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December 10[edit]

Word for people in their twenties[edit]

How people in the age of 20-30 are called? Twens? Twenagers?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:17, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's funny that the German Wikipedia has the article de:Twen but the English one does not.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:23, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

LOL. Thank you for making me aware that the German de:Twen is actually a German invention - it seems odd that it does not exist in English, with Teen|ager being an established term, "twen" seems so obvious an equivalent term. odd.

and twentysomething seems very plausible to me, seeing that thirtysomething even made it into a TV-series title. Pardon my German (Fiiiisch!) (talk) 02:02, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See wikt:vicenarian.—Wavelength (talk) 00:24, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Twentysomethings - Cucumber Mike (talk) 00:27, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In English, tweens are 10-12 year-olds, while those in their 20's are, as noted above, twenty-somethings. God, being a tween was intense. 03:45, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Although a recent British sitcom, The Inbetweeners, is about older teenagers, and a children's TV programme Tweenies is aimed at the pre-school age-group. A 1970s pop song by The Goodies called "The Inbetweenies" was about thirty-somethings. "Tweens" is not often heard on this side of the Atlantic. Alansplodge (talk) 14:12, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's (tweens is) not heard so often on the left side of the pond either, but when it is it refers to 10-12 year-olds. μηδείς (talk) 21:51, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think "pre-teen" would be more widely understood (but probably not a good Google search term). Alansplodge (talk) 22:34, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Lucky" ? StuRat (talk) 22:47, 10 December 2012 (UTC) [reply]

If octogenarians are people in their 80s, should not people in their 20s be bigenarians? (Where does vicenarian come from?) → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 00:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The etymology of "vicenarian" is at wikt:vicenarian, the page to which I provided a link at 00:24, 10 December 2012.

—Wavelength (talk) 02:00, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On the matter of morphological inconsistency, please see Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 May 29#Math word complaints.

—Wavelength (talk) 06:46, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Michael J -- These come from the Latin set of "distributive numerals", and do not contain the root of "generation" or "genealogy"... AnonMoos (talk) 11:27, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Cardinal	Distributive
decem	deni
viginti	viceni
triginta	triceni
quadraginta	quadrageni
quinquaginta	quinquageni

This still doesn't answer we there is a c in viceni and triceni and a g in quadrageni, etc., since the cardinal numbers all have g. I notice that [Lewis & Short] list a variant form of vigeni. I suppose it's just one of those random inconsistencies... Lesgles (talk) 02:34, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

From a comparative/historical linguistics perspective, the question is where the "g" comes from at all in the Latin tens names. Possibly from combining the "d" and "k" in a "-dkmta" suffix into a single consonant sound (though in some cases the "d" of "dkmt" seems to have already disappeared in late proto-Indo-European)... AnonMoos (talk) 02:59, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See Kortlandt, Frederik (1983) Greek numerals and PIE glottalic consonants, pp.101-102.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:51, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your-all's answers, although I knew some. But I am still surprised that English, having the word for the 13-19 period and even the neologism for the short 8-12 one, has not a slang word for the 20-29 period of life (I think this period is quite distinctive and important), but instead has two words: one is a clear bookish Latinism and the other seems to be a long and obscure compound.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:17, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If we were to compile a list of all the things for which we think there should be a single word or short expression in English, I suspect it would be a very long list, Lyuboslov. And probably true for most if not all other languages. On the one hand we have the OED, which contains millions of words that most people have never even heard of, let alone use; on the other hand, there's long been perceived to be a need for a gender-less third person pronoun that would help us avoid using "he or she / him or her / his or her(s)" or using "they / them / their" as a singular. Creating such a word should be a snap for a world that's got people to the Moon and back and invented the internet and decoded the human genome and solved Fermat's Last Theorem and eradicated smallpox and so on, yet the best efforts of many people have failed to come up with anything that's caught on. Sometimes, as a culture, we like having unsolved problems. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 19:42, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Kortlandt ref is quite interesting. As for concepts, we could imagine one that related to blond men between the heights of 5'11" and 6'1". The reason we don't do so is economy and necessity. If such men were to become the only living people that women would consider using the last of their contraceptic sponges to have casual sex with, we would probably come up with a concept for them like "spongeworthy". Until that point it's more economical to use a phrase. μηδείς (talk) 03:35, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Le Roi des Etoiles poem in French - problem with 2 lines and a translation[edit]

The poem goes with Stravinsky's Zvezdoliki.

I have a copy of the poem with some slightly different lines in the middle. I'm trying to verify whether your version is correct, or the one that was published some years ago in a Los Angeles Philharmonic program. Any idea how I can track it down?

Your link to it is as follows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_roi_des_%C3%A9toiles

If your version is correct, I need an English translation of the lines "Autour de lui brille la dides / entourent son chef rayonnent." I cannot find a translation anywhere for "dides."

The Philharmonic version also appears to have problems, as it has 2 more lines than your version, does not have the word "dides" and repeats a line.

Any idea where I can find an "official" version with no problems, in French and English? FloraMacD (talk) 16:07, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For future reference, Flora, the best way to link to a Wikipedia article within Wikipedia itself is to simply surround the title with double square brackets: [[<title>]] - thus, Le roi des étoiles. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 17:05, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, ah! If you take a look at this sheet music, you can read below the first staff : Sept gloires d'étoiles splendides entourent son chef rayonnant. Below the second staff: Autour de lui brille la foudre au ciel ravagé, lourd d'orages,. The "dides" is the end of the word "splendides". The transcription on the Wiki page Le roi des étoiles is wrong. — AldoSyrt (talk) 20:50, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]