English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

4:03 PM

@AndrewLeach The flipped initial S in SERMONS as compared with the final one does stand out. Inspecting more of the text at high magnification discovers many instances of lowercase final s ("round" s not "long" s) set "upside down" or inverted. But I can discern no pattern; it appears random.

CowperKettle

The nurse told me not to exercise for 3 days after the vaccine. But I haven't found any mentions of this in English. Why should exercise be detrimental?

@Conrado I was not reading, I just recalled that passage. I've memorized all GM Hopkins that seemed good to me, and it's all in my head.

tchrist

Two other matters contribute to this perception. Not every impression captures the same amount of ink in the same places for "the same" letter. And not all copies of "the same" letter may have been identical; after all, this was hand-cut type.

@CowperKettle Maybe the advice to take it easy on yourself for a day or two afterwards is because your body is using energy as it "learns" about the new invader.

Conrado

@Robusto True, I stand rebuked.

Cerberus

This is how we wrote in Germanic places until modern lettering.

Words of Latin descent were written in Latin script.

CowperKettle

Exercise May Boost Your Vaccine Response - NY Times, 2020

Conrado

4:19 PM

Actually, those were the things in my own mind when I discovered that particular passage, and so it seemed to reflect them.

CowperKettle

@Conrado You mean the Hopkins poem? It's a beautiful poem

Cerberus

But words like Römischen and Italien and Kanzler and Rom and Merz and -Personen were apparently not viewed as Latinate, while Militz was.

tchrist

@Robusto ¿Sugieres que le llamaron "Sandía" al laboratorio nacional porque se parece la montaña suya a una sandía al anochecer?

Cerberus

By the way, I think @Conrado is such a cool name.

Coenraad in Dutch.

tchrist

@Cerberus So if the main text was in a blackletter face (aka gothic, textura, etc) then the Latin was set in a roman face in the same fashion that we when setting the main text in a roman face set the Latin in an italic face?

Cerberus

4:24 PM

@tchrist Exactly.

Except that the difference is even starker.

To the untrained eye.

Notice also etc. etc. in Fraktur, not in Roman.

Not quite consistent, methinks.

tchrist

@Cerberus Well, what seems like a false step is that the stroke widths differ so greatly that the overall page color (amount of ink per glyph) changes too dramatically. This is why we use an italic not a bold.

It’s also why we use small capitals not shrunken ones. You need to preserve stroke width to preserve page color.

It feels "wrong".

Conrado (nombre)

Conrado es un nombre propio masculino de origen germano en su variante en español.. Proviene del antiguo germano Kuonrat, de kuoni (atrevido, temerario) y rat (consejo, consejero), por lo que significa "atrevido en el consejo, consejero audaz". Etimológicamente, equivale al griego Trasíbulo. == Santoral == 21 de abril: San Conrado, confesor, lego franciscano, bávaro. 26 de noviembre: San Conrado, ermitaño y abad italiano. 26 de noviembre: San Conrado, obispo de Constanza. == Variantes == Femenino: Conrada, Conradina. === Variantes en otros idiomas === == Véase también == Antroponimi...

Conrado

@CowperKettle Yes and Yes.

tchrist

"Daring in counsel"

I wonder whether it was brought to Iberia by the Visigoths, like their royalty.

Mitch

@Cerberus I've never in my life confused those two

Mostly because I've never seen the word 'cataphract' ever before.

tchrist

@Mitch Really?

Cerberus

4:34 PM

@tchrist There is also that.

But the letters are also very much different.

The average Italian of the 16th century might not be able to read the Gothic letters at all, while the Roman ones are his own.

Let alone the modern Italian...

tchrist

@Mitch Then you must have missed out on playing tabletop wargames with ancient Greek soldiers.

Mitch

@CowperKettle That does seem strange. You might want to refrain from picking up extremely large weights with the arm muscle that got the shot. Maybe it's advice for people who towards the older age where any additional exertion (in addition to the 'exertion' your body is putting into making antibodies) is ... an additional exertion.

@tchrist Nope. Never. I must be reading the wrong things.

@tchrist Yes. Yes, that's it.

Gigili

Haha, the dativpräpositionen song doesn't sound like a song at all.

I wonder who came up with the idea

Mitch

I recognize the words hoplite and myrmidon but only vaguely wonder if it is soldiers that are hopping and what does that have to do with ants.

or mold

some vague connection

tchrist

@Cerberus And who can fault him for that? :) The Carolingian minuscules and the humanist hands out of Italy were far more "legible" than the gothic gruel's unending march of minimimuminums. So were the uncial and the halfuncial hands out of the Isles of Britain.

Gigili

4:39 PM

> I can handle a stain on my character, but not on my clothes!

Mitch

also when they talk about the cataracts of the Nile I wonder why they keep showing pictures of waterfalls instead of old people with poor vision.

Cerberus

@tchrist None, indeed.

Mitch

@Gigili I can handle both.

pretty easily

on other people though, ugh

tchrist

@Mitch Methinks thou catachrestest too much.

Mitch

@tchrist oh I catachresis -a lot-

tchrist

4:41 PM

@Mitch Get thee to yon catachthonian vaults!

Even the Pompeian graffiti were not written in all-caps like Trajan’s Column. Latin writers had a bookhand of their own.

The needs of the stonecutter differ from those of the scribe.

Mitch

@tchrist NOU troglodyte

tchrist

Roman cursive

Roman cursive (or Latin cursive) is a form of handwriting (or a script) used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive and new cursive. == Old Roman cursive == Old Roman cursive, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even by emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal...

Nobody who disavows cursive hands ever writes much at all.

Mitch

But really, about cataracts, I always wondered why use cataracts when they could have just said waterfalls, because I only ever heard cataracts for the eye problems.

Gigili

@Mitch Noöne can handle that.

Mitch

picks fluff off lapel

Gigili

4:48 PM

ugh

Mitch

My favorite memories are labeled on the fronts of my shirts 'oh remember that meal we had'

tchrist

@Mitch cataract < French cataracte (in senses 1 – 4, 6), < Latin cataracta waterfall, portcullis, floodgate, < Greek καταρ(ρ)άκτης down-rushing, a down rushing bird, a portcullis, waterfall, ? (in the Septuagint) floodgate; < καταράσσειν to dash down, dash headlong, rush or fall headlong, as rain or a river, < κατ' or κατά down + ἀράσσειν or ῥάσσειν to dash. (But some think it a derivative of καταρρηγνύναι to break down.)

> The sense-development in Greek, Latin, and French-English, is not in all respects clear.

Mitch

'... and while I was about to down some alu ghobi and you told that joke and I spluttered my forkful half over my front'

Turmeric -never- comes out

Also beet juice

never

tchrist

> 2. a. A waterfall; properly one of considerable size, and falling headlong over a precipice; thus distinguished from a cascade n. [A rare sense in Greek, but common in Latin, where applied to the Cataracts of the Nile.]

CowperKettle

tchrist

4:50 PM

@CowperKettle heh

Mitch

@CowperKettle when the revolution comes that guy... wait... is this the revolution coming?

Oh shit.

Get my 'go bag' ready beside the front door..

tchrist

> †1. a. plural. The ‘flood-gates’ of heaven, viewed as keeping back the rain (with reference to Genesis vii. 11, viii. 2, where Hebrew has 'rbt lattices, windows, Septuagint καταρράκται, Vulgate cataractæ, the former probably, the latter certainly, = flood-gates, sluices; hence also French cataractes du ciel). This, the earliest use in English, is now Obsolete.

I have a hard time keeping separate my cataractes from my caracteres. :)

Gigili

@Mitch Interesting, we also have the word "aloo" in Persian but it is something totally different.

tchrist

> 4. Pathology. An opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye, or of the capsule of the lens, or of both, ‘producing more or less impairment of sight, but never complete blindness’ (New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon).

Gigili

Aloo gobi doesn't sound appetizing. I dislike both aloo and gobi.

tchrist

4:56 PM

> [Apparently a figurative use of the sense portcullis. In French, the physician A. Paré (c1550) has ‘cataracte ou coulisse’; and Cotgrave (1611) has coulisse ‘a portcullis.. also a web in the eye’, the notion being that even when the eye is open, the cataract obstructs vision, as the portcullis does a gateway. (But if originally in medieval Latin, it might arise from the sense ‘window-grating’ fenestra clathrata, Du Cange.)]

"a web in the eye"

Goby

Goby is a common name for many species of small to medium sized ray-finned fish, normally with large heads and tapered bodies, which are found in marine, brackish and freshwater environments. Traditionally most of the species called gobies have been classified in the order Perciformes as the suborder Gobioidei but in the 5th Edition of Fishes of the World this suborder is elevated to an order Gobiiformes within the clade Percomorpha. Not all the species in the Gobiiformes are referred to as gobies and the "true gobies" are placed in the family Gobiidae, while other species referred to as gobies...

Mitch

@Gigili what is it in Persian?

Gigili

@tchrist TIL, thanks.

@Mitch plum

Mitch

@Gigili To me it sounds like a side dish or rather you had some of these things randomly put together and let's just call it 'potatoes and cauliflower'. So what's in it? Potatoes and cauliflower. It's all in the spices.

which -never- some out of a stain.

@Gigili I bet somewhere there is some cuisine where they have plum and cauliflower.

I do not want go there.

tchrist

@Mitch What’s a side dish? Something lacking dead animals?

Gigili

@Mitch Genau. More like a "what's left in the fridge" kind of dish

tchrist

5:01 PM

@Mitch Did you get your go bag from here?

Mitch

@Gigili One person did it once. Then everybody thought, screw it, that's set in stone now.

@tchrist haha.

no

@tchrist ... yeah...

CowperKettle

8:26 PM

It's interesting why in Spanish the letter z is read like s

Andrew Leach

I thought it was th, /θ/

tchrist

8:43 PM

That's correct.

Occasionally there is a bit of voicing if the next sound is a voiced consonant.

And apart from Granada, everybody in Andalucía remaps that to /s/. Plus those are the folks who settled America.

Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives

In Spanish dialectology, the realization of coronal fricatives is one of the most prominent features distinguishing various dialect regions. The main three realizations are the phonemic distinction between /θ/ and /s/ (distinción), the presence of only alveolar [s] (seseo), or, less commonly, the presence of only a denti-alveolar [s̟] that is similar to /θ/ (ceceo). While an urban legend attributes the presence of the dental fricative to a Spanish king with a lisp, the various realizations of these coronal fricatives are actually a result of historical processes that date back to the 15th century...

It's the same between "Galician" and "Portuguese". In Santiago de Compostela, Galician words (I don't mean "Spanish") can have /θ/ in them, but in Lisbon, they don't, not unless you're originally and recently from the distant borderland to the north.

@CowperKettle Well just look at what happens in Italian or German to words with the letter Z in them. Those aren't like they are in English either.

Z is a "new" letter, one not found in the post-archaic/classical Latin/Roman alphabet. Even the best of English writers have cursed it.

> Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter! — My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him.—Spare my gray beard, you wagtail?

@Cerberus News of your narco has reached us. nytimes.com/2021/01/24/world/australia/…

SmokeDetector

9:08 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer (34): Origin of "Given up the ghost" by Christopher Goben on english.SE

Robusto

9:35 PM

@tchrist A ver ... creo que no hay otra explicación.

tchrist

> However, as Robert Julyan notes, "the most likely explanation is the one believed by the Sandia Indians: the Spaniards, when they encountered the Pueblo in 1540, called it Sandia, because they thought the squash gourds growing there were watermelons, and the name Sandia soon was transferred to the mountains east of the pueblo."

Sandia Mountains

The Sandia Mountains (Southern Tiwa: Posu gai hoo-oo, Keres: Tsepe, Navajo: Dził Nááyisí; Tewa: O:ku:pį, Northern Tiwa: Kep'íanenemą; Towa: Kiutawe, Zuni: Chibiya Yalanne), are a mountain range located in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties, immediately to the east of the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The mountains are just due south of the southern terminus of the Rocky Mountains, and are part of the Sandia–Manzano Mountains. This is largely within the Cibola National Forest and protected as the Sandia Mountain Wilderness. The highest point is Sandia Crest...

See the Etymology section there.

Without looking up anything at all, I had imagined the squash scenario because I know what grows in that terrain. All our melons and such come from the high but watered plain of the San Luis Valley bordering on New Mexico.

Robusto

9:58 PM

@tchrist I like the "watermelon-colored sky" explanation better than the gourd one. But your explanation works better for Alamogourdo.

¿Te parece?

We are finally under 40 cases/100K, and falling. I hope this trend continues.

tchrist

10:16 PM

@Robusto ¿Yo qué sé?

Winston Churchill sure did have a way with words, didn’t he?

> An old darkey, with hair as white as the Colonel’s, appeared from behind the partition.

“I ’lowed you’d want it, Marse Comyn, when I seed de Cap’n comin’,” said he, with the privilege of an old servant. Indeed, the bottle was beneath his arm.

The Colonel smiled.

“Hope you’se well, Cap’n,” said Ephum, as he drew the cork.

“Tolluble, Ephum,” replied the Captain. “But, Ephum—say, Ephum!”

“Yes, sah.”

“How’s my little sweetheart, Ephum?”

“Bress your soul, sah,” said Ephum, his face falling perceptibly, “bress your soul, sah, Miss Jinny’s done gone to Halcyondale, in Kaintuck, to see her…

Published in 1901.

The Crisis (novel)

The Crisis is an historical novel published in 1901 by the American novelist Winston Churchill. It was the best-selling book in the United States in 1901. The novel is set in the years leading up to the first battles of the American Civil War, mostly in the divided state of Missouri. It follows the fortunes of young Stephen Brice, a man with Union and abolitionist sympathies, and his involvement with a Southern family. == Story == Set in the author's home town of St. Louis, Missouri, the site of pivotal events in the western theater of the Civil War, with historically prominent citizens having...

Robusto

I didn't know there was a Winston Churchill the Different.

tchrist

Mirabile visu.

I thought his command of Merakin Dialick was a bit too good to be Britty.

Robusto

At that time period Winston Churchill the Greater was learning "no end of a lesson" from the Boer War.

tchrist

Churchill was half-American. Maybe this was his other half. :)

> He resigned from the navy to pursue a writing career.

> In the 1890s, Churchill's writings first came to be confused with those of the British writer with the same name. At that time, the American was the much better known of the two, and it was the Englishman who wrote to his American counterpart about the confusion their names were causing among their readers.

"were"?

Robusto

@tchrist Well ... not so it showed. It's not like he grew up on the streets of Philadelphia.

tchrist

10:23 PM

"The confusion that their names were causing." Boy that confused me.

> Their lives had some other coincidental parallels. They both gained their tertiary education at service colleges and briefly served (during the same period) as officers in their respective countries' armed forces (one was a naval, the other an army officer). Both Churchills were keen amateur painters, as well as writers. Both were also politicians, although here the comparison is far more tenuous, the British Churchill's political career being far more illustrious

> The two men arranged to meet on two occasions when one of them happened to be in the other's country, but were never closely acquainted.

I kinda like his "Kaintuck".

Cerberus

11:59 PM

@tchrist Hurrah!

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…