English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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1:41 AM

Well, I got a library card today and now I have access to the O.E.D. online. I guess those notes I transcribed from the O.E.D. 2nd Ed. were mostly for naught.

Tonepoet

2:00 AM

@Cerberus Everybody knows tchrist is actually somewhere inbetween the first and second coming, and the true neutral form of Jesus. =P

Cerberus

@Tonepoet Or they're a kind of trinity together?

Like me.

Tonepoet

@tchrist Is the T short for tri?

tchrist

Tonepoet

2:16 AM

@tchrist Did you make that? Google isn't giving me a reverse image search result.

tchrist

There, I’ll let you fill in the missing tehtar in your own mind.

Oh bother.

Not gonna finish, too tired.

Google's OCR just isn't OCD enough for this, is it now?

Tonepoet

2:42 AM

@tchrist I just tried a reverse image search. I did not really consider its O.C.R. abilities.

tchrist

Tinco.

tchrist

3:02 AM

Call me Tauron.

Conrad.

Tonepoet

3:36 AM

@tchrist It's spelled Konrad and I'm a King Arthur wannabe. Get it right or I'll have my purple robed mentor Delphador zap you with force lightning or something. It has a 70% accuracy rate! >_>...

7 hours later…

Andrew Leach

10:18 AM

@tchrist I can just about get Tauron out of that. It's very stylised.

Færd

11:11 AM

@Mitch There's this book, Oxford English Grammar Course (Advanced), which claims to be more than sufficient for the most advanced English tests. In one of its appendices titled "prepositions after verbs, adjectives and nouns" it provides a list of more than a hundred common combinations of prepositions with other words, saying: "These are examples of some common combinations (and some cases where no preposition is used), which may still cause problems at this level." (Emphasis mine)

So yeah, it does stick with learners till the end.

Here's a couple of those examples:

> Do you often dream about work?

> When I was young, I dreamt of being an explorer.

It suggests that dream in the sense of active daydreaming comes with of and in the sense of sleep dreaming it comes with about.

Hmm, I don't think that's exclusively true.

Færd

11:33 AM

@tchrist Thanks. I didn't realize till the very last verses that it was in English!

@Cerberus So was it a spelling irregularity in Latin? Because denounce is from the same root (de-nuntio or something like that) and yet doesn't have two n's.

Maybe the d and the first n in ad-nuntio fused into nn.

1 hour later…

tchrist

12:53 PM

/slɔθ/ or /sloʊθ/?

1 hour later…

Andrew Leach

2:12 PM

@Færd Dream of something which is essentially unattainable, dream about something which is normally (or likely to be) within one's own experience.

I think.

@tchrist /sloʊθ/ whether animal or abstract.

tchrist

2:30 PM

@AndrewLeach It was hearing David Attenborough say it with /o/ that made me ask.

Thanks.

I’ve never been able to detect any pattern into whether words like that fall into the moth bucket or into the both bucket.

Cerberus

2:49 PM

@Færd Yes, that is normal in Latin, and it's called assimilation.

Annul, annotate, annex...

tchrist

3:18 PM

> Q: Can the senate elect a dictator for life?
A: Yes they can, but the term runs thirty days only.

tchrist

3:38 PM

Senior    Senate      Seniorum
Senator   Senatrix    Senatores
Senatory  Senatorian  Senatorial
Senex     Senium      Seniliter
Seneca    Stentor     Stentorian

Mitch

4:04 PM

Senatorium

tchrist

Santorum

tchrist

4:20 PM

I feel like we suffer from a surfeit of writing-advice requests masquerading as this-or-that requests. Convince me otherwise.

tchrist

5:18 PM

Do towns count as urban, suburban, or rural?

To me, none of those applies.

Well, huh: dailykos.com/story/2008/4/8/491907/-

> Clearly what is thought of as rural by someone in New York City is very different than a person in a small remote town in Montana.

Yes, that is exactly the problem.

tchrist

5:49 PM

+1 and I am sorry to hear about your scortle’s floopess. I have to say never really trusted her. — oerkelens May 9 '14 at 15:57

tchrist

6:01 PM

Today I learned:

1. ELLers are not taught about conjunction reduction.
2. ELLers do not recognize the validity of conjunction reduction.
3. ELLers don’t think conjunction reduction makes sense.
4. ELLers keep asking about conjunction reduction, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
5. ELLers have a very dim grasp of how to coördinate constituents in the first place.
6. ELLers have never read much English outside the Twitterverse, let alone in actual written English from the past five hundred years.

Solution: Read real books.

Somehow no one can understand simple matters of written English any longer, let alone the more complex constructions used in fine writing, oratory, and rhetoric.

And they would hate my last sentence because I used conjunction reduction, having long ago lost track of the fact that they were still in the direct-object constituent and thus that was what was being coördinated.

So they want everything repeated so that they don't lose track of what was being said and they want everything repeated so that they don’t have to understand anything about how a sentence is put together and they want everything repeated so that they don’t have to think.

I guess that's what we get with a nation whose average reading level is stuck somewhere between the third and fourth grade.

2 hours later…

Tonepoet

8:04 PM

@tchrist Wait, you've been an English Language & Usage member longer than I have, and you're just learning that today?

1 hour later…

Rejlan Givens

9:08 PM

Hi everyone, can someone please tell me what this thing is called in English. It is a sort of a cotton material used for cleaning in industry primasubotica.com/image/l87800.jpg

2 hours later…

Anonymous

11:01 PM

@tchrist I'm not familiar with the latter!

Anonymous

The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists various pronunciations on both sides of the pond, but suggests that /əʊ/ is favored in BrE and /ɔ/ in AmE.

Anonymous

The LPD does list /oʊ/ and /ɑ/ for AmE as well.

Anonymous

I wonder if I've never heard those before or if I've simply never noticed before. Are they common?

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