Famous Russian physicist made headlines when he arrived at the Presidential Awards ceremony in the Kremlin wearing a hazmat suit. He had been invited there in recognition of his recent discovery that despite the accelerating expansion of the Universe, the Hague is getting closer, for some mysterious reason.
@tchrist I usually say [ˈfɛb.jəɹ̈.i], with just three syllables
I think maybe I alternate between that and [ˈfɛb.ju.ɛəɹ̈.i]
Not sure about that [ɛə], the Mary/marry vowel confuses me
Also: is it just me, or is the /b/ there not actually a plosive but actually some sort of approximant or fricative? My lips don't actually close all the way. Hrm...
> When Mao unleashed his Cultural Revolution in 1966, he needed no fewer than nine categories to snag his millions of enemies: ex-landlords, “rich” peasants (three pigs were enough), counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist roaders and the “Stinking Ninth”: intellectuals.
Consider this example:
Commercialese is an instrument of art,
designed to enrich and invigorate our
language—surely you will all agree
with this—, and we should encourage newcomers to learn it. However, a side-effect is the
spread of commercialese to other
domains. This we must obje...
@alphabet No, it's just the normal voiced bilabial stop [b], not the corresponding fricative or approximant in that series, as it would be in Spanish cava or faba. Perhaps you have loose lips.
@alphabet Barely; the Old World's ailurids and the New World's procyonids are reasonably close cousin clades under the musteloids. But you knew that already.
> The longe nightes, whan every creature Shulde have hir rest in somwhat as by kynde, Or elles ne may hir lif nat longe endure, Hit falleth most into my woful mynde How I so fer have broght myself behynde That, sauf the deeth, ther may nothyng me lisse, So desespaired I am from alle blisse.
This same thoght me lasteth til the morwe And from the morwe forth til hit be eve; Ther nedeth me no care for to borwe, For bothe I have good leyser and good leve; Ther is no wyght that wol me wo bereve To wepe ynogh and wailen al my fille;
He says the printout used to hang above his working desk in the battallion's repair shop in Moscow
A pro-Russian fighter/blogger poking fun at the lack of modern tanks in the Russian army. "Russia's latest T14 Armata tank with a camouflage cover making it look like an old Soviet T-55"
> Ukrspecsystems, a company in Kyiv that makes fixed-wing reconnaissance drones, said in a statement that supply chain issues with China had led it to look beyond the country.
“Today, we virtually do not use any Chinese components because we see and feel how China deliberately delays the delivery of any goods to Ukraine,” it said.
OK, I think I got it, kinda, in a nutshell… 1. Descriptive grammar is CamGEL, basically, and allows for dialects and such. 2. Prescriptive grammar is about rules and more rules, for children or non-natives who need them. 3. Generative grammar is hung up on the NP VP (NP) analysis, and they're upset about Wh-movement, like the Grinch about Whoville before his heart grew.
The syntax below is grammatical in colloquial American English and I'm wondering how the sentence is analyzed grammatically.
What's going on at work these days that you're always on the phone?
@Araucaria-Him Voted to reopen for purely selfish reasons. I'm not sure what sort of "research" you'd be supposed to do here--it's hard to Google grammatical constructions.
What roles (Subject, Head etc) do the words can, do and is each play in this sentence in terms of its syntactic grammar, either individually or as a group?
Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back.
If we use to before the verb smile, as in:
Death smiles at us all, but all a m...
> “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses.
In 1998 I read this story by Asimov, and could not understand the title. I could only understand "Thou", but I could not understand "art", so I approached my English teacher at the University after a lesson, and asked. She also could not guess what "art" meant there.
Before the next lesson, she said to me that she had looked up, and it was the second-person form of "are", it had turned out.
@Vikas I've been reading a Reddit sub, a Russian-language sub populated clearly by schoolkids. One of them wrote a post like "What's up with the AI? A year ago nobody cared about it, and suddenly it's everywhere".
There are schoolkids who had Wikipedia and torrents and YouTube their whole lives, they could barely imagine a world without this.
But AI is something new for them.
But there will be soon kids for whom AI "has always been around"
At school, our math teacher used to say: "Don't you get used to your pocket kurkulators!" (she mockingly garbled the world). "They won't always be near you! You have to train yourself to do mental calculations!"
We've been having some discussion on this channel about how to deal with overzealous close-voters.
@DannyuNDos I'll let someone who knows more about phonetics answer this, but I pronounce fifth as just [fɪθ], omitting the second /f/ entirely. I'm not sure how common that is.
@HippoSawrUs Generative grammar is this approach that Noam Chomsky started. Prof. Lawler is a fan. Pullum has accused Chomsky of starting a personality cult; I secretly suspect that CGEL is his attempt to start his own, competing cult. Both are descriptive grammar, since neither is inventing rules that you should follow (e.g. "don't split infinitives").
@HippoSawrUs CGEL's approach to dialects is...imperfect. Mostly they just ignore the existence of nonstandard dialects; they occasionally mention AmE but sometimes even ignore AmE/BrE differences.
@alphabet "Opinion-based" strikes again. IMO, it's vastly overused. I suppose you'll be hearing the full rant eventually since I plan to post it to meta at some point
> Titanic from her high throne in the north, That City's sombre Patroness and Queen, In bronze sublimity she gazes forth Over her Capital of teen and threne, Over the river with its isles and bridges, The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges, Confronting them with a coeval mien.
> The Mekan traditionally participate in a unique festival known as Ka'el, during which the Mekan women sexualize the process of Mekan men gaining weight, and assist and encourage them in becoming as fat as possible. Mekan women will often select partners during this festival, typically from among the men they assisted in becoming larger.
@Mitch No, leaves are falling, but many are still there :)
@tchrist Well, partially there. These things have been true for a while:
> Young women and men shown on TV as world famous, you’ve never heard of. New idioms leave you baffled. You are Rip Van Winkle without having fallen asleep.
@CowperKettle OK that sounds like what I would expect from what I hear about east of the Urals (= Siberia = frigid to me). Whenever you show pictures of the weather there it seems almost just like here (Boston area) which is supposedly more maritime than continental.
Here it's like the leaves don't even know that winter's coming, all still green, but raggedy around the edges).
and 70s (= 20-25C) this week
but next week it'll be jacket and sweater weather.
but no -real- snow until January. maybe a weird one-off snow in November.
@Robusto It's easy nowadays to be connected to one source of stuff and not hear the others.
Then there are all those "new idioms" that don't so much baffle you as irritate and exasperate you.
> I hear you Let's parking lot this See if the juice is worth the squeeze Let's circle back Synergy Demystify Pivot Out of the box We're a family Learnings Ecosystem Let me pick your brain In email signatures, "Best" Quick question Take it offline Do the needful Set the expectations Co-create Low-hanging fruit Doesn't pass the smell test "Can we do ... ?" when everyone knows you mean "you do this" Ping me Land the plane Let's unpack that The art of the possible If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask
@alphabet Just like I thought, it's an allusion to hand grenades. Do you not find your conversations utterly dull when you don't pepper them with allusions to tools of war?
Does anyone have a definitive origin for the phrase/idiom "Put/stick a pin in it/that" used to mean "let's delay, come back to something later"?
I searched the site, but didn't see this asked or answered.
Possible origins I've found or considered:
Urban Dictionary (sorry) offers a WWII origin o...
Even in China, English instruction is compulsory in public schools. Rates of fluency are low, though; presumably they don't actually aim to make people L2 speakers.
@alphabet they're all meaningless. I can't ascribe any difference to any of those. Best, warmest, wishes, whatevers you just choose something to say this is the end.
@alphabet Not strictly mandatory in France but 96% of primary students and 99% of secondary ones study English at school, so I would say it's de facto mandatory.
There was only one kid I remember who left Spanish class with some Spanish competency, but that's because he was a Spanish native speaker that for some reason was allowed to take a Spanish as a second language class
I don't know if he snuck in or why nobody stopped him
1. Pre-highschool instruction. 2. High school instruction. 3. College instruction. 4. College major. 5. College major a year overseas in an immersive program in that language.
That's in increasing order of the normal retention period for all of those levels of schooling. Many factors can affect it, but really only the last one gives you much that lasts at all. Which tells you that you still have to live the language to learn it, and the degree may not be as important for that.
I can't remember where I read that now, but I really did.
The best I can do with a foreign language is that I can struggle my way through French webcomics with what I learned in high school plus google translate
Chinese kids who come here only for grad school never get rid of their mistakes and accent. They're a little too old by then.
You'd learn far more French than you learned in high school simply by wandering the French countryside for a month, talking to people.
I don't know why but here even people who do a pretty good job learning Spanish or French in high school or even college can manage to do so without ever getting their mouths to "do the right thing". They forever sound like gringos, and it's like nail files scratching chalkboards to natives.
I think because written tests only test writing.
You're never actually taught to speak or listen, or not very well.
And you're never tested on whether you can speak without sounding too gringo.
Consider this example:
Commercialese is an instrument of art,
designed to enrich and invigorate our
language—surely you will all agree
with this—, and we should encourage newcomers to learn it. However, a side-effect is the
spread of commercialese to other
domains. This we must obje...
The syntax below is grammatical in colloquial American English and I'm wondering how the sentence is analyzed grammatically.
What's going on at work these days that you're always on the phone?
What roles (Subject, Head etc) do the words can, do and is each play in this sentence in terms of its syntactic grammar, either individually or as a group?
Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back.
If we use to before the verb smile, as in:
Death smiles at us all, but all a m...
Does anyone have a definitive origin for the phrase/idiom "Put/stick a pin in it/that" used to mean "let's delay, come back to something later"?
I searched the site, but didn't see this asked or answered.
Possible origins I've found or considered:
Urban Dictionary (sorry) offers a WWII origin o...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…