To my knowledge, neither the USSR nor the PRC ever claimed to actually have achieved communism (hence why the USSR has "socialist" in its name, not "communist"), but they were governed by "communist" parties in the sense that they were following in the tradition of Marx and Lenin and at least claimed to want to achieve communism at some point. Of course, the USSR no longer exists, and the PRC has undergone a series of economic reforms since the 1970s, after the death of Mao. They now claim to follow something they call "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", but as far as I can tell it seems very similar to something I would call "capitalism in an authoritarian one-party state and a bunch of blabla about how it technically doesn't contradict Marx", but ymmv. So imo the CCP is now only called "communist" for historical reasons, and in that sense I see it as similar to the case of North Korea, but they might still have some theorists who would disagree with that assessment. And in the West in particular many people just mix up terms like "socialist" and "communist" anyway, and also often don't realize that the economic systems of Russia and China have changed a lot since the end of the cold war (or Mao's death).
h34d
Some websites/apps for finding language exchange partners:
- https://www.italki.com/
- https://conversationexchange.com/
- https://www.language-exchanges.org/
- https://language.exchange
- https://www.tandem.net
- the links in https://learnlanguagesfromhome.com/language-exchange-apps-websites/
There might even be more that you can find by googling for "language exchange" or "tandem" etc. (I'm fairly certain that there are some that I saw on Duolingo forums years ago and that aren't among those mentioned above, but I forgot their names.) Unfortunately I don't know which ones of them are both working well on a technical level and actually have available tandem partners, but you can probably just try out a few and see if it works out for you. You could also consider starting a lemmy community for finding language exchange partners, but I would guess that there aren't enough language learners on lemmy yet to make it really work well.
Depending on where you live, universities or (community) colleges in your area (even if you're not a student yourself), or possibly a Goethe institute, could also be places where you can find language classes and/or tandem partners.
sidebery (best tree tabs I can find)
I was looking for something like that, thanks! I also followed these instructions to hide the native tab bar.
Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?
Yes.
Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?
No, because you constructed them by merely replacing the verb "have" by the preposition "of" in situations which have nothing to do with "of" after "should"/"would"/"could". I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, since neither I nor the people I cited ever claimed that this should work in the first place. The claim of in particular the author of the first paper I cited is that for some speakers there seems to be a novel construction modal verb + "of" + past participle, not that the preposition "of" has the same function as "have" in this case or in any other (in this case, the novel construction as a whole would have more or less, but not entirely the same function as modal verb + "have" + past participle, but "of" would still be just a preposition).
I don't know man, Oxford Dictionary (click Grammar Point to expand) says that [...] it is definitely considered wrong in standard English.
Yes, it certainly is considered wrong in standard English, but the interesting thing is that in some non-standard dialects there might be genuinely a novel grammatical construction which actually uses the preposition "of". I mean, you don't need to find that interesting, but I do. And if that is indeed the case, it would mean that the speakers of those dialects are not making a purely orthographic mistake like when people confuse "they're" and "their", for example, but are rather speaking or typing in their dialect.
Just read the second (or the first, but that is more technical) link I shared. Some native speakers do in fact seem to say "should of" even when the "of" is stressed, so in their dialect it would be grammatical.
I believe this can happen if your instance (in this case lemm.ee) doesn't yet know about the new community. But if you enter the full url (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/lemmy_wishlist) into your instance's search, it should look for it and find it. Maybe you have to wait for a couple seconds but for me this usually works.
While it is true that "should of" etc. can easily originate from a confusion between "'ve'" and unstressed "of", which sound identical, the statement
"Should of" is incorrect
itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.
Interestingly, there seem to be at least some native English speakers who genuinely do say "should of" (with a stressed "of") sometimes. This paper for example argues that people who say "should of" really do use a grammatical construction of the form modal verb + of + past participle. One argument the author mentions is that this would also explain the words "woulda", "coulda" and "shoulda", since "of"->"a" is quite common in general (e.g. "kind of" -> "kinda"), but "'ve"->"a" basically doesn't occur elsewhere (e.g. no one says "I'a" or "you'a" instead of "I've" or "you've"). Another is that the reverse mistake, i.e. using "'ve'" in place of "of" (e.g. "kind've"), is much rarer, which is a clear difference to e.g. the situation with "they're"/"their"/"there", where people use these words in place of the others in all combinations frequently. I recommend this blog article for a much longer discussion.
Also, whether genuine mistake (which it almost certainly is in many cases, although probably not all) or different grammatical construction, YSK that "should of" etc. didn't just become popular recently, but have been used for centuries. E.g. John Keats wrote in a letter in 1814: "Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter.". Many more examples (some older as well) can be found e.g. here or here.
TL;DR: While in many cases "should of" etc. can well be a mistake, originating from the fact that it sounds identical to "should've" when unstressed, there is some interesting linguistic evidence that at least in some dialects of English native speakers really do say "should of" etc. (i.e. in those cases it is not a mistake, merely non-standard/dialectal).
It's not entirely the same though. Some of the "tankies" in the West seem to be Maoists more than Stalinists, as far as I can tell. Besides, some (many?) Stalinists also consider the term "Stalinist" derogatory, and prefer to call themselves "Marxist-Leninists".
Reminds me of a quote by Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels from 1935, after the Nazis took power:
-- source
Rough translation:
For fascists at least talking about freedom of speech and the like is just another tool they try to wield in their quest to gain power, nothing else.