English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

00:27

@M.A.R. That is how native speakers learn, without any formal training in grammar until after it knows how to speak like a native.

And I really learned all my grammar after that from reading. I read voraciously from age 5, at least half a dozen books a week. Sometimes more. When I had to do schoolwork grammar I just remembered how things sounded from what I read, and did fine.

RegDwigнt

01:25

Ah yes. I almost forgot what site I was on.

A timely reminder to go to bed.

CowperKettle

01:42

@FaheemMitha Yes, by "die" I meant that the management should go to jail for defrauding customers, and the company should be sold to the next highest bidder.

In Russia, every citizen unknowingly paid a couple of thousand rubles to support a bankrupt bank run by a part of the Putin gang. The top management was not in any way punished for losing, or likely stealing, the money.

Xanne

01:58

@M.A.R. @Robusto Here is a website that promotes learning English without grammar. antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm I’ve always been puzzled. But why can’t others learn the way natives do, whatever the language?

Xanne

02:19

The air quality index here is 195. Not good.

CowperKettle

02:30

> a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way — suggesting that we’re living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it’s a “possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network.”

SmokeDetector

03:34

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in link text in body, potentially bad ip for hostname in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body, potentially bad keyword in body (72): Contact dunks and rate boost by Dingbest on english.SE

CowperKettle

Word of the day: depraved-heart murder

CowperKettle

04:20

> Recommendations for entities engaged in medicinal products circulation on handling of labeled/unlabeled drug products in the most typical situations

Some Russian translators faithfully reproduce the plural form, as in the example above. But I think that in such cases one could use the singular form: "in medicinal product circulation" - that would not imply "in the circulation of a single medicinal product".

But I'm not 100% sure, so I often leave the plural form, despite the urge to "fix" it.

In the original Russian text, the plural form is commonly used, but it's a quirk of the Russian language.

Xanne

04:36

@CowperKettle Singular or plural, the puzzle is “an entity engaged in medicinal products circulation.“ An entity (a person or organization?) handling medicines? “Dealing with”medicines or medicinal products would be undesirable because of the confusion with “dealing drugs.” Medications could be substituted for medicines.

CowperKettle

05:14

nods

> By Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 1954 of 31 December 2019, medicinal product manufacturers have been granted the right, starting from 1 January 2020, to apply drug product identification

Can we use Present Perfect here? The phrase has a specific time identifier, so it must be ungrammatical to use Present Perfect

On the other hand, the sentence affects the present time, so it might be okay.

CowperKettle

06:08

CowperKettle

06:29

> If a distributor receives labeled drug products manufactured before 1 July 2020, it is obliged to submit information on the drug product circulation to the monitoring system in accordance with part 7 of Article 67 of FZ-61, provided that the monitoring system contains information about presence of this drug product in the account of the shipper.

This is a hard one. I need to rephrase it, but I'm afraid that a question might be downvoted on the main site.

The matter is, in Russia a drug product tracking system has been put in force this year.

And what's meant in this sentence is that the product was initially registered in this tracking system as part of the shipper's assets.

The shipper sold the product and shipped it to the distributor (who owns farmacies).

The distributor is obliged to send the info to the system, so that it continues the tracking process.

But the distributor must first make sure that the shipper's "list of assets" included the product to start with.

The original Russian phrase was on the balance of the shipper, but I think that in English this means something else entirely. In Russian, "on the balance of somebody" means basically "owned by somebody"

It's a derivation from balance sheet but I'm afraid I cannot use balance sheet here since a balance sheet is not what's meant here.

What's meant here, is that the tracking system still "thinks" that the shipper has the medical product.

And the distributor, upon reception of the product, must inform the system that the "owner" or "holder" of the product has changed.

I'm at pains to translate this particular phrase into English.

I haven't found a thorough description of the new tracking system in English.

In an inside document of the 1C book-keeping software (Russian), some English-language merror messages indeed include the English word "balance".

I'll use "asset list".

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted website in answer, pattern-matching website in answer, potentially bad ip for hostname in answer (172): How could i express changes in this image in English? by Rachel R. Fields on english.SE

CowperKettle

Basically it's a labeling system that allows the complete tracking of every drug package throughtout its distribution chain. Who produced, who shipped it, who distributed it.

So that not a single package remains untracked.

Xanne

06:47

@CowperKettle I’d add a the before presence and use accounts rather than account. I read it, and your description is exactly what I thought it meant. I think it’s a GO.

Faheem Mitha

@M.A.R. Based on my experience, immersion and a lot of reading can be an effective way to learn a language, but there is nothing with lessons in grammar. Disclaimer: I'm (a) bad at languages (b) only know one language (English), though I can sort of fake Hindi, of the kind spoken in Bombay, at least.

I mostly learned English on my own, but no formal study was involved. My school was a joke. Horrible place.

Xanne

”Accounts” is more general than “asset”, referring to all entries rather than a specific location in the accounts.

CowperKettle

@Xanne Thank you! In the account, then! ))

Faheem Mitha

Though apparently an Indian citizen cannot be a "native" English speaker, so in order to study in an English-speaking country, I had to experience the delights of TOEFL and other English language tests, whose details I have now mercifully forgotten.

As an expert could tell, my command of grammar is quite patchy. I'm still making sporadic efforts to learn about it, though it's a bit late in the day.

From when I was a small child till my late 20s, I used to read a lot. Then it gradually dropped off, though I probably still read a lot by skimming on the internet. The Guardian, for example, tells me I've read 1200+ articles on their site in the past year, though I don't think it should be that much. But I suppose they just count every page that is opened.

CowperKettle

Word of the minute: to directly register ( Like all felines, they directly register; that is, they place each hind paw almost directly in the print of the corresponding forepaw, minimizing noise and visible tracks.)

Faheem Mitha

06:58

@Cerberus I never learned grammar. I'm very ill-educated. Still trying to learn. In theory, at any rate.

It used to be said (or thought), that learning Latin and possibly Greek to, was advantageous in learning to write good English. There may be some truth in that. At any rate, one is likely to have a better grasp of the etymological underpinning of the English language.

For example, Robert Graves wrote quite good English. Was that because he was traditionally educated, or some innate ability? And I've noticed that educated British speakers are often good writers of English. Of course, it really is their native language.

(Excuse ramblings...)

@CowperKettle Ok, that sounds reasonable. As long as the company is not just automatically shut down. There should also be an attempt to recover costs from the management. Though the thing these days (at least in India), is to promptly flee the country.

Maybe if I hang out here, I'll learn something. By osmosis.

This is a bit late, but I meant to write above: "but there is nothing wrong with lessons in grammar".

Actually, since I grew up in India, my English language experience wasn't particularly immersive. And in fact, when I spent a bit of time in the UK as a student later on, people thought it funny when I mispronounced words. Because I had never heard them spoken by someone other than myself. Or spoken correctly, at any rate.

Xanne

07:40

@FaheemMitha What is your “native” language then? What you learned in the crib?

CowperKettle

Federal Service for Surveillance in Healthcare (Roszdravnadzor) - should one use The with RosZdravNadzor? Or should it be used as a proper name, without the, in sentences?

@FaheemMitha I think that some linguists might disagree. As I understand, the view of English grammar as a grammar aligned with Latin was popular until the 18th century, but later it was decided that English has its own grammar, and that the Latin grammar is a poor guide in deciding what is right or wrong in English

But maybe generally learning any grammar is good for getting "the feeling" of grammar. I don't know.

My sister knows Hindi. I have a copy-book printed in India, with some untypical English phrasing on the cover.

Faheem Mitha

@Xanne English.

@CowperKettle I'm not personally a proponent of this viewpoint. I'm just saying that it's an opinion that is, or used to be held.

@CowperKettle I don't think it's about grammar per se. It's about having a knowledge of the roots of the language.

Xanne

@CowperKettle In American English we speak of the FDA—the Federal Drug Admin., and the CDC (Center for Disease Control). But IBM, Exxon-Mobil, Tesla. The Department of the Treasury. In English in literary writing we would avoid alphabet soup by speaking of the Service, the Center, etc., if the document would not be confusing because of other centers, departments, agencies, etc. But in government docs, the initialisms are used.

@FaheemMitha English is your native language, but mostly you taught yourself?

M.A.R.

07:59

@Rob @Faheem Well, my experience with grammar is 1) while learning a new language, you see some permissible constructs, and the brain would unconsciously deduce that some other constructs are also permissible. However, language is not a mathematical operation, so some of these deductions would be wrong. Grammar, which is essentially establishing which patterns are acceptable and which patterns aren't, would be the most effective (short-term) way to tell apart the right constructs from the wrong.

Xanne

If you aren’t “taught” English, you speak it as did those from whom you learned it; and write it that way, too. I personally think Latin and Greek are useless, although I studied a bit of Latin. Some people, or a teacher, may correct a few phrases, if they have a concept of what’s “right” vs. “wrong.” Or you learn it from reading.

M.A.R.

This effect is more pronounced for ESL, which would borrow some patterns from their other languages. Sure, you wouldn't need grammar if you read four score and seven books a year, but isn't that more difficult than learning some patterns?

2) this, for me, explains why many native speakers of English that don't show much education tend to make grammatical and spelling errors.

@Xanne native speakers of a language learned most of it when their brain was essentially a knowledge-aborbing sponge. ESL, and especially the kind that seems to want to evade learning grammar these days, aren't willing to spend more than a small amount of time learning the language everyday, and sometimes have unrealistic milestones that even babies couldn't accomplish. If it's possible to optimize language learning to speed up the process, why not do it?

Xanne

@M.A.R. But you know only that some speakers who make errors are uneducated. You don’t know whether those who don’t make errors avoid errors because their family and friends spoke good English even though they weren’t taught a bunch of rules.

M.A.R.

So I don't buy the argument that trying to emulate the way native speakers learn is automatically the 'best' (fastest, most effective, or longest lasting) way to learn the language

Xanne

The rules come from the language “as she is spoke”, after all. Or as it is read, in fact.

Knight admires Chappo

08:10

Can someone tell me what “black stream” might mean in Biblical allusions?

Xanne

@KnightadmiresChappo No idea; I’d have to go to a Biblical site.

M.A.R.

@Xanne which is why I was getting to 3. 3) It's easy to shun grammar because we don't or we think we don't use grammar when forming sentences, and I certainly don't wonder about grammar when writing "I like apples". But it's an entirely different story when I'm trying to venture out of the ordinary constructions and beautify my writing or make it stand out. Even if I don't say aloud fancy names for subordinate clauses in subordinate clauses, I'd be thinking about whether rules allow me to

. . . to compose a difficult sentence. It seems to me there are no substitutes for grammar then, not even native/fluent speaker intuition

Knight admires Chappo

@Xanne I get this feeling that it related to the eating of apple by Adam and Eve.

Xanne

I got a little grammar in high school, but mostly literature and composition.

M.A.R.

@Xanne how many literary works are you familiar with? How many years would it take for a learner to read bits of them until they're fluent in the language?

Which brings me to another problem of the TPRS method: It relies on every English teacher being a good story teller.

Xanne

08:21

The compositions were corrected for grammar but were not expected to include complex sentences that didn’t arise through what I was trying to say.

M.A.R.

If I ever had to write golden rules for learning a language, it'd have one rule: "Be persistent". I started learning English when I was eight. Many parents are sending their kids to private English learning institutions and it's very fashionable in urban areas at least these days. No one I was ever a classmate with kept going. They quit at one point or another. I plateaued a lot, but I never stopped learning, and still have some way to go.

There are many many Iranians with A2 or B1 fluency in English. More often than not they're the bunch that went to one of these institutes as a kid but didn't like it after a while

If people are willing to spend decades of their lives learning a language (as native speakers do) restrictions like "no grammar" sound rather arbitrary.

Xanne

@M.A.R. I am familiar with a large number of historical and literary works, but not all. I don’t know what the TPRS method is, but at some point the teacher becomes irrelevant, I would think. How many years, for a native speaker? None. For an NNS? Three to four years, with focus (not too much other material like STEM.

M.A.R.

@Xanne apparently, the proposed system to replace the one with grammar teaching is a guy writes stories with the most common words and constructions, and then makes this "100% comprehensible" for learners by translating the story or any other method. Rinse and repeat.

Xanne

@M.A.R. Why not use already written stories at increasing levels of complexity. Why translate? Let the students use s dictionary; that’s it. Or whatever other books they like.

M.A.R.

08:36

Translations and certain vocab teaching methods are questionable. Some employ MSV, which was debunked by cognitive scientists decades ago. (Although TBF other methods sometimes use MSV too)

@Xanne Because apparently they have to be one hundred percent tailored to the students. Great literary works that are out there aren't.

Xanne

I don’t recognize TBF or MSV. I do believe that multiple choice with three out of four wrong answers can do more harm than good.

M.A.R.

@Xanne "to be fair", MSV is briefly introduced in that link

This is the generation of abbreviating things that don't need to be abbreviated. You need to catch up!

Speaking of which, I need to catch up with some things. BBL

Xanne

@M.A.R. Some link many pages past? Something I missed.

CowperKettle

10:09

> The first pilot lot of the Russian covid vaccine shipped out into the country's regions ria.ru/20200912/vaktsina-1577122789.html

CowperKettle

10:26

Tongan castaways

The Tongan castaways were a group of six boys between 13 and 16, who, in 1965, ran away from a school on the island of Tonga, stole a boat, and became shipwrecked on the deserted remote island of ʻAta. The Tongan castaway boys formed a strong bond and, despite deprivations and injuries, kept themselves fit and healthy for 15 months. The boys survived primarily through consumption of local birds, fish, wild taro, and chickens and bananas that had been raised and cultivated on the island 100 years prior. They captured rainwater using hollowed out logs, though it was sparse during the initial months...

Curious

SmokeDetector

10:53

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Potentially bad ns for domain in answer, username similar to website in answer (64): A code or some code? by dkbusinesspatron on english.SE

Cerberus

11:39

@Xanne One would be wise to avoid abbreviations in any kind of text where speed nor space is lacking.

So I would extend that advice outside literary English.

Of course the occasional abbreviation can be forgiven.

But it is always nicer to avoid them.

Faheem Mitha

12:16

@Xanne Sort of. Mostly I absorbed it, I guess. But my parents did speak it, and also I went to an English speaking school.

In India, English is the language spoken by the elites, but perhaps you know that.

I guess we had English lit classes in school, but mostly it was pretty dire, like everything else in that school.

@M.A.R. Agreed, one deduces from a sample, so it helps if the sample is (a) large (b) correct.

@M.A.R. I suppose I understand the (very) basic rules of grammar, but mostly it is (still) unconscious. I'm not sure where I learned that. It's possible I give my school too little credit, but it really was terrible.

Cerberus

@FaheemMitha Dire, in what way?

Faheem Mitha

@M.A.R. What is A2 and B1?

@Cerberus In a variety of ways. A detailed answer would be quite long.

Cerberus

OK.

Faheem Mitha

The quality of the eduction varied from indifferent to really really terrible. Areas like history were basically a joke. Civics, ditto. Math was probably barely adequate by international statndards, but didn't involve learning any actual math.

The sciences were probably adequate, but I don't remember much about it.

There was a biology teacher for a while you in hindsight I recall as reasonable, but I wasn't really paying attention.

The general atmosphere was terrible. This was a school for rich kids, and that in Bombay that was the children of Bombay businessmen. In India businessmen are mostly bandits, so their children were mostly nasty little thugs.

Common (poor) people in India have much better manners and morals than the rich do.

Cerberus

Hmm.

That is unfortunate.

Faheem Mitha

12:30

I spent a while outside India, and during that time I thought perhaps I had exaggerated it, but I met such people when I came back to India, and I think probably not.

Rich people anywhere are not very nice. Though they do tend to get the best of everything, including education.

Cerberus

It depends.

There are different kinds of "nice".

Faheem Mitha

That discussion about English learning is interesting, but I don't know that much about it.

Cerberus

I would say the nouveau riche are the worst, but I'm probably biased.

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus Possibly. But a lot of the rich in India are nouveau riche.

Cerberus

Makes sense.

Faheem Mitha

12:33

They're basically gangsters who rob the poor.

Cerberus

Conversely, poor people may have coarse and violent manners.

Faheem Mitha

This isn't theoretical. I've met such people. I'm even related to some of them.

Cerberus

I'll believe it.

That is not the case here.

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus They might, yes. But India's poor people are often suprisingly refined and well-mannered, considering the conditions they live in.

It's all relative, of course.

But India's culture is quite old, and in some ways is quite tolerant and sane.

Cerberus

I'll believe it.

Faheem Mitha

12:35

The country was basically trashed by the British and never really recovered, but some things do persist.

CowperKettle

Before that, by Moghuls

Faheem Mitha

One thing to add to that debate. I think language learning has a large psychological component to it. It really helps if you have positive associations with the language. Ideally, you should think of the language as "yours".

@CowperKettle Not really, no. The Mughals weren't nice, but they didn't trash the country.

CowperKettle

@FaheemMitha How so? In what way did the Brits trash India that was worse than Moghuls?

Faheem Mitha

The British basically raped India for two centuries and then walked away. It was without historical parallel in Indian history.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Or other conquerors from India proper...

Faheem Mitha

12:38

@CowperKettle They basically stole everything from India. And also simultaneously turned into a service area.

CowperKettle

For instance, the Soviet Union conducted mass resettlments of peoples. Did the Brits do that? In resettlements, hundreds of thousands died.

Faheem Mitha

The important thing is that the Mughals were Indians. They moved in.

@CowperKettle Within India? I don't know. Not as far as I am aware.

Cerberus

My theory is that most conquerors were terrible, no matter where they came from.

Faheem Mitha

The British very much did not think of themselves of India, and took everything they could for their own country.

CowperKettle

At a different period, the USSR established new industrial plants in Central Asia and built schools.

Faheem Mitha

12:39

@Cerberus Of course, but there are different kinds of terrible.

Cerberus

No doubt the Mongols did the same.

And the Mughals no doubt behaved terribly at some point after their conquest in some former kingdom in India.

Faheem Mitha

They also did a lot of forceable deindustrialization. For example, the Indian textile industry was second to none. They basically destroyed that, for example. Because they didn't want the competition.

CowperKettle

One example of "trashed" is what the Mongols did to the Kievan Rus, basically to Russia. Razed the major cities down to the ground.

Cerberus

And the Chinese conquests by Chinese groups (the Taiping Rebellion, the Communist Rebellion) were among the most deadly in all of the history of the human race.

Even worse than the conquests of China by the Mongols or the Manchus, I think.

Faheem Mitha

The Mongols was 13th century, right? The point about the British wasn't so much that they were destructive. "trashed" is a loose term.

CowperKettle

12:42

> However, at the same time as Britain took control of India the British cloth industry began to change towards making cloth in factories. By the early 1800s cloth made in British factories was cheaper than cloth made in India. The Indian cloth industry was gradually destroyed.

So they did not physically destroy it, they destroyed it by setting up steam-driven factories that produced cheaper textile.

Cerberus

Then again, what is "China"? No doubt the Taiping and the Communists were seen as being from an entire different region by people in, say, the souther of China, who didn't even speak Chinese at home.

Faheem Mitha

But didn't most of these people just pass through? Did they stick around and continue doing it?

Cerberus

Sure they did.

Faheem Mitha

Like who?

Cerberus

The damage done to China by Mao is incredible.

And long lasting.

Just like the damage done by Stalin.

CowperKettle

12:43

Yes, the Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions.

And the "Culture Revolution"

Faheem Mitha

Did this involve resource stealing and deindustrialization?

Cerberus

And would you say the Nazi conquest of Europe was a "home grown, interior European conquest" or a conquest by a foreign aggressor?

CowperKettle

And there are still morons who love Stalin, many of them

Cerberus

@FaheemMitha De-education, mass murder, mass famine, etc. etc.

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus The Nazis didn't deindustrialize Europe. For one thing, they didn't have the time. They murdered people they didn't like.

Cerberus

12:45

They devastated the continent.

Destroyed so much of it.

And of its people.

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus That's news to me. What did they do, exactly?

CowperKettle

Any empire does the same.

Cerberus

Now, the Germans considered us Dutch their "German brothers".

But they destroyed the entire city of Rotterdam on the first day of the war.

CowperKettle

@FaheemMitha Didn't you read about the WWII?

Cerberus

And they starved a large part of Amsterdam in the final year, on purpose.

Faheem Mitha

12:46

@CowperKettle Of course. There was lots of bombing, for example.

CowperKettle

Yes, the Hunger Winter

Cerberus

Etc. etc. etc.

CowperKettle

I wrote an article in Russian Wikipedia about it

Cerberus

Cool.

My grandmother ate tulip bulbs in the Hague, in 1944.

CowperKettle

Голодная зима 1944 года (Нидерланды)

Голодная зима (нидерл. hongerwinter) — массовый голод, поразивший гражданское население Нидерландов под конец Второй мировой войны и унёсший жизни около 18 тысяч человек. Причиной голода стало эмбарго, наложенное Германией на поставку продовольствия в Западные Нидерланды после провала операции Маркет Гарден и начала забастовки железных дорог, охватившей страну в сентябре 1944 года. Численность населения в зоне бедствия превышала 3 миллиона человек. == Голод == На протяжении всей войны, вплоть до сентября 1944 года, Нидерланды не сталкивались с крупными проблемами в снабжении продовольстви...

I wrote the Russian article in 2008

It was very interesting to write it.

I came across a mention in scientific literature that children born after this winter had a very high incidence of schizohprenia. The poor nutrition affected the development of their brain.

Faheem Mitha

12:47

Anyway, Europe survived the Nazis. India didn't survive the British very well. Though no doubt they could have handled the post imperial period better.

The last 70 years have really been a shambles.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle My father was born in 1944, and he has rather bad teeth. We try to blame the Hunger Winter for it...

> A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm towns.

@FaheemMitha This is what our "brother nation" did to us, whom they considered part of Greater Germany.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus Sorry to hear that!

Cerberus

@FaheemMitha So you can see why I'm not terribly impressed by the kindness and humanity of local conquerors.

@CowperKettle Yeah but it may not be true hehe.

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus I didn't say they were kind.

CowperKettle

@FaheemMitha An example of "poorly survived" is the Russian occupation of Crimea, where Crimean tatars went from being the dominant nationality to being a minor nationality, and they were forcibly removed to Kazakhstan in trains in 1944, in a single day. Britain never did that.

Cerberus

12:50

And the local conquests in Africa were responsible for, what, 95% of the slave trade?

That is, of enslavement.

CowperKettle

And there are several hundreds of Crimean Tatars in Russian jails right now for refusing to accept the occupation of Crimea.

Cerberus

Besides, I think the whole concept of "local" conquerors is a 19th-century invention, implicitly based on nationalism.

Africa was not a nation.

There are no "brother peoples".

Maybe a conqueror from a culturally similar area will treat you better than one from far away, but maybe not.

The Nazis were certainly much worse than many conquerors from far away.

> At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions more homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed.

Of course the Nazis did not do all of this: but they did do most of it.

@FaheemMitha I would say the Nazis were similar to if the Islamic State had conquered an entire continent.

They exterminated peoples, displayed extreme cruelty, and deliberately tried to destroy the cultural monuments of several civilisations.

Hitler commanded the destruction of Paris when the Germans were forced to retreat from the city.

He ordered his generals to bomb all of the important cultural monuments in the city.

And the Nazis issued similar commands in many cities around Europe. Even in "brother country" Austria, which had officially become part of Germany even before the War: they ordered their army to bomb the great mediaeval Cathedral of Vienna when forced to retreat.

Luckily, enough officers disobeyed Nazi orders. The German army had not been Nazified completely yet.

CowperKettle

13:07

This phrase, "application of identification means", seems very awkward, but this is the official translation located on the official website, and the translator whose translation I'm editing uses this phrase.

I would use "application of identification marking" - this seems more natural than "means".

Okay, let it stay as "means".

It makes me wonder how in Germany a regime arose that was more horrible than Stalin's USSR.

Stalin deported whole peoples, but he did not exterminate them, the goal was a mere deportation.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle I would say, the procedure for the application of the means of identification of...

"Means of identification" sounds like a natural term.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus I would also switch the position. Thank you!

Cerberus

I would also use Monitoring the Flow instead of Monitoring of Flow.

CowperKettle

When Hitler's troops first moved into the Cossack regions, people were meeting them with bread and salt, a display of good will. Nobody expected that Germans would just exterminate people right and left. People thought that they were freeing them from Stalin's regime.

Were they in for a surprize. He did not even disband the collective farms.

Robusto

@CowperKettle No, but he did let them starve to death.

CowperKettle

13:18

Yes, he was a bastard. They were supplied with means of living, but in a traditional Russian, way, that is, haphazardly and badly organized.

Similarly many people in Gulag died due to bad management.

As the time progressed, the rate of deaths decreased.

And by end of Stalin's rule they were even paid money for work.

So it was not like the system built by Hitler, aimed at wiping out.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle I believe, in some regions in Eastern Europe, the Germans did actually treat people better than did Stalin.

CowperKettle

It was a system of "we'll kill all the bad people and then build a paradise for the working class", but it turned out very profitable to find "bad people" everyhwere and to put them into camps for hard work.

Robusto

I remember a Soviet-era joke I once heard. A collective farm was visited by a Soviet official. One of the workers, to fool the official, took some hay and began to eat it. The official asked why he was eating hay.
"Because we have no food, comrade."
The official immediately gave him some food.
A week later a higher official came and the worker again ate hay in front of him.
The same dialogue followed, and the man got another meal.
The following week Stalin himself visited the collective. The worker, sure of himself this time, repeated his hay-eating act.

CowperKettle

)))

@Cerberus Maybe only Bulgaria, which was, strangely, an ally, despite being Slavic

Cerberus

@CowperKettle It probably also depends on who you were back then.

But in Estonia, many people felt the Nazi period was better than the Soviet periods before and after.

CowperKettle

13:25

Yes, because the USSR had invaded it in 1939-40 and deported about 50 thousand of people to Siberia, if I remember correctly, just before Hitler's invasion.

@Cerberus My grandfather took part in the Soviet occupation of the Baltic in 1939

A postal card from him. "Happy new 1940!"

From the newly-established Soviet military base at Ventspils, Latvia

In June 1940, the USSR used these bases to take over the countries and annex them.

Cerberus

Wow, a post card with your grandfather's picture on it?

CowperKettle

13:45

@Cerberus Yes, it's quite an artistic card. I never knew that such custom cards existed in 1940s

The oldest photo I have of my family is from the 1910s.

After that, a big empty period, and some photos from late 1920s.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Neither did I!

Even now, it would be hard to get such a card made, except by making it oneself (which is admittedly easier now, electronically).

CowperKettle

15:54

What is the meaning of the word register in "direct register walk" (in felines)?

I found this sense in Wiktionary:

> (transitive, especially printing) To make or adjust so as to be properly or precisely aligned.

But I haven't come across this usage.

CowperKettle

16:56

> In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.” nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html

> Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

> .. Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized.

What? Just because he has made racist remarks, he cannot be toasted? Weird. He was still the discoverer of the DNA

M.A.R.

19:05

@CowperKettle "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours" is a big citation needed

@CowperKettle Well, there you go. We're headed in the direction of moral censorship.

Well, the west is. It's like they're going backwards so we can catch up

@FaheemMitha CEFR fluency levels. fluentin3months.com/cefr-levels/….

Faheem Mitha

19:25

@M.A.R. I see. Thank you. I don't know what CEFR is either, but I'll look at the site.

Robusto

20:04

Xanne

21:43

m.imgur.com/gallery/iG5fcSn

Here is a cat diect registering.

Stealthy little beasts @CowperKettle

Didn’t know my cat did that.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle American PC people are crazy.

@M.A.R. Some Americans are. Europe is trying to resist.

RegDwigнt

23:13

0

Q: Is there a word for depth-based like spatial is for space?

I am trying to describe types of trends that we see in my research. Space --> spatial Time --> temporal Depth --> ??? I want to use "deptual" but unfortunately that is not a word... Thank you to this post for getting close to the question I'm trying to ask: Is there a word for event-based like sp...

single-word-requests

Wait, depth is not spatial?

My world has changed.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…