Supergrunch

Awesome tower, but mind my house guys - it's going to take up most of those hills to the right if I ever get some time when I don't have several books to read.

Arab_Freak's image gallery?

I've played it fro several weeks and there's an awful lot more I can do in single player as it is - plus I've hardly invesitgated multiplayer, and there's a massive game-changing Halloween update coming out soon. If it weren't for severe lack of time and my problems with lag on this rubbish laptop, I'd be pouring hours into it.

I thought the Time Lords granted the Master a new cycle of regenerations.

I think someone like RTD previously suggested that it was a limit imposed by the Time Lords, who now no longer exist so the doctor can do what he wants. So an ad hoc explanation, but at least it's actually an explanation.

Happy birthday guys!

I think we should try and build a NE logo out of diamond. :wink:

Well, they're not natural sciences, they're social sciences, which of course should also get funding and so on, but aren't the same kind of thing. Linguistics can be a social science, a natural science, a formal science, or a humanity depending on how you approach it though.

Sell off now useless universities? Loads of money was wasted creating more universities than are/were necessary.

A better solution would be to increase the quality and reduce the quantity of degree courses, without changing the price. But nobody wants to do that...

Other servers work fine (although kind of laggy on this computer). I used to get an error log after pressing connect, but now it just says "Failed to connect to the server. Unknown host '85.236.100.199'." Sadly I don't have a better PC to test things on right now. Edit: Yay, it worked after I entered the IP from the online thread! But that should be the same, right? Will have to test some more.

This is pretty rubbish, even though it doesn't affect me now I'm a graduate. Someone needs to classify linguistics as a science so it gets more funding...

First off, as has been implicit both in your post and some of the responses, there's a distinction between a foreign accent and a native dialect which should always be made, as native speakers already speak a genuine variety of English whereas those learning English as non-native speakers will be trying to approximate to one or more native accents in their speech. That said, as people like Fish have pointed out, it's best not to try and sound exactly like a particular type of native speaker, and instead retain some of your accent. This is because all languages and dialects are sufficiently complex that anyone who isn't brought up speaking them will practically never reach a stage where they're indistinguishable from a native speaker – indeed, it's been suggested that one of the functions of language and dialect is to allow people to identify others as coming from a particular group or area, and this is why it's so impossible for outsiders to perfectly learn. Furthermore, being a native speaker of a language generally suggests that you also carry a good deal of cultural knowledge, that, as a foreigner, you may well not have – for instance, I might ask a native English speaker I'd just met about something like children's TV we're likely both to have seen, but if the speaker had a foreign accent, I'd know to avoid topics of conversation like this. So as long as you can be clearly understood, it's best and in fact unavoidable to retain some kind of accent, especially in terms of phonetics and phonology. Moving on then – you talk about the differences between Finnish and English stress, which as you note work very differently. Firstly, as you identified, English stress is used extensively to indicate what linguists call information structure – a good example of this is how stress can be used to mark the topic of the sentence. For instance, let's consider one sentence but put the stress in different places: He gave the money to John. (Him rather than someone else) He gave the money to John. (Given as opposed to some other action being taken) He gave the money to John. (Not just any money but some money previously identified in the discourse) He gave the money to John. (Money rather than anything else that was given) He gave the money to John. (Given specifically to John rather than anything else e.g. “via John”) He gave the money to John. (John rather than anyone else) On the left of these sentences is how a native speaker would interpret the stress assignment – as far as I know, Finnish doesn't exhibit this kind of phenomenon. In addition to this kind of stress, the basic stress systems of the two languages also differs quite a lot – Finnish has one of the simplest stress systems in the world, with stress always falling on the first syllable of a word. English, by contrast, has perhaps the most complex stress systems of any language, and there seem to be all sorts of rules governing the assignment of stress to words, and nobody has managed to fully define them so far. As an example, the formation of some words can cause the location of stresses to change - “compare” has primary stress on the second syllable, but “comparable” has primary stress on the first. There's another necessary distinction that you didn't make as much, which is that written language is a very different thing to spoken language. Indeed, while the latter of these develops naturally and seems to be an aspect of some kind of evolution, whether cultural or biological, the former is very much a conscious (albeit probably gradual) invention of humans, and has to be taught to people or they won't learn it. So linguists think of spoken language as primary, with the written form being only a flawed representation of this, and so there can be an awful lot of mismatch between the written and spoken form. Written English is actually a very good example of this, as our spelling system is rather counter-intuitive, with lots of remnants of Middle English pronunciation. For instance, look at the following lines from Chaucer. And smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al the night with open eye It doesn't take very much to correct this to modern spelling, though of course the syntax looks a little odd: And small fowls make melody / that sleep all the night with open eye If we compare how these are pronounced, however, the difference is far greater. Here's my inexpert rendition of the first, and my native speaker rendition of the second. Note that the Middle English is far closer to the actual spelling, – the “e”s at the end of words are often pronounced, as is every letter of “night.” Furthermore the vowels are much more like those of other European languages. These massive changes in pronunciation without corresponding changes in the writing system are in part a result of the Great Vowel Shift, which led to lots of English vowels being pronounced very differently, and one of the knock-on effects of this was that final “e”s in words began to indicate differences in vowels rather than new syllables – compare for instance the English pronunciation of “mak” as opposed to “make.” So when you say that in Finnish every letter is pronounced, what you really mean is that the Finnish writing system corresponds more closely to modern spoken Finnish than the English system does – in fact, you even split your English rendition of “there” into two syllables, when it only has one – the “e” just tells us what type of vowel the word has. You also seem to pronounce the “r” at the end a little here – this pronunciation of syllable-final “r”s known as rhotacism, and is present in certain dialects of English, especially in Ireland and America, although some varieties on the UK mainland also use it. Interestingly, neither RP nor your accent appear to – while you use it when pronouncing “there” slowly, none of your other words seem to exhibit this property. Anyway, having said all that, it's now time to reveal that I'm actually an RP speaker myself. Here's an example of my accent, reading a text commonly used by phoneticians. RP (received pronunciation) is a dialect of English spoken in the south-east of the country that is often considered to be “standard” English – it's the prototypical accent people tend to think of when thinking of British English, and in the past the BBC always picked newsreaders and so on who spoke RP. I've heard that the term originates because it allowed people to be received in court, as apparently lawyers weren't fans of regional accents. It's pretty much the same thing as the Queen's English, but this term is a bit more confusing as firstly the Queen doesn't really speak RP, and secondly the her accent has changed over time. Plus it's a bit more of a loaded term. So yes, as people have pointed out, RP is considered to be “posh.” This used to mean it was desirable to speak, and highly sort after, with many trying to alter their native accents so they sounded more like RP speakers, but in recent years it's started to get less popular. This is because of a phenomenon known as covert prestige (where people take pride in speaking varieties of English that are considered to be less posh) has recently become a lot stronger in England, perhaps because of various cultural changes such as the increase in multiculturalism and the greater proportion of left wing views. So for whatever reason, regional dialects are in fashion, and now chosen over RP speakers for jobs such as TV announcing (the Big Brother narrator guy is a good example of this), which is nice for linguists as we get to hear a lot more dialects. If anything, RP is looked down upon more these days because of its “posh” associations, although it's of course prided in certain circles. I personally would like to speak a dialect other than RP, if only people RP is much better studied than other dialects and so a bit more boring from a linguistic perspective. Either way, it often seems to be tradition that RP is used when English is being taught as a second language, presumably because it's (outdatedly?) thought of as “standard” English. Increasingly, however, American English is being taught instead, which makes quite a lot of sense even if British English speakers don't like it much. Do upload it! There's no such thing as an awful accent if you're a native speaker, and I'm sure if yours is as diverse as you say it will be interesting. All these considerations of easiness really depend on the native language of the second language learner. As you correctly note, English inflection is very easy to a native Portuguese speaker as it's far simpler, but Finnish has even more inflection than Portuguese, so this aspect of Finnish would seem hard even to a Portuguese speaker (and even more so for an English speaker!). Furthermore, while you might find that some languages are more similar to Portuguese in their phonology, meaning you don't have as much of an accent, others will be much harder. For instance, Mandarin Chinese would be much easier to pronounce for a Vietnamese speaker than for a Portuguese speaker, as both Vietnamese and Mandarin are tonal, whereas Portuguese isn't. The only aspect of English that's objectively more difficult than most (but definitely not all!) other languages is the writing system, but as I've covered above, learning to write a language isn't the same as learning (to speak) a language. And I'm not sure what you mean by “badly conjugated” – phrases like “I don't want no trouble” (meaning “I don't want trouble”) are indeed ungrammatical in many varieties of English including RP (though the sentence is fine in RP if the meaning is “I do want some trouble”), but this is nothing to do with conjugation. It's because RP doesn't allow what's known as negative concord – multiple negations cancel each other out instead of just leading to an overall negative. By contrast, many other English dialects do allow negative concord, hence phrases like your example, and in French, even simple negation requires two negatives - “ne” and “pas.” You're both wrong, it's ing-glish or /'ɪŋ.glɪʃ/, unless you're American in which case the /g/ is optional. A couple of things here. The first is that language prettiness is very much a subjective and culturally shaped thing – while there are certain sounds like gutturals that are fairly universally thought of as ugly (except by speakers of languages that use them ), most judgements of prettiness tend to be decided for sociological reasons. For instance, native Greek speakers tend to prefer the more prestigious Athenian dialect to the Cretan one, whereas when English speakers who don't speak Greek and are unaware of the relative prestiges are given the same choice, they tend to prefer sound of the Cretan dialect, even when the choice is blind. So interestingly prettiness is very subjective, but of course that shouldn't stop you talking about it. You also spoke about Japanese not appearing to have stress. While it does use stress a little to mark things in discourse and so on, this is far less extensive than in English, and the actual structure of the language is based on timing units known as mora, whereas English by contrast is timed with stresses. French is similar to Japanese in this respect, only timed with syllables rather than mora (people have actually suggested that Indian English is also stress-timed, although this is debated). Anyway, if we look at a simple Japanese sentence, we can clearly divide it up into mora units, which roughly correspond to single hiragana and katakana characters: ringo ga dai suki ri N go ga da i su ki Each mora is given similar stress, and the language is timed to these units. Note that moras are not the same as syllables, as “rin” is a syllable yet is comprised of two mora – it's for this reason that Japanese N is sometimes referred to as the mora nasal. By contrast, the same sentence in English is very different: I LOVE APples. Each stressed syllable, rather than each syllable (French) or each mora (Japanese) acts as a timing unit. Danish is also stress-timed. Yeah, English doesn't have any rolled Rs. The standard English R is what's known as an alveolar approximant, meaning it's produced by bringing the tongue close to the ridge above the gum (the alveolar ridge) while vibrating the larynx (voicing). Spanish R, however, isn't produced in the throat either – Spanish has two Rs, as in “pero” (but) and “perro” (dog). The first of these is an alveolar flap, produced by quickly tapping the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing, while the second is an alveolar trill, produced by vibrating the tongue on the alveolar ridge while voicing. You may be thinking of the French R, which is a uvular trill – like the aveolar trill only done with the uvulum, the dangly bit at the back of your throat. The Danish R is a uvular fricative, so close to the French R, only air is forced through a small gap instead of vibrations being produced, as with sounds like S. Well, writing systems like those of English and Italian actually correspond to phonemes rather than phonetic reality, as contextual variants of the same phoneme (allophones) are never represented – for instance, the L in “pill” and “lip” is a different sound or phone, but the same phoneme. In fact the only phonetic writing systems are those designed by phoneticians, presumably because the brain doesn't store representations at the phonetic level. But yeah, Italian is one of the most phonemically accurate non-scientific writing systems there is. And Eenuh, your accent sounds amazing. A bit like other Dutch-speaking Belgian's I know, but with more of a cockney twang (which is more common for speakers of Slavic languages). Edit: If people know of something better than Rapidshare for uploading little mp3s, let me know about it and I'll reupload my files.

You will need a mouse of some some. And my 3 year old laptop with an intregrated chipset has some difficulty running it (the online version just about works, but the client doesn't at all).

I can't get the server to work - first off when I entered the IP it just said it wasn't recognised, and now every time I press connect the game crashes.

Which is precisely what I was going to say. I was going to write more about what RP sounds like and its sociolinguistic status, and compare stress systems of English and Finnish anyway. Go forth and TESOLate.

There are no good free resources for BSL that I've found sadly, but there might be a few for the linguistically unrelated ASL. The best thing you can get for a starting point is the official BSL dictionary, which is only £30ish and very big, with additional sections on grammar and so on. Anyway, I know some BSL, mostly from the perspective of linguistics, and am interested in learning more - I intend to write a little on it in my thesis.

Being a linguist I have a lot to say on this topic. Detailed post coming soon.

I built a castle on sand, so had to give it a firm floor and chose cobblestone.

Wetherspoons refused my old housemate entry just because her ID was Irish. To be fair though, she does look about 10...

I'll join, and would like to donate a few quid, but don't have a Paypal account right now...

I get IDed about half the time, slightly more so after I cut my hair a bit shorter a month or so ago. It's funny though, because people think I'm either easily old enough or trying to break the law, I guess because I'm 6 foot 3 ish with a kiddy face, so it depends whether they look at the height or the face. On my sister's 18th birthday, when I would have been 15, she got IDed and I didn't. But then again when I was about 20 I got IDed buying the Spaced boxset (a 15) which I found more hilarious than anything else. Also, my dad got IDed buying a saw in Homebase a few months ago. He's 63, mostly bald, and has grey hair with a beard.

Also if you have severe allergies you can get epipens on prescreption, which are basically adrenaline shots that you inject (or more likely, get other people to inject) if you go into anaphylactic shock (what you probably went into).