Teacher Discussion Forums

'Love is a many-splintered thing'

Clicky

Hi folks Is it just me or is the wholesale change to the "Georgia" font or similar for the index pages to this forum a bit much? Dave - or Dave's stylesheet designer - it's nice for bold stuff and headlines, but can we go back to boring old Verdana/Sans-Serif for the content bits and menu items? P-p...

OK, enough already. In terms of meaning, ESL/EFL are roughly interchangeable. But: ESL: predominantly American usage. By association with ESOL (English as Second or Other Language) can be more about the teaching of English to foreigners in the country of the target language (the US/Canada/Australia,...

Hi Andrew It should be straightforward. Here's a checklist - some of whose points will be a bit bleedin' obvious but hopefully one might be of relevance: 1) have you got a web server environment with Apache (recommended), PHP (compulsory), MySQL (ideally, but other dbs will work)? 2) The downloads a...

This is your standard smoke-and-mirrors escape, Shun. You have done nothing other than pontificate on a one-sentence basis until this point. Why move the target now? And what is the bold type supposed to prove? I'd tend to agree with you on the contextualisation point - albeit for reasons not connec...

Hi Sameera If what you want to do is actually write some software yourself, Andrew's links are good - one addition I might make is Microsoft's .NET framework, especially the free webMatrix server which basically does a lot of hard stuff like databases for you. If, on the other hand, you don't want t...

So it's not merely a matter of which is more simple in syntax. Markedness seems to be independent of tense or aspect.

That certainly can be the case where syntactical variation is constrained. In English at least, intonation will often do what syntax doesn't.

Al

You're both right. 'But' as simple conjunction would need 'not' after it to preserve sense and syntactically to act as pro-verb. However, 'but' has another meaning, close to 'except'. In this case it can be seen as a preposition and so need only be followed by a noun phrase - in this case, 'you'. Ch...

I find it amazing how anglophones (such as the author of the above letter) have such severe judgments against Canadian French (or any other form of French that isn't from Northern France), but watch English programming from all over the world and never would say that the Crocodile Hunter, Eddie Mur...

Sian,

Why on earth would anyone work with a Mac ?

Have you got a month free while we explain?

Andrew and Lauri

Sorry I didn't get back over the weekend on this - I have found what appeared to be the fix but you guys pipped me to the post. Nice one...

Cheers, Al

What is in debate here is the appropriateness of the particular example from Bryson, and your attempt to air brush out the idea of tenses having anything to do with time A bit of a strawman, really, Stephen. Nobody here's made that claim, and nor would they. The point is that tense is not always ti...

I don't have dream-weaver, so if you could make the links it would be very useful. But I'm not sure that my image is quite ready yet, so don't do anything yet. From your point of view does it matter if you link to another GIF or text page? I'm likely to to either or both. The smart move would be to...

HI all

To Andrew in particular - if you're using dreamweaver, there's a hotspot option you can use to make particular areas link graphically - you can do it by the naked eye, not using abstruse maths to determine the coordinates.

I have DW if you don't. It's a 10-minute job. Want a hand?

Al

import javax.BullSheetDectector; public class BogOff{ public static void main (String[] args){ System.out.println ("this is an English language forum, not an outreach centre for wannabe programmers. Which you'd know if you'd RTFI ('I' being 'instructions' here)"); goFigure(); } }

Do you mean that English has developed an aorist tense, Al. Er, nie mam zielonego pojecia , mate :? ('Haven't a clue' for those who don't do Polish). I've forgotten all my Greek so can't remember what makes the aorist what it is. As I recall though the aorist is a time-reference tense and in Greek ...