Language Here, Language There

Discuss any questions in English. Practise your writing skills.

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VictorB
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#126

Сообщение VictorB »

Yety пишет: 12 мар 2022, 21:27wondering why
A total pinhead, I'm still wondering why...
Is it just an "American vs British English" thing?
If that's what it actually is, I'll quit wondering and just take note of it:)
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#127

Сообщение Yety »

VictorB пишет: 12 мар 2022, 22:08 an "American vs British English" thing?
Don't see how it provides the evidence supporting this hypothesis, or even correlates with the raw data from googlebooks...
VictorB пишет: 12 мар 2022, 22:08 still wondering
I think it's a matter of the focus - those who choose the singular form of the verb obviously tend to stress the 'research', so 'decades of reasearch shows' is perceived by them as a whole, something like "decades-long research".

The answer from a David Richerby at the llink above seems to summarise this interpretation well:
It depends on whether you're talking about the research or the decades. If you mean "Research which took decades", use the singular verb (research is a mass noun so it doesn't take plural verbs); if you mean "Decades, which were spent doing research", use the plural.

For example, "The decades of research were the happiest time of my life" but "Decades of research was needed to solve the problem." (Similarly, "tons of concrete was needed to fill the hole.")
This approach works for those who don't find the formal disagreement in number ungrammatical, of course.
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#128

Сообщение VictorB »

Yety пишет: 13 мар 2022, 01:35 I think it's a matter of the focus - those who choose the singular form of the verb obviously tend to stress the 'research', so 'decades of reasearch shows' is perceived by them as a whole, something like "decades-long research".
Just thinking out loud: Might the adjective multidecadal broaden, kind of, the focus to stress both the research and its duration (even if there's no valid ngram for that collocation)? :)
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#129

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

VictorB пишет: 12 мар 2022, 20:42 Decades of research shows
Strictly speaking, the verb should be plural here, I believe. However, decades of is probably interpreted similarly to loads of/lots of in this case:

Loads of food has been delivered for the party.
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#130

Сообщение VictorB »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 13 мар 2022, 22:32 decades is probably interpreted similarly to loads of/lots of in this case:
Easy-Breezy English, those are the words that indicate portion, aren't they?
But does the plural noun"decades" indicates that, too?
СпойлерПоказать
Rule 8a. With words that indicate portions—e.g., a lot, a majority, some, all—Rule 1 given earlier in this section is reversed, and we are guided by the noun after of. If the noun after of is singular, use a singular verb. If it is plural, use a plural verb.

Examples:
A lot of the pie has disappeared.
Aot of the pies have disappeared.
Fifty percent of the pie has disappeared.
Fifty percent of the pies have disappeared.
A third of the city is unemployed.
A third of the people are unemployed.
All of the pie is gone.
All of the pies are gone.
Some of the pie is missing.
Some of the pies are missing.
(same source)
Not that I'm trying to (dis)prove anything. I've been told that there's nothing (drastically) wrong with the grammar of the sentence and I've taken notice of it:)
Thank you very much:-)
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#131

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

VictorB пишет: 13 мар 2022, 23:25 those are the words that indicate portion, aren't they?
But does the plural noun"decades" indicates that, too?
They all indicate a large quantity of something, and in that way they are similar.
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#132

Сообщение Yety »

The Language Nerds
30 Hilarious Comics That Illustrate The Differences Between Cultures and Languages.
They are. They do.
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#133

Сообщение Juliemiracle »

Yety,
it was such a scream! I particularly liked the maps of any European/American city.
P.S. Needed VPN to open it.
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#134

Сообщение Yety »

Psychology Today
Is Your Body Language Getting You in Trouble?

New research suggests what can go wrong when your body betrays your emotions.
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#135

Сообщение Yety »

ScienceAlert
New Experiments Hint Human Language Likely Didn't Start With Grunts
As the main function of language is to convey meaning across people, the researchers tested to see whether gestures or non-verbal sounds were more effective at getting meaning across.
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#136

Сообщение Yety »

N+1
GPT-3 научили редактировать тексты и писать логические связки между абзацами
Изображение
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#137

Сообщение Yety »

Literary Hub
Toward a Literature of Sign Language
Ross Showalter on ASL, Translation, and Deaf Culture
...
As I relearned ASL, I also discovered Deaf authors. I thrilled in finding people like me who were adding nuance and cultural specificity as they wrote about Deaf people. In those stories, Deaf people had power and agency in a narrative. As I adopted a “big-D” Deaf identity (the uppercase D signifies a cultural identity, rather than a medical condition) and grew into a Deaf adult, I turned to literature written by Deaf writers to validate my existence.
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#138

Сообщение Yety »

TheJournal.ie
"A boiling pot": Growing pains of the Irish language in Northern Ireland
The Irish language faces intense obstacles in Northern Ireland, but many are prepared to stand up for it.
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#139

Сообщение Yety »

PureWow
The Ellipsis is Widening the Gap Between Millennials and Boomers. Here’s Why
...
More change across our keyboards is inevitable. Younger generations will usher in new forms of digital language, and we’ll all try to keep up. “We don’t want to get too hung up thinking we’ve discovered the right way to do things because we’re just going to get proven wrong again,” says McCulloch. So just wait. Before you know it, Generation Alpha (aka the iPad kids) will be eager to make fun of your “main character aesthetic” and that cat sweater you’re wearing ironically.
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#140

Сообщение Yety »

France 24
A language ‘revival’? Quebec moves to protect French amid Canada’s shift towards English
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#141

Сообщение Yety »

The Guardian
8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today

David Shariatmadari
Think hyperbole rhymes with Super Bowl? Don't worry, it could be the start of something beautiful

Someone I know tells a story about a very senior academic giving a speech. Students shouldn't worry too much, she says, if their plans "go oar-y" after graduation. Confused glances are exchanged across the hall. Slowly the penny drops: the professor has been pronouncing "awry" wrong all through her long, glittering career.

We've all been there. I still lapse into mis-CHEE-vous if I'm not concentrating. This week some PR whizzes working for a railway station with an unusual name unveiled the results of a survey into frequently garbled words. The station itself is routinely confused with an endocrine gland about the size of a carrot (you can see why they hired PRs). Researchers also found that 340 of the 1000 surveyed said ex-cetera instead of etcetera, while 260 ordered ex-pressos instead of espressos. Prescription came out as perscription or proscription 20% of the time.
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#142

Сообщение Yety »

JStor Daily
Alpha. Bravo. Cyrillic.
Free from Russian dictates over language usage and education, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan prepare to embrace Latin lettering. It’s the latest chapter in the region’s fraught history of alphabet reform.
Последний раз редактировалось Aksamitka 14 дек 2022, 16:51, всего редактировалось 1 раз.
Причина: корректная ссылка
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#143

Сообщение Yety »

The Guardian
English is picking up brilliant new words from around the world – and that’s a gift
Danica Salazar
From ‘lepak’ to ‘deurmekaar’, terms borrowed from its 1.75 billion global speakers are enriching the language we share
...
...the World Englishes.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.
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#144

Сообщение VictorB »

The Gurdian
More than a decade ago, I moved down from Liverpool to London to study and work, like many thousands of other young people before and after me. Countless times during this period people have said to me, “You’ve not lost your accent.”
It’s always struck me as an odd phrase, as if the pronunciation of words is something external, at risk of being accidentally dropped down the back of a sofa. Can you really lose an accent, and more importantly, why would you want to?
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#145

Сообщение Yety »

The Indian Express
‘Grammar’s greatest puzzle’: What was the Sanskrit problem in Panini’s ‘Ashtadhyayi’, now solved by an Indian student?
In his PhD thesis published on December 15, Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat claims to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’, an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4th century BC. Experts are calling the discovery revolutionary, as it may allow Panini’s grammar to be taught to computers for the first time.
A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by “the father of linguistics” Pāṇini, and is now encapsulated in his thesis entitled ‘In Panini, We Trust: Discovering the Algorithm for Rule Conflict Resolution in the Astadhyayi’.
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#146

Сообщение Yety »

Mental Floss
12 Widely Repeated Phrase Origins, Debunked

1. To Throw the Baby Out With the Bath Water
2. Raining Cats and Dogs
3. Bring Home the Bacon
4. Dirt Poor
5. Threshold
6. Chew the Fat
7. Dead Ringer
8. Saved by the Bell
9. Graveyard Shift
10. Trench Mouth
11. Upper Crust
12. Wake
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#147

Сообщение Yety »

PhysOrg
When did humans first start to speak?
How language evolved in Africa
When did humans first begin to speak, which speech sounds were uttered first, and when did language evolve from those humble beginnings? These questions have long fascinated people, especially in tracing the evolution of modern humans and what makes us different from other animals. George Poulos has spent most of his academic career researching the phonetic and linguistic structures of African languages. In his latest book, "On the Origins of Human Speech and Language," he proposes new timelines for the origins of language. We asked him about his findings.
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#148

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

Stanford releases guide to eliminate 'harmful language,' cautions against calling US citizens 'American'
...
The index also advises against using language with "violent" words included. These terms include "beating a dead horse," "pull the trigger," "trigger warning" and "killing two birds with one stone."
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#149

Сообщение Yety »

PNAS
Rapid infant learning of syntactic–semantic links
Infants start learning words at an incredible pace in their second year of life. One of the strategies they use to learn words so efficiently is to take advantage of clues hidden in grammar: ‘syntactic bootstrapping’. How infants with fledgling lexicons learn complex relationships between words and grammar is unknown. Using eye tracking, we demonstrate that 1 to 2-y-old infants can quickly learn a novel relationship between words and grammar from short videos and use it to learn new words. These results show that young language learners exploit links between language elements on the fly, suggesting that infants self-supervise learning through a network of efficient language-learning shortcuts.
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