English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:43 AM

It's hardly something that couldn't stand some improvement, that's for sure.

> Larger GPUs require a different system architecture and blah.

Being able to put them...where?

1:27 AM

@tchrist Ah, that's what I was wondering about.

I would have written put in.

(Into the computer case.)

I have seen this use of put for put in before, but I always assumed it was a simple error.

1:43 AM

You still should.

@Cerberus Computer case?

@tchrist Gladly.

Took this on my bike ride this morning. Beautiful weather today, after a crap weekend.

@Robusto Ja.

Great view.

Thanks.

1:47 AM

And very few buildings in sight!

Me gusta mucho.

Even better, no?

In the distance, I mean.

Ja.

The reason is that what you see in the distance is a Native American pueblo, a/k/a reservation.

The desert has greened up quite a bit due to the bit of rain we've been getting.

I never get tired of the vistas. After almost three decades in New England, where you get at best a tiny wedge of sky surrounded by trees, here you can see for more than 100 km.

@Cerberus As a city dweller, I'll bet you don't get many vistas.

Also, @Cerb, I took that picture on the G6. Not bad for a phone, IMO.

@tchrist: How's the snow up in Boulder? We got some in the mountains, but I'm sure it won't last.

@Robusto All melted now, or nearly.

With or without salt?

1:58 AM

Ick

It was 55 and sunny. At this altitude that's more than plenty.

In Boston they salt no matter what. It's ugly.

Some friends are in Mallorca right now. I chose not to go, because I thought it might confuse my Spanish studies.

Bad reason.

It would have been great.

But wouldn't Catalan just cloud the issue?

You don't really have to learn Catalan. It just helps sometimes.

How close to "regular" Spanish is Catalan?

2:09 AM

It's not like you wouldn't k ow which language it was. That doesn't happen.

It isn't.

Ah, ok.

It's really a Languedoc.

And you never get French and Spanish confused.

It shares most phonemes. It's much farther in root cognates and grammar than Portuguese is.

Hmm.

There's a tiny amount of code switching crossover. Like vale.

Damn, I just got a look at their hotel. I thought they were staying at a pension or something. But it looks pretty great.

2:15 AM

Yeah.

Ah, well, maybe next year.

That's in the Balearic Islands, I think. Mallorca is maybe the largest of the Balearics? I can't remember.

That's correct.

Mallorca, Menorca, e Ibiza.

My c key must not be working.

Ah, Ibiza is the other one.

A: Are questions about Mirandês on-topic?

Here, read these tiny samples of a dialect continuum from Spanish to Catalan:

6

I would always wish for our community to be inclusive where possible. But I honestly don’t know that Mirandês is a good match for us. We could always try and see how it works out. It could be an experiment, and we could always change our minds later. I would argue, as Jacinto has suggested, that...

@Robusto Indeed not! Only in the country.

2:17 AM

@tchrist You could always try playing in G#.

@Robusto Not bad at all.

Is Mallorca related to magnus?

The big island?

I'd always assumed so, but never checked.

It's Majorca in Catalan.

Seems like Mallorca and Menorca would be diametrical, yes?

Maybe.

Not.

Not?

2:20 AM

No, can't tell.

Have to go read non-English.

Ok yes.

It becomes obvious when you read non-English.

Why the hell the Anglophones can't just come out and tell you obvious things, I don't know.

Mallorca

Mallorca (del latín insula maior, ‘isla mayor’, posteriormente Maiorica, en contraposición a Minorica o insula minor) es la isla más grande del archipiélago balear, la cual, junto a Menorca, Ibiza y Formentera, forma una comunidad autónoma uniprovincial, la más oriental de España. La isla tiene 3640,11 km², lo que la convierte en la isla más extensa de España y la sexta más extensa del Mediterráneo. Sus &&&&&&&&&0859289.&&&&&0859 289 habitantes (INE 2015) la hace la isla más poblada del archipiélago balear y la segunda isla más poblada de España tras Tenerife. Mallorca posee una densidad de población...

So yeah.

@tchrist The chances are it doesn't even occur to them to do so.

I like to know why things are named stuff.

So do I.

For example, now I want to know if Ibiza has some special meaning as well.

On my dialect-continuum study there regarding Mirandese, the missing piece is French, which you can compare with the Catalan:

> Le mirandais (mirandés, en portugais mirandês) est une langue romane rattachée au groupe astur-léonais1, dérivant directement du latin et parlée dans le nord-est du Portugal, dans la Terre de Miranda, dans la région du Haut Trás-os-Montes (en portugais Alto Trás-os-Montes). Elle est une langue reconnue et protégée officiellement au Portugal. Elle est même une langue co-officielle avec le portugais dans son aire influence qui demeure toutefois très restreinte.

Seems like it might be from Arabic, though.

2:24 AM

/z/ is usually Mozarabic or Euskense, yes.

Ibiza is Eivissa in Catalan.

> Phoenician colonists called the island Ibossim (from the Phoenician iboshim, meaning dedicated to the Egyptian god Bes).

So it predates Arabic.

> Es en esta época cuando Ibiza también es conocida como "Insula Augusta" en continuidad a su nombre sagrado fenicio de Isla de Bes.

Eivissa and Isla de Bes are pretty obviously tied.

Yep.

Second Punic War, blah balh.

> También los romanos comerciaron con las Islas Baleares, que poseían ciertas riquezas como la sal, higos o la extracción de minerales (minas de galena-argentífera y minio en s´Argentera - San Carlos). ʾībošim (en fenicio 𐤀𐤉𐤁𐤔𐤌, ʔybšm) fue el nombre que le dieron los fenicios,10 y Ebusus su adaptación al latín.

I know nothing.

I think of the 2nd Punic War as the Barca Longueur.

Joke.

2:29 AM

yay

> Mientras en las islas mayores habitaban tribus menos desarrolladas culturalmente y con tradiciones bárbaras a los ojos de la cultura helenística, en las Pitiusas vivían gentes de tradición semita, descendientes de emigrantes de Oriente Próximo, Qart Hadasht o las polis fenicias del sur de la Península Ibérica.

Needless to say, the Spanish version is more interesting.

Sí.

I first learned of the Balearic Islands from a Flaubert novel.

Salammbô.

(Took me a minute to find the circumflex.)

> El Puig Major desde un avión.

Catalan digraphs are nuts. I think that rhymes with Butch.

Puig = Butch?

Yikes.

Rhymewise, yes.

So the j in Catalan is like y or ll in Spanish?

2:34 AM

Haha.

Like French.

Or Argentine.

> Puig Major (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈpudʒ məˈʒo]) is the highest peak on the Spanish island of Majorca.

Ah.

Ok, so rhymes with splooge.

It's not as bad as having to trying to learn the Hungarian digraphs and trigraphs, but it's just really weird.

I think the i in front of the g is to make it soft not hard.

Yeah. And after I got used to Spanish orthography being decidedly not weird.

Note: in front, not behind.

And is otherwise silent.

Spanish is really quite sane, in many ways that most people don't realize is a very lucky position. That Academy has worked to keep it that way for longer than we've been a country.

I find it quite refreshing.

For that reason.

2:38 AM

It didn't get this way by accident. They've worked hard to keep it sane.

After the twin shit shows of English and French, I guess they felt obliged to do that.

At least, the orthography. They constantly change the spellings when the pronunciations change. "Constantly" like every couple of centuries.

If you can read it, you can pronounce it.

Of course, that's pretty much true of German, I suppose. Except for their French borrowings.

With only a super few, super famous exceptions, this is also true of French.

One such exception is ville, but EVERYONE knows it.

Some Catalan digraphs, and their pronunciations.

They, um, haven't had an Academy as long. :)

Like Catalan, Portuguese spelling also adopted the Occitan (Langedoc, Provençal) tradition back during the days of the troubadours before the Castilians rose to power.

But Catalan has gone weird as some of those show.

That's from here. You should learn it if you go to Cataluña but not worry too much if not.

@tchrist Then I wonder why Puig is /pudʒ/, given the pronunciation they show for -ig.

2:45 AM

You can see why I thought it was unvoiced, eh?

It may be because of the following M in Major.

Voicing often bleeds backwards in these languages, as in mismo and desde.

Not fair.

Speaking of mismo, I find it really hard to remember not to pronounce it "mizmo" ...

So in mismo and desde, the phonemic /s/ is actually a [z].

@Robusto Wait, that one is [z] not [s].

It's still /s/ is all.

Oh. So the /s/ is voiced in mismo and desde?

The M "bleeds backwards" (regressive assimilation).

Yes.

Absolutely.

So I've been right, thinking I've been wrong, all this time? Weird.

2:48 AM

It's too hard to say those otherwise.

Your glottis isn't that nimble.

Good. Now I don't have to feel incompetent. At least in that respect.

Because it isn't phonemic, no one will think you said a different word. They'll just think you're still working on your accent. :)

Which I am.

@Mitch Ah, OK. I would really like to know the 'absolute' rules governing how some claims come with POVs, though. Depends on the claim and the POV, prolly. But we'd have to define POV for that, and the definition could not contain the defined, so POVs would have to be absolute fact themselves. So that quote translates into "There's a fact behind every opinion". Cool.

It's too realistic for your taste, I know. Sorry 'bout that!

It's something that just happens naturally once you have gotten used to how the phonology works. You don't think about it.

2:50 AM

Spanish is fairly easy to approximate, accentwise, but as I listen closely I hear a whole lot of different notes in there.

"Didja eat yet" kind of stuff.

Jaeatyet?

That.

We have a Japanese person who is having a really hard time with the rhythm of English.

And "Wutchagunnadoonow?"

And we have not enough people who can explain to her what she wants to know. Lawler can, but she has only gotten a few Lawler answers.

2:52 AM

@tchrist Well, that's to be expected. Japanese has to be the hardest language from which to learn to pronounce other languages.

She's going from isochronous to all-over-the-place.

Q: Is stress-timed rhythm true?

This is exactly the problem.

0

It is said that English has stress-timed rhythm. Is it true? because it sounds that syllables with stress doesn't necessarily get a beat and make isochrony. If it is true, I would like to hear how you feel the rhythm while using it.

Look at her other questions, too.

And here’s a deleted one with a Lawler answer-comment.

I've asked around for people to help her, but haven't gotten anybody yet, though some have tried.

Another dead one.

When you look at her list of questions, nearly all of them revolve around these same matters. I fear it's driving her crazy, but she is perfectly polite and persistent.

What you would expect from a Japanese.

I wish someone could help her. I've talked to Snailplane even.

Probably what she needs is a very good, live, university-level course about this. It's hard in this format.

Yes.

I studied Japanese and can tell you that the isochronous nature of your language makes it very difficult for you to learn rhythm in a non-isochronous language, especially English. Our language codes for different things than yours does. For example, the untrained native English speaker will not even hear a difference between, say, 地図 and チーズ. Both use the same phoneme, and that is all we hear. Our language must sound awfully sloppy and capricious to you, who have always relied on syllables to be more or less like ice cubes in a tray. — Robusto 24 secs ago

Dunno if that will help.

Thank you.

3:05 AM

De nada.

It could be worse, though. She could be trying to learn French, where the "implied" consonants would make her tear out her hair.

One of the hardest things for an English speaker to learn is to stop shortening and reducing syllables in Spanish.

This may come easier to a Japanese speaker.

Hmm, I was thinking the same thing the other day.

There's so much that just isn't encoded in an alphabet.

Exactly.

Even IPA falls short.

I love hearing my Ecuadoriana teacher speak. Such a beautiful prosody.

You don't get timing. You do get that things don't reduce. Although there is plenty of assimilation, that's the consonants. The vowels are theoretically inviolate. There are open allophones but you mustn't think like that.

3:13 AM

What made me think of the Japanese thing was the way she pronounces the terminal and preconsonantal /n/. We talked about this a bit, but she always seems to develop it terminally as almost a separate syllable, the way the Japanese would.

And you sure don't get phrase prosody.

The terminal n is moving back in speakers all over the world now. I read something about this but in print.

Hmm.

If all our languages used phonetic spelling, not only would that 50% connection between English and Romance be lost, languages within the group would no longer look alike either. The link to Latin would be lost.

Think of French

Almost every oddity in Spanish spellings is about preserving etymological indicators.

Silent h. B/v. Even for many speakers s/z/c.

Yes. And as I've mentioned elsewhere on this site, Japanese would be impossible without kanji.

As in English they restored things deliberately to remind people of Latin.

Vehículo not beículo.

But you only say the second one.

As it were.

It could be worse. You could have the two different kinds of silent H that French has.

3:29 AM

Well, the Chinese characters (kanji) mean that every time the Japanese reads something they get the etymology of the word right there in plain sight.

I've heard that.

Renaissance.

It helps if you can see the three morphemes there. But most people don't.

A: Is stress-timed rhythm true?

So I tried to answer her question. Dunno if it's at all helpful.

0

English almost never walks its way into real isochrony, possibly because that would make even poetry sound too regimented. Too bad we don't have audio tools available here, because it really requires something like that to give you an illustration of what I mean. Take the sentence Well, I do...

I pity Asians and Arabs alike in this. SATs.

Heh.

Oops forgot something. Must go do it.

3:37 AM

Later.

I need to go as well.

4:31 AM

@Robusto Are you the P.S.A. narrator?

12:07 PM

@Tonepoet I think I would make a fine PSA narrator.

12:23 PM

@motoki: Come by here if you want to discuss stressed and unstressed syllables in depth.

12:57 PM

@Robusto I don't think you can ping her if she hasn't been here.

@tchrist I put that there just so I could grab the permalink and reference it in a comment.

If you're still confused, perhaps you can come by the chat room for a while. That would be easier than trying to handle your questions in comments. — Robusto 42 mins ago

1:50 PM

@Færd Rules? Claims? Govern? How? The? ','? ' '?

Wait no, it translates to "There is an opinion behind every fact"

Which one is grammatically correct: (i) "So I shouldn't be welcomed here?" or (ii) "So I shouldn't be welcome here?"

You don't have to be post modernist to see that there are 'theories' behind the data points that feed into the next higher theory (or rather a reductionist philosophy of science but with no bottom).

@englishstudent both. with the slightest of different connotations.

'welcomed' implies that there is some sort of explicit greeting happening.

okay, thank you.

'welcome' just means vaguely that people are happy to have you there, which might very well have included specific greetings.

But don't we normally use ed form with "shouldn't be" structure? That's why it is confusing.

1:55 PM

@Færd You don't need a full theory of physics to explain chemistry, so you can do chemistry with being adept at physics. But of course, physics -does- explain the foundations of chemistry to some extent.

Like "It shouldn't be done" not "It shouldn't be do"

etc.

@englishstudent that's a different situation.

I see.

don't complicate things with 'not'

'It can be done'

Ok. Good, thanks!

1:56 PM

'welcome' is an adjective, but 'do' is not

@Færd so physics is like the 'point of view' that the 'facts' of chemistry are interpreted in.

Yeah makes sense now.

but really the quote is better applied to historical things. Things you think are facts may not be accepted as such by others. What happened in Armenia in the 1910's are disputed by Armenians and Turks

But upon looking at the dictionary it seems like "welcome" can be a "noun", "verb" or an "adjective".

@englishstudent words can have many meanings (and part of that meaning is POS)

yeah

2:01 PM

but there's no cognate of 'done' that is an adjective (and past participles are both like verbs and adjectives at the same time, which confuses things)

'The cake is done and is ready to be sliced'

'That's a done deal' (meaning the deal has been decided on definitively; this is idiomatic, do you really can't use 'done' as an adjective anywhere else I don't think)

yeah. So it takes practice to get perfect at all types of sentences I guess, I mean my English is not bad but I still make mistakes, even basic mistakes.

Can I use “attachment issues” in the sense of “attraction” or a “crush” even? Like “He has attachment issues with xyz girl”. Or is it only used in the 'parental attachment' sense?

Because I was writing something where I felt like saying “He has attachment issues and gets attracted to people”. Would that be natural sounding?

I don't mean it in a parent child sense.

So not sure if that's the correct usage of the term.

Now is the month of maying

►

2:52 PM

@tchrist Now's the time to invest in Ball mason jars, because this practically guarantees everybody will be canning this month instead. Also, since when did helping verbs take gerund form?

@englishstudent Sounds fine to me, like the guy is too attached to the girl. But you may have a point that it is supposed to only be a bout a child with a parent. So basically I'm saying exactly what you are that I'm not sure.

3:49 PM

@Mitch okay, thanks a bunch.

@Tonepoet Why? Due to spring?

@englishstudent Because.

oh okay. That's funny.

> Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers; such a scampering of feet in the dark; such droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another's arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly; such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling—it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener.

I mean had heard that joke but didn't know you meant "canning" as in "can" like "maying" as in "may".

The dictionary entry definition.

What with all the willing and shalling.

4:02 PM

@tchrist Okay, fine, I'll grant you that. XP

When I was in school I would sometimes say "Miss I'll go to the washroom" without making it a question. Kind of odd I know. And the teacher wouldn't correct me. Btw do you call your female teachers "Miss" there?

4:15 PM

@englishstudent I think universally now you'd say 'Ms' pronounced /miz/.

'Miss' might be used for a waitress, but not for anything else.

Yeah with /z/. I agree.

@Mitch In some other places too. Ever heard of "Mistress" or "Miss" when it comes to BDSM community?

In your sentence you would use a title only if followed by a name. If no name, not 'Ms' but 'Excuse me'

I have an Australian friend (on the internet) and she is into that stuff. That's kinky stuff.

@englishstudent hah clever monkey I won't fall into your trap of getting me to divulge my alternate 'habits'

Sorry for going off on a tangent but yeah, they use it there.

@Mitch haha

4:19 PM

Smaller subcultures may very well have there own linguistic habits different from the mainstream

In the movies they're always having the 'client' bark like a dog

Wait...maybe that in movies about fraternities

Easy mistake

6:27 PM

Why are most so-called style guides really just over-glorified dictionaries?

I mean A.P. style, New York Style, Wired style... It's like the news outlets don't trust their own reporters to know how words should be used.

They're more like usage guides than anything. Corporately mandated usage guides.

Now I can understand wanting to define a few especially contentious words, they don't have much in the way of anything else, esp. compared to a guide like the Chicago Manual of Style, which actually shows you how to style your writing.

7:07 PM

'?'?
(I mean, you just don't get to ask too many questions. Anyone who asks a question knows *some*thing.)

@Mitch I was thinking of more intimate things rather than science. But OK; you can begin with science. Where does that chain lead to, though? To opinion or fact?

Shall we get down to defining opinion now? I think it's a good way to get on with the discussion, (Fact is, I believe, an undefinable prime concept.)

To be fair, you can't really observe something without a point of view. Even with direct observation, you are relying on your own ability to process the data to be accurate, and there is no guarantee of that.

7:24 PM

@Tonepoet Inaccuracy lies in the discomformity between an object and another thing that serves to represent, describe, or model that object. However, you don't always observe things with the help of a representative or intermediary. There is direct observation.

Hint: you're talking about your dubious capability of processing some data accurately. Go back a step: is there really any data? How do you know? By processing some other data or by direct observation of the data?

@Færd That's predicated on the assumption that anything can really be known. I can make assumptions, but how do I know I'm not a madman in an insane asylum having a mad fit?

Even if you are, the mad fit is what you're directly experiencing (read: observing).

That's a kind of knowledge, even if you're not, on a higher level, aware of having that knowledge.

@Færd I suppose that's true. Weren't we arguing over Descartes's declaration of cogito ergo sum before?

Yeah.

I was making another point back then though.