Story Monday March 28, 2016

[Stature 96]

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2173

Diane had me at "déjà vu". And chilly scenes. And owebacks.

[partner555 170]

Couldn't they just go inside the cars?

[ijuin 572]

Yay for Charlotte being pedantic.

[Scotty 1,061]

I like Ellen's look in panel 4, but unsure whether it's a reaction to Diane and Charlotte's conversation, or her wondering what Ashley's thinking, or her wondering if anyone would care if she snuggled closer to Nanase to keep her warm.

[Aura Guardian 57]

It's still a misuse of the word "begs," while the fallacy's name, curiously, is not a misuse. Mistranslation, sure. Misuse, Charlotte was right the first time. (I wish there'd been a bit more to this comic, plot-wise, than basically that)

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

Charlotte, you disappoint me.

Grammarians who are willing to nit pic mistranslated Latin phrases must never yield so easily.

[Jaynomer 0]

Its all well and good being strict about grammar on paper, but colloquially its fine (I'd be hard pressed to find someone who corrected "begs"). That, and the Latin we know about is the formal/high society/written type, I doubt your everyday Iron Age Italian had many rules regarding grammar.

Also Ashley and Ellen seem fine, quit complainin'.

[Don Edwards 548]

As to the problem Diane was pointing out, I have no doubt that Ellen can just pick Nanase up and carry her.

(No, moving her is not a problem. When they were having a movie night at Susan's and she went fairy, she was moved to a guest room.)

[Scotty 1,061]

4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Charlotte, you disappoint me.

Grammarians who are willing to nit pic mistranslated Latin phrases must never yield so easily.

What gets me though, is the roller coaster Diane and Charlotte have been on for the past few hours, one moment they're on the same wavelength about how Fox (Nanase's clone not the entertainment giant), then Diane essentially tells Charlotte she has no life (though Diane does immediately regret saying that), then Charlotte saves Diane from the spider vampire, tells Diane she's her friend, and now we're at nit-picking phrases.

I actually hope that they sit down a talk about what just happened and get things sorted so that we all know if there's a ship that can be launched or not.

[Howitzer 32]

Am I a bad person for immediately going through Charlette's entire rant mentally before I looked at the second panel?

[hkmaly 490]

14 hours ago, Scotty said:

I like Ellen's look in panel 4, but unsure whether it's a reaction to Diane and Charlotte's conversation, or her wondering what Ashley's thinking, or her wondering if anyone would care if she snuggled closer to Nanase to keep her warm.

I think she is looking at Ashley if she has same reaction to the conversation as she has.

8 hours ago, Jaynomer said:

Its all well and good being strict about grammar on paper, but colloquially its fine (I'd be hard pressed to find someone who corrected "begs"). That, and the Latin we know about is the formal/high society/written type, I doubt your everyday Iron Age Italian had many rules regarding grammar.

You would be surprised how good in grammar can average roman citizen get if bad grammar brings the risk he will be labelled barbarian. Romans were proud people.

6 hours ago, Scotty said:

What gets me though, is the roller coaster Diane and Charlotte have been on for the past few hours

Do you also thinks Charlottle might not apologize if not for the "get a life"?

6 hours ago, Scotty said:

so that we all know if there's a ship that can be launched or not.

... 1) As if they could say anything which could stop such ship. 2) It already launched.

[Scotty 1,061]

38 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Do you also thinks Charlottle might not apologize if not for the "get a life"?

It just seems like, for the moment, Diane and Charlotte have completely forgotten about Diane's outburst on the way to the belltower. I'm hoping they haven't and that we get to see Diane apologize to Charlotte.

[Matoyak 51]

13 hours ago, Aura Guardian said:

It's still a misuse of the word "begs," while the fallacy's name, curiously, is not a misuse. Mistranslation, sure. Misuse, Charlotte was right the first time. (I wish there'd been a bit more to this comic, plot-wise, than basically that)

Basically summed up my thoughts on this page nicely.

[Dabat 60]

50 minutes ago, Scotty said:

It just seems like, for the moment, Diane and Charlotte have completely forgotten about Diane's outburst on the way to the belltower. I'm hoping they haven't and that we get to see Diane apologize to Charlotte.

Is this a "My 'ship has not yet sailed" moment?

[Scotty 1,061]

Personally, it doesn't need to be something that makes me say "I'd ship that", I just feel there needs to be closure, like Diane going "What I said before was wrong and I'm sorry."

[Drachefly 30]

The only Charlotte/Diane ship I have is a friendship. I just don't see it, feel it, or hear it otherwise.

[Matoyak 51]

2 hours ago, Drachefly said:

The only Charlotte/Diane ship I have is a friendship. I just don't see it, feel it, or hear it otherwise.

Yeah, I only see the friendship. But were they to go beyond that, they would be a cute couple, I could see. I merely very much doubt it'd ever happen.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

On 3/28/2016 at 7:15 PM, Jaynomer said:

I doubt your everyday Iron Age Italian had many rules regarding grammar.

Trust me, they had lots of rules regarding grammar or their language just wouldn't work. The problem is that formal grammatical rules are an attempt to describe how a given language works, not actual rules for how it works -- and too many people put the cart in front of the horse and think that they are the latter.

Since language is constantly and extensively mutable, it follows that grammar must be as well. The trouble arises when people treat grammatical rules as ironclad, which they really aren't. The best metaphor I can think of is to compare grammar to a map of a language. But the 'landscape' the map depicts is one subject to constant change and prominent features keep appearing, vanishing or shifting about. And if there is conflict between map and reality, grammaticians who insist that it is reality that is wrong will all too often find themselves walking off metaphorical cliffs.

[hkmaly 490]

6 hours ago, Matoyak said:

9 hours ago, Drachefly said:

The only Charlotte/Diane ship I have is a friendship. I just don't see it, feel it, or hear it otherwise.

Yeah, I only see the friendship. But were they to go beyond that, they would be a cute couple, I could see. I merely very much doubt it'd ever happen.

... this way we won't win the price for most-shipping fandom ...

(For record, I agree with Matoyak here ... but that page was so obvious ship-tease it can't be ignored. Even if Dan actually didn't do it deliberately.)

[Matoyak 51]

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Trust me, they had lots of rules regarding grammar or their language just wouldn't work. The problem is that formal grammatical rules are an attempt to describe how a given language works, not actual rules for how it works -- and too many people put the cart in front of the horse and think that they are the latter.

Since language is constantly and extensively mutable, it follows that grammar must be as well. The trouble arises when people treat grammatical rules as ironclad, which they really aren't. The best metaphor I can think of is to compare grammar to a map of a language. But the 'landscape' the map depicts is one subject to constant change and prominent features keep appearing, vanishing or shifting about. And if there is conflict between map and reality, grammaticians who insist that it is reality that is wrong will all too often find themselves walking off metaphorical cliffs.

It's interesting to apply this type of thinking / analysis / linguistics thought to programming languages. They have to be very rigidly defined...but still often grow and mutate over time...while still having to be absolutely rigid in their definitions and grammar. And the breaks tend to come from just outright creating a new language (if not outright whole cloth, then close to it).

EDIT: And I feel there's an interesting comparison to make between the two styles of language and how each type evolves and how they're created. Additionally, I feel there's an interesting conversation to be had between linguists on both sides.

[Scotty 1,061]

4 minutes ago, Matoyak said:

It's interesting to apply this type of thinking / analysis / linguistics thought to programming languages. They have to be very rigidly defined...but still often grow and mutate over time...while still having to be absolutely rigid in their definitions and grammar. And the breaks tend to come from just outright creating a new language (if not outright whole cloth, then close to it).

This is how LOLCode exists.

[Matoyak 51]

3 minutes ago, Scotty said:

This is how LOLCode exists.

Well, yeah. I mean, if you're getting into esoteric programming languages we can talk Malboge, Brainf**k, or Shakespeare Programming Language.

[hkmaly 490]

11 hours ago, Matoyak said:

It's interesting to apply this type of thinking / analysis / linguistics thought to programming languages. They have to be very rigidly defined...but still often grow and mutate over time...while still having to be absolutely rigid in their definitions and grammar. And the breaks tend to come from just outright creating a new language (if not outright whole cloth, then close to it).

Which programming language is absolutely rigid? At least some programming languages directly say what version of specifications they are supposed to be compiled with.

11 hours ago, Matoyak said:

Well, yeah. I mean, if you're getting into esoteric programming languages we can talk Malboge, Brainf**k, or Shakespeare Programming Language.

You think there are parallels between spoken languages and this kind of intentionally obscure and hard to program in languages?

[Matoyak 51]

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Which programming language is absolutely rigid? At least some programming languages directly say what version of specifications they are supposed to be compiled with.

In a programming language you can't suddenly decide to change the meaning of a key word. You can't change what the language considers as a scope limiter. They're ALL rigid in that you have to conform to the language specifications, or if you wish not to, then create a new version of the language / a new language outright. You can't just decide that the keyword "final" means "ironically final" or "actually first" (like for example what happened with "literally" or "awful" in English). You'd have to change the language definitions itself, and it would be a conscious, explicit change, which is not close to normal for how spoken and written languages change.

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

You think there are parallels between spoken languages and this kind of intentionally obscure and hard to program in languages?

Not really, no. Nothing explicitly about esoteric languages. I was talking about programming (and markup, to some extent) languages in general. There are interesting differences and interesting similarities in how they evolve and are used. Having the equivalent of a programming linguist chat about that and related topics with a spoken and written word linguist could be neat.

[HarJIT 97]

On that topic, on a UNIX system, for example there's the small matter of cat, which is named for its ability to concatenate multiple files into a singular stream, but which is mostly used for outputting singular files to stdout (literally, it concatenates a list of files of length 1 and outputs the result, which amounts to outputting a file to stdout).

Hence an idiom of doing something may develop.  If an existing feature designed primarily for something else does something when invoked in a certain way, that might become the accepted way of doing it.

Take also Python's empty-slice syntax for taking a copy of a mutable sequence (literally, it takes a subsequence with no start or end bounds, which amounts to a copy of the original sequence).