willyt (u/willyt) - Readit News

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

throwanem · 14 days ago

Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!

willyt · 13 days ago

And also ignoring British English (and probably other international Englishes too); writing ‘try put’, ‘go put’ or ‘go see’ for example would get a red mark and a correction from the teacher in the UK.

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

treetalker · 14 days ago

Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.

Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)

[1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)

willyt · 13 days ago

‘Try and’ is correct British English and the Register is a UK publication. If the author had written ‘to try make’ they would have gotten in trouble with their editor and ‘to try to make’ doesn’t flow as well, to my eyes at least.

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

vehemenz · 13 days ago

Both are "correct." I'm not saying this is why, but there are many dialects in British English, so it might be more difficult to pin down what is "correct" compared to American English.

willyt · 13 days ago

But you would have your essay corrected if you wrote “go put” in any British school (and possibly other ‘commonwealth’ countries) but it’s fine to say it in informal speech; sometimes we hint at ‘and’ by saying the ‘n’ and sometimes we don’t in regional dialects. In the US you would have “go and put” corrected if you wrote it in an essay. So there is a meaningful difference.

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

bsoles · 14 days ago

As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.

willyt · 14 days ago

In written British English it would be correct grammar to say “try and” or “go and”. In speech it would be said “go’n” with very little emphasis on the ‘n’ and some dialects drop the ‘n’ completely but would still write ‘and’. I suspect that this would also be true for other dialects of English from NZ, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, India etc but I stand to be corrected.

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

mdcurran · 14 days ago

'Go put your shoes on' is sensical in British English. If I heard someone saying this, I wouldn't bat an eye.

willyt · 14 days ago

Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)

willyt commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

willyt · 14 days ago

‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.

willyt commented on Introduction to Indian English oed.com/discover/introduc... · Posted by u/sandwichsphinx

susam · 2 months ago

I think the most confusing one is the usage of "I'll revert back" to mean "I'll get back to you". At least once in my life, I've seen an actual confusion caused by this. Here's how it went:

Let's call the two people involved Bob and Raj. Bob was working in the US and Raj was based in India. Bob emailed the team, addressing Raj, and said one of the attachments in a service needed to be deleted (I don't even remember why anymore).

Raj replied something along the lines of: "Yes, fine with me! Please delete and revert back."

Bob immediately replied, "Once the attachment is deleted, it's gone! It can't be reverted. Please confirm if you really want me to delete it."

It took a bit of back-and-forth before everyone was on the same page. What Raj had actually meant was simply, "Please delete it and get back to me."

willyt · 2 months ago

That is a common usage in British English as well. E.g “I will update the draft document and revert back to you”.

One of the most annoying things about Duolingo is that they haven’t spared a week of an intern’s time to come up with a way of substituting the British/Indian/Irish/Austrailian/New Zealand/South African… word for the American English word. OK there’s a lot of slang out there and you could really go down a rabbit hole but when the usage is well documented in e.g. Collins-Robert there’s no excuse really.

willyt commented on Why English doesn't use accents deadlanguagesociety.com/p... · Posted by u/sandbach

TacticalCoder · 2 months ago

Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways?

For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).

Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".

No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.

Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.

I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.

Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.

Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Source: I'm a native french speaker.

willyt · 2 months ago

I’ve been learning french and for the most part once you learn that you just start but don’t finish saying the last letter of any word and you understand which letters you don’t pronounce on the end of the verb that change between je/il/elle/on (usually the last one) and ils/elles (usually the last 3) it’s not that hard. To test my pronunciation I can read a french word I’ve never heard before and have a pretty good chance that the apple speech recognition in notes will get it or conversly I can hear it and have a good chance of spelling it correctly. By contrast I am a native British English speaker, I have two postgraduate degrees, I can read the ‘dearest creature in creation’ poem perfectly and still there are words I would avoid saying in a professional or academic context for fear of saying them wrong and looking ignorant. And good luck pronouncing the name of any UK town or village correctly. What is hard about french is remembering if something is masculine or feminine.

willyt commented on A brief history of hardware epidemics eclecticlight.co/2025/06/... · Posted by u/ingve

vikingerik · 2 months ago

Yeah, the headline is using "epidemic" clickbaitly just to mean widespread, not transmissible.

The classic real example of actual transmissibility was the Zip drive click of death. A bad drive would damage disks, which would in turn damage another drive they were put in. The case was rarer than people thought but did happen. https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm

willyt · 2 months ago

I got an electric shock plugging in a zip drive once. They used to arc when you plugged the mains cord into the back of the drive or the power brick, I forget which.

willyt commented on Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018) kevinchen.co/blog/cant-st... · Posted by u/wonger_

CJefferson · 3 months ago

In many areas of computing, I hate setting pen and paper exams.

Asking people to write Java (or whatever) on paper is crazy, it doesn't really line up with anything you would ever do in the real world, and expecting people to memorize the signatures of functions feels like a total waste of time.

On the other hand, we have to accept that LLMs are I think, at this point, better than over half of all 1st year University students, so we can't let students use LLMs, without either letting half of students pass with no effort, or making tests harder and failing half of students -- and that isn't a long term solution, as I imagine LLMs are just going to keep getting better.

willyt · 3 months ago

Couldn't you have an exam room with raspberry pi's flashed with a fresh install of debian (or whatever) and no internet and just say you are allowed to lookup anything that's preinstalled on the system plus a PDF of the go to reference for whatever language you are asking them to program in.