air conditioning may be making us fat
in [Europe]
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From: Dave Frightens Me on 15 Jul 2006 04:43 On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 01:15:40 +0200, Mxsmanic <mxsmanic(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Dave Frightens Me writes: > >> But not demonstrably so. > >Look at a few case histories and you'll have all the demonstration you >need. So you can't demonstrate it then. -- --- DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com --- --
From: Mxsmanic on 15 Jul 2006 05:56 Stanislas de Kertanguy writes: > It's more or less the same in French (you will write, and say, > _l'h?tel_ but _la_ hi?rarchie) and, of course, when a word is common to > the two languages, there's no general rule as to know whether it's > pronounced or not ! H is never actually pronounced in French, so that's one rule. -- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
From: Mxsmanic on 15 Jul 2006 05:57 Dave Frightens Me writes: > Because you say so? I'll leave that determination as an exercise for the reader. -- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
From: Stanislas de Kertanguy on 15 Jul 2006 06:05 Le 15/07/2006, Mxsmanic a ?crit : > Stanislas de Kertanguy writes: > >> It's more or less the same in French (you will write, and say, >> _l'h?tel_ but _la_ hi?rarchie) and, of course, when a word is common to >> the two languages, there's no general rule as to know whether it's >> pronounced or not ! > > H is never actually pronounced in French, so that's one rule. OK. Fine. But it may be /Aspir?/, right ? -- remplacez "lesptt" par "laposte" pour me joindre substitute "laposte" for "lesptt" to reach me
From: Karen Selwyn on 15 Jul 2006 07:16
~* Magda ~* wrote: > > What are you guys talking about?? All languages are defined by usage. Grammar can say what > it likes; if people won't follow, then the *rules* have to change. Magda, Interesting. I took Mixi's and DFM's exchange to refer to the definitions of words, but both interpretations work equally well. If people won't follow, then the rules -- grammar or meaning -- have to change. But then, you know that. I know that. DFM knows that. I suspect among RTE readers there's only one lone holdout who doesn't know that. For the sake of the lone holdout, here is evidence that English is defined by usage. Grammar example: Growing up, I was taught to form a posessive out of a word that ends in an "s" by adding only an apostrophe after the "s." Now, literate publications like the WASHINGTON POST, CHICAGO SUN TIMES, and LA TIMES routinely form posessives by adding "'s" even to words ending in "s." Here's a sentence from a July 2 book review in the POST that I located by putting "s's" into their search engine: "The breaking point between Hemingway and Dos Passos," writes Koch, "came one day in the early spring of 1937, when a group of armed men . . . came knocking at the door of Pepe Robles's modest apartment in Valencia." Definition example: Irony For centuries, there were two accepted definitions: (1)the use of *words* to convey a meaning opposite to its dictionary meaning and (2) Literary Irony: a situation in which the reader or audience knows more than the characters in the work of literature. The general public routinely mis-used the word "irony" to refer to *situations* in which the outcome is the opposite of that which was desired or intended. One by one -- with OED being among the last -- dictionaries began to include this situational definition. Karen Selwyn |