Random Thread - Anything Goes
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@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
I don't know about that. . . maybe farts are a screen with which poop time hides!
What is "poop time" and how do I not know about it?
"Poop time" is when you urgently need to use the toilet because you weren't expecting to need to poop at that time.
Makes sense.
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Sorry
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@valentina said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
Another reason English lacks behind other languages.
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@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
@valentina said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
Another reason English lacks behind other languages.
The way this is phrased means the daughter was drunk. Although the intent of the author likely meant that the mother was drunk and decided to beat up her daughter.
If the latter is the intent, the sentence needs to be rewritten.
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@valentina That's what I thought it was at first too and was confused.
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@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
Another reason English lacks behind other languages.
This is still a very clear sentence, it's the author who has failed.
If the intent is to state that the 'mother beat up her drunk daughter' it could be explained in different ways. But this is still a correct way of stating so.
If the intent was to state that the mother was drunk and decided to beat up her daughter, well then the author fails at being an author.
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@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
Another reason English lacks behind other languages.
I don't think that's a good demonstration of how English "lacks behind" other languages, considering even most other Germanic languages alone the reflexive pronoun(s) tend to be the same word no matter what making certain sentences very ambiguous. I think one of English's neatest things is the possessive pseudo-case of 's, which works a bit easier than genitive case in many languages because you can chain them, but is a hell of a lot more clear than a reverse list of "de", which at least in the case of Indo-European languages is the opposite direction of how speech tends to run.
Plus also the -ing ending is one of the best aspects that almost every other Indo-European language lacks or has to achieve in a complex manner which itself is also potentially vague. One of the problems is that -ing is also the ending for gerunds and some other things.
English's biggest problems are:
- The spelling system is one of the worst in the entire world, certainly worst in the western world, even beyond French. Funnily a lot of people who speak only English will say "but things are spelled the way they sound." No. At least French has a consistent way to "decode" (read) sounds and know what they are even if they can be hard to "encode" (write). /u/ may be written u, ou, et al but it still is essentially always pronounced /u/. English is broken both with encoding and decoding, though it's rough to write out all the reasons why.
- The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.
Languages don't tend to lack or gain a whole lot of features, they make up with them with syntax, grammatical forms, stress, all sorts of things. Sort of like how people tend to view AAVE as a simplified or dumbed down version of General American where in fact it may not have some of the same grammatical properties GA has but it gains its own which in turn are sometimes ambiguous to whitey.
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@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
- The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.
thou v you is tu v usted; not usted v ustedes.
y'all is because ye was dropped as the plural of you.
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One of the problems with English is that informal slang usage is commonly accepted as proper over time. All languages do this some, but English has really embraced it like no other language. So what is wrong today is right tomorrow. And the language just expands and gets murky. So while to some, thou and ye are dropped, they aren't completely. And while y'all is weird and improper, it's considered proper to many.
