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Scotty

Story, Monday December 4, 2017

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On 12/10/2017 at 5:56 AM, ProfessorTomoe said:

You should see the book I've got hanging in limbo due to my pain problems. For names, I looked up street names in the two ZIP codes I lived in (one in Austin, one in Houston), pulled out the streets that looked like they'd be good people names, and made up a spreadsheet. I played mix and match from there. When the action took place in Houston, mostly Houston names got used. Stuff like that.

Heck, in a story I'm writing (what's done is published on the Wapsi Square forum) I have a couple of characters eating in a certain restaurant in Minneapolis. I mention what they are eating. You could walk into that restaurant with a friend and order the same thing. It's real.

(I use that to shoot down the "it's all true or it's all lies" crowd, because that part of the story IS true, as are a number of other details such as typical driving time between the university area of Saint Paul and the nearest Wal-Mart, but as for the overall story... well, while eating at that restaurant in real life you won't have a pair of centaurs eating at the next table, and I'm pretty sure there aren't three werewolf art-school students renting a basement apartment near the university.)

While it's possible I've passed through Minneapolis/St Paul once or twice, I can't say for sure that I have, and I've definitely never been there in any meaningful sense.

The internet is very helpful to writers.

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2 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:
5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Note that Bridge Street is not exactly good name for person.

Someone related to Della Street?

Mention her friend Paul Drake and you're almost back to our previous topic.

Interestingly enough on the topic of naming characters, while I was going down the Wiki rabbit hole on Perry Mason and company, it appears Earl Stanley Gardner picked the name for Perry Mason from the name of a company that published his favorite childhood magazine.

Going the reverse route and naming the real after the imaginary, the name I created for a character in a fantasy short story I wrote got used for a cat of mine.

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14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Yeah. Like 'Eastgate' and 'Bridge Street.' What the Hell were people thinking of, using just letters in names?

Single letter, I say.

Plus, you forgot the commas, periods, and hyphens. And those fancy stuff on top. :demonicduck:

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20 minutes ago, Stature said:

Single letter, I say.

Plus, you forgot the commas, periods, and hyphens. And those fancy stuff on top. :demonicduck:

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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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

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.

I believe you. If the symbols themselves were to have phonemes, I would run for the hills.

You win, also since I got no Æ Ø Å, but I somehow got a Ñ with me. ;)

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19 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Note that Bridge Street is not exactly good name for person.

Why not? Eliminate the space between words and you have Bridgestreet. No stranger than, say, Longstreet, who was a general during the Civil War.

Some name being actually used doesn't make it GOOD name.

14 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

well, while eating at that restaurant in real life you won't have a pair of centaurs eating at the next table, and I'm pretty sure there aren't three werewolf art-school students renting a basement apartment near the university.)

While it's possible I've passed through Minneapolis/St Paul once or twice, I can't say for sure that I have, and I've definitely never been there in any meaningful sense.

If you weren't there, how can you be so sure about art-school students at local university? :)

5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

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.

Do ǃ and ʔ (often written as ' ) count? I'm sure someone who is actually linguist would be able to provide even more examples.

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Some name being actually used doesn't make it GOOD name.

Pffft. Who died and made you the judge of what makes a good name and what doesn't? :P

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Do ǃ and ʔ (often written as ' ) count? I'm sure someone who is actually linguist would be able to provide even more examples.

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. :danshiftyeyes:

And yes, I am a linguist. Admittedly an amateur linguist, but still. ^_^

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10 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

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.

Clearly, you have missed out on a real classic!

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7 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

And yes, I am a linguist. Admittedly an amateur linguist, but still. ^_^

So maybe you can explain something for me.

The version of Linux I'm running includes, in a standard install (and not even as options - they just happen, period), language packs for multiple versions of English. Some of these are expected - English is spoken, and particularly written, differently in Britain as compared to the US, and it's entirely plausible that the same is true of Hong Kong, Australia, India, Nigeria, and several other English-speaking countries.

But... English as it is spoken and written in Denmark?

I would have guessed that the people of Denmark, when speaking English, regard the British version as "proper" and make their best effort to match it.

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2 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

But... English as it is spoken and written in Denmark?

I would have guessed that the people of Denmark, when speaking English, regard the British version as "proper" and make their best effort to match it.

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?" :icon_eek:

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

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?" :icon_eek:

To turn an old adage on its head: "If nobody is in charge then everybody is in charge."

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

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.

Not only this is best way to learn language (although I'm not sure if it can be used for any other languages than English and Japanese), I would say that even people who claim to learn english in other way may have their dialect easily changed this way.

7 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

The version of Linux I'm running includes, in a standard install (and not even as options - they just happen, period), language packs for multiple versions of English. Some of these are expected - English is spoken, and particularly written, differently in Britain as compared to the US, and it's entirely plausible that the same is true of Hong Kong, Australia, India, Nigeria, and several other English-speaking countries.

But... English as it is spoken and written in Denmark?

I'm not sure why other variants of English are not recognized. Don't tell me there is no specific English dialect as spoken in Russia, to use some big country as example. Also, there are likely more Russians speaking English than Brits speaking English.

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3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Not only this is best way to learn language (although I'm not sure if it can be used for any other languages than English and Japanese), I would say that even people who claim to learn english in other way may have their dialect easily changed this way.

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.

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I'm not sure why other variants of English are not recognized. Don't tell me there is no specific English dialect as spoken in Russia, to use some big country as example. Also, there are likely more Russians speaking English than Brits speaking English.

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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6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I'm not sure why other variants of English are not recognized. Don't tell me there is no specific English dialect as spoken in Russia, to use some big country as example. Also, there are likely more Russians speaking English than Brits speaking English.

The only country I recognized as not having English as a native or national language, that this version of Linux automatically installs English-language support for, is Denmark.

Here's the complete list of auto-installed versions of English: Antigua & Barbuda, Australia, Botswana, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Most of them in an 8-bit version and a Unicode version. A few have only an 8-bit version. Several have two Unicode versions, I won't try to guess why.

There are about 180 other languages I could install, many in several versions (Castilian Spanish alone has 21 national versions) plus often coming in Unicode and 8-bit variants, but no other versions of English that the standard install is even aware of.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Not only this is best way to learn language (although I'm not sure if it can be used for any other languages than English and Japanese), I would say that even people who claim to learn english in other way may have their dialect easily changed this way.

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.

Noone smuggled english version of Donald Duck to Faroe Islands?

Right, almost forgot Astérix. And I think there may be few more popular originally-French comics ... although I can't think of any now, so they may not be THAT popular ...

... oh. Right. Tintin. (And, technically, The Smurfs, as they are originally in French despite created in Belgium and originally comics despite being more popular as animated television series.)

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I'm not sure why other variants of English are not recognized. Don't tell me there is no specific English dialect as spoken in Russia, to use some big country as example. Also, there are likely more Russians speaking English than Brits speaking English.

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.

Sounds logical, but why Denmark then?

 

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45 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Noone smuggled english version of Donald Duck to Faroe Islands?

Oh, I am sure, and I am equally sure that these would prove helpful to any children and adults who wanted to learn English.

46 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Sounds logical, but why Denmark then?

Beats me. I just live there.

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On 12/13/2017 at 9:11 AM, hkmaly said:

(And, technically, The Smurfs, as they are originally in French despite created in Belgium and originally comics despite being more popular as animated television series.)

They've animated The Smurfs? First I've ever heard about that... What's next? Animating Gaston, Spirou or Lucky Luke?

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1 hour ago, Cpt. Obvious said:
On 12/13/2017 at 9:11 AM, hkmaly said:

(And, technically, The Smurfs, as they are originally in French despite created in Belgium and originally comics despite being more popular as animated television series.)

They've animated The Smurfs? First I've ever heard about that... What's next? Animating Gaston, Spirou or Lucky Luke?

yes, yes, yes and yes. I'm sorry.

(Actually, the Gaston seems to not be related ... or maybe they just took some creative liberties ...)

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13 hours ago, hkmaly said:
On 12/13/2017 at 9:11 AM, hkmaly said:

(And, technically, The Smurfs, as they are originally in French despite created in Belgium and originally comics despite being more popular as animated television series.)

They've animated The Smurfs? First I've ever heard about that... What's next? Animating Gaston, Spirou or Lucky Luke?

yes, yes, yes and yes. I'm sorry.

(Actually, the Gaston seems to not be related ... or maybe they just took some creative liberties ...)

Definitely unrelated Gaston. I was thinking of Gaston Lagaffe, who apparently haven't been turned into an animated TV series. There was a movie adaptation, but the author refused to allow them to use the character names, so I can't really take it seriously. I guess he knew it never could live up to the comic.

 

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They've also animated Asterix.

(There are I think 26 comic books in that series by the original author-artist team, and some less-well-regarded ones by others after the original author died; of which I've read I think 8 in French and 2 in English, and I'm currently trying to read one in Spanish but really struggling because my Spanish is not that good.)

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31 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

They've also made live-action asterix movies but I would put THOSE next to Highlander II and Star Trek V.

In that round container with the removable plastic lining?

I was referring to the aisle of shame but your idea is also good.

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