English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

02:26

KannE

03:22

Quick, help! The tablet children have grown up and they don't know if they're a people or many person or alone in a crowd all the time or crowder peas or Children of the Corn or what. Please help them to pronounce their own names and to look forward while ambulating. That will be a good start.

CowperKettle

06:34

@FaheemMitha I don't know. I only knew about Olympiads, because it was easy to participate in them. They went up from school level to city distric level to whole-city level and higher.

If you won a high-level Olympiad you could be automatically invited to enroll into a specialized physico-mathematical school.

In our case, the city-level Olympiad was in Noyabrsk, and the school was in Novosibirsk.

A girl from the same stair entrance with me, Olya Tishkina, won a high place on an all-city Olympiad and enrolled into this Novosibirsk school, and packed her things and went there. Although she was only about 13 years old.

She was way smarter than me. I also took part in the contest, but failed.

Both of her parents were teachers.

They were a very intelligent family.

I lived on the second floor, and she on the top floor, the fifth.

She was so smart. I'm 43 but she was probably still more mature than me now, being 13.

Faheem Mitha

06:52

@CowperKettle That's interesting. Do you know what happened to her?

CowperKettle

07:27

@FaheemMitha Hard to tell. I just searched, and only managed to find one mention of her dad.

math.school-11.ru/rabotali_na_kafedre_matematiki.html

He is listed as a "former math teacher"

admin.school-11.ru/pdf/NazProekt6.pdf

And in a document dated 2006, he is listed as a teacher of 33 years of teaching experience.

He must have retired long ago

And in a 2004 decree signed by Vladimir Putin he is awarded the title of Teacher Emeritus (I don't know how to translate this title properly), among many others. pravo.gov.ru/proxy/ips/…

Signed by V. Putin, Moscow, Kremlin, October 2004.

CowperKettle

08:42

The story has got as far as The Guardian theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/06/…

Faheem Mitha

09:15

@CowperKettle Thanks for trying. These days a lot of people are on Linkedin, but of course not everyone. It's fairly popular in India. No idea about Russia.

I generally give Facebook a wide berth, because it's evil. Linkedin might be evil too, but isn't quite so in-your-face about it.

tchrist

12:18

theconversation.com/…

@CowperKettle Naw, that middle Boris's head is a whole lot smaller than the twins' ones to either side of him are.

Cerberus

12:59

@tchrist Hmm.

Interesting.

But extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proof.

Mitch

13:49

@Cerberus That's a pretty extraordinary claim

haha

i'm not kidding

sort of

Also, it's very conservative.

Like people who grow up in a highly theistic environment will need -a lot- of justification for atheism. (assuming they are reasonable/logical)

(also the other way around)

wait ... what was the claim? That Danish children take longer to learn the past tense?

That may be extraordinary but it is not very earthshaking

Cerberus

14:04

@Mitch That Danish is more difficult to learn for Danish children than if they had learned Norwegian or Swedish, because of vowels.

Mitch

@Cerberus OK...yes that is extraordinary given that all previous child language learning experience goes against the general statement (that one language is harder to learn than another.

but...

Cerberus

Yes.

The article is also not super concrete.

Mitch

I think that very specific items in a particular language may be harder to learn than others (eg number systems in language show very different learning rates, eg, Chinese super easy, but French much harder)

but that's not a general claim

@Cerberus All I got out of the article is that Danish adults mumble a lot.

Cerberus

@Mitch Exactly.

@Mitch Like the French, I would then ask.

Mitch

14:23

Do you mean the French mumble and so you would then ask a French person to repeat more articulately? or that you, like a French person, would ask the mumbler to repeat?

Cerberus

I mean that the French also swallow lots of syllables, so it didn't strike me as super special that the Danes do so.

Vowels could be an extra problem if there are many minimal pairs in Danish. But are there? The article does not specify.

Mitch

@Cerberus Yes, I had that feeling too (that mumbling isn't special)

@Cerberus Right...maybe they just have a lot more vowel splits there aren't actual minimal pairs. but the article is for general readership, not for language nerds. So maybe the writers have access to the technical vocab but are using lay terms or avoiding issues altogether

Am I just saying what you're saying but with more words?

CowperKettle

15:32

Portugal is really shipshape in terms of vaccination

CowperKettle

15:45

> Every time there's an election, I see you three together.

Man_From_India

16:06

Can anyone help me here?

0

Q: Comparative Construction - She can get through more work in an hour than I can get through in a day

I was reading the Comparative Construction Chapter from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Pullum and Huddlestone. There on page 1109, I came across one sentence: He is more afraid of her than [she is __ of him]. It is written there that the contrast lies not in the head of the co...

> He is more afraid of her than [she is __ afraid of him]. -> CORRECT

Is the following also correct?

> She can get through more work in an hour than [I can get through __ work in a day].

The explanation behind why the first is correct is written in the question. If we analyse the last sentence the way way, can we say it is also right?

tchrist

17:01

@Cerberus His last name is Christiansen. Good enough for me. :)

Their paper is at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lang.12450

> Abstract
It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related languages, Danish has an unusually reduced phonetic structure, which seemingly delays Danish-learning children in several aspects of their language acquisition. Adult language use appears to be affected as well, resulting, among other things,…

We could ask Janus what he thinks. :)

Cerberus

17:15

@CowperKettle It should be considered that these figures are not up to date, for various countries. I see 69% in Holland, for example: that was probably two months ago.

@tchrist Ah!

@tchrist Do!

@Man_From_India Somehow, this does not sound right to me.

I'd have to think about why not.

> She can get through more work in an hour than [I can in a day].

This what I would write, if I really wanted to use those expressions.

Xanne

19:59

@Cerberus But if you wanted to say “She can get through more work in an hour than I can in an hour,” you’d say “She can get through more work in an hour than me.”

Unfortunate, in my view, but it seems to be the case. ;)

Cerberus

20:11

@Xanne I would say, "...than I can".

Or even, "...than I".

Eyla Chu-Generis

21:51

Hi! I was watching The Wire and in S01E06 Kima is interviewing Omar Little and she says "And you ain't afraid to go into court... and testify against one of Barksdale's people?" and Omar replies "Omar don't scare.". So African-American Vernacular. It's not the tense that intrigues me but rather why he didn't choose ain't like Kima and because you usually have the passive to be scared but I also understand to scare as to get scared like I scare easily...

So I mean, is he saying he's not scared, or that he never gets scared when it's phrased like that? In your opinion...

I'm just curious, maybe that's overanalyzing it.

Another thing I'm curious about is word, the interjection, also AAVE. Wiktionary lists 2 use cases, one is truth, indeed, and the other one is emphatically used in a stereotypical manner, like man I guess, but it is supposed to be an abbreviated form for word up i.e. " a statement of the acknowledgment of fact with a hint of nonchalant approval."

Of course in the same TV series you have that. D'Angelo: "My people are onto one of Omar's boys down at Greek's."; Stringer: "Word? All right, sit tight. I'm gonna take care of it."

That has to be the first use case, I see it as "really?" (yet none of the two use cases exactly mean "really") What do you think? Thanks!

Finally, yeah sorry for the wall of questions, but in the dict. entry I see this reference to "My word is my bond." Do you think that bond is about the emotional link, the covenant, or the cementing force? I see it as the covenant but I'm not sure. Any idea? Thanks again.

Mitch

22:11

I don't know for certain but I'm pretty sure AAE uses "ain't" and "don't" just like most non-formal varieties.

"ain't" for "isn't" or "aren't" in standard E negative copula "I am afraid/I am not afraid" vs "I afraid/I ain't afraid".

"don't" is do-support of negation of non-copula...and I read "Omar don't scare" as a shortening/AAE of "Omar doesn't scare easily". So it isn't "Omar isn't scared".

As to 'word', sure, maybe the etymology is like 'You have my word.'

Eyla Chu-Generis

Sometimes it feels like "I swear", but sometimes it's less meaningful, and more like interspersing or whatever that word I tried to type was. Hey thanks btw.

Ok, I did get it right (interspersing).

The Omar thing is nuance, but I'm happy I looked up word because that I couldn't really guess when presented as a question sort of thing like in the example I provided, the first thing in the sentence. Anyways, thanks.

Cheers!

Cerberus

There is also my word!, an exclamation of surprise, annoyance, etc.

Mitch

@EylaChu-Generis sure, there's all sorts of implications that may overlap, like 'word?' could be "Wow I can't believe what you said, really? I guess so". I remember (a long time ago) when that first became popular in popular culture and it sounded so weird because what could that possibly mean 'word'? But most of these AAE things were popular forever in African-American communities and only when someone writes it into a popular meme or song do the majority of (white) people start using it.

"No cap" for "no lie"

"I'm finna ..." for "I'm fixing to .../I'm about to..."

Cerberus

> Omar doesn't scare easily

This is an intransitive use of scare, isn't it? Omar doesn't scare easily = Omar does not get scared easily, right?

Mitch

"Imma" for "I'm going to"

@Cerberus That's how I understood it.

Cerberus

22:26

And I.

Mitch

But AAE does verbs a bit more complexly than standard English so there's a possibility of another parsing.

Also it's screenwriting which is not necessarily accurate with speech patterns.

The actor who played that character just died at 54. Which might explain the interest in seeing again that actor's performances.

"The Wire" is also where Idris Elba got his first big role (as Stringer, mentioned above). Which is funny because Elba is totally a Londoner but he had to play an african american in Baltimore.

Or maybe he was popular already in the UK and that was his first US job.

How would I know?

Oh... by checking IMDB

checking IMDB

sure a bunch of UK TV shows in the 90s but I have no idea how popular they were.

Eyla Chu-Generis

23:37

@Mitch Thanks for the insight! It's true that Michael K. Williams just died but in my case this must be the 3rd time watching the show and I'm at S02 already. But yeah, actually when I watched this the 1st time over I didn't even know Dominic West was British.

There is only one moment in the show he has the accent and that's just a thing for the viewer really.

So yeah the same goes for Elba.

Plus of course I'm a learner and not a native speaker, and obviously not from the U.S., so it takes time to sink in. I'm no longer as young as I wish I was and I don't get to be a young person again and meet people from all parts and hear them talk and all.

My connection is with the movies and series and music to some extent but I don't listen to much rap really. It's just I have this newer interest for language now so I sheds a new light unto the English language material I go through, such as Dallas, and now The Wire.

I mean I have to make the effort to look it up. Well worth it. I remember some time ago I asked a question on ending a conversation with one in a Seagal movie. I thought 1 was a radio code like 5-0 for police but no, from what I remember I ended up discussing together one or something like that. I find it really interesting, expressive.

After 30 years+ being a learner it is really time for me to get around stuff like that.

Plus from where I come from I was exposed to some vernacular before I had a formal command of the language.

I remember a few years ago I posted a question on French and there was that dialog in Eastwood's Unforgiven, with a verb tense conjugated like it don't matter and right away someone reacted in a prescriptive fashion. Same for y'all 2SG which makes native speakers react quite a lot from my experience. Aniways.

My point is when I was learning the language I would have reacted the same. But there's more to this than mistakes. Learners should know this imho.

Thanks for your time.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…