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Supergrunch

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Status Updates posted by Supergrunch

  1. Thanks! And yes, although all too busy right now, with talks and so on. I'm looking forward to a bit of a summer respite soon though!

  2. So as not to derail the thread - genuine rules of grammar don't need to be told to native speakers, as they know and follow them already. For instance, nobody has to tell English speakers to put the before, rather than after, nouns. Rules that have to be enforced are therefore not real rules, and are at best style guidelines and at worst pointless (like the beginning sentences with conjunctions one).

  3. Yep, they're generally silly though. The split-infinitives one is particularly so - around the 17th century, it became fashionable in England to publish grammars of English, which tended to compare it to Latin grammar (which everyone learnt at school), and generally the more "logically deduced" prescriptive rules there were, the better the grammars sold, so lots of things got made up. For instance, in Latin, you can't split infinitives (because the Latin infinitive is just one word, e.g. amare, "to love,") and at some point it was arbitrarily decided that this should also be the case for English, even though it's got two word infinitives. Which of course makes no sense.

  4. Good for you. :wink:

  5. Depends how complex you want the pun to be. Given the way Japanese names works, there are tons of names that could be used, the simplest of which is just juu (十). Note that 10 is juu, not ju, so jun is unrelated however you spell it, and you can also have other readings of 十 that aren't anything like juu, such as to - for example, akito (昭十) which is bright+ten. There are countless others on top of these - what kind of thing are you looking for?

  6. The time is ripe to chat once more.

  7. :kiss:

     

    (argh, messed up the conversation thingy the first time :heh:)

  8. I was of course just giving myself practice at deleting messages. Yes, that's what I was doing...

  9. Haha, I've seen ghoti for fish before, but this one is better.

  10. Login as someone who can... :wink:

  11. Login as someone who can... :wink:

     

    It's just admins and jayseven I think.

  12. Nope, I'm afraid not!

  13. I just ordered Mass Effect 3.

     

    I hope you're happy.

  14. I still have to wait for it to come first. Stupid cheap Amazon. :heh:

  15. But I actually need it for Wednesday... I'm far more cunning than you realise.

     

    Although the expected arrival date is Thursday-Saturday, so that kind of ruins my cunningness.

  16. But maybe I will die! Anyway, I look forward to good characters for once. :) And Jason, or whatever he's called.

  17. Lol at how you put yourself in the Wikipedia article for Illeism. :heh:

  18. It's

    . Crazy stuff.
  19. With respect to natural v.s. social sciences: the natural sciences are the sciences of the natural world, and so include physics, chemistry and biology. This contrasts with social sciences which study the emergent phenomena of social interaction and so on. Linguistics can be approached as a natural science (e.g. language being an aspect of biology), a social science (e.g. sociolinguistics), a formal science (e.g. the formation of mathematical models of grammar regardless of ontology), or a humanity (e.g. philosophy of language, literary and discourse analysis).

  20. Well, I just thought you were saying linguistics was a social rather than natural science, when it's really a hybrid of loads of stuff. But yes, everything should get lots of funding, although experimental sciences inevitably require far more because of all the equipment and so on involved. But that doesn't mean social sciences should get nothing.

  21. The purple is good, but I'm not convinced by the green...

  22. Sorry, was busy last night, but will be free in the daytime today if you want to play. I may or may not still have the app, if it doesn't work shall we use Yahoo?

  23. Yeah, it wasn't bad thanks! Sorry not to reply sooner, only just regained interent access - see you on IRC tonight?

  24. Hmm, that's a pity, but bear it in mind for another time... and let me know how the Wellington goes! I think you can always make mushroom wellington and the like for vegetarians, but maybe she wouldn't like that either. Maybe just put chicken in it or something?

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