What can you do with a promise? You can make it, keep it, fulfill it, deliver on it, redeem it (I think); break it, renege on it, and go back on it. Nice collocations.

I think you should shorten the pain and just eat it

if Neanderthals are still extant and can be enslaved by us, then they are good recourse of us.

Shorten the pain is not a collocation. At least not a strong one.

Nor is be recourse of.

home whose host is a miser is a place for starvation

family is the vulnerable organization; fortunately, all other organizations won't necessarily accommodate you.

when you have not got admitted to an organization of your milieu, your intellectual speciality won't be appreciated.

unfortunately

when you are in the wasteland, it's like the hunting and gathering era when everyone needs to be self-sustained.

nobody would build public bathroom in the wasteland

you have to traipse a long distance to access civilized community

The way Bohemian describes his neighborhood reminds me of Blade Runner-style dystopian settings.

How nice if such a free public shower room is everywhere!

@KannE I've been complaining about this for a while.

On the other hand, track lighting is awesome.

@CaptainBohemian Sure they would, like this:

I just realized I feminized Zimmer when I should have neutered him. Gah, languages with gender are the worst.

And German is the worst of the worst for that, at least of the ones I've had experience with. Even Russian gives you clues, though it sucks for other reasons. And Spanish has a few simple rules, and a few simple exceptions.

Every language is the worst in its own way.

Except for Hindi

And for all that its writing system is ponderous and not easily learned, Japanese is simple AF. No gendered nouns (although many, many other things are gendered in different ways).

@Mitch NOU.

It's another one of those factoids that I just read in the past week but have absolutely no idea of where I heard it.

Well, Hindi ... you don't know her as well as some.

As a friend once said, "There is no woman in the world so beautiful that some man isn't entirely sick of her shit." Applies to languages, I suppose.

@RegDwigнt You know, when I first read that yesterday I thought you were saying "Violin for sale" ...

@Mitch Won't get fooled again.

Goddamit I need a google search for my brain

except for the ads

Anyway, time to face the day's ride. Going to be very nice here today. Warm and sunny with little or no wind. A perfect day for riding.

same here. you're not missing anything

@Mitch Funny, that's exactly what Google hoped you'd say.

laterz!

so basically I'm saying you didn't need to leave

cya

@Mitch Yeah, it's come a long way since the 80s, track lighting. And I was easily annoyed then, so unlike now.

@Student404Mus All good up until "by". What do you intend to convey? Also, not wrong, but I wouldn't use an article before "presence".

@Mitch Have you played Flow Free?

Hmm, I dunno if that game's got a universal name but that's the most famous version that pops to mind

@Robusto from my cold dead hand.

She has a name, you know. You don't sell someone who has a name. Not north of Virginia, anyway.

Speaking of which,

> I need to find a name for my antique 1940s solid metal clarinet... my flute is named Felipe, and need a name that goes nicely with it.

How about Merkel. Or Brexit. Goes well with Felipe I should think.

Also how is 1940s antique. I wasn't aware WWII happened in ancient times.

@Cerberus never taught me.

@Robusto German has much stronger clues than Russian. WTF are you on about. A German word ending in -er is never, ever, feminine. Like, neuter wouldn't be your first guess, but feminine wouldn't even be your last.

Meanwhile a Russian word ending in -a could be literally any gender at all. Or indeed several genders at once. (Lots of those in Russian. In German, it's basically only Ketchup and Reisig and that's about it.)

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Mostly dots in answer (36): Which is correct? Launch Ceremony or Launching Ceremony? by user344557 on english.SE

-ung, -heit, -keit, always feminine. -chen, -lein, always neuter. And so on.

Meanwhile in Russia, even from a Russian to a Russian, they teach you there are three declensions when in reality there are five, two numbers, when in reality there are three, and six cases, when in reality there are nine.

Russians wouldn't be caught dead giving you clues.

@RegDwigнt Indeed.

@RegDwigнt Even so, when we had to learn "rules" to determine the gender of German nouns, we receives ten pages in small print.

With exception upon exception, to the point of uselessness.

I still never know.

Even in Greek, it's easier.

And that is coming from a speaker of Dutch, which is basically a German dialect with lots of similaities.

In Latin, it fairly easy.

I could teach you in ten minutes and you'd get 95%+ of all Latin nouns correctly.

@Cerberus that's not a problem with German. That's a problem with teaching.

We've discussed this many times before.

You cannot learn a language by taking a book of rules and learning the rules. That is the one sure way to never learn that language.

You have genders in Dutch, so you should know full well how you learned them. And that is exactly how you learn them in German, too. And in Russian and in French and in Spanish. By not printing out ten pages in small print.

They will be completely and utterly useless. As you say yourself.

You're contradicting yourself.

I am not.

First the rules were easy. Now it is no use learning rules.

You are contradicting myself. And through that contradicting yourself.

@RegDwigнt How I learm genders is completely different depending on the language.

@Cerberus how do you mean that. First as in ten million years ago? in PIE?

In German, I know a handful of rules, but they cover only a fairly small portion of all nouns.

I do not know any rules in German. And that is why I am fluent in German at a native level. QED.

@RegDwigнt That, too. But, no, what you were saying.

@RegDwigнt In Latin, I know a handful of rules, and they are enough to know the genders of 95% of all nouns.

In French, I know very few rules, and I only know a fairly small proportion of nouns by gender.

So? In English we know the genders of 100% of all nouns with one simple rule. Does that make English better than Latin?

Greek is somewhere in between: I probably know the gender of a slim majority of words.

@RegDwigнt It makes it easier in English.

German and French are among the harder languages I know qua genders.

Of course I will believe you if you say Russian is harder.

@Cerberus Try saying that the next time someone brings up how articles make sense and cannot be lived without.

Dutch is probably as hard as German.

But you can get away with not knowing genders more easily in Dutch.

I believe Dutch is category 3, and German 4.

I vaguely remember that only because German was the only language in category 4.

Is that hardness or easiness?

So Dutch must be 3, or maybe even 2.

Speaking with a Dutch person, she was unaware whether her language had gender. I assumed it was because it was not an issue there.

She knew about gender in German etc.

It's probably harder to know the gender in Dutch than in German; but you need it less often. So I'd say genders are easier in Dutch overall.

@Færd She was unaware because she doesn't really know what it gender is.

Do you have gendered pronouns?

Well, yes; I think all IE languages have those?

We also have gendered nouns.

I only know je and het so far. :X

Ding!

Okay.

Je "you" could probably be said to be epicene.

I was right in the back of my head. Dutch is category one. The easiest for English speakers.

German is alone in category 4. The second hardest.

As it can be used to address a man or a woman, or even, in theory or poetry, a thing.

2:45 is the timestamp

@RegDwigнt Which is not super relevant to our discussion about genders.

@RegDwigнt Maybe even easier for German speakers.

@Cerberus it is not relevant at all to that discussion.

It is relevant to your question that you asked me.

So thanks for nothing.

@Cerberus A handful of rules with too many exceptions.

Next time you ask a question I will make sure to not go and search YouTube for two minutes. :-P

@RegDwigнt What question? Do you seriously think I would remember something I said over one minute ago?

Who?

@Færd Exactly what I said earlier.

@RegDwigнt Do.

Re mi fa sol la ti.

But just for the sake of completeness: the hardest category, of course, is Japanese.

So the only question I saw myself asking is what your category numbers meant.

Still, that slacker @Robusto managed to learn it somehow so he should drop the act and stop pissing about Russian.

I know very well how closely related those languages are to each other.

@Cerberus and that is the question that I answered.

I went and looked for the source of my knowledge.

I maintain that German genders are harder to learn, at least for a Dutchman, and probably also for an Englishman, than Latin genders.

@Cerberus this is not about how closely the languages are related.

I watched about 45 seconds of your video, from the suggested time stamp.

It said nothing about genders compared.

Oh ffs. I need beer.

Arabic genders are comparatively easier.

So many markers covering most nouns.

This is not about genders, doggy. Jesus Christ on a cross.

In Dutch, you can get away with knowing only two genders outside formal language.

This is a metric made up by native speakers of English to gauge how difficult the various languages of the world are for native speakers of English to learn.

I have nothing to do with any of that. I am merely reporting.

Anglocentric.

I have seen various interpretations of that metric as well.

But who speaks English anyway?

None here.

Noöne, indeed.

@Cerberus Well the way I remember it it was made by Americans and the Brits for their spies. So it's not really up for interpretation. They literally take a language and assign a number to it, and that's what you have to believe if you want to be a spy as opposed to being a dead spy.

@Cerberus (None is also correct)

@RegDwigнt That is all very well.

I was only trying to make the point that German genders aren't easy to learn.

@Færd Yes.

German genders are exceptionally easy to learn. Ask me the gender of any German word.

But noöne is a favourite room word.

@RegDwigнt No: ask me!

I'll do my best.

@RegDwigнt You can make that assessment objective by counting how many hours it takes learners of various languages to reach a specific level.

Provided that you have objective definitions of levels.

By the way, I found a booklet with rules about the German genders not so long ago in my old room at my parents' house, and I read it.

@Færd And provides that your clones were all raised in the exact same environment.

Go on!

Of course I remember nothing!

@Cerberus Kategorie. Anomalie. Prämie.

@Cerberus If the number is big enough it can make up for those differences.

@RegDwigнt Feminin

@RegDwigнt Okay, I would have no idea except that I would guess based on Latin and Greek: f, f, n. But maybe there is a rule about words ending on -e: I don't remember.

But that's too easy.

@Færd Yes...but what is enough?

@Færd well yes. That's the point. We here are discussing things in the abstract on a theoretical level, but these people actually looked at how long it takes for Joe Idiot to learn language X to pass for a native speaker. They had actual data from actual Joe Idiots, and if they got it wrong actual people got actually murdered. You know.

I don't dispute that German is easy to learn for a Dutchman. It is.

Just that its genders are not. Latin genders are easier to learn for us.

@Cerberus I don't know a rule. I just posted a bunch of feminine nouns that all end in -ie.

@Cerberus I don't know. Statistical analysis determines the error margins.

@RegDwigнt Right.

Why the fuck would anomalie be feminine but prämie not feminine?

@RegDwigнt I remember the heit, keit, schaft rules.

Yeah except Schaft itself is masculine so fuck that rule.

@RegDwigнt Because it's kategoria in Greek and anomalia and praemium in Latin?

One interesting thing they found was that learning Esperanto takes about one-tenth of any other natural language.

I believe it!

Regularity makes it easier.

Indeed.

@Cerberus I am sorry, when you asked me to post a bunch of German words, I didn't realize you wanted to look at Latin words instead.

@RegDwigнt So you did fool me.

Who the fuck cares about Latin. Stop bringing up Latin.

Now get this: Ergebnis, Kenntnis.

@RegDwigнt I said that because I had no other way of guessing. I wouldn't know any applicable German rules.

@Færd neuter, feminine. Easy.

@Færd Somehow I think das Ergebnis, die Erkenntnis.

No idea why.

OMG I was right.

@Cerberus ie ending is mostly feminine.

@RegDwigнt Duh

@Cerberus Bravo.

@Cerberus as I've said like three times by now, neither do I. That is not how you determine the gender.

@RegDwigнt No: that is not how you determine the gender in German.

@Færd hey WTF he gets a bravo and I get a duh=

But it is how I determine the gender in most languages for most words, because I have no other way.

@Cerberus exactly right. And that is why I know the gender of every single word in German, and you do not.

That is my whole point.

Whatever I'm doing, I'm doing it right.

@RegDwigнt But that was not my point.

@RegDwigнt Weren't you the one who spoke German?

@Cerberus Of course not. It is my point. You can't have it.

My point is that genders are much easier to learn in Latin than in German.

Stick your point somewhere else.

@Cerberus yes but you've made that point and I've agreed, so why do you keep repeating it.

@Færd He has lived in Germany since forever. And he is a translator by profession, I believe...

@RegDwigнt !! You never have!

Well technically both is not true.

@Cerberus I have. Indeed I expanded on it.

I am in the comfortable position of not only having run a test experiment on myself, but having had a control group that was also myself.

So unlike most people who just think their way is right because that's the only one they know, I know only one of my ways is right, because I have tried all the other ways too, and they were all wrong.

Are you a musician by profession?

No. I make websites. And do quality assurance. Some tech support. Very little software development.

Hmm. Multi-professional.

Not really no. We are a small company with a flat hierarchy.

Everyone can do a million different things, and often does.

I would have never guessed. The way you rant about your old computer.

Mostly we just sit around and watch YouTube and play with LEGO or the flute.

@Færd I don't rant about it, I love it. I would have thrown it out if I hated it.

I am keeping it until it dies, or until I do, whichever comes first.

It does its job and that's all it's supposed to do. It is a tool.

Okay. I hope you won't be the first to die.

It is a poor craftsman that blames his tools.

@Færd it depends really. All my sheet music is on it. It better live on after me.

There's always many ways to look at things.

Back them up before it's too late.

Except learning genders. There's only one correct way to look at that.

Which is?

@Færd I do that all the time. And then I back up the back up. And then whatever is finished I just dump on the Internet, where as we know nothing ever vanishes.

So my hope was not misplaced.

@Færd well, just learning every individual word.

Just use it a couple times, and that's all.

And if you don't use a word, there's no point in learning it anyway.

Takes me quite a few more than a couple times.

If you use the word "book" just a couple times, you will know that it's masculine in French, neuter in German, and feminine in Russian, and none of the above in English.

But fair enough.

If you don't use the word "book", then what's the point of learning its gender.

Kataba. That's the first word I learned in Arabic.