Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Username

jayles

Member Since

August 12, 2010

Total number of comments

748

Total number of votes received

228

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Latest Comments

“If I was” vs. “If I were”

  • March 1, 2014, 6:12pm

cum essem parvulus loquebar ut parvulus sapiebam ut parvulus cogitabam ut parvulus tuncque didici linguam populi Romae factusque sum vir

“If I was” vs. “If I were”

  • March 1, 2014, 6:05pm

Lingua populi Romae lingua deorum semper non oblita atque non oblitanda saluatio omnibus ominbusque problemis humanis...

“If I was” vs. “If I were”

  • March 1, 2014, 5:56pm

Fortisan si omnes illi incolii...

“If I was” vs. “If I were”

  • March 1, 2014, 5:54pm

Fortisan si toti illi incolii olim apsumebent sui dies grammatica linguae latinis eruditione, omnibus minor tempora esset in vicis alii populi necare. An fortasse nos seniores in irreale praeterito habitant.

@WW after an intial spike 1800-1820, it just wanders along till 2000 where it suddenly rises back to the initial levels. Works in Firefox

“This is she” vs. “This is her”

  • February 27, 2014, 5:45pm

The map is on Wikipedia under "treaty of trianon"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ethnographic_map_of_hungary_1910_by_teleki_carte_rouge.jpg

Note the area covered is "Greater Hungary" and includes parts of modern Slovakia as north as the Tatra mts, most of Romania, hunks of Croatia, Serbia, and a good slither of SW Ukraine. The red areas indicate Hungarian speaking places, and so on. Widely touted by Hungarian Nationalists - think the current PM, as well as the Rightists (Jobbik) - and still taught in Hungarian schools so the gripe lives on.

take it on/off and put it on/off

  • February 27, 2014, 5:34pm

@WW yes Polish is like Russian (apart from the script) ; your examples sound almost the same: ходить / входить / выходить / приходить; and the prefixes are inseparable - same in Latin/French/Spanish. However in Hungarian the particle is sometimes separable: "feladtam" = I gave up; "nem adtam fel" = I didn't give up.
(And maddeningly "elado" = for sale; "kiado" = for rent - so confusing! - and thus "eladtam" = I sold it; "nem adtam el" = I didn't sell it.

AFAIK only English can form the noun in two different ways with different meanings like "the lookout", "the outlook"; "an outbreak", "a breakout".

take it on/off and put it on/off

  • February 26, 2014, 9:20pm

Hungarian itself has phrasal verbs - "meg" or "el" often correspond to "up" in English, giving a perfective, or sense of completion. Unfortunately, "put on clothes" in Hungarian is more like "dress up", and "dress up" more like "dress out", while "undress" is more like "take down" rather than "take off". The one that used to bug me was "post" a letter, in Hungarian is like "give up", but "Don't give up" translates word for word..
So try learning some Hungarian if you would understand the learner's plight. As for teaching phrasal verbs, with a monolingual class it's a good idea to mark up your own copy of the teaching materials with the translation and prick up ears when they start whispering Hungarian. My success rate for phrasal verbs was abysmally low but "ne adj fel!" "Making Sense of Phrasal Verbs" (Martin Shovel) is still my favorite.

“This is she” vs. “This is her”

  • February 26, 2014, 8:47pm

@Jasper Parts of western Ukraine were at one time part of Poland =- Lviv (or Lvow) for example was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939. Other bits were part of the (Austro) Hungarian Empire until the Treaty of Trianon around 1921.
Linguistically, "Ukrainian" used to slide off toward Polish/Slovak in the west, village by village. There was a survey of language use in Eastern Europe carrried out around 1920, which was supposedly used to determine the current borders, creating Romania, Czechoslovakia and so on.
Out in the Ukrainian countryside things stil tend to look like they did in 1950.....

@WW "for_CONJ_" on Ngram shows a marked resurgence over the past decade, which threw me. However, I have just realized this might be skewed by republication of old books.
The real reason for my asking was I was asked whether it would be a good idea to include "for" as a conjunction in academic writing (ie IELTS). ??
[I often ban sts from using "and/but/so/because/however/on the other hand" to force practicing alternatives like "as/since/although/in case/in sofar as..." ].