English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2016-10-31

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12:18 AM

This answer deserves ᴍᴏᴀʀ upvotes:

4

A: When should we use "can", "could", "will", "would"?

OK, piece by piece. Most people say I wish I could, I wish you would. Can we use I wish I can, I wish you will? No. *I wish I can and *I wish you will are both ungrammatical sentences. As pointed out. I'd like to know what the main differences are between the usage of can/will and cou...

1:08 AM

@Mitch Ah, yes, that is a very nice map!

My house is partly from the 17th century, partly 18th.

Some of the dates on the map are not entirely correct, though: many buildings are supposedly from 1005, which is unlikely: there were very few houses here before 1200.

And your house?

Where did you stumble upon this map?

2 hours later…

3:06 AM

I don't know why so many voters are so surprised that Sauron turns out to be the foreign power backing the first-ever Orkish candidate in the American election.

3:48 AM

@tchrist Maybe it's because we thought the Union of Soviet Socialist Ringwraiths were dissolved when The One Ring was melted in Mt. Mordor?

Vote for Sauron as a write-in candidate: why settle for the lesser evil?

1 hour later…

5:26 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer: On second glance, at second glance, on a second glancing, etc by Nowunoe on english.stackexchange.com

1 hour later…

6:28 AM

This should be pinned. Other than the like, six mods (?) and the hundred and a half people who gave this a cursory glance, no one is paying any attention to it (unless I just missed round one of the comment deletion).

6

Q: What is plagiarism? How do I avoid it? How do I address it when I see it?

The purpose of this question is to clarify how plagiarism is defined for the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, and how the community can respond appropriately to plagiarism when it is discovered. This is being posted for discussion, but my hope is that after getting feedback, correcting e...

discussion policy plagiarism

2 hours later…

7:59 AM

@Mitch Nice map. Is that available for other countries as well?

3 hours later…

user227867

10:30 AM

I just had minced pork noodles for dinner.

user227867

It seems I have run out of pens at home, so I will get a nice new pen tomorrow. Shall I get one with blue ink or black ink? Hmm.

user227867

@FaheemMitha You have been in this room for a long time but have not spoken for a long time.

user227867

11:00 AM

It costs only 16 pounds per year to subscribe to Oxford Dictionaries Premium online which gives you access to not only the English but also the French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Chinese unabridged dictionaries.

user227867

If one does not need paper copies of their dictionaries, then this is a rather good deal.

user227867

Of course, Collins already offers their English, French, German, Italian and Spanish dictionaries for free at collinsdictionary.com.

11:44 AM

@WillHunting True, I'm not terribly active here. Sometimes I come and ask questions about English usage.

He's a lurker, our Faheem

:P

12:44 PM

Hoppy Holloween

@Mazura Faqqed that for you.

12:56 PM

@tchrist And also to you.

Spiritus vobiscum

Hm, maybe more than one ghost.

Et cum dominu tuo...?

I'm shipping up to Boston this afternoon.

Hello @KitZ.Fox long time no see. Hope you are well.

Hello @Arrowfar

1:30 PM

@Cerberus and few that could survive from that time, unless they were stone castle types.

@Cerberus 1950

user image

user227867

@KitZ.Fox I just watched 'The 11th hour' starring Kim Basinger which is about a woman who desperately wants to have a baby and cannot conceive. I thought it would be interesting to a mother like you.

Islam, the religion of peneace.

user227867

No religion in this chat.

user227867

Here comes Mr Aruba-ruba-ruba.

1:36 PM

@Cerberus twitter feed from someone who does random visual things. Or was it 'Amazing Maps' twitter feed? One of those.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Morning

user227867

The movie I talked about above has a twisted story and a surprise ending. It has negative reviews but is actually brilliant in its own way. Kim Basinger pulled off the role.

user227867

I give it 8/10, highly recommended.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt and of shitty phones, it seems

@Arrowfar Most maps like these are one-offs. Someone got hold of, or worked real hard on, one special set of limited data, and then worked real hard on one special visualization for it. Yeah, I'd love to see this for any town of my liking. But unlikely to generalize.

user227867

1:39 PM

No shit in this chat.

user227867

Happy Halloween! Don't let the pumpkin man get to you!

I think I haven't watched a movie in like 1.5 years. The last movie I watched was Gone Girl.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@WillHunting you mean Trump?

he is orange, after all

@Mitch Yeah it is pretty good. And hello.

user227867

ALEX (Feat. Jacob Sartorius) | Trailer

user227867

1:41 PM

Jacob seems to be acting in a Halloween movie. Wonder where it is showing...

user227867

My phone went mad. It gave me thumbnail images of things I deleted weeks ago on files that I created hours ago that are totally not related.

@Cerberus towns w > 1000 inhabitants:

user227867

It's like I take a pic of Mr Shiny and the thumbnail shows a pic of Kit that I deleted a decade ago.

user image

user227867

@Mitch I really like AHD. You know about the appendices on Indo-European roots too. It's really good. Not present in any other dictionary, it seems.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

1:43 PM

@WillHunting are you reusing filenames?

probably the thumbnail cache still has the old images and they match somehow

@WillHunting right. it's like they have actual linguists working on it rather than a bunch of copy editors. They also have a similar root list for Semitic.

user227867

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's the auto file name generated when you take something with your phone, and the date is different, so the name should be different because it is based on the full date.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@WillHunting hm, odd.

user227867

@Mitch I think Oxford has a lot to learn from American Heritage...

So you know the etymology of maven

user227867

1:44 PM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Strange things keep happening to me, more so than to others, it seems.

@WillHunting OED or one of those bastard dictionaries I vaguely hear of that use Oxford in the name?

user227867

Since the Oxford Paravia Italian Dictionary is out of print and the Collins Italian Dictionary only has 230,000 translations, I think English speakers have to use a bilingual dictionary published by an Italian publisher to have at least 400,000 translations, such as the Ragazzini published by Zanichelli. Now why am I even mentioning this in this chat? I guess there is no other place to talk about it.

@Arrowfar disturbing. You need an uplifting happy movie. Like 'Up'. Except for the first fifteen minutes. Spoiler: it's sad. but after that it's fun.

@WillHunting I have some things to say that I can't say anywhere else.

Uh oh...I've already said too much

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch yeah the first few minutes of that movie. ugh. I didn't want to watch the rest.

My favorite is the The Free Dictionary dot com.

1:47 PM

hides in safe room

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@WillHunting software glitches happen to everyone.

enables booby traps

@ChristoferOhlsson Good morning!

@Mitch No bras required?

Christofer Ohlsson

@tchrist Good day! :)

user227867

My favourite underwear store closed down, so I need to find another store to admire beautiful men's underwears without buying them.

Christofer Ohlsson

1:49 PM

Regarding "preposterous" I do think what you write sounds like the writings of an expert. I just cannot perceive how what you write is factual on that matter. I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand how you can be right.

So, what do you find preposterous? Romance phonemes’ phonetic realizations are quite different English ones. This in part derives from the tenser articulation of Romance lagnuages compared with Germanic ones.

Tell me what you don't believe.

Christofer Ohlsson

Surely their ears must be able to pick up the exact same sounds as a Spanish ear does?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's very troubling to watch as an adult. Despite that, I recommend the rest of the movie.

@ChristoferOhlsson That isn't how phonemes work.

@tchrist for collecting combustibles.

1:51 PM

We all of us hear many different sounds that we map to phonemes, which are a mental not auditory thing.

Do you really thing an English-speaker hearing the [ɣ] in amigo will correctly reproduce that? They can’t because that is not a valid sound in English.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch If you want a movie about a grumpy old man who reluctantly becomes a father figure to a child, who defeats a villain that invents stuff, I'd recommend Despicable Me

@ChristoferOhlsson different languages pronounce things differently. Even a Spanish 't' is slightly different from an English one.

Frankly some English 't's are different from other English ones.

Similarly, an unstressed a in English reduces to a schwa. That does not happen in Spanish but the English speaker cannot even notice that.

Australia, amirite!

It takes a great deal of training to break the habits of one’s mother tongue.

Or even to realize these exist.

1:53 PM

It's like your tongue is broken

also your ear

Think of the word Castro.

a better analogy would be...

Fashion?

@Mitch Hah true. I couldn't watch the whole film in one sitting anyway. Yep I hear "Up" is pretty good, I will definitely watch it sometime.

or is that too post-modernist?

@WillHunting Lol! I am puzzled though.

Christofer Ohlsson

1:56 PM

When you say "cannot", that just has got to mean "has a hard time to" or "will need some dedicated training in order to"?

Oh sorry, you addressed that concern in part.

It's not that everyone's opinion is right (that's the pomo part), but rather that language communities... have habits that fall into ...let's say... distinct categories?

@ChristoferOhlsson For Castro, the English speaker says [ˈkʰæstɻʷoʷ] and the Spanish speaker says [ˈkäs̺t̪ɾo̞]. And the English speaker will tell you they are saying the same word even though they are pronouncing each and every sound in that word differently than each sound is being produced by the Spanish speaker. See the problem?

they may overlap with others, but there will definitely be non-overlapping parts.

Christofer Ohlsson

I cannot fathom how the English speaker would think that :)

And of course for one language X, they don't know the parts of Y that... wel, the parts they don't know.

likewise Y for X.

so one is not better or correct, and the other worse or wrong, they're just diffferent.

an extra f for emfasis

So which is correct? English [ˈkʰæstɻʷoʷ] or Spanish [ˈkäst̪ɾo̞]? Both are. Obviously the Spanish one in Spanish contexts and the English one in English contexts.

2:02 PM

Sorry, missed a diacritic on [ˈkäs̺t̪ɾo̞].

But what about in mixed contexts? The answer is, for a Spanish speaker hearing an English person saying it, is "Wow, that dude's Spanish accent is the worst"

The /k/ is not aspirated. You cannot get an English speaker to do that.

And for the English speaker hearing a Spanish speaker, it is "That dude sounds funny. Is he Spanish?"

But for both, they're both pointing at that Castro dude and understanding it.

The /a/ is a centralized [ä], not [a] or [ɑ] or for the love of all that’s santo, [æ]. The swap of [ɑ] for [æ] is the most annoying screw-up.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 no, that's Apple.

2:04 PM

The /s/ is apical so [s̺] which sounds "thicker" to an English speaker. It makes it easier to get to the dental [t̪] that follows it.

@Mitch I'd like to see the same map for City or Town above 10,000,000 inhabitants.

And English doesn’t have a dental /t/.

So they cannot say it right.

Ask the Welsh. They are generally better at everything.

Like, they can even pronounce ы, you know.

Then we come to [ɻʷ] in English for [ɾ] in Spanish. The English do not understand that this is the sound in ladder and kitty so screw it up.

As for English [oʷ] for Spanish [o̞], I think we’ve covered that one.

@RegDwigнt @ChristoferOhlsson is boggling at why English speakers do not faithfully reproduce Romance, in this case Spanish, phonology.

Fun fact: 50% of all sounds in BrE are glottal stops. (The rest are schwas.)

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:07 PM

@tchrist Just to be devil's advocate, saying the same word and pronouncing a word the same way are two different things.

ʃʔ

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Completely valid.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist which is, I think, part of people's misunderstanding. They feel like they're pronouncing the word properly, because it's close enough.

Fuʔ faʔt: the Briʔish are gloʔl stoʔs.

In North America we no longer swap [ɑ] for [æ] in Romance words like taco and macho but the Engrish do.

@ChristoferOhlsson Don't worry about cannot vs have trouble with. There is nothing special about English vs Spanish. The Inuit have trouble pronouncing Tahitian (and vice versa).

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:11 PM

@Mitch Fun fact: The inuit have 200 words for languages they can't pronounce.

San Francisco no es macho, es solamente un borracho.

@RegDwigнt I'm sure that's been done.. well maybe 1M.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 To pronounce it properly requires putting your entire mouth into a different setting. If speaking Spanish you cannot stick in an English word and have it sound right, nor vice versa. You have to use the current language’s rules, or it stops your speech cold.

@Mitch I think my point just went straight over your head.

That map would have exactly one dot on it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist yeah. I have a hard time fitting my own kids' names into French sentences.

2:12 PM

@RegDwigнt ¡Qué no digas tantas porquerías sobre Papa Paco!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I can believe that.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 fun fact: the inuit do not have 200 words for anything at all. Their language is highly agglutinative. They do not have words, only complete sentences.

user image

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt fun fact: The Inuit have over 200 sentences for whoosh

@ChristoferOhlsson Are you sure you can say [ˈkäs̺t̪ɾo̞] for Castro instead of [ˈkʰæstɻʷoʷ]? Probably the closest you can get is still [ˈkʰɑstɻoʷ] I would bet.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 nono, I got yours alright. You ain't got mine tho.

2:16 PM

@RegDwigнt whatever your point, there is more than one city with more than 10M. NYC, Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City... maybe Jakarta? Anyway, there's a map with other city names.

@Mitch jesus fuck. I meant on that exact map you posted earlier.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt no, I got it, it's like German

There'd be exactly one dot.

Moscow.

I will only allow Istanbul to be counted as a European city if they rename themselves Constantinople.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 you can't have gotten it. I haven't even mailed it yet. Liar.

@ChristoferOhlsson But [ˈkʰɑstɻoʷ] is not [ˈkäs̺t̪ɾo̞], even though those are both /ˈkastro/ phonemically. It’s the different mapping of abstract phonemes into phones between Spanish and English that makes this completely different; each language is doing things the other cannot, and so neither will hear the precise allophones manifest here, nor be able to reproduce them.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt I get future mail deliveries in the present; saves time.

2:18 PM

Impossible. English quite literally has no future.

Oh, and Castro is often affricated in English.

@RegDwigнt I didn't!

Cas-chro.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt Thankfully, I also speak French, which does.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 haha, "thankfully" and "French" in the same sentence. Brilliant. Keep them coming.

2:19 PM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 They made it all up, you know. The French future is just an inflection of avoir smashed on to the infinitive. :)

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist It's all made up, so, I'm okay with that

Too damned many make up experts.

Also, French technically doesn't have future, either. They just randomly attach "ra" to words. Kind of like Lady Gaga.

0

A: Shall: In Present Tense

If you will please read the rest of your link, you see that it itself spells out that should is “properly” the past tense form of shall, which is itself a present tense verb. This is similar to how would is the morphological past tense form of the present tense verb will. Similarly with may and m...

> Hoc autem scito quod in novissimis diebus instabunt tempora periculosa.

TL;DR.

Shall, go to hell.

2:22 PM

If you want a future tense, you know where to find it.

That’s the TLDR.

I can produce future tense in an instant: instabunt.

I can produce present tense in an instabunt: instant.

Huhuh. Insta bum.

I saw a pause there

In the wink of an eye.

@Mitch Thaʔ's because you're Briʔish at heart. We discussed earlier.

Scuss it now.

2:24 PM

Scusate.

Me excuso.

Pero no te excuso yó.

Me expresso! He has a flea!

Duo expressis, fush favor.

gushes

0

Q: IOS imploded baiduMap sdk error?

this is xcode tip error msg removed after this problem is not troubled by the day I was aware of can help me about it!!thanks

Migrate to sexperts.se, right?

2:30 PM

Do not migrate shit. Flush it.

Not being a sexpert, I couldn’t comment on their scatty practices.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 reminds me of a sketch I loved watching as a child, on a program similar to Sesame Street. It involved a mom teaching her kid the Russian word for "apple", which happens to begin with the Russian word for "I", which the kid then kept replacing with the word for "you".

And orange you glad about it!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt heh

Like, if you had to do this in English, she talks about "ice cream", and the kid keeps talking about "youscream".

Interestingly it's not up on YouTube. Hm. What gives.

2:40 PM

English or Russian?

Christofer Ohlsson

I've been away, but it looks like I have lots of good replies to read through. Thank you for taking your time with a lingual sap such as I.

I believe that otolaryngologists can treat lingual sap now.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwigнt yeah we play that game a lot with words that have "I" or "me" or "you" in them

@tchrist Russian, and the word to search for is тыблоко.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist in Quebec they'd boil it into lingual syrup

2:43 PM

Tree ankle you say?

This is pretty good:

6

A: Where does the @ symbol come from?

It seems the best current scholarly theory is "none of the above." The theories cited in the question have been proposed by various scholars, but there is little evidence to back any of them up. However, another proposal came out of the work of Italian scholar Giorgio Stabile in the late 1990s....

1 hour later…

4:04 PM

@tchrist Hi, I am not sure what happened, but you are undeleting some posts that are not necessary to undelete, for example, his/her draft version.

How to say that something is real and it's a serious matter? Do you know some cool phrases?

No shit

No joke

It's not a fairy tale.

more?

@JustynaNogala "I'm dead serious" or "I am not joking" perhaps?

"It's grave"?

@JustynaNogala I'd need more context to select something really good, but "Don't scoff it off" comes to mind if you can tolerate dangling prepositions.

Louisiana is full of dreadful black magic, the magic which does no good but harm, make blind, captivate, impose, ruin and eventually kill.

btw check if I made any mistakes in this sentence.

4:24 PM

@Tonepoet That's odd phrasing. "Don't scoff at it" or "Don't laugh it off" would be more common, I should think.

It should not be too informal.

No shit is very informal.

Also "No kidding" comes to mind.

idioms.thefreedictionary.com/No+kidding

@KitZ.Fox I know, that was just an example.

@tchrist Can you stop undeleting those posts for a while?

You are producing duplicate answers by undeleting preliminary versions.

4:35 PM

@Rathony Where?

@tchrist The one that you just deleted 2 minutes ago. There are much more.

@tchrist Please review one by one. His/Her style used to be make a draft, delete it and post a new answer again. I saw many of them in the past.

@Rathony I’m afraid that’s not dispositively identification.

@tchrist What I am saying is be careful when you undelete those posts.

whatever the reason is.

Noted.

Cool.

I am out.

4:42 PM

@JustynaNogala I prefer "Louisiana is full of dreadful black magic: The sort of magic which does no good but harm, blind, ensnare, impose, ruin and can eventually kill." The colon introduces the next sentence as an exemplification of the first if I recall correctly. Depending upon what you mean, beguile might be better than ensnare, or you might want to add that to the list afterwards. Captivate sometimes has positive connotations, e.g. 'captivating interest'.

thanks.

@KitZ.Fox It seems that you are right, especially if the web is an accurate indicator, which is news to me. I hear "scoff it off" occasionally though, and part of the appeal to it is prosodic

Could be regional difference.

@JustynaNogala Will might sound better than can.

5:23 PM

@Mitch Indeed. We have some exteriors from the 14th century that I know; I know there are many houses with newer gables but old inner walls/etc., but that's not very visible.

@Mitch That's a nice map, but it is also a matter of definition: what counts as a town?

And administrative change could multiply the number of towns in a region.

Same for cities / urban areas / agglomerations.

Are both of these grammatical: "Always leaving then deciding to coming back" and "Always leaving then deciding to come back"?

I wrote the first one somewhere recently but now it seems wrong. I'm not sure.

Decide to + infinitive.

~~Decide to + gerund.~~

Hi. Yeah I know, but we often use "to plus ing" as well. That's why I was confused.

Ah I see

And hello!

@Arrowfar Yes, but it depends on the verb.

If the verb can have to + noun, then it can also have to + gerund.

If not, then not.

~~I decided to negotiation.~~

I am committed to the defence of the realm.

I am committed to defending the realm.

5:45 PM

@Cerberus That makes sense. So how can I know which verb can have "to + noun"?

For example we say “Looking forward to hearing from you” in emails etc. I’m looking at the word “hear” in Webster’s online and don’t see any guidance or key etc. that helps or says it can have “to + noun”.

@Arrowfar I'm afraid there is no way to know.

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hear

Oh.

You can search Google Books and see what you find.

If you find to + noun, then you know that this is possible.

Yeah that's the only option I think heh.

I was looking forward to the party.

Does this sentence sound good to you?

5:46 PM

Yes absolutely.

Then you know to + noun is possible with the verb look forward.

And so to + gerund must also be possible.

And that also means that to + infinitive is usually not possible (although sometimes both constructions are possible with the same verb).

~~She intended to the surrender.~~

Does this sound good to you?

Um it looks awkward.

I agree.

So intend to + noun is not possible.

phew. yeah.

Hence it is she intended to leave, not ~~she intended to leaving~~.

Hint: verb + to + infinitive is common.

Verb + noun/gerund is common.

Verb + to + noun/gerund is uncommon.

5:51 PM

I see. nods

Verb + infinitive means the verb is an auxiliary verb, she will leave, she can leave.

There are very few auxiliary verbs, but the ones that we have are very frequent.

Thanks!

De nada.

In school/college here they only covered the basics and this seems like detailed stuff. I mostly get it right but only sometimes it seems awkward.

I think more reading and practice is required.

Reading helps with idiom like this.

5:59 PM

Also it depends on the teacher I think. They didn't cover anything this deep/small I think.

Make sure what you read is proper English, though.

yeah.

heh true.

Like a major newspaper or a classic novel.

These days I only read stuff written by native speakers. Here we get this English newspaper.

Good, good.

Especially novels can help you with constructions and idioms that are less common.

6:03 PM

I get this newspaper daily at my home but I am pretty sure only non natives write in it. I don't read it but my dad does. This one:

dawn.com

Well it is a website. I get the paper version.

Yep, some novels are well written and good for English.

6:16 PM

@Arrowfar Looks good to me, I read an article.

Yeah it is quite popular here.

7:16 PM

@Cerberus Yes. How things are defined is important. I'm not surprised that Champagne and les Alpes Maritimes are less dense than others but then should also be Gascony, Brandenburg and Bavaria. and such differences could be artifacts of how borders and 'town' and 'resident' are defined.

It's one big artifact.

I've complained here before about how maps can be misleading with assumptions that are different about data from location to location.

Why Bavaria?

I always thought Bavaria was sparse.

sparser.

user image

user image

7:26 PM

Also, 'towns >1000' could mean blank space is same population but spread out more evenly (which should correspond to density).

Also chloropleth maps are notoriously misleading because they color by area. They usually don't correct by dividing by area.

That said, on second look, brandenburg and Gascony are less dense, in boh the '>1000' map and the population density ones you gave

Surprising that Spain looks depopulated as Scandinavia

Wait...Ireland... I thought its entire population was ~5M, but it looks near as dense as (Little) England having probably 10 times the population.

@Mitch Exactly.

@Mitch I should think they do correct for area is they are to be useful.

My first map does.

Then again, you can do some gerrymandering with what areas you pick.

That can result in vastly different colourings.

@Mitch Brandenburg, yes; but Bavaria?

@Mitch Spain has larger and darker dark areas, so it's more densely populated.

I think my second map is not very useful.

@Cerberus I always thought Bavaria was pretty thinly populated except for some big cities like Munich, Nurnberg. But I guess I was wrong

@Cerberus I thought the 2nd map would be more accurate because it doesn't have the possibility of the relative area problem.

2 hours later…

9:54 PM

What unofficial rules govern the pronunciation of Nahuatl words like 'chipotl' in Spanish? For instance, I recently looked in my fridge and saw a bottle of Tabasco chipotle hot sauce. The label gave a a pronunciation (in Mexican Spanish). Obviously, that's nowhere near how a Nahuatl speaking person would say it. What are the rules? — Mitch 1 min ago

@ChristoferOhlsson @tchrist I jest of course. But Christofer, can you narrow things down on that question? maybe just ask what the rules are for that single word?

Boo!

10:42 PM

@Mitch I would say the areas make it better!

It's per km², not the total population of an area.

10:57 PM

@Mitch The stuff he looked up and found is very deceptive. And not true.

@Mitch I still think Castro being [ˈkʰæst͡ʂɻoʷ] in English versus [ˈkäs̺t̪ɾo̞] in Spanish is a good one. Most people will pick up on /æ/ for /ɑ/ but miss everything else.

And honestly, [ˈkʰɑst͡ʂɻoʷ] is almost as bad. The thing is that every anglophone monoglot will think they are saying [ˈkʰɑst͡ʂɻoʷ] "like the Spanish version" when it is anything but.

Matt E. Эллен

11:50 PM

It's funny that the pun "happy hollow bean" works because of the rigid way we order adjectives.

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Oct '1631

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...

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