English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2017-09-10

« first day (2495 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2419 days later) »

12:10 AM

0

Q: Old synonyms for "blockbuster"?

How were blockbusters called before the word blockbuster came along? I mean major productions, historical epics and prestige films of the 1930s, e.g. Gone with the Wind (the term "prestige film" is also quite a latecomer). I believe Germans have the word Großfilm… I guess I want to emphasize mo...

single-word-requests

5 hours later…

5:19 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body: Subject verb agreement- by Lizzie on english.SE

2 hours later…

7:23 AM

0

Q: What is a single word to describe the state of being singular or plural?

In grammar we have singular and plural nouns. Is there one word to describe this component, like we have the word "tense" to describe the state of being "past", "present", or "future?" e.g., Whether the verb should be singular or plural depends on its [word-goes-here].

single-word-requests

7:39 AM

0

Q: What kind of "-ware" are vases and cups?

Mary makes tea cups, tea bowls, vases and other __ware at the pottery workshop. If it were just tea cups and tea bowls I could write teaware. However, vases aren't teaware. What's the correct word to use in this case? (Say, if the stuff is made of clay?)

single-word-requests

3 hours later…

10:52 AM

0

Q: What is an old legal term for a lease contract that was common in the previous centuries

It is a word that start with "e" and might be derived from Latin. If you buy a piece of land, the notary will usually do a bit of research to trace back the ownership and sometimes it happens that they discover that the land used to be owned by some family who lent it to another family for some...

single-word-requests

5 hours later…

4:16 PM

0

Q: Is there a word to describe a company who keep their clients for life?

To cut a long story short, I'm in the process of setting up a marketing agency and am trying to come up with a concise way of summing up my target market. Essentially I am targeting companies whose services would normally be considered 'expensive' but whose clients often last a lifetime. Examples...

single-word-requests phrases phrase-requests vocabulary

5:13 PM

3

A: Psychology of diphthongs

TD;DR All tense vowels in English form non-phonemic phonetic-only diphthongs in most speakers and contexts. These minor phonologic effects are part of getting an accent right, but they do not change the abstract phoneme, which is still just /e/ or /o/, /i/ or /u/. Native speakers do not think ...

Russian only has five (or six) vowels, and they don’t diphthongize. It has the potential for diphthongs with a /j/ off-glide but those are always written out. In English, they are not. This is confusing the poor fellow.

> Russian diphthongs all end in a non-syllabic [i̯], an allophone of /j/ and the only semivowel in Russian. In all contexts other than after a vowel, /j/ is considered an approximant consonant. Phonological descriptions of /j/ may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda. In such descriptions, Russian has no diphthongs.

> The first part of diphthongs are subject to the same allophony as their constituent vowels. Examples of words with diphthongs: яйцо́ About this sound [jɪjˈt͡so] ('egg'), ей [jej] ('her' dat.), де́йственный [ˈdʲejstvʲɪnnɨj] ('effective'). /ij/, written ⟨-ий⟩ or ⟨-ый⟩, is a common inflexional affix of adjectives, participles, and nouns, where it is often unstressed; at normal conversational speed, such unstressed endings may be monophthongized to [ɪ̟].

From here.

6:03 PM

@RegDwigнt I have a Russian speaker doing his best impression of a bulldog who won’t let go of his notional bone he’s trying to pick in the question I just linked to above. One or both of us is definitely not getting through to the other, so I wondered if you had any insight that might help him.

6:23 PM

@ValentinDrozdov You should come chat here so that other people can read it. I'm in the middle of a domestic project right now though.

1 hour later…

Valentin Drozdov

7:46 PM

Thanks for an invite.

8:16 PM

@ValentinDrozdov Hurray, you're here!

I'm on a coffee break now so we can chat if you have time.

Valentin Drozdov

Yes, though I'm sleepy a bit.

Then I would share my coffee with you if I could.

Valentin Drozdov

I think we need some person who pronounces /au/ and /ai/ with different starting point.
It's almost night here, coffee isn't best choice :))

You said your 15 y/o couldn't think of a word that started the way the beginning of the "ai" diphthong does. This might be because those are two possible diphthongs in General American, one higher than the other. For me, the one in died starts the same as the word otter does for me (but not ought to), while the one in tight starts the same as the word utter does for me.

Plus if he is someone with the CLOTH vowel in otter, that would not work for him.

I think that the first part of the /au/ in cloud would go with otter for me, not with utter.

Valentin Drozdov

he said that about first part of /au/.
first part of /ai/ didn't appear as something standalone for him

8:22 PM

And ought to is more rounded for me.

Well, I don't know which flavor he speaks, but I would expect it to be either the one from his father, his otter, or his utter.

Valentin Drozdov

I mean first part of /ai/ was even less standalone than that of /au/

I understand that.

I just cannot tell you why he said that.

Thinking.

That diphthong might shift a little in some speakers in ways I haven't mentioned, and he may be one of those.

For example, in the Deep South, /ai/ can come out quite differently.

It becomes almost a monophthong, but held out and protracted.

That could have been his case.

It has very little /i/ left to it.

So you can't cut it in two and find a word for the first part.

Valentin Drozdov

In fact you were the only source which said these diphthongs have the same sound AND this sound exists as a phoneme.
Also, this was in fact the reason I started to talk to him. I wanted to ask, why starting sound of these diphthongs doesn't exist in English.
About /ai/ - he said it goes from somewhere near ah to ee

Here's a reference for it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English#South

The starting sound does exist in English.

If it starts near ah, that's a normal sound in English.

Valentin Drozdov

But it's not standalone

8:28 PM

What do you mean?

That's the sound from father and for most of us, from otter.

How does it now stand alone? It's alone there in both those words.

Valentin Drozdov

it's not a monophthong, I mean. He said it's near ah

And he said it only after I asked him 10000 times about this

Before he even didn't think about it this way

Perhaps that's simply the otter/utter variation from died/tight.

If you ask a teenager something ten thousand times, they're going to agree with you just to make you go away. :)

Or tell you anything you want to know. This is why torture is ineffective. :)

Valentin Drozdov

But I didn't suggest him these exact sounds he named :)

I've never met a 15-year-old monoglot anglophone who can talk sensibly about subtle phonetic issues; they haven't the experience or vocabulary.

Valentin Drozdov

but we indeed didn't talk about variations of a sound in different words

8:33 PM

ok

A fifteen-year-old bilingual in English and something else might be able to, though.

I wouldn't get hung up on "near" in "near ah".

Whenever sounds come into contact with other sounds, they always change a little bit.

Valentin Drozdov

No, he was learning Spanish IIRC.
But it was his impression. He said it is near ah because I wanted to find at least approximate location.

I asked if he feels it as a monophthong

And he said no

Well.

Kids here are taught confusing things.

Usually they are taught that a diphthong is two vowel LETTERS like "oy" or "ey" or "ou" or "aw" or "au".

Not that it is two vowel sounds, which is the correct thing.

So it's hard for them to think of the vowel in ate as a diphthong, even though in its homophone eight they might.

If he was learning Spanish this will help. Spanish has five pure vowels, and if you ever need a diphthong you have to add another letter to one of those.

Valentin Drozdov

Yeah, that was a reason not to believe him, but we supplied almost every message with words containing sounds we were talking about. So it seems unlikely there was a mistake. But who knows.

He seemed to understand that we are not talking about "letters", only one time he misunderstood me

From what I can tell, Russian's vowels have a lot of possibilities when you count both stressed and unstressed ones. But those other possibilities don‘t include mutating to diphthongs on their own the way we see happening in English.

You surely already know much more about phonetics than any fifteen-year-old American monoglot I've every met.

It may be that something got confused in the exchange of your conversation.

I really think all our "off-gliding" in English tense vowels is due to our loose articulation. We don't like tense. :)

Valentin Drozdov

Maybe you can ask somebody about this? Maybe you'll find someone who pronounces these sounds different.
lol, that boy also learned a lot, because he was like "let me try to pronounce it loudly, i'll see what'll happen"

It seems to me that your looseness goes from more general tense of vowels

8:45 PM

I did ping our Russian moderator here about your questions, but he doesn't usually show up this late on Sundays; he might be around tomorrow morning your time though.

@ValentinDrozdov yeah

Does Russian have a tighter articulation than English or German?

Certainly Spanish and Italian and even French all do.

Valentin Drozdov

What's difference between tight and tense?

Those are the same, really.

We speak of tense vowels versus lax vowels, but tight articulation versus loose articulation.

Valentin Drozdov

And what exactly you mean by articulation?

It's a matter of how fixed things are, how close, how unchanging.

Valentin Drozdov

I would say it's more tight than English, don't know about German though

But we have this thing..

8:49 PM

Consider German the same as English for these purposes.

I only mentioned it in case you knew it.

Valentin Drozdov

Our words are written more or less as we pronounced it, not like in English.

But

I believe you have your soft consonants in Russian versus hard ones. I think that's palatalization.

You write the same thing for both, but say them differently.

Valentin Drozdov

When we have unchecked syllable (unchecked means unstressed), some vowels must change

Indeed so.

It is the same for us.

Valentin Drozdov

And then comes a slight change in perception of a word.

8:52 PM

That tends to be something that happens in looser articulations; vowel reduction.

Italian and Spanish have stressed versus unstressed, but the vowel is the same no matter where it lands between those. French has no word-based stressed, so it doesn't matter there.

Valentin Drozdov

Yes. But there's a weird phenomenon. You see "A" but must say "O". And your "O" becomes slightly more like "A" because you see "A"

Sounds like vowel harmony.

We have so many flavors of A and O that those are often confused in English.

Valentin Drozdov

A and O are for example, it's not what really changes

oh

ok

We used to pronounce our words the way we write them, but that was five to seven hundred years ago.

Valentin Drozdov

it's more aw (as in law) changes to ah

Yes, that's very interesting part of your history

8:56 PM

I personally get confused by people who do that aw to ah thing in English; they're almost always Californians. :)

Valentin Drozdov

it's a very approximate description :) If you imagine sound between ah and aa

and sound between oh and aw

2 goes to 1

Unless a language is very dedicated to updating its spelling to match changes in speech, there will always be "phonetic drift" that becomes greater and greater as time gets longer and longer.

Compared to when that language's writing was first settled on.

Valentin Drozdov

But the change is very small. You can hear it when you really think about it

(The fear of doing that is that we would know longer recognize each other's languages in writing.)

Valentin Drozdov

But you recognize speech of other accents

8:59 PM

The vowel in English law is either the CLOTH vowel or the THOUGHT vowel, not the FATHER vowel, for most of us.

But for some it's like in FATHER, just ah.

Valentin Drozdov

Yes, that's weird part about accents, and I tend to not think about it

@ValentinDrozdov Yes, but not if we each wrote what we said. We wouldn't be able to read it anymore.

Valentin Drozdov

Because there're too many problems other that this

Because each of us says things a little different from how the next one says things.

Valentin Drozdov

If you write phonemes, then there'll be not much difference

9:01 PM

When an American and an Englishman say the word letter or the word water, we each say a different consonant there in the middle, but that's just what happens in our respective accents.

Valentin Drozdov

Even if australian /ai/ is your /oi/

@ValentinDrozdov You're absolutely right about that!

@ValentinDrozdov "Bugger that!" :)

Yes, "right mate" becomes "roit might" in Stralian.

The phonemes are still distinct, but the phonetics are all shifted.

0

Q: Descriptive word for someone who sees other worlds

What do we call a person who sees between two worlds ? is there a name for such a thing

single-word-requests meaning word-usage phrases meaning-in-context

Valentin Drozdov

a medium?

Answer: Delusionally schizophrenic .

Something like that, yes.

9:05 PM

Or a large.

You can right in phonemes in English, but it takes a while to get used to.

> Yur rayt ðæt “sɪks” ən “sɪt” hæv ɛvər so slaytli dɪfrɪnt fənɛtɪks, bət ðoz ɔl tæli tə ðə sem əndərlayiŋ fonim /ɪ/ ɪn ðə maynz əv əs netəv spɪkərz. Yor tʃælənʒ ɪz tə lərn tə θiŋk ðæt sem we æz wi du.

right.

user image

At least that way you can right it write, or write it right, and never get confused about which of those you should have ridden.

written

See?

Of course for me written and ridden are NOT homophones, so that's somewhat unfair.

Valentin Drozdov

yes

I rather like writing English using that particular phonemic alphabet.

Valentin Drozdov

9:07 PM

But maybe you need to use English alphabet for that

oh

But I can't do that part.

It takes letters that aren't in the English alphabet.

If you want a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters.

> ɪŋlɪʃ raytiŋ wəz orɪdʃənəli ɪntɛndəd tə bi fənimɪk: ælfəbɛts ar nɛvər fənɛtɪk rɛprɪzɛnteʃənz, onli fənimɪk wənz. ɪt wɪl nɛvər bi pasəbl tə rayt ɪŋlɪʃ fənɛtɪkli ɪn ə we θæt pipl awtsayd θæt dayəlɛkt wɪl bi ebl tə mek ɛni sɛns awt əv, sɪns fənɛtɪks veriz so gretli. ɪts also ə hyudʃ baðər gɛdɪŋ ɔl ðə lɪdl sɪmbəlz rayt. bət raytiŋ ɪŋlɪʃ fənimɪkli ɪz rili kwayt izi, rili, wəns yu gɛt yustə ɪt, æz bay naw yu kən si hir ɪn θɪs ʃort ɛgzæmpl.

Valentin Drozdov

but your sites like dictionary.com have spelling for words

I've had to borrow "letters" from the phonetic alphabet for that.

Valentin Drozdov

using only English alphabet

@ValentinDrozdov Those are not useful.

It never tells you how to say it if you don't already know how.

Valentin Drozdov

9:09 PM

why? You only need a way to make the spelling shorter

really?

How do I distinguish the vowels in cat, Kate, cart, cot, cought ?

Valentin Drozdov

I know uh as in butter and uh as in book are the only confusion

They have distinction for all of that

Writing in a phonemic alphabet would blow up the differences between dialects and hinder communication. There's enough dispute over spelling discrepancies already.

The book sound is rounded, but then so too is the room one.

@Færd I fear you're right about that.

If we have to use "ae" to mean the vowel of ham and cat, we might as well write that as its own letter "æ".

Valentin Drozdov

room seems to have 2 possible pronunciations..

9:12 PM

Oh, I think it has only one, just /ru:m/.

What's the other?

Valentin Drozdov

with a short u

Never heard of that.

I don't think you can use a short u in room.

There are definitely words where what you say is true, though.

Valentin Drozdov

dictionary.com/browse/room?s=t

roof, hoof, root

9:14 PM

Really? Out of those I only knew about hoof.

Valentin Drozdov

It's definitely possible to use only English alphabet, you only need to figure out how :)

@ValentinDrozdov This is why I hate spelling pronunciations. If that is intended to mean that it admits both /rum/ and /rʊm/ for room, I believe that an error.

Valentin Drozdov

it's obvious to a mathematician

@Færd Yes, I pronounce all of those with the PUT vowel myself.

Ah.

9:15 PM

So like book not like room.

Like cook not like doom.

Valentin Drozdov

@tchrist but you have like 10000000000000 words with different pronunciations...

@ValentinDrozdov You can use the binary numeral system, but no sane man does that in his daily life.

Like soot not like toot.

@ValentinDrozdov That's because we have 10000000000000 speakers!

Like foot not like pool.

Valentin Drozdov

that's a good joke.

a clear representation of English

@tchrist That's most interesting.

9:17 PM

The funny thing is that when I say "roofs" in the plural, I not only voice the final /z/ but also the /v/.

And still retain the PUT sound?

I say /rʊvz/ for roofs, which is one reason to spell it rooves the old way, I suppose.

It's like hooves being /hʊvz/.

Not /hufs/.

I thought it was either /hʊfs/ or /hu:vz/. (edited, @tchrist)

Valentin Drozdov

I only want to know how you understand each other when speaking?

@Færd It can be /hʊvz/ with a short u but the rest voiced. It is for me.

@ValentinDrozdov We don't hear these phonetic variations is how. We "hear" only abstract phonemes. We have these big mental buckets that a whole bunch of different sounds land in.

9:20 PM

@ValentinDrozdov I bet there are dialectal differences of the same proportions in your own mother tongue.

That is, if enough people speak it.

You train yourself as a little kid to stop hearing little phonetic differences.

@Færd Hooves almost rhymes with wolves.

Valentin Drozdov

So when you hear /rʊvz/ it's okay that 3 of 4 sounds are wrong?

"wrong"

What's wrong?

There's nothing wrong there.

Valentin Drozdov

oh sry it's my grammar

BUT it could be wrong

You know that phial and vile are homophones, right?

Valentin Drozdov

9:23 PM

no

That's another F pronounced as a V, like with Stephen. :)

Valentin Drozdov

what is phial?

It's a glass, a vial.

It's a silly old way to spell vial.

Valentin Drozdov

what do you feel when you hear that California change aw to ah?

Confused.

Bawthered.

Wait, I mean bothered.

See what they do to me!

Valentin Drozdov

9:24 PM

That what I'm talking about.

You can't say anything, of course.

You just have to shift your brain for a bit.

Why would it bother you? It's like a game to me when I try to keep up with a new accent.

Personal names are the worst. There's no way to know without asking him whether Rhys is a Reese or a Reece.

@Færd Because it is a Shibboleth amongst my people. :)

Or whether Smyth is a Smith or a Smithe.

You could change your attitude, if it's just that.

It just marks them as foreign is all.

9:28 PM

Hmm.

People who grew up thousands of miles away from where I did.

Literally.

Me, I like to expose myself to foreign music, eg foreign accents.

Valentin Drozdov

Interesting thing about Russian is we don't actually have many accents. In fact, we only have them where people have different native language along with Russian. Can it be that English spelling is the cause of all your accents?

For a language spoken across such a vast tract of land, that is a strange thing.

Anyway, I came here to ask a question about this:

> "We accuse Sir William Berkeley as guilty of each and every one of the same, and as one who hath traitorously attempted, violated and injured His Majesties interest here, by a loss of a greate part of his colony and many of his faithfull loyal subjects, by him betrayed and in a barbarous and shamefull manner expoased to the incursions and murther of the heathen, and we doe further declare these ensueing persons in this list, to have been his wicked and pernicious councellours."

@ValentinDrozdov Oh no.

Accent precedes literacy.

9:32 PM

The same what?

@Færd Don't know.

Valentin Drozdov

maybe there was another person accused with the same things?

I presume there was some earlier context.

feels comforted

Yeah, perhaps. I'll look for it.

Thanks.

And good night.

Silly me. This is what it is:

> 8. For the prevention of civil mischief and ruin amongst ourselves while the barbarous enemy in all places did invade, murder, and spoil us, his Majesty’s most faithful subjects.

Of this and the aforesaid articles we accuse Sir William Berkeley as guilty of each and every one of the same, ...

Ah right.

Valentin Drozdov

9:40 PM

@tchrist
"Accent precedes literacy."
But people can read some words for first time, for example...

@ValentinDrozdov The different pronunciations people have for words are seldom what we call "spelling pronunciations", which are spellings that proceed from having only seen a word written not heard it said.

Valentin Drozdov

ok

Different pronunciations usually exist because of differences between dialects.

Valentin Drozdov

And how these differences appear?

Maybe if Russian doesn't have accents it won't have them because people already are connected via technology...

Time.

Isolation.

Centuries.

Distance.

You have to hear each other talk. If you don't, things change.

Valentin Drozdov

9:51 PM

How happened that American English is more like British English centuries ago than British English itself is?

@ValentinDrozdov That's mostly a myth. For the most part, each has gone its own way.

user image

That's a pretty complicated phonetic picture for vowels.

Russian phonology

This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect (unless otherwise noted). For discussion of other dialects, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel, /ɨ/, is separate from /i/. Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two sets: hard (твёрдый [ˈtvʲɵrdɨj] ) or plain soft (мягкий [ˈmʲæxʲkʲɪj]) or palatalized Russian also distinguishes hard consonants from soft (palatalized) consonants and from a soft consonant followed by /j/ or a...

I'm sure English speakers take a long time getting all those just right when they learn Russian.

Valentin Drozdov

https://translate.google.com/?source=osdd#ru/en/%D1%88
https://translate.google.com/?source=osdd#ru/en/%D1%89
try to tell these apart

That's hard for English speakers, too; it's (European) Portuguese.

@ValentinDrozdov Those are different for me.

But then, I'm not a normal English speaker. I'm too contaminated.

Valentin Drozdov

I watched a guy on youtube who said it's impossible to tell them apart

Can you?

Valentin Drozdov

9:57 PM

both sound like SH etc.

yes

Then he's wrong, isn't he?

Valentin Drozdov

Yes, I mean he was Russian learner

Probably not one who's studied phonology from a linguistics point of view.

A trained linguist will hear the difference.

People who train to be Bible translators of rare languages have to study like that, languages that are barely written down.

I know people who have done that. It's even something I once wanted to do when I was very young.

Valentin Drozdov

You mean learn a language from speaking directly to a person because they don't write anything down?

Yes!

It seemed very interesting, and very hard.

And people do do it.

I know some of them.

You have to retrain your ear to hear things you've been all your time since being an infant trying NOT to hear.

LegionMammal978

10:02 PM

Got bored and decided to make a list of tenses in English:

Simple present:                  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Basic simple past:               The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Expanded simple past:            The quick brown fox did jump over the lazy dog.
Simple future:                   The quick brown fox will jump over the lazy dog.
Past perfect:                    The quick brown fox had jumped over the lazy dog.
Present perfect:                 The quick brown fox has jumped over the lazy dog.
Present progressive:             The quick brown fox is jumping over the lazy dog.

Anything you think I missed?

You poor fellow.

Those are combinations of tense and aspect and mood.

There are almost infinitely many permutations, most of which nobody is going to say.

LegionMammal978

NOOOOOO ded

English verbs can have only two morphological tenses: the past and the non-past. Everything else we add words for.

Valentin Drozdov

The quick brown fox had had been being having jumped over the lazy dog.

We can't change a verb into the future or the past perfect progressive by changing its ending.

Likewise the whole passive dealio.

So those aren't all that useful, the things you've listed. They don't all have names, and you can always make more of them.

LegionMammal978

10:05 PM

Yeah, I guess the only four forms of the actual verb I see are jump, jumps, jumped, and jumping

Yeah.

LegionMammal978

Language is just weird, I guess

The fox would have had already been being jumped over by the lazy dog.

That doesn't deserve a name.

It also doesn't deserve to see the light of day.

LegionMammal978

Is that even technically valid?

Of course.

But to construct a plausible reference frame in which it could occur is extremely outlandish.

LegionMammal978

10:08 PM

It's weird: The more I try to repeat that sentence out loud, the more my brain decides it probably means something :P

Yup.

It means that the quick brown fox would have already had to have been being jumped over by the lazy dog.

And you can remove being with little change in meaning.

Except that you would be losing the progressive aspect.

LegionMammal978

And once again, the poor LegionMammal978 has learned that he simply cannot have had been out-languaging the linguists

Your take away is that now you can go stump people by asking then what tense that sentence is in. :)

> The quick brown fox would have already had to have been being jumped over by the lazy dog.

"What tense is that?"

It's a terribly mean question.

Because it makes them think there is an answer to it, and it's patently one they do not know.

Of course the question has no answer.

That's the meanness.

It's a trick question.

Would is the only verb that has any sort of inflection to it at all, and it's the past tense of will. That won't help anybody because this is being used as an epistemic modal.

Because we use the past tense to express various kinds of hypothetical events in English.

Especially the past-preterite modals.

Don't go down that rabbit hole. You will find no bunny friends in that warren.

Just smile knowingly and ask them to get back to you once they've worked it out.

You can chain all these together for a very long time, much longer than they have any names for them.

LegionMammal978

11:09 PM

But yeah, too many scenarios involving a quick brown fox, jumping, and a lazy dog :P

« first day (2495 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2419 days later) »

Transcript for

Sep '1710

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

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

phrase-requests pronunciation single-word-requests synonyms

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile