English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

00:19

@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?

Robusto

01:10

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...

Multi-Collider bait ^

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

Robusto

01:24

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

tchrist

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

Robusto

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

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

Cerberus

In Britain or in Brittany?

And who counts as indigenous?

Prae-Celtic?

Or Prae-Germanic?

Robusto

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?

tchrist

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

@Cerberus Well see, that's the question.

@Robusto My point.

Cerberus

01:39

Everyone arrived from somewhere.

tchrist

@Cerberus Rift Valley.

Cerberus

Our reptilian ancestors came from the sea.

Robusto

@Cerberus Speak for yourself.

Cerberus

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

tchrist

We're all just Africans you know.

Before that, we were not people.

Cerberus

01:40

Animals can be indigenous.

And other organisms.

tchrist

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

Cerberus

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

Robusto

It's all in turmoil.

Cerberus

@tchrist To Anatolia, I have heard.

Probably just a theory.

Robusto

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

Cerberus

01:41

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

tchrist

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.

Cerberus

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

tchrist

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

Cerberus

Who does?

Robusto

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.

Cerberus

01:44

When?

Many monarchies have done this.

Robusto

It's just stupid.

Cerberus

And most monarchs came from Germany and France.

Robusto

Sorry, but there it is.

Yes, the House of Windsor is a German import.

tchrist

> 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.

Cerberus

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

Robusto

01:45

One and the same.

tchrist

Golgotha sounds scary.

Jacobite heresies.

Cerberus

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

tchrist

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

Robusto

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...

Cerberus

Balderdash.

tchrist

01:48

@Cerberus They're all Germans!

Cerberus

Indeed, they are.

Robusto

@Cerberus Go tell it to the Queen.

Cerberus

The Queen is Argentine.

tchrist

> HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS

Cerberus

Nor of noble birth.

Robusto

01:50

The Queen is Argenteen.

tchrist

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.

Cerberus

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

tchrist

Quite.

Cerberus

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

We spell and say Oranje, not Orange.

tchrist

j and ge are the same :)

> And gave the Prince of Orange her.

Cerberus

02:02

No to us!

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

tchrist

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.

Cerberus

Uhh.

tchrist

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

Cerberus

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

tchrist

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!

Cerberus

02:18

Hah.

tchrist

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:

Mitch