English questions

I should have used a broader title for this thread but oh well.

Much had been said about the (mis)placement of commas and how it can alter the meaning of a sentence, but what about periods? I initially didn't notice it in the following sentence:

"There is no good reason. American taxpayers must stop subsidizing Elon Musk."

I'm not entirely sure it would have been 100% natural English, but I was completely fine with it. The only reason why I double checked is that it seemed to go against the rest of the article.

Also I don't think I'm as obsessed about Musk as my posting habits would have you think, but then again, am I? :/

As usual, let me use a thread for something it wasn't originally meant to be used for. In this case, I will randomly mention a few fact and questions I've found interesting in the first episode of the Linguistics After Dark podcast I've recently discovered. I was about to create a catch-all thread on linguistics, but the podcast revolved almost entirely around English, so there.

Syntactical ambiguity: "I like syntactical ambiguity more than most people": are you comparing your liking for SA with your liking for people, or with people's liking for SA? They described it as "everyone's favorite joke", but I'd never heard it.

Morphological ambiguity: Does "unlockable" mean "(a door) that can't be locked" (un-lockable), or "that can be unlocked" (unlock-able)?

The above ambiguity stems from the fact that you can't easily tell what part of a word an affix is meant to modify, but a simpler kind of ambiguity is when a prefix has multiple meanings. "Inflammable" was mentioned as a contronym: its usual meaning is "capable of burning, easily set on fire", but it also has an opposite nonstandard meaning of "incapable of burning, not easily set on fire".

Regional variants of words: An organizer ("a non-electronic notebook or calendar or something similar, used to organize one's affairs") can be called an agenda in certain parts of the US, like in French. There's also the word "bubbler" for a drinking fountain. Also used in Australia.

"Guys": The first time I heard a mixed-gender group being addressed with "guys", I found it weird since to me "guy" was equivalent to French "gars", which strictly refers to males even in the plural. My conclusion was that I had to deal with it, that's how English works, let's move on. But apparent from this discussion is that some native English speakers from the US actually do take issue with this use. It reminds me of how in recent years certain French feminists have been questioning the standard rule of French that "ils" is the pronoun you have to use when referring to a mixed-gender group (a rule that's commonly and somewhat unfortunately referred to as the "le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin" rule).

Pluralizing names: different actors have played the role of Spider-Man in different movies. Do you say "Their Spider-Men are different but equally valid?" or "Their Spider-Mans"? I thought this was very well put, because it's about different incarnations of the character known as Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, as opposed to say a group of people all dressing up as Spider-Man. I would go with "Mans" because I treat "Spider-Man" more as a proper noun than as a description (the article is almost never used, for one thing), and the usual way to pluralize names is to add an S, but "their Spider-Men" sounds okay.

'Inflammable' may be nonstandard, but warning signs on things that can be ignited say 'flammable', because of the danger of misinterpretation. Although you could argue that it would be a form of natural selection.

I haven't heard anyone here object to 'guys' for mixed-sex or female groups. Some people may object to the word in any context as an Americanism, particularly in Frinton.

The masculine/feminine rule is (occasionally) known in English as 'the masculine embraces the feminine'. Which may be sexist, but still quite cute.

"Guys and girls" to address a mixed-gender group is cumbersome. So I say let's just embrace and be embraced. If I were to reflect our gender reality when addressing the regulars of this forum collectively, it would be even more awkward, as there's only one female other than me: "guys and girl"? Nope. Now, if I were addressing a female-only group it would cost me nothing to say "girls" instead of "guys", and I think I'd prefer it.

The fact is, though, that "guys" is getting grammaticalized. "You guys" is mostly just a plural "you", and people aren't necessarily thinking beyond that anymore (hence the female use).

Here's a real English question:

I've been listening to a podcast called "History of the Germans" (Etaoin may or may not remember me posting a link in our facebook chat and asking if people could detect a German accent in the speaker, and Bitmap replying that he sounded totally German). The author of the podcast is a German who's been living in England for quite a while (I think 20 years or so). His English is mostly excellent apart from a few slips and oddities here and there and a slight (to my mind, maybe not to Bitmap's) German accent. But there's a recurrent thing that sounds unusual to me: the guy keeps using the phrase "other than" in the sense of "unlike"; e.g., "other than his father, he was a good politician" (I just made up that sentence, but it illustrates the usage.) Is that a Germanism or an idiosyncrasy, or is the phrase actually used that way in some (British?) dialect(s)?

It seems from a bit of googling that "anders als" can be used that way. So maybe it's indeed a Germanism.

Again misusing a thread, this time to make an observation*: it's like "I, uh" (or whatever punctuation you want to use) has become lexicalized, judging from American TV series at least. When someone is about to say something difficult to say (hurtful to themselves of to others, risky, embarassing, etc.), they often start with "I uh" followed by a pause. The "uh" tends to be long. One of the things that make me think it could be considered lexicalized is that what follows is sometimes a non-sequitur, like "I uh... Did you do it?", in which case it almost functions as a mere interjection, one that indicates a troubled state of mind perhaps. Of course, it's not always followed by a non-sequitur.

*I won't apologize for it. The Everytime thread is convenient, but since the search function of this forum is total crap, what's said there should be thought of as lost forever.