English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:00

I do know how SE works by now.

At least, obvious bits like that.

We would catch you, you see.

Because you would suddenly pop to the head of the list without having said anything. :)

Supper

J. Musser

@tchrist exactly.

@tchrist Have a good meal!

I have to go also.

\o

Motoko Kusanagi

@tchrist thank you

tchrist

00:18

You’re welcome.

crl

Soylent (drink)

Soylent is a nutritional drink, intended to cover all human nutritional requirements for an adult so that it may serve as main or sole food. Its creator, software engineer Rob Rhinehart, researched nutritional requirements and developed the formula by self-experimentation based on his own research online, with textbooks, and through scientific journals. A commercial version of Soylent has been financed by a crowdfunding campaign on Tilt and venture capital which raised funds in excess of US$3,500,000. The funding paid for additional research and modification of the formula. The first shipments...

@terdon ^

tchrist

> Perhaps the most radical approach to disrupting the food industry comes from Soylent, whose beverage is designed to be a complete substitute for food and not just one of the many diet drinks or nutritional supplements. Sold as a powder to be mixed with water, it contains all the ingredients needed for sustenance, says Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s founder.

Soylent Green Is People!!!

►

And now.
You know.
The rest.
Of the story.

Soylent: How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days

►

crl

00:38

watching

Mitch

@crl I wonder how it treats one's digestive tract, particularly the ...um... back end.

Also, boredom.

Mitch

00:54

@JohanLarsson Brezhnev

crl

01:19

Meh, not convinced by Soylent

I'll continue my diet
- banana 20%
- tomato 15%
- rice+curcuma 15%
- carots,fennel 45%
- whitefish,turkey 5%

A Beautiful Mind

01:50

Hi @crl.

Robusto

@RegDwigнt What is the word for touch in German, like in a game of pool?

Like to say someone has good touch.

Cerberus

02:07

Angriff?

crl

@ABeautifulMind Hi @jsp

@Robusto Do you mean skill, dexterity, agility, adroitness?

Robusto

Yes.

The ability to hit the ball just so, neither more nor less than is required for a shot.

crl

02:23

Looking in wordreference.com/ende/touch since translate.google.com/#auto/de/touch isn't satisfying

> with sure touch: mit sicherer Hand

Robusto

02:44

@crl Hmm, thanks. I wonder if it has the same connotations, though. We say "with a sure hand" in English, and that's pretty much a literal translation of mit sicherer Hand.

Cerberus

That sounds like the same thing to me.

I think my German is good enough to tell me that.

Robusto

@tchrist: Eso sí no me lo esperaba.. What does the sí do to that sentence? Without it, it would just mean "That I did not expect," but I'm not sure what the addition of the affirmation means there.

tchrist

It’s an intensifier. Try really.

Robusto

@Cerberus But I really want to see what it means to say someone has good touch, a soft touch, a deft touch, in German.

Cerberus

Right.

Robusto

02:48

@tchrist Ah. I get it. Thanks.

Cerberus

I think the word hand is good.

I would say it the same way in Dutch, met zekere hand.

Met zachte hand.

Both entirely idiomatic.

tchrist

Seems . . . inherently Germanic.

Try French.

Cerberus

@tchrist What does?

crl

O'Sullivan a un bon toucher

tchrist

@crl That’s a bit different, no?

Robusto

02:50

Yeah, it's probably Hand in German. That's the only link I found, and it's one line only on Beolingus.

crl

@tchrist No, you really say: "Federer a un excellent toucher de balle"

We could less frequently say "Il a une bonne main"

tchrist

To me, un ligero toque might be said of a pianist, but I don’t know if it works for other things.

Deft is trickier.

I might go for clever. Hm.

Robusto

Deft is such a good word.

tchrist

Papa Paco: María con mano segura nos guía a su Hijo Jesús.

Robusto

Where else can you get the connotations of skill, speed, and dexterity all in one four-letter word of one syllable?

It's a bargain at twice the price.

Well, I should sleep. My last day of freedom is tomorrow.

tchrist

02:57

Good night.

crl

Buena noche

Buen coche

tchrist

Hábil is capable.

@crl Buen coche. :)

You always shorten it when it come before the noun (in masculine singular).

crl

ah right!

tchrist

Spanish only has a few of those, but they’re mandatory. Italian has a lot of them, but it depends a bit on the region and speaker.

They call it apócope.

En français.

I’m not sure whether cuan counts as an apocope of cuando; probably.

But it isn’t an adjective.

It’s more like how as an adverb.

So the French page counts like nine of them. Not very many.

I’m counting vientiún (and all the other such numbers) as a version of un.

@infinitesimal I’m sorry.

crl

Yep the apocope, I remember you telling me it

El gran hombre

SackToSell
BackToBell

tchrist

03:12

@crl Which is completely different from el hombre grande, of course. :)

The first is a great man, the second a big one.

crl

Yes knew it :)

tchrist

03:30

Of course usage errors exist, and of course everyone admits it. If you use "begs the question" to mean "orange cat", that's quite obviously an error. If, however, tens of millions of native speakers agree that that is a fine way to use it, then it is a fine way to use it. That's just how language works. After all, no word in and of itself has any meaning whatsoever. It is assigned a meaning. And it is assigned that meaning not by some professor, or critic, or committee, or self-proclaimed keyboard warrior in a gloomy basement in Oxford, but collectively by all speakers of the language. — RegDwigнt ♦ yesterday

Gosh, that's good.

Motoko Kusanagi

04:09

> After all, no word in and of itself has any meaning whatsoever.

I disagree.

Take the word f*ck, for example.

Inflection completes the idea communicated by the word.

No one is live?

Cerberus

@MotokoKusanagi Hi!

Motoko Kusanagi

04:45

hello

I bit the bullet and posted my question to meta anyway.

idk why that ping didn't show up in my inbox

EnglishMaster

06:37

Hey guys

EnglishMaster

07:01

Guys, how well do you think you can do in GRE?

Alenanno

11:02

@KitZ.Fox Thanks for the help the other day. I used one of your comments. Also, someone else helped counterbalance the situation.

Robusto

11:13

@EnglishMaster I already did well in the GRE.

Johan Larsson

what is gre?

Robusto

Graduate Record Exam

Graduate Record Examinations

The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for most graduate schools in the United States. Created and administered by Educational Testing Service (ETS) in 1949, the exam aims to measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, and critical thinking skills that have been acquired over a long period of time and that are not related to any specific field of study. The GRE General Test is offered as a computer-based exam administered at Prometric testing centers. In the graduate school admissions process, the level of emphasis...

Johan Larsson

decent

have not heard all of it

Have you been to Birdland?

Robusto

@JohanLarsson Are you talking about the jazz club in NYC?

If so, yes, but not in the original version.

Johan Larsson

@Robusto yes

Robusto

11:37

0

Q: "Are these sentences correct?"—Is a title like this enough reason to close a question?

It seems like every other question we get has the title "Are these sentences correct?" Either that, or "Is this grammatical?" Generic question titles make it more difficult to figure out if a question has been asked before. And usually, after you pore over the question like an archaeologist dec...

discussion

Johan Larsson

meta: ew

Robusto

@JohanLarsson C'mon, this needs your vote.

Johan Larsson

ok only because you are such a good friend

now I will have to live with the shame from being active on meta

infinitesimal

12:29

@tchrist about what?

Robusto

@JohanLarsson We won't hold it against you.

infinitesimal

13:09

Is this what your avatar is suppose to represent? @crl

crl

@infinitesimal Well no, I chose it a bit randomly

infinitesimal

I see.

crl

I'll change to something more personal

Johan Larsson

14:32

@Robusto do you like K&D?

infinitesimal

14:45

Channels Television - Live Streaming

►

they have a "chat" too

Robusto

@JohanLarsson Ain't heard 'em till now.

Johan Larsson

pretty slick drum & bass, hold on I'll give you a couple of gems

Robusto

@JohanLarsson Kinda reminiscent of Thievery Corporation or Zero 7.

Johan Larsson

yes, I think this is with Thievery

here with Lamb I think

Robusto

@JohanLarsson Not as layered as Zero 7 nor as energetic as Thievery Corp. Interesting, though.

Johan Larsson

15:00

long time since I listened to them, don't remember the names of the songs. They made pretty solid albums.

Robusto

@tchrist: Care to take a crack at a query that would support this question about the prevalence of "Are these sentences correct/grammatical?" questions on ELU?

tchrist

@Robusto I was crackin’ on this:

0

A: A little question about the usage of "and"

TLDR: You are basically correct, but because the things you are connecting with and are not the entire verb but only a part of it, it can feel ambiguous unless you repeat some pieces. Abstract Discussion When you have a compound verb sharing the same subject, there is no need to repeat the sa...

Robusto

@tchrist Haha, those are the lyrics to La Cucaracha?

The roach, the roach
   already he can't walk
Because he is missing and
   doesn't have to smoke marijuana

Does that make sense?

tchrist

15:16

Mostly.

The last line definitely needs to be doesn’t have any marijuana to smoke though.

Robusto

Ah, OK.

tchrist

The second line is probably better as now she can’t even go or something, since the car is female. :)

Or maybe it.

Robusto

It's about a car?

tchrist

It is, actually. :)

Robusto

Weird.

tchrist

15:18

La Cucaracha

"La Cucaracha" (Spanish: "The Cockroach") is a traditional Spanish folk corrido that became popular in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. == §Structure == The song consists of verse-and-refrain (strophe-antistrophe) pairs, with each half of each pair consisting of four lines featuring an ABCB rhyme scheme. === §Refrain === The song's earliest lyrics, from which its name is derived, concern a cockroach that has lost one of its six legs and is struggling to walk with the remaining five. The cockroach's uneven, five-legged gait is imitated by the song's original 5/4 meter, formed by removing one...

Robusto

A car that runs on marijuana. More expensive than gasoline, for sure.

tchrist

¿En Méjico? ¿Seguro? :)

Robusto

Es cierto.

"Doesn't have to smoke marijuana" would be no tiene marijuana fumar, I guess.

tchrist

No, that’s no tiene que fumar marijuana. But doesn’t have any marijuana to smoke is no tiene marijuana que fumar.

"Doesn’t have to" needs the que right up close to the no tiene que.

No tengo que decir palabras.
No tengo palabras que decir.

See the difference?

I don’t have to say words.
I’ve no words to say.

Robusto

Yes.

Ha, the naysayers have already started attacking my meta question with down votes.

tchrist

15:25

Don’t get me started.

And Kris is such a goddamned troll.

MartyIX

Hi, is the sentence "Do you go exercise sometimes?" correct? For some reason the word "sometimes" doesn't sound good to me in the question.

tchrist

Then put it closer to the verb.

Robusto

It's the "go" that is problematic. Better would be "Do you sometimes go exercise?"

Jinx, I guess.

tchrist

Do you exercise sometimes?

Do you ever exercise?

Robusto

Yes. You could drop the "go" without hurting the sentence.

MartyIX

15:28

I tried a google query '""do you go * sometimes?""' and it seems people don't say it :)

@Robusto Thank you

@tchrist Thank you too :)

Robusto

No problem. You're so much more agreeable than MartyVIII ever was.

MartyIX

Now I know what happened to my father! Haha

He made a grammar error.

tchrist

@MartyIX Right, they say Do you ever go Xing? instead.

Do you ever go swimming?
Do you ever go bowling?
Do you ever go kite flying?
Do you ever go fly a kite?

MartyIX

I thought that "go exercise" is some kind of exception.

tchrist

16:00

It is not true that all French people are annoying. However, it may well be that all lawyer wannabes are. :)

0

A: Past tense of “to lie” versus past tense of “to lay”

Mnemonic: “Use a d when there is a direct object” The paradigm is the fixed-format part which you say you are perfectly clear on already: present past past participle ------------------------------- lie lay lain lay laid laid You say you know that and that you are not as...

His posting was not intelligible.

But the Teut’s answer was worse. :(

tchrist

16:14

Maybe folks unclear on the concept of constituent parsings need to use NLP tools more:

0

A: Exact meaning of the Gandalf quote, "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."?

You are misparsing the actual constituents here: “is has” is not a single constituent, but rather pieces of two. If you feed Gandalf’s sentence to the Link Parser and examine the resulting constituent tree it generates, all should become crystal clear because the inherent structure of the senten...

tchrist

16:30

Voting to close; this guy doesn’t get the point:

0

Q: Epicure, gourmet distinction

Anticipating a delicious meal shortly, we have found ourselves in rival camps of gourmets and epicures. My OED searching suggests these are, essentially, the same. Do you agree ?

meaning

@ciechowoj No, because which cannot start a restrictive relative clause, only a descriptive one. That’s why it is "ungrammatical", which really just means that it is something which "sounds wrong and confuses native speakers". See what I just did there? The first which with a comma is descriptive and so may not be replaced by that; the second which without a comma is restrictive and so may indeed be replaced by that. One reason for not doing so, however, is that that that that just occurred four words previous would sound the same as the next one, so some writers switch. — tchrist 4 mins ago

It’s going to be in the mid 70s today, and nearly already is. That’s enough for me.

Hasta la pasta.

Sigh. I explained that wrong. I’m leaving it, and this desk.

Cerberus

17:16

Hello.

mikeonly

18:26

Hi all.

Does ‘chum’ mean male person more often than female?

tchrist

@mikeonly Maybe. Maybe not. :)

I mean, it kinda feels that way, but I’m a guy, so I may be wrong. :(

@mikeonly Just curious: have you checked a good dictionary for this to see whether there’s any mention of the person’s sex?

Here’s one:

> chum /tʃʌm/, sb.1 Now colloq.
Also 8 chumm.

Etymology: Recorded only since c 1684. A well-known conjecture is that it was a familiar abbreviation of chamber-fellow, chamber-mate, or the like. But no historical proof or connecting link has been found.

1. a. One who shares apartments with another or others, one who lodges or resides in the same room or rooms: ‘a chamber-fellow, a term used in the universities’ (J.); also, more generally, a habitual companion, an associate, an intimate friend. Now chiefly in familiar colloquial use with school-boys, fellow-students; also with criminals, co…

mikeonly

@tchrist Yes. In Apple Dictionary it has male connotation. But none of others dictionaries mentions (or mention?) that.

tchrist

@mikeonly I think the OED’s entry mentions various male things, but does not strictly say that in its presented senses. One’s chums are one’s pals, mates, buddies, fellows, friends. Notice some of those are kinda male-oriented.

Can a girl be a pal? Sure. Can she be a fellow? Hm. :)

> 1882 Miss Braddon Mnt. Royal III. viii. 148 ― Leonard and she are great chums.

There’s a female-use citation.

However, it’s the only one given there.

@Robusto More squicking here:

-2

Q: What tense is the phrase " I have to come and go"

What tense is the phrase " I have to come and go" .Need answers!!!

tenses

See the comments. :)

mikeonly

18:50

@tchrist Oh, thanks.

terdon

19:30

Unfortunately, your Ngram is not as pertinent as it might seem. "There was also found" is going to be much less frequent than "We also found" because the former is derived from a very specific passive construction obtained by passivising the subject of an infinitive clause to the subject position of the matrix clause verb phrase, whereas the latter can occur in any type of finite clause, whether in a matrix clause or a subordinate clause, and which is also going to be more prevalent because it is not passive voice. — Araucaria 17 hours ago

Are you related to Sir Humphrey Appleby? — terdon 17 hours ago

Robusto

19:48

No, actually it isn't our job. Nobody pays us for this, and if we do it it is on a voluntary basis. My point is that it should not be something people should expect. And before you get all holier-than-thou, I'll point out that I have the gold Copy Editor badge. Where's yours? You've been around here nearly as long as I have. — Robusto 5 mins ago

noahnu

What is the process of creating/coining a word called? I'm thinking of a single word, I just can't remember it.

Robusto

It's called coining a word.

noahnu

there's a single word for it

Robusto

Coining is a single word.

Also minting.

@noahnu Prove it.

noahnu

@Robusto I guess there's 'neologize', not sure if that's what I was thinking

or neologism as the noun

terdon

20:01

@noahnu wordsmithing?

If one can be a wordsmith, you can make a noun out of it.

Leuchte

Hello everyone

tchrist

@Robusto HOLY MF CRAP! There are thousands more where these came from:

0

A: "Are these sentences correct?"—Is a title like this enough reason to close a question?

TLDR: After looking into this in some detail, I now believe that the word “correct” and the word “grammatical” should both be forbidden in question titles. Look at the data and see whether you don’t agree. We’d also have to cover missssspelings, alias — see “grammer”. :( Brief questions aski...

That is incredibly depressing.

Incredibly.

Cerberus

20:22

@terdon I had to vote that up.

Her comment didn't seem to make sense. What infinitive? I saw no infinitive.

But her second comment does make sense, as you agreed.

terdon

@Cerberus Thanks, I was hoping someone would get the reference :)

@Cerberus Yes, she was quite decent about the whole thing really. For all I know, her first comment also makes sense if you know the lingo.

Cerberus

Several people on ELU are fans!

terdon

@Cerberus I would be shocked were that not the case.

Have you seen that they've made a remake?

Cerberus

Which makes sense, because what other comedy series makes more brilliant fun of the English language?

Who have?

terdon

THEY

Cerberus

20:26

Who are they?

terdon

imdb.com/title/tt2612376

Cerberus

Oh, I read mistake haha.

I have heard of it, but people say it sucks.

There also is a Dutch version, which is also said to suck.

terdon

Yeah, I watched one episode and was not impressed.

It's kind of hard to beat the sheer brilliance of the first one.

Cerberus

Yeah.

They need educated script writers and civilised actors.

But British politics have changed.

Are they trying to emulate current British politics?

terdon

@Cerberus Yes, it's all up to date.

tchrist

20:48

@DanBron The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The answer to your question is that almost nobody ever bothers to edit anything on ELU: most edits are clustered in the top few editors. This is everyone’s fault, a glaring failure of the ELU community as a whole. — tchrist 47 secs ago

I’d also like to know why nobody ever delete-votes all the horrible closed questions with negative vote totals. The CMs have repeatedly said that closed questions should eventually get deleted by the community at large. Well, the community at large never delete votes, so that simply does not happen. We have to much crap that it's embarrassing.

Robusto

21:21

@tchrist ¡Madre de dios!

Cerberus

@terdon Perhaps that is part of the problem: current British politics are less fun?

tchrist

@Robusto I think we should request help from a Community Manager to tell us how many deleted questions contain any of "correct, grammar, grammatical, grammatically"—and perhaps their spelling mistakes, too. The non-employee version of SEDE does not contain data on deleted questions, so without their help we really cannot know. Moderators can add deleted:1 to their regular non-SEDE queries, but for various reasons like stemming and subject isolation, that won’t provide the accuracy we’d need.

@Cerberus Politics? Fun? Are you mad? :)

Cerberus

Hey, you don't think YM is fun?

tchrist

21:36

I thought you meant real politics — which nearly never are.

It’s fricking summer here, like over 80. Just amazing!

Really humid, too: a dreadful 13%.

:)

@Robusto Hey, you think it’s bad that phenry has no gold Copy Editor badge. Here’s an even better datapoint: he’s only 1% of the way towards the gold Illuminator badge. So much for putting one’s money where one’s mouth is!

In contrast, you’re about 20% of the way there and I’m about 35% of the way there — in round figures.

infinitesimal

What was the apology about @tch?

tchrist

@infinitesimal Cluttering up your world with Spanish.

infinitesimal

np

:-)

tchrist

21:52

Well, at least you answered in English.

Wait, no you didn’t! I saw your Ningún Problema abbreviation! :)

infinitesimal

multiculturalism is an important part of the world

Cerberus

@tchrist I hate to break it to you, but YM is, alas, not real.

tchrist

Well, there’s multiculturalism on one hand but actual polyglottism on the other. It’s curious that almost all the regulars here in ELU chat, and the ELU mods, are all studied in more than English alone.

Cerberus

However much we should like it to be so.

@tchrist Well, the connexion is love for language.

tchrist

You intentionally wrote that in its sexier spelling!

Cerberus

21:58

In its proper spelling.

tchrist

Sexy.

Cerberus

It should be the supine stem, after all.

Thank you.

infinitesimal

Yes, that's a good point.

Cerberus

And you.

tchrist

@Cerberus Supine: something to take lying down.

> 1. Lying on one’s back, lying with the face or front upward. Also said of the position. Often predicatively or quasi-advb.
2. fig. Morally or mentally inactive, inert, or indolent.

:)

A safer word than prostrate, but I’m not prone to use it. :)

Cerberus

22:03

> In Latin grammar, applied to forms of a verbal noun, the one an accusative singular ending in -tum or -sum, used with verbs of motion and called the first or †former supine, the other a locative singular ending in -tG or -sG (varying in early times with a dative singular in -tuW, -suW), used with adjectives and called the second or †latter supine.

The Oxford English Dictionary gets it half wrong.

-t- and -s- are possible endings of the supine stem, but there are others.

Such as -x-.

tchrist

Well, that kinda ends in -s.

Cerberus

Kinda, but not quite.

There are other supine stems ending on -u-...

tchrist

Can you think of any English words derived from one of those?

Cerberus

Mortuary?

tchrist

Yah.

Good.

Cerberus

22:07

Not 100% sure.

It's complicated.

But I think it is the same stem as that of the past participle of morior, mortuus.

tchrist

It’s funny you mentioned that word, since like the very first -u- type word than came to mind was gen. pl. mortuorum.

Cerberus

Yay!

In other words on -tuary, the -t- is probably the supine suffix, so the supine stem ends on -t-; the -u- in that case is something else.

Because it is common practice to form nouns with -u- stems from the supine stem, so they end up looking like -tus or -sus or -xus; and, if you make an adjective based on such a noun, you have to preserve the u, since it is a -u- stem, not a normal -u/o- stem, where the u/o is merely a theme vowel that you can and must leave out.

tchrist

> abortuary [n.]
actuary [n.]
† ˈaestuary [n.]
× allectuary → electuary
annuary [adj.]
antiquary [adj.]
† ˈbustuary [adj.]
† ˈcartuary [n.]
× centerie → sanctuary
× centuary → centaury
× centurie → sanctuary
deˈciduary [adj.]
electuary [n.]
× eˈmunctuary
estuary [n.]
February [n.]
† ˈfluctuary [adj.]
fructuary [adj.]
† habituary [adj.]
† inˈventuary [n.]
× Jan → January
× Janever(e → January
× Janivare → January
January [n.]
× Jenever(e → January
× latewar → lectuary
† ˈlectuary [n.]
× lettorye → lectuary

I don’t think squary counts. :)

manuary isn’t from the 2nd.

Lots of words I wouldn’t dare use there.

Cerberus

Mortuary seems to be the only word in that list using a true supine stem + -ary with nothing in between.

tchrist

Curious.

Cerberus

22:16

@tchrist Most in the list aren't.

tchrist

I was thinking that but I didn’t look at each and every one of them.

Cerberus

I did.

There are very few part participles on -uus in Latin.

In fact, I think there is only one.

tchrist

I did a quick halfstab at search but found no others. No promise about the reliability of the absence of evidence, though.

Cerberus

And it probably came to be by means of suppletion, since all other adjectival words on -uus aren't past participles but have a somewhat similar meaning. So this -uus is a special adjectival suffix probably also in mortuus, originally; but mortuus was later promoted to past participle for the defective verb morior.

Because people thought it looked like a past participle because of the -t-, which is in almost no other -uus words?

Even then, it shouldn't look like a past participle, since past participles otherwise never end on -uus...but you know what people are like.

The -t- in mortuus is actually the stem of the noun mors, most probably.

tchrist

Well, a lot of those in the list are formed from nouns not verbs.

Cerberus

22:25

Yes, well, most are formed from nouns that were in turn formed from verbs.

tchrist

Can’t live without verbs. :)

Cerberus

Fruor "enjoy" → past participle fruc-t-ŭs → nomen actionis fruc-t-ū-s → English usufructuary.

tchrist

Hm, no joy in battuo.

Cerberus

That I do not know.

To beat? Italian?

tchrist

Yes. Defective. No passive participles.

Some of the tribute verbs are the same.

Cerberus

22:28

French has battu...

tchrist

Well, they’re French. :)

battuo

== §Latin == === §Etymology === From Gaulish. Compare Welsh bathu (“beat”); Old English beadu (“battle”), bēatan (“to beat”), bytl (“hammer, mallet”). From the same Proto-Indo-European root *bʰedʰ-, *bʰew- (“to hit, strike”) as fūstis, futuō. === §Pronunciation === (Classical) IPA(key): /ˈbat.tu.oː/, [ˈbat.tʊ.oː] === §Alternative forms === bātuō === §Verb === present active battuō, present infinitive battuere, perfect active battuī (no passive perfect forms) I beat, hit, pound, beat up. I fight. ==== §Conjugation ==== ==== §Derived terms ==== battuālia ==== §Descendants... ====

That’s lame.

But note "no passive perfect forms".

Was looking through -uo verbs.

What’s κλύω?

I wish it were I clue. :)

Hm, clueo.

The verbs lacking perfect or supine forms seem to have the passiveness built into them already.

Cerberus

Yes, they're usually intransitive at least.

But many intransitive verbs still have past participles (which are always passive, except to the extent that p.p.'s of e.g. deponentia are not translated passively, of course).

They just don't have a passive meaning.

Like itus, from eo "go".

You can't use it with a noun, no gone ways.

Itum est in Italiam = "it is gone into Italia" = "[they/someone] went to Italy".

In English, it makes more sense with verbs like it was decided that...

tchrist

That’s the -um that is an indefinite use of some sort. I don’t remember the right term.

Cerberus

@tchrist To hear, but it's not the standard word.

@tchrist Exactly.

You could call it indefinite or impersonal.

tchrist

I have to go do cat duty while the sun yet shines. I’m out of cat food, so am walking to the store and back.

Cerberus

22:42

Italian and Spanish would probably do something with se/si.

Walking?

How far is that?

tchrist

I dunno. Six blocks.

@Cerberus Irrespectively, but yes.

Cerberus

How long will it take you?

Just curious.

@tchrist Yes, irrespectively: I never can remember their se/si stuff.

tchrist

Depends on dilly-dallying.

Cerberus

This is the one thing that French got right.

Se is se and si is si.

> According to a new poll conducted by Iceland's largest newspaper, Fréttablaðið, if elections were held today, the Pirate Party would become the second largest in the Alþingi, the country's parliament, with 14 seats.

tchrist

@Cerberus It’s the Italians who are messed up. Everybody else uses se for the pronoun and si for the other one.

Cerberus

22:47

There's a thorn for you, is it not?

@tchrist Oh, really?

I will try to remember.

tchrist

It’s also maybe a couple hundred feet downhill.

Cerberus

Sounds...far.

tchrist

Only on the return. :)

Cerberus

> Led by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the so-called Poetician (she was a published poet before entering politics), Píratar became the first Pirate party to win seats in a national election when it took three in Iceland's 2013 election.

The Pirates are really not so bad.

They also wrote the best election programme of all parties here, it wasn't dumbed down.

Or dumb in the first place.

tchrist

Voy andando.

Cerberus

22:55

Succes!

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…