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Messages - Avis-Mergulus

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1006
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you laugh today: Thirty plumbers and poems about sewage
« on: October 08, 2015, 11:22:49 am »
Quote from: Graknorke on October 08, 2015, 11:11:28 am
Quote from: Reelya on October 07, 2015, 09:57:45 am
permanent development
haha you funny guy

no it's basically dead, since he can make more money by putting people's furry waifus in his new game instead
Somebody is salty. Mmm.

1007
General Discussion / Re: Food Thread: Puenster on Punpernickel
« on: October 08, 2015, 11:14:55 am »
I made brownies! And they turned out fairly delicious, even if I had to make the batter in two batches and they turned out to have a different look and consistency when baked. It was a pretty cool visual effect, actually, where there was this fluid dark brown spot in the lighter brown brownie. The recipe's here, it's really a pretty good one.

1008
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 08, 2015, 09:43:00 am »
Quote from: Tack on October 08, 2015, 07:59:30 am

Am I actually severely mistaken in thinking that English has more than Russian, Spanish and/or German?


Again, I can only vouch for Russian, and even then, only by how I feel about it because I didn't really count all the synonyms in it, but yeah, you're sort of mistaken, I think. Russian does have as many direct synonyms as English, and then there's the ambiguities that come from a loose word order and case choice. I'm pretty sure that is true for the other Indo-European languages as well, and probably most living, functional languages in general.
I guess dying languages do have less because nobody uses them in the full range of contexts.

Quote from: IcyTea31 on October 08, 2015, 08:43:08 am
Quote from: penguinofhonor on October 08, 2015, 08:27:24 am
Also I don't know who has the most idioms. English has more than you can shake a stick at though.
I'm pretty sure all languages have lots of idioms. Finnish has them completely as a pig, so don't leave it out like a percussion cap on a rock. That'd be stupid as a boot. You have all your owls in the tower, right?
Obviously I have everyone at home. Even a hedgehog could understand that! Obstruct your mitten, y'hear!?

1009
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 11:56:58 pm »
I still do not think that your definiton of everyday use has much to do with reality. You just lump together all non-ceremonial or informal language, more or less. I quote, "the sort of interaction that is ordinary and routine". Right now, we're using fairly complex and nuanced vocabulary, despite the fact that we're in a casual situation, by your own definition, and they, again in your own words, don't need a great degree of granularity.

Of course, one might say that we're discussing a thing, and that makes it a sort-of-formal situation because there are rules for this sort of productive two-sided conversation. But then there are rules for any kind of conversation, and the whole distinction becomes unnecessary. You assume that you watch yourself when you're giving a presentation to your boss, but then, you also watch yourself when you talk to your friends. It is just that different things are allowed in these situations, and both of them have a vocabulary attributed to them. The level of nuance actually doesn't have much to do with how casual the context is - it has to do with how thin you have to slice things in this particular conversation.

I do see a reason for excluding, for example, liturgical language and formulaic speech like poetry into its own subclass. But why the everyday use thing? Writing consists of vocabulary that you would use when talking to your friends or boss or whoever, had you been forced to convey to them thoughts that are as complex as your usual writing subject. And sometimes, you have to do that. Like we are doing now, for example.

1010
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: October 07, 2015, 09:54:25 pm »
Quote from: EnigmaticHat on October 07, 2015, 09:47:30 pm
Quote from: Ispil on October 07, 2015, 09:35:32 pm
Arch Linux
This sounds fake.

Like someone was making a computer wizard joke.
Little did EnigmaticHat know... It was not a computer wizard joke, but instead a horrifying computer wizard reality.

1011
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 09:33:15 pm »
Quote from: Flying Dice on October 07, 2015, 09:16:24 pm
-snip again-
You might think I'm being anal here, but define "everyday use". Is it what, when I'm talking to strangers in person? My friends? My parents? Talking on the net? Each of these situations has different "catch-alls", and a different proportion of catch-alls to elaborations (because when I'm describing to my friends how atrocious the food in my canteen is, I sure as hell will elaborate). Note that I'm just accepting the whole "catch-alls vs. elaborations" dichotomy without complaining - even though there are causes for complaint, in theory.
After you've defined "everyday use", explain why the fact that some words don't fall under this definition makes them redundant. I mean, they are important for narrower contexts, within which you couldn't substitute them for catch-alls. I mean, "fucknugget" is just "person" with a negative value judgment attached to it (oversimplifying, but who cares). Now substitute it for "person" in the phrase "Eat shit and die, fucknugget". Do you, as a speaker of English, consider the result to have the same meaning as the original?
A dumb mechanical analogy is that if a part of a mechanism is way smaller than many other parts, that hardly makes it redundant. Language can communicate nuance when it is necessary. If it isn't necessary in all contexts, or even most of them (also a bit dubious), that doesn't mean nuance is redundant.

1012
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 06:28:26 pm »
You messed it up!

Quote
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

1013
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you laugh today: Thirty plumbers and poems about sewage
« on: October 07, 2015, 06:10:51 pm »
Quote from: Baffler on October 07, 2015, 05:09:21 pm
Quote from: TheBiggerFish on October 07, 2015, 05:08:13 pm
Quote from: Akura on October 07, 2015, 05:04:37 pm
Quote from: Omeganaut on October 07, 2015, 08:26:22 am
If you like bay12's sense of humor, I think you'd appreciate this as well.

Even if, for some reason I don't know why, I want to punch that guy in the face, those are funny.
BAHAHAWAHAHA.

I felt the same way. Within seconds of opening the video. Something about this dude just screams "I need a fist in my face."
His extreme punchability actually makes him sort of entertaining.

1014
General Discussion / Re: The small random questions thread [Talk about stuff I pretend to understand]
« on: October 07, 2015, 05:59:38 pm »
Quote from: Baffler on October 07, 2015, 05:07:11 pm
If I can only get one of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, is it better to get Call of Pripyat, or Shadow of Chernobyl? I'm leaning toward Call of Pripyat because it's apparently more replayable and mechanically tuned, but I've heard Shadow of Chernobyl's writing is a lot better.
I'd recommend Call of Pripyat if you haven't played any of the games before and don't want to deal with SoC's buggy ass. However, SoC offers more value for your money, since it's longer. And is also an interesting experience.

1015
Forum Games and Roleplaying / Re: What do you get if you add...
« on: October 07, 2015, 04:39:48 pm »
A sequel to Dishonored.

A snowmobile, the Gobi desert, and thirty gallons of industrial lube.

1016
General Discussion / Re: Terrible Jokes
« on: October 07, 2015, 03:53:33 pm »
I am always so weirded out by the Latvian potato jokes. I mean, I get Irish potato jokes, but the Latvian SSR (which I guess where those jokes are supposed to be set) always had one of the highest consumption levels per capita in the whole USSR. And during the Latvian Republic times before that, it didn't really lack for potato either, IIRC. Now, Latvia has plenty potato as well (even though it is all probably imported from their Euroverlords </joke>). As far as I can tell, there has never been a period in which Latvia had less potato than neighboring lands.

Are those jokes supposed to be Latvian as in told by Latvians, or Latvian as in about Latvians?

1017
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 02:50:40 pm »
Quote from: Flying Dice on October 07, 2015, 01:43:53 pm
-snip-

In my semantics class, one of the talking points was that there is actually no redundancy in natural languages (in a synchronous perspective, as in, in the language's current state at a given time), or at least, there is a tendency toward elimination of redundancy.

Now, that may seem to contradict my previous bit about redundancy being everywhere, but you seemed to interpret redundancy as having multiple words referring to the same thing, but differing by degrees of meaning, and I just went with it. What I mean here is that there is a tendency toward reduction of true redundancy - words that refer to the same thing and have no difference in degrees of meaning, attached value judgment, stylistics, etc. As in, with every usual (I mean "which is in use", dunno if this is the English term) pair of words with seemingly similar meanings, there's going to be at least one context where one is acceptable from a native speaker's perspective, while the other is not. So, there's no word pairs that have a completely identical range of acceptable contexts. If such a pair was to appear, one of the words in it would fall out of use, is what I've been taught. It seemed quite convincing.

Redundancy as you're describing it (the multiple shades of meaning thing) is just an universal for any natural language, and as such I have no strong feelings towards it one way or another. It's just how things are. I am, however, a second-year ling student, so I'm just approaching it from a less artistic perspective because that's what I'm supposed to do... I guess. I haven't figured it out completely yet.

1018
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 01:21:33 pm »
Quote from: Flying Dice on October 07, 2015, 01:10:41 pm
Quote from: Tack on October 07, 2015, 11:21:39 am
Is English actually the language with the most redundancy?
I don't know about "the most", but apparently so; I was rather surprised when I first heard that as well. That said, I can sort of see where it's coming from, given that just about any word or phrase in English (that isn't a conjunction or something) will have multiple synonyms or alternate and equivalent forms of expressing the same sentiment with slightly different implications.
That's true for downright every natural language there is. Is overestimating the complexity of their language some sort of national pastime among English-speaking individuals? Because it seems to be a very widespread phenomenon (chiefly among monolinguals, to my great amusement).

1019
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 10:03:27 am »
Quote from: BlitzDungeoneer on October 07, 2015, 09:54:17 am
Quote from: scrdest on October 07, 2015, 09:36:38 am
Quote from: IcyTea31 on October 07, 2015, 02:58:25 am
Quote from: scrdest on October 07, 2015, 02:27:26 am
Though I'm starting to wonder which one is the second language by now.
Are you me?
Yes! You never even noticed all that time! MWAHAHAHA!

Seriously though, I'm freezing up or stumbling all over my sentences when I try to talk to people in Polish sometimes, because I don't think about it verbally, end up trying to use a concept that exists in English and wind up with 404: equivalent not found.
Huh. I do basically the exact same thing.
I had this problem before, but I got rid of it when I decided to make my speech more lucid and comprehensible in general by taking more time to think before speaking. I still end up with awkward turns of phrase sometimes, but much less now than before.

1020
General Discussion / Re: [🎺💀🎺] Nuclear donuts, advise countering with vampires (Happy thread)
« on: October 07, 2015, 06:26:11 am »
Quote from: BFEL on October 07, 2015, 06:16:47 am
Thank you Avis-Mergulus for providing the best OOCQ I think I've ever managed.
It has been an honor.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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