@Sudhir I'm talking about the way you used it. You wouldn't describe a tool as being imperative, unless it was a robot directing you to do things. You could say that it is imperative that you use such a tool, but the quality or state of being imperative has nothing to do with the tool itself. You could say that you have needs that are imperative, or that a course of action is imperative, but a shovel or a bathtub or a dictionary are unlikely to be called imperative.

That's the problem with speaking from a dictionary understanding of a language. It's like a person trying to sing who has no concept of pitch.

> When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn’t say it. —Mark Twain

This is a criticism, but not an attack. I would have absolutely no ear for your language, @Sudhir. And if I tried to speak it by looking up things I wanted to say in a dictionary, I would likely be met with blank stares, laughter, or derision.

Twain putting on the mantle of an Oxford don. He was laughing on the inside, to be sure.

Is that called a mantle?

Not a gown?

Figuratively.

Ah.

mantle 1. (Clothing & Fashion) Archaic a loose wrap or cloak 2. such a garment regarded as a symbol of someone's power or authority he assumed his father's mantle

He looks eccentric.

In a fun way.

He was. In both senses.

@Robusto No need to quote dictionaries, I got it.

You didn't get it soon enough.

@Cerberus Read the piece that quote comes from. It is quite hilarious, and serves as a good demonstration of Twain's wit.

@Robusto I did.

You said "figuratively". I said "ah".

No. I said figuratively.

I was given this engraving yesterday.

You can see the supermarket I always go to in the background.

@Cerberus What is the subscript T at the beginning? I'm assuming the rest of it means "House of the Honorable (cf. Herr in German) Mayor Trip in St. Anthony's Way."

't = het = it/the.

NB: If I were St. Anthony, I would shove him rudely out of the way.

@Cerberus Ah, makes sense.

The first part is correct.

Did I get the rest of it right?

The second part is "and St Anthony's Weighing-house".

Ah.

The Trippenhuis (as it is called now) in on the right, built in the 17th century.

My firstest Dutch lesson.

The Waag was the old city gate, formerly called St Anthonis Poort.

Any poort in a sturm.

It is now part museum, part restaurant, part 3D-printing-house.

They wanted to demolish one tower/turret/whatever of the gate in the sixties and attach a large glass wing.

Sturm?

As in German?

Dutch = storm.

@Robusto <quote dictionary entry>

@Cerberus How English of you people.

How Dutch of you people!

You steals our wordses!

Like ring = ring.

We gots them in our pocketses.

I will bites off your hobbit finger!

falls into Mount Doom

The End.

TPTB destroyed

Sauronara!

Jeff dropping from the sky, wings crumbled

@Novice No. People do not “belong” to countries in English. I may be American, but that does not mean that I “belong” to America. America does not own me, nor am I a member of some club that one might belong to.

Shog trying to hold on to iron crown

@tchrist We do too own you.

@tchrist It can be an acceptable metaphor.

But can it be an acceptable meteor?

@Robusto George Martin should read that. But it would probably make him feel bad.

If it crashes on, say, Iran's nuclear facility, and it is sufficiently large, then, yes.

@Robusto No ownership duties herein apply.

Speaking of which, 2012 DA14 was a ruse designed to draw attention from the actual meteor attack, which was successful. It is a common military strategy.

@Cerberus It is something highly characteristic that non-native speakers from India and Pakistan say all the time, one of the “tells” that you are engaging one of them in conversation. There are many of these, but please don’t ask me to enumerate them. We can watch The Simpsons if we need to mine stereotypes from Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

@Robusto Drove me nucking futs.

It was like tripping on the stairs every time. Pulled me right out of the story.

@Robusto Was it North Korea or Iran this time? I forget which axis I should be not-paying attention to.

America. We're responsible for the meteor that hit Russia.

> In the political realm, Russian Liberal Democrat leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who is known for his controversial statements, blamed the blast not on a meteor, but on the United States testing a new weapon.

worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/15/…

@Robusto Somewhere I have a posting where I exhaustively enumerate all these fuckups. In one place, he even said "to whence we go", or close to it. Clearly he has no editor with even a scintilla of testicular fortitude.

Just like us to leave our flag planted in it before we hurled it at them.

@tchrist An editor? What is that? Must be an archaic term from the time of books.

@Robusto Last used in the 17th century...

Is it ignorance, or affected archaism?

It's both. Ignorant, affected archaism.

@tchrist Oh, I see. I am not very familiar with the dialects of the Subcontinent.

Ayup.

@Robusto If intellectuals such as the tycoon Zhirinovsky say so, then it must be true.

Hello, How are you all?

There’s a reason that tycoon rhymes with typhoon.

Yes. They're both from Japanese: tai kun and tai fun. (The tai part means big.)

Is this 24 hour channel? Can i ask question for support anytime here?

@Robusto Well, if he were truly affecting the archaic noun on purpose, then it is a mere archaism...but he probably thought it was not so archaic as a noun, right? That is, it sounds a bit archaic but acceptable in an imitation of high-fantasy dialogue, but excessively so as a noun.

@guru Hi!

Ask away, but there is no guarantee that you will receive an answer!

@Robusto Really! I had no idea tycoon was Japanese.

Which one is recommended? Asking question here? or Asking question in english.stackexchange forum?

@tchrist So what do native speakers of Dutch say a lot?

@guru It depends on the question. Questions on the main site are required to be somewhat polished and well-researched, and on topic: see the FAQ. In chat, anything goes!

大君 is tycoon (great prince), 颱風 is typhoon. I was wrong about the "big" part in tai fun.

Actually, I knew that.

Or should have known.

Any idea why we use a y in Japanese words?

颱 means typhoon all by itself; when coupled with 風 it is kind of a pleonasm.

I know q in Chinese stands for something like ch.

@Cerberus The words entered our language before we had standardized on ai to represent the long i vowel sound in Japanese.

So it is pronounced how in Japanese? /ai/?

But there are so many readings for tai and dai that it isn't even funny.

@Cerberus Kinda. It's actually two syllables: ah and ee. Tai is Ta + i.

Western ears would not hear the distinction, in most cases.

Hmm if it is pronounced /ai/ in Japanese, then why does Dutch have tyfoon, pronounced /i/?

@Robusto Oh OK.

Because Dutch is messed up. You people hear the last syllable only, apparently.

It would suggest that Dutch took the word from English.

Odd, considering that the Dutch got to Japan before the English did.

Because y is an exotic letter in modern Dutch.

Yeah.

"Most of my question is word-meaning related." , is that a correct grammatical sentence?

So perhaps these words were only recently imported into Dutch, and from English.

@guru No. Most of my questions are.

When an adjective is used substantively, i.e. not preceding a noun, it is usually plural.

> Some like beer, some don't.

> The rich like yachts.

@Robusto That is the correct answer.

The name Japan itself is a Portuguese transliteration of a Dutch mishearing of a Malay approximation of a Chinese word for the land known as Nippon.

"How easy/hard is it to learn this subject?" is it grammatically correct sentence?

@Robusto Haha, really? I knew Japan ~ Nippon, but not that the journey was so convoluted.

@guru Yes.

Nippon always reminds me of Grand Tetons National Park.

Also, there are four syllables in Nippon: にっぽん　（日本）。

Syllable or mora?

Four?

What do they sound like?

I thought that Nippon had four moras, not four syllables.

"There is not a scintilla of error in this paper." , is this correct sentence?

We called them syllables. The gojuuon is called a syllabary.

I believe that both Nihon and Nippon have two syllables by the western definition of that word, even though the first has three moras and the second has four moras.

*morae

If you prefer.

Makes me think of eels, though.

五十音　(gojuuon) = "fifty sounds"

@guru I don't know...it may be acceptable, but somehow I'm not too happy with "a scintilla of error". Perhaps it is the metaphor.

@Cerberus ni + ' + po + n

@Cerberus, scintilla of error = single error

I think I want a scintilla of x to be of something active.

A scintilla of doubt, of hope, of truth...

@tchrist Whatever you wish to call them. Three beats and four beats, respectively. Everyone involved in teaching me Japanese has always called them syllables.

But a scintilla or error? I don't know.

@Cerberus You will note that Rob’s use of “syllable” does not match ours.

In Japanese they are simply sounds: 音

@Cerberus, is English your native language?

What is the apostrophe?

@Robusto How does the apostrophe work?

We've been over this before.

@tchrist I don't know what he means exactly, so I couldn't say.

@guru No.

But I would advise against a scintilla of error as a casual metaphor, unless you really want this specific metaphor to stand out.

@Cerberus Well, I can tell he doesn’t mean what we do. You cannot have a bare n as its own syllable following a CV syllable. It makes a CVC syllable.

@tchrist I don't know, I don't have a problem with long, stressed nnn as a syllable.

@Cerberus You do following an open syllable, I bet.

A dropped but held syllable?

@tchrist It's just that it does not occur in your languages.

@Cerberus Yes. I know it sounds odd, but there it is.

Is it possible to post an image here?

It is a lacuna. Conspicuous in its absence.

But I can imaging stretching the n such that it may be considered its own syllable.

@guru Yes, just post the link here, or click the "upload" button on the lower right.

So a long vowel has two of these non-syllabic morae.

You are counting lengths, not syllables.

Should it be an image or a image?

Mora is about poetic quantity to me?

@guru An.

Should it be an image or a image?

I remember my first Japanese teacher literally drumming this concept into my head. She would rap her knuckles on the table four times, enunciating the sound (or lack of same) for each syllable: ni ... ' ... po ... n

An image.

Thesaurus.com , is it good to know the usage of english word?

@Robusto And was she slient during the ', or did she continue the iii sound?

Finnish uses ä for a long/double a (writable as aa) and ö for a long/double o (writable as oo).

@Cerberus She choked off the ii sound and there was silence but for her knuckle on wood.

@guru That site is OK, depending on what you want to use it for.

But that doesn’t make them separate syllables, just a longer one. Apparently, the way the Japanese count things in their poetry, it would be two “J-syllables”.

Glottal stop?

@Cerberus, word meaning and it's usage.

@Robusto Hmm OK. It could be that she was merely trying to emphasise the "choke", or that an actual, lengthy silent pause was required?

Apparently we need to add 𝄽 and 𝄾 and 𝄿 and such to our phonemic transcriptions. How . . . cute.

@guru Ehh I don't know how to answer that. You know what the site does; what else is there to say? You can only learn the fluent use of a word by lots of reading and listening, but a thesaurus can be a good start.

@Cerberus, i need to know the usage of a particular word.

See above.

That is very broad question.

@Cerberus, What would you read to know the usage of an English word?

Should it be an English word or a English word?

𝄼 𝄻 𝄺 𝄩 . . .

@Cerberus A silence held for a beat. Have I not made this clear yet?

@guru An.

@Cerberus, What would you read to know the usage of an English word?

@guru I would read whatever I could put my hands on. Newspapers, anything. Make sure it is written by a respectable author. After lots of reading, the use of words will come naturally.

@Robusto Be ats o nly ma ksen si na sy lla ble - tim ed lan guage.

There is a haiku by the great master Matsup Basho

@Cerberus, You can read many newspaper, but the word you are searching may not be in your reading.

@tchrist Of which Japanese is an isochronous example.

It is difficult for those of us using stress-timed languages to understand this.

@guru If you need a particular word at a specific time, you can only use a thesaurus or dictionary, and it won't be perfect. But that is the best you can do in a short time. You might also research the word in Google Books to get a feel for how the word is used through context.

I would generally advise that you only use fancy words either if you have a "feel" for them, or if there is no simpler alternative available to you.

@Robusto Sure, but my questions was, did she mean to show what the actual silence sounded like in real speech, or was it a didactic pause to teach you something?

@Cerberus, what do you mean by fancy word?

A fancy word is a complicated or sophisticated word.

@Cerberus For the last time, it is a gap, a silence, a lacuna, a not-sound filling the beat where we would be accustomed to hear a sound.

Fine.

forvo.com/word/nippon/#ja

I don't know. To the untrained ear, it sounds like two syllables, albeit accented in an unusual way.

To understand Japan, I recommend you read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

amazon.com/Chrysanthemum-Sword-Ruth-Benedict/dp/0618619593/…

Isn't there a book about how Dutch and American cultures differ that I should read first?

@Cerberus I don't hear how you get two syllables out of that. But surely you hear the gap, especially in the first three examples.

Yes.

Which dictionary do you advocate to learn American English?

So those recordings sound like four to you?

Absolutely.

Okay.

@guru You can use any dictionary.

Are you people paid to support us to learn English here?

And you probably mean "recommend", not "advocate". See? That was a fancy word.

The last speaker's attempt does sound slurred though, and that is not uncommon. But if you misheard and asked him to repeat, he would go slower and pronounce it more like the first three.

@guru Nope. We are just random people on the Internet, just like you.

I am not random. I am self-determined.

@Cerberus, Is advocate a fancy word?

Be careful with fancy words. Avoid them unless you know what you're doing, or unless you have no alternative.

@guru Yes.

@Robusto I'm looking at you, so you are uncertain.

Wait, it was the other way around.

I must go now. Laters.

Bai.

@Cerberus, Bye.

You mean Robusto.

Why did i get this type of message here? "@Robusto, Bye. - timeout - retry / cancel"

retry/cancle , why?

Probably an error in the chat software.

One more thing, @Cerb: Listen to these pronunciations of Osaka and try to hear that the O at the beginning is actually two syllables. This is a four-syllable word. Listen to the length of time for the last two syllables (saka) and compare.

ANyway, bye.

@Robusto I clearly hear that the o is long, possibly as long as the last two syllables.

Just like the i in Nippon.

But two syllables? I reserve that for a different phenomenon. I would rather call it a long syllable. I vote for @tchrist's two morae.

Perhaps the word "syllable" has a different tradition in Japanology.

Bye.

@Cerberus Bastardus stultus sum, qui peccatibus numquam discet. Sed non mihi praeterea terror orientis dixit.

@WMD Nescio quid credam aut dicam de primo. Secundum autem melius est.

@Robusto you are a master of diplomacy and tact.

Or is it nipponology? Nippology?

@Cerberus Secundum mirabilis est.

Secundum cucumis est.

@KitFox Yay, it worked!

@Cerberus This isn't something you can vote on.

大坂（おおさか）is clearly four syllables. You can tell this because it uses four characters from the syllabary to write it down: お+お+さ+か

There but for the modified sounds, are the syllables spoken in Japanese.

The second, third and sixth lines can take nigori (two strokes) at the top right to turn them into voiced consonant sounds, and the sixth line may also take a little circle (handaku) which turns them into unvoiced plosives. But they all take the same duration, even when they're omitted.

Certain syllables may also acquire a y-glide, but we needn't go into that, as it doesn't affect the meter.

The first line represents the only true, unalloyed vowel sounds.

The rest begin with what we would call consonants.