Oh sorry! I didn't realize we don't translate from English to English. All these sentences that started with "How about" made me feel that I was living in a trailer park. My real concern is that if the English sentences sound too "low life" then at some point it will affect the translations into other languages and then the corpus in that language will no longer be representative of that language.
You can delete my English sentence if you want.

Wait, we don't translate English-to-English?

But what if two sentences are interchangeable?

@Dejo: I don't understand your point regarding "low life" sentences.

@Dejo
The "low-life" sentences should be translated accordingly.

If you want to create a more formal sentence, feel free to do so! ^^ But it *should not* be linked to a less formal one, because it will cause confusion.

If you want to warn people against using some sentence, you can use comments (E.g. “This is ... because ..., sentence No. ##### is a more ... variant.”) or tags.


@FeuDRenais
This is the only case when they can be linked to each other, at least it's how I understand this. :) Though it’s not very useful anyway, since Tatoeba focuses on translations, not on rewording.

@Dem: I think it's very useful, in the sense that it immediately clarifies things and says "these sentences, for all purposes of use and connotation, are equivalent". Otherwise, learners will wonder what the difference is, despite them being linked to the same thing(s).

Otherwise, "how about" is NOT limited to trailer parks. It's quite common and enjoys widespread use, even in formal, educated contexts.

I also personally believe that more low-life sentences would be nice, since they would allow for a greater variety of the language, and not just the language that educated translators use. When are we going to have an ebonics contributor?

@FeuDRenais Re:"low life" sentences. In colloquial English a "low life" is a person of the lower social classes.(And they usually have little respect for grammar.) What I'm talking about is what's called Registers. People who speak French or German for example use a totally different level of language for speaking to strangers than they do for speaking to family or friends. When studying French they give you exercises to recognize 4 different levels of language. In English this is almost unheard of. You don't change your accent or your vocabulary as you walk out the door and meet the public.

@FeuDRenais: When you're brainstorming, coming up with new ideas then "How about" has it's place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re...iolinguistics)

In colloquial (and standard, to the best of my knowledge) English, "low life" carries a bad connotation and refers to people of base character. It's not an expression I would recommend using unless when trying to insult someone. It's not a fair expression either, since the two meanings mix and one is often drawn to assume that people of lower social classes are of low character (which is why I'd never use it to refer to people from lower social classes).

All that writing aside, I still don't see the problem with having such expressions. They carry their own rules (they're not simply nonsense), and have their own beauty. Of course there need to be standards for how a language is presented, and it won't be based on that, but on the standard English that the educated speak. Still, it would be neat to have expressions from all echelons (with appropriate tags for the non-standard).

Wrote too much. Sorry.

Regarding, again, "how about":

I disagree. I can completely see educated people saying, e.g., "how about some more orange juice?" to one another.

@FeuDRenais:
> "these sentences, for all purposes of use and connotation,
> are equivalent". Otherwise, learners will wonder what the
> difference is, despite them being linked to the same thing(s).
I strongly believe that such sentences are exceptionally rare.

Even when all dictionaries state the two words as full synonyms, the 2 words may be perceived as different.

@Dimurat:

Hmm, I agree on "rare", but not on "exceptionally". As two counterexamples: لازىم and كېرەك in Uyghur are virtually identical, as are "ought to" and "should" in English. I can't imagine a context where replacing one with the other would invalidate the meaning or change it.

@Ogon’Vozrozhdeniya:
> as are "ought to" and "should" in English. I can't imagine
> a context where replacing one with the other would invalidate
> the meaning or change it.

“Lest I should forget” is possible. Replacing it with “ought to” invalidates the meaning, since “ought to” can’t function as an auxillary forming a Suppositional mood. :P

I think we learnt some differences, but I don’t remember them now. :) I have to take my groupmake’s notes (too lazy to write them myself) and check.


I don’t know about ‘lazim’ and ‘kërek’ in Uyghur.