Disqus - Latest Comments for marnen

Re: Some Observations on Morphophonological Adaptation of English-derived Loanwords in Russian Slang

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 21:13:00 -0000

Interesting article. A few thoughts:

* Файфок rather than the expected файвок is fascinating.
* Are you sure кекс comes from the English “cakes” directly, rather than from the German “Keks”, which is singular? (The German is ultimately a borrowing from the English, but that’s probably not widely known.)
* Is мани perhaps considered plural by analogy with деньги, of the same meaning?
* You say Russian doesn’t have syllabic L, but what of words like рубль? (That’s not quite syllabic, perhaps, but it’s an example of a word ending in consonant plus L.)

Re: The Geography of the “Onion” Vocabulary

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 20:36:26 -0000

I love this article, but I thought I’d point out a couple of minor issues: the Turkish word is “soğan”, and the Welsh situation is rather vexed—all the words seem to be of the “onion” form, but there are many variations; look up “onion” in https://geiriaduracademi.or... (unfortunately I can’t seem to find a direct URL for the definition).

Re: The &. operator in Ruby – Georgi Mitrev

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 12:42:14 -0000

Not quite true. Since nil and false are not equivalent but are both falsy in Ruby, nil? treats them differently from !:

nil.nil? # true
!nil # true
false.nil? # false
!false # true

Sometimes this difference is important, and so sometimes only one of nil? or ! is appropriate.

Re: Throwaway Code

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 14:22:13 -0000

When does a test *not* provide value, unless it is describing behavior that is no longer desired (or behavior that can be verified by other means such as a strict type system or formal methods)?

Re: Throwaway Code

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 14:21:28 -0000

There are surely times when we write code we know we will immediately throw away. But I don't think tests are a good place to do that.

In the example given in this article, it's surely true that we might not have written the acceptance test if we hadn't found this particular bug. But IMHO that doesn't mean that we should throw it away once we have the lower-level tests in place: keeping the acceptance test will prevent us from regressing on this bug *even if* we entirely refactor the lower-level code, so it's not redundant to keep it around. The distinction I like to make is that the acceptance test verifies behavior, while the unit tests verify implementation.

In general I'm not a big fan of throwing away tests *as long as* they describe functionality that we still want to verify.

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: gerbil

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 14:59:36 -0000

Huh, I had always wondered if there was any connection between “gerbil” and “jerboa”, but discounted it as unlikely. I guess I was wrong!

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: mesukan

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 15:44:12 -0000

And then there’s “consultant”, which used to refer to the person doing the asking, not the one being asked...

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: mesukan

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 15:43:14 -0000

You see this sort of development with passive/impersonal constructions in English too. Think of the development of the word “like” (v.) from “please” in Early Modern English (Hamlet contains “it likes us well”) to “enjoy” in current usage, so that “it likes us well” from Hamlet would now be “we like it well”. Or, for a more modern example, I’ve seen people (native speakers at that) post things like “any replies would be grateful” instead of “any replies would be welcome” or “I’d be grateful for any replies”.

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: alachson

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 18:23:56 -0000

I wonder if lanx is connected to Gk. λάγανον and Lat. laganum ‘flat cake’, whence probably Ital. lasagna...

Re: Whoever Blinks First Loses

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 14:58:35 -0000

I very much doubt that it’s inertia. I doubt that financial service companies’ lawyers would be OK with leaving clauses in the contract that they don’t intend to enforce. More likely is that they enforce it selectively, and care less than they should as long as they’re still getting their transaction fees.

But they do seem to enforce them at least sometimes (at least, I know they enforce bans on minimum charges sometimes when they’re notified, so I’d assume it’s the same here). It’s worth a try, anyway.

Re: Whoever Blinks First Loses

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 14:43:48 -0000

If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t put it in the contract, would they?

They’re not as good at enforcing them as they should be, but if you report them to the card issuer’s merchant violation department, they’ll at least check it out. It’s in card issuers’ interest to have their cards accepted with as few barriers as possible, which is why they prohibit asking for ID.

Re: Whoever Blinks First Loses

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:57:43 -0000

In the US?

Re: Fully Armed And Operational Feminine Wiles

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 11:29:04 -0000

I’m well aware of that. I’m from the NYC area and have traveled in Oregon. And I’ve even known a woman from NJ who didn’t know how to use a gas pump because she’d never had occasion to learn.

But that’s an entirely different matter from what this customer did. (And BTW, my Jerseyite friend, when confronted with a self-service gas pump, responded with “how do I use this?”, not “will someone pump a girl some gas?”.)

Re: The Geography of the “Onion” Vocabulary

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Tue, 19 May 2020 00:07:00 -0000

I assume that just as кромид has a Greek connection, so too does праз to words like πράσο?

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: partzuf and frum

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 14 May 2020 08:52:04 -0000

If “prosopon” means “mask” but eventually came to mean “person” as well, then it in fact has a similar development to “person”: a “persona” was originally a mask worn by actors (through which the sound of their voice projects, hence “per-sona”).

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: derash

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Mon, 11 May 2020 14:57:27 -0000

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Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: peshat

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Mon, 11 May 2020 02:41:22 -0000

Ar. basat is cognate to Heb. pshat? Really? Wouldn’t Heb. p normally be cognate to Ar. f?

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: shipud

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 08 May 2020 10:07:14 -0000

And of course there’s the souvlaki-like specialty from around Binghamton, NY, called spiedies, from the Italian “spiedo”, which means “skewer”. I assume this is somehow related to the Greek...

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: seder

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Fri, 08 May 2020 02:34:52 -0000

The showbread might well have been unleavened, so perhaps this is a Pesachdike topic after all!

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: praklit

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 07 May 2020 13:01:03 -0000

And “parakaló” (παρακαλώ) means “please” in Modern Greek. I assume this is from the same root and would literally mean something like “I request” (parallel to German “bitte”, Italian “prego”, Hungarian “kérem”, and many others).

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: ababuot

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 07 May 2020 12:02:51 -0000

One small issue: why would there be a prosthetic alef on a word that doesn’t begin with a consonant cluster?

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: sylvester

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Thu, 07 May 2020 11:11:33 -0000

Well, no. 31 December happens to be St. Sylvester’s Day, but that’s not why it’s a holiday: look at all the other saints’ days that aren’t celebrated as holidays even by religious Catholics. 31 December is celebrated as a holiday only because it’s New Year’s Eve in the Gregorian calendar, which is the main secular calendar in most of the world. It’s no more a religious holiday than Thanksgiving is, and there seems no reason to say that Jews shouldn’t celebrate it. Whether they should call it St. Sylvester’s Day is a separate question.

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: sufganiya

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Tue, 05 May 2020 10:10:10 -0000

“Digamma” is not a double gamma. Rather, it’s the modern name (from the shape) for the Ancient Greek letter ϝ, corresponding to Hebrew ו, which was pronounced w and dropped from Greek when the w sound itself was lost (compare Lat. vinum and Gk. οἶνος, originally ϝοῖνος). When this letter was still in use in Greek, though, it was probably called wau, not digamma.

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: ayin

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Tue, 05 May 2020 10:03:19 -0000

I assume the “soft” ayin corresponds to Arabic `ain (ع), while the “hard” one is ghain (غ)?

Re: Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective: yamin

Marnen Laibow-Koser — Tue, 05 May 2020 10:01:03 -0000

The pictographic origin represents the sound of each individual letter. The meanings of the individual letters’ pictographic origins are not relevant to understanding the word as a whole; it’s not a logographic script like Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs.