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6:01 PM
I've felt for a while that we need more questions on these types of English
 
@Mitch Is the vaccine approved by Microsoft?
 
@Laurel Indeed. It's worth noting that the vast majority of English speakers worldwide know it as a second language. Us natives are the weird ones.
 
@Vikas Microsoft is a vaccine denier
 
Of course, some of those questions have to go to ELL, but if they're ones that native speakers also would have trouble answering, ELU is likely the best place.
 
Because they're seen as "nonstandard" there's not many people interested in writing about them
 
6:07 PM
I would like to point out that ever since @Mitch's first AI-hype vaccine, many children with autism have been born
 
@alphabet I don't see too many on ELL. There are a few about AAVE (apparently learners love rap) but that's about it
 
Clearly measles is caused by UFOs
 
@Laurel Yes, lots of people get confused by AAVE lyrics in pop songs.
Also people think that English pronunciation should make logical sense. Compare the pronunciation of writing and riding in AmE.
(I have the thing where those words have the same consonants but very different vowels.)
 
I remember when I discovered about writing/riding/flapping
 
Aliens have traveled billions of kilometers to make graffiti on corn fields
 
6:11 PM
I could find the post, think it's on ELL
 
I think it was this one
That one was about the metal/medal thing
 
3
A: Pronounce double t in AmE

LaurelThis is known as flapping (or tapping), and it is done in some words that have double t, but not all of them. It's also done in some words that only have a single t (like water and beautiful), and between some words, (like "what a"). The rule, according to Wiktionary, is: American English h...

 
Then there's the thing where some of us have both t-flapping and t-glottalization, leaving us with relatively few actual /t/ sounds
 
@M.A.R. that reminds me...I need to start a rant about how extroversion is not actually a thing to be overcome but instead should be embraced as a minisuperpower. I mean in the right circumstances.
@alphabet soon we won't have any consonants at all
 
To help ESL we should go to the other extreme and pronounce it Botchle
 
6:14 PM
@Mitch The year is 2300. All consonants are glottal stops. All vowels are schwa.
 
Uh huh
Some dialects will have h
 
As Geoff Lindsey pointed out, some of us already have extra glottal stops at the start of our words
 
@alphabet we will speak in binary, after having assimilated ChatGPT (no, not that brand of AI but we still use the term as a generic)
 
@alphabet uh oh
That's the only time I can think maybe possibly I do it
 
@alphabet The sus amogus
 
6:16 PM
@Laurel like Kleenex or google
 
@alphabet all that air pollution
 
True for me in some circumstances. I would pronounce "to end" as [tə.ʔɛnd], not [tuw.ɛnd]
(Usually, at least. I'd almost need to record myself to figure out how often this happens after "to" and "the.")
 
I have no phonetic awareness so I can't tell you anything :p
Or would it be phonemic awareness???
 
@Laurel Phonetic. Usually you say "thuh" before consonants and "thee" before vowels. Some people sometimes use "thuh" before vowels, then add a glottal stop to keep the vowels separate enough.
Likewise "to" is usually "tuh" before consonants, "too" before vowels. But for me "to end" is "tuh end," with a glottal stop before "end."
 
6:31 PM
I remember that when I was really young I had a workbook with laminated pages that explained which one was hard g and which was soft and I can't even really remember that
The phonetic differences I tend to be aware of are the ones that kids used to bully other kids for using at school
And the ones they put on billboards
Dialect pride lol
 
@Laurel I wonder if there are human languages that are more conducive to automatic voice recognition than English.
 
The only advantage English has over other languages for most things is that it's used by a lot of people
And a significant number of them aren't going to learn another language
 
@Laurel [ˈfejɹ̈ʷ.əˈnəf]
 
@Laurel kids are jerks
 
@alphabet me reading square bracket IPA is probably worse than me trying to read elderly people's cursive lol but I figured it out
 
6:42 PM
@misk94555 the usual answer to any general question like that is that all languages are equally difficult in their own way. But...
Maybe a small phonetic inventory would make voice recognition easier.
And for that there are several choices... Any of the Polynesian languages like Hawaiian or Maori would do.
Three or maybe five vowels (aeiou) and really simple consonants no clusters
 
@Mitch My thought too. Trouble is you need a lot of training data.
 
@Laurel wait ... which ones are those?
@alphabet that's a good desideratum which immediately says that English is the best (or maybe Chinese)
 
@Mitch Indeed. Trouble is that Chinese is actually like 12 different languages that share an orthography but aren't at all mutually intelligible when speaking.
 
7:03 PM
Sure. Mandarin then
 
7:48 PM
I feel that declaring the inner workings of the Parliamentary system to be "not democratic" isn't a good lens for understanding it, simply because it's not presidential — pjc50 2 days ago
Hunh?
So only the president can be seen doing undemocratic things, or?
Been a while since I went hiking
@Robusto Have fun! (OMG I'm already jealous)
 
8:37 PM
@Mitch The one I remember was a localized regional pronunciation vs the general American pronunciation
 
@Mitch Average number of syllables per word could also make a difference. Words may be easier to distinguish when they have more syllables. Vowels may be easier for machine to distinguish than consonants (or the other way around).
 
 
1 hour later…
9:51 PM
homoglyph fuckery. nice. — Michael Altfield 18 mins ago
noho motrix
> With woe and weariness and war sated,
kingship owning crowned and righteous
he would pass in peace pardon granting
the hurt healing, and the whole guiding,
to Britain the blessed bliss recalling.
Death lay between dark before him
ere the way were won or the world conquered.
Between what did death lie?
Getting home?
 
Maybe there should be "and" instead of "ere"?
 
I think "dark before him" describes death.
 
@CowperKettle Oh, that "ere" line is a repetitious concluding verse. It occurs earlier as well.
 
Ah!
> But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.
A repeating line in the City of the Dreadful Night
 
10:06 PM
> Toll must he pay and trewage grievous,
the blood spending that he best treasured
the lives losing that he loved dearest;
there friends should fall and the flower wither
of fair knighthood, for faith earning
the death and darkness, doom of mortals,
ere the walls were won or the way conquered,
or the grass again there green springing,
his feet should feel faring homeword.
 
@CowperKettle recently we had "top 1% world scientists" who were Iranians setting up a meeting with Raisi, and one sounded so unintelligent he's become a bit of a meme
 
(I'm typing these in by hand; they are not copypastable, being in print rendered blinding the google monster.)
 
Judging by PubMed, Iran has more science than Russia. Some reports of clinical trials, studies.
 
I dunno what he was a scientist of, and I wonder if theologians have a way of inflating the h-index somehow, or if he was some scripted bumbling idiot trying to make Raisi look smart
 
10:08 PM
We had Raisa, the wife of Gorbachev. Raisa Gorbacheva.
A loving couple.
 
FIRST "ere walls were won or way conquered" THEN "ere way were won or world conquered".
 
@CowperKettle the top 1% scientists of the year X are usually determined by h-index. Sure, academia is pretty loose, you can have gangs of people citing themselves and each other often enough to qualify
 
@CowperKettle More more more!
 
@CowperKettle Raisi means "like a boss". Now you can laugh
 
@M.A.R. I've noticed that. Some scientific groups produce articles that are repetitive, and then cite them again and again.
@M.A.R. Nice!
 
10:14 PM
@tchrist so he's about to break this siege, and the way ahead is dark, either literally or figuratively, because he has to see his friends and other less important people die
 
@tchrist Nicely written.
 
But he has to see it to the end so the spring and blessing and pardoning and all that stuff feels authentic
I'm probably missing a lot of nuance here but it's 1:46 a.m.
My Engkish quota dare tamoom mishe
 
@CowperKettle It's from near the end of Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur. It's in the old four-beat alliterative of the Norse and the English. I didn't mark the caesuras between beat-pairs on each line, but they should be obvious.
Came up in the context of Russian "dolnik verse", which apparently had constraints I was unaware of.
 
The only poem by Tolkien that I tried to memorize, back in 2000, was
> The wind was on the withered heath,
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night or day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.
 
Tis wicked in the wild to fare.
 
10:21 PM
I know the one about glittering and gold and ferrous sulfide
Aragorn is shiny and not lost.
3
 
@CowperKettle The perl porters team used to get together and recite Tolkien's verse by memory. The Fall of Gil-Galad. Durin's song "A king there was on carven throne, in many-pillared halls of stone". The short version of Beren and Lúthien "The leaves were long the grass was green, the hemlock umbels tall and fair, in the glad a light was seen of stars in shadow shimmering."
 
Word of 03:25 am: perceived mattering
 
The Road Goes Ever On and On.
I sit beside the fire and think, of all that I have seen....
It was surprising to us how many of those we all knew.
It was the first time we got together face to face, back in the mid 90s or so.
 
I googled "perl porters" and this was the first link: nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters
 
Yes, it's the people who develop perl.
It was in 1997 in San José, California.
> The first O'Reilly Perl conference was not until 1997 in San Jose, California, a decade since the language was first released and three years after Perl 5 was birthed to the world. At that conference many of the people who had been communicating simply with lines of text met face to face and realised that wasn't such a bad idea.
 
10:30 PM
> In December 1987 American programmer and linguist Larry Wall first released Perl 1.0 for computers running the UNIX operating system.
The writing's on the Wall.
 
I was immured there once.
 
@CowperKettle ever since, many Perl users have banged their heads against Wall
 
> While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it.
@M.A.R. LOL
> Wall is an active member of the New Life, Church of the Nazarene.[5][6] He also works with his local church for Bible Quizzing for the Nor-Cal district.
> Bible Quiz, also known as Bible Bowl or Bible Quizzing, is a quiz-bowl competition based on Bible memorization and study.
So he knows IT and Bible.
And linguistics.
 
@tchrist censored. Have you guys been mean to my precious government somewhere in there?
Not that they require much of a reason for anything
 
Perhaps their feelings or pride have been hurt.
 
10:35 PM
Probably they have some bowl in which questions (on pieces of paper) are placed?
 
@M.A.R. They're probably afraid your country's religious folk will gain a new programming religion and turn apostate.
 
@M.A.R. If only there were some way of getting around censorship
 
@M.A.R. Yesterday at the ParkRun event I actually taught a guy how to install a VPN on his phone. Amazing. He must have been consuming only state-operated news sources all the time.
 
@M.A.R. Do they let you read this?
 
He only needed a VPN for installing Strava and logging his runs.
 
10:38 PM
@alphabet well, my cheap ass VPN likes to munch on my data and I expect for the next three weeks to see job recruitment ads related to Perl. Or maybe scuba diving
 
@CowperKettle I have heard that the US military doesn't want you using Strava. People could use Strava to find US military installations because soldiers would use it around bases
 
@alphabet Yes, there was a story in the media 10 years ago about that :)
 
@M.A.R. Most perl diving is done without scuba gear.
 
In the Russian Army, they take away your phone, lest the signal is caught and you get shelled. I mean, close to the frontlines.
 
@CowperKettle you taught a man how to fish and he won't ever be deficient of essential fatty acids anymore
 
10:40 PM
LOL
 
These mutant divers can hold their breaths for 13 minutes. I'm not sure they still count as human. :)
> Specifically, the Bajau possess variants of the PDE10A gene and the BDKRB2 gene, variants that are absent from their closest neighbors, the Saluan, who do not live their lives at sea.
 
Mosaic mutations may be involved in Bipolar Disease: nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02096-x
@tchrist This is cool
 
> Unfortunately, many disparate factors are erasing the traditional Bajau way of life.
Yeah like holding your breath for 13 minutes
 
Extremely.
 
> For one, Bajau have spleens that are 50 percent larger than the Saluan.
 
10:45 PM
So that takes them from 2 minutes to 3? Still 10 shy.
The Sama-Bajau include several Austronesian ethnic groups of Maritime Southeast Asia. The name collectively refers to related people who usually call themselves the Sama or Samah (formally A'a Sama, "Sama people"); or are known by the exonym Bajau (, also spelled Badjao, Bajaw, Badjau, Badjaw, Bajo or Bayao). They usually live a seaborne lifestyle and use small wooden sailing vessels such as the perahu (layag in Maranao), djenging (balutu), lepa, and vinta (pilang). Some Sama-Bajau groups native to Sabah are also known for their traditional horse culture. The Sama-Bajau are the dominant ethnic...
> FAM178B, a regulator of carbonic anhydrase, which is related to maintaining blood pH when carbon dioxide accumulates; and another one involved in the response to hypoxia.
 
> Wall's Christian faith has influenced some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46).
 
@CowperKettle Kind of. But he also studied the Middle English poem, Pearl.
> Perle plesaunte, to prynces paye. To clanly clos in golde so clere: Out of oryent, I hardyly saye, Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.
It's a nacred language but not a knackered one.
Margaritaville.
@CowperKettle He wanted a small little gem-like name for it.
Early on he decided pearl was too long to type for a Unix programmer.
Practical
Extraction
And
Report
Language

became

Pathologically
Eclectic
Rubbish
Lister
Before he created perl, he created the patch program, without which nothing we know as the internet would have come to exist.
The computer tool patch is a Unix program that updates text files according to instructions contained in a separate file, called a patch file. The patch file (also called a patch for short) is a text file that consists of a list of differences and is produced by running the related diff program with the original and updated file as arguments. Updating files with patch is often referred to as applying the patch or simply patching the files. == History == The original patch program was written by Larry Wall (who went on to create the Perl programming language) and posted to mod.sources (which later...
 
> Examples include FAM178B, which encodes a protein that forms a stable complex with carbonic anhydrase, [...] CACNA1A, which is involved in the regulation of the release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate (Catterall, 1998) and the response to hypoxic conditions (Wang et al., 2005); and PDE10A, a cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase involved in the regulation of smooth muscle contraction, including that of the muscle surrounding the spleen (Exton, 1981).
 
11:01 PM
HelloWorld ("Print");
 
If it's a glutamate-related polymorphism it's probably more important regarding epilepsy and eye neurologic problems
Doesn't sound like a fair trade
Yes I'm jealous
 
> "Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise with a mission in life."
Yes, this gene is associated with numerous disorders ))
 
Phew
 
Chromatic is a writer and free software programmer best known for his work in the Perl programming language. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, United States. He wrote Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, co-wrote Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, is the lead author of Perl Hacks, and an uncredited contributor to The Art of Agile Development. He has a music degree. Also, he has contributed to CPAN, Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot. In 2009, he founded Modern Perl Books, in part to revitalize the world of Perl and to publish materials that other publishers had neglected.In 2010, he released the book Modern...
 
Here I thought for a moment they were cooler than me. Well guess what, they have migraine!
 
11:26 PM
@CowperKettle Yes, all the funny little marks have meaning, just like diacritics added to the alphabet. Ignore them at your peril. :)
 
> Though he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was adamant that he wasn’t mentally ill.
Right, because other schizophrenics always admit they're ill. They're schizophrenics!
 
@tchrist Yes, this is very sad. Let him rest in peace.
I'm not sure he had schizophrenia.
He did not seem to have the negative symptoms.
 
11:42 PM
There are positive symptoms?
 
Positive symptoms are delusions and hallucinations.
Negative are lack of will, apathy etc. Most likely stemming from poor operation of the "working memory" in the frontal lobes.
He had the will to study and make bombs.
I wish there was some more precise biological test for schizophrenia.
 
@tchrist Hmmmm Perl is longer than a lot of programming language names, the big exception being Python. Fortunately for those folks, someone came along and invented Pyth.
 
@Laurel length("f77") > length("cc")
I'm saying that Larry got annoyed with how often he had to type a five-character command. Those are rather rare in Unix: when's the last time you type mknod? :)
 
What about mkdir????
 
Yes.
 
11:49 PM
chmod?
 
He just wanted it shorter.
 
I can respect that
Cut out all the unnecessary vowels
I program in a language that has no vowels, PHP. I also do JS, because writing out the full name is a hassle
 
addbib apply ar arch arithmetic asa awk banner base64 basename bc
cal cat chgrp ching chmod chown clear cmp col colrm comm cp cut
date dc deroff diff dirname du echo ed env expand expr factor false
file find fish fold fortune from glob grep hangman head hexdump id
install join kill ln lock look ls mail make man maze mimedecode
mkdir mkfifo moo morse od par paste patch pig ping pom ppt pr primes
printenv printf pwd rain random rev rm rmdir robots shar sleep sort
spell split strings sum tac tail tar tee test time touch tr true
@Laurel I can do that.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
#
# unvowel - convert English to teenager txtspk
# Tom Christiansen

use v5.14;

use strict;
use warnings;
use open qw(:std :utf8);

use re "/xi";

my $C = "bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz";
my $V = "aeiou";  # no y
my $L = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

#binmode(DATA, ":utf8");

if (@ARGV == 0 && -t STDIN && -t STDERR) {
    print STDERR "$0: reading from tty, best type something...\n";
}

while (<>) {


    s/ \b easy \b 		/ez/g;
    s/ \b easier \b 		/ezr/g;
    s/ \b easily \b 		/ezly/g;
Feel free to add your cutsies.
I used this for chat here this past week, but I can't remember what I started with.
Jun 3 at 14:41, by tchrist
NFI Y thy tnk TLM alrdy knz althr psnl ltl kbd cts. Sa frm v slpstc rdns.
Jun 3 at 14:37, by tchrist
@Cerberus I have no flitting idea why they think everybody else already knows all their own personal little typographical shortcuts. It's a form of solipsistic rudeness.
See how much easier to type the shrt vsn is? :)
The French part I added for @jlliagre. :)
 

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