English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:11 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, potentially bad asn for hostname in answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer (37): What is a British biscuit called in America? A cookie? A cracker?‭ by mogk0r‭ on english.SE

Cerberus

12:27 AM

I believe most of Kant's teachings were popularised by his students and contemporaries. I think that is the main (intermediate) source of knowledge of most of his theories.

tchrist

12:48 AM

The top two most commonly "changed from" baby names since 2017 were Issac and Chole.

The top two most commonly "changed to" baby names since 2017 were Isaac and Chloe.

Perhaps giving birth has a temporary negative impact on a mother's ability to spell names right? :)

Cerberus

A cédille, really?

tchrist

Where's a cedille?

Oh, I can't see.

It's from this story.

Cerberus

Better?

Many recent names are regrettable indeed.

tchrist

I must have dragged my left little finger over the Opt key when I was going for the Shift key.

Which is because I wasn't typing normally. Or I would never have used the same hand for the shift as for the main letter.

And Conner they changed to Connor.

@Cerberus You can say that again, in spades even.

Cerberus

Ahh.

Better use Autohotkey!

You won't accidentally type C,, instead of C.

tchrist

12:56 AM

Methinks I can type a C without addons.

Cerberus

Indeed.

But I type Ç by doing C,,.

tchrist

It's weird on the Mac keyboard. It's not a combining character composure like the various accents marks and the tilde.

Because in Western European we don't cedille anything but a C.

Whereas everything else has multiple possible target letters.

óòôõ

éèê

ñ

Also, and don't ask me why, it's officially cedilla with an -A in English.

Well, at least in Unicode.

 ¸  00B8        CEDILLA
        * this is a spacing character
        * other spacing accent characters: 02D8-02DB
        x (combining cedilla - 0327)
        # 0020 0327
 Ç  00C7        LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
        : 0043 0327
 ç  00E7        LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
        : 0063 0327
 Ģ  0122        LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CEDILLA
        : 0047 0327
 ģ  0123        LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CEDILLA
        * Latvian
        * there are three major glyph variants

OED attests no cedille, which baffles me.

Cerberus

@tchrist Not even the e caudata?

@tchrist I know, but I use the international term!

tchrist

@Cerberus I don't know what language that's used in.

Cerberus

Latin.

But probably also other European languages, since it is a palaeographical abbreviation/diacritic.

Cedilla

A cedilla ( si-DIL-ə; from Spanish) or cedille (from French cédille, pronounced [sedijə]) is a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese (called cedilha) it is used only under the c (forming ç), and the entire letter is called, respectively, c trencada (i.e. "broken C"), c cédille, and c cedilhado (or c cedilha, colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon. == Origin == The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of...

tchrist

1:05 AM

@Cerberus No, that's was only a Middle Ages scribal thing, right?

Caesar wrote no ȩ.

E caudata

The e caudata ([eː kau̯dˈaːta], Latin for "tailed e", from Latin: cauda — "tail"; sometimes also called the e cedilla, hooked e, or looped e) is a modified form of the letter E that is usually graphically represented in printed text as E with ogonek (ę) but has a distinct history of usage. It was used in Latin from as early as the sixth century to represent the vowel also written ae or æ or in old Gaelic texts from the 13th century to represent an ea ligature.In Middle and Early Modern Irish manuscripts, and in unnormalised transcriptions of them, e caudata is used for e, ae, and ea. In Old Norse...

Cerberus

Latin was not only used in the Middle Ages, but also later.

tchrist

The sixth century being not very middling, I confess.

> 1599 R. Percyvall & J. Minsheu Spanish Gram. 6 Marked with a dash vnder it thus, ç, called ç Cerilla, or ç Cedilla, is proper to the Arabique tongue, from whence it was first taken.
1753 Chambers's Cycl. Suppl. Cedilla..denotes a sort of small c, to the bottom of which is affixed a kind of virgula, as ç... The cedilla is called by some of our printers a ceceril.
1878 Kitchin tr. Brachet Fr. Dict. (at cited word) The cedilla was a z, placed first by the side of, afterwards underneath the letter affected.

> 1929 National Geographic Mag. Jan. 102/1 On the street cars the old bilingual signs in Arabic-script Turkish and Latin-lettered French have given way to clearer signs in New Turkish, which is equally easy for the foreigner to read, even if the ‘d’ and ‘t’ and the ‘b’ and ‘p’ seem to be juggled somewhat and cedilla and umlaut markings added.
1933 Slavonic & East European Rev. 12 712 C with the cedilla..is in common use in French (also in Portuguese and Turkish).
1978 Hart's Rules for Compositors (ed. 38) 134 Turkish. Note the accented letters Ç ç Ş ş (with cedilla) Ğ ğ (with ro…

Some of them are wrong, of course.

The Visigoths were notoriously poor at Arabic. :)

CowperKettle

3:06 AM

Word of the day: Lembert suture (invented in 1826, when no anesthetics were available, ouch)

CowperKettle

3:35 AM

CowperKettle

4:06 AM

In St Pete, the authorities were sending out invitations for people to visit the local military commissariates in order to update their personal data. People noticed that these invitations were designed outwardly to look like conscription notices, writes BBC.

My relative in St Pete also said that some people have been receiving these notices. I guessed right away that those were non-binding invitations, since no mass mobilization has been announced yet.

If I were in his place, with a university diploma and a fine knowledge of English, I would try emigrating to the West, while there's still time.

Cerberus

Outwardly?

So they are trying to make people think those are binding conscription orders, when in fact they aren't?

Won't you emigrate?

CowperKettle

@Cerberus Yes

@Cerberus I have no university diploma. Who would need a freelance translator in Europe?

I tried self-studying C#, but I've been feeling bad and stopped. Something with my GI tract, and my escitalopram stopped helping out in terms of work performance.

Cerberus

You could offer lessons in Russian at least, or translations into Russian.

And I think you are a capable and skilled person.

CowperKettle

6:13 AM

@Cerberus I'm finding it hard to concentrate and make a lesson plan

Once an editor of a magazine asked me to give her English lessons

I could not come up with a lesson plan, so we just talked and I explained her something, answering questions.

I would gladly be a teacher of Russian via the Internet, I even joined a Facebook group where teachers of Russian exchange textbooks. But I feel overwhelmed trying to read these books.

I keep a time log to force myself to do something.

Cerberus

Yeah, always use a textbook, if the goal is general improvement of your student's language.

And you don't need to read the whole book.

CowperKettle

When I was reading into English grammar, I found it fascinating and went online and explained some stuff to people. That's how the magazine's editor found me. I explained English grammar in a forum. But via the Skype, I could not come up with a plan.

Cerberus

Just leaf though it and read some pages here and there, to make sure you like it. Then use parts/chapters/exercises from it that you find useful.

CowperKettle

I get distracted and find it hard to maintain some plan in my mind.

Cerberus

Use the textbook to guide you.

Teachers don't normally invent their own plan for a course of many lessons!

Just follow some chapters that you like.

Or even just start at the beginning. And skip parts when you feel like it.

I have to go to bed now, adios!

AncientSwordRage

2:19 PM

I noticed language-change was added to my question and while I don't have an issue I'm not understanding what makes it relevant or what the tag exactly entails?

Cerberus

@AncientSwordRage Perhaps the editor felt that, since this use of the comma was new, it constituted a change in the language?

AncientSwordRage

@Cerberus but the question is not specifically about the change. We no longer speak middle english (at least I don't) so all language has changed since then....

Cerberus

2:38 PM

@AncientSwordRage Isn't this comma thing a recent change?

AncientSwordRage

@Cerberus I don't know how long it's been going on for

but how recent is recent?

And then... when it's no longer 'recent' do we remove the tag?

so it doesn't make sense for recentness to be a criteria for the tag, at least to me

Cerberus

The adder probably thought, a change is a change, and something recent is more clearly a change.

But of course anything was once a change.

AncientSwordRage

@Cerberus exactly

@Cerberus if the tag had a wiki it might help with it's usage

Cerberus

Yeah, I saw there wasn't any.

Perhaps it was also inspired by your repeated use of the word "change" in the question?

AncientSwordRage

3:00 PM

@Cerberus could be, but then I'm not talking about language change, am I?

Cerberus

I suppose not.

But that word, combined with the recency of what you describe, may have made the editor add the tag?

AncientSwordRage

@Cerberus could be

I'm trying to do due diligence before I remove it, that's all

Cerberus

If it is important to you, perhaps ask the editor?

Mitch

7:14 PM

@Laurel "Also, some OED pages were last updated a century ago, so it's not even that great as a general purpose dictionary".

sputters out tea in shock

Is your statement about the OED about its use as 'general purpose'?

Surely there are errors and aged items and other difficulties with the OED, but 1) you realize this is ELU which is not for a general purpose audience, 2) whatever problems the OED has, the other online dictionaries have far worse quality issues.

M.A.R.

@Mitch tea? Are you British?

Real Americans drink coffee that tastes like wet paper, or a drink they brewed themselves that'd be classified as a level 3 biohazard in 150 countries.

Laurel

7:40 PM

@Mitch Those old pages aren't that great for etymological purposes either since you can often trivially find earlier examples in Google Books (or at least that's true for anything that was coined after c1700)

Laurel

7:57 PM

Also, even if this is ELU, I think there's still a need for general purpose dictionaries. Even when I had access I wasn't citing the OED all the time when I was answering SWRs or deciding if a question was adequately answered by a dictionary

Mitch

9:02 PM

@M.A.R. sputters out hot chocolate in shock?

@Laurel Google Books is well known for being -very- problematic as far as dating the publications it uses (OCR errors, using the wrong date, etc etc).

Also, OED is -the- prime resource for etymologies in English. Nothing else comes close in accuracy and comprehensiveness, especially with its dated quotations.

Coinages after ~1700?... sure, I mean Urban Dictionary is a good source of new slang terms, but its not high quality. All things being equal, I'd trust OED before something else, and there's have to be good supportable evidence before I'd think some other source had a particular word defined/analyzed better.

@Laurel Sure. SWRs aren't particularly academic questions where OED shines. Sometimes you want the simple version for quick thesaurus questions like SWRs.

Laurel

@Mitch Not if you, like, open up the book and read for yourself :p

Mitch

But lexico or dictionary.com or free dictionary or shudders wiktionary are not -reliable- as references. For free, M-W (for AmE) and Collins (for BrE) are reliable (but not great). OED is much better than either but not always easily accessible.

@Laurel I'm sure that there are lots of things to find in Google Books that would give older printed instances for some words in OED, but that is fun research on minutiae, when the great majority of words have well researched and substantiated entries.

Laurel

9:21 PM

I tend to use a variety of dictionaries. NOAD (which Lexico is based on) is only one of my main ones because it's installed on my phone and stuff

Mitch

That is one benefit of googling for 'definition word', it gives lots of links (below the specially formatted stuff at top, which is often, despite a full screen of text, lacking in useful detail about the meanings of the word).

SmokeDetector

10:31 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in link text in body, bad keyword in title, bad keyword in username, potentially bad ns for domain in body, +3 more (354): Why Do Students Choose Assignment Writing Services in The UK?‭ by assignment writing service‭ on english.SE

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…