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I never metastatement I didn't like.
Sep. 17th, 2022 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauammaSo that discourse schema in informal-register English that describes something in an interrogative noun phrase then assigns a property to it in an agentless verb phrase with the noun phrase as the implied subject? Is totally topic-comment order or I don't know what that is.
pauammaImportant note: I'm planning to point Lingthusiasm here because I'd love to read their take on it. If you comment on this, please state whether you're willing for them to use it in a future podcast episode. (Obviously, I am, both for this and for anything I reply to others' comments with.
This MJD blog post about their own use of "shall" and "will" got me wondering about historical use of them in context. I find that historical graph of English use patterns interesting.
There are 2 clearly separated groups, a high-use group of two ("we shall see" and "you will see") and a low-use group of a dozen or so ("I will see", "You will see" with an uppercase y, "We will see" with an uppercase w, "We shall see" with an uppercase w, "I shall see", "you shall see", "he will see", "ye shall see", "they will see", "You shall see" with an uppercase y, "He will see" with an uppercase y, "they shall see", "They will see" with an uppercase t, "he shall see" (both lowercase and uppercase h), "who shall see", and "who will see"). These two groups and the large separation between them appear to be largely American English, as they're much less visible in British English. As uppercase and lowercase pairs ("You/you" and "We/we") end up split between groups, sentence-initial usage patterns may be different from patterns in other sentence positions.
Frequencies in the high-use group wobble substantially and there's a large intra-group gap between the mid 1950s and the mid 1990s. Frequencies in the low-use group are much steadier and the (much shorter) intra-group gap there is "you shall see" between the mid 1800s and the mid 1810s with a peak in 1809 that's below the high-use group but much closer to it than to the rest of the low-use group. That brief excursion from the low-use group is absent from Google's American English corpus and wholly due to its British corpus, which also shows two excursions up by "you will see", one between 1910 and 1923 peaking halfway between groups in 1918 and the other between 1938 and 1950 peaking in 1944; both might be due to an influx of American English speakers in Great Britain then, although I don't see those peaks having an steadier American English equivalent.
And then there's "we will see", which after being in the low-use group until about 1970, detaches from it then, with its frequency going up sharply, and essentially enters the high-use group between 1980 and 1985 depending on where you place the boundaries of that group. British English also shows you will see splitting off in the early 1920s and ending up alone about half-way between the two groups.
I'm also curious about similar patterns in other regional English corpora. Anyone knowing of any is welcome to explore it and report or discuss their findings in comments. (If you do, please link to them. I don't know nearly enough about English corpora available online.
This MJD blog post about their own use of "shall" and "will" got me wondering about historical use of them in context. I find that historical graph of English use patterns interesting.
There are 2 clearly separated groups, a high-use group of two ("we shall see" and "you will see") and a low-use group of a dozen or so ("I will see", "You will see" with an uppercase y, "We will see" with an uppercase w, "We shall see" with an uppercase w, "I shall see", "you shall see", "he will see", "ye shall see", "they will see", "You shall see" with an uppercase y, "He will see" with an uppercase y, "they shall see", "They will see" with an uppercase t, "he shall see" (both lowercase and uppercase h), "who shall see", and "who will see"). These two groups and the large separation between them appear to be largely American English, as they're much less visible in British English. As uppercase and lowercase pairs ("You/you" and "We/we") end up split between groups, sentence-initial usage patterns may be different from patterns in other sentence positions.
Frequencies in the high-use group wobble substantially and there's a large intra-group gap between the mid 1950s and the mid 1990s. Frequencies in the low-use group are much steadier and the (much shorter) intra-group gap there is "you shall see" between the mid 1800s and the mid 1810s with a peak in 1809 that's below the high-use group but much closer to it than to the rest of the low-use group. That brief excursion from the low-use group is absent from Google's American English corpus and wholly due to its British corpus, which also shows two excursions up by "you will see", one between 1910 and 1923 peaking halfway between groups in 1918 and the other between 1938 and 1950 peaking in 1944; both might be due to an influx of American English speakers in Great Britain then, although I don't see those peaks having an steadier American English equivalent.
And then there's "we will see", which after being in the low-use group until about 1970, detaches from it then, with its frequency going up sharply, and essentially enters the high-use group between 1980 and 1985 depending on where you place the boundaries of that group. British English also shows you will see splitting off in the early 1920s and ending up alone about half-way between the two groups.
I'm also curious about similar patterns in other regional English corpora. Anyone knowing of any is welcome to explore it and report or discuss their findings in comments. (If you do, please link to them. I don't know nearly enough about English corpora available online.
pauammaIn Google Ngrams aggregate English use of "lavender marriage(s)", the small bump between 1880 and 1890 in an otherwise all-zero graph until use takes off in 1988, which isn't present in American English but wholly due to British English and is attested in the British press in 1895 (although that year may be a typo for 1995 so what meaning it had in the 1880s is unclear to me).
Note the complete lack of "lavender marriages" as a plural in British English, which hints that it mostly refers to the custom, not to specific marriages. I don't know what the lack of a bump in 1880s English fiction indicates. (There's no region-specific English fiction corpus in Google Ngrams, unfortunately, and I'm not sure whether the lack of the plural form there means it's because of the genre, because of the region, or both.) Then there's that perplexing sharp trough hitting the bottom in 2001 for English fiction. (Is it corpus sampling bias?)
Note the complete lack of "lavender marriages" as a plural in British English, which hints that it mostly refers to the custom, not to specific marriages. I don't know what the lack of a bump in 1880s English fiction indicates. (There's no region-specific English fiction corpus in Google Ngrams, unfortunately, and I'm not sure whether the lack of the plural form there means it's because of the genre, because of the region, or both.) Then there's that perplexing sharp trough hitting the bottom in 2001 for English fiction. (Is it corpus sampling bias?)
pauammaI was wondering about the differences, if any, about the concepts of topic and comment (which IIRC are what Japanese and ASL, among others, use in that order) and those of news and point of departure (which the Tagalog learning website I'm using says Tagalog uses in that order, although it also mentions they're sometimes called comment and topic), and while DDGing for clues I came across theme and rheme, and now I'm very confused because I have 3 sets of concepts to puzzle out instead of 2 and I'm not any closer to an answer to my initial question. Help?
ETA1: https://learningtagalog.com/articles/tagalog_focus.html says news and point of departure match comment and topic as linguists use them, but not as the general public would (which I can accept, for all that it confused me). Still trying to understand how topic and comment differ from theme and rheme.
ETA1: https://learningtagalog.com/articles/tagalog_focus.html says news and point of departure match comment and topic as linguists use them, but not as the general public would (which I can accept, for all that it confused me). Still trying to understand how topic and comment differ from theme and rheme.
pauammaIs it still an acceptable/accepted minced expletive, or is it (because of the implied reference to the activity) now considered too racist to use?
pauammaIt occurred to me during tonight's Tagalog vocabulary drill that umaga (morning) and maaga (early) may both come from the same root aga, one using the aspect prefix/infix "um", the other using the adjective/stative verb prefix "ma". The online Tagalog dictionary I use confirms that aga is a word meaning earliness.
Teochew dialect tone audio reference?
Feb. 25th, 2020 11:46 pmhypostatizeTeochew is a Southern Min dialect of Chinese spoken in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong. It is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or Cantonese.
I'm currently trying to teach myself, but since it's a tonal dialect with eight distinct tones, IPA and Peng'im romanization does not prove helpful in pronouncing tones. It also has tone sandhi rules that I would be interested in hearing in practice as opposed to reading from a text.
( Tone table )
Does anyone know of a simple audio reference for pronouncing this dialect? There are a few videos containing basic conversational dialogues, but it has proved difficult to find more formal references beyond Youtube and Wiktionary so far. Teochew is primarily a spoken rather than a written dialect, so I would prefer learning to speak and understand before reading and writing (I predict I will have trouble learning to write as well, since the writing system uses Chinese characters but is not standardized, and there are several words in Teochew that do not have equivalents in other written dialects, but I will get there when I get there...)
Additionally, does anyone have experience learning less-spoken dialects of Chinese as a second language? There are many resources on learning Mandarin (official language of China) and Cantonese (large overseas population) these days, but what about the other hundreds of dialects?
I'm currently trying to teach myself, but since it's a tonal dialect with eight distinct tones, IPA and Peng'im romanization does not prove helpful in pronouncing tones. It also has tone sandhi rules that I would be interested in hearing in practice as opposed to reading from a text.
( Tone table )
Does anyone know of a simple audio reference for pronouncing this dialect? There are a few videos containing basic conversational dialogues, but it has proved difficult to find more formal references beyond Youtube and Wiktionary so far. Teochew is primarily a spoken rather than a written dialect, so I would prefer learning to speak and understand before reading and writing (I predict I will have trouble learning to write as well, since the writing system uses Chinese characters but is not standardized, and there are several words in Teochew that do not have equivalents in other written dialects, but I will get there when I get there...)
Additionally, does anyone have experience learning less-spoken dialects of Chinese as a second language? There are many resources on learning Mandarin (official language of China) and Cantonese (large overseas population) these days, but what about the other hundreds of dialects?
pauamma... and currently considering https://learningtagalog.com/ and https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/tagalog/. Do you all have an
opinion/have you heard anything (good or bad) about either?
opinion/have you heard anything (good or bad) about either?
Greenlandic, Inuktitut
Jul. 13th, 2017 05:47 pmlusentojHey, I've just started trying to learn Greenlandic and would really like a friend who could help me out (fluent speaker or fellow learner). Considering they're all just dialects of each other, if you know Inuktitut or something and I could learn that for a while then switch to Greenlandic afterwards, I'd still be really thankful.
So far I've been taking suffix meanings from Inupiaq, grammar lessons from Inuktitut and then practice material / dictionaries from Greenlandic and trying to piece everything together while only really having newspaper articles for practice. It's going really, really slowly! Even if you can't help, if you have friends you can ask or something I'd be really grateful! I'm very open to using other sites, Email or even snail-mail (in case you can only find someone's grandma) for communication too.
So far I've been taking suffix meanings from Inupiaq, grammar lessons from Inuktitut and then practice material / dictionaries from Greenlandic and trying to piece everything together while only really having newspaper articles for practice. It's going really, really slowly! Even if you can't help, if you have friends you can ask or something I'd be really grateful! I'm very open to using other sites, Email or even snail-mail (in case you can only find someone's grandma) for communication too.
Independent Study? Not my forte!
May. 5th, 2009 12:21 pmgeekmama Right now any type of formal education is not an option for me but as I said in my introductory comment I'm in the process of studying French. I've run into some roadblocks that have to do with the way I learn and I figured I'd ask everyone for some suggestions to overcome these roadblocks.
My problem is that I'm not able to grade myself. Right now I'm using some old high school text books from a French teacher who knows my partner, a workbook we picked up at the bookstore in the mall and a couple of reference materials - my partner's French-English dictionary and a big book of French verbs. I'm in the process of going through the textbooks and workbook from front to back but I'm not really able to check for myself to see if I'm doing the exercises correctly and if my answers are coming out right. My partner tries to help but he's not a very good teacher or at least he's not able to explain things in a way that I can understand.
The solution I thought of myself was to buy a teacher's version of the text books where it'd have all the answers listed so I could grade my papers myself. It'd be easier for me to pinpoint areas where I'm having troubles comprehending and allow me to focus more on those but I don't know where I'd be able to get a teacher's manual or version of the textbook (it's pretty old).
Do any of you have suggestions on where to find a book like this or other ways to help me with my independent study?
My problem is that I'm not able to grade myself. Right now I'm using some old high school text books from a French teacher who knows my partner, a workbook we picked up at the bookstore in the mall and a couple of reference materials - my partner's French-English dictionary and a big book of French verbs. I'm in the process of going through the textbooks and workbook from front to back but I'm not really able to check for myself to see if I'm doing the exercises correctly and if my answers are coming out right. My partner tries to help but he's not a very good teacher or at least he's not able to explain things in a way that I can understand.
The solution I thought of myself was to buy a teacher's version of the text books where it'd have all the answers listed so I could grade my papers myself. It'd be easier for me to pinpoint areas where I'm having troubles comprehending and allow me to focus more on those but I don't know where I'd be able to get a teacher's manual or version of the textbook (it's pretty old).
Do any of you have suggestions on where to find a book like this or other ways to help me with my independent study?
