Ben Kovitz

@JoonasIlmavirta I just typed @cnread and hoped for the best.

@cnread I just stumbled across an interesting conversation between you and @ShootForTheMoon about infinitives with a nominative subject. I may have found a solution to part of it; vide latin.stackexchange.com/questions/12795/…

latin.stackexchange.com valde distracted me from work today.

@JoonasIlmavirta Good idea! Can you suggest a better name than "conversational"? I went with it simply because I couldn't think of a better idea right then. Colloquiale seems good, though not accessible to beginners, but it should be a synonym.

@JoonasIlmavirta Oh no! I just found a terrible alternate theory for why King Sigismund thought that schisma should be feminine: sense III here.

Hey! What happened to Palizsche? She was great!

(posting this message to keep the room open)

(I'm still struggling to crank out code for my dissertation; I still want to do this.)

(posting this message to keep the room open)

(posting this message to keep the room open)

@Unbrutal_Russian So much the better! I'm not looking to "argue", only to get to the point where we each understand the other person's thinking well enough to articulate it accurately. If your thinking improves while I'm delaying to finish work, that means I'll learn something even more from you.

Sleepiness gone; still catching up on to-do list. Our spicy topic is not forgotten!

I am both sleepy and needing to get a bunch of work done right now. As soon as I get a moment, I will see if I can summarize your line of thought.

@Unbrutal_Russian …or perhaps all week. There's no rush, of course. Whenever we do it, I think it could be fun.

Aut sei in Italia aut ты в России?

Quid sī sīc?

I figure that there is no chance of reaching agreement on the topic where we seem to disagree here, and there's no need to agree about that, anyway. I propose that we each only try to understand the other's conclusion and reasoning well enough that we can each state it in our own words to the satisfaction of the other. That alone could take all day.

Latīnitās mea nōn satis est ad colloquium tam pungentem (acrem?) gerendum, ergō posthāc Anglicē scrībō.

Salvete, amici pungentes!

@HotLicks I don't understand specifically what is the proposition you disagree with regarding this answer. Will you please tell what it is? I'm also curious about your reason. I've also noticed that the brain does some mind-bogglingly sophisticated signal processing, almost certainly not addressed by any existing scientific theory, maybe involving subtleties that don't show up on spectrograms. For example, what's the difference between sounding 'acty' and spontaneous speech? Nobody knows, AFAIK. It sounds like you've noticed something like that, but so far I can't tell what you're pointing to.

… That suggests something that you may or may not want to add to the answer: If the OP is not a native speaker, the OP probably finds it much easier to hear the devoicing than native speakers do. If the OP doesn't already know it, this is a crucial thing to know when learning a foreign language: every language creates "blind spots" in your hearing (allophones). Consequently you have to "unlearn" your native ones and "learn" the foreign ones. (Might be better for an ELL answer, though.)

BTW, I'm further convinced partly by some personal observations that agree with what you've so excellently summarized from the research literature: (1) I do hear these aspects of English speech, without use of a spectrogram. (2) I've often gotten objections of the "Gibberish! Claptrap!" variety when I've tried to point them out to fellow native speakers. Most native speakers can't hear them. (3) But that changes when you stop and start an audio recording at just the right spot. Then even a native speaker who can't hear the aspiration or devoicing can easily hear the h or s. …

OK, I'm back. Now that it's sloshed around in my head a couple days, I think I couldn't ask this question on linguistics.SE fully in good faith. I could still ask it, of course, but I'm confident you've already answered it correctly. I am satisfied and enlightened. Right now I'm mostly interested in understanding @HotLicks' objection in the hope that it will trigger some unexpected new insight—the kind that one can't ask about but can only stumble upon.

@AraucariaMan Good idea! When I come back from taking my own advice in that meta post, I'll look into this. (I don't have serious doubts about your answer, which I find utterly and even definitively clear, useful, accurate, informative, thorough, and to have already gotten my +1. :) )

I await the outcome of this debate with bated, er, aspiration, so I can decide whether to +1. Seriously, @HotLicks, if you can still remember it, could you spell out your point of disagreement with this answer? I'm hoping that what you say might shed some light on something else I'm interested in where some people say that the acoustic evidencce from spectrograms settles the matter and others don't.

@BillJ Let's chat here.

@user178049 Calling "be" an auxiliary because it has the NICE properties is confusing and misleading. In ordinary English usage, we don't call the main verb of a sentence auxiliary. Correct would be to say that "A certain esoteric grammar terminology, hardly in use by anybody who knows English, would call 'be' auxiliary here." If the CGEL people wanted to define a category of verbs by the NICE properties, they should have called them NICE verbs instead of redefining "auxiliary". Hell, even computer programmers take more care when naming things.

@P.E.Dant This comment gave me much delight. :)

Neither of those interpretations fully makes sense to me, so I figure I probably missed your point.

Two interpretations came to mind: (1) You were amplifying/summarizing what I was saying about how the context makes the male sense of "drone" salient. (2) You were disagreeing, meaning that outside of a sentence or other specific context, no meanings of the word are more salient than any others, so the male sense of "man" outside a sentence isn't more salient than its unisex sense, its chesspiece sense, etc.

@Tᴚoɯɐuo BTW, can you say a little more about what you meant by this comment?

BTW, can you say a little more about what you meant by this comment?

@Tᴚoɯɐuo Lately I've been wondering about different ways that people think about the way that words have meanings and how this affects the way they explain meanings—prompted most recently by reviewing my odd conversation with ColleenV here. Are you thinking that gossip has, in effect, "two centers", hence none, or that words don't normally have a "core" or "center" (or even multiple ones)?

OK, thanks for explaining—especially while handicapped by browser/HTML/annoyances. …

Totally on a tangent here: Could you explain more of what you meant when you said that the word "gossip" doesn't have a center of gravity?

It doesn't have to be malicious, but you know the word's center of gravity is a long way from mere transmission of news. Anyway, we can respectfully disagree, and I'm three minutes late starting work… :)

I'm thinking that gossip is usually negative and behind someone's back, so engaging in it is a dirty sort of pleasure, but one that people often get immersed in. "Gossiping away" is thus a kind of shameful self-indulgence. I don't think you need to explicitly spell all that out, just explain it in such a way as to hint or imply the negative aspect of gossip. For example, TV newsreaders aren't normally accused of gossiping. (If you don't want to, I'll either take a crack at another answer or get back to working on what I should be doing right now…)

I was just about to hit +1 until I saw the explanation of gossip as "to relate tidbits of news to another person". If you cover gossip at all, can you say it in a way that explains why some people would do it the immersed, unrestrained, merry fashion suggested by the passage?

Ciao! (P.S. "Baseball" is a one-word noun cluster.)

@P.E.Dant There has to be! Hopefully someone will link to it.

@P.E.Dant The what?? (Googling…) Oh. That was on purpose, but I never got around to pointing out that that's typical, and results from the way the "noun cluster" construction works.

@P.E.Dant Your comment led me straight to the answer.

@P.E.Dant Thanks for the edits. :)

@jwg Could you tell me specifically what makes it seem sneering in tone? If the topic itself triggers something in you to go on the offensive regardless of what's said or how it's said, then I can't fix that. Some people get that way when social status is talked about plainly. But if you can point out some specific wording that creates such a tone, I might be able to find a better rewording. I was able to make use of JPhi1618's comments above.

@Lambie If you scroll through here a few pages, you'll find plenty of working-class examples. Many even include the accented é. If you remove the "-90" from the search, you'll get a lot of clips from a reality show called "90-Day Fiancé".

@jwg Could you explain what makes it seem like a rant? I intended it as an explanation of why there are multiple spellings and pronunciations, their different levels of authority and status, weird social stuff that's not documented in dictionaries and that an ESL learner might never guess without a lot of exposure, and the sorts of pressures that affect spelling and pronunciation in English. No sarcasm, please. If you point out something specific that gives the answer a rant-like tone, I might be able to fix it.

@jwg Two questions: (1) Did you read the first paragraph? (2) What gives you the impression that the answer is a rant?

@JPhi1618 Thanks. I just added a couple sentences to the first paragraph. Hopefully the answer is clear now. Of course, the opening sentence is meant to throw you for a moment. It's a sort of teaser for the long tangent that makes up the rest of the answer, playing on the ambiguity of "the same" (within speakers vs. between speakers).

@JPhi1618 Did you read the first sentence? Could it use more emphasis?

I just took a crack at it myself.