English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

00:44

Who pronounces foreign words like PASTA right? 🇺🇸 or 🇬🇧?

►

@tchrist ^

Interesting

tchrist

I was talking to @Mitch about that.

Robusto

It's a more nuanced interpretation than we supposed.

But Brits definitely do nativize foreign words more than we do.

> Q) What's the difference between a Republican and a Ukrainian ?
A) A Ukrainian defends his capital.

alphabet

@Robusto His point about "Harry Potter" at 9:10 is about the father-bother merger, right?

Robusto

@alphabet Not quite. It's more like the Brits use a different phoneme, one that's more like the voll vowel in German.

alphabet

01:00

@Robusto Huh. Also: is it a coincidence that the "five tense vowels" AmE uses for foreign words (see 11:20) are also how we pronounce long vowels in Latin? Maybe it's just that Spanish and Latin match, but I wonder if it's partly a tendency to "Latinize" loanwords.

Robusto

@alphabet In a way, sure.

alphabet

@Robusto Which phoneme is it? Now I want to look this up because it bothers me.

Robusto

Translate "Mein Gepäck is voll" from Deutsch to English in Google and you get a fair inkling of the sound. For my money she shades too far toward fall, but if you pull that back a bit it's a good approximation.

@alphabet And click the speaker button so she speaks it.

tchrist

It's a myth. The Scots use [o].

I actually talked to Wells about this dumb [əʊ] idea. Turns out he's not a fan, either.

Don't look or listen to dictionaries. Useless. Use the Sound Comparisons site.

Robusto

01:17

Should have been Mein Gepäck ist voll ... d'oh!

tchrist

sore

cold

holy

daughter

lamb

eight

warm

WHITE

nekkid

better, where ain't nobody got no [d].

Robusto

@tchrist I don't like that you can't click on words individually. (Maybe you can?)

tchrist

You can.

My links are to individual words. You have to mouse over to get the sound clips pronounced.

To get a different word, go to the right hand column.

Mouse over the IPA to hear it pronounced.

Robusto

@tchrist Doesn't work for me.

tchrist

Are you using a computer?

Meaning, not a handy.

Robusto

01:31

Of course.

tchrist

Weird.

Robusto

I don't do chat on a phone.

Maybe that feature only works on iOS?

tchrist

I dunno, I'm running darwin under chrome on a macbook pro.

I could see if it still works in Safari and Firefox.

Robusto

I just tried Firefox. No luck.

Edge doesn't do anything either.

jlliagre

Works fine with both Firefox and Chrome here. Fascinating.

Robusto

01:36

@jlliagre What OS?

jlliagre

Windows 10

Robusto

Same here.

Wait, it just worked on the Engl & Wales row. But not the other ones.

Very weird.

jlliagre

Just wait for a while for the sounds to be loaded.

Slow Internet?

Robusto

No, I have fast Internet.

I pay for Gigabit speed.

Looks like it's working now, though.

jlliagre

No surprise I had no idea what people was saying to me when I visited Liverpool :-)

Robusto

01:40

If the IPA is bolded it works now. If not, not.

jlliagre

Bolded or Blued?

Robusto

Both?

jlliagre

There is no sound for the historical pronunciations.

Robusto

That may have been my problem to start with.

CowperKettle

@alphabet Yes, it's scary

> Stalin learns to photoshop

> the eldest son of the Roman Emperor Claudius with his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla

Died of air passage obstruction by food.

The same way a 38 yo woman died in the Urals just days ago, at a pancake contest.

Once I read about the technique where you can open an air passage by making a tiny cut in the person's neck.

Unfortunately, the position of the cut should be extremely precise, or you may make it worse.

And the cut should not be deep.

It's called cricothyrotomy

alphabet

02:08

New word of the day: astericize. To banish a nonstandard usage from the realm of correctness by putting an asterisk next to it in a linguistics paper.

2

CowperKettle

There's an early 20th century story in which a doctor met by chance on a street by a poor workman saves the workman's son by performing makeshift cricothyrotomy on him. A Russian story. I read it once in childhood, and can still recall some of it.

tchrist

@alphabet Unicode code point U+2042 is named "ASTERISM", and should display as ⁂ for you.

Also what happens when you're seeing stars.

> < Greek ἀστερισμός a marking with stars, a constellation

alphabet

@tchrist Not to be confused with the Big Dipper: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(astronomy)

CowperKettle

tchrist

> 1. A group or cluster of stars; a constellation.
†2. loosely, A star, or anything shaped like one.
3. A group of three asterisks placed thus (⁂) to direct attention to a particular passage. Rarely, a single asterisk (*) so used.
4. Mineralogy. (Also in modern Latin form asterismus.) An appearance of light in the shape of a six-rayed star seen in some crystals, as in star sapphire.
..

@alphabet The Valacirca!

CowperKettle

02:16

Oh, and Bulgakov has a story about cricothyrotomy, titled "steel throat" ru.wikisource.org/wiki/…

alphabet

So: apparently sources disagree on the relationship between "oat" and "oats." Is the latter the plural of the former, with the plural being preferred in some circumstances? Or is "oats" a separate word from "oat," one that is always plural?

tchrist

Or Πλειάδες, which I never know where to put the diacritics for in English. French has Pléiades but no diæ̈resis.

@alphabet It's one of those that's only singular when used attributively to modify another noun.

> In 1556 Ronsard used French Pléiade (in la septiesme Pleïade ‘the seventh Pleiad’) of his fellow poet Belleau, apparently comparing himself, Belleau, and five other poets of his brigade (compare brigade n.) to the constellation (i.e. sense 1), and at the same time alluding to the Greek name for a group of famous poets (compare e.g. Sainte-Beuve's discussion of this passage ( Tableau historique et critique de la poésie et du théatre français au XVIe siècle (1843) 65), which makes the comparison with the Alexandrians explicit).

alphabet

MW says the former. Cambridge and OxfordLD say "oat" as a noun does not exist (???).

tchrist

Oats are a cereal, but you can have a mainly oat-based breakfast treat.

alphabet

I'd always assumed "an oat" was a single grain of oats or some other unit thereof.

tchrist

02:24

> Pronunciation: Brit. Hear pronunciation/əʊt/, U.S. Hear pronunciation/oʊt/
Forms: ... (Show More)
Frequency (in current use): Show frequency band information
Origin: A word inherited from Germanic.
Etymology: Cognate with West Frisian oat , Dutch oot , Dutch regional (West Flanders) ate , ote , (Zeeland) ōōt , ōōte , all in sense ‘wild oat’ (compare sense 3); further etymology uncertain: perhaps < the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek οἰδεῖν to swell (see atter n.). In most Germanic languages the word for oat is derived from the base of haver n.2

CowperKettle

> kibbled oats

tchrist

Using the singular for the mass noun is obsolete.

It is very very rare to use it in the singular but does exist.

> 1879 Cassell's Techn. Educator i. 17 The oat is the hardiest of all cereal plants.
1946 A. Nelson Princ. Agric. Bot. i. vii. 174 In some peculiar varieties of oat the fruit escapes naturally from the leaves.
1974 A. J. Huxley Plant & Planet (1978) xxvii. 338 The resultant hybrid was irradiated and a stable, resistant oat was selected.

See the text wall.

It is used attributively in the singular to create compound nouns:

> Compounds
C1.
a.
(a) General attributive.
oat bran n.
1858 B. Taylor Northern Trav. xxxii. 333 The bread made apparently of saw-dust, with a slight mixture of oat-bran.
1900 Daily News 26 Apr. 5/6 Porridge made from oat-bran husks.
1990 Health Shopper Jan. 14/2 Oat bran may be helpful in lowering levels of cholesterol—one of the biggest causes of coronary problems.
(Hide quotations)

oat chaff n.
a1500 Walter of Henley's Husbandry (Sloane) (1890) 52 (MED) Let your provynder be medled wt whete chafe or ote chaffe but not with barle chafe, for þt hurtithe þem in þe mowthe.

Of which there are a great many.

@alphabet There's just no trusting lesser dictionaries. :)

The oaves who know no oat.

alphabet

@tchrist The question is: can you use the singular in contrastive focus reduplication? Eg "These are books, but those are book books. These are oats, but those are oat oats."

tchrist

I believe you've just done so.

Adjectives: The normal adjective is oaten. The boring version is oat-like. The happy-fun bopper-teeny version is oaty. I would avoid oatish if I were you.

alphabet

Of course there's also oation, the process of making things out of oat.

CowperKettle

02:37

> Germany's largest family law reform in decades could mean that non-romantic relationships — like friends or flatmates — would be granted the same legal rights as married couples.

Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse.
Before they sit down under their own vine
And live for use. Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,–and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark

alphabet

New law: everybody is now married to everybody else simultaneously. To be married to one person, you just divorce the rest of the population. All problems solved!

CowperKettle

Google Books AI: talk to books using this experimental AI books.google.com/talktobooks

A cat was walking in the nature, and brougth on its mane a tick with encephalitis.

A year later, 11 yo Evelina has regained her speech.

72.ru/text/health/2023/02/28/72065681

CowperKettle

04:14

Viktor Bautin, 34 yo, an orphan, was mobilized, then got a shell splinter into his head. Now cannot speak, but is conscious. He is homeless.

He only has a twin brother whose apartment was taken away for debts.

And to top it all, officially he was not wounded, until the local media raised hue and cry.

e1.ru/text/world/2023/03/02/72095648

Horrible on so many levels.

CowperKettle

08:08

> Running therapy and antidepressant medication had similar effects on mental health (remission and response rates). Running therapy outperformed antidepressant medication on physical health variables. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032723002239

M.A.R.

Running is better for your waist than antidepressants? Who knew

CowperKettle

Well, being scientists, they had to measure available parameters.

I'd wished to also assess inflammatory markers, and maybe some other, but that would be expensive.

Літо

►

Ukrainian synthpop.

Is there good Iranian synthpop?

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle asssessing inflammatory markers in settings other than where it would make sense would lead to useless results

@CowperKettle I wouldn't know

CowperKettle

There are studies linking inflammation to depression etc.

It would be curious to assess why exactly patients felt better.

Whaf if some markers budged more in one group vs the other group.

M.A.R.

You could try to see if it potentiates the effects of, say, anti-rheumatoid drugs. Then it would slightly make sense, but you should still be very catious on what to conclude

@CowperKettle of course, and a thousand other ailments. But which is the cause and which is the effect?

And since it's immunology and we've barely scratched the surface, one would expect to see a lot of shifts in perspective regarding even common inflammatory markers.

TNFα is good. No wait it's bad. No it's sometimes good and sometimes bad. No wait, there's this unexpected thing it does which is bad.

@CowperKettle it could be a good or bad thing.

Just because it's an inflammatory marker doesn't mean it's bad if it's raised.

Some proinflammatory cytokines also activate signaling pathways that suppress their own effect, and vice versa. Some cause a negative feedback mechanism on tissue level that ends up achieving the opposite thing.

It's a huge entangled mess. Once we unravel it we might actually finally be able to cure cancer.

I.e. almost every cancer type.

I was writing something on cancer immunotherapy. Fascinating stuff. Why cancer vaccines don't work.

CowperKettle

08:22

Ah!

Cool.

M.A.R.

Why, despite a functioning immune system, tumors grow in the body

CowperKettle

Because they mask themselves

M.A.R.

Not only that, they actively recruit immune cells and turns them towards their side

Your killer cell can't even infiltrate the tumor tissue without being killed or turned off

Eventually, the traitorous immune cells help the cancer tissue grow

And of course this all happens in the first place because the immune system naturally selected for cancer cells that survive

CowperKettle

That's sad!

M.A.R.

Word of the day: Cross-talk

Tumor and immune cells cross-talk. The tumor cells have activated STAT3. They secrete anti-inflammatory cytokines. Those cytokines activate STAT3 pathways in immune cells. The result is immune suppression, angiogenesis, and tumor growth

Xanne

09:06

Wordle 621 3/6

🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

CowperKettle

10:16

@M.A.R. This is cool. Tumor cells evolve into molbiol hackers.

A virtual friend of mine, a psychologist, is dying of cancer. She is my age.

She is in Czechia now, I believe. A friend told me of her illness.

I knew her back from the LiveJournal times, from the 2000s

CowperKettle

14:32

Mediazona has analysed statistics on "excess weddings" in Russia and now thinks that the number of mobilized could have been as high as 527 thousand men. I don't know.

People could have gone into wedlock just in case they are suddenly mobilized, not because they actually were. And some may have done that just before fleeing abroad.

It's too complicated.

I'd only trust some well-known statisticians on that, not a media.

Our local legend, who ran across the city every day, mostly barefoot and in shorts. In winter he wore running boots though, but nothing except shorts.

Locals nicknamed him Tarzan.

He died of stroke in the fall of 2019.

He had three apartments in the city, and rented them out.

He was lonely, and in his sole interview said that he "cries every night".

He worked as a policeman in the north, and this allowed him to go into retirement early.

Robusto

#Worldle #405 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

CowperKettle

Now another legend has appeared. A man who's walking around in the city wearing early 19th century clothes.

Locals christened him Alexander Pushkin.

In our district, there was an old lady who wore extravagant dresses and her hair in an exotic updo style, as if going to attend a ball.

I haven't seen her for a long time.

She had worked as a psychiatrist, but always loved to model clothes.

Robusto

14:53

🌎 Mar 2, 2023 🌍
🔥 48 | Avg. Guesses: 4.88
🟨🟥🟧🟥🟧🟧🟥🟥
🟩 = 9

globle-game.com
#globle

Ouch!

Wordle 621 3/6

🟩⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Quordle 402
8️⃣🟥
7️⃣9️⃣
quordle.com

Ouch again.

jlliagre

Wordle 621 3/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Daily Quordle 402
6️⃣7️⃣
5️⃣8️⃣
quordle.com

jlliagre

15:16

Daily Octordle #402
7️⃣8️⃣
2️⃣🕛
9️⃣6️⃣
🔟🕚
Score: 65

Robusto

I'm groggy this morning. Dopey, even. Kinda out of it.

CowperKettle

I'm often thus. Coupled with a stiff feeling in the calf muscles sometimes.

Robusto

I stayed up late, that's why. I normally practice bed discipline, going to sleep the same time every night. But I was up playing a game with my son, so ...

Family time takes precedence.

jlliagre

🌎 Mar 2, 2023 🌍
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 6.56
🟨🟥🟩 = 3

globle-game.com
#globle
Lucky!

Robusto

@jlliagre They tricked me, saying the island group was farther away than the French-named one. When my head clears I'll check that on Google maps, but I think they're wrong.

CowperKettle

15:30

> I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

Robusto

Daily Octordle #402
🔟6️⃣
9️⃣🕛
8️⃣🕚
5️⃣2️⃣
Score: 63

CowperKettle

In the Omsk region, a 14 yo schoolgirl persuaded her 17 yo boyfriend to kill her mom, dad, and a 10 yo disabled sister, because they prevented them from dating. Today they got 6 years of jail each. ngs55.ru/text/criminal/2023/03/02/72101537

Robusto

@CowperKettle Good thing it wasn't a political crime, or they'd have been put away for much longer.

CowperKettle

She only took pity of her 6 yo brother. He survived.

Robusto

I don't see how they only got six years.

CowperKettle

15:38

Because they are young.

parz

Hej!

CowperKettle

He used a cattle butchering knife.

@parz Good evening!

Robusto

What did the 10-ear-old have to do with their dating?

parz

The Netherlands and Cyprus have released their Eurovision songs.

CowperKettle

@Robusto She was disabled, and the Juliet did not want to take care of her.

Robusto

15:40

Keerist.

CowperKettle

I pity the policemen. One must go mad after several such cases.

Robusto

@CowperKettle But she could take care of the 6-year-old?

CowperKettle

Now I can see why the former policeman was running across Yekaterinburg wearing nothing but shorts.

@Robusto Yes, he wasn't disabled, he could walk by himself.

parz

Who’s (bad attempt at romanization) Aleksei Shchimanskiy?

He’s from the Russian Stack,

so I would assume you may know him?

Mitch

@CowperKettle That's now a cliche scene in every medical drama.

Here's a spoof of it:

The Heat Choking Scene

►

Usually they call it a tracheotomy (whether that's perfectly accurate or not I don't know)

Which I often confuse with the non-word tracheostomy (on analogy with colostomy) which would mean 'removal of the trachea)

Robusto

15:54

@Mitch I don't understand why there are -ostomy and -ectomy, which mean the same thing.

Plus I'm too lazy to look it up.

Mitch

@M.A.R. This is also used (in English) for a style of Chinese comedy...

Comics reinventing China’s Crosstalk tradition

►

Xiangsheng

Xiangsheng (traditional Chinese: 相聲; simplified Chinese: 相声; pinyin: Xiàngsheng; lit. 'face and voice'), also known as crosstalk or comic dialogue, is a traditional performing art in Chinese comedy, and one of the most popular elements in Chinese culture. It is typically performed as a dialogue between two performers, or rarely as a monologue by a solo performer (similar to most forms of stand-up comedy in Western culture), or even less frequently, as a group act by multiple performers. The Xiangsheng language, rich in puns and allusions, is delivered in a rapid, bantering style, typically in the...

@Robusto Here you go: The difference between tomy, stomy, and ectomy

I've read it and now I will promptly forget it and I predict within the next ear I will mistake them again.

Robusto

@Mitch Thank you.

I will no doubt forget that anon as well.

Mitch

@Robusto Karibu!

Robusto

Did you mean caribou?

Or are you speaking Swahili again?

Mitch

@alphabet I'm not sure what his point is (or rather he has a lot of points and I'm having a hard time juggling them) but...

I think what you're calling the 'father-bother' merger is what I would refer to as the cot- caught merger.

@tchrist So maybe all I'm thinking of is that Americans tend to use the /a/ in 'father' for foreignisms? I'm still having trouble coming up with many words in AmE with /a/.

Robusto

16:06

@Mitch Hmm, how long has it been there? Because I worked in Waltham for several years and don't recall it.

Mitch

Oh.

cot, not, knot, bob... hmm al these written with 'o'.

weird.

@Robusto It's kind of in a weird hidden place behind ... In A Pickle.

Which is also in a new place robably for you (they moved from Main St to Moody St.

tchrist

@Mitch No, FATHER has a back vowel not a front vowel.

Mitch

anyway, google mao Karibu... its entrance is set back from Circle St just a few feet from Moody.

parz

‘Lo again.

Robusto

@Mitch Hmm, I don't recall it, but I used to walk from the MBTA down Crescent Street to work and back every day.

tchrist

16:11

There is no /a/ phoneme in American English. We have only /ɑ/ as in FATHER and /æ/ as in TRAP and BATH.

Mitch

@tchrist In GenAmE it looks like the COT set has the same vowel as the PALM set en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set

tchrist

Ya know, that's not true eiither.

PALM patterns with THOUGHT for many of us hicktards from the stupid backwards cold northern midwest nobody would dare admit exists.

parz

@tchrist language?

CowperKettle

@parz I don't recall talking to him. I think he likes to lurk and read, or maybe just forgot to exclude this room from his Favorites.

Mitch

@Robusto Probably newer then, past 5 years maybe?

tchrist

16:14

@parz I'm self-deprecating. I can call myself a dumbass if I want to.

Robusto

@Mitch Maybe. But I was most likely looking at the ducks in the Charles.

parz

@tchrist but some of us don’t enjoy that.

Robusto

@tchrist flagged

tchrist

It comes from being ignored by the saltwater peoples.

It breeds resentment.

parz

Unrelated question: have you seen Dall E 2 yet?

Mitch

16:16

@Robusto also swans

@parz Do the fat lazy people rise up against their cute robot overlords?

Robusto

@Mitch And now that I look at a map, I see that I used to walk down the Charles a ways before hooking up with Crescent. So there's that.

parz

No. The image generator.

tchrist

@Mitch That's dall not dahl, doll.

Mitch

@Robusto That's a nice walk. Also Moody st is a nice urban walk. Yards from each other.

in the middle of the suburbs

parz

Like (me, frantically searchring IPA because I don’t know it by heart: WRYYYYYYYY)

Mitch

16:19

@parz I can't keep track of all the versions... did dalle-2 come out before or after Stable Diffusion?

tchrist

@parz ipa.typeit.org/full

Mitch

@tchrist I've never been able to tell apart all the 'a's

parz

@tchrist Dear god, what is this?

@Mitch I have no idea.

tchrist

@Mitch Just watch your tongue!

Mitch

@parz So then just whatever caption->picture creator? Yeah they're fun to mess around with.

@tchrist I usually just bite it.

Also I totally get it with deaf people when the speech pathologist is telling them to do their tongue 'like so' and it's always 'I'm doing it! I'm doing it' and it never sounds right.

tchrist

16:21

Front means tongue in front near the lips, back means tongue in back away from the lips, high means tongue up high near the roof, low means tongue down low far from the roof.

parz

@Mitch \dˈɑːl\

Mitch

I find consonants easier to manage

tchrist

Backslashes??

Mitch

@parz mmm dal

tchrist

@Mitch Then you never got the hang of Chinese or Spanish. :)

parz

16:23

\ dˈɑːlˈiːtˈuː\

Yeah, backslashes.

Mitch

Chinese has a lot of subtle sound changes that they just don't tell you in class.

parz

I’m so used to the Merriam-Webster pronunciation guide

that I use them subliminally

tchrist

Virtually ever Spanish consonant is different from every English consonant for which the same Latin letter is used, and you'll never figure this out by reading.

parz

Like v is b and b is a weird meld of v and b.

tchrist

So I doubt that you do well on consonants. You just think you do. :)

Mitch

16:24

@tchrist you could say that about every language

parz

Hi @Vikas

Mitch

@tchrist Thanks!

Vikas

Hi @parz

Mitch

@parz What time zone are you in?

parz

I don’t care.

Mitch

16:25

Nice

Antarctica it is then

parz

I just want more stars. They make me happi patent pending

Mitch

@parz Oh, then move out to the country. Much better view.

Vikas

Don't we have infinite stars in the universe?

parz

No. The inter-web points.

Mitch

@Vikas I think the universe itself is not known to be infinite and highly suspected to be finite.

Vikas

16:28

At my grandparents home I see far more stars.

Mitch

But there sure are a lot

Vikas

In New Delhi I would notice them very less.

tchrist

@parz Kinda sorta yes and no. The b/v spelling never matters; that just encodes etymology not pronunciation. Pronunciation is conditioned by the surrounding phonological context, whereby there is a voiced bilabial stop allophone [b] corresponding to the P in English speed in a few places but a voiced bilabial approximant allophone [β̞] in most places, which is a sound that English does not have. Véase esto, por favor.

parz

Yo hablo solo un poco de español.

tchrist

Mejor que nada.

O mejor que nades con traje, digo. :)

Mitch

16:31

When you look at the sky, the stars you see are pretty much really nearby. Anything cloudy, like the Milky Way (which is our galaxy and has a few billion stars) and other further galaxies are collections of stars so far away that they're impossible to distinguish by eye.

parz

Pero yo sé que hablo “black monkey”, porque un persona habla eso a me en un videojuego.

Personas son estupidas.

Mitch

With telescopes, I'm pretty sure you can distinguish a lot more in the Milky way (but not all) but in galaxies further away you can't distinguish them.

tchrist

Oiga señor, ¿por qué (Usted) no nada nada?

Porque no traje traje.

Mitch

But there are not an infinite number of them

a lot, but just not infinite.

parz

“traje traje”

Mitch

16:32

Billions? Not sure... ask google?

parz

”nada nada”

tchrist

Yeah, vicious.

Same word for noun and verb.

Vikas

@Mitch So they end somewhere? What's beyond that point?

parz

OH

i thought u mistyped

tchrist

Excuse me sir, why aren't you swimming at all? Because I didn't bring a swimming suit.

parz

16:33

“don’t aren’t” Now that’s vicious.

tchrist

I changed my mind progressively.

Mitch

@Vikas There's two 'endpoint'. One is the visible universe, which is the part of the universe from which light has had enough time to reach us since the universe began (as far as science has figured out so far)

tchrist

nada = 3s present verb < nadar; nada meaning nothing.

traje = 1s preterite verb; traje meaning suit

parz

Yeah, I know.

It’s irregular verbs that horrify me.

The stress…

Mitch

the age of the universe is ~14 billion years, so we can only see as far as ~14 billion light-years.

tchrist

16:35

You mean the preterites that aren't stressed on the last syllable in the singulars?

Mitch

2) there are probably stars beyond that which we just can't see because they are too far away and there hasn't been enough time for light to reach us yet.

parz

No, like… let me remember…

tchrist

There are like hundreds more of those in Spanish than in Portuguese. Don't know why.

parz

vistó and visto

CowperKettle

Going cold turkey on internet pornography found to be harmful, increasing depression in survery participants medicalxpress.com/news/…

tchrist

16:37

That's 3s pret vistó vs 1s pres visto, right?

yo hablo hoy, él habló ayer

Stress is phonemic, yes.

Robusto

@Mitch I only took Moody if there was a lot of snow or I was in a hurry.

CowperKettle

One-electron universe

The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman: I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" A similar "zigzag world line description of pair annihilation...

> I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!"

Mitch

Observable universe

The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the Solar System and Earth since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. There may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, although that number was reduced in 2021 to only several hundred billion based on data from New Horizons. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe...

> The size of the whole universe is unknown, and it might be infinite in extent. Some parts of the universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang to have had enough time to reach Earth or space-based instruments, and therefore lie outside the observable universe

I feel like it -can't- be infinite otherwise... weird things would happen?

Robusto

@Mitch You mean weird things aren't happening now?

Mitch

Also, I think that would be too much for God to worry about.

@Robusto weirder?

Robusto

16:45

The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, But Queerer Than We Can Suppose (No puerile jokes, please.)

Mitch

@Vikas google for 'how many stars in our galaxy' and then 'how many galaxies' and how many stars in the universe. They'll give a number, so it makes me think it's gonna be finite.

M.A.R.

17:24

@Mitch don't modern astrophysical models assume it's finite but without an edge?

Mitch

@M.A.R. I would be able to answer that confidently with a yes if I actually knew anything..

I feel like maybe I don't know?

maybe?

Do you have any idea of how it connects on the other side? Like is it a torus or the surface of 4-dimensional sphere or what?

alphabet

18:13

Vowel change of the day: the rod-ride merger (some southern AmE, some AAVE)

Mitch

@alphabet I'm amazed that there are any vowels that haven't merged or split

-at the same time-

You know what's really annoying? Tacocat

I just heard that yesterday for the first time in my life and it's really annoying that people think that could possibly be a thing.

It's sort of like 'fetch'.

Or rather it should be like 'fetch', it should not be a thing.

Also, kind of gamey.

user2236

Also, a punk band...

user2236

18:35

TIL this was #9 in 1975?

sugarloaf - don't call us, we'll call you

►

That would've made it pop music...

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