Is this example sentence correct: "Wishing to improve one's English but being unable to surround themselves with native speakers, one could pursue other methods." How could it be corrected/improved? It seems wrong to ask this as a formal question - perhaps you can just help me here, please?:)
@Cerberus It is indeed. It was a fair and welcome warning for me to rethink the track I'm on. It hit me where it hurt.
What troubles me most about my English is that it friggin' lacks originality. And the banal medium of the language can't seem to cultivate fresh thoughts, or hampers the process at least.
It also reminded me about what kind of language I should aim for and expose myself to.
@PrzemysławP themselves --> oneself
And I don't think that long participial phrase ("Wishing to improve one's English but being unable to surround themselves with native speakers") is felicitous. You can rephrase it in a simpler, less confusing way, like: "If one wishes to improve one's English but is unable to surround oneself with native speakers ...", or less formally: "If you wish to improve your English ...".
My opinion anyway. Maybe others can give you better tips.
@Færd thank you! The priority here is writting long but formally correct sentences, regardless of them being confusing or not. It's instance of trying to use language for esthetics more than for communication.
@Færd Example could be made of poetry where often simplicity is nowhere to be seen and yet beauty is present. Similarly painter is not expected to limit himself to presenting content but is anticipated to exercise formal perfection in his work. It is one thing to be able to speak beautifully, other to have something meaningful to say and yet another to be able to speak in understandable manner. Here I am willing to advance my competence in first of these three.
@AnimeshAshish Why would you ask me? Mistake not one who learns with one who knows. Joking aside - I really don't know. Perhaps someone else can help you.
@Lawrence It is our joy and our delight to extend to both you and your lady wife the honor of an invitation to attend the graduation ceremony of our belovèd son Vernon Ebenezer Milton-FitzReine on Sunday the Twenty-First Day of May in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Seven at Three Hours of the Afternoon, with formal luncheon to follow in the pavilion. — tchrist ♦5 mins ago
I wonder whether he'll catch on. :)
@tchrist Thank you kindly. I hope the graduation went well, but I'll have to offer my apologies as unfortunately the invitation was held up in the post. My compliments on the excellent formatting of your dates. — Lawrence1 min ago
@PrzemysławP You are trying to disprove the claim that "any beautiful language is simple", which is not at all what I said. All I said was cut down on unnecessary convolution, because it won't make your language better in any way. And I think beginning your sentence with a 14-word participial phrase is a good example of what you might want to avoid.
And those three factors you ticked off: they are not as separable as you think. I'll leave it to you to think of the counterexamples, since you're so good at that.
@Færd It's not the case that I disregard simplicity in general. I believe however that if I am able to construct greatly convoluted (even to point of absurd) but formally correct sentences then my proficiency in using language is bound to increase greatly.
Then I would be able to construct desired utterances at will, which can in turn be used for easier expression of thoughts or(inclusive) for fullfilment of aesthetical functions. The sentence I asked about was meant for training reasons and not for practical use. Anyway - thank you for your response and have a beautiful day!
@PrzemysławP I think once you learned the basic rules, twisting them together and coming up with tortuous prose won't be particularly difficult; it can even be easier than producing succinct material if you get used to it. It can take the burden of organizing your thoughts off you and put it on your reader's shoulder. So (and I'm warning myself too) beware of the trap.
I suppose learners (like myself) should put the emphasis on natural language (as opposed to what is deliberately unnatural). But if that sentence doesn't represent a training policy, I have no objection.
@tchrist There is a germ of an interesting question here "Why English ^*&% s Russia in the *%$%*$" but it's so annoyingly worded. I hate 'why' questions. There's no 'why', there's just 'is'.
The assumption may not be correct, but it would be interesting to confirm it or show something else. From the examples, I can see that I think he may be right. English really doesn't have 'roots' like russian does, just words that you tack on endings to. And most English vulgarities are nouns and not really convertible much to other parts of speech (except 'fuck', and maybe 'shit').
But the 'why question is totally idiotic.
because the church did such and such later in Russia, blah blah, and English people are obsessed with poop. That's just a bunch of kids talking.
@Mitch I can't really understand what he's doing with the Russian, but is it in any way specific to the obscene roots or simply a characteristic of Russian words in general? That they can be used to build other words, I mean.
The assumptions I object to are i) the only obscene word you can build insults from in English is fuck and ii) the silly church idea.
@terdon I think part of the question is really claiming that 1) Russian is much more inflected than English and 2) of the inventory of Russian and English obscenities (or vulgarities...I don't know what the difference is), Russia tends to have more ways to build them up, and more of those words are common. The first one is undeniable. the second one I can accept, not knowing Russian.
But 'why'? I hate that kind of question, it is unanswerable.
I just don't know whether what the OP describes is in any way specific to, or even related to, obscenities. It seems like a general characteristic of Russian.
but 'f^%$' really seems to be the only really productive swear word. Yes, you gave a lot of possibilities for others, but those are just not that common in comparison to 'f(*&#'
@SergeyZolotarev actually, cunt is more obscene than fuck. Cock and prick are also obscene. That said, you are making a distinction between vulgar and obscene that isn't very clear. Both your question and your comments make it clear that English is not your first language and you are not entirely comfortable in it (no offense, your English is fine, but you make quite a few mistakes). I respectfully suggest that you might want to consider the possibility that your command of English and its subtleties of meaning is not up to the task of evaluating the vulgarity of my examples. — terdon4 hours ago
That last sentence might be kinda hard to parse for a non-native speaker. Then again, the case could be made that if a sentence like that gives you trouble, you won't be able to understand many of the answers here anyway.
@Mitch No! I took great care to avoid saying anything about whether they should be using this site and restricted myself to an assessment of their chances of profiting from their use.
You should have seen the version I didn't post here, full of phrases like "dirty foreigners" and "taking our jobs" and the like.
Heh, yes. I had to read that a few times before I gave up and concluded the OP doesn't know what the word means.
@SergeyZolotarev Instead of making your writing look cooler, using yore for you're just makes it look like you don't know how to spell. It's definitely not "modern" either. And it's at best a distraction on a website like this one, where we try to have serious discussions about language. Intentionally misspelling words for no reason just hinders communication. — Mr. Shiny and New 安宇56 secs ago
Unless, that is, you can do it well:
Because he was sposta hoist the bomb and the bomb hoist him instead. Rough humour, but it's a rough business. Light the fuse and run is not the most subtle form of anything. — John LawlerSep 4 '13 at 22:50
once I was arguing with someone about the meaning of a word with someone, and finally he said, exasperatedly, as I drove a point home: "That's just semantics".... I didn't know how to respond.
@terdon heh, I actually had Lawler in mind when I wrote that comment. That's why I added the "for no reason" bit.
I'd guess that it would depend on when the -able word was formed. If formed in English, I'd imagine a strong tendency for +ate+able. If borrowed, I'd expect a tendency towards keeping it like the borrowed word.
The beginning was really tough - such a sleepy baby and we had to wake him every 2 hours to feed him in order to get weight gain on track. And my recovery was no cakewalk either so needed a lot of help.
But now we're allowed to let him sleep longer and he often goes 5 hours at night, which is really key to my getting one good stretch of sleep and staying sane.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I don't know how I'd be handling going back to work if it wasn't for the night sleep. My friend with a slightly older kid still doesn't get more than a 3 hour stretch most of the time. Fortunately (as US leave goes) she has the year off unpaid.
@aediaλ yeah my kids didn't start sleeping 4+ hours until about 4 months. My oldest used to wake up at around 10-11pm and be up until 3am... those hours were somehow my responsibility despite me being the one who was working. But she adjusted her sleep cycle longer and earlier until she was going to bed at 9:30 and sleeping until 5am at around 8 months
I'm told I didn't sleep through the night until I was like 18 months or more. Turns out it was because my mom would give me a bottle in the middle of the night... the pediatrician said "give him water", and it only took two nights of that for me to stop waking up.
Hi everyone! I have a quick question. How "strange" is it that an adult native English speaker would not know the word "bovine"? This happened to me in a conversation lately, I'm wondering if that person "forgot" the meaning on purpose or actually didn't know it.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Somehow (trying to go outside a lot despite the cold?) we managed to get baby to agree that bedtime starts sometime between 9pm and 1am, at least for now. He previously insisted that bedtime was 5am and that was kinda rough.
@aediaλ It sorts itself out with time. It can be hard to imagine when you're sleep deprived and dealing with a problem, but the days will go by quickly in retrospect.
@vovick It's not a word used in day-to-day conversation. I'd expect most people to know it, but can imagine that a person might have encountered it rarely enough to have never learned it.
I'd say of all the words like bovine, feline, etc, it should be in the top 5 most well-known, but I bet most people don't know most of those words for most animals.
Huh, ok, thanks, that's reassuring. I was asking because I was being sold something with crushed cow bones by a person who knew I was vegan. So they used "some white substance" instead and only "remembered" after a series of questions about the nature of the substance. Perhaps they really didn't know. :)
Well, the metaphor in "revolution" is that the old thing is overturned and a new thing takes its place. But for a wheel, a single revolution puts it back in the same position it was in before (if not the same location).
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…