rossitter · HackerTrans

In this case I just did a full-text search of HathiTrust's catalog for "and per se and" (quotes of course are part of the query in this case). These are two results of many.

rossitter

3년 전discuss

From The Frumentary by William King (1699)[0]:

  U’s conversation ’s equal to his wine,  
  You sup with W, whene’er you dine:  
  X, Y, and Z, hating to be confin’d,  
  Ramble to the next Eating-house they find;...   
  And Per Se And alone, as Poets use...

See also an elaborate classroom game described in the Documents of the Board of Education of the City of New York (1861)[1]: "One [student] represents &—called ‘And per se and’—as being appended to the alphabet, but not belonging to it....The merriment of this pastime turns upon the endeavor of An’ per s’and to take precedence of Z, and so get fairly into the alphabet..."

[0] A 1781 printing: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068156031&vi...

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876&vi...

rossitter

3년 전discuss

The contractors in that joke are for the CEO's kitchen reno:

> ...complicated global factors like [one], [two], and my desire for a marble kitchen island with a waterfall edge. As we all know, our competitors are relentless. Even as we speak, they’re [one], [two], and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months.

rossitter

4년 전discuss

Home button on a keyboard, tap the top of the screen on iOS, and I believe Android implements something similar.

I agree with the other commenter here. If a text-only article follows the tenets of some version of 'minimalist' design, I should be able to read it comfortably on my phone. Straight to reader mode for me.

I tried it on my desktop, where it was better. But I still wouldn't call it 'minimalist.' Again, it's just an article, but the background image draws my eyes away from the text. The top and sidebars do too, but to a lesser extent.

That's fine, but it's not minimalism. If I hear that an article on the web has been presented in a minimalist style I'm going to click on it assuming that once I start in on the article that's all I'm going to notice.

rossitter

4년 전discuss

Words are only ever added to the OED after a period of use.

Before performant made it into the OED as an adjective, the nominal form was listed as a "nonce-word" only and didn't merit its own entry; it was kept under performance. It was never widespread in any dialect, unlike modern performant.

-Ant/-ent is not reserved for nouns anyway. There are informants, inhabitants, defendants, and many others, of course, but they can be ignorant, hesitant, pleasant, constant, tolerant, conversant, triumphant, significant, vigilant, dominant, compliant, adamant, reluctant, elegant...

Some of the second group fall into both categories, adjective and noun. Frequently the one form came later than the other. Add performant to that long list.

rossitter

4년 전discuss

This wouldn't really be pro/rel, not as it's implemented in European football anyway. It's a single league where entry into the lucrative year-end tournament is partly based on long-term (3- or 5-year) performance, whereas now it is only short-term (1-year).

rossitter

4년 전discuss

This image from Streetview, taken about halfway across the bridge, shows the scale well, I think: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.439515,-79.9004771,3a,75y,99...

rossitter

5년 전discuss

> Is it supposed to sound like the end of "turquoise?"

Yes, though some speakers use an S rather than a Z sound (think "choice").

I have only heard these pronunciations from British speakers.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

I can say I have heard this from native speakers, but I can't pull up any YouTube links right now. I suspect I've heard it from people who don't always go by the spelling pronunciation, in the same way many people who insert a T sound into often don't always do so. (I include myself in the "variable often" group.)

For what it's worth the Oxford English Dictionary lists /ˈtɔːtɔɪs/ ("TAW-toice") and /'tɔːtɔɪz/ ("TAW-toiz") as alternate pronunciations in British English. This appears to be the result of a revision made to the entry sometime after 1989. (The public-facing revision history is not very precise.)

rossitter

5년 전discuss

> An-th-ony (with TH from "the")

Out of curiosity, is it definitely the voiced TH from "the," rather than the unvoiced TH from "thing?"

In the US the spelling pronunciation of Anthony is by far the more common (at least in my experience), but I've never heard it with a voiced TH.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

> "Please list the most important things that give meaning to your life"

The actual English-language version[0]:

> ...What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?

So respondents in English were not prompted to list more than one item. What is not marked for plurality.

Unfortunately I've only been able to turn out the English-language prompts for this study.

As far as Korean goes, it might not require speakers to mark (certain) nouns for plurality, but there are of course common ways to do so when desired. There is a particle (들), and there are various modifiers that could be translated to e.g. some, several, many, a few, one or more... The difference is that if you use these modifiers, you don't (as in English et al.) have to make the noun "agree" in number. Roughly speaking, one or more thing would be fine.

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-lif... (under "How we did this")

rossitter

5년 전discuss

"Cushion" is a particularly bizarre example, because even if speakers were to stress the second syllable when using it as a verb, it still wouldn't demonstrate initial-stress derivation. The noun "cushion" is not derived from the verb "cushion." It's the other way round. (Source: the Oxford English Dictionary, unfortunately behind a paywall.)

rossitter

5년 전discuss

The point is that context usually suffices to tell which word is which, same as with wait/weight, time/thyme, and so on. Speakers with the pin-pen merger do pronounce these words the same, and I've known someone who was surprised to learn that I didn't—more than a year into our friendship. Yet he'd heard me talk about our friend Jen and gin, possibly even in the same sentence. He just hadn't noticed that I said them differently.

That's just the way with mergers, though: we don't attend to differences that are unimportant in our personal grammars except through conscious striving. I'm the same way with marry/merry/Mary: I know there are people who say these differently, but even if I'm talking to someone who does, those words are all the same to me. The other speaker may be giving me one of three distinct tokens by their interpretation, but whichever one it is I interpret it as one of a set of identical triplets and rely on context to tell which meaning was meant.

Or to give another example: many speakers where I grew up (Pittsburgh) reduce the diphthongs in "tire" and "tower" so that both of these words sound like "tar." In other words, three words share the same token. But I've never misinterpreted a strong-accented Yinzer's "tar" as "tire," "tower" as "tar," etc. That doesn't mean a Texan would be wrong to say that some of us pronounce these words all the same: we do.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

> While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of people use vowel sounds that land in between them

Definitely, but this is equally true of mat, met, and mate.

As for marry/merry/Mary, there are speakers with a partial merger. Usually they maintain a distinction between "marry" and the other two. That does not discount the fact that there are English speakers who feel (rightly) that the strength of the difference between these three in their own dialect is equal to the strength of the difference between mat, met, and mate in most dialects.

When it comes to mergers more broadly, many speakers who grow up with distinctions that some of their neighbors don't make will wind up falling into the nebulous middle ground you're describing. There's a cognitive burden placed on someone who consistently distinguishes sounds that others in their community do not, because the speaker who makes the distinction will regularly misinterpret what they hear out of the mouths of others. ("Wait, did they just say 'Mary'? Oh, no, it must have been 'marry.'") This is true even when there can be no confusion over homophones: "What does 'fahl' mean? Oh, they must have meant 'fall.'" This is one mechanism that makes it quite easy for a vowel merger to spread. Speakers are conditioned not to pay too much attention to phonological differences that are not a part of the grammar of others in their social circle.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

No, this merger only affects the vowel in "pen," not "pine." So it would be "pineapple apple pin."

rossitter

5년 전discuss

For speakers without the merger, marry:merry:Mary as mat:met:mate.

If you didn't grow up with the distinction (as I didn't), you may find it easy to enough to notice the difference—particularly between marry (~mat) and the other two—when listening to someone without the merger say each word one immediately after the other. "Implementing" this knowledge when listening to the same person speak naturally is another thing altogether.

It's very hard to acquire new phonological rules as an adult, no less in your first language than a second one.

An audio example: https://forvo.com/word/merry_mary%2C_marry_me/#en

rossitter

5년 전discuss

Comparable to one use case of the passive voice, maybe.

What do you mean by "intended agent"? "Agent" has a common definition in linguistics, and an agent is only an agent in the context of a verb, not an overarching narrative. The same referent can be an agent in one sentence but not the next: "We hid. To our surprise we were found by group A." "Group A" is the only agent in the second sentence.

There may be other definitions of "agent" in other contexts, but we're talking about grammatical voice here.

The passive voice is quite simple: the grammatical subject is filled by the patient or theme of a clause, not e.g. the agent. There are many use cases for the passive voice apart from obfuscation, and obfuscation is hardly a necessary result.

I might call "surprisingly" in your interpretation a weasel word in the broad sense. The inference is that the author wants the reader to take up an attitude but is not being forthright about it.

Of course some passive clauses may be weaselly in their own right, but the passive voice is not weaselly by definition.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

I'm not sure I agree that a distinction needs to be made between the two, certainly not on lines of agency. The "our" in "to our surprise" may or may not correspond to an agent, patient, etc., in the modified clause.

To an agent: "To our surprise, we found them. To our surprise, group A was found by us first."

To a patient: "To our surprise, they found us. To our surprise, we were found by group A."

To neither: "To our surprise, group A found group B. To our surprise, group B was found by group A."

I suppose "to our surprise" is explicit about whose expectations weren't met in a way that "surprisingly" is not. But in a first-person narrative, I imagine most readers would understand "surprisingly" to mean "to my/our surprise."

rossitter

5년 전discuss

"To our surprise" is an adverbial. It has no voice. It can modify passive or active constructions, but it does not prefer one over the other.

Active: To our surprise, they had left the door open.

Passive: To our surprise, the door had been left open.

rossitter

5년 전discuss

The word "tweet" wasn't added to the OED, just a new meaning of it.

Two entries for "tweet" (one for the verb, one for the noun and interjection) have been in the OED since 1916, with citations going back to the 16th century.

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