English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

SmokeDetector

00:41

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected: "Straight man" is to "womanizer" as gay man is to _______ by Steven B. on english.SE

tchrist

01:13

Chill, Smokey.

Feeds

0

Q: Word to describe a character who is famous but misunderstood or taken out of context

The best example I can think of at the moment is Frankenstein’s monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Many people know of the existence of this character well enough to allude to it (though usually erroneously by the name of its creator) at times when they see or imagine a grotesque being. Ho...

single-word-requests

KannE

01:39

Misunderstood character--Charlie Brown--Frankenstein has become Charlie Brown. YW.

Feeds

08:28

0

Q: "During evening" / "During morning" words?

I know there are similar words for "during night" - nocturnal and "during day" - diurnal. Are there any words (no matter the origin) to describe "during morning" an "during evening"? The best options I could think for now are.. well, "evening" and "morning" because things like "That's a morning ...

single-word-requests

Feeds

09:31

1

Q: Word like oratory but for writing

As it says in the headline, looking for a word that represents "the art of writing" in the same way that 'oratory' in some sense represents the "the art of speaking". Should be able to complete the sentence, "She had great ___________ ". BONUS: Obviously a noun, but is there a specific grammati...

single-word-requests nouns

Matt E. Эллен

10:10

writeatory

Matt E. Эллен

11:41

dang I'm sleepy

user1732

11:52

sleep

Matt E. Эллен

I must work

user1732

wanna hear a joke?

Matt E. Эллен

sure

user1732

Q: how many Oxford dons does it take to change a light bulb?

Matt E. Эллен

I don't know how many Oxford Dons does it take to change a light bulb?

user1732

12:04

A: gasp CHANGE?!

Matt E. Эллен

lol

user1732

:D

Matt E. Эллен

accurate :D

user1732

(not my original)

Mitch

14:03

Oh Monday

Feeds

14:32

0

Q: Term for a type of relationship that two parties benefit from

Looking for a term, phrase or idiom that best describes a special type of relationship between two parties, not necessarily humans, in which both gain unprecedented benefits. However, such advantages could not be acquired without the relationship; they can continue their own ways without that. In...

single-word-requests phrase-requests meaning-in-context idiom-requests

Cerberus

14:52

@RegDwigнt Also impressive.

Especially the overnight bag, wow.

@user1732 Accurate and appropriate!

tchrist

15:07

> A zonkey, sometimes called a zebrass, or a zedonk, is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a female donkey.

Several oddities there.

You first notice the unusual glosses.

Then you notice the oddly imparalleled pair at the end.

Rather than having a male zebra and a female donkey, or a zebra stallion and a donkey jenny.

Cerberus

And what is that "oddly imparallelled pair" called?

tchrist

It's called a parallelism failure.

Or are you seeking the Greek term used for that rhetorical device?

Cerberus

Well, it was a rhetorical question.

So no seeking.

Did you notice how I wrote "What what" for "And what"? Why do I do that?

Do other people do this, too?

tchrist

The Greek would be some sort of antiantithetical construction, but not thetical.

Cerberus

A strange care of regressive verbal assimilation.

Matt E. Эллен

15:13

the should be a book series about a horse who discovers on their eleventh birthday that they're destined for greatness. An elephant with an umbrella should come and rescue them from a terrible holiday and shout "You're a donkey, Jenny!"

Cerberus

Chiasmus

In rhetoric, chiasmus or, less commonly, chiasm (Latin term from Greek χίασμα, "crossing", from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ") is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words". Chiasmus should not be confused with a subtype of this scheme, antimetabole, which also involves a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses, but unlike chiasmus, presents a repetition of words in an A-B-B-A configuration. == Examples of chiasmus and its subtype antimetabole == Chiasmus balances words or phrases with...

tchrist

Antithesis being the opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.

Cerberus

It seemed you knew.

Matt E. Эллен

Jenny Trotter and the Veterinarian's Stethoscope

tchrist

@Cerberus I always think of it as a gaping syntactic gulf for dramatic effect.

Cerberus

15:15

@MattE.Эллен "And you're a bit old for a horse to still not have found your destiny. And destiny is a fairytale invented by silly people."

@tchrist Aren't you confusing chiasmus with hiatus?

tchrist

Oh semantic not syntactic?

@Cerberus Of course.

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus oh dear. yeah, not long to vanquish You Know Who

tchrist

@MattE.Эллен The oneteenth birthday is said to be especially hard if you’re an ass.

Cerberus

@tchrist Chiasmus means "having the shape of the letter Χ ("chi")". Hiatus means yawning, opening.

tchrist

@Cerberus Yes, I’m thinking of the chasm.

Which gapes.

Hm, or is that unteenth?

Cerberus

15:18

Yes, Latin hio (=>hiatus) is from Greek chaô, I believe.

Matt E. Эллен

unteenth sounds better

Cerberus

Maybe gape could be related as well?

> *ghieh-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to yawn, gape, be wide open."

It forms all or part of: chaos; chasm; dehiscence; gap; gasp; gawp; hiatus; yawn.

Yes, indeed.

Matt E. Эллен

and, of course, ciao

Feeds

0

Q: Is there a shorter alternative to "server connection configuration"?

I am trying to find a name for a variable that contains the hostname (node45.service.com), the port (9984) and the server name (US Salami Server) of a service I want to connect to and looks something like this class server_connection_configuration string server_name string hostname ...

single-word-requests

tchrist

Writing request.

That beauteous category of infinite jest.

Matt E. Эллен

15:21

"I want to name a variable" tut tut tut

naming is hard, that's why we don't do it

tchrist

Well, he got the hardest part right.

Cerberus

Dutch has both gapen and geeuwen, both of which mean "to yawn", the former also "gape, be wide open", but that sounds almost like a metaphor in modern Dutch, probably unjustly so.

@MattE.Эллен We don't??

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus no. it's explicitly against the rules

Cerberus

Oh, I thought you meant in general.

Something cryptic.

tchrist

He used natural_English_word_separation, not DeutcheWortTrennungGenau.

@MattE.Эллен I wonder that any school/university programming class has ever taught the importance of good naming, the perils of poor naming.

Matt E. Эллен

15:26

@Cerberus well, that too. I've never named anything. everything came with a name and I just intuited it where I couldn't read it

tchrist

You don't need any education to name absolutely anything: after all, Adam seems to have managed. Although why he named his wifeman Nightfall I cannot fathom.

Matt E. Эллен

@tchrist I think they try, but until you start maintaining other people's code you can't understand.

Cerberus

@tchrist I usually do that too, when there would be spaces in whatever natural language the words are from. Don't you?

tchrist

@Cerberus Of course I do.

But the children of a lesser god have no appreciation for language.

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен So when you programme, all your variables are like $[ and %^?

tchrist

15:29

wonders what %^ might be betoken

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus they're named whatever they tell me their name is.

Cerberus

@tchrist Good. I really dislike the dromedary style. Well, I like it all right as long as the first word is also capitalised, and as long as it is strictly confined to programming.

@MattE.Эллен By what means do they speak to you?

tchrist

const char *his_name = **pointer_variable->whatʼs_your_name;

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus through the medium of dance!

Cerberus

@tchrist An apostrophe? Is that same?

@MattE.Эллен How lovely. Did you go to a Rudolph Steiner school?

Matt E. Эллен

15:32

@Cerberus Julliard!

Cerberus

The musical school in America?

Matt E. Эллен

yes :D

tchrist

And yes, that’s U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, not U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. Otherwise you couldn't use it in an identifier.

Matt E. Эллен

it's the only one I can name off the top of my head

Cerberus

I saw Joyce Di Donato teach students singing in public classes; that was really nice to watch.

At Julliard.

Is it Julliard or Juilliard?

Matt E. Эллен

15:33

:-o

the latter

Cerberus

With the extra i, just like the French month.

tchrist

I also furiously disapprove of brv8ed variable names.

Makes maintenance harder.

Cerberus

@tchrist I would still be afraid of something messing up code with Unicode characters. Like an editor, software, who knows.

@tchrist I agree, when they're like "s" or "$rn".

tchrist

@Cerberus All characters are Unicode characters. :)

Cerberus

But how about "config"?

@tchrist I was thinking you might say that...

tchrist

15:36

"Too many bits!"

Cerberus

But of course I meant the ones that have to be transformed into special code rather than simple letters, or however it works.

Look at this: â†’

tchrist

They all have to be transformed into special code.

Cerberus

That used to be a neat arrow.

But something happened to my Autohotkey script that messes up symbols that used to be fine.

é and ê still work fine.

And ē.

tchrist

@Cerberus That's some dumbfucked mojibake caused by idiots who can’t understand that there's no such thing as "plain" or unencoded text.

Cerberus

So why not â†’?

tchrist

15:38

Which arrow?

Matt E. Эллен

by "arrow" do you mean two character that look like an arrow when put together, or a single character that was in the shape of an arrow?

tchrist

It's faster for me to just ask you rather to go running transforms.

Matt E. Эллен

three characters, even

tchrist

The problem is that some dillrod managed to conflate bytes and characters again. I bet the same scumnull also confuses pointers and integers.

Matt E. Эллен

->

<-

tchrist

15:41

Which arrow was that â†’ originally?

Jasper Loy

So many blue names, and then comes a blue square.

Cerberus

@tchrist :R*:->>::→

This is the code.

It's in the same file it's always been in, and it always used to work.

But something changed.

And now it doesn't work any more.

Matt E. Эллен

did you update aftohotkey?

Cerberus

I don't think so?

The odd thing is, when I put that same line in a new Autohotkey file, it works.

Matt E. Эллен

what if you copy the whole file?

Cerberus

15:44

So I would need to cut and paste those lines into a new file. But why??

@MattE.Эллен I think I've tried that, and it didn't work.

Matt E. Эллен

:(

Cerberus

Trying again...

tchrist

Your → glyph there is currently represented in this chat via the three-bye UTF-8 byte-sequence "\xE2\x86\x92" which encodes as UTF-8 the abstract Unicode code point number decimal 8594, also written U+2192 which is hex. Its assigned name is RIGHTWARDS ARROW.

Mojibake happens when those three bytes are interpreted not as one character but as three.

Matt E. Эллен

→↑←↓

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен I've tested it again, and it doesn't work.

Matt E. Эллен

15:46

weird

Cerberus

@tchrist Hmm but why would that happen, when it usen't to?

tchrist

And then re-encodes each of those three separate byte-qua-characters again into UTF-8.

@Cerberus You edited a UTF-8 file in something that only knows binary?

Matt E. Эллен

maybe the UTF-8 encoding rubbed off

tchrist

Something, somewhere is reading your UTF-8 encoded character data as ISO-8859-1 byte data.

Or worse, what the fuck is †’ ?

Cerberus

@tchrist I'm using Sublime Text, and it says UTF-8 at the bottom.

I've just tried the following. I've copy-pasted my entire script into a new file, then deleted all lines except the one I quoted.

tchrist

15:50

Oh for fuck's sake you are so screwed.

Cerberus

Then I still get the garbled symbols.

tchrist

mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e ISO-8859-1 0xe2 0x86 0x92
iso-8859-1   E2  ⇔  U+00E2  ＜ â ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX}
iso-8859-1   86  ⇔  U+0086  ＜ - ＞  \N{START OF SELECTED AREA}
iso-8859-1   92  ⇔  U+0092  ＜ - ＞  \N{PRIVATE USE TWO}
mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e MacRoman 0xe2 0x86 0x92
MacRoman     E2  ⇒  U+201A  ＜ ‚ ＞  \N{SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK}
MacRoman     86  ⇒  U+00DC  ＜ Ü ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS}
MacRoman     92  ⇒  U+00ED  ＜ í ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}

So this is all Microsoft's fault. You aren't even getting your bytes interpreted as Latin1 for fuck's sake.

Cerberus

When I create a new file and copy-paste only the quoted line, it doesn't work either.

Matt E. Эллен

good old cp1252

tchrist

yeah

Cerberus

15:53

HOWEVER, when I create a new file and copye-paste and run WITHOUT SAVING (piped buffer), it works.

Matt E. Эллен

perhaps sublime is messing up saveng as utf8 then?

tchrist

You have the encoding set wrong SOMEWHERE. It may be in the output/saved/target filetype.

Cerberus

Ü and Í and the like have no issues.

tchrist

I know, I know.

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Perhaps! But it says UTF-8 at the bottom!

Okay, so you think it must be something in Sublime?

Let me try it in Notepad++.

Matt E. Эллен

15:55

are you still running windows xp?

Cerberus

Okay, it works when I save the file using Notepad++!

Matt E. Эллен

yay!

Cerberus

I seem to remember now having had this issue before, long ago, and also fixing it in a way I didn't understand.

@MattE.Эллен I am!

tchrist

mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e Latin1 0xDC 0xCD
iso-8859-1   DC  ⇔  U+00DC  ＜ Ü ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS}
iso-8859-1   CD  ⇔  U+00CD  ＜ Í ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}
mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e cp1252 0xDC 0xCD
cp1252       DC  ⇔  U+00DC  ＜ Ü ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS}
cp1252       CD  ⇔  U+00CD  ＜ Í ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}
mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e MacRoman 0xDC 0xCD
MacRoman     DC  ⇒  U+2039  ＜ ‹ ＞  \N{SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK}

Cerberus

I'm switching once I get my new computer.

I'm pondering Intel versus AMD.

tchrist

15:56

See what's happening with the ones "you have no problem" with?

It's because cp1252 byte DC is Unicode code point U+00DC: the same number.

Cerberus

Okay, so...?

tchrist

So even worse than interpreting as binary bytes, you have something misinterpreting crap as cp1252 byes.

Cerberus

Hmm.

tchrist

I don't know how your cotton pastes work there.

Cerberus

But there shouldn't be any crap.

tchrist

15:58

Of course there shouldn't.

Cerberus

Okay, in Notepad++, when I open the problematic file, it says: ANSI as UTF-8.

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus exciting! I don't think I've ever used AMD CPUs

tchrist

Do you have two files in two separate edit windows that you're using the mouse to transfer data between?

@Cerberus Stop stop.

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен AMD is a nicer brand. Less anti-competitive.

tchrist

"ANSI" means "You are fucked".

That's the problem.

Cerberus

15:59

Yes. But, oddly, it doesn't show that in Sublime: it says only UTF-8 when I open the same file.

And everything looks fine in Sublime, the symbols look right.

tchrist

It means it's been mojibaked from "ANSI" (which is meaningless Microsoft jargon that connects to whatever 8-bit "code page" was active on your system at the time) into proper UTF-8.

Matt E. Эллен

do you have maybe two options? one to display as utf8 and another to save as ansi?

tchrist

"ANSI" just means byte data interpreted as characters, without telling which characters those will be interpreted as.

Cerberus

@tchrist That doesn't sound good...

@MattE.Эллен Yes, there are options "reopen with encoding..." and "save with encoding...".

I now see that the right file, saved using Notepad++, says "UTF-8 with BOM" in Sublime, whereas the wrong file says just "UTF-8".

tchrist

These are all "ANSI":

mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e cp1253 0xDC 0xCD
cp1253       DC  ⇒  U+03AC  ＜ ά ＞  \N{GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS}
cp1253       CD  ⇒  U+039D  ＜ Ν ＞  \N{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER NU}
mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e cp1252 0xDC 0xCD
cp1252       DC  ⇔  U+00DC  ＜ Ü ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS}
cp1252       CD  ⇔  U+00CD  ＜ Í ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}
mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e cp1251 0xDC 0xCD
cp1251       DC  ⇒  U+042C  ＜ Ь ＞  \N{CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SOFT SIGN}
cp1251       CD  ⇒  U+041D  ＜ Н ＞  \N{CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN}

I'm sure you see the problem.

Cerberus

16:03

I believe it.

Matt E. Эллен

Yeah, the Bright Orange Mango is UTF-8's support fruit. it doesn't work without it

Cerberus

So what you were saying was that the system things it must do something with the symbols, while in reality this had already been done, so it shouldn't do that again.

tchrist

@MattE.Эллен unicode.org/L2/L2017/17211-mango-emoji.pdf

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Ah, that makes more sense than stuff with line endings.

Matt E. Эллен

@tchrist lol

tchrist

16:05

Line endings?

Cerberus

So should I pick "reopen with encoding..." or "save with encoding..."?

And should I then pick ANSI or UTF-8? With our without BOM?

@tchrist I think BOM has to do with line endings?

tchrist

@Cerberus No, it's for something else that doesn't apply here.

You should normally/"always" pick UTF-8 "without BOM", but that won't undo the damage.

For a new file, it should be ok that way.

I don't suppose you have the iconv utility program installed, do you?

Cerberus

Copy-pasting the line into NP++ undid the damage for that line.

Matt E. Эллен

I think you should write the whole file out again from scratch

Cerberus

@tchrist I've never heard of it.

tchrist

16:07

Yeah.

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен OK I will.

Matt E. Эллен

lol

Cerberus

It's only 5000 lines.

I've backed the file up.

tchrist

Mail it to me and I'll fix it for you and send it back. You need tools you don't have for this.

Cerberus

So I will now try "save with encoding as utf8 without BOM" and all the other options, see which one does the trick.

tchrist

16:09

Luck is a lady.

Cerberus

@tchrist Oh, thank you, but I'd rather be able to fix this myself the next time it happens.

tchrist

I worry that you've got a doubly mojibaked file.

I don't know how to repair that using Microsoft tools, just ones you can run on a Mac or Linux.

Cerberus

I have a back-up.

I've chosen "save as UTF-8 with BOM", and now it seems to be fixed.

tchrist

What's the BOM for?

Cerberus

But you're saying I should probably have it without the BOM.

tchrist

16:11

Well.

It will confuse some things. UTF-8 needs no BOM.

Cerberus

I think BOM is something to do with line endings.

tchrist

No.

BOM is Byte Order Mark.

Cerberus

I hate abbreviations.

Oh.

tchrist

It's for specifying whether the machine-language integers in the file are in Big Endian byte-order or in Little Endian byte-order. This is only sensible when you are storing actual machine integers in your file, such as under UTF-16 or UTF-32, UCS-2 or UCS-4. But UTF-8 is a byte encoding not an integer encoding so it doesn't fucking matter.

Microsoft are idiots.

7

A: What's different between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?

Quoted at the bottom of the Wikipedia page on BOM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark#cite_note-2 "Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8, but may be encountered in contexts where UTF-8 data is converted from other encoding forms that use a BOM or where the BOM i...

If you accidentally re-encode into UTF-8 a UTF-16 file as though it had been a UTF-16LE file or a UTF-16BE file, this dumb crap happens.

> Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8

But Microsoft are idiots.

And I repeat myself.

There is no "byte order mark" in Unicode. There is U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.

In UTF-16, the first 16-bit integer in the file is a sentinel, either FEFF or FFFE.

That tells you whether the rest of the file should be UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE.

It is metadata. It is not data.

Cerberus

Oh...

I see.

tchrist

16:18

When you turn that into UTF-8, WHICH NEVER HAS METADATA IN THE BYTESTREAM, you get a spurious character that never was.

Cerberus

At least it works fine now that I've concerted the file into UTF-8 with BOM.

Even though the BOM is apparently useless/unwanted.

Bom means bomb in Dutch.

Matt E. Эллен

the question is what is XP doing to the file when the BOM is absent?

Cerberus

Like the sound of the English word.

tchrist

@Cerberus Yes.

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Or, what is Autohotkey.exe doing with it.

→

↑

≠

tchrist

16:20

The problem is that many files have absolute syntactic restrictions that mandate the beginning of that file.

And none of these tolerate a fucking ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. So you break those.

It's not data.

Cerberus

Hmm.

tchrist

Sorry, my wrath is ill-directed and wasted on you.

It's just Microsoft fucking over the world again with their stupidity.

That’s because Microsoft has swapped the meaning of what the standard says. UTF-8 has no BOM: they have created Microsoft UTF-8 which inserts a spurious BOM in front of the data stream and then told you that no, this is actually UTF-8. It is not. It is just extending and corrupting. — tchrist Oct 2 '14 at 0:14

It's a lock-in mechanism to make something that was supposed to be standard and compatible utterly non-standard and incompatible: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

omg

Cerberus

Annoying.

So the BOM is just a few bytes at the beginning of the file?

tchrist

I have a scrub jay at my feeder. I never get those, just Stellar jays and blue jays.

@Cerberus Yes. In UTF-8, it's three bytes that represent the Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.

Cerberus

tchrist

16:26

Yeah.

I'm not so much in scrub-jay territory here.

Cerberus

@tchrist Annoying. And there is no easy way to get rid of it?

tchrist

I haven't seen one this whole season in my yard.

Cerberus

Looks great.

tchrist

@Cerberus There are many ways, but I don't know if you can call those "easy". Moreover, I don't use Microsoft so cannot tell you how the toolset works there.

Just open the file as UTF-8 in a text editor and delete that invisible first character.

Now, how does your editor represent invisible characters? I don't know.

Or open as binary and delete the first three bytes.

Cerberus

I didn't see any invisible characters.

tchrist

16:30

Funny how that works.

Remember also that "UTF-8" in Microsoft does not mean "UTF-8" anywhere else.

So your "open as UTF-8" will silently convert to the nonstandard "open as UTF-8 after ignoring the leading BOM".

So you will never see it.

You probably have to open it as "UTF-8 without BOM" even though it has one.

And then you still won't be able to see it.

Open it as cp1252 and you'll get funky crap.

mac(tchrist)% byte2uni -e cp1252 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF
cp1252       EF  ⇔  U+00EF  ＜ ï ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS}
cp1252       BB  ⇔  U+00BB  ＜ » ＞  \N{RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK}
cp1252       BF  ⇔  U+00BF  ＜ ¿ ＞  \N{INVERTED QUESTION MARK}

It'll be those three.

Because Unicode code point U+FEFF encodes to "\xEF\xBB\xBF" as UTF-8.

So many do that. I don't know.

Cerberus

I've tried everything I can in Notepad, but every time I save it as / convert it into UTF-8 without BOM, the problem returns.

tchrist

Graecum est, non potest legi.

Cerberus

So it seems I cannot get rid of the BOM.

tchrist

Open it as cp1252

Cerberus

Graeca sunt; non leguntur.

I thought it was.

@tchrist This I cannot do.

tchrist

16:35

This is so easy when programming. I'm so sad. A one liner would fix it.

Matt E. Эллен

write and AHK script to fix it!

tchrist

But you are not a programmer when you are a Prisoner Of Bill.

Cerberus

But wouldn't that mess up the file, if its contents were created under a false assumption?

That is how it looks to me.

@MattE.Эллен Yay!

I could Google it.

tchrist

You can only do the things the gods of microsoft condescend to allow their filthy peasants to do.

Cerberus

sighs

tchrist

16:39

1

A: What are the rules behind the use of 'would' in these examples?

I'm afraid you've been misled. You mention "the standard rules most frequently explained in grammar books" but don't cite the grammar books nor quote the rules, but they sound like the usual mishmosh one finds online and in many textbooks -- zombie rules, incomplete lists of workarounds labelled ...

Good.

Cerberus

> You can simply put some colors:

Do you know how wide-spread this use of put is? And what is your opinion on it?

dylpb.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/…

From this ↑ page.

Færd

18:43

What makes some French speakers pronounce people as peep-'ole? Don't they have the English schwa?

And their peuple is not like either one, so no assimilation should be going oon.

Mitch

@Færd I think because the spelling 'people' is so bizarre, that it is read with metathesis as 'pepole'.

Færd

Is it more bizarre than peuple?

Mitch

like sometimes 'aeropleane' is pernounced 'areoplane'

@Færd Non.

Pas du tout

peu - ple.

tres simple

Færd

Bien sûr que non

Mitch

Penses-tu

Cerberus

18:53

@Færd I think it's not the vowel, but the L.

Færd

Oh?

Cerberus

Many languages, like French and German, have a nicer L than do Dutch and English.

Færd

I think you're onto something!

Cerberus

And the L and R in English and Dutch probably influence the way the vowels preceding them are pronounced.

Færd

"nicer" guffaws

I think you're right.

Cerberus

18:56

When I was young, we were often criticised by our elders for pronouncing vowel + r and vowel + l in a sloppy manner.

Færd

@Cerberus Do you mean tho two languages behave the same in this regard?

Cerberus

The old Queen always pronounced the L the old-fashioned way, more like German.

@Færd I think there are similiarities.

I haven't researched it yet.

Færd

Sloppy? Like the English L?

@Cerberus I see

Cerberus

Yes, and the Dutch L. Partly.

It's complicated.

I'd really have to study and ponder it.

Interestingly, the fat Slavic L sounds lower class to us.

Færd

Hmm. My ear hadn't caught this particualr detail when listening to German or French.

Cerberus

18:58

The German L affected (when used in Dutch).

Færd

I'm going to be on the look-out for it now.

Cerberus

Yay.

So we have the diphthong ei/ij in Dutch (ij and ei sound the same).

When followed by L, they tend to sound like -el, or at least at the end of a word.

Which is sloppy.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…