English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

12:05 AM

@Robusto Because all three were flagged no longer needed.

Robusto

3:06 AM

@RegDwigнt "Also I don't know anything about music. Is it hard?"

@RegDwigнt Sorry, I don't listen to KPOP.

You can tell it's KPOP without listening. All you have to do is look at the Hangul in the title and you're there.

@tchrist I wonder how one determines whether something is needed or not. It's a comment. Rare is the comment that is actually needed.

tchrist

@Robusto Doesn't matter, they're all of to the chatroom of their discontent now.

Robusto

Ashworth writes an answer in a comment on every single question and somehow they stay up there.

tchrist

No they don't. Not all of them.

Robusto

OK, somewhere north of five digits of comments, then, making a wild guess.

tchrist

I didn't spend too much time on it. The flags came from someone whose opinion I had reason to take seriously. But I loathe spending more than a moment on comment flags.

The comments aren't gone. I undeleted them and moved everything.

Rebooting to install updates.

Robusto

3:15 AM

Yes. Which is another way of saying they are gone. Very few ever pursue the dialogue into the chat.

Not that I care if some of mine get deleted. It just bugs me when many people @Robusto one of my comments and then that gets deleted, leaving a gaping hole. It just seems messy.

There, I said it. I'm done with it.

tchrist

5:09 AM

@Robusto You're right. I hate it when I do that, too.

Cerberus

> Il y a un an, vous affirmiez que vous n’aviez « pas le temps d’avoir une fiancée ». Et aujourd’hui ?

C’est vrai que je n’ai pas le temps pour. Je suis en studio dès le matin, ou en tournée.

@tchrist How do you feel about this word order?

I actually didn't think French occupied itself with that same question, one which is amongst our most popular here.

tchrist

@Cerberus I think you've caught one of those weirdo kaybeckers who strand prepositions.

Cerberus

But, now that I see this, I seem to recall seeing avec in a similar position.

tchrist

Maybe.

Cerberus

En fin d'une phrase comme ça.

tchrist

5:22 AM

I just don't like that pour hanging out there at the end. "You want to come with?" is fine in Germanic, but not in Romance.

Cerberus

But you may be right, that it is wrong or informal this way.

tchrist

Oh, it does happen.

I wouldn't write it.

It happens notoriously in Québec, but I imagine that's not from there.

Cerberus

Ah, I see.

tchrist

I'd've written pour ça.

Or pour tout ça, you know, that sort of thing.

Cerberus

I've no idea, it might be Québecois.

tchrist

5:24 AM

They do this.

Cerberus

Yes, I would certainly have added an object myself.

I have been listening to Coeur de Pirate a bit of late. I had all but forgotten the name of the band, it took me ages to find it again.

They are from that province.

tchrist

Then that would be why.

Cerberus

But this is not related to them.

An interview with a French singer.

Could it be because he is a gypsy?

I have noticed some other things in his language that sounded wrong to me.

tchrist

> A few non-standard dialects of French seem to have developed preposition stranding as a result of linguistic contact with English. Preposition stranding has been found in areas where the Francophone population is under intense contact with English, including certain parts of Alberta, Northern Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Louisiana. It is found (but heavily decried) in very informal Quebec French.

Cerberus

I believe he was born Spanish.

tchrist

5:26 AM

Spanish never does that. Nor Portuguese. Not even Brazilian.

Cerberus

@tchrist Oh, borrowed from English, even!

tchrist

peut-être

Languages in Collision!

Cerberus

It's quite a crash.

tchrist

> Wh-movement: Qui est-ce que tu as fait le gâteau pour?
Whom did you bake the cake for?
Standard French: Pour qui est-ce que tu as fait le gâteau?

> Pseudopassives: Robert a été parlé beaucoup de au meeting.
Robert was much talked about at the meeting.
Standard French: On a beaucoup parlé de Robert au meeting.

> Relative clauses: Tu connais pas la fille que je te parle de.
You don't know the girl that I'm talking to you about.
Standard French: Tu ne connais pas la fille dont je te parle.
Another, more widespread non-standard variant: Tu ne connais pas la fille que je te parle.

Cerberus

@tchrist Okay, this does really sound like a big, fat Anglicism.

tchrist

5:29 AM

> To standard French ears, these constructs all sound quite alien, and are thus considered as barbarisms or "anglicismes". However, not all dialects of French allow preposition stranding to the same extent. For instance, Ontario French restricts preposition stranding to relative clauses with certain prepositions; in most dialects, stranding is impossible with the prepositions à (to) and de (of).

> A superficially similar construction is possible in standard French in cases where the object is not moved, but implied, such as Je suis pour ("I'm all for (it)") or Il faudra agir selon ("We'll have to act according to (the situation)").

Cerberus

Yeah, it is even more egregious with de.

@tchrist Ah, yes, that is the case in my quotation.

tchrist

Still sounds a little

See, don't you want me to finish that? :)

Cerberus

Does your source pass judgement on the last construction?

tchrist

Apparently.

Preposition stranding

Preposition stranding, sometimes called P-stranding, is the syntactic construction in which a preposition with an object occurs somewhere other than immediately adjacent to its object; for example, at the end of a sentence. The preposition is then described as stranded, hanging, or dangling. This kind of construction is found mainly in English and in some other Germanic languages or dialects. Preposition stranding is also found in languages outside the Germanic family, such as Vata and Gbadi (two languages in the Niger–Congo family), and certain dialects of French spoken in North America. ��2...

There a large section there on Dutch, a smaller one on French.

Cerberus

> for example, Dutch in can mean either in or into when used prepositionally, but can only mean into when used postpositionally

I don't think I agree with this, or perhaps that text is a bit old fashioned?

One could say, "welke zak zat hij in?", but perhaps that is slightly informal.

tchrist

5:37 AM

More than it would be in English?

At least you don't have to figure out which case for "in welke".

Accusative with movement, dative if it just sits there. :)

Cerberus

Welk doesn't have cases!

That's the point.

Right.

> Auf welchem

@tchrist Somewhat more informal than in English, yes.

Wikipaedia is rather cautious about Dutch.

tchrist

5:40 AM

> Für welchen

Cerberus

Oh, you mean, you don't have to worry about cases there, unlike English.

tchrist

That kind of fussiness.

Cerberus

Yet another class of very popular questions here.

tchrist

Can you tell that him was originally dative in English, not accusative?

The -m gives it away.

But we've lost all that now, of course.

Somebody else has died in Seattle today.

Cerberus

Yeah, him and hem looks dative.

tchrist

5:44 AM

And the highschool lad whose test came back positive Friday has a strain of the virus that's a lineal descendent of the very first U.S. case in Washington State six weeks ago.

Cerberus

On Wednesday, we had zero cases.

On Thursday, one.

tchrist

And there's no way the second person could have contracted it from the first.

So whom else has it gone through?

Cerberus

Their number has so far doubled every day since ___.

We're now at ten.

tchrist

I think this is going to explode here over the next week.

Cerberus

(In Dutch, that would have been sindsdien: we cannot use the praeposition/conjunction sinds without an object or clause!)

tchrist

5:46 AM

And then again the week after next, at which point they'll be imposing serious measures. And Trump may have perished of a heart attack by then for having watched the stock market.

Cerberus

Or he may have caught the disease.

tchrist

Been to see the Holy Father again, has he?

Try reading that one with an Irish accent. :)

Cerberus

I think il Papa didn't have it?

tchrist

No se sabe.

Non si whatever in Italian, but he speaks better Spanish.

He looked danged sick.

Cerberus

No doubt.

That would be something, if the Pope, Khamenei, and Trump all got sick.

tchrist

5:49 AM

I wouldn't put them in the same wagon.

Cerberus

No, I don't think they would like it.

Poena cullei

Poena cullei (from Latin 'penalty of the sack') under Roman law was a type of death penalty imposed on a subject who had been found guilty of parricide. The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water. The punishment may have varied widely in its frequency and precise form during the Roman period. For example, the earliest fully documented case is from ca. 100 BC, although scholars think the punishment may have developed about a century earlier. Inclusion of...

tchrist

We know nothing right now. We'll know more in six months, but it will have run through a lot of us by then. Once that's done, we'll know a lot more, like in a year or two.

Cerberus

Perhaps it will wane in Summer.

Like the flu.

tchrist

And perhaps not. We don't know.

Cerberus

Indeed not.

tchrist

5:51 AM

About 20% of colds are from coronavirus not from rhinovirus, you know.

Cerberus

We have fewer colds in summer.