English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Sure, but take Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian. Only about 15 million speakers, in a reasonably small geographic area; but there are about 50 dialects all up.

Mahnax

Huh, interesting.

Another factor that may affect things is how rigid Finnish pronunciation seems to be.

David Wallace

How so?

Mahnax

In English, letters tend to have many pronunciations. In Finnish, there is usually only one pronunciation per letter.

David Wallace

Likewise in Serb/Bos/Cro. Except for R, which can be vowel or consonant.

Mahnax

Hmm, that is interesting.

David Wallace

6:58 AM

I mean that Serb/Bos/Cro is like Finnish and Spanish; unlike English and French.

Cerberus

@Mahnax In a box in the attic?

Mahnax

@Cerberus I think you should stay out of that attic, it's getting weird.

Cerberus

@Theta30 Ah OK. Well, I never understood the benefits of voice-recognition anyway except for typing.

David Wallace

I am curled up in an easy chair, with my laptop at an odd angle. Some inaccurate typing is inevitable.

Cerberus

@Mahnax Why!

Mahnax

6:59 AM

Well, I'm off to sleep. Nice chatting with you all.

@DavidWallace Fair enough.

Cerberus

Night!

David Wallace

Good night.

Mahnax

@Cerberus I have a feeling that tomorrow I will come in here and find that Shog has frozen this room permanently for getting dangerously off topic.

2

Anyhow, night!

David Wallace

Who's Shog?

Theta30

@Cerberus you must have seen Star Trek....Pour me a glass of water....Done!

Cerberus

7:02 AM

@Mahnax He might!

But I think he will be friendlier now that his master has gone.

@DavidWallace This guy who works at Stack Exchange.

Theta30

I had a collegue who use a remote control for the computer and that was 9 years ago

Cerberus

He closed our one of our favourite chat rooms in which we discussed a game we were all playing, all of a sudden after six months.

@Theta30 Yeah, well, have you ever noticed how incredibly inefficient their use of computers is?

David Wallace

Did he lose the game?

Cerberus

@DavidWallace If only! Then there would have been some reason.

No, it was "policy".

David Wallace

Censorship?

Cerberus

7:05 AM

No: the room was private, that means the transcript was not public.

And not everyone could join.

We needed that, because the game involves faction wars against other people.

David Wallace

Why would SE provide rooms like that?

</devilsadvocate>

Cerberus

Because we have a faction with mainly people from this site.

And because it is what we like, and why not foster community spirit?

If you play the game, you're welcome to join!

War Metal Tyrant

A card-battle game.

David Wallace

OK. I guess I don't have my head around how SE pays for itself.

Cerberus

I wonder whether they are making money.

But one little chat room isn't going to cost them more than maybe one cent a month...

David Wallace

If they were losing money, wouldn't someone just pull the plug on the whole network?

Cerberus

7:08 AM

Yes.

Or milk it for cash, somehow.

Sell it to some investor, put advertisements everywhere until the number of visitors dwindles and it dies.

I wonder what their business plan is.

David Wallace

So how can it possibly exist?

Cerberus

I should like to know that too!

David Wallace

AFK about 10 mins.

Cerberus

OK.

Mahnax

I'm back, can't sleep.

Oh well.

David Wallace

7:30 AM

Well he didn't stay long!

Maybe the US government funds it, or something, because it's beneficial to the IT industry.

(the SE network, not Mahnax's beauty sleep)

Mahnax

Beauty sleep, pfft.

Right now, it's hurting my survival sleep.

David Wallace

7:46 AM

Or maybe there's some benevolent billionaire involved.

Theta30

why does it matter?

wikipedia works and is free

David Wallace

It would be nice to know that it's not going to get sold to some investor who's going to kill it off.

(Forgive me if I said that twice, I'm having connectivity issues)

Or maybe they're going to switch it off and publish all the Q's and A's in some giant-arse book.

Theta30

Good point, Well enjoy it as it lasts :)

It has about 2 years already

And there were no major modifications

which I like at it

Some QA sites "renew" themselves and end up dead

David Wallace

Really only two years? I thought it was heaps older.

I'm sure I've seen questions on SO that are older than that.

Maybe I imagined it.

Also, isn't wikipedia always running out of money?

Cerberus

8:03 AM

Hi!

Wikipedia is a foundation, with statutes and all.

It can't be sold.

It really is a great website.

Theta30

@DavidWallace right, at least 3 and 1/2 years

Cerberus

Wikipedia is more than ten years old.

Or were you talking about SE?

Theta30

yes, about SE

Cerberus

Ah OK.

Yeah, I don't know.

I imagine Joel has some money of his old, and they probably collected plenty of cash from investors.

Theta30

night

David Wallace

8:09 AM

I meant SE

But if wikipedia had ads, it would still be a great site. Possibly even better than it is now.

Because they could pay professional researchers.

Cerberus

Hmm why would they need those?

@Theta30 Night!

I am very, very glad that Wiki doesn't have any more ads than it already has.

The ones on top are very annoying.

David Wallace

I manage to tune them out.

And I have yet to buy into the philosophy that a large community can do a better job of providing good information than a small number of professionals.

SE is a case in point. If somebody asks a question and gets two contradictory answers, how can they know which is true? Somebody's numeric reputation isn't necessarily a good indicator of their ability to provide accurate answers; and the community votes don't always go the way they should

Cerberus

True.

But Wikipedia isn't as much based on quantity as SE.

There are in fact a few professionals who guard certain articles in their field and maintain their quality.

I mean, if you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said, "I have no idea: Wikipedia may not work at all; it may dissolve into chaos".

But time has proven that it works quite well.

Several tests have been organized in which professionals compared Wikipedia articles with articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

David Wallace

Yeah, I guess WPedia and SE are two different animals. And I AM aware of all the studies showing that WPedia is as good as or better than a "professional" encyclopedia like Britannia.

Cerberus

It turned out that Wiki was almost as good, and that was several years ago.

Jinx!

Well, then isn't that proof that it works fairly well?

I was talking about "approved versions" with Reg earlier.

David Wallace

8:25 AM

It relies on the people who want to maintain the site being the same ones who have the expertise.

And the absencce of vandals.

Cerberus

I think that's the future: of each Wiki article, there will be a peer-reviewed version with a stamp of approval. It may be old, but it will have been checked, as opposed to the current version, which could contain mistakes.

David Wallace

Yeah, that sounds good.

Cerberus

So there are always two versions you can check: the approved version and the current one.

David Wallace

And it should be the approved one that shows up in search engines, so that when Jo Citizen googles something he/she gets what's appropriate.

Cerberus

Perhaps.

As long as people know the difference.

David Wallace

8:28 AM

Doesn't matter. People editing pages will be served the latest version, approved or otherwise.

Good night.

Cerberus

Night!

RegDwight Ѭſ道

9:46 AM

I see George got trolled real fine last night.

And to think that the starred line about bloempz was originally about vaginas... umpossible!

Cerberus

10:14 AM

Was it??

I had no idea.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Of course. Obviously Matt provided the actual meaning of the word, not this nonsense.

But then Vit said that it was a riddle for you, so we reworded.

Anonymous

Hello

Cerberus

Ohh I never entered that into my mental notebook, because I didn't know what it was about at the time of utterance.

Hi!

Anonymous

What is your time now?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

11:22

Anonymous

10:22 AM

You're six hours behind me. I thought it's early morning at Netherlands .

Wrong person, I thought you were @Cerberus , lol.

Where do you live?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

That's Cerberus's time.

Cerberus

10:37 AM

Yours too, innit?

Anonymous

innit - is this formal word?

Cerberus

No, on the contrary!

It is slang for "isn't it?".

RegDwight Ѭſ道

11:26 AM

0

Q: Could the order of words in the common question be changed?

Examples (somebody is thinking about some thoughts, said by the devil): Maybe he is right... Or isn't he? Maybe he is right... Or he isn't? Maybe he is right... Or even to doubt in his falsehood would be a mistake? Maybe he is right... Or would it be a mistake even to doubt in his false...

word-order questions

Too localized IMHO.

So many mistakes, not only grammatical but also logical.

FlackBot

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…