English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Yo yo.

@crl maybe... something like 'due to the fact that..' when all you need is 'because...'?

@Cerberus Boomerang

Room bang?

Why room bang?

Broom hangar.

Makes the kitchen a little tidier

did you just get back?

crl

> Quit trying to quit quitting after trying not to quit

12:08 AM

@crl I tried that. Didn't work

there's a Mitbewohner here who is a garbage American redneck

just tonight, in the span of about 4 hours, he has managed to proclaim, loudly "I'm American!" at least 6 times, ask everyone to speak English at least 10 times, and make awkward world war 2 references which everyone felt really crappy hearing at least 20 times.

I'm being driven insane by this

Anonymous

Um.

maybe I'm exaggerating a bit.

anyway I'm really intolerant of this kind of person.

@GeorgePompidou it's the worst. can't defend him, because he's an idiot. can't not defend home because other people are idiots.

he thinks humanity started with literally two people in a magical garden with an applesnake, and he thinks businesses should have the right to refuse business to gay people

I just have no capacity to deal with such idiocy in person. I can't do it, it makes my blood pressure too high.

12:18 AM

he could just be playing up to stereotype, because he doesn't have anything else in him (that is, he isn't actually a stereotype, but all he's ever seen in media about Americans is the stereotype and he's not imaginative enough to be himself.

Or maybe he's just an idiot.

I think he's just an idiot. he comes from an idiot family. he's uncultured and has never traveled, he believes the bible literally, he thinks the United States is categorically superior to any other place in the world

@GeorgePompidou just play along with the others. Like question the theory of gravity.

@GeorgePompidou why is he there then?

I DON'T KNOW THAT'S WHAT I KEEP ASKING

(I didn't mean to yell, just to exclaim)

Whoa dude. USA is the best. Except where it's not.

he always goes around like to supermarkets and stuff and exclaims that he is looking for AMERICAN things

like he wants AMERICAN cookies and AMERICAN soda

but wait, that's not my problem with him. I can deal with the fact that there are people this shockingly dumb in the world, especially in America; I'm used to it.

the issue is that I'm here trying to learn German, a bit about Germany, I'm trying to make this my future home.

and when he's in the room, somehow he gets everyone to go into English only mode, and he talks so much about the US that people become intrigued and go "oh tell me more about so and so place in rural iowa"

12:21 AM

@GeorgePompidou Isn't there an ethnic section now in most german supermarkets where you can get peanut butter and marshmallow fluff and real chocolate (like Hershey's not that weird commie Lindt or Toblerone)?

so, to me, it defeats the point of my entire stay here

I don't know, I find all those things disgusting.

almost as disgusting as the comma splice I made.

@GeorgePompidou Oh. Iowa is nice. What's your problem? Are you not a patriot?

not when I'm around this type of person.

@GeorgePompidou I didn't notice. If you hadn't said anything...

I just want to point out I ended a sentence with a ...

I mean a '...'.

and honestly, actually, no I'm not. I couldn't give two shits about the US. I was raised by Romanians mostly in Switzerland, and I find Western Europe of much higher quality than anywhere in the US.

I appreciate the US for its scientific achievements, ventures to space, technological advancement… but not when it comes to everyday life.

12:23 AM

@GeorgePompidou so do you have a native fluency in German (but with a child's vocabulary)?

there it fails miserably.

I wouldn't call it native. I spent many years in Zürich, unfortunately going to an American school. besides, in my experience, most people I knew in Zürich speak English most of the time, wherever they're from.

@GeorgePompidou we win on convenience (and store hours!) also snacks. We win the olympics in snacks. Quality, quantity, whatever, we win.

at that age, I didn't appreciate the value of integrating with local people.

@Mitch false. a few years ago you'd've been right.

also schmyzer tutsch or however they call it supposed to be weird.

but not now. there are two 24/7 convenience stores with better snacks than any 7/11 right near my house in a small city in Germany.

12:25 AM

@Mitch I like that.

@Mitch I did, had drinks in the Hague and then in Amsterdam.

And you?

@GeorgePompidou hmmm...ok. Maybe I'm intimidated by the american supermarket with 3 huge football field long aisles of snacks. and then 3 more for soda.

I haven't seen anything like that open 24 hours.

but maybe because I'm from one of the less rednecky places in America.

I meant to say that in a very pretentious tone with an upward inflection at the end.

@Mitch Peanut butter? That's Dutch.

@Cerberus yeah it's amazing how engineers can come up with something so simple to hold a broom with the handle up. Handle down is obvious.

@Mitch I'll believe it when I see it.

@GeorgePompidou Ask him to speak German a few times when he switches to English.

12:29 AM

pff, I've learned my lesson trying that a few times

he ridicules me.

tells me to shut up, and if I make any argument, he says that I'm privileged and white.

whatever that means.

@Mitch They have 24/7 stores in Russia.

@Cerberus Whoa... they're that close by train or car? Drinks in one, then travel, then drinks in the other?

which, I've learnt, is the conservative American argument to pretty much anything anyone says that disagrees with them.

@Cerberus Dammit, Putin!

@Cerberus I'm planning on this next weekend

12:30 AM

@Mitch Sure, 50 minutes or so. The same by train.

I'm super excite.

Haha good.

@GeorgePompidou that's such a white privileged things to say.

I was riding on an ICE yesterday and it had an NS logo on it instead of DB.

(is that how he does it?)

12:31 AM

We had a borrel in the Hague, then we went home to Amsterdam and had a few drinks in a pub to end the evening.

@GeorgePompidou Nova Scotia is a long way to go.

I didn't know they did that, but I suppose the ICE 3M was made specifically to function in other countries, so they made an agreement with NS

Yay!

They say German trains are superior to ours.

And more punctual.

well, in fairness, they are a bit better looking on the inside.

@Cerberus oh. sounds reasonable then. almost sounded like bar hopping.

12:32 AM

the Dutch didn't bother to make their trains luxurious.

No, I'm back from sushi. I drive so no drinking.

Anonymous

Trains aren't nearly as useful in the US as they are in lots of other places :-(

And everyone bitches on the NS. But in fact they're fairly OK. At least a ton better than e.g. Italian or English trains.

heh

das stimmt

@Cerberus what's a 'borrel'?

12:33 AM

@Mitch Sure. I could hop on a train to Rotterdam now to have a couple more beers now. Except that Rotterdam is ugly because of WW2.

AFK to go kill an annoying insect...

ah, pesky insects.

but why do you have to go away from Koblenz?

I didn't know you were even in Germany.

@Mitch 1. A drink; 2. an occasion on which one has drinks. And drinks are of course alcoholic.

@GeorgePompidou Who is in Koblenz?

apparently Mitch.

Why not Koeln? or Kamenz? or ... struggles what's that place on the Baltic?

12:44 AM

huh?

Kiel! (I looked it up)

Oh, Kiel.

1:08 AM

Krankenwagen?

What Krankenwagen?

ah, but don't you mean… which Krankenwagen?

or better yet, whom Krankenwagen?

My what was meant to indicate that I had no idea at all that there was anything going on about a Krankenwagen.

Had there been a specific collection of Krankenwagen to choose from, I would have said which.

my whom was meant to indicate that I had not had a hat which was anything on a indication that an idea was what I had going on with a Krankenwagen.

Your English is deteriorating...

1:17 AM

decorating!

I'm actually insane from dealing with this guy. you know what his name is? it's so fitting. his name is literally Christian.

Heh.

Well, generally Christian is a respectable name.

Except when it is a Christian's name.

even then. he takes it a step farther.

he's a fundamentalist Christian.

get a load of that.

he literally believes in creationism.

I'm just… I know I've been talking about this (complaining) for a while

but I cannot find a way to wrap my mind around his existence

1:34 AM

@GeorgePompidou just don't engage. or rather just leave it at politeness.

has gone insane

has a crazed look and bloodshot eyes

can be seen skulking in the dark near his room with a gigantic human-sized glass

@Cerberus I can actually respect the name in many languages, but for some reason it sounds crap to me in English.

Chris-chun.

Chrish-chun

klingt lächerlich

Robusto

2:06 AM

@snailboat Probably that was the OP trying to encourage respondents.

@GeorgePompidou There are billions of idiots on this planet. Why pay this one any more attention than the others?

2:32 AM

WHOA! do you guys realize that if the stack exchange guys ever wanted to start a Q&A site about cats targeted at French people, the domain of choice is already long gone

how can someone have let this happen?

Cerb, it's cause he gets in the way of my learning and integrating with the people of this country, inside my own residence.

3:14 AM

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7:11 AM

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Alenanno

9:41 AM

@Cerberus You here?

Or anyone?

@AndrewLeach Yes, you're right about the question. I was looking for some mod to ask about the migration but didn't see anybody, so I thought I'd just migrate.

But while I think that "Lang X -> English" is better on this site, maybe that one requires more Chinese knowledge than usual.

11:41 AM

@GeorgePompidou If you go against what he says in public, people will think of you as the "good American".

@Alenanno Yo!

I missed it.

user116848

Hi folks

12:12 PM

Happy Mrs Santa Claus Day!

Andrew Leach

12:28 PM

Wut?

Oh.

It's the secularists' Mothering Sunday.

Jez

yesterday, by Mitch

@Jez can you explain the weird distribution of popular vote vs seats won? Because winner-takes-all (FPTP), does it mean that in lots of districts where conservative and labour won, it was a close vote (lots of votes) for UKIP and Greens, and that for the the fringe groups, they won in smaller districts where few of the other parties got votes?

@Mitch The UK has the most unfair electoral system in the world. First-past-the-post means every constituency (let's say "region") has just one representative (MP). The candidate who gets the most votes in that region becomes that region's MP. It's a very simple system, but also a very bad one for properly representing the pattern of voting on the national scale.

To take the most extreme example, there could be two parties, where one party gets 49% of votes in each region and one party gets 51% in each region. The latter party would win 100% of the seats.

Many sensible proposals have been made to make this fairer, probably my favourite being from the Lib Dems, where you just increase region sizes to maybe 5 MPs, allowing a good degree of proportionality when MPs are elected via the D'Hondt method.

@AndrewLeach Snow, Andrew. I got rather heavily snowily snow on. Quite extraordinary.

I awoke to hummers trying to get inside my house. I went out and poured a pitcher of very hot water over the hummingbird feeder that was buried in snow and therefore inaccessible. I am again the most popular person in Colorado as far as hummers go. I fear to look beneath the tarps at the garden. It is still well below freezing anyway.

I told my neighbor he shouldn't put his tomatoes in before Mother's Day.

He said, haw, May Day is good enough.

Jez

A combination of entrenched interests wanting the unfair current system, and moronic voters who believe their lies that it's "good" in some way, prevent this reform from happening and will (IMHO) cause the break-up of the Untied Kingdom and a huge level of voter disenfranchisement. I'm already thinking I won't ever bother voting again unless we get electoral reform.

I reminded him that there were elders amongst us who swear by Memorial Day.

He said, "Well, if it snows, I'll just put them again. By May Day, I can't wait to garden."

One year he put them in thrice.

Jez

@Mitch In the specific case of this election, UKIP and the Green party got lots of votes but only in two regions did their candidate actually get the most votes. This could easily have been zero regions, had those two regions gone a few thousand votes the other way, meaning their ~5 million votes would have resulted in zero MPs.

Alternatively, they could have had regional concentrations of their votes. In that case, they would've won an unfairly high number of seats. Heck, with UKIP's 4 million votes being in just the right places, they probably could have won 300 seats.

12:38 PM

His philosophy is that if they live, he’ll have a head start on everybody. And usually, they do. He has to put them in twice ever couple years, but three times is a lot. Still, it's a great deal of effort lost to the snow goblins.

Our frost-to-frost growing season is so ridiculously short it is hard to get real tomatoes for long here.

He doesn't want a head start on others, just on himself.

Why to we put vegetables in and up?

I mean, Englishwise.

One puts one’s tomatoes in (the garden) during the spring, and one puts them up (in the cupboard) as summer fails.

Hello all. Can anyone tell me if there is a linguistic term meaning the change of a word's part of speech eg. from a noun to a verb?

Conversion (word formation)

It’s called conversion.

Or zero derivation.

Morphological derivation

In linguistics, morphological derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happiness and unhappy from the root word happy, or determination from determine. It often involves the addition of a morpheme in the form of an affix, such as -ness, un-, and -ation in the preceding examples. Derivation stands in contrast to the process of inflection, which means the formation of grammatical variants of the same word, as with determine/determines/determining/determined. == Derivational patterns == Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational...

> Derivation can also occur without any change of form, for example telephone (noun) and to telephone. This is known as conversion, or zero derivation.

In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation; specifically, it is the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (e.g., the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean). == Verbification... ==

@mikeeustace Does that answer your question?

5

A: What is noun to adjective conversion called?

The process of changing a word with one grammatical function into a word with a similar meaning but a different function is called Derivation. Derivation one of the two varieties of Morphology (the other is Inflection). English has almost no inflection left, so its morphology is almost all deri...

26

A: Is 'Updation' a correct word?

No, the -(t)ion derivational suffix can't be applied to update. Derivations are almost all irregular, and restricted in the words they can appear on. Since update is a modern word, it follows the modern English trend of Zero-Derivation, like what Calvin calls "Verbing". Hence, as Shyam points ou...

4

A: Can we use patient as a verb?

More or less any word can be verbed in English—that is, turned into a verb by zero-derivation. That includes patient. The trouble with patient, though, is that it is both an adjective and a noun, and the two mean quite different things (“able to accept or tolerate waiting, delays, etc.” vs. “a p...

2

A: Is verbing in "I medalled in volleyball" correct?

An important means of creating new words in English is zero-derivation (aka conversion). This is the process of converting a word from one part of speech to another without any overt morphological process. The use of the noun 'medal' as a verb is an example of this. There are many other examples—...

12

A: Past participle of "flaw"

Well, to start with, flaw is not really a verb; it's a noun, and nouns don't have past participles. Like practically any noun, however, it can be "Verbed" (as Calvin calls it; linguists call it Zero-Derivation, or Conversion), resulting in a causative verb to flaw, meaning 'cause to have a flaw'...

1:09 PM

@tchrist - it does thank you.

Been a while since my degree. Funny how people expect you to know the answers to things like that though.

Zero derivation was what I was after. "I'll text you later." (God, I hate that one)

Zero derivation is a term of art in the linguistics realm. It is not really one in general circulation.

Another kind of derivation occurs when converting mass nouns to count nouns: simply render them into the plural instead of using a partitive premodifier of some sort. This also jars people.

@mikeeustace If God has texted you, who are we to complain? :)

I have a BSc Linguistics (but a primary teacher). The English lang teacher in secondary asked me to make a "very slightly risque" presentation on why I chose my subject etc.

I'm going to talk about censorship in news. Use of * to represent a letter. Moving on to a 'joke' about zero derivation and the noun finger

Oh, you said secondary, not second-grade. Ok then. Still could be potentially risky to present a risqué presentation; one never knows who will complain, and believe, someone always complains. So annoying.

1:26 PM

They're lower sixth (thinking about their degree applications) so like something near the knuckle. Makes them feel more adult (oooh, zero derivation).

Thanks for the help.

2:11 PM

@Jez 1) thanks for the explanation 2) I think the American electoral college system for presidential voting is worse (America wins again!!) 3) I agree with you that the FPTP (or winner take all) is dumb (that's how the US electoral college works, see how much we're alike?).

I agree with Mitch.

sings the America sucks song

Mohammad

2:33 PM

Hi Guys

please could any one answer this question

ell.stackexchange.com/…

huh. I think the fly I sadistically trapped under a glass with its dead friend somehow escaped overnight.

I can't for the life of me say how but I also can't for the life of me find it.

4:25 PM

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6:41 PM

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cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

7:23 PM

@tchrist hackaday.io/project/5689-lossy-text-compression

crl

8:23 PM

why is "sewer" so close (in spelling) to "sew/sewing", but so far in meaning?

Don Larynx

8:37 PM

drowning in conformity sounds just as appealing as drowning in isolation. Perhaps it is the use of the word drowning that is awful, and should be eliminated from vocabulary, Then, for example, indulging in conformity and indulging in isolation sound just as great.

@crl sewer: sows all pipelines together.

something that performs the action of sewing.

user116848

9:07 PM

Ahh, so my wall clock has stopped working.

user116848

That’s what all the mystery is.

user116848

I better go and change its battery.

user116848

Although I was staring at my computer screen this whole time, I still didn’t notice the correct time in the task bar.

user116848

feels dumb

I'm probably going to get violent toward this idiot American kid at some point

tonight he made multiple holocaust references, and claimed that Germany got the "short end of the stick" during the world wars.

Anonymous

10:37 PM

@mikeeustace Obscenicons!

Anonymous

@GeorgePompidou Maybe he likes attention and he's figured out a way to get it? Trolling