English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

20:00

If you are on a cell phone, I don't know how to do that. I mean on a "full" computer, not a handheld palmtop device.

Ronald Allan Carter (4 May 1947 – 12 September 2018) was a British linguist. A native of Leeds, Carter studied English, Russian, and German, as well as comparative literature, at University of Birmingham. He began teaching at the University of Nottingham after completing a doctorate in 1979. Carter was a founding member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, and later led the group as chairman. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1995, and granted an equivalent honor by the Academy of Social Sciences in 2002. In 2009, Carter was named a Member of the Order of the British...

I don't know who I am.

I am using this site from Chrome browser.

I am on the phone.

tchrist

Then to the right of where you type, you should see a send button and also a grey upload button.

Oh then I don't know how it works in cellular land.

The GUI is different.

I never use it for chat, unless I'm in bed. Just too awkward.

I don't know who I am.

Cambridge Grammar of English by Ronald Carter and Micheal McCarthy. Search on Google. It has a green cover.

tchrist

I showed that above.

Well, linked to it.

(17) a. It may surprise you to learn that this chair was once sat in by Sir Winston Churchill.
     b. #It may surprise you to learn that Swindon has been walked in by SirWinston Churchill.

(18) a. This bed has been slept in.
     b. #The monastery has been slept in.

I don't know who I am.

I see. So, these are all passive constructions, right?

tchrist

20:03

> (19) The denotation of the by-phrase NP in a passive clause must denote something at least as new in the discourse as the subject.

His section "2.4.2 The new-information condition on by-phrases" is what it most often misdone, but the earlier quotes were from the previous section, "2.4.1 The state-affecting condition on prepositional passives".

You can't read his pdf on a cell phone. You'll go blind. :)

The force of the constraint is illustrated by the infelicitous character of case (b), but not case (a),
in (20).
(20) a. Have you heard the news about YouTube? It was bought by Google. [acceptable
because the subject is old and by-phrase NP is new]
    b. Have you heard the news about Google? #YouTube was bought by it/them. [unacceptable
because the subject (YouTube) is newer in the discourse than the by-phrase]

It's a good paper. Just don't try to read in on a palmtop nanocomputer. :)

I don't know who I am.

I will try to read it.

My phone may help me to read it easily.

tchrist

Good for you!

I don't know who I am.

I can't use laptop right now. It's hard to switch on.

tchrist

I understand.

I don't know who I am.

@tchrist. I have another question.

tchrist

20:07

Go ahead.

> This information-packaging constraint is a real, important, and fully general part of the way long passives work. It is remarkable that, as we shall see immediately, hardly any attempts at describing the passive make any mention of it.

I don't know who I am.

Why do we have double nouns of the same word. Example: the word "sagacity" and sagaciousness " are both noun. Why do we have these double nouns of the same word "sagacious"?

tchrist

Why would you not?

I don't know who I am.

Why don't we have a single noun?

tchrist

There are many Latin suffixes that allow one to derive one part of speech from another.

It is not possible to know which ones will win out. Sometimes many occur, especially historically.

I don't know who I am.

Was "sagaciousness* not enough? Why do we have "sagacity "?

tchrist

20:09

Oh that.

I don't know who I am.

Yeah.

There are other words as well in English which have the same case.

tchrist

Well, because the former uses the general Germanic -ness suffix, which alone of all such in derivational morphology, has no restrictions that it must only be applied to Germanic bases. It can go on anything, even Latinate bases.

But sagacity is the shorter form that uses only Latinate morphology.

It shall have come to us via French, pretty sure.

Somewhere there's a fine paper about all these constraints, one I've referenced before but which I don't have at my fingertips just right now. No doubt several.

I don't know who I am.

Great to know. I think this is about MORPHOLOGY. It is mostly discussed in Linguistics. Unfortunately I haven't studied linguistics. I only know about grammar.

tchrist

Somehow to me, at least right now as we speak and before semantic satiety sets in, sagacity sounds fancier or more formal than sagaciousness. Both are inferior to native Germanic wisdom for most purposes.

I don't know who I am.

Today one of my students asked me about the question. Her beauty is unique or her beautifulness is unique.

Now these two words are nouns, of course.

tchrist

20:14

Well, there are all these suffixes, and occasionally prefixes, that come to us from both our native Germanic heritage and our overlaid Romance imports. The general rule is you can't mix those. But -ness his special.

The paper I'm thinking of talks about things like that, why some dominate others.

I don't know who I am.

These are both grammatically correct. But it depends on our choice and preference.

tchrist

Tacking on more and more derivational suffixes on to the end of a word is unappealing when compared with backing up and looking for a simpler original related to the same base. It is all to easy to create monsters.

It isn't a matter of grammar.

It's a matter of custom and usage.

Occasionally some derived forms are blocked because they have other meanings.

And, again, if you look at the past thousand years of written English historically following the Norman Conquest, you'll find that many, many, many possible derived forms have occasionally been used that are no longer in common current use, all because they simply never caught on.

They fell out of fashion.

OH HURRAY I FOUND THE REFERENCE!

73

A: Why can’t I turn “fast-paced” into a quality noun by adding the “‑ness” sufﬁx?

Why sure you can, and indeed you have just done so! I really cannot imagine what it is that makes you think you cannot do what you have just yourself done. Do you mistrust your own eyes? What’s the source of your afraidness here regarding fast-pacedness? Perhaps it’s just its nonceness or ad-hoc...

It's in there.

> I strongly recommend that you read Aranoff and Fuhrhop’s 2002 paper on Restricting Suffix Combinations in German and English: Closing Suffixes and the Monosuffix Constraint, published in the journal Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.

I don't know who I am.

THANKS, @tchrist. I would love to study these things slowly and smoothly. For now, my mind isn't trained well. Hhhhhh!

tchrist

Save them for later.

I don't know who I am.

I studied Michael Swan's book. I mean Oxford Practical English Usage.

@tchrist. I have captured the screenshots. Thanks for your kind help and support.

tchrist

20:24

As you see, it's complicated, and the subject of serious study.

I don't know who I am.

I got it.

tchrist

I don't know who I am.

I am unable to understand them well because my level is average.

But I will try hard to go through them well.

tchrist

These are hidden "rules" that native speakers (and extremely fluent non-native speakers, especially those coming from Germanic languages closely related to English, like Dutch or Danish) all know but know not they know, for they are completely internalized.

I don't know who I am.

Lemme download them.

tchrist

20:30

Hindi from Sanskrit while very distantly related through Indo-European, may not have this dual overlay coming from two different cousin sources the way English does with Latinate and Germanic word formation. I don't know.

I don't know who I am.

@tchrist. Which grammar books would you recommend me to study for my sentence structures and grammar understanding?

@tchrist. Thank you very much for everything.

I appreciate your efforts.

tchrist

I don't know what to tell you because I don't know your level or your patience or your resources. You're clearly completely fluent in English, as you do find in professionals from the subcontinent. I can't tell if you're a native English speaker (there are a few of those in the subcontinent, just the tiniest minority) from your grammar or word choice, but your question choices suggest you may not be. Or you're just trying to understand how to teach things.

@Idon'tknowwhoIam. You're welcome.

I don't know who I am.

@tchrist. I worked on English grammar very well. But sometimes I really don't know how to deal with sentence structures.

I am OKAY with my grammar. I really don't have problems with it.

tchrist

I can tell.

I don't know who I am.

Yes, please, @tchrist.

tchrist

20:40

Please do what? :)

This time "I can tell" meant "I am able to see that" rather than "I am able to explain something". :)

I don't know who I am.

Hahahah! Thank you. I can tell.

@tchrist. Are you an English Trainer?

tchrist

@Idon'tknowwhoIam. No, but I have at various times in my life taught spoken languages as well as computer programming. Professionally.

I don't know who I am.

Oh, great. Do you know about @todos?

tchrist

And I also sometimes do translations as needed.

No, I do not.

Not if that's a user.

"todos" might mean more than one "to-do", but it also is Spanish for "everybody" in the common masculine plural.

alphabet

@Idon'tknowwhoIam. You're confusing two separate books. The one Pullum co-wrote is this one; the one you're talking about is this one.

The former is a linguistics textbook; the latter is intended for English learners.

tchrist

20:46

Depending on whether it's an adjective or a noun.

alphabet

Oh wait, sorry, I think you already figured this out.

I don't know who I am.

@tchrist. On messenger groups, people use @todos and all members are notified automatically. But I was unable to do it. There was only one who was doing so. His phone was displaying such thing, but not mine.

tchrist

Oh I see. So, like Slack's @here or @channel.

No, Stack's chat doesn't support that, at least not deliberately and not anymore. It's too noisy. It has occasionally been possible, but they've fixed that every time, and quickly.

I don't know who I am.

Yes. But it doesn't work when I tag my members on Messenger group. I don't know. There would be another App to use for this, I suppose.

tchrist

Ah, so that it is the Spanish sense, meaning "everybody". Gotcha.

I don't know who I am.

20:51

Stack has completely been updated. When I joined this site, I was 16 years old. But I forgot my email to join this again.

But my old posts might be shared on my timeline here. I was like a kid. Hhhhhhhh!

tchrist

I might be able to figure that out and help you.

You can request a merge if you can figure out the previous user.

alphabet

Importantly, Carter's book seems to generally follow more traditional accounts of English grammar, rather than the newer account given by H&P, even though Carter was written four years later.

tchrist

Do you have a link to one of those long-ago posts from ELU?

I don't know who I am.

Maybe yes.

tchrist

Well, or anywhere on Stack?

I don't know who I am.

20:52

Let me try.

tchrist

Ok.

I don't know who I am.

@alphabet. How about Practical English Usage by Michael Swan? I also hit this when I get time.

alphabet

@Idon'tknowwhoIam. The difference is that Huddleston & Pullum (aka H&P, aka CGEL) is basically a linguistics textbook; it isn't aimed at learners like works by Michael Swan.

tchrist

That's an OUP textbook. Pretty sure it's on my shelves.

> In his Acknowledgements for the first edition, Swan refers to the aid given him by "various standard reference books – in particular, the splendid A Grammar of Contemporary English, by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik" (Longman 1972), and in the second edition, to "the monumental A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language" (Longman 1985), by the same authors.

I don't know who I am.

7

Q: "I am at home" vs "I am home"

Last night I was watching the movie in which I heard this phrase "I am home" Actually, I am looking for explanations. How can it be possible to say, I am home? Is it the same like I am at home Please explain it to me in details.

adverbs

@tchrist. I asked this long ago.

tchrist

20:59

That one is somewhat but not completely geared towards Standard Southern British English. You might try Garner's Modern English Usage for North American usage. While I'm "sure" the English spoken in Pakistan is more likely to be of the Commonwealth variety, you doubtless have need to figure out what North America's take on similar things is as well.

@Idon'tknowwhoIam. Isn't that the same user as you have linked to your ELU account?

I don't know who I am.

199 3 8 20

word-usage differences prepositions questions active-voice adjectives american-english

I don't know who I am.

Yes, but I restored my account now. It works well now.

tchrist

Okay.

I had thought you meant you had two, one no longer recoverable.

I don't know who I am.

No, now it's working well. I recovered my email. Well, Stony Bay was also there to help me when I was learning grammar, but I don't find him anywhere now.

tchrist

He may have fully re-retired, or passed away. I don't know.

He was elderly.

I don't know who I am.

Yes. But I miss him. 😔

tchrist

21:01

Well, he was last seen in June of this past year.

I don't know who I am.

He was a great person and his efforts were incredible here. But I saw you helping the members as well in my time.

tchrist

Yes, he was. Or is.

StoneyB on hiatus, St. Louis, MO

68.8k 4 134 239

meaning grammar etymology word-usage meaning-in-context single-word-requests verbs

I don't know who I am.

Wonderful! Well, do you know Khan as well?

tchrist

Kublai or Genghis? :)

alphabet

It seems he left because of the whole Monica thing.

(Incidentally, tchrist doesn't see any messages I send, so if it sounds like we're talking past each other that's why.)

tchrist

21:12

> † ˈevolate [v.]
† evoˈlatic [adj.]
† evoˈlatical [adj.]
† evoˈlation [n.]
† eˈvoluble [adj.]
‖ évolué [n.]
évolué [n. (and adj.)]
evolute [adj.]
evolute [v.]
› evolute-cog ← evolute
› evolute curve ← evolute
evolutility [n.]
evolution [n.]
evolutional [adj.]
evoˈlutionally [adv.]
evoˈlutionarily [adv.]
evolutionary [adj.]
evolutionary algorithm ← evolutionary [adj.]
evolutionary biologist ← evolutionary [adj.]
evolutionary biology ← evolutionary [adj.]
evolutionary clock ← evolutionary [adj.]

-2

Q: Any differences between 'evolutionary' and 'evolutional'?

I heard the word 'evolutional' quite recently and I wanna know if this word has the same meaning as 'evolutionary'. Do they have different connotations? My gut says 'evolutionary' is like praise and 'evolutional' is more logical. This artwork is evolutionary! vs. The evolutional fact that pred...

meaning synonyms

tchrist

21:25

> evolutive typically occurs about 0.06 times per million words in modern written English. evolutive is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English.

> evolutional typically occurs about 0.06 times per million words in modern written English. evolutional is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English.

> evolutionary is one of the 5,000 most common words in modern written English. It is similar in frequency to words like artefact, biology, compatible, restricted, and written. It typically occurs about ten times per million words in modern written English. evolutionary is in frequency band 6, which contains words occurring between 10 and 100 times per million words in modern written English.

Really? I bet evolutionary is less common than written. :)

In any event, going from frequency band 3 to frequency band 6 involves a jump of three orders of magnitude.

Pineapples just don't have a feel for what's common versus what's rarer than hen's teeth.

> evolvent typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. evolvent is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English

> evolutionistic typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English. evolutionistic is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English.

Note that evolative is not about evolution but about flying. :)

As in the verb to evolate.

Compare with the French and Italian cognates.

Heck, or Spanish.

And these don't all mean the same thing. Time weirds language.

See also to avolate.

I used the a- version not the e- version here, but I no longer recall why I made that particular choice. Both are from the 17th to 18th centuries, back when the learnèd calqued terms from Latin they used for all scholarly communication at the drop of a mitre.

21

A: Word for someone who acts like an expert but who has very little knowledge?

Cryptonescient Morosophs and Ultracrepidarians The cryptonescient are best described as morosophs and ultracrepidarians, as any philodox or sumpsimus drawn into this epeolatrous logomachy like a saturniïd to a pharol will deliciate in apprising you with all due impigrity. Those epithets you may f...

Dannyu NDos

21:52

Does the US have any kind of season-fried chicken?

Apparently it is invented in South Korea, so

Xanne

@tchrist Do you have rreasonable confidence in these measures, based on Ngram 2, apparently?

Robusto

tchrist

@DannyuNDos Like summer-fried chicken, winter-fried chicken, spring-fried chicken, and autumn-fired chicken?

Robusto

My granddaughter experiments with becoming a raccoon. ^^

Dannyu NDos

????

tchrist

21:55

@Xanne Can you access this explanation of their frequency analysis and methodology?

@DannyuNDos Winter-fried, right?

Dannyu NDos

I cannot tell whether you're joking.

tchrist

Or you do mean Kentucky Fried Chicken's 17 secret seasonings from good Colonel Sanders?

Dannyu NDos

No, not those.

tchrist

That looks like certain "spicy" Chinese fried-chicken recipes. Is it?

@DannyuNDos Then my work here is done.

Dannyu NDos

@tchrist Yeah, but it was South Korea that has done it first.

alphabet

21:58

@Robusto Stop normalizing raccoonface.

tchrist

Fried chicken is typically fried dipped in a batter containing various seasonings, isn't it?

Robusto

@alphabet Hey, it was for Halloween.

Xanne

@jlliagre Yes, I already read it. I was asking about your views of their measures.

alphabet

@Robusto It's appropriative when people treat raccoonness as a costume to put on without having actually experienced the struggles of our community.

tchrist

Oh, you should say seasoned fried chicken, not season-fried chicken.

Robusto

22:00

@alphabet What, she's not shy about playing in the dirt and eating things that fall to the floor.

Dannyu NDos

Yeah, I guess that's where I messed up.

tchrist

> Korean fried chicken is unique in the sense that is known for being double-fried. It is first fried at a low temperature and then fried at a higher temperature, giving the chicken a crispy texture that is loved by many.

Xanne

UMm, meant for @tchrist.

tchrist

@DannyuNDos I was doubtless overly subtle in conveying that when I elaborated the four seasons. :)

alphabet

@Robusto But she will never have to experience getting evicted without notice by an exterminator. Nobody's going to hunt her and turn her into a hat.

Mitch

22:01

@DannyuNDos For commercial brands see Popeyes fried chicken. For regular old recipes, any kind of spicy fried chicken (from anywhere in the south of the US). As to who did it first...who knows.

@alphabet she's entitled

tchrist

Korean Fried Chicken, the other KFC.

Robusto

@alphabet You're just grumpy.

Dannyu NDos

kfckorea.com/delivery/chicken

tchrist

> Among many delicious variations of fried chicken in Korea, yangnyeom chicken is one of the most popular ones. Literally meaning “seasoned chicken,” yangnyeom chicken is fried chicken smothered in a spicy red sauce. The ingredients used in yangnyeom sauce vary widely, including gochujang, ketchup, hot sauce, strawberry jam, etc. It started out being thick and heavy, but the current trend is a thinner, lighter sauce.

Strawberry jam!?

Xanne

@tchrist ELU folks have frequently commented on the inadequacies of Ngram, although clearly they’ve tried to fix up some errors.

Dannyu NDos

22:04

@tchrist Yeah, I guess that's for sweetness.

tchrist

Gochujang Chicken from the New York Times.

> Historical frequency values are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on a corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010. The Google Books Ngrams data has been cross-checked against frequency measures from other corpora and re-analysed in order to handle homographs and other ambiguities.

@Xanne So, yes, probably I do. They have cross-checked their data etc.

That's just for the historical ones.

The moderns ones they have their own corpus.

> Modern frequency values are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words compiled by Oxford Languages. This corpus covers the period from 2017 to the present. It is mainly compiled from online news sources and covers all major varieties of World English.

> Where a value is given for the frequency of a word “in modern written English”, this is calculated by taking the average frequency per million words from 1970 to the present day; or from the first recorded use of the word, if later than 1970.

> The overall frequency score for nouns is calculated by summing frequencies for the singular and plural forms. The overall frequency score for verbs is calculated by summing frequencies for the infinitive form and all inflected forms.

> If a word has any significant spelling variations (especially differences between US and British spelling), the frequency values for these are also combined. Thus the overall frequency for the verb colour is calculated by summing frequencies for colour, colours, colouring, coloured, color, colors, coloring, and colored. Frequency scores will be recalculated periodically as the OED is revised.

@Cerberus Yes, I'll grant you that. There are so many different analyses of these things, models created at different times and for differing purposes, that it isn't something solid like basic arithmetic. It's all an exercise in creative categorization by many historical parties. The purpose to which you will put an analysis may determine which model you select.

Say, is it just me, or doesn't diæ̈reticked look better than diȧėreticked does? :)

Dannyu NDos

@tchrist Æ with diaeresis? I don't think that's a single Unicode character?

tchrist

Notice that 83% of the non-obsolete words in the OED are from Frequency Bands 1, 2, or 3, which means most people won't know most of them.

@DannyuNDos Well, it's not a single Unicode code point, that's for sure. How many you get, though, depends on which Unicode Normalization Form you select for output, at least in the single-dot above case.

mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "dia\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}e\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}reticked"' | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File
       0    undef        1       12       14       16 standard input
mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "dia\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}e\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}reticked"' | nfd | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File
       0    undef        1       12       14       16 standard input
mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "dia\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}e\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}reticked"' | nfc | uniwc

So in Normalization Form C you have 12 "chars" but in D you have 14.

Robusto

22:26

English Actors Get This Wrong

►

tchrist

But there's no precomposed one for the AE version.

mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "di\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER AE}\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS}reticked"' | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File
       0    undef        1       11       12       14 standard input
mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "di\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER AE}\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS}reticked"' | nfc | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File
       0    undef        1       11       12       14 standard input
mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -e 'print "di\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER AE}\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS}reticked"' | nfd | uniwc

So that one is invariant under both normalizations.

mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -le 'print for "di\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER AE}\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS}reticked", "dia\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}e\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}reticked"' | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File
       0        2        2       25       28       32 standard input
mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -le 'print for "di\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER AE}\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS}reticked", "dia\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}e\N{COMBINING DOT ABOVE}reticked"' | nfc | uniwc
   Paras    Lines    Words   Graphs    Chars    Bytes File

@DannyuNDos Oh that's right, you're Korean so you know all this stuff by default a lot better than almost any Americans would.

Dannyu NDos

Huh?

tchrist

Normalization for Hangul.

Presumably.

Dannyu NDos

Normalization for Hangul isn't done often. Because most Korean IMEs output Hangul that are already precomposed.

tchrist

> There are also special rules to fully decompose Hangul syllables. Full decomposition involves recursive application of the Decomposition_Mapping values, because in some cases a complex composite character may have a Decomposition_Mapping into a sequence of characters, one of which may also have its own non-trivial Decomposition_Mapping value.

From tr15.

aka the Unicode Standard Annex #15 on UNICODE NORMALIZATION FORMS.

I know there are complexities carved out for Hangul.

The word Hangul occurs 15 times in tr15.

And there are special Hangul character properties for syllable types and jamo, which you can use as \p{....} in regexes and such, or via various function/method calls on a Unicode character.

mac(tchrist)% uniprops -gal | grep -i hangul
Block=Hangul_Compatibility_Jamo
Block=Hangul
Block=Hangul_Syllables
Hangul
Is_Hangul
Block=Hangul_Jamo
Block=Hangul_Jamo_Extended_A
Block=Hangul_Jamo_Extended_B
BLK=Hangul
InHangul
Hangul_Compatibility_Jamo
Script=Hangul
Hangul_Syllables
Hangul_Jamo
Hangul_Jamo_Extended_A
Hangul_Jamo_Extended_B
Hangul_Syllable_Type=L
Hangul_Syllable_Type=Leading_Jamo
Hangul_Syllable_Type=LV
Hangul_Syllable_Type=LV_Syllable
Hangul_Syllable_Type=LVT
Hangul_Syllable_Type=LVT_Syllable

Mostly it's the Hangul_Syllable_Type=.... property that makes it special.

I remember they worked on it for what seemed to me a long time to finally come up with something that would be useful for you guys.]

I used to sit in by invitation on the tr18 subcommittee meetings discussing regexes now and then. It was thorny. I remember this coming up.

That is, tr18 meaning UTS#18 on Unicode Regular Expressions.

The word Hangul also occurs 9 times in that document.

But that's nothing! tr29 on Unicode Text Segmentation mentions Hangul no fewer than 51 times. That's where the hard parts are.

See section 8. Hangul Syllable Boundary Determination.

It makes converting UTC to arbitrary local times seem easy. :)

CowperKettle

23:37

Cerberus

Interesting.

CowperKettle

23:55

No wonder there are few Africans online

alphabet

@Robusto That Australian English lesson--where they tell you to put the "ar" vowel in large, grass, start, aunt, laugh, heart, and clerk--made my brain hurt.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…