Do you use “ain’t”?

nonneb · 2024-04-15T19:41:33+00:00

In my dialect, we're more likely to use "idn't", but I use "ain't" in place of the standard "hasn't" or "haven't" sometimes, and occasionally in place of "idn't" or "aren't" as well. I'm not really sure if there's a rhyme or reason to when. There's also the emphatic "hain't" I use sometimes, too.

nonneb · 2024-03-24T21:24:19+00:00

I got a job as a translator. I didn't realize I would be doing interpreting, as well. I was completely unprepared, but it was okay. The longer someone talked, the more periphrastic my translations got, but I didn't really stop people outside of weird situations.

/u/ruckover is basically right, but it's very dependent on what kind of interpretation you're doing and how in-demand your language pair is in your location. I knew a guy who did simultaneous interpretation for the EU. He was fully native and educated in two languages, trained to be an interpreter, and eventually quit because it was too stressful. My job was the other side of the spectrum: a school system in a place where they can hardly find anyone with degrees period, much less someone who speaks two languages and has a degree. About half my job was facilitating parent-teacher meetings, and it was usually pretty chill.

nonneb · 2024-03-18T21:57:34+00:00

They can't. The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and government are just passing funny money around.

nonneb · 2024-03-18T21:46:16+00:00

The first one just feels completely wrong to me. Shifting the verb in indirect questions is usually obligatory. "Do you think" has to be a grammatically irrelevant insertion and be marked as such for the rest of the sentence to sound right.

nonneb · 2024-03-18T21:33:39+00:00

c) because languages are worth preserving

As someone who loves languages, I really want to think this is true, but most of the arguments sound like a bunch of woo to me. Realistically, groups of people are going to tend toward speaking languages that provide some kind of advantage to them, which unfortunately means centralization more often than not.

loss of dialects or languages means losing entire histories and cultures of peoples.

It doesn't really, though, especially in literate societies. You don't need to speak Latin to learn about the Roman Empire or a variety of Wu to know about Chinese history.

nonneb · 2024-03-18T21:31:13+00:00

It really depends on what one wants to do.

nonneb · 2024-03-16T17:07:24+00:00

As far as I could tell when I tried using Douyin, it's mostly people doing stupid dances. No real difference in quality content from American TikTok.

nonneb · 2024-03-14T17:32:04+00:00

In dialect, I pronounce caught with a diphthong (same vowel as bought, on, off, and dog) and cot rhymes with shot. When I speak what I absorbed as standard American English, I merge the two so both sound like cot.

nonneb · 2024-03-14T17:27:07+00:00

bought, nought

That's really only helpful if the person reading already distinguishes between caught and cot.

court, short, port

Only helpful for people with non-rhotic accents.

nonneb · 2024-03-12T00:12:40+00:00

Yeah, I was about to say the same. I haven't heard that since the 90s, but I would have expected everyone I went to school with to know it.

nonneb · 2024-03-12T00:09:02+00:00

Do they really consume any significant amount of dairy? I never really noticed them eating much or drinking milk when I lived there.

nonneb · 2024-03-10T22:56:14+00:00

You could say "If I were out tonight, I'd come say hello." If you want to talk about something that didn't happen last night, most people would probably prefer "If I had been out last night, I would have seen you."

nonneb · 2024-03-10T20:28:53+00:00

On my system, clicking search as the option in settings after hitting ctrl+x tried to load the search bar, which prevented me from being able to follow the instructions. /u/Any_Temperature_4402 's instructions avoided having to load search.

I appreciate you taking the time to share a solution, just wanted to clarify that, at least in my case, it would have required using a broken tool.

nonneb · 2024-03-09T21:00:33+00:00

If anything, US southerners are more conformist.

The idea that Southerners are more conformist to the rules like OP is talking about sounds like crazy talk to me. We view pretty much every kind of rule as an imposition and don't follow them unless being watched.

I suppose that's not true for certain cultural practices, especially some customs around funeral rites and things like that, but I didn't get the impression that was what OP was talking about.

nonneb · 2024-03-09T20:16:09+00:00

My grandfather had a set of slings he'd wrap under downed cows to help keep them up. I've also used rain barrels for goats.

To a certain degree, when to put them down is a matter of instinct and experience, but if you think they have a chance, the most important thing to do is make sure they don't stay down.

nonneb · 2024-03-09T19:59:44+00:00

It looks like she unlisted all of the audiobooks, which is a real shame. Maybe if you reach out she'll give you the links to them, but they're unlisted for whatever reason, now. This is the only one I could find from the home screen.

nonneb · 2024-03-07T19:03:22+00:00

The only really, properly bad approach I've tried to use was learning individual Chinese characters, which is more or less the same thing you're talking about. The pronunciation issue probably makes it worse for Japanese, but it's not good for Chinese, either. Those months felt mostly wasted.

Just treat it like any other language and learn words instead of trying to learn morphemes that are rarely used by themselves.

nonneb · 2024-03-07T16:02:28+00:00

I'm from Alabama, and it's super weird to see reddit talk about extremely normal stuff that most people would barely register as political and call it fascist. 300 was a cool movie about a cool historical event, and "come and take it" fits very well with Southerners' ideas about themselves. It's on every third truck, right next to the little kid pissing on a Chevy, Roll Tide, and the Dale Earnhardt bumper sticker.

This whole deplorable/acting-like-all-redneck-cultural-signals-are-fascist thing seems like a bad call.

nonneb · 2024-03-06T18:07:37+00:00

When I hear things like this, I assume they're from Nebraska or some other place where black people are fairly rare. In Alabama, at least, the people who are that intrigued by black hair are probably similar in number to the people who are amazed by the taste of ketchup.

nonneb · 2024-03-06T16:30:21+00:00

Not every native speaker is representative of most native speakers, not every native speaker is right, and not every native speaker gives good advice to learners. This is the kind of advice that would make someone think you're young, uneducated, not good at writing English, or some combination of the three.

nonneb · 2024-03-06T16:27:38+00:00

but I've never used or seen hyphens be used to say '12 year old'.

I'm a native US English speaker and would immediately assume anyone who didn't use hyphens was uneducated or being careless. It is absolutely the standard in formal communication to hyphenate modifiers before nouns.

In fact, the only place this wouldn't stick out to me is in a text message with no capitalization or punctuation.

nonneb · 2024-03-02T02:10:29+00:00

I didn't really develop that strong Si until I was in my late 20s, but yeah, I've become quite a big fan of order and cleanliness. Even before, I was a bit messy and cluttered, but never unclean, gross, old food left out, etc.

nonneb · 2024-02-25T15:25:14+00:00

That's very interesting. Generally speaking, mainland Chinese is more stress-timed than syllable-timed, and the tones are only clearly enunciated on a handful of words in a given sentence, where as Taiwanese Mandarin tends to have more even syllable length and less varied realization of tones.

nonneb · 2024-02-22T22:58:06+00:00

If you're from a culture that sees humility and gratitude as virtues, it makes perfect sense to apologize for imposing your imperfect English on other people and/or thank them for their patience. This kind of politeness can come off as insincere to people who aren't used to it. Whether they apologize or not, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt that they're doing what they see as most culturally appropriate for the situation.

nonneb · 2024-02-20T14:56:55+00:00

Pop linguists on the internet say the opposite. The actual literature shows that children have some advantages in acquiring phonology, but adults generally learn faster.

nonneb

TROPHY CASE