English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-07-14

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12:19 AM

@RegDwigнt: On Measure 88 (after the key change to A-flat) you have a D-flat marked as an accidental, which is unnecessary, as is the one at the beginning of the A-flat section. Or perhaps that's an artifact of the software?

1:10 AM

13

Q: What's a positive word to describe happily stumbling around on a pleasant afternoon, accomplishing nothing in particular?

The situation I'm trying to describe is one where someone is tottering around the yard, maybe a little buzzed, enjoying the weather during a lazy summer afternoon. It's sort of the way I'd think of a Hobbit as being—content to be drinking some cider, mulling around the back yard, not accomplishin...

single-word-requests synonyms

Multi-Collider bait ^

What a lot of rubbish this site is. All the regulars come out sniffing after this crap.

1:24 AM

Q. What's red and bad for your teeth?
A. A brick.

Hey, are there any Indigenous Britons left, or have they all been displaced or killed?

@tchrist Are you asking in this chat, or in Britain?

I would have thought the Welsh would qualify if you're talking about Britain.

In Britain or in Brittany?

And who counts as indigenous?

Prae-Celtic?

Or Prae-Germanic?

I've been watching this show Hidden, which is a crime drama set in Wales, where they code-switch between Welsh and English all the time. And when they switch into Welsh it's a whole different world. I normally can get a cadence or something to latch onto, but not this.

Also, what does indigenous really mean?

The Native Americans aren't really "indigenous" to North America, since they arrived from Asia, right?

@Robusto I've done just about everything I could reasonably do to it.

@Cerberus Well see, that's the question.

@Robusto My point.

1:39 AM

Everyone arrived from somewhere.

@Cerberus Rift Valley.

Our reptilian ancestors came from the sea.

@Cerberus Speak for yourself.

Our unicellar ancestors probably came from one or a few very specific places on Earth.

We're all just Africans you know.

Before that, we were not people.

1:40 AM

Animals can be indigenous.

And other organisms.

You could tell the Germans to all go home, and the Vikings, but where do you send the Celts?

@Robusto I am perhaps a bit more reptilian than you, but I think it's mostly terrestrial serpents.

It's all in turmoil.

@tchrist To Anatolia, I have heard.

Probably just a theory.

Everybody comes from somewhere else. The only trouble comes when they choose to stay.

1:41 AM

And, before that, both Germans and Celts lived around Central Asia.

The guy at Cardiff Castle told me that the Welsh were pushed out to the edges of the Isles by the invaders, and that they were the real natives.

I was kind.

They probably were for quite a few centuries at least, perhaps millennia.

The Brits don't take to being contradicted. :)

Who does?

Here's how bad the Brits are: they felt it necessary to import their royal house since they couldn't find a monarch from one of the old lines.

1:44 AM

When?

Many monarchies have done this.

It's just stupid.

And most monarchs came from Germany and France.

Sorry, but there it is.

Yes, the House of Windsor is a German import.

> Ken ye the rhyme to grasshopper?
Ken ye the rhyme to grasshopper?
A hempen rein, a horse o' tree,
A psalm-book, and a Presbyter.

I do not know this house, but did you perhaps mean the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha?

1:45 AM

One and the same.

Golgotha sounds scary.

Jacobite heresies.

The one whose current Prince Consort is from the houses of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and Hesse-Darmstadt?

It's hard to find many heirs left to King Harold Godwinson, and he was still an invader.

House of Windsor

The House of Windsor is the reigning royal house of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. In 1901, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (a branch of the House of Wettin) succeeded the House of Hanover to the British monarchy with the accession of King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1917, the name of the royal house was changed from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the English Windsor (from Windsor Castle) because of anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom during World War I. There have been four British monarchs of the House...

Balderdash.

1:48 AM

@Cerberus They're all Germans!

Indeed, they are.

@Cerberus Go tell it to the Queen.

The Queen is Argentine.

> HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS

Nor of noble birth.

1:50 AM

The Queen is Argenteen.

That guy and his heirs aren't doing so well either, despite the futurus bits. But I don't think he was German.

@Cerberus The first rule of the kingdom is that the king must have a name his people can actually most of them manage to pronounce. That one fails. Hence the Windsors.

Or rather, hence their name-change.

I rather thought it was about Anti-Germanism during the Interbellum?

Quite.

One can otherwise simply pronounce and spell a foreign name in a homely way.

We spell and say Oranje, not Orange.

j and ge are the same :)

> And gave the Prince of Orange her.

2:02 AM

No to us!

J and g are /j/ and /x/, though ng is /ŋ/.

So just [ɻ̩̃ʒ] in one single syllable. Nothing else is allowed.

I don't know the symbols but it sounds like you've got a bumblebee between cupped hands, and she is very unhappy.

Uhh.

I can't find "angrily buzzing dumbledor" in the IPA charts.

I don't know that first symbol, nor what you are referring to.

It's just a nasalized syllabic retroflex rhotic approximate.

Orange ya glad you asked?

Attempts at pronouncing it can bring Chinese ESL students to tears.

Just as their sounds can us.

Janus figured out the symbols once for orange, but I can't find that now. It must have been in a comment.

The fruit is 橙 or 橙子 chéngzi in Chinese; 色 means ‘colour’ and is only part of the name of the colour, not the fruit. Incidentally, it's very common to call oranges 橘子 júzi, which is really more specifically a tangerine or mandarin (in itself a reverse etymology, as it were, the fruit being named after the orange robes worn by Chinese mandarins/officials). — Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 16 '14 at 11:07

Nope, not that one.

For the record, the reason bluening sounds so bizarre is that the factitive/causative suffix -en (which is only semi-productive in current English anyway) is highly restricted: it can only be applied to simple, monosyllabic roots that end in an obstruent (including fricatives, but excluding nasals). That's why there's a redden/blacken/whiten, but no *greenen/orangen/bluen/purplen/yellowen, etc.: they are either polysyllabic or they end in non-obstruents (including vowels and nasals). — Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 5 '15 at 14:18

Nor that.

This clearly isn’t metathesis since it’s not two sounds switching positions, but one sound moving further up in a word. I’ve never come across a term for that. English has a sporadic tradition of nasal insertion before a /dʒ/ in the onset of the final syllable in trisyllabic words, especially of French oran—sorry, origins (message ~ messenger, passage ~ passenger). There isn’t usually an n at the end to delete/move, but this still feels like it must be closely related to that process. — Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 6 '19 at 19:45

Getting warmer!

2:18 AM

Hah.

Very commonly, you would be missing a sound; or rather, over-hearing one. Intervocalic /nt/ usually gets reduced in AmE to a nasalised tap, [ɾ̃]. This is quite similar to an actual [n], but the contact between the tongue and the alveolar ridge is faster and covers a smaller part of the blade of the tongue. It’s by no means unheard of for intervocalic /n/ to be reduced to a tap as well, nor for /nt/ to be realised as an actual [n], but many (I would guess most, but not sure) Americans do pronounce interview and inner view differently. — Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 31 '19 at 19:12

Yes, I'm using superpowers. It's the only way to find these.

I would second @Plato’s description. In more careful speech, the /d/ and the /j/ would normally be fairly separate: [aɪ ˌʌndɚˈstæ̃ːnd.jʊ]. In normal, improvised, but still not exactly fast speech, they would coalesce into /ʤ/: [aə̯nɚˈstæ̃ˑʤə]. In rapid improvised speech, I’d most likely drop both the /n/ and the /d/ altogether (leaving both the glide and the following schwa nasalised): [aɾ̃ɚˈstæ̃ȷ̃ə̯̃]. — Janus Bahs Jacquet May 17 '15 at 22:47

Okay, I've been up too long. He writes _φαίνεσθαι_ and I go trying to figure that out as though it were IPA.

Not only is the /t/ in I don’t wanna (X) nearly always elided in AmE—the /d/ is frequently (almost) elided as well (being usually represented by a very weak retroflex approximant), I is monophthongised, the /n/ in don’t is debuccalised (leaving behind a nasal vowel and nasalising also the following glide /w/), and the /n/ in wanna is reduced to a flap. In casual speech, it is exceedingly common for I don’t wanna (X) to be pronounced something like [ˈɑɻ̞õw̃ɒ̃ɾə]. The only sound that’s really left completely unchanged is the /ə/ at the end… — Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 13 '15 at 19:01

I should just ask him.

@MariaFernandes You can use it as an imperative in any sense where it makes logical sense to do so; just make sure an imperative is what you actually want to use. “Get it!” as an imperative would be an order for someone to understand what you're saying already; “Get it?” is a not-very-polite way of checking that they do understand. If I may presume from your name that you are Portuguese, it would be akin to the difference between, “Não preciso das tuas sugestões, percebe-o (já)!” and “Não preciso das tuas sugestões, percebes?”. — Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 27 '16 at 13:00

Heh, even his Portuguese.

And yes, I was searching for him commenting õ

Can also use the mod tool to search for him commenting ɾ̃. That's simply impossible in Google.

Ditto ɪ̃

Incidentally, @PeterShor, we know this wasn’t PG since fronting of /a/ to /æ/ did not happen with nasal vowels or before nasals in Anglo-Frisian, though it did (later on) in German. In PG, the word was still *gans-, with a nasal present, and this developed regularly into ON [ɡɑ̃ːs] (written gás) and West Germanic [ɡɑ̃s]/[ɡɔ̃ːs] with compensatory lengthening, but Proto-German [ɡans]. Only after the nasality of the vowel was lost in WG (yielding [ɡɔːs], later raised to [ɡoːs]) did i-umlaut take place. If it had been earlier, the plural would have been *goose as well. — Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 17 '15 at 11:06

This is hilarious:

user image

2:47 AM

@Cerberus And the Etruscans. And the Manchus.

@Mitch Gesundheit.

3:05 AM

@Mitch I don't think so?

The Etruscans may have come from Anatolia.

I don't know about the Manchus, but Europe would seem extremely unlikely.

1 hour later…

4:22 AM

From the "just when you thought things couldn't get worse" department, they've just shut down one of our local parks here because of the plague. I found it both sad and funny that they had to clarify that this had nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic, only with the plague plague, as it were.

1 hour later…

Captain Bohemian

5:31 AM

air-invading rehearsal

I got such a message

"triage" has been seen to be used in different contexts.

Captain Bohemian

6:05 AM

missile warning drill

@Xanne The ambulance arrived within several hours, thankfully, and the woman is now in the hospital.

Captain Bohemian

6:26 AM

I am going to forage

hunger upsets me

so hot

33 degrees Celsius here

don't how hot outdoors

It's horribly hot here, +31°C

I don't know how people in the southern states of the USA existed prior to the introduction of air conditioning.

How did they work?

I can barely move in this heat.

1 hour later…

7:50 AM

@CowperKettle 88 F. doesn’t seem so hot to me, but even U.S. cities in the north have 100 degree days. A fan helps; so does a wet towel around your neck.

8:18 AM

@CowperKettle Someone once told me people adapt (next year will be easier), especially if they lived in a climate with hot summers as a newborn. Supposedly (this is in the folk-medicine category) the infant develops more, or perhaps more efficient, sweat glands.

@CowperKettle I once forgot about the heat on a hot Chicago day reading an account of Admiral Byrd’s rescue from Antarctica in desperately cold and windy weather. My memory has the title “By Dog Sled for Byrd”, which may have been a chapter in a book. Anyway I forgot about the actual miserable weather for an hour at least.

2 hours later…

10:02 AM

@Robusto yeah no idea. It's small, so that's placed by hand. I normally mark the first occurrence of a new note after key change. Here that's not the first, it's like the fourth. Heck, it's not even the first occurrence of that note in this particular measure.

And I wasn't even drunk this one time.

Hm.

So yeah anyway, thanks for your help last night. Some DNS server went down somewhere and I got cut off half the Internet. Basically anything in North America. So I just went to bed and watched YouTube instead. YouTube worked, of course. Yay Google.

Watched a new Vengerov master class for like four hours. Mozart and Brahms and Mendelssohn and someone else I don't even remember anymore.

3 hours later…

12:40 PM

> Welsh evolved from Common Brittonic, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celtic Britons. Classified as Insular Celtic, the British language probably arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age or Iron Age and was probably spoken throughout the island south of the Firth of Forth.[25] During the Early Middle Ages the British language began to fragment due to increased dialect differentiation, thus evolving into Welsh and the other Brittonic languages.

@tchrist ^

12:53 PM

@Cerberus Weren't there a couple of kings of Rome that were Etruscan?

Sort of like how the Tudors were (of) Welsh (origin)?

And then the Qing dynasty was begun by non-Han from Manchuria.

Ohh another...the Yuan dynasty was founded by Kublai Khan. The Chinese assimilated the invaders every time.

Wait...not the Japanese.

Or the English.

Most of the time?

@Mitch Certainly!

Many powerful states have been ruled by foreign dynasties.

1:08 PM

@Cerberus Isn't that the pattern we were talking about, foreign rulers?

Though I would say there is a difference between foreign dynasties than actually came from outside the state and conquered it on the one hand, and just people of foreign descent who were already part of the state.

@Mitch Yes!

So Mongols are the first kind and the Tudors the second kind?

The modern practice of 'importing' a monarch from somewhere else may be considered a third category.

@Mitch Yes, I think so, though I know little of the Tudors.

What pattern do the Etruscan kings fit in though?

The Hyksos conquered Egypt and ruled it for a long time as well.

@Mitch I'm not 100% sure if we know enough about how the dynasty actually came to power.

But Rome was partly Etruscan at the beginning.

1:12 PM

Wikipedia seems so trustworthy until you actually know something about a subject and then it's frustrating.

It lay within the sphere of influence of Etruria, was probably best considered part of the Etruscan Empire.

@Cerberus Oh.

@Mitch Just like newspapers.

@Cerberus What?

Once you know a lot about a subject, suddenly newspaper articles about it seem flawed.

1:14 PM

@Cerberus Reading the wiki page about the kings of Rome with all the use of familiar terms like 'senate' and 'pontifex' and 'republic' all makes it sound so civilized. But they were all acting like tribes in New Guinea or the Amazon (well, some of them).

@Cerberus Sure there's a comparison, but wikipedia is way less reliable than newspapers.

Matt E. Эллен

can't hold your chips in wikipedia

I don't know if this makes my case or not, but I was recently concerned about a dog that might have been chewing on some lilies of the valley. And I had always heard that LotV were poisonous (how poisonous I've never known). And so I googled..everything says that LotV will cause vomiting diarrhea pains etc (but not death), and similar in dogs... except Wikipedia says 'no, LotV are not poisonous.

@Mitch In a way.

They were certainly much less civilised than we are.

Who do I believe?

Which neighborhood pet or child do I give LotV to to test our hypotheses?

@Mitch It kind of depends, but I'd say Wkipaedia is also fairly reliable.

Matt E. Эллен

1:20 PM

@Cerberus wait until you get your degree in unknown history.

@Mitch Why not both!

@MattE.Эллен Hah.

OK, I'm waiting.

@Cerberus 'nobles'. makes it sound so fancy.

My body is ready.

Matt E. Эллен

It's in the post

Oh!

1:21 PM

Where they all farmers by that time? (700's BC)

So it's that kind of degree.

Matt E. Эллен

yes. that kind of degree

distance learning

@Mitch In early states, noblemen were just the most powerful people in a tribe, often warriors.

@Mitch Not all, but most people were farmers in almost every state before...a certain time.

@MattE.Эллен Was it one that I paid €1000 for?

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus I hope you tipped your examiner

Surely there is no exam?

I'm not paying to go through an exam!

Matt E. Эллен

1:24 PM

that's what the tip ensures

a perfect mark

otherwise it'll be a third class, or even no honours at all!

@Cerberus I'm just trying to get perspective about the relative civilization vs the German and Celtic tribes that they conquered later. You get the impression that they were all roaming northern Europe totally disorganized. Maybe they just weren't writing everything down or didn't have easy access to marble. But otherwise had Graf and Herzog and whatever titles the Celts had. and councils and deliberating bodies with their own fancy names.

You have classes in degrees?

So everyone has huge numbers of open tabs in their browser. Things you want to read but just don't have the time right this moment.

Is it bad to also have multiple windows?
with multiple tabs in each?

@Mitch They certainly did (though not those specific titles). But the Romans were urban, and considerably more civilised than those others.

@Mitch Probably not dissimilar in badness.

The Etruscan and Greek civilisations were far more developed than the Celtic and Germanic tribes of the time.

And Rome developed near the Greek-Etruscan border.

Took their writing, technology, culture, lots of things.

Writing is very, very important.

I wouldn't be too impressed about Rome 753 BC.

Matt E. Эллен

@Cerberus yes, first, 2:1, 2:2, third. If you have no class you have no honour. not that the British university system is classist.

1:33 PM

This is officially the hottest 14th of July in history in our city

user image

The previous record was in 2012, at 35°C

user image

The Celts arrived in Europe around the beginning of the Roman Republic?

Matt E. Эллен

some of them just sat in the middle of Turkey bu didn't settle anywhere along the way!

"Bulgaria? No thank you." (translated from Celtic)

I have heard theories that the Celts invaded Europe from Anatolia.

So perhaps it is rather that some stayed there.

Matt E. Эллен

"Istanbul? it's no Constantinople. We'll just drop Ankara here."

Because this is all praehistoric, there's just a lot we don't know. Guesses.

Weigh?

Matt E. Эллен

1:40 PM

Stow?

Ankara is something you can stow?

@tchrist: Squirrel with bubonic plague found in Colorado

Matt E. Эллен

The opposite of weigh anchor

Ahh.

OK OK.

Matt E. Эллен

weigh was the wrong word to begin with

1:41 PM

> Why did Constinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks!

@MattE.Эллен Whigh do you say that?

@Cerberus Oh wow... and the Germans followed?

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch weighing the anchor is picking it up. I meant dropping it.

@Mitch Much later.

movements of the Cimbri around late 200's BC

That just seems perverse. Some guy just randomly scribbled a line.

"I heard they visited Iberia" "OK, let's add that in somewhere."

@MattE.Эллен 'Anchors Aweigh' sounds like you're releasing the anchor, so that you are free from it.

Intuitively implying that you need to keep a lot of anchors on board. Every time you stop you lose another anchor.

I'm guessing this isn't really how it works.

Relatedly, there's an entry in Urban Dictionary for 'drop trow'.

Ah, early Germans.

user image

I didn't know the Cimbri already travelled that far by 200 BC.

But they probably didn't settle there.

Matt E. Эллен

1:58 PM

@Mitch In real life, they just sink the ship as it comes into harbour. Save a lot of money on anchors

'Dropping trou' reminds me of this old person joke:

> First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.

Matt E. Эллен

2:25 PM

ewwwwww

2:38 PM

My work is done here.

@Mitch Thanks!

21

Q: If the President's power to grant pardons is absolute, could he face any consequences?

Does the Presidential power to pardon include the power to avoid any consequences? Consider this hypothetical situation: An extremely rich individual (a US citizen) gets involved in a sordid love affair, and winds up charged and convicted of murdering his mistress on Federal property. The eviden...

united-states president pardon bribery

user image

To grant a blanket pardon without consequences sounds unpresidenty to me

@M.A.R. Everything about Trump sounds unpresidenty to me.

I mean, constitutions, including the US constitution, always seemed a lot of steps ahead of where I was thinking. They predicted lots of possible cases of abuse by this person or that or the public, even, and cemented the law on firm ground

But in this, they somehow assumed presidents were always going to be good people, ideal Americans?

Wasn't it ever thought of, that a president with some shady stuff would be able to pardon his henchmen? I doubt it

2:48 PM

@M.A.R. Well, no. That's why they put all kinds of balances of power in government.

I mean, one possible response would be to trust in people not to elect a shady person. But even a decent man risen to an important position of power can change in four years

@Robusto Yeah, that's the impression I get reading random Politics HNQ

It's the reason why a lot of crazy things he wanted and wants to do are mere bluffs, and likely to be overruled somewhere or another

But all that is necessary for a tyrant president to prosper is for the other branches of government to do nothing.

Enter: the Republican enablers of Trump.

-3

Q: Is it a possibility that foreign leaders are flattering Trump behind closed doors?

Is it a real possibility that foreign leaders are making flattering remarks towards Trump in order to curry favour with him? I am not talking about just being "nice" but saying things that would normally be considered socially "awkward" or even "embarrassing", especially considering their role as...

politics psychology donald-trump

Lol, just when you think questions about Trump can't get any weirder

npr.org/2020/07/12/890075577/…

In all fairness, Obama has apparently pardoned a serial bomber. But the bomber didn't lie to protect the president, and had already served 35 years of sentence

3:10 PM

@M.A.R. The one constant in the Trump presidency: tomorrow will be worse

> Whenever you are asked to name the lowest moment of the Trump presidency, one answer is almost always correct: Tomorrow.

@M.A.R. Did he do that?

@Robusto Yeah, I know: that one was down in Morrison, south of me near Golden maybe 15 or 20 miles away. The other was in Broomfield, just east of me and a little closer than that.

It could always be worse: we haven't seen the Rocky Mountain locusts that formed massive, destructive swarms last century resurrect themselves out of apparent extinction yet. But you never know.

@tchrist I actually went through one of those locust swarms on my way from Chicago to San Francisco in 1985.

Oh I hope not!

academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/55/1/80/248302

In theory they were gone before then.

Not completely positive, I think. "The truth is out there" =~ s/truth/locusts/

@tchrist Different bug, perhaps, but there were enough of whatever we had to completely block my radiator and cause my car to overheat.

3:26 PM

> The last living specimen of the Rocky Mountain locust was collected in 1902 on the Canadian prairie.

Well yes, there are still grasshopper swarms.

We returned through Idaho, thinking to avoid the Nebraska/Colorado mess. Silly us.

Those just aren't ones that have turned into werebugs.

hcn.org/issues/243/13695

Yeah, Mom still talks about the Mormon crickets from when we lived out in Utah when I was toddling.

1 hour later…

4:58 PM

@Cerberus Yes, for Stone. 'blanket' meaning all the convictions made on him through the Mueller investigation. I don't think it covers future convictions for past or future crimes.

I don't think it -can-.

As @Robusto said, it's not necessarily in order to get this outrageous thing to happen, but implicitly makes a circus out of things. Try something crazy, see if it works, if not, then we wated the process's time.

Ah, I thought he had given amnesty to all convicts.

no just the one (totally guilty) guy.

1 hour later…

6:26 PM

user image

1 hour later…

7:41 PM

Ida Haendel died two weeks ago and I'm only hearing it now.

Didn't see it reported anywhere.

Nobody took notice.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Ida Haendel un film d'ESTI

I hope her epitaph does say what she hoped it would.

3 hours later…

11:01 PM

@RegDwigнt In small print on the headstone: "If you can read this, you're standing on my chest."

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Jul '2014

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