Supergrunch

Never actually seen Air, but Kanon (2006, i.e. the KyoAni one) is mostly good in my opinion. Lots of people seem to think it's amazing, but I'm inclined to disagree.

Surely it depends on the degree? The way mine works is absurdly complex, but sort of doesn't depend on the first year, ish.

nɑrt ɪf jiː biː 'spiːkɪn ɪn аɪ piː eɪ It's all about the arr-coloured vowels people... for this day only, I shall be rhotic!

I'm usually either working so much or staying up so late that I go to sleep pretty much instantly, but when this isn't the case it usually takes well over an hour.

Some CLANNAD after story promotional stuff: The one I saw in Akiba, and I love it. The white text on the right says "Right, work. Let's go." Lots of Nagisa. Why do you think she's wearing that dress? That's Fuko's name on the board behind Tomoya, and you can see the Furu of "Furukawa" behind Tomoyo, but then we knew about that bit of writing already. The pink text says "If this place could exist without changing..." Nice simple one. Where could Nagisa be? I can't be bothered to translate everything (can't even read it in this quality, anyway), but the white text in the bottom corner says "Nothing beats this happy day to day life." I'm looking forward to seeing the anime deal with after story, it should be great.

Good good. I saw a massive promotional poster for it in Akihabara, of

The misinformation in some of those comments infuriates me, but I doubt anyone will read anything I write so there's not much point replying. It just annoys me that people get away with nonsense such as "no missing links have ever been found" and the like. Anyway. Boring day, apart from the book I'm reading about universal grammar. I can't wait to go back to Cambridge... still another 18 days to wait.

Don't remake locked threads - if you have a complaint about a decision, PM someone about it. Public complaints ensure you won't be taken seriously. Anyway, promotion is effectively advertising, and this isn't even the right forum. [locked]

First I've come across.

Tomorrow, I shall commence BISHing. Be afraid. How long do I get, by the way?

Lewis Caroll != C. S. Lewis C. S. Lewis wrote Narnia, Lewis Caroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, and he wrote the Alice books. The paedophilia rumours are about Dodgson. Also, On the Origin of Species directly advocates religion: Whether or not Darwin believed what he was saying at this point is more arguable.

Persevere with university - it's hard at first, but becomes awesome. (in my experience, anyway) I can't wait to go back, unfortunately I still have 19 days to wait.

Pretty awesome... did many a thing, mostly in Tokyo. Might write some more when it comes to mind. I'd go with チュ rather than シ at the end there, but thanks. Sorry, would have been cool to have met up, but I was with a couple of friends who probably wouldn't have taken kindly to meetings with random internet people... Maybe next time I go to Japan, if you're still there then.

I've seen the first few episodes, thought they were pretty good.

I am returnèd from Japan, as of yesterday. Hello again.

Off to Japan until 11th September - goodbye people!

I will destroy you all... as soon as I get back from Japan.

Did you see King Lear at the globe? If so, that's a crazy coincidence - I was there last Thursday... and am flying to Japan tomorrow.

I'm talking about this meaning of the word inflection, overt inflection in particular. Well, it's more of a linguistics topic, so I suppose English teachers of any kind are less likely to know. No, words such as "his", "its" and "ours" (possessive determiners) are far older than the possessive use of the apostrophe. (which, as I said, derives from the genitive case) Pretty much, but it's old English rather than Latin that had the "-es" ending; most Latinate words weren't introduced into English until around 1100, when the language changed to middle English. And "hybrid language" is a bit of a misnomer - all languages have some inflection, it's just that old English has a lot more than modern English. Right, let's look at old English first: It was a highly inflected language, so words tended to overtly inflect to indicate things such as case. Among the inflecting words were possessive determiners. There was also a genitive case, which often involved words ending in "-es". Now, how does modern English differ? It's not nearly as inflected. Most words no longer overtly inflect, but a few still do, such as possessive determiners. The possessive determiners used are "his", "its" and the like. Note there are still no apostrophes used; nothing is being omitted. However, the genitive case no longer really exists, and the "-es" ending has changed to "-'s", with the apostrophe marking removal of the e. Hence "dog's bowl" indicates a bowl belongs to the dog in question. But what do we do if there are multiple dogs that own the bowl? Well, "dogs's bowl" is a bit clumsy, so people settled on "dogs' bowl", simply because it's neater. This is the only apostrophe usage in such pronouns that doesn't really indicate any omitted letters. (though you could argue "-es" is omitted from the end of the word) In addition, apostrophes are now used to indicate shortenings such as "hasn't" for "has not", and this usage extends to "it's" for "it is". This is completely unrelated to the possessive determiner "its", and the apostrophe is not used to indicate possession - why do that, when we already have the "its" possessive determiner? So "ites" is a bit meaningless. Firstly, words have changed a lot since old English, so "it" wouldn't be the same. Secondly, there is no need to use the genitive case, as we can simply use the possessive determiner. The genitive case marks nouns, not determiners. As I said, the Latin influence was relatively small until 1100, so I think that's not that likely. There was still some influence, what with the Saxons originating from Europe, and the widespread use of ecclesiastical Latin, but I doubt this would be great enough to have much effect on old English cases - more likely is the introduction of a few Latinate words. I love all grammar.

To answer this you need to look at old English, which was much more inflected than modern English. (as was middle English, though to a lesser extent) In a highly inflected language, all (or most) words have to change form according to their function in the sentence - for example, their grammatical case (nominative, accusative etc.). Examples of highly inflected languages are Latin and Icelandic - often in such languages inflection rather than word order defines word function. In modern English, little inflection remains, but there are still some vestiges - note how "I gave it to his" is wrong, but "I gave it to him" is right. Pronouns are among the words still inflected in the English language, and "its" is the third person singular possessive determiner - basically, the right pronoun for phrases like "its box". Other possessive determiners are things like "ours" and "yours", which are similarly inflected, and similarly use no apostrophe. In old English, there was also a genitive case, used to indicate possession, which usually involved words ending in "-es". Today, this is still sort of present, but an apostrophe is used to mark omission of the e - hence "the dog's bowl" and so on. At some stage, the idea of placing the apostrophe after the s was introduced, to indicate multiple things possessing, which seems relatively (though perhaps not entirely) logical if you think about it. Of course, apostrophes are used to mark omission in many other situations, such as in "mustn't" (must not), and "this day's long" (this day is long). This usage extends to shortening "it is" to "it's", which causes a lot of confusion because of the similarity with the third person singular possessive determiner combined with the fact that it looks like the modern equivalent of a genitive case marker is being used. I care.

I'd stalk you, but we never seem to be in the same place at once.

Birthdayness! And happiness.

Ayup. In which case, yay juryness.

That picture is despicable - it's "you're", not "your". Seriously though, we don't want to see that...

General information on languages and writing systems: Omniglot. Information on Japanese: The Japanese Page, Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese grammar, Jim Breen's WWWJDIC. Information on Ancient Greek: Ancient Greek Tutorials. You can find various things on other fun writing systems like Hangul (the Korean writing system), the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Ukranian, etc.), Indian writing systems (Hindi, Sanskrit and so on), Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and all the millions of other scripts by searching on Wikipedia and the like. I love writing systems.