilia programs. These include the fidanacogene elaparvovec (fidavec) program for hemophilia B and the SB-525 program for hemophilia A along with in-lin...

A curious phrase.

11:08 AM

Robot Tries to Escape from Children's Attack

> According to The Academy’s new Best Picture rules—which go into full effect in 2024—films must meet at least two of four new standards that stipulate roles both onscreen and behind the scenes be filled by people from underrepresented groups, including race, women, LGBTQ and people with cognitive or physical disabilities, including the deaf and hard of hearing.

user image

> - are you a disabled or an Asian?
- I'm a lesbian

1 hour later…

12:34 PM

@CowperKettle I'd recommend yoga instead.

I used to get colds all the time. Much less now.

@CowperKettle A fine about what?

Six days ago I spent several minutes chatting with a store clerk while bying water during a jog. Very inconsiderate. I was thinking that I might be having a mild case of COVID, but then I checked the symptoms and they don't match.

@FaheemMitha After invading Ukraine, Putin passed laws to constrain "foreign funding" of media. The New Times received several payments from a foreign non-commercial organization, titled "Fund for the freedom of press", and forgot to include them in the account to officials.

This was used as a pretext to impose a fine, which should have closed the media for good.

A series of laws have been passed since 2011 that made it increasingly complicated to perform media and human rights-related activities in Russia. You need to do a lot of paperwork and every missing comma or dot can be used to fine you.

It's not nearly as tough as under the Soviets but it creates a nervous atmosphere.

@CowperKettle I see. That sounds very bad. Direct censorship of this kind is not yet a big thing here, but I suspect it will happen if things continue to worsen here.

The RSS is going to have to actively censor the media if it wants to stay in control in the long term.

For now they seem to be making sure that they either own a controlling interest, or the media owners are "friendly".

Perhaps I should say that direct censorship is not a big thing as far as I know, because the news of the censorship itself may be censured. There are certainly plenty of pressure tactics being used.

In Russia, Putin is popular enough to don't have to need direct censorship.

He has direct censorship only in state-owned media.

And even there, there is one hitch - the Echo of Moscow radio station remains outspokenly free, despite being owned by Gazprom, a state corporation.

The Echo of Moscow radio is basically retained free in order to show that in Russia, there is freedom of speech.

I'm afraid that if some nationalist takes over after Putin, he might really crack down on the media.

After the invasion of Ukraine, a big swath of militarized people sprang to life, who consider Putin a traitor for not invading the whole of Ukraine.

They have training camps throughout the country, the so-called patriotic clubs.

There is nationalism and imperialism in many a Russian brain.

Many people still vote for Zhirinovsky, who wrote in 1992 that "the Russian soldier must wash his boots in the Indian ocean". Read: Russia must reconquer Central Asia and Afghanistan and move further South.

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia

The LDPR — Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (Russian: ЛДПР — Либерально-демократическая партия России, Liberalno-demokraticheskaya partiya Rossii), briefly, the LDPR or Liberal Democratic Party, is a socially conservative, nationalist, economically interventionist political party in Russia led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky since its founding in 1989. Opposing both communism and neoliberal capitalism of the 1990s, the party scored a major success in the 1993 Russian Duma elections with 22%. In the elections in 2016, the party received 13.14% of the vote, giving it 39 of the 450 seats in the State Duma...

It's a nationalist party.

Their title is a mockery, because they were created by the KGB in 1989.

They were created as a means to oppose the anti-Soviet democrats in the final years of the USSR.

So it's counter-democratic and anti-liberal.

1:25 PM

0

Q: In need of accurate translations for "discount"

I’m writing a program for point of sales work. Thus, in my code, I need to name things (in English) related to concerns like "Store", "Sales", "Price", etc. I’m now writing code related to "Discount" concepts. The thing I’m currently struggling on is that I have three similar but different concep...

terminology translation french finance money

@Cerberus You know, I'm not so sure that he's going to find three distinct and commonly used English terms corresponding to his French terms escompte, rabis, ramise. This reminds me of the difficulty I had at work translating an English point-of-sales error message into Spanish: the original and theoretically English error message was Card escheated, but not being a finance geek it looks more like Law French to me than it does English.:) Mais si on a des idées sur cette question-là... :)

1:44 PM

@tchrist Oh, gosh, I would have no idea.

Some of those things sound rather similar.

@tchrist: Turns out George R. R. Martin was just denied permission to build a castle keep library in his house in Santa Fe because it would be too tall.

The neighbors don't want sightseers traipsing through Old Town looking for it.

Word of the day: sharrow

@Cerberus Yeah, my take entirely.

@CowperKettle Awesome!

@Robusto Old Town is pretty architecturally controlled there.

So, in fact, is the entirety of the downtown area, and possibly then some.

Yeah. It's also a rabbit warren of streets.

2:04 PM

@CowperKettle Ugh.

@CowperKettle Why is Putin popular? Modi is supposedly popular, though I don't know how this is measured, and whether I believe it.

Utterly ridiculous. Instead of fixing the rating system, they make movies even more stupid.

Nobody I personally know has a positive opinion of him, though in most cases they probably also don't know much about him.

@CowperKettle sparrow, pharaoh, narrow, marrow, ferro-, Chevy Camaro, barrow, arrow, aquacero, banderillero, bandolero, bolero, caballero, cartero, cenicero, cocinero, compañero, dinero, sombrero, torero, vaquero, cruzeiro, Trocadéro, El Embarcadero, Mia Farrow, the Islands Faroe, y yo te espero. :)

@CowperKettle What is RT, and how does it fit in here?

I've watched videos of their stuff. They also employ Americans.

2:07 PM

Request Tracker

Request Tracker, commonly abbreviated to RT, is a ticket-tracking system written in Perl used to coordinate tasks and manage requests among a community of users. RT's first release in 1996 was written by Jesse Vincent, who later formed Best Practical Solutions LLC to distribute, develop, and support the package. RT is open source (FOSS) and distributed under the GNU General Public License.Request Tracker for Incident Response (RTIR) is a special distribution of RT to fulfill the specific needs of CERT teams. It was initially developed in cooperation with JANET-CERT, and in 2006 was upgraded and...

@FaheemMitha You need a significant portion of the population, and not a majority, to support the leader, and any dictator that would pander to nationalistic instincts would probably automatically gain that

Regardless of whether Putin or Modi goes (?!?) so far as to be a dictator.

They can't be worse than Orange-utan

@M.A.R. Goes? :)

People use plural for everything now. It confuse me sometime.

Uh, I think I confused myself

Oh haha

I've noticed that people have been construing or to work like and.

No it's just it's after a workout and a lunch for me so I can't use my brain parts that help with language

It's frigging hot

Olivier salad

2:12 PM

@M.A.R. Orang-pendek, Orang-gadang, Orange-chew glad I didn't say banana?

Hmm, but now that I think about it, I would probably indeed phrase it as "Putin or Modi go"

I'm truly a child of this generation, TCh

@M.A.R. True but his daughter's a lass.

Google tells me you're talking about Sarkozy

Crois pas.

This Olivier guy is supposedly Russian, Google also tells me

Is Iran a post-Soviet country? O.o

2:15 PM

@M.A.R. Un olivero es un sitio donde se coloca la oliva o aceituna en la recolección hasta que se lleva al trujal.

Bless you

Goes in tight.

In my defense, the salad mom makes is much more appetizing than the mesh in Google images

avert size

@tchrist "An olive tree is a place where the olive or olive is placed in the harvest until it is taken to the trujal"

I love Trujal, wherever that is.

2:17 PM

@M.A.R. Exacto.

Childhood favorite place.

What's aceituna?

Un trujal es un molino de aceite. O puede serlo.

@M.A.R. The thing you get aceite from. Gosh and here I thought you spoke Arabic.

Hmm

@tchrist An oil mill? What is that? Maybe for crushing oil from seeds?

@tchrist Well I'm more fluent in speaking chemistry and can't shrug off "acetone"

2:20 PM

@M.A.R. aceite: From Old Spanish azeyte (cf. Ladino azeyte), from Andalusian Arabic, from Arabic زَيْت‎ (zayt, “oil, edible or for combustion”), cognate with Hebrew זית‎ (záyit, “olive”).

And I can't speak Arabic. Best I can do is stare down a passage until the meaning jumps out

@Robusto It's how you get aceite from an aceituna.

ZOMG

Aceite by itself, unqualified, mean aceite de olivo/aceituna, just like carne unqualified means carne de vaca.

Aceitunas are olives. Aceite is (olive) oil.

@tchrist I'd call that a press, not a mill.

2:22 PM

Uh-huh

But I guess it works the same.

Behold I shall tell unto you a great mystery!

> Fires are releasing record levels of carbon dioxide, partly because they are burning ancient peatlands that have been a carbon sink. nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y

Q: Why didn't Spanish use some cognate of oil < L. oleum like everybody else did?

Because of Moors on the Iberian peninsula?

2:24 PM

@CowperKettle I like how the nature is still doing its thing while we're occupied

@tchrist They did, but the plan failed

@Robusto A: No, because oil is a common everyday item. But so are eyes. There was a phonological collision between eye ojo < L. oculus and ojo < L. oleum so they bumped the second one and used an Arabic word for that one instead.

The eyes have it.

It seemed important to them to know whether somebody had a problem with their eye or their oil.

This just made making olive oil into a horror movie

There was this B movie where plants had eyes

@M.A.R. Because of all those Moorish monks stomping down the olives with their bare feet? It's the pits, man, the pits that grind you down.

@FaheemMitha The living standards have increased greatly under Putin, although they have been stagnant since about 2010. They increased rapidly in 2003-2008.

user image

Orange oil

2:36 PM

Dude didn't they tell you that Halloween has been cancelled this year?

Everybody was trying to get their hands on respirations for costumes.

2:49 PM

@M.A.R. No trump in chat

@M.A.R. There could be a lot worse.

There could -always- be worse.

@tchrist Somehow it feels like that could have something to do with Moors ...

2 hours later…

4:39 PM

@tchrist Thanks for the link, but I meant the TV/news channel. Owned by the Russian state or something like that.

@M.A.R. That's debatable.

@tchrist Yes, I think that should be singular. I posted a question similar to that recently.

Ok, now I'm confused too. Should that be singular or plural. Damned natural languages.

@CowperKettle Oh. Any idea why that happened?

4:54 PM

@FaheemMitha Market reforms performed in 1992-1998 finally kicked in in 1999, and starting from about 2002 the prices of oil and gas went up. Putin continued the market reformed planned by Boris Yeltsin's economists for several years.

Putin began wrecking the economy in 2003, but it had accumulated a big redundancy and momentum by that time, and thus it kept going strong until the 2008 crisis.

@CowperKettle I don't know what these market reforms are.

And words like that usually just mean ways for rich people to get richer, in my experience.

Privatization in Russia

Privatization in Russia describes the series of post-Soviet reforms that resulted in large-scale privatization of Russia's state-owned assets, particularly in the industrial, energy, and financial sectors. Most privatization took place in the early and mid-1990s under Boris Yeltsin, who assumed the presidency following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Private ownership of enterprises and property had essentially remained illegal throughout the Soviet era, with Soviet communism emphasizing national control over all means of production but human labor. Under the Soviet Union, the number of state...

Market reforms aimed at restoring a market economy in Russia, by taking the companies from under state control, and allowing the sale of land.

Putin has been meddling with these mechanisms, and now we have again a predominant state-run sector in the economy, estimated at above 50%.

This is bad. It's state capitalism, with state monopolies preventing free companies from developiing, because state monopolies are privileged.

@CowperKettle I don't know the details, but privatization is often a bad thing. Having said that, the companies under Indian govt control are a shambles. Because the Indian govt is.

I've had personal experience of that, notably MTNL, which is basically a bad dream to deal with. Also a brief encounter with SBI.

@FaheemMitha The less the Government owns, the better.

@CowperKettle I think that depends.

Govt ownership isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can be a good thing.

5:00 PM

@CowperKettle Privatization backfires here often.

But not when the govt itself is a disaster. As is the case in India.

I could tell you all sort of stories about MTNL. It a sort of black hole of a company.

Some idiot millionaire with lots of money and no expertise thinks owning this sector or that company will increase their money. Without expertise, they botch up the industry for the next decade and get their lost money back from banks. AFAIK.

Govts don't have to be awful and incompetent. It's not like a natural law.

@M.A.R. Yes, for example. Predatory capitalism. (Is there any other variety?)

The economy should be built in such a way as to allow inefficient companies to die.

@CowperKettle Ours is built in a way that keeps killing things, rest assured :p

5:03 PM

Governments should not run commercial companies, it's a perversion.

@CowperKettle Well, what happens in India is that companies like MTNL, which loses staggering amounts of money, are bailed out with taxpayer money. This isn't a secret, and has been going on for a long time.

It's an incredible waste of money, and rewards a horribly badly run company.

The other side of the coin is AFAIK our automobile industry is state-owned. And it kills many people every year by creating very cheap cars.

@CowperKettle Define commercial, please.

Same here. Banks owned by Putin's friends have been bailed out using tax money, at great costs. This is bad.

@FaheemMitha Profit-oriented companies should be privately owned.

Oh, yes, and banks too. MTNL is a phone company though, not a bank.

5:04 PM

And if a bank goes bust, it should not be supported, it should die.

Survival of the fittest makes the economy stronger.

@CowperKettle Oh. No, I disagree with that generalization. But it's not necessary for companies to maximize profits, as long as they do make a profit.

@CowperKettle Possibly, yes. If the bank cannot be made to run properly. That obviously would be the better option.

The term profit-oriented implies maximization of profits, I assume.

But it's better if a company can be saved, possibly by firing incompetent or criminal management.

There's tons of fraud in India, so the criminal thing isn't that unusual.

5 hours later…

9:49 PM

user image

10:22 PM

Can advanced proficiency in a language be taught without any grammar at all?

There's this TPRS method language teachers seem to adopt increasingly, which is, in a nutshell, teaching students with only the aid of a story and what words are there. It seems feasible or even optimal for absolute beginners, but it seems like it'd fall apart for intermediate and advanced learners.

One of their mantras is "Don't teach grammar at all", which to me sounds as absurd as trying just to teach grammar to ESL. I mean, I regret not being able to form a coherent sentence in Arabic despite six years of being fed Arabic grammar.

I would have dismissed it entirely as some idiot teacher's way of being contentious, but research seems to support it. Two dozen studies have been performed about TPRS vs. "traditional methods", which to me sounds like a low hanging fruit like my Arabic teaching, but TPRS students seem to hage performed better.

I'm still skeptical because of course any real immersion is better than just memorizing vocab and mumbling big grammar words, si the studies don't necessarily prove much. Another reason to be skeptical is it would seem you'd have to use a lot of translation to make difficult texts accessible to students, and translation sucks as a teaching method above a certain level.

TPRS aims to correct many common learner misconceptions about learning a language though. That's undeniable. So I was wondering if you guys have heard about TPRS and have formed any opinions about it.

There seems to be a lot of almost entirely one-sided commentary on TPRS. Seems like the more frantic adaptations don't have any textbooks at all. And lots of flowery language that makes TPRS sound like snake oil.

My dilemma stems from the fact that I learned and relearned a lot of English grammar or non-grammar while learning English. Despite my experience with Arabic, I never thought twice about the impact it had on my fluency.

This guy has filled their entire Wordpress with TPRS, in case you want to give it a read: tprsquestionsandanswers.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/…

10:53 PM

Here is a TPRS guy: effortlessenglishclub.com/…

His rule #2 is "never learn grammar". Other rules aren't so controversial.

@M.A.R. I think I agree with your on almost all points.

I do think you can get a long way without translations.

For Latin, the method by Ørberg is currently en vogue.

You learn by reading increasingly complex stories, with the help of pictures and small bits of grammar, but everything is in Latin.

It seems to work reasonably well, though I believe, in practice, teachers do add lots of explanations to the book during their lessons, probably also teaching some grammar.

But I think a mixture of reading stories and learning grammar is the most efficient way to proceed to an advanced level, and the only way to reach a really high level.

Native speakers who never learned grammar do not write well at all, nor do they speak well.

And they may very well be unable to understand language on advanced topics.

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Sep '2011

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