Language Overflow - 2020-06-28

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3:12 AM

The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound. The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound. If a person is getting poor quality auditory information but good quality visual information, they may be more likely to experience the McGurk effect. Integration abilities for audio and visual information may also...

1 hour later…

4:27 AM

This answer's basically completely wrong and pointless - no offense. (1) The etymology is totally irrelevant to current usage. (2) Examples of usage mean, simply, absolutely nothing. Because: (3) It's completely, utterly, totally normal that a word can be BOTH acceptable (even positive) in certain situations and derogatory in other situations. (The "n-word" is an extreme example.) — Fattie 8 hours ago

Right, right, okay.

2 hours later…

6:21 AM

jesus

7:08 AM

@M.A.R. Excuse me? What is trolling the ballots?

7:33 AM

@CowperKettle What did the rigging look like?

@CowperKettle I think this is a bit too graphic?

7:51 AM

→ 2 messages moved to Trash

I removed it in case it would get flagged

@M.A.R. I don't remember, I was very ill then and did not follow the events

@M.A.R. No, it's just a usual meal, they are not eating a human being but only a herd animal

8:12 AM

@CowperKettle Of course they're not, haha. But the image was still graphic

4 hours later…

12:38 PM

@AIQ Hmm, so any discussion of whether any word is derogatory is useless? Probably not.

I think you're obsessing too much over that post BTW. Deattach.

Before anyone corrects ^, I meant it like that for some emphasis

@M.A.R. Yeah, I should stop looking at that post now ... but what do you mean in your first sentence?

1 hour later…

2:00 PM

> To boldly go: NASA launches Lunar Loo challenge

Haha, nice headline

@AIQ What Fattie implies, AFAICT, is that just because I can say "Thank you" in a sarcastic and negatively angry way, then analyzing the negative social connotations of a word is useless.

Which I disagree with.

Oh okay thanks I had just woken up and my brain wasn't working properly to understand what you wrote

excuses

Of course a commonly used word cannot be simply labeled as bad or good. It's always more nuanced than that with language.

@AIQ I dunno, my brain chooses a random time of the day to malfunction most of the time so I don't have even that excuse

@M.A.R. Hey I wanted to ask you sth. You are in Iran right? How do people address each other there? Like do you guys call each other by just the first name?

@CowperKettle Lunar . . . loo? Is it just me or has 2020's scientific advancement been either about COVID or useless bullshit?

Mostly useless

I blame Musk

@AIQ Like everywhere else, depends on who I'm talking to of course

And my education and my mental image of what kind of a person I am dictates that more than language specifications.

2:13 PM

@M.A.R. Why he came up with that trunk of truck ... or was that 2019?

Although maybe you could Sapir Whorf that argument, hmm

@M.A.R. Nope that is not how it is everywhere.

@AIQ I used to like and respect the guy but right now he just seems to be the butt of the buzz like a burnt out Hollywood actor, except with a so-called scientific theme

@AIQ So you don't address a stranger, a foreign tourist, a pregnant lady and a very old man differently?

Unless you mean masked politeness

@M.A.R. Yeah that is right. No I mean to say in some countries we address people a little differently than how it's done in NA and Europe

So I wanted to know how you do it there ...

So, to answer your question, in my region, there's a Turkish word that used to mean and does mean "beggar", but its meaning has shifted among young blokes familiar with each other so they call each other that, like some sort of a "bruh"

Other than that, I don't think there's any other common word to use to refer to a stranger, other than "sir" or "lady"

I'm in the northwest, and my mother tongue is Azeri Turkish, not Persian.

2:43 PM

@M.A.R. How similar is Azeri to modern Turkish?

3:01 PM

@EddieKal Well, my Turkish, the Turkish Turkish, and Azerbaijani are between three dialects and three different languages. I understand some of what they say, as they do mine, but it's nowhere near full comprehension

@M.A.R. I have seen a Uyghur person having a conversation with someone from Turkey. I was amazed

I dunno, but I think Uighur is very different!

I mean, the roots are the same, but so are, for example, Persian and Hindi

We have a few similar words, like "sky". But no way would I understand a single sentence of Hindi

3:20 PM

It's +9 C and rain all day. I've turned on the air heater, for the first time since late January.

@M.A.R. You know, where I am from .. and in India, we have to add a term after the first name when we talk to someone who is older than us (like if the age difference is 2 or more years) ... we are taught this from childhood ... I don't know where this tradition actually came from

@AIQ I think that is also the norm in Turkish culture

So for example, I have to "John brother" if John is older than me. The wording is "bhai" or "bhaiya" which means "brother". And it is not a religion thing. Christians say "John da" and Hindus say "John dada"

Muslims say "John bhai"

We have "apu" for women (for muslims). For Hindus it is "didi" pronounced like "the" "the"

@EddieKal Oh that is what I was asking M.A.R about

like when I came to Canada, I was always calling my professors "Dr. Lastname" or just "Professor" ... I couldn't use their first name even when they asked me to and said it was okay to call them by their first name ...

When I am from if we call our teachers by their first name, they will kick us out, call the disciplinary commission on us ... etc., etc.,

I remember there were boys who were 1 year seniors in school (like when I was in std. 7 they were in 8) and they used to flirt with my female classmates ... and I was so jealous ... I hated calling them "brother"

lol

Also, here you can call your in-laws by the first name ... we have to call our in-laws "mom" or "dad" ...

Damn now I gotta take the IELTS jesus

3:47 PM

@AIQ It's always a difficult thing to navigate, even with friends' parents. Sometimes it's okay to go on a first-name basis with them, other times not

@AIQ precocious bunch!

lol yeah

@AIQ In Japanese school, you address your classmates by their last names (family names is the term I prefer in this situation, because the East Asian name order is family name given name)

Yeah ours as well

Only friends, no, close friends, can be comfortably on a given/first name basis with each other

@AIQ Which one are you referring to?

like my name is in this format in my birth certi and passport: Family name Given name ... So here everyone calls me by my Family name which is basically the first name.

3:57 PM

=I see

Also cause they can't properly pronounce my Given name

4:46 PM

@AIQ Now, see, that's one thing most languages don't have.

The Turkish I speak doesn't. I don't think the other two Turkishes do either.

Persian doesn't either, but it has a sophisticated system of classifiers that appear before or after NP head.

@AIQ Lol, so Apu from The Simpsons isn't a real name?

@AIQ This depends on the language. You'd get odd looks if you get too familiar in German, but English folks don't mind

Now, @snail would need to confirm this, but I think this obligatory mark in the directives would be mostly limited to East Asian languages

I know Thailand has it. Sigh IIRC "Khrap" means roughly "sir"

@M.A.R. I stand corrected then.

@M.A.R. I would call Thailand a South East Asian country

@EddieKal It might as well have a while ago. Languages here are going through rapid changes

@EddieKal Meh, too lazy to type S. SE is still E

If I hazard a guess, in less than a generation, these languages would become heavily . . . "Anglicized"

@M.A.R. You mean SEA and EA languages?

Oh, I mostly meant my Turkishes

@EddieKal lol

5:00 PM

@M.A.R. Do you not count effendi and bey?

With such interest in learning, say, Japanese, I don't think it'll be affected much

@EddieKal They're nowhere near as obligatory, I think

@M.A.R. Oh I see. My understanding was too generalized

But Turkish, Persian, Arabic (it has already changed a lot!), and other Middle Eastern languages would be affected foshure

@M.A.R. haha so "apu/appi" means sister ... It is really hard to use that when the girl is pretty - that creates an unwanted friend-zone or eliminates the romantic possibility

@AIQ I mean he's a guy

5:02 PM

@M.A.R. I know, I am just saying

The Simpsons is obviously making fun of the stereotype, but still

@M.A.R. Hahaha Japanese? Not Anglicized? A Japanese person can't go on for one minute without invoking English-rooted words

The Japanese language has been destroyed by English

so the equivalent of "I have a boyfriend" in my part of the world is "bhaiya" calling men "John bhaiya" = "John brother" ends all hopes of romance lol

Well then

I need to qualify "a Japanese person": a young Japanese person

5:04 PM

@EddieKal but why?

@AIQ This friendzone thing is really weird. So what are people looking for in a significant other, other than care and love? The boyfriend should be a wild asshole that will dump you in a garbage can, or?

@EddieKal Oh I fully understand

So it's perhaps just simply global, without that being an oversimplification

On one hand, some beauty is lost. I strictly believe in the Whorfian notion that languages unlock different ways of looking at the world, and vice versa.

But on the other hand, people aren't looking at the world anymore so much as their screen, and perhaps getting anglicized is merely a shadow of what we miss by not checking outside

Checks outside, nah it sucks, same as usual

P.S. it's really hard for me to believe languages wouldn't thrive and evolve out of this eventually.

@AIQ In the past few centuries a pandemic stormed across the world and wreaked havoc on languages, cultural pride, and peoples, one that is 100 times more devastating and infectious than COVID, one that is known by the name colonialism

Perry's black ship is deeply carved into every Japanese person's mind

Now people talk about it as part of history. It is history, but not ancient history.

The Black Ships (in Japanese: 黒船, romanized: kurofune, Edo period term) was the name given to Western vessels arriving in Japan in the 16th and 19th centuries. In 1543 Portuguese initiated the first contacts, establishing a trade route linking Goa to Nagasaki. The large carracks engaged in this trade had the hull painted black with pitch, and the term came to represent all Western vessels. In 1639, after suppressing a rebellion blamed on the influence of Christian thought, the ruling Tokugawa shogunate retreated into an isolationist policy, the Sakoku. During this "locked state", contact with Japan...

Then after WWII, the American occupation and lasting American military presence in Japan continue to cast a shadow over the nation

After the 1960s speaking English is cool

Well, things change.

Let's see if our beloved POTUS can help with that

So I used to date this Japanese person and our online chats could be all English transcribed in kana (Japanese alphabet)

Like I would say "Hey are you there?" but what I type is (transcribed back into the Latin alphabet): Aa yuu zea?

We were doing it for fun.

our chat is mostly in English as well ...

5:15 PM

But that is how the Japanese language has morphed in the past few decades. People take an English word and start using it in daily conversation

@AIQ You mean you and your gf?

@EddieKal Yes, and other friends

@M.A.R. What do you mean "evolve out of this"? Like convergence?

@AIQ That's odd

Unless you don't have any other common languages?

people in the capital city (and those who have some level of education) often use English letters to write in our language ... like "Ki obosta?" to mean "What's up?"

@EddieKal Divergence, rather.

5:21 PM

Hmm

What Eddie Kal said about Japan happened to us as well ... English has spread in our country ... while people don't know how to use it properly, they still use it

Uh, I think whatever it is we have, you have way more severely

like 99% of people will say "court" even when the majority of them don't know how to spell it. Many don't know that it is an English word

"Battery" is an English word ... everyone says that in my country (honestly, I don't know what it is in my own language )

Btw, I just gave the comment section in that cop post a scrub. I hope the comments look fine now. Let me know if some things still seem out of place

okay

5:53 PM

@EddieKal I think people would object that you handpicked the comments under your answer

I'd either move them all to chat or keep some of the more useful dissenting comments

@M.A.R. They already did. And yes, I am afraid more will. I think a second mod should do the clean up, just so no one can point fingers on Eddie Kal

I saw that, but that was inflammatory speculative noise. Now they'd have "evidence" to back it up.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

That is why I tagged Snailcar before. Well I can't ping Em. here

let me try the mod's double ping now

@@Em.

@M.A.R. I am on my own on this

Unfortunately

@M.A.R. Also I refuse to be put down or stand aside and let AIQ be put down

Well, the moderator would need to appear unbiased so as to avoid censorship accusations

@AIQ That's not how it works, you lack a blue name

5:59 PM

@M.A.R. I actually posted a bit about this in the Teachers' Lounge earlier today

My interest was only rekindled because I'm the one who flagged for comment cleanup. I don't care either way, really. I just want this not to be a bigger headache than it already is for you.

@EddieKal Secret society!!!

@M.A.R. So for me this is a make or break point, but even if I break I will stay on to fight, yes I use the word fight here for the first time

Well, fight is too strong a word. This is not a war, really.

@M.A.R. Have you seen this?

99

Q: Resignation notice

When efforts arise to formalize or corporatize a community, there's often understandable concern that the effort could destroy the very community it seeks to grow. [...] Any effort to grow will fail if members sense that the community leadership is neglecting important values or introducing unwel...

discussion moderation

6:03 PM

If they disagree with your answer or AIQ's question's premise, they can simply downvote it, and then comment on that downvote. Anything other than that is unnecessary noise. I don't want a smartass to tell me "Karen" is pejorative, and it's at best tangential to the question. We're not virtue signalling here, and neither is it a court.

So, Britney Spears (when she was young) was the dream girl of most men in their youth?

But that in itself makes the word distracting and therefore suboptimal

@AIQ I think so, for the boomers

It shot my heart to pieces yesterday when I lighted upon it while searching for existing discussions about voices being silenced

@EddieKal You do recognize this post was written in an extraordinary context most of which was never revealed in public other than by a clearly biased SE employee who publicly defamed one of the sides in the argument?

@M.A.R. What context? You mean the Monica incident?

6:09 PM

I still dunno that, if we approach the Q&A objectively, without all the sociopolitical hyperbole, it really doesn't need to feel like you're being 'silenced' or even 'bullied' by a dissenting vocal minority

@EddieKal Yes. We never found out really what happened, but it seemed Monica inquired about the then-ridiculous CoC terms, and her badge was removed without notice, and she was publicly defamed.

@M.A.R. If you look at what some of the people who "object" to my answer and/or the question said in the flags and things they have deleted or modified, you'd be surprised how much they hate the whole Q&A

I honestly have no idea what the second group of resignations, like the one up there, were about. They never clarified whether they're referring to Monica, but this post seems to be. If anything, she struck me as a defender of said rights, and she received vehement support from other mods, regardless of their opinion, so this wasn't some Mel Gibson crap.

They hate what people have said in that discussion so much that I don't know what else I can make of it if not silencing

@EddieKal I wouldn't, really. I probably hate half the questions on the main page at the moment. I don't hate their askers of course, and except unsalvageable cases, I wouldn't hate the questions if they were edited into shape.

You should see how much hate is thrown around in a Politics or Skeptics question. It's the nature of HNQ; brings irrelevant topics and makes mountains out of mole hills.

Some people hate it because they didn't like the fact that it became a HNQ

6:15 PM

You were obviously not 'silenced', nor should be. The score of the question and the answer indicate people found the question interesting, popular, or high quality, and either of which makes deletion of the post questionable.

The comments are another matter. If people disagree civilly, they should be able to disagree civilly.

@M.A.R. Well I am not sure about that. I had to hold back a lot of things that some of them need to hear

I am not a moderator and for good reason ... unlike Eddie Kal, I don't really care about what the occasional site visitor says ... I would be worried if some of ELL's established users said my question or the answer was bad or something ... so far only one did.

@AIQ There are some OPs on every SE site who typically write questions on popular, baiting topics, and get to HNQ. By the nth question, I end up upvoting very grudgingly, or not at all. The idea is they dispute the seeming value of the questions.

If they think your post is not good, they have the right to express it, as long as it's expressed relevantly and respectfully.

Yeah. agree agree. claps for M.A.R.

@AIQ One question doesn't need such heuristics, or a dozen

Call me if you get an existential crises after two hundred posts

@EddieKal Well I dunno what those things are. I just know that this thread can mostly be left to stay dormant and get the random dormant vote in the future, except that the comment section seems rather impartially moderated.

6:23 PM

My point is, if a, say, Martial Arts. SE question become HNQ, and I see users with 101 rep commenting with such conviction, but have absolutely no idea about MA, I would probably be pissed, because I don't want to hear anything from non-experts. SE is for experts to answer questions right, by that I mean those who know what they are talking about. But the prob with ELL and ELU is that just about any native speaker thinks they are an expert - well they are not. Not every native speaker is say,

some of your advanced answerers

Yes, that's definitely annoying

so I am fine with them commenting and criticizing ... but in certain cases, they seem to act in a way that their opinion is the only right one, simply because they are a native speaker - who never bothered to answer any questions on ELL

Well that's a different issue, overlapping a bit

America has lots of native speakers in prison for child abuse, gang violence, murder etc, I am not simply going to say "Yes Sir" just because you're a native speaker. Sorry that title needs to be backed up by peer review on ELL or ELU

@AIQ Just so we are clear: was the person who corrected your speech male or female?

6:29 PM

female

10

A: "noob" considered slang? offensive?

Slang is not inherently offensive. The term usually denotes non-standard linguistic innovations restricted to a particular speech community and used to mark one’s membership in that community. Typically slang is the speech of young people—words and phrases which mark the user as ‘cool’ or ‘hip’...

@M.A.R. Saw that as well as several other posts considered highly controversial at the time

A very tactfully written answer by P.E. Dant for example is a great source of learning for me but should also be what criticizers look at if they really want to be impartial

@Colleen some very insightful (but perhaps inconclusive?) reading on the effectiveness of the lockdown measures

50

Q: Has the US COVID-19 lockdown resulted in more years of life lost than COVID-19 itself?

Published in The Hill on May 25, 2020 an opinion piece by Scott W. Atlas, John R. Birge, Ralph L Keeney and Alexander Lipton claims that as of the time of writing, in the United States, COVID-19 was responsible for 800,000 lost years of life, but the lockdown had been responsible for 1.5 million ...

united-states covid-19

@EddieKal sure, what I'm saying ultimately is that you shouldn't demonize a (wrong) criticizer

Hmm, has "wrong" been used in that sense in the attributive position?

6:44 PM

Even with an answer as carefully drafted as PE Dant's, you get people yelling at them saying "You are a Democratic tool!! You are a commie!"

7:31 PM

@M.A.R. I just used "fight" for the second time today. A Seasoned Advice mod is telling the story of how she is getting evicted.

> And meanwhile, I'm thinking if this is how they treat a seriously disabled but pretty feisty vet, how are they treating the English as a second language single mother of two down the hall?

user435118

7:48 PM

@EddieKal Is there any reason why my NAA flag is still pending?

@Daniil Mods don't handle NAA, they often let the review queues take care of it.

Which means, you should keep waiting

user435118

@M.A.R. NAA is often handled by mods

Not often

user435118

Quite often, especially if it's a thanks answer (like it is in my case)

If the VLQ queue takes care of it first

Mods are exception handlers. R/A can be modstuff, but NAA really isn't

Whatever. I'm not going to argue.

G'night

user435118

7:51 PM

@M.A.R. Please do :)

user435118

I would personally handle a NAA flag on my site but that's personal choice

It's different for smaller sites Daniil. You probably don't have an established reviewer userbase, but a site ELL's size should

user435118

ELL isn't that big either

Well, I shouldn't be preaching what I'm not doing. I myself am guilty of neglecting the review queues, or the whole site, really.

user435118

ell.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats

user435118

7:53 PM

93 need review

@EddieKal Well, I've said all I was ever going to say on that topic so I won't continue. I can trust you to do as you see fit since I voted for you

Seriously, can't keep my eyes open. My sleeping habits have taken a healthy turn and I won't go back to the sleepless 4 a.m.'s

@M.A.R. You and several others here in this room have always been a trustworthy source of knowledge and experience. Sleep tight!

@Daniil I have been staying away from the close queue because of this

7

Q: Mods Binging on Reviews. Leave some for the rest of us?

On my History Review page there are approximately eight pages, each with 50 items, where the names of two moderators dominate the close review. In over 400 reviewed posts, I counted the names of only five reviewers who are not moderators. Only 20 of these 400 posts were reviewed by users...

discussion support review moderators

She had a point. Mostly because I didn't fully understand how mod-reviewing works. But she did scare me out of active reviewing

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Jun '2028

Language Overflow

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