12:33 AM
> Forse la spiegazione è più banale: in inglese la consonante della lettera greca Xi può essere pronunciata in diversi modi – /saɪ/, /zaɪ/, /ksaɪ/ e /ɡzaɪ/ – e anche questo potrebbe causare confusione.
> Aggiornamento 27 novembre – In seguito alle supposizioni di ogni genere apparse sui social e alcuni media, una portavoce dell’OMS ha spiegato perché sono state saltate due lettere.
Nu è stata scartata perché la pronuncia /njuː/ in molte varietà di inglese equivale a new e c’era il rischio che Nu variant venisse inteso come “nuova variante”.
Xi è stato scartata perché è anche un cognome molto comune (non solo del presidente della Cina!) e le linee guida dell’OMS indicano di non usare nomi associabili a luoghi, animali o persone per evitare potenziali discriminazioni e stigmatizzazioni.
Nu è stata scartata perché la pronuncia /njuː/ in molte varietà di inglese equivale a new e c’era il rischio che Nu variant venisse inteso come “nuova variante”.
Xi è stato scartata perché è anche un cognome molto comune (non solo del presidente della Cina!) e le linee guida dell’OMS indicano di non usare nomi associabili a luoghi, animali o persone per evitare potenziali discriminazioni e stigmatizzazioni.
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Archaic meaning of the day: moment -- A definite period of time, specifically one-tenth of a point, or one-fortieth or one-fiftieth of an hour.
S.M., also sometimes referred to as SM-046, is an American woman with a peculiar type of brain damage that prevents her from experiencing fear. First described by scientists in 1994, she has had exclusive and complete bilateral amygdala destruction since late childhood as a consequence of Urbach–Wiethe disease. Dubbed by the media as the "woman with no fear", S.M. has been studied extensively in scientific research; she has helped researchers elucidate the function of the amygdala.
== Characteristics ==
Experiments with S.M. revealed no fear in response to exposure and handling of snakes ...
6:12 AM
@Pureferret Our recent shunning of asinine for its — how can I put this delicately? “redolence of farce” as our English friends might say in their special accent — leaves a burrito-sized lexical gap where a donkey once stood that dooms new readers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to forever wonder why the character Bottom got polymorphed into a burro. :) — tchrist ♦ 1 hour ago
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A word I just came across: urtext (A primitive, seminal, or prototypical example of an artistic genre or the basis of an ideological movement.)
In biblical studies, the Urtext is the theorized original, uniform text of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), preceding both the Septuagint (LXX) and the Masoretic Text (MT). Since the 19th century there has been much scholarly work to regain this Urtext. The theory that there was an Urtext was advocated by Paul de Lagarde. Today it is disputed that there ever was such a uniform text.
== See also ==
Documentary hypothesis
Supplementary hypothesis
Q source
== References ==
The Great Glen (Scottish Gaelic: An Gleann Mòr [an ˈklaun̪ˠ ˈmoːɾ]), also known as Glen Albyn (from the Gaelic Gleann Albainn "Glen of Scotland" [ˈklaun̪ˠ ˈaɫ̪apən]) or Glen More (from the Gaelic Gleann Mòr), is a glen in Scotland running for 62 miles (100 km) from Inverness on the edge of Moray Firth, in an approximately straight line to Fort William at the head of Loch Linnhe. It follows a geological fault known as the Great Glen Fault, and bisects the Scottish Highlands into the Grampian Mountains to the southeast and the Northwest Highlands to the northwest.
The glen is a natural travelling...
The Great Glen Way (Scottish Gaelic: Slighe a' Ghlinne Mhòir) is a long distance path in Scotland. It follows the Great Glen, running from Fort William in the southwest to Inverness in the northeast, covering 125 kilometres (78 mi). It was opened in 2002, and is designated as one of Scotland's Great Trails by NatureScot. The Great Glen Way is generally walked from southwest to northeast to follow the direction of the prevailing wind. It can be walked in 5–7 days, or cycled in 2–3 days. The trail is maintained and improved by the Great Glen Ways partnership, which consists of Highland Counci...
The Biggest Little Railway in the World (BLR) was a temporary 71 mile (114 km) 1.25 inches (32 mm) O-gauge model railway from Fort William to the City of Inverness, the two largest settlements in the Scottish Highlands. It has been described as a crackpot project to run a model train the length of the Great Glen Way by an army of madcap enthusiasts, geeks, and engineers in the best spirit of eccentric Britishness.
== Project ==
The project was headed by Dick Strawbridge, MBE. It was backed by a television production with the same name as the railway. The production team and security staff were...
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@CowperKettle ur- prefix meaning "original, earliest, primitive," from German ur- "out of, original," from Proto-Germanic *uz- "out," from PIE *ud- "up, out" (see out (adv.)) At first only in words borrowed from German (such as ursprache "hypothetical primitive language"); since mid-20c. a living prefix in English. Compare also Urschleim under protoplasm and Urquell under Pilsner.
Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" (Arabic: تل ٱلْمُقَيَّر) in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres (9.9 miles) from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada.
The city...
I'm using a special kind of baby talk with my cats, and one of them instantly recognises it and starts to bask and stretch on his back.
Sergey Samborskiy, a citizen of Tomsk, was brought up by his grandma and loved her very much. She was put into a covid hospital and he suspected maltreatment. He donned a medical uniform and sneaked into the hospital, and stayed and cared for her for 2 days.
When he arrived to her ward, she was in a terrible condition. Due to the lack of doctor staff, she was not cared about.
Phone calls what told him that if he divulged too much to the Presidential Councilor on Human Rights, on his return to Tomsk his throat would be cut.
Two law proffessors at the prestigious Higher School of Economy in Moscow were dismissed days ago after they critiqued the current condition of the legal system of Russia during their lectures to their students. ovdinfo.org/express-news/2021/11/28/…
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> Teacher: Let's solve a problem. A block of wood is hanging on a thread. A bullet hits through the block and travels on, losing half of its impact speed. Calculate the angle Phi of the resulting inclination of the block of wood.
A girl in the class:
- Do you have any problems about squirrels and nuts?
Teacher:
- Sure. A squirrel is hanging on a thread ...
A girl in the class:
- Do you have any problems about squirrels and nuts?
Teacher:
- Sure. A squirrel is hanging on a thread ...
@CowperKettle Yes, it is from the movie 'A Christmas Carol',from the Dickens story about Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean old miser, who learns about the meaning of Christmas during a dream on Christmas Eve. Towards the end of the story/movie when he has just woken up, he asks out the window 'You boy, what day is it?" and a bot in the street answers "why, it's Christmas Day old man!" And Scrooge tells him to go buy a Christmas goose for the family of Bob Cratchit, his one poor employee with a sickly child".
Steven Quincy Urkel is a fictional character on the American ABC/CBS sitcom Family Matters, portrayed by Jaleel White. Originally slated to have been a one-time only character on the show, he soon broke out to be its most popular character and gradually became its protagonist. Due to the Urkel character's off-putting characteristics and the way he is written to stir up events and underscore the plot or even move it along, he is considered a nuisance by the original protagonist's family, the Winslows, though they come to accept him over time.
The character is the epitome of a geek or nerd of the...
"The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree" (Russian: Мальчик у Христа на ёлке; Mal'chik u Khrista na yolke) is a Christmas-time short story written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1876. It was first published in A Writer's Diary, January 1876. This story is also known as "The Heavenly Christmas Tree".
== Creation ==
On December 26, 1875, Fyodor Dostoevsky and his daughter Aimée attended a children's ball and a Christmas tree held at the St. Petersburg Artists' Club. On December 27, Dostoevsky and Anatoly Koni arrived at the Colony for Juvenile Delinquents on the Okhta (outskirts of St. Petersburg at that...
Jan 17 at 1:55, by Mitch
"After Heracles killed his wife and children" whoa whoa whoa... that seems a little dark, like he opened the cupboard and found the vodka bottle empty so he killed them?
the line by Wodehouse about how awfully depressed someone is, like a Russian peasant who, after strangling his father-in-law and dumping him in the village well, beating a horse blind, and stumbling through a blizzard losing both arms to frostbite, opens the cupboard and finds the vodka bottle empty.
> “Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
Nov 1 '18 at 13:25, by Mitch
> Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
>I am a novelist, and I suppose I have made up this story. I write “I suppose,” though I know for a fact that I have made it up, but yet I keep fancying that it must have happened
4:21 PM
@Mitch I have no idea. Perhaps it's because you can't answer it succinctly without appearing to giving short shrift to certain elements which he considers more important than others, or because he hasn't ordered them in impact, or because whenever he considers any single elemental cause in isolation he sees it ramifying into subcases.
I gave a brief outline of ten contributing factors off the top of my head with little to no thought or research, and I didn't seek to order them or weight them. It's possible he sees errors both of commission and of omission in my list. I don't know.
It would not surprise me if the list I threw together had errors of omission and of commission alike, even errors of misrepresentation.
I tried to repurpose the asker's original question from one that sounded like some querulous admixture of "WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS TERRIBLE THING!?" and "WHY THE HELL DO YOU ALLOW THIS TERRIBLE THING TO CONTINUE TO EXIST!?" into more of a neutral HOW question about its multifactored origins instead of an unanswerable wun uv morel ouchrage.
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Snail on the Slope (Russian - "Улитка на склоне") is a science fiction novel by Soviet authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The first version of the novel was written in 1965 (during March 6 and 20), but then it was significantly rewritten. The original draft was published in 1990 under the title Disquiet.
In the spring of 1966 the so-called "Forest" part of the novel was separately published in the USSR. In 1968 the other part was published, in the journal "Baikal". A full version was published in 1972 in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the USSR in 1988. The brothers Strugatsky have described...
in Language Overflow, Sep 22 '16 at 18:46, by Anonymous
And oh my, it's amazing! I have to take a picture :-)
5:20 PM
@tchrist haha shit I don't know anything. My list I can count on one hand with a few fingers missing and then I don't actually know.
Ok I know that a tragedy is often a theatrical presentation but a travesty is not by default such a presentation. And a theatrical tragedy could be a travesty but only if the particular production and one night's event were particularly bad.
I'd guess the Great Vowel Shift (causing lots of mergers and splits 500 years ago) and no central academy to fix up weird things. Those two are the main differences between English and other languages.
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You’re listening to a speaker who happens to lack the now-common FOOT-STRUT split that you must be expecting to hear in those words. Speakers who now have the FOOT-STRUT split have rounded /ʊ/ in words from the FOOT side of this split like in puss, push, put, pull, full, foot, good, book, would,...
It's not just the splits and mergers from half a millennium ago. These are still a factor in our own day and age, as my supercited but not superciliary answer just given explains.
@Mitch Only compared with Dutch and English should you consider Italian and Spanish to have "so" regular orthographies. Both absolutely do have their own issues. You can know out how to say a word if you can read it, but it is not always so when going the other direction. Italian marks phonemic stress at best inconsistently if at all. Spanish can have more than one way to spell the same thing often for the sake of etymology alone: uva, vaca, cabo, burro, hierva, yerva, honor, azar, azahar.
In other cases some dialects have mergers unreflected in the orthography that make homophones like cocer/coser, ciervo/siervo in some dialects but not in others.
So people with poor literacy or spelling skills still make many common spelling mistakes even in Spanish, such as writing *debolver for devolver or *demaciado for demasiado.
I don't know what to do about any of this because any proposal for reform based on One True Pronunciation is guaranteed to make things worse for anybody whose dialect lacks those features. Shall we have non-rhotic speakers of English stat riting theya wuds without the Rs that they never say while the rest of us keep putting ours in ours?
Either your words are anti-phonetic so that they can be used by everybody despite divergent pronunciations, or else everybody writes things "the way they say them" in their own dialect and all notion of standard written English is forevermore lost to us because the same word is written 37 ways.
This would be somewhat easier if we were only just now romanizing English out of a runic heritage. No language with a transparent orthography today got that way without either being only recently adopted or through the hard work of continuously updating their standards.
If all the languages writing words they inherited or borrowed from Latin did so using their own phonetic rules instead of resorting to strange exceptions, we wouldn't notice cognates across languages so easily. There's some evidence that this doesn't matter much, though.
Then notice that Spanish spells it differently as acción but in America and southern Spain pronounces it just like the French do action. (Northern/"Standard" Spanish of course does not since they have a theta there.) And do you recognize ação as "the same word" in Portuguese? Should you? Does this matter?
Some say it's hopeless mostly because the people who won spelling bees now rule the world, and they don't want to render their pricey edge in kay shins no longer to their advantage.
Brazil and Portugal have an uneasy agreement that is unworkable in the long run. They have agreed that everyone should write the word they actually say. This leads to things like económico and econômico both being correct because those are not the same pronunciation for the same word, or ator and actor and all the rest like that.
Where ó always represents the open-O of English cost and ô always represents the close-O of English coast.
I say tomato, you say tamada tamadǝ tamado tamata tamatǝ tamato tameda tamedǝ tamedo tameta tametǝ tameto tǝmada tǝmadǝ tǝmado tǝmata tǝmatǝ tǝmato tǝmeda tǝmedǝ tǝmedo tǝmeta tǝmetǝ tǝmeto tomada tomadǝ tomado tomata tomatǝ tomato tomeda tomedǝ tomedo tometa tometǝ tometo.
7:13 PM
Virgil Abloh (; September 30, 1980 – November 28, 2021) was an American designer, and entrepreneur. He was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection from 2018 until his death. Abloh was also the chief executive officer of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2012.
A trained architect, Abloh, who also worked in Chicago street fashion, entered the world of international fashion with an internship at Fendi in 2009, alongside American rapper Kanye West. The two then began an artistic collaboration that would launch Abloh's career into founding Off-White...
> The prognosis is poor and the mean survival is usually 6 to 11 months from the time of diagnosis.2 Survival up to 3 years has been reported in a few cases.
Amazing. Do they use tubes to pump blood through the circulation while the heart is stopped for the duration of surgery. Wow.
Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is lingua franca and de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Krio is spoken by 87% of Sierra Leone's population and unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad. The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people, or Krios, a community of about 95,000 descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, Canada, United States...
> Atikul Wan
Ɛvribɔdi bɔn fri ɛn gɛt in yon rayt, nobɔdi nɔ pas in kɔmpin. Wi ɔl ebul fɔ tink ɛn fɛnɔt wetin rayt ɛn rɔŋ. Ɛn pantap dat wi fɔ sabi aw fɔ liv lɛk wan big famili.
Ɛvribɔdi bɔn fri ɛn gɛt in yon rayt, nobɔdi nɔ pas in kɔmpin. Wi ɔl ebul fɔ tink ɛn fɛnɔt wetin rayt ɛn rɔŋ. Ɛn pantap dat wi fɔ sabi aw fɔ liv lɛk wan big famili.
> Artikul Wan
Òll mòrtalmandèm bòrn fri èn ekwal pan dignity èn raihtdèm. Dhèm gèt ratio èn kònshèns èn pantap dhat dhèm fòr akt with dhèm kòmpin na bròdharhudim spirit.
Òll mòrtalmandèm bòrn fri èn ekwal pan dignity èn raihtdèm. Dhèm gèt ratio èn kònshèns èn pantap dhat dhèm fòr akt with dhèm kòmpin na bròdharhudim spirit.
An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations, or letters with diacritical marks.
The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of...
8:09 PM
> A Ɑ B Ɓ C C̱ D Ḍ Ɖ Ɗ Ð
a ɑ b ɓ c c̱ d ḍ ɖ ɗ ð
E Ɛ Ǝ F Ƒ G Ɣ H Ḥ I Ɪ
e ɛ ǝ f ƒ g ɣ h ḥ i ɪ
J K Ƙ L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P Q
j k ƙ l m n ŋ o ɔ p q
Q̱ R Ɍ S Ṣ Ʃ T Ṭ Ƭ Ʈ Ɵ U
q̱ r ɍ s ṣ ʃ t ṭ ƭ ʈ θ u
Ʊ V Ʋ W X X̱ Y Ƴ Z Ẓ Ȥ Ʒ
ʊ v ʋ w x x̱ y ƴ z ẓ ȥ ʒ
a ɑ b ɓ c c̱ d ḍ ɖ ɗ ð
E Ɛ Ǝ F Ƒ G Ɣ H Ḥ I Ɪ
e ɛ ǝ f ƒ g ɣ h ḥ i ɪ
J K Ƙ L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P Q
j k ƙ l m n ŋ o ɔ p q
Q̱ R Ɍ S Ṣ Ʃ T Ṭ Ƭ Ʈ Ɵ U
q̱ r ɍ s ṣ ʃ t ṭ ƭ ʈ θ u
Ʊ V Ʋ W X X̱ Y Ƴ Z Ẓ Ȥ Ʒ
ʊ v ʋ w x x̱ y ƴ z ẓ ȥ ʒ
A Ɑ B Ɓ C C̱ D Ḍ Ɖ Ɗ Ð a ɑ b ɓ c c̱ d ḍ ɖ ɗ ð E Ɛ Ǝ F Ƒ G Ɣ H Ḥ I Ɪ e ɛ ǝ f ƒ g ɣ h ḥ i ɪ J K Ƙ L M N Ŋ O Ɔ P Q j k ƙ l m n ŋ o ɔ p q Q̱ R Ɍ S Ṣ Ʃ T Ṭ Ƭ Ʈ Ɵ U q̱ r ɍ s ṣ ʃ t ṭ ƭ ʈ θ u Ʊ V Ʋ W X X̱ Y Ƴ Z Ẓ Ȥ Ʒ ʊ v ʋ w x x̱ y ƴ z ẓ ȥ ʒ
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As I pointed out in a comment on the original post, the real problem is the insistence on there being a "correct" spelling. It is neither necessary nor useful, and as we can see, is as elusive as "correct" grammar, a myth we have already discounted. — John Lawler 1 hour ago
10:12 PM
@JohnLawler Maybe. For my part I'm not yet ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇʟʏ convinced that English is hard to spell simply because we sanction and sanctify only one or maybe two approved spellings for a given word yet withhold said blessing from all other possibilities. I ᴅᴏ realize that this blessing from the academy’s sanctioning committee is a weird new hurdle wholly unknown before Caxton and then Johnson had their ways with us, and that we still managed to get by without it before the troublemakers barged in and ruined it all by condemning future generations of children and other learners to eternal vexation. — tchrist ♦ 16 secs ago
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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...