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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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The Old Hack
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Days Won
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Everything posted by The Old Hack
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The Complete Idiot's Guide To The Middle East Conflict
The Old Hack replied to animalia's topic in Off Topic Discussion
The Prof intended no harm. He was merely gently ribbing me in response to the dart I aimed at the good people who delight in discussing food on these forums. -
There is some evidence that comic books are very helpful in this regard. For example, the very popular Donald Duck comic only came out in Danish on the Faroe Islands for quite a while. But when a Faroe language translation appeared, the Danish proficiency of pupils in Faroe schools dropped noticeably. I myself have found that reading Astérix has been very helpful for me when learning French, often affording me wonderful laughs when I read the original jokes by messrs. Goscinny and Uderzo. These often varied very widely from the ones employed in the Danish translation. When speaking of dialects one tends to look largely at languages as spoken by native speakers, i. e. those who speak it as a first language, usually for reasons similar to why it is difficult to pin down exactly what Danes are taught in school -- teachers come from different dialects or have been taught differing dialects. Exceptions to this include creoles (pidgin languages formed from two populations intermixing, then becoming nativised in their children) and large populations of second language speakers gathered in the same area and using the language in question to communicate with one another. In India, for example, English is becoming the national language by default in spite of how unpopular the English were, for the simple reason that it is the one language speakers from different regions can be sure will be understood when they encounter one another.
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I have no idea, I never actually try to read the stuff. I just print stacks of it out and leave it where the poor sod can reach it. He can't make himself leave it alone.
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I have one of these. I keep him chained in the back yard and feed him on printouts of arguments on 4chan. His manic howls soothe me to sleep at night.
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Pffft. I am made up. It is everybody else who are real.
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Be vewy vewy quiet...
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Oh dear. I am not sure how to simplest explain this but here goes. In a perfect world, we would no doubt wish to have a standardised source for our teachings. In the reality in which we live, it is rather different. Let me give you a small sample from my own experiences. I have in my time been taught by and encountered teachers variously from: England Canada East Coast USA, Boston New Zealand The US Midwest (I forget which state, as she put it, it was one of the square ones in the middle) Southern California Italy (not as weird as it sounds, his spoken English was beautiful but still had a slight but noticeable Italian accent) Danes who have been taught by English-speakers from everywhere around the world, all of them with unavoidable Danish accent added in on top Ex-Pat Danes who have lived for extended times in an English-speaking region, less noticeable accent but dialect could be from ANYWHERE Add in on top that ubiquitous and all-pervading influence: the media. Popular TV series, movies, radio shows, even single individuals, all of them provide their own mark on the education of individual speakers. I personally taught myself a great deal of English through reading comic books, science fiction and fantasy, and I was not particularly selective as to dialect. I picked up snatches of phrase from Britcoms, McCloud, District Hill Street, Star Wars, James Bond movies, Soap... I guess you could call my experience 'eclectic'. I do not know what the current rules of English as it is taught in Denmark are, they change over the decades, but in my preteens they optimistically stated that 'English should be, to as great an extent as is possible, be based on British English.' If one takes into consideration that even the English themselves do not completely agree on exactly what that is, it is... not a very solid standard. I suppose it could all be summed up as, "You mean no-one is in charge here?"
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My wife has a wonderful vet named Dr. Asiz. He is so nice and warmhearted and loves dealing with his patients. One must make allowances for him, mind you, for occasionally he'll spot clients arriving and pause for a moment while he exclaims about how adorable the dog, puppy, cat or other animal they are bringing along is.
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Oww! Owww! Please don't! Owww!
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*dryly* Linguistically speaking they do not work that way, with all due respect for my countryman.
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Oooh! Oooh! I know the answer to that one! "All the world's a stage, and we but players!"
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Pffft. Who died and made you the judge of what makes a good name and what doesn't? Accents, tone markers, diphtongs, triphtongs and glottal stops (if you mark them at all) are most certainly punctuation. They have no independent existence from the sound they are modifying. The accent-circonflexe from French is even odder as it is commonly employed to mark a sound that is no longer there. 'Côte' (French for 'coast') was originally pronounced with an s-sound after the 'o'. How would you pronounce an absence of 's' independently from any word? Or if you go to Danish, 'løber' and 'lø'ber' are two distinct words, the former without a glottal stop, the latter with one. The first translates into the noun form of 'runner', the second into the present tense of the verb 'to run.' Again, the glottal stop merely slightly modifies the o-slash vowel. You can't just produce a glottal stop without anything to actually... stop. And yes, I am a linguist. Admittedly an amateur linguist, but still.
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Sesame Street!
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Commas, periods and hyphens -- in other words, punctuation -- are mere modifiers there to make text easier to read. They have no linguistic existence per se. Punctuation did not even exist a few centuries ago. Even spaces between words are mere convention to ease reading. Try to read any Latin text from around the turn of the first millennium and you will see what I mean. It made it even more interesting that at the time no such thing as upper or lower case letters existed. Don't believe me? Try to pronounce a name that consists solely of commas, periods, hyphens and accents. I would be sincerely interested to hear if you got even a single sound from it.
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Doghouse. *snickers quietly*
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Noooo, not him! I want him to stay safe and happy where he won't get hurt! >.<
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It isn't. Being on topic in the off topic forum is a violation of the purpose of the off topic forums. If I catch anyone posting about EGS, its characters or its continuity here, they will be dealt with accordingly. In case of repeated offences, I may have to resort to suspension of posting privileges or even to temporary or permanent banning.
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Why not? Eliminate the space between words and you have Bridgestreet. No stranger than, say, Longstreet, who was a general during the Civil War.
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The Moderator: Kindly restrain bad jokes of this kind. They do not get any better in taste by being offensive in multiple ways.
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Maybe he changed address to avoid this.
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We now ask ourselves, does this belong on a comic-centric forum? Only for readers who possess a stomach.
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The Complete Idiot's Guide To The Middle East Conflict
The Old Hack replied to animalia's topic in Off Topic Discussion
The Moderator: Animalia very kindly took the matter up with me first and we shared several messages discussing the matter before I issued tentative approval. I am watching the thread but have nothing against it in principle as long as modern politics do not start to take over. I also have some liking for learning more of matters I did not know much about before. This is the off-topic forum. One could argue that a discussion of what one had most recently eaten did not belong on a comic-centric forum either. That is in fact what the off topic forum is for. This is actually my greatest concern. Perhaps paraphrase would be better suited, with full credit to the creators of the document. That might even encourage readers to buy the original, which hopefully the author would not object too strenuously to. -
Yeah. Like 'Eastgate' and 'Bridge Street.' What the Hell were people thinking of, using just letters in names?
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Clearly, cishet white males of great wealth are heavily represented amongst aberrations as they are particularly likely to consider themselves entitled to eternal life at the expense of others.
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Book recommendations can be a happy thing especially when traded around between friends. So, without further ado, I am restarting the thread. First, since this seems to be in the air, I would like to recommend The Gun Primer: A Writer's Guide To Firearm Facts For Fiction by Bruce Jenvey for anyone interested in either writing stories where knowing your guns might be important or in knowing a bit more about the topic in general. Please note that it is a very basic work and that the author strives to merely inform about firearms and their function without getting into the political side. As he says, it is an attempt to help writers avoid basic and common misconceptions about firearms (or for that matter, to allow those who read it to better debate gun control issues, whether pro or anti, based on facts rather than urban myths.) I found the book easily read, entertaining and helpful in clearing up certain misunderstandings of mine. The author really did try hard to keep political judgment out of the work and in my opinion succeeded fairly well. If you are a firearms expert in your own right I doubt he has very much new to tell, but at the very least he has some entertaining anecdotes about horrible mistakes in TV shows and books committed by writers whom I can only believe have never actually held a loaded gun in their hands, much less fired one.
