Jon Ericson

653 reputation

315

bio	website	fivesecondreview.wordpress.co…
	location	Pasadena, CA
	age	39
visits	member for	1 year, 6 months
	seen	Feb 14 at 1:22
stats	profile views	11

My day-to-day work is with a combination of C, ksh and PL/SQL. I enjoy asking and answering questions that come up at work. I also dabble in Perl, lua and LaTeX. My boss has asked me to learn Python as well.

My favorite living philosopher is Alvin Plantinga and my favorite dead philosopher is Blaise Pascal. I think Paul of Tarsus is too little credited as a force in Western philosophy. If you think I'm a Christian, you're right.

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. -- 1 Corinthians 1:20-25 (ESV)

At home, I have a potted herb garden, potted dwarfed citrus, and a hanging hummingbird garden. My wife and I are also trying to grow a son, but he's harder to feed and train properly.

	653 reputation	bio	website	fivesecondreview.wordpress.co…	visits	member for	1 year, 6 months
315 badges		location	Pasadena, CA		seen	Feb 14 at 1:22

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32 Comments

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May 31	comment	How important are accents in written Spanish? You forgot to say: "Posted from my mobile device." That would have allowed me to +1. ;-) Seriously, the best answers site some sort of authority, not just express an opinion.
Feb 3	comment	Why don't Spanish words start with “sp”? @Peter: I'm curious about that too. But I didn't even know that there were linguistic rules that explained the issue. Maybe that would make a good separate question?
Jan 31	comment	How outdated is the Spanish of the Reina-Valera Bible? The comparison is very helpful. Maybe because I don't ever open them side-by-side I've never felt like one version reads better than the others. Mal really doesn't fit with the way I think of this passage. Problemas does. Thank you.
Jan 10	comment	Can I learn to roll my R's? Learn to pronounce 'r' Japanese in order to pronounce it in Spanish seems a long way to go. Do you happen to have a source for that?
Jan 10	comment	Can I learn to roll my R's? +1 for "rotacismo". I'll have to look at the exercises.
Jan 10	comment	Can I learn to roll my R's? I've been singing Spanish-language songs just about every week for years (in a Spanish-language church service). But I haven't focused on pronunciation during those times and not on the R in particular. Practice at home in song seems like a good idea, however. +1
Dec 13	comment	Origin and usage of “¿” and “¡” @pferor: If you peruse the article I linked to, you'll see that something like the mirrored question mark was first proposed by Marcel Bernhardt, a French poet, in 1899. There have been a large number of proposed irony and sarcasm marks. But these comments are much less about Spanish and much more about typography. ;-)
Nov 28	comment	Why don't Spanish words start with “sp”? The concept of "sibilant blends" helps--I hadn't noticed that more general rule. (But now that I see it, the rule is intuitive.) Do Spanish words not start with them because of pronunciation patterns then?
Nov 28	comment	Why don't Spanish words start with “sp”? Got it. I didn't know about the rules for "syllablification" in Spanish. Thank you.
Nov 28	comment	Why don't Spanish words start with “sp”? I'm not sure why the syllable couldn't be divided elsewhere. In English, "special" is divided "spe-cial".
Nov 28	comment	Why don't Spanish words start with “sp”? @Joze: But in English we do have words that start `esp`: "especially", "espionage", "espresso", "espouse", etc. Some are on loan from French or Italian, but there's no rule against that spelling. (There are hardly any rules of English spelling, but that's a topic for another site. ;-)
Nov 28	comment	Are there native-born Spanish speakers that can't trill their R's? Yet another reason my Spanish just sounds dorky. As with English, it seems the very phrases used to describe the condition are unpronounceable for those of us who suffer from the defect.
Nov 23	comment	How should I ask someone to repeat something they've said? @hippietrail: At our church, we have an Italian drummer who sometimes plays in the Spanish-language service. It surprised me that he spoke with the rest of the band in English! My wife got on best in Spanish when we traveled to Italy and even I understood a surprising amount of spoken Italian. But I suppose the drummer and the band are interested in exercising their English skills, which are valuable around here in the long run.
Nov 23	comment	How should I ask someone to repeat something they've said? Yes, the suggestion to "slow down, please" is useful. But sometimes I need the other speaker to use different phrasing rather than just going at my learner's speed. Are any of the above more useful than the others for that purpose? (Might be better as a separate question, however.)
Nov 23	comment	How should I ask someone to repeat something they've said? Welcome to Spanish.SE, by the way. It seems like the consensus is that I continue using ¿Cómo? Thanks for the input.
Nov 23	comment	How should I ask someone to repeat something they've said? Interesting. I was taught that ¿Perdón? is best used when you are asking permission to part company, as in: "Excuse me, but I have to take this call." I've never heard_¿Perdona?_. Could it mean something like "I'm sorry. Would you repeat that?" I wonder if it works in other places... Thanks for the suggestion.
Nov 23	comment	How should I ask someone to repeat something they've said? Hmm... I learned that that phrase was best used when you accidentally ran into someone or stepped on their toes or some physical invasion of space like that. But I can verify that ¿Mande? is common in Mexico and therefore LA.
Nov 23	comment	¡Buenas! greeting in morning @Diego: The first time I heard it (in Bolivia) I thought the speaker was too lazy to finish the phrase. But a day or two later, I realized it was the usual greeting. With new people I tend to use the full phrase to avoid confusion. (And, since it's clear I'm not a native speaker, I don't want to be seen as being lazy.)
Nov 23	comment	Can “los cristales” be translated as “mirrors” or “looking glasses”? @hippietrail: I don't plan on asking any more of this sort of question since the translation takes a long time that I no longer have. (I didn't know about the Literature site and I'll pretend I didn't to save me losing my days to projects that don't pay the bills. ;-)
Nov 23	comment	Can “los cristales” be translated as “mirrors” or “looking glasses”? @belisarius: On the plus side, nobody can prove I was wrong. ;-) I love reading Borges in translation and I really want to be able to read his poems in Spanish. There can be no better way than to try translating them myself.