English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@Cerberus Seems so.

> Others, all wonder, scan the gift of doom
by virgin Pallas given, and view with awe
that horse which loomed so large. Thymoetes then
bade lead it through the gates, and set on high
within our citadel,—or traitor he,
or tool of fate in Troy's predestined fall.

Whose?

Theodore C. Williams, 1910.

A: Formal alternative to bullsh-t

The high tone fits it well.

0

Arrant Nonsense! If for whatever reason you cannot bring yourself to call a political con artist or marketing spin doctor who’s forever dissembling and prevaricating a liar to his face, and bollocks is too earthy for you and bovine-tainted variants of coproloquy, coproloquent, coproloquence too ...

My good deed for the day is done.

No one will see it; there are 2,329 other answers already. All bad.

Nobody reads any longer.

2:49 AM

> Think ye the gifts of Greece can lack for guile?

But thee and me.

> ... et dona ferentes

@tchrist Perhaps so! But it is on the first page, which some may scan.

> 43 ... Aut ulla putatis
dona carere dolis Danaum? ...

Yeah, those guys.

We are not at that line yet.

> 49 Quicquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.

@Cerberus That verb gave birth to Spanish and Portuguese carecer meaning to be lacking.

2:53 AM

Ah, what suffix is that?

You mean where did the infix -c- come from?

Is it really an infix?

The -er is just the infinitive.

No, it's not.

Right.

I know they have -r infinitives.

It's because of the -sc- bit it went through.

> From Vulgar Latin *carescō, from Latin careō (“I lack”), whence English caret.

Another like it is parecer.

2:55 AM

Ah, I was thinking of the inchoative suffix, but it didn't seem to make sense.

1s is carezco, parezco but 2s is the normal careces, pareces.

@Cerberus I'm not completely certain you're wrong.

Well, as you quoted, it is the inchoative.

But it's far too late for me to dig through my subterranean stacks of reference works.

It's just not what I would have expected semantically.

In Ancient Greek, too, this suffix has a weaker meaning.

Also merecer does the same thing.

2:57 AM

Perhaps it is semantic inflation in both Spanish and Greek.

Parecer is to seem, merecer is to merit.

It's not perish. :)

And the predicate frame wants de to follow carecer, so to be lacking OF something.

I would have guessed similar meanings.

That is not so strange: Latin careo has a separative ablative complement.

Conocer for to be acquainted with does the same -sc- thing in 1s.

Where Greek would have a separative genitive.

@tchrist Ah, but Latin has cognosco.

Right.

I don't think it's the same as the -ecer verbs, but it still gets -zco* like them.

3:00 AM

I suppose Latin has other verbs where an inchoative sense is apparently weak or lacking, as in vescor to feed.

Vescor made thing of "vittles" (victuals).

But nothing else came to mind.

edible, I guess.

Spanish just used alimentar there.

To stick things down your alimentary canal. :)

But I'm not sure you can use alimentar for animals, only people.

Hm.

Oh, you can. There's also nutrir and comer(se).

> nutrir = Aumentar la sustancia del cuerpo animal o vegetal por medio del alimento, reparando las partes que se van perdiendo en virtud de las acciones catabólicas.

I think vescor may have died in Latin.

There are some nice old words in Portuguese related to provisioning, but they use the more obvious etyma.

> Cómo alimentar ganado. Alimentar al ganado podría parecerte tan simple como colocar un poco de heno frente a los animales, pero, en realidad, involucra ...

Ganado means livestock, so feeding livestock is merely alimentar ganado.

@tchrist Vittals are from vivo!

@Cerberus Huh.

Vivo, past participle victus.

Similar to victus "conquered".

VICTuals. Oh.

I thought of vivo meaning alive in newer tongues.

3:11 AM

There is also vivus "alive".

Hm, in vivo.

Yes, that one.

I believe comer is from edo, no doubt related to eat?

think so

comestible

Yeah.

> Del lat. comedĕre.

3:12 AM

The compound comedo is common.

="Masticar y deglutir un alimento sólido"

They really like their aliments, as you can see.

I rarely see a word in Spanish that isn't from Latin!

¡Ojalá!

All the al- words are Arabic.

Many of the z- words.

Naranga, I think?

Some J- words. jinete might be. But not jaca, that's from English hackney.

3:15 AM

Or how do you spell that.

Yes.

Naranja?

Arabic language influence on the Spanish language

That's the fruit. Naranjo is the tree

Rice is Arabian.

> arroz Del ár. hisp. arráwz, este del ár. clás. āruz[z] o aruz[z], este del gr. ὄρυζα óryza, y este del tamil arici.

Well, Greek via Arabia. :)

Earlier from Tamil!? Tell JG. :)

> Aceite (Spanish Arabic – azzáyt, Classical Arabic – azzayt) – Oil.
Aceituna (Spanish Arabic – azzaytúna, Classical Arabic – zaytünah) – Olive.
Azafrán (Spanish Arabic – azza'farán, Classical Arabic – za'farān) – Saffron.
Azúcar (Spanish Arabic – assúkkar, Classical Arabic – sukkar) – Sugar.

Lots more where those came from.

anythingbutlanguage.com/en/44-spanish-words-arabic-origin

> Berenjena (Spanish Arabic – baḏinǧána, Classical Arabic – bāḏinǧānah) – Aubergine/Eggplant
Café (Italian – caffe, Turkish – kahve, Classical Arabic – qahwah) – Coffee
Fideo (Spanish Arabic – fidáwš) – Noodles
Jarabe (Spanish Arabic – šaráb, Classical Arabic – šarāb) – Syrup (medication)
Jarra (Spanish Arabic – ǧárra, Classical Arabic – ǧarrah) – Jar/Mug
Limón (Spanish Arabic – la[y]mún, Classical Arabic – laymün) – Lemon
Lima (Spanish Arabic – lima, Classical Arabic – līmah) – Lime
Naranja (Spanish Arabic – naranǧa, Classical Arabic – nāranǧ) – Orange

> Ajedrez (Spanish Arabic – aššaṭranǧ or aššiṭranǧ, Classical Arabic – šiṭranǧ) – Chess
Alcohol (Spanish Arabic – kuḥúl, Classical Arabic – kuḥl) – Alcohol
Alfil (Spanish Arabic – alfíl, Classical Arabic – fīl) – Bishop (chess)
Álgebra (Latin – algĕbra, Classical Arabic – alǧabru) – Algebra
Algoritmo (Latin – algobarismus, Classical Arabic – ḥisābu lḡubār) – Algorithm
Dado (Classical Arabic – a‘dād) – Dice

These are all very common words.

> Alcalde (Spanish Arabic – alqáḍi, Classical Arabic – qāḍī) – Mayor (literally “judge”)
Aldea (Spanish Arabic – aḍḍáy‘a, Classical Arabic – ḍay‘ah) – Small village
Alfombra (Spanish Arabic – alḥánbal, Classical Arabic – ḥanbal) – Carpet/Rug
Almohada (Spanish Arabic – almuẖádda, Classical Arabic – miẖaddah) – Pillow
Alquiler (Spanish Arabic – alkirá or alkirí, Classical Arabic – kirā’) – Rent
Asesino (Arabic – ḥaššāšīn) – Murderer
Barrio (Spanish Arabic – bárri, Classical Arabic – barrī) – Neighborhood

Notice that a chess bishop is an alfil, not an obispo.

Which isn't so odd since chess itself is an Arabic word.

ajedrez

Giraffes and tobacco.

Lemons and limes and oranges.

Arabic influence on the Spanish language overwhelmingly dates from the Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492. The influence results mainly from the large number of Arabic loanwords and derivations in Spanish, plus a few other less obvious effects. == History == The Spanish language, also called Castilian, is a Romance language that evolved from the dialects of Roman Vulgar Latin spoken in the Iberian peninsula. The first documents written in a language with some features specific of modern Spanish are ascribed to a number of documents from different monasteries in the area...

There, knock yourself out. :)

OK OK.

I believe it's like 7% of the lexis.

The thing is, you recognize lots of them because they got to English, too.

Sometimes via French or Italian instead.

Q: Where did Spanish get its /x/? Arabic influence?

3:24 AM

19

Most Romance languages don't have /x/ (like the j in hijo), nor did Latin. Where did Spanish /x/ come from? Internal development, Arabic influence, or something else? Since Moroccan Arabic also has /x/, one would suspect Arabic influence; but perhaps that is simplistic.

Yeah, that one came out of the sibilants not out of Arabic.

"Sherry" is now "Jerez" but used to be spelled "Xerés" -- and had the "sh" consonant from "ship" for X.

But now the J in that word is IPA /x/.

Spanish no longer has the freestanding "sh" sibilant except in loanwords. It does occur in the "ch" affricate of course.

@Cerberus Did you ask that because it's a phoneme that only you and Reg can pronounce among Europeans? :)

And I mean the strong Dutch one, or the Russian sounding one, not the weaker German one.

A Spaniard can pronoun Van Gogh reasonably well if you tell him to say "joj". The word "reloj" means a watch.

As in a wrist watch.

They sometimes flub the one in the coda, even though it's ok elsewhere.

They'll swap in a random sibilant, as though it were spelt reloz or relof.

@tchrist I don't think Achtung is so very weak!

@Cerberus Well, it's certainly not /h/ weak, no.

@tchrist A funny deformation.

To us Dutchmen, the Moroccan /x/ sound sounds harsh.

Really?

Hm, they have a bunch of those that we don't have, further back.

/ɢ/ or /q/ or something.

@Cerberus They have red STOP signs there, but they cannot even come close to pronouncing them like we do. They say /es'tof/ or /es'toθ/ or /es'toɸ/

Because you can't have a stop at the end.

Nor a "liquid" (freestanding) s- at the front followed by a stop.

3:36 AM

Ah.

French and Portuguese also cannot.

Italians feel the need to use lo before s + occlusive, I believe.

They do indeed.

sbello

@Cerberus In a way it's the same issue, but doesn't "seem" like it.

France and Geneva have STOP signs. But Québec? Mais non! Québec has no STOP signs, only ARRÊT signs.

Hehe.

Liberté, égalité, et pureté.

3:40 AM

How very patriotic.

Italian also says "lo zio" for "el tío" IIRC.

They have /ts/ there.

(uncle)

Also for a few other categories, I believe.

Yeah, it's been years -- decades!! -- since I formally studied Italian during grad school, and it never "locked in" in the way Spanish (and French (mostly)) did.

Then again, I have like a minor in French, so some of that stuck.

And Spanish, FFS I use every day it seems.

Not very literarily, but still.

Damn it, I forgot to mention omnishambolic nonsense.

> Chiefly in political contexts: (of a person) prone to making blunders and miscalculations; (of a situation) utterly disorganized or chaotic, comprehensively mismanaged. Cf. omnishambles n.
2010 @Kirsty_CSk 30 June in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive) ‘Omnishambolic’ is my word of the day.
2012 Irish Independent (Nexis) 16 Apr. The award for the most omnishambolic politician of the month has to go to the chancellor.
2019 @RachGrocott4043 21 Mar. in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive) Time to stop this omnishambolic nonsense. The government embarrasses us in front of the world whilst act…

But that isn't what @Mitch was looking for here.

From omnis and shambles?

yep

I looked for the collocations of "X nonsense" in the OED's citations. There were nearly 700 citations with "nonsense" in them.

> Etymology: < German Henide (1903 in Weininger, in the passage translated in quot. 1906 at main sense) < ancient Greek ἕν (neuter) one (see henad n.) + German -ide -id suffix2.

Compare henism n.

> 1908 J. London Martin Eden xxxvii. 321 By some henidical process—henidical, by the way, is a favorite word of mine which nobody understands—by some henidical process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong.
1926 G. Sterling in Overland Monthly June 185/3 The henidical nonsense with which weak souls flatter themselves.

henid, henism, henidical

New to me.

But they're twentieth-centurisms.

Rare.

@Cerberus Can you manage to pronounce enjuto as [ẽ̞ɴˈχut̪o̞] not as [en'huto]?

3:58 AM

Of course.

That's the /x/ that's a tiny bit farther back.

And a dental t, and a nasalized e.

Well, I might or might not get the g sound right, but it certainly won't sound like h.

good :)

You can say [x] there; the other is just an allophone that not everybody has.

Only happens to [x] under assimilation before an [o] or [u].

Not the other three vowels.

My God it's nice to have just five vowels.

Hard to confuse them that way.

I could live with 7 vowels: adding /æ/ and /y/ for Old English isn't too bad. (They also had phonemic length for all 7, mind you.)

But at least they had the fine sense NOT TO REUSE THE SAME LETTERS.

The same letter taking on different values in different words is hard.

But a quarter of the world speaks English now, they say.

Sigh. Can't anybody who's under retirement age ever win anything anymore?

> The deterioration of the brain has many symptoms. Reflexes become slower. Memory starts to fail. It becomes harder to learn new things. Thinking becomes brittle. Mental stamina declines.

These symptoms become measurable as early as age 45, at which point most people have already experienced a 3-4 percent decline in mental agility, and it's all downhill from there. By age 60, the changes are usually obvious; by age 70 they're often debilitating.

Tell me about it.

Speaking of which, I forgot to felicitate your getting less young.

Gosh!

I had no idea he would win by such a large margin.

I'm surprised too.

4:10 AM

I do agree that, in general, it is good to have not only old people rule the land.

I would prefer a mixture.

But, in this case, despite his age, he may be what the country needs.

I know.

I have nothing against Buttigieg or Klobuchar, mind you.

A bit of socialism might do you good, present company excepted.

A bit foot-dragging, maybe.

You have something against Warren?

No, I was just naming young people. Warren is fine.

4:12 AM

Ah.

Sanders is so often angry.

I can't blame him for that: he's angry about things you should be angry about.

But it's hard on him, and on anyone.

Yeah, I'm no fan of public anger.

But I'll forgive him.

Ten or fifteen years ago he was almost a joke to most people. They thought he was crazy.

Or is that twenty or thirty years ago? I dunno, it all compresses. See my quote about brain deterioration above.

But he was elected time and again.

Of course. Vermonters are good people.

The rest of the country, not so much.

He's the white-right-racists' bugbear and hobgoblin, their perennial punching-bag piñata. They wave the word "socialism" at him to scare their children with. That's because he has deliberately played up the word, but it does not mean what the evil media empire of the goosestepping racists wants you to believe it means.

It doesn't mean Lenin or Stalin or Mao. It means Norway.

His Fraudulency wants to run against Bernie because it's the easiest way he can think of getting out the panicking Nazi vote.

But many of those people would just stay home if Biden is the opponent. Hell, some might even vote for him. Can't have that.

The key is to fight someone you can get people to hate hate hate hate hate.

That's all anything is about for those folks now.

4:23 AM

Last elections, polls suggested that Sanders would have performed better against Trump than did Clinton.

I know. The Party did some dirty tricks to keep him out.

Because that's what parties do.

This time, that doesn't seem possible?

@tchrist Just as they did with Trump.

He could always pick her for veep. :)

That could be fun.

Like everything, it's really all up to Putin now.

Brexit. Prexit.

He supported Sanders last time, too.

Because he's seen as a bomb to drop into stability.

As the current mob boss was.

And as Brexit is.

Fucking Putin won. Everything. I'm so deflated.

4:28 AM

Now, now.

Not that much has changed.

On verra.

It's all about propaganda and partitioning. You put people in their own rooms and feed them nothing but you want them to see.

It's all very Clockwork Orange. And Brave New World.

I need to go collapse in bed, the creatures are restless and keep coming to see why I'm not there yet.

Meanwhile, the forgotten horseman is coming for us all.

The virus is running free in South Korea and Iran. And Italy has quarantines now.

We haven't had quarantines in this country in nearly a century. Something like that.

Yellow fever and typhoid I think were the bad ones before.

This isn't so fatal, but still.

My grandmother lived under quarantine as a girl. Groceries were delivered to them.

Maybe it was typhus; don't remember now.

It was the whole area, not just our family.

That was during the 1920s.

Or so. Maybe 30s.

Yeah, the epidemic seems hard to control.

But those Belgian researchers found that a certain medicine helped alleviate the symptoms.

It also worked against SARS, and it has now been tested again the new disease.

> South Korea reported 123 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing its total to 556, and reported a fourth death.

Six deaths in Iran. So probably 300 cases, something like that.

worldometers.info/coronavirus

You don't have 6 deaths amongst only 29 cases. That's not what we've seen anywhere. That means there are hundreds of people in Iran who already have this.

We don't know what's happening in North Korea. At all. But apparently people are dying.

4:45 AM

It is said that the incubation period can be longer than 14 days.

There seem to have been some outliers.

North Korea is imposing a full month-long quarantine on any arriving foreigners.

And Japan is letting infected people amble about at their pleasure.

Is it really?

They made a mistake.

> The health ministry let 23 passengers off the Diamond Princess cruise ship without going through mandated tests for the novel coronavirus, health minister Katsunobu Kato said Saturday.

For three days through Friday, 970 passengers who tested negative in tests after Feb. 5 were allowed to disembark the ship. The 23 passengers had been tested before Feb. 5, but results came back negative.

Having negative results was a condition to be allowed to get off the cruise liner that has seen more than 600 cases of passengers and crew members infected with the virus, NHK reported.

Yeah, the Washington Post has a new article saying it may be more than 14 days' incubation.

Couple long incubations with asymptomatic transmissions, and this is really hard to stop.

@tchrist Have these 23 caused any new infections?

japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/22/national/…

Is where that's from.

I don't think we know yet.

That's ok, California accidentally released someone whose test was positive.

4:59 AM

Mistakes are bound to happen.

Yes. They did get that person back. Eventually.

The Dutch government allows those returned from Wuhan to stay out their quarantine at home...

After having been tested negative, but still.

right

In their own houses, I mean.

Provided that their houses are suitable.

Apparently there's a problem with the testing, too. Too dodgy. Lots of false negatives at first.

5:00 AM

So it would seem.

> As a preventive measure, Iran has closed schools in Tehran, Qom, Arak and three other provinces. Also, the city of Tehran closed down all bistros and water fountains in the city's subway stations until further notice.

Authorities also suspended popular football matches for 10 days and additional measures include daily cleanings of metro train cars and city buses.

Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia announced that citizens and residents of the kingdom are not permitted to travel to Iran following the spread of the virus there. Anyone previously in Iran will only be permitted entry to t…

aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/…

I believe that the Iranian minister for health said that it might be present in all Iranian cities now.

Not a lot of trust by the Iranian people of the Iranian government these days.

Their current numbers in Iran would suggest a 20% mortality rate, not a 2% one. So it's all still unseen, undisclosed, unknown.

But we know there are many more cases in China as well.

puppy on lap, not taking no for answer

Suspending all international travel would seem in order.

But I have said this before.

Also good for the environment.

5:18 AM

Almost no country is doing that yet, I think.

skullpatrol

5:56 AM

Heavyweight boxing news flash:

The fight has been stopped as Wilder’s corner throws in the towel in round seven. Say it out loud: Tyson Fury is the new WBC heavyweight champion of the world!

9:16 AM

Can you provide the re-wording you're thinking of that does not have a verb? I am not seeing a way to remove it. — RegDwigнt ♦ 10 hours ago

@RegDwigнt i.e. could it be removed? — SaidbakR 10 hours ago

Is my English that bad?

Please read my previous comment and act accordingly. — RegDwigнt ♦ 55 secs ago

@tchrist tried both, did not help.

Have you heard the German accent?

Please say "no". I don't want you to be as unhappy as I am.

Paul Simon Deconstructs 'Mrs. Robinson' | The Dick Cavett Show

10:07 AM

@Robusto more insight from Simon:

►

Keep these mind

12:20 PM

Is the group of abbreviations using / a large one? w/o, w/, a/k/a, b/c. Is that about it, or are there many, many more? Are they AmE only?

user8718165

2:25 PM

@RegDwigнt Hello! Thank you very much for the reply. I got it.

Robusto

4:19 PM

@RegDwigнt Nice. I actually knew that the song in the movie came before the one on the album (Bookends) because I lived through that. But it's interesting to hear him talk nevertheless.

A: Do British people insert a glottal stop before consonants like k, p and ch?

5:27 PM

1

Some British dialects glottalize word-final or syllable-final oral stops. That is, a glottal stop is articulated simultaneously with the stop. I suspect this is what you're hearing. Some American dialects also do this, for example my own Midwestern dialect. When the oral closure is lost for s...

> Oral closure is lost for glottalized [t'] before a consonant and for [p' k'] before a homorganic stop. For example, I say [hɪʔmətaiz] for "hypnotize", where the [p] causes assimilation of the following [n] to [m], and the [p] glottalizes, then loses its oral closure because it is now before homorganic [m].

I was unaware that a ho morganatic marriage was even possible.

6:56 PM

@Robusto yeah for me in this case it was not even about whatever song he's even talking about, but more like, holy shit, here I just clicked on some interview completely at random, and he immediately starts saying things that are interesting and true.

Like, the very first two or three sentences alone that he says are an instant payoff. Totally worth the effort of one mouse click.

9:12 PM

Like a vice? ? ? — Laurel 10 mins ago

I am not familiar with that phrase and the usual sources are of no help, either.

What does it mean?

I cannot assess its fitness for the purpose of that question at all.

Robusto

9:56 PM

@RegDwigнt Yes. It's always worthwhile listening to intelligent people talk about their work.

Especially people like Paul Simon.

Apropos of nothing, I just learned that the game we call Tic-Tac-Toe in America in some Spanish-speaking countries is called El juego del gato (The Cat's Game). Which is curious, because the way I learned Tic-Tac-Toe was that if the game ended in a draw it was called a "cat's game" ...

The two must be related, right?

Notwithstanding the fact that my cats suck at all games that don't involve clawing or biting.