linguoboy wrote:Osias wrote:linguoboy wrote:My bad; I was guessing at what you meant by "strophe" since you were using it with a meaning that doesn't exist in English.
What about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StropheThe term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem
Considering the lyrics as a poem.
I'm not really sure why you're arguing. I've given you my expert opinion as a fluent native speaker and paid tutor of English and as a trained linguist that no fluent English-speaker is going to understand "strophe" with the meaning you tried to give it above unless (a) they also speak a language where a cognate of
στροφή is used to mean "verse of song" (and I'll point out that I speak more than one of those languages and I didn't make the connexion) and suspect L2 intereference or (b) they know the term from a study of Classical poetry and can make an inductive leap. The common term--in fact, the
only term you can reasonably expect anyone to recognise--for "the part of a song which is not the chorus" is "the verses". Do with that information what you will.
Osias, I concur with linguoboy; strophe in English is not used to mean a verse/chorus or stanza of a song or poem. The only or at least most common general word we have is stanza. Even with your quote above, if you read through the rest of the sentence on Wikipedia, it says:
The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length
Therefore when talking about the most basic structural unit in a poem or song lyrics, you can only talk about the stanza.
Osias wrote:france-eesti wrote:The person after me would disguise himself/herself as Mary-Jane to rescue me.
I'd like to use the famous "singular they", but my spellchecker refused both "theirself" and "themself".
Yeah unfortunately neither "theirself" or "themself" has become popular enough that spellcheckers and the like accept it. There are those who still will use it. Alternatively, you could use themselves with singular they. This is what I tend to do, since from a syntax point of view, themselves goes with they. And from a semantic point of view, I just consider both to refer to a singular entity instead of a plural one.
By the way, nice catch on the addition of the reflexive; I was going to make the same correction but you beat me to it!
Osias wrote:france-eesti wrote:Actually I was directly quoting from Fool's Garden's song "Lemon tree"
I just read the lyrics, they eventually sing "I wonder why" after a couple of "I wonder" at the ending of the strophes, I think the name for that is ellipsis.
Leaving aside grammar corrections (since that was done already), france-eesti was correct in just quoting, "And I wonder". While ellipsis is a thing, I don't know if Fool's Garden was employing ellipsis when they ended each verse with, "and I wonder". If someone said that to me, my natural response would be "you wonder what?". And in the chorus, Fool's Garden essentially answers that by saying "I wonder how? I wonder why?".
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