zompist bboard

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

I recently heard an interesting form of code-switching. A woman was talking with a street vendor in Arabic. Then she took out her purse, and began counting her money in French.

My hunch is that she grew up in an Arabic-speaking family, so she speaks Arabic natively; but she learned to count in school, so she's more comfortable counting in French.

She wasn't just from North Africa?

Then why did she count in French and not in Arabic? She was counting aloud, but still for herself: and the vendor spoke Arabic anyway.

Because people from North Africa code-switch between French and Arabic all the time? Lots of Malayalees would do the same thing with English and Malayalam; they'd speak Malayalam with fellow Malayalees but count in English. I know Malayalees in Kerala who don't even know how to count in Malayalam, even if they're just kids and barely speak any English otherwise.

OK, but that doesn't contradict what I was saying : that she probably learned how to count in a French-speaking school, that's why she prefers to count in French. (I never said that I thought she was born in France.)

True.

"I'm pretty for sure we won't be done by six."

I think I've been hearing people say "for sure" rather than just "sure" in this context for a while now, but I'm not for sure for sure.

Fer sher fer sher? She's a Valley Girl, and there is no cure?

Something that occured to me, from my father: the use (although in his case only when being jocular or nostalgic) of azzel for I, and likewise wuzzel and so forth. [so, wuzzel gaan? for standard "are we going?"] But it's only just occured to me: I don't know why?

I'd always assumed I think that this was reinforcement by a reflexive. But the reflexive/emphatic forms are normally created from the oblique: mizzel, not azzel. But maybe this is using the nominative form for a non-reflexive emphatic...

But then it occured to me: this is only in the present/future tense. So presumably it's a tense marker derived from will. But why the sibilant?

Well, I've heard that in other northern dialects - Is, wes, etc. But why? Is this a mysterious plural -s even in the singular? Or is this incorporation of either is or has, for no particular reason? Or something else?

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

What is this dialect?

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

My mom pronounces Uzbekistan [usbɛskisˈt̪aːn].

Apparently, she grew up thinking of Uzbekistan as the stereotypical "exotic country," kind of like how Azerbaijan is the stereotypical exotic country to my dad and Nicaragua apparently is to some other Malayalees.

"Supporters say the protests represent a realization of power and influence by young people raised on social media who have come of age in an era of never-ending wars, highly publicized mass shootings and virulent national politics."

I'm not sure what about the use of "virulent" strikes me so odd here. I guess I'm used to it being used to indicate a particularly heightened degree of malignancy from something which is negative and destructive by nature (e.g. diseases, anger) and not being applied to something essentially neutral to indicate a highly negative manifestation.

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

In a post I myself recently wrote on this forum, I used the words "immigrant population." Yet often, when I read it back to myself, even if I'm only reading it in my head, somehow I read it as "immigration population."

I have written like that on occasion, but the phrase is highly specific.

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Golden age set the moral standard, the Silver Age revised it, the Bronze Age broke free of it and the Rust Age ran wild with it. -- A. David Lewis

We're all under strict orders not to bite the newbies. -- Amaya

And while web search is far from a perfect technology, Google really does usually surface accurate, reliable information on the topics you search for. (Vox)

More interesting to me than the transitive use of surface is the choice of "web search" as the name of a particular type of technology.

Using surface as a transitive verb doesn't seem strange to me in the slightest; I wouldn't have even noticed it had you not pointed it out. Web search as a noun in place of the expected search engine, though, is odd.

I've started working as a transcriptionist, and something I've noticed is just how frequently people use a rather than an before a vowel, and not just in places where you might expect it, such as before a pause or false start, but even in normal-flowing speech.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

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Golden age set the moral standard, the Silver Age revised it, the Bronze Age broke free of it and the Rust Age ran wild with it. -- A. David Lewis

We're all under strict orders not to bite the newbies. -- Amaya