Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 August 30

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August 30

Using the word " seeing "

hi .. I am not much familiar with english language but i always try to speak it.

I want to know, is the word " seeing " used generally.

for example: 1. after seeing him crying I got emotional. 2. Are you seeing any black spot here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.140.235.82 (talk) 11:13, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's often used like that. Also, there's a common expression: "Seeing is believing". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:52, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Not commonly used, but the equivalent could be "to see is to believe". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:34, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

There's also a colloquial idiom "seeing as" (or "seeing that") meaning "given that". Seeing as this is Wikipedia, and read world-wide, I'd better mention that this idiom might be regional. Dbfirs 15:59, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Your sentences would be corrected to:

1 "After seeing him cry, I got emotional" and

2 "Do you see any black spot here?"

You're use of the progressive in the second sentence is substandard, but it is in increasing use, compare the McDonald's slogan, "I'm lovin' it". μηδείς (talk) 16:30, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

As a non native English speaker: Is Medeis´ sentence "You´re use of ..." correct? The woman seems to be a linguist, but it I would have written "Your use of...". --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 17:40, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Go to the top of the class, Cookatoo. There must be a term that means "While correcting another's error, the speaker/writer makes one of their own that is at least as bad". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:28, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Muphry's law? AndrewWTaylor (talk) 20:56, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I take Medeis's point about the progressive, but it intrigued me, because to me there seems to be a subtle difference between "After seeing him cry ..." and "After seeing him crying..." For a clearer example of what I'm getting at, try this substitution. "After hearing him singing" implies for me a casual event, perhaps overhearing the chap warbling in the shower as you walk past the window. "After hearing him sing" definitely for me suggests a formal event: in this case, attending a performance at which the singing was the focus of attention. I hadn't noticed this before. I wonder whether this admittedly rather nebulous distinction seems familiar to anyone else, or whether I am just slicing the language too thinly. As for the your/you're thing, I suspect autocorrect, which drives me doolally on a regular basis. - Karenjc 22:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Undoubtedly (re autocorrect).

Ditto for the distinction thing. Scenario: They're looking for the Next Big Thing and enter stage right is a guy with exactly the right look. One judge (almost literally) ejaculates "He's the one!". Another judge retorts "Yes, he looks perfect, but I want to hear him sing". They'd almost certainly not say "I want to hear him singing". Alternative scenario: "How did you know there was anyone at home?" - I heard someone singing in the shower (never I heard someone sing in the shower). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:44, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I do not make that distinction, even if some people do. See YouTube search results for "heard sing" and "heard singing".

—Wavelength (talk) 00:56, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

I might also change "After seeing..." to "After I saw...". StuRat (talk) 02:33, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

• "Once I heard you sing the song": you sang it in its entirety.

"Once I heard You singing the song": you had begun, I don't know if you finished.

μηδείς (talk) 21:53, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

One use of "see" and "seeing" involves "understanding". One might say, "I see what you mean", or "I am seeing the point that you are making." Bus stop (talk) 22:32, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

As/Like

What's the difference? In Spanish both mean como. ZooTgirl ^[zootalk] 12:19, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

That one gets kind of tricky, and requires examples to make it clearer. It depends on how it's used. The Real Academia page[1] says como derives from the Latin quomŏdo, which actually means "how" ("[by] what manner"). EO says out that in English, "as" and "so" are really the same thing,[2] and in any case those words along with "like"[3] are derived from old German rather than Latin. Don't forget tan which means "so" in Spanish, and which EO would claim is functionally the same as "as". The Spanish word tambien, "also", derives from tan bien, which we could read literally as "so well", but in common English usage the expression is "as well", which means "also". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:21, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

See http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/grammar-reference/and

and http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/like-versus-as?page=all.

—Wavelength (talk) 15:43, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

So, how should I use them? Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 17:09, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

As you like to? --Jayron32 17:30, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Ohhhhh.. O_o? But I cannot say I like people as you, I should said I like people like you, right? Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 17:37, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

You definitely shouldn't say "I as people like you". --Jayron32 00:02, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Jay's just messin' with ya. "I like...", as a verb, is etymologically vaguely related to "like" as an adjective; however, in Spanish, "I like people like you" would maybe be something like Me gustan personas como usted. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:51, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

See also the grammar controversy section of Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Matt Deres (talk) 14:08, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Oy! And that mini-controversy led to ads saying "What do you want - good grammar, or good taste?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:44, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

For a semi-related topic, see "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana".

—Wavelength (talk) 19:08, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Miss Bono: Language evolves, and the word "like" is used in more contexts than used to be considered acceptable. Some modern usages of "like'" are rejected by language purists, but they have lost this battle because a wide variety of uses of "like" are widely accepted. Here are some correct usage examples: These have only a noun after them, and I think that everyone accepts them:

I feel like crying.

I feel like an idiot.

In the following, like means as if, but as if sounds kind of formal, whereas like may be objectionable to some purists:

I feel as if I could cry

I feel like I could cry

In the following, like means as; as sounds formal, and like might be objectionable to some purists:

He tries hard in school, as he should

He tries hard in school, like he should

Duoduoduo (talk) 17:07, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Duoduoduo Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 19:13, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Like has a hallowed place in youth-speak, and it will never be supplanted by as. E.g. "im as" to mean "I said" - nah, that makes no sense at all. Let's stick with the obviously correct version: "im like".  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:27, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Why did they use a Romance vocabulary?

Why did our Anglophone ancestors start using a Romance vocabulary instead of the native Germanic one? Did they think that it was ‘cool,’ or whatever the equivalent word was back then? --66.190.69.246 (talk) 21:01, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

After the Norman conquest, French (originally Norman French) was the language of the ruling class. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 21:08, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I know, but why did people start speaking (somewhat) like them? --66.190.69.246 (talk) 21:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

"Though the great mass of ordinary people spoke Middle English, French, because of its prestigious status, spread as a second language, encouraged by its long-standing use in the school system as a medium of instruction through which Latin was taught. In the courts, the members of the jury, who represented the population, had to know French in order to understand the plea of the lawyer. French was used by the merchant middle class as a language of business communication, especially when it traded with the continent, and several churches used French to communicate with the non-religious people. A small but important number of documents survive which are associated with the Jews of medieval England, some featuring Anglo-Norman written in Hebrew script, and typically in the form of glosses to the Hebrew scriptures."

(See the subsection "Language of the people" in the article Anglo-Norman language for references. Further down in that article, there is also a (short) subsection titled "Influence of Anglo-Norman French on English". ---Sluzzelin talk 22:31, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

That did not last forever, though. What's confusing is that we still have foreign words when they are no longer necessary. Am I wrong? --66.190.69.246 (talk) 22:44, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

You might be interested in reading about linguistic purism in English. Surtsicna (talk) 22:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

What's a foreign word? The changes that have happened in English over the past several millenia are not unlike what happens to every language ever, and will continue to do so forever. The illusion that language is or should be a static thing should be instantly recognized as silly by anyone whose spent even a cursory amount of time looking at the history of linguistic evolution. --Jayron32 00:07, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

You may also be interested in this quotation from Usenet denizen James Nicoll: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." Even before the Norman Conquest, English was borrowing from Latin, Old Norse, and other "foreign" languages. And few would maintain that such borrowings are "not necessary"; they tend to occur when English does not have a concise way of expressing a particular concept or nuance. Sometimes there's no discernable reason for the ascendancy of adopted terms——why do we call the stuff overhead the sky rather than the welkin? It just stuck for some reason. Deor (talk) 00:23, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but what language has not done that? Is there any widespread language which is recognizable to speakers from the same age as, say, Old English? Would modern French speakers recognize their language from 1000 years ago? Would modern Mandarin speakers? Languages change, evolve, borrow, steal, morph, merge, split, and always have and always will. English is not particularly alone in this regard. --Jayron32 00:33, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

A human being is the end result of ALL of his ancestors, not just those we might prefer to talk about. Same with languages. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:35, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Languages often borrow from their neighbors. There are a number of Latin words in German, a number of Arabic words in Spanish, a number of aboriginal words in Mexican Spanish, etc. I like to say that English is the most democratic language, because we will freely take in any word from any language which fits a given situation... and then, of course, freely butcher its pronunciation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:46, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

"Butchering" is our prerogative once it's become fully absorbed into our language. We are not required to use the plurals or case endings or capitalisation protocols or diacritics that would apply in the language of origin, so why the pronunciation? Admittedly, we do often retain some of these things (plurals being the usual suspects - except people routinely use some plural forms as singulars, e.g. "this criteria", "a phenomena") - but mostly we don't. We're more than happy to talk of bureaus rather than bureaux; kibbutzes rather than kibbutzim; dachas and gulags rather than dachi and gulagi; role rather than rôle (pace some WP editors); muesli, pretzel, hamburger, sauerkraut and wiener schnitzel (or snitzel) rather than the capitalised versions; and so on. Expecting us to master the intricacies of other languages without any education in them is futile. Other languages borrow English words wildly and pronounce them in ways that are often incomprehensible to our ears. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:34, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Icelandic - 1000 year old Icelandic texts are almost perfectly intelligible to current speakers. (Replying to Jayron's question) Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:46, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

On the theoretical side, you may wish to read language contact, language assimilation and maybe cultural assimilation. This is quite common, in varying degrees, throughout history when speakers of one language "conquer" speakers of a different language. The Hebrew of the Ancient Israelites "became" Judeo-Aramaic language, Vietnamese is so sinicized that is almost un-recognizable as a Mon-Khmer language. Filipino (Tagalog language#Vocabulary and borrowed words uses a high proportion of Spanish words, etc. The opposite also happens, where the conquerors take on the language of their new land, as with the Central Asian Bulgars adopting the Slavic language of the area.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 00:49, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

It really is not that "we still have foreign words when they are no longer necessary." It is true that when a word isn't any longer necessary, it may fall out of usage (see mercer, cordwainer, and manciple), but I would argue that we kept the foreign words we did precisely because they became useful. See this artcle, where it says:

"A noted advocate of English linguistic purism was 19th-century English writer, poet, minister, and philologist William Barnes, who sought to make scholarly English easier to understand without a classical education. Barnes lamented the "needless inbringing" of foreign words; instead using native words from his own dialect and coining new ones based on Old English roots. These included speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, fore-elders for ancestors and bendsome for flexible. Another 19th-century poet who supported linguistic purism was Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wrote in 1882, "It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done [...] no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity"."

Unless we are really trying hard to be bendsome with our speechcraft, we use words such as "flexible" and "grammar" because they are necessary. One thousand years ago this would not have been the case, but these words have become a part of our language, replacing words that would have been used before. Evidently "atelic" used to mean "horrible" . But you can't use the word "atelic" that way anymore if you want to be understood[4]. It is also kind of strange to call words such as "flexible" 'foreign words'; they may be latin in origin, but they are English. It's not like you walk into a restaurant, see a beef sandwich on the menu, and ask what "beef" means because it's a 'foreign word'. You know what "beef" means; it is completely assimilated into our language, and is used or understood by virtually all English speakers. "Beef" is an English word, even if it comes from the Latin "bos, bovis" via the French "boeuf". Falconus^{p t c} 15:07, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the section "Influence of Anglo-Norman French on English", the following statement baffled me:

 several churches used French to communicate with the non-religious people

So far as I know there was only one church in medieval England, the Roman Catholic Church, whose services were in Latin. And since, apart from Jews, everybody was subject to this church, there was no option to be an atheist. What then does the statement mean? --Hors-la-loi 08:52, 1 September 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hors-la-loi (talk • contribs)

Churches=parishes, obviously.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:04, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Now I get it! Does it mean that several parish churches used French to communicate with lay people? --Hors-la-loi 14:59, 1 September 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hors-la-loi (talk • contribs)