I have asked vets several times about diet, none had any concerns about them being fed dry food, or even only dry food. They can’t free feed though because one is a fat bastard.
If I were to feed them wet food I’d have to feed them tiny quantities 10 times a day for them to not starve. Every so often I feed them an offcut of meat or fish from human food, and most of the time they flop it out of the bowl onto the floor, push it around, lick it, and then abandon it.
In case anyone is interested now this “helpful” character has departed:
The conventional explanation for “bad big wolf” sounding “wrong” is that “big bad” is an example of ablaut reduplication, which has a fixed sequence of vowels.
This is a weak explanation for two reasons: a good example of ablaut reduplication is for example “bish bash bosh” where only the vowel changes. This is a weaker example, and so ablaut reduplication is a weaker predictor of the pattern, because the final consonant is not the same between “big” and “bad”. Secondly, “big bad wolf” is a phrase from a folk tale and hence deeply embedded in the language in its own right. It’s hard to disentangle whether “bad big wolf” sounds strange to native ears because it’s a violation of the pattern of ablaut reduplication, or because it’s a violation of the specific example, “big bad wolf,” that all native speakers heard many times as children.
Remember, this is all a tangent from whether English has a rigid adjective order. A stronger example to consider is A1: “big beautiful house” versus A2: “beautiful big house”, and B1: “little beautiful house” versus B2: “beautiful little house”. As a native speaker, I strongly prefer A1 but B2. The adjective order adherents say it should be A2 and B2.
So, I don’t think the supposed rule of adjective order really exists.
I think if the helper were still around, they would say that actually this just proves their point. Even though they complained about the “rule” of adjective order, actually the fact that there is no rule is even worse! (how convenient, if true), and you just have to learn each example - B2 not B1, A1 not A2 - one by one, and their real point is that English is particularly bad because of this.
Unfortunately, because they are apparently not any kind of linguist, they never presented any comparative examples. Tagalog has a strong preference for adjective order, for example. Languages with flexible word order in general, such as Finnish, nevertheless have a preferred default word order and if you don’t learn it you will sound weird. Languages which use prepositions pair certain verbs with certain prepositions (so in English you sit in your seat, watch the performance in English, and in the end the good guys win) but this pairing is arbitrary and if you pick the wrong one you’ll generally be understood but sound wrong (in German you sit im Sitz, watch auf Deutsch, and am Ende the good guys win).
Languages - all languages - abound with aspects that mark out non-native speakers. That’s because they’re complex things that incorporate huge aspects of culture, not merely a means of communication. That’s not something that anyone needs to “defend” and it’s not something that makes a language cease to be “real”. Is it the same degree in all languages? I’m sure it isn’t, but that’s not the point either.
What exactly are you trying to “help” me with?
I’m talking about orthography because the thread is about how language (German originally) is written - i.e. orthography. You didn’t mention anything about grammar until this latest comment; your previous comment mentioned orthography and vocabulary. All I did was continue talking about what I was already talking about.
The rules are so convoluted and nonsensical (the adjective order is a great example)
The adjective order is an old, overblown meme. The meme came with a ready-made exception (“big bad wolf”) which is no less of an exception for the fact that it came with ready-made excuse (“ablaut reduplication”).
Did you notice that “old, overblown meme” violates the order (opinion follows age)? That’s because it’s overblown.
Did you know that other languages have adjective orders of various specificity and rigidity?
Yes, it’s a fascinating topic, and yes, there are many markers of non-native English speaking which are impractical to teach. But it sounds like you’re trying to steer the conversation somewhere I don’t want to go, and I’m not going down there. As soon as you start categorising languages as “real” or “not real” you’re on your own. Your misunderstanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, likewise.
The idea that English’s orthography is crazy because it came into written use late doesn’t really hold water. The ancestors of Modern English have all been written down for many centuries, even though post-1066 no-one was using it for a good while at court.
It’s more that English as a whole is split between a Germanic and Romance ancestry, with the orthography of both sources being represented, while standardisation took place right around the time of a huge shift in pronunciation - the great vowel shift - fossilising an orthography that represented a bygone pronunciation.
In fact I think more can be blamed on English writing being standardised early than late, and then not keeping up with changes in pronunciation: the infamous <gh> cluster used to represent a pronounced /x/ sound - compare English night with German Nacht, or knight with Knecht, or freight with Fracht. All these spellings were standardised from a language that pronounced this consonant! If English really standardised late, then the likelihood would be that these words would not have a (written) consonant where the pronunciation doesn’t have one.
I tried to find how much of a premium traceable gold carries but wasn’t able to. Got a good surface for how much?
Well the rest of the rules around written English are arbitrary, why would this one be different?!
I think I’d write fish bowl separately though.
German compound nouns are just written without spaces. There’s no grammatical difference between “Schlafsack” (= Schlaf “sleep” + Sack “bag”) and “sleeping bag”, except the way they’re written down. In English we analyse a “word” as “a thing you write down with spaces on either side”, which is valid as a definition or as an analysis, but it’s not what we really think of when we talk about words, which we think of as something more fundamental.
If, tomorrow, we decided in English to write compound nouns without spaces, the language would have suddenly gained thousands and thousands of words, yet the only real difference would be a rule about writing things down. Spoken English would be exactly the same, so nothing fundamental about the actual bits of English would have changed.
But government isn’t able to do every single thing in its remit, so effective protest also sets government priorities amongst multiple valid things it could be doing. That means that a protest for something that is a job of government could be encouraging the government to do something less important. It could be encouraging the government to adopt measures that are harmful to the country even though they achieve something.
I consider it part of the government’s job to secure the country’s borders and prevent illegal immigration… but I think it’s pretty far down the list of priorities compared to other stuff. So protests against immigration, aimed at getting the government to reduce it, are dumb in my opinion. Yet it seems to me that your rule gives it the thumbs up because it’s “pressuring the government to do its job” and “a valid from of active citizenship.”
I suspect you don’t really want to see more anti-immigrant protests, so I think it’s more complicated than that.
me_irl
No, I don’t believe this is a joke.
What a strange non-sequitur
I understand that, but often questions are based on assumptions, and those assumptions need to be bright to the foreground to properly explain.
When you ask, “why don’t they…” you must believe doing whatever it is will achieve something. No-one asks “why don’t they make teapots out of chocolate” because everyone understands it would be a bad idea. But people do ask “why don’t they make a machine to suck CO2 out of the air” it’s with the assumption that:
Your question contains assumptions but they’re less obvious.
So every protest broadly aligned with your views is justified, basically? That’s exactly the rule of thumb I’m trying to avoid.
At some point I realised I have no idea how to evaluate protests in other countries. We have protests, and some extremely important, some are dumb as fuckshit, and some are just an excuse to riot. I know this, because I know the issues… but in a foreign country when they protest against bad conditions at school I have no idea how bad their schools are. Are they worse than our schools, or better? Are the problems extremely widespread, or somewhat rare, but amplified by some part of the media to seem widespread? No idea.
If only you’d made any attempt to be convincing whatsoever.
Yeah… I don’t exactly the relationship between S0ix, s2idle, and “modern sleep” - I’m sure there’s some overlap but to me it’s all the same: it’s not old-fashioned S3 sleep, and it just doesn’t work properly. I remember reading that with my laptop specifically, S3 was replaced with S0ix so I’m pretty sure that’s the right term in this case ;)
But of course it’s not all they know. I’m not saying they only nibble at wet food out of my backside - I’m saying it because that’s what they did when I give them wet food - as kittens.