Author Topic: Dear Expert (Read 165348 times)

dkw · « **Reply #825 on:** April 06, 2014, 09:39:08 PM »

They vary greatly.

Noemon · « **Reply #826 on:** April 07, 2014, 12:51:04 PM »

I wondered if that might be the case.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #827 on:** April 18, 2014, 10:12:38 PM »

All this talk of regional supermarkets just made me remember Pace. It was like the Costco of Colorado when I was growing up. Does it still exist? Did it exist elsewhere? The first time I went to a Costco was when I moved to Montana in 1994.

BlackBlade · « **Reply #828 on:** April 26, 2014, 07:52:18 AM »

Flux.

"It's in a state of flux."

"It's fluctuating."

Why don't we spell it "fluxuating"?

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #829 on:** April 26, 2014, 07:30:42 PM »

That looks like the generic name for Paxil.

rivka · « **Reply #830 on:** April 26, 2014, 11:23:19 PM »

Quote from: BlackBlade on April 26, 2014, 07:52:18 AM

Flux.

"It's in a state of flux."

"It's fluctuating."

Why don't we spell it "fluxuating"?

They are not the same word. The noun form of fluctuating is fluctuation. The verb form of flux is also flux.

They both seem to have a common origin though, from the Latin for flow.

Jonathon · « **Reply #831 on:** April 27, 2014, 04:45:50 PM »

There's a lot of ct/x variation in Latin roots. I'm guessing the answering is buried somewhere in the historical phonology of Latin, but I don't know enough about it to explain.

pooka · « **Reply #832 on:** April 27, 2014, 06:41:31 PM »

Some latin verb conjugations use x in the perfect and ct in the participial, and other things in the active/infinitive.

ago, agere, axi, actus is where we get agent, actor, and just about every english word ending in x besides x.

Another very productive root is
Facere, factus. Transfer and manufacture are from the same root.

A weird one is
Fero, Ferre, tuli latus, which means carry. Lat- is used extensively but I can't think of any instances of -tul-

BlackBlade · « **Reply #833 on:** July 07, 2014, 11:58:22 PM »

Help me use "affiance" in a sentence. It's a verb, meaning to promise, but it just doesn't sound right to say,

"I affiance that I will return."

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #834 on:** July 08, 2014, 12:15:55 AM »

It means not just "promise" but "promise to marry", like you're going to be fiances.

"Miss Piggy was affianced to Kermit the Frog."

BlackBlade · « **Reply #835 on:** July 08, 2014, 01:39:38 AM »

Ah. That makes way more sense. Thanks!

Noemon · « **Reply #836 on:** August 05, 2014, 09:25:36 AM »

Someone in my office pronounces "taco" as "tyaco" and "never" as "nyever". What region(s) is that native to?

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #837 on:** August 05, 2014, 06:16:41 PM »

Russia?

pooka · « **Reply #838 on:** August 05, 2014, 09:18:52 PM »

Basilica.

Jonathon · « **Reply #839 on:** August 05, 2014, 11:29:49 PM »

I'm not aware of any regional dialect with that feature. The closest I can think of is the way some people with the Northern Cities Shift raise and tense the vowel in cat.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #840 on:** August 07, 2014, 09:33:54 AM »

Quote from: Jonathon on August 05, 2014, 11:29:49 PM

I'm not aware of any regional dialect with that feature. The closest I can think of is the way some people with the Northern Cities Shift raise and tense the vowel in cat.

That was my first guess. It's why I crack up when my Wisconsin aunts talk about laptops.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #841 on:** August 20, 2014, 01:16:03 PM »

Why is feed both a transitive and intransitive verb?

Jonathon · « **Reply #842 on:** August 20, 2014, 01:45:52 PM »

Why not? Lots of verbs are both transitive and intransitive. Taking a transitive verb and making it intransitive (or vice versa) is a pretty common shift.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #843 on:** August 20, 2014, 02:08:44 PM »

Is there typically one that comes first? Like, was it the transitive verb and then people started intransitiving it?

Jonathon · « **Reply #844 on:** August 20, 2014, 06:26:11 PM »

I don't know whether there's a typical pattern. Feed was first transitive and then acquired some intransitive senses.

Dro_Trebor · « **Reply #845 on:** August 23, 2014, 09:31:02 AM »

Annie, in particular, but feel free to chime in even if you aren't Annie...

I could use some advice on how to help a Chinese born engineer with pretty decent English writing skills learn a few basics to make her writing sound less stereotypically Chinese. In particular, is there a good way to teach when a native English speaker would use a, an, and specially the?

There are a couple of other things that she struggles with, but otherwise her writing is actually very clear and easy to understand. The one or two other things she'd like to work on are proper use of state-of-being verbs (is and are seem to disappear or are used indiscriminately), and there are some just odd constructions for things that are basic statements used frequently such as "crashes are due to a number of reasons". Not hard to understand, but atypical use of the word reason when normally you'd see the word "factors" or a construction like "crashes occur for a number of reasons". Minor, but it marks her as a non-native writer in a field that values writing skills, and is clearly dominated by US educated engineers with sufficient biases against women and foreigners that having her writing stand out in this way can negatively impact her career.

I've put together a list of sample sentences from Chinese authored papers that I've reviewed, but I'm thinking this may be a slog for her if the only thing I do is throw hundreds of bad sentences at her without maybe some explanation of the "rules".

I personally don't know all the rules, though. I can readily spot the bad usage and tell her what it should be.

Is that going to be enough, with tons of practice will she develop an ear and an eye for this?

BlackBlade · « **Reply #846 on:** August 23, 2014, 12:49:51 PM »

Bob: To be perfectly honest those very things are what 95% of Chinese people learning English struggle with particularly because Chinese doesn't contain tenses or a/an/the equivalents. It's simply a part of English everybody learns through struggling with the language and accept correction every time it comes up.

One quick short cut for a/an is if the word afterward starts with a vowel (though the rule is actually a vowel sound) you use "an", otherwise "a". As for a/the I guess the best thing I can think of is we use, "a" to reference one of something. If the "one of something" we are discussing is unique from others in some way we start referring to it as "the something".

I wish I could be more help, but honestly in my own experience helping Chinese people leap these hurdles it just comes down to them hearing and using them correctly over and over and over and eventually habits form.

Dro_Trebor · « **Reply #847 on:** August 23, 2014, 03:32:09 PM »

That's kind of what I thought, that practice and repetition is the only way. Hoping someone with experience teaching ESL to this population would have a better solution.

For the a versus an, the problem doesn't appear to be the rule about vowel or consonant. I wish it were that simple. It's more like that they realize that there should be an article sometimes, but not sure when, and they use a/an some times when it should be the, and vice versa, intermingled with not using an article at all. Or using one when one isn't required. It seems like the usage is random, and certainly not rules based.

And, yes, I agree that these are common problems. They mark this very bright competent engineer as someone who cannot be used to write reports on her own or edit the work of others, and that limits her future as supervisory positions all require the ability to edit writing others have produced, and write well on ones own. The company is taking steps to have a more purposeful QC step using tech writers, but she will still be at a disadvantage if all her work costs the company more to fix than the work of other engineers does.

So, she can't get by having the same flaws as 95% of her countrymen. Not if she wants to rise up in the private sector. She will have a ceiling in our firm, I suspect. And we are one of the more flexible firms. More importantly, she wants to address this, and it seems like it should be fixable.

BlackBlade · « **Reply #848 on:** August 23, 2014, 04:52:38 PM »

I am not an ESL teacher of course, and I really hope Annie has more to say.

My advice would be tutoring in the evenings. Taking reports, marking where those mistakes are, but not saying what the fix is, and seeing what she can figure out. Then where she is stuck, explain to her why "a" or "the" doesn't work there. She might also consider using a previously corrected report as a template when she writes up new ones. She also might consider a service like Live Mocha

Link.

You correct other people's language assignments or give them practice time (In her case she would help somebody with Chinese) and in turn somebody who speaks English would help her with her reports or other kinds of writing. Honestly I have seen so many Chinese people have this problem, but with time and concerted effort, it goes away. It really does. I have seen people who could barely form a sentence go on to be very eloquent purely by practicing in their spare time with native speakers.

Dro_Trebor · « **Reply #849 on:** August 23, 2014, 04:59:23 PM »

I'm sure she'll manage it. I just don't want to steer her in a direction that is either wrong or more time consuming or frustrating than it needs to be. I really want to help. I can give her hundreds of practice sentences as I am a frequent reviewer of very badly written stuff from Chinese universities. She's already better than most of these folks, so I'm just picking examples of the specific things she wants work on. I figure it'd be better than critiquing her own writing at this point.