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October 9

Lambda

My physics prof keeps pronouncing the Greek letter lambda as "lam-buh". From what I can tell of the IPA in the article, this is incorrect. And I've always pronounced it "lam-duh". Who's right? Dismas|^(talk) 09:23, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Merriam-Webster's says \ˈlam-də\ [1], so I would say you are correct. Gabbe (talk) 09:27, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If that's the only thing strange about your physics professor, consider yourself lucky! --Zerozal (talk) 18:43, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Forget professors! My physics teacher in high school had a lot of strange quirks, one being his inability to pronounce the word 'organism' without stuttering and correcting himself time and time again. Only this word though! We all 'knew' why. :) --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 02:49, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No no. This isn't the only off thing about this guy. He also pronounces "entropy" as "enthropy", the reason for which I haven't figured out just yet. He also constantly gets off on tangents. Most to do with growing up here in rural Vermont. In a 1 hour and 15 minute class period, we'll get to maybe twenty minutes of real actual physics work. Dismas|^(talk) 04:32, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've had lecturers with the same tendency to go off on tangents (often telling the same (vaguely) humorous anecdotes repeatedly) - they usually know how much they can get away with and still finish the syllabus. It can be a good way of giving people a chance to catch up if they write notes slowly. --Tango (talk) 18:31, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Are both sentences the same?

"The" or no "the": "The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All." or "Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All."

"Close on" or "close to": "Between February and December 1942, close to half a million Jews were killed in its gas chambers by the German SS." "Between February and December 1942, close on half a million Jews were killed in its gas chambers by the German SS." Mr.K. (talk) 17:10, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Close to" or "close on" are colloquialisms. "Nearly" or "approaching" might be better. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 17:15, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, "nearly" and "approaching" seem better alternatives, at least regarding style. But do all 4 options mean the same? For example, if they were 500,488 Jews, is it still "approaching half a million?" Or "approaching" always means "almost"?--Mr.K. (talk) 17:21, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Nearly" and "close to" and "close on" mean "almost". 500,488 is "over" half a milion. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 17:26, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Approaching" in this case is almost always seen as approaching upwards, e.g. "Unemployment Approaches 10%". If one has surpassed a number like 500,000, then it's already been approached, and can't be approached in the opposite direction (I'm talking about the rhetorical sense here, not pure logic.) The same applies to "nearly" and "close to". "Close on", which is idiomatic and not universally clear, might be more slightly more ambiguous. However, one could easily call 500,488 "about", "around" or "approximately" 500,000 without the reader assuming it was either above or below that number. How about "more than 500,000", or "over half a million"?

As for the first question, one can't say without context, since they're not complete sentences. I would put in "The" because otherwise "Responsibility to Protect" sits out there rather vaguely and ambiguously. "A Responsibility to Protect" might be better than both, dependent on the context and the meaning intended. —— Shakescene (talk) 17:55, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The first question was about a published book about the responsibility to protect. "The.." seems more natural, but I was not sure. The author also chose "The...". --Mr.K. (talk) 18:13, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This may be an artefact of Wikipedia's house style, which prefers to reduce the number of articles beginning with "The" to ease searching and indexing. For example, The United States redirects to United States, The Declaration of Independence redirects to United States Declaration of Independence, and The Law of Nations is empty while Law of Nations (redirecting to Public international law) is not. There are a few exceptions, like The Hague, The Times and The Bronx, but the title of an article in Wikipedia or similar works is not always a reliable guide to current common English-language usage. —— Shakescene (talk) 20:53, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, close on sounds nonstandard and dialectal to me. I am a native English speaker and never use that phrase, nor does anyone in my environment (urban northeastern United States). Marco polo (talk) 19:22, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I had never heard that "close to" is a colloquialism, but it seems plausible. "Close on" is definitely nonstandard in US English though. -Elmer Clark (talk) 20:22, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Close on" is commonly heard in Australia. It usually seems to imply "very close", even closer than "close to". -- JackofOz (talk) 23:55, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In my childhood home, we used "nigh on" to mean the "next best thing to", especially in the phrases "nigh on impossible" and, worse, "nigh on bedtime". It was, from Jack's comment, our equivlent of "close on", though "to follow close on the heels of" is a relatively common phrase even today. Bielle (talk) 17:53, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah but close and on the heels are separate modifiers to follow; close on is not a unit in that phrase. —Tamfang (talk) 07:35, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 10

Gallus gallus

What's the etymology behind calling chickens French twice? KageTora says Latin for chicken is "pullus"; why not "pullus pullus"? This is something of a joint question from both of us. Vimescarrot (talk) 00:07, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

According to wiktionary, gallus is the Latin for rooster. Algebraist 00:12, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In Latin, gallus (rooster) and Gallus (Gaul, or inhabitant of present-day France, Belgium, or northern Italy) are homophones. Gallus (Gaul) is an ethnonym probably based on the name that a Celtic people used to describe themselves. Gallus (rooster) is a word probably derived from the Indo-European root *gal-, which meant something like "call" and/or which may have been an onomatopoeic imitation of a bird's call. The English word call is probably derived from the same root. It is something of a coincidence that the two words are homophones, but the Romans liked puns about Gauls and roosters. Marco polo (talk) 00:32, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As to "why not Pullus pullus?", you'd have to ask Linnaeus - he made the decision, and, by the Principle of Priority, his name for the species stands. Tevildo (talk) 00:36, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nicely done! And swift, too. KageTora says: "that's what teamwork gets you! a speedy, well-worded and informative set of answers!" So he likes it, too. Cheers, keep up the good work! Vimescarrot (talk) 00:41, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also, see Gallic rooster, one of the national symbols of France, hence Le Coq Sportif. -- JackofOz (talk) 00:42, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! Now it all comes nicely together! Cheers all! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 02:43, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If I may contribute a pun: There's also the long standing rumor that the element Gallium was named not after France alone, but also after its discoverer Paul Emile Lecoq ('the rooster'). --Pykk (talk) 19:47, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also on the naming things twice: It's not uncommon for common animals, who've given name to their families, to have such a double-name. I'm far from being a birdwatcher but I do know the magpie is 'Pica pica' and the eagle-owl is 'bubo bubo'. Oh and a funny one: The ocean sunfish is 'mola mola'. --Pykk (talk) 19:51, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I know; rattus rattus, puffinus puffinus. Double-naming has a name, but I don't remember what it was. Vimescarrot (talk) 20:59, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There's also octopus octopus. It seems like sometimes Linnaeus ran out of branches to his naming tree, but each branch needed a name. It's funny how the French went with Middle English for their word for rooster. Spanish stuck with the Latin-based "gallo". →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 21:10, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are even triplets, of course, if one includes subspecies names, my favorite being Gorilla gorilla gorilla, the Western Lowland Gorilla. Deor (talk) 02:20, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's a gorilla megillah. :) →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 03:35, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some biologists have been known to employ a dash (or more) of humor in naming species. (I seem to recall that we have a list somewhere; but I can't find it at the moment, so see here.) I wonder if there's an organism out there named Lui lui. Deor (talk) 12:17, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Poking around at the site I linked in my preceding comment, I found that binomial names like Gallus gallus are known as tautonyms. In addition to our article on the topic, we also have a List of tautonyms. Deor (talk) 15:50, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Tautonym, that's it! Cheers for that. 90.195.179.24 (talk) 21:48, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"contract conclusion" meaning entering into vs. finishing a contract?

I was given some policy documents to translate at my Chinese firm and upon doing so have been told that my choice of vocabulary doesn't match up well enough with the PRC's English legalese. That's well and good and an easy thing to change, but one particular sticking point that's bothering me is the use of the word "conclude" or "conclusion" when discussing contracts. In this PRC legal document sitting in front of me it's used to mean entering into or beginning, as seen here:

The conclusion of employment contracts shall comply with the principles of lawfulness, fairness, equality, free will, negotiated consensus and good faith.

...not really too striking there as understanding it to mean conclusion of negotiations isn't difficult, but deciding to use "conclude" in this fashion forces the author/translator to write this in another section:

The conclusion, performance, amendment, termination, and ending of employment contracts by state authorities etc. etc.

...which just sounds wrong to my American no-legal-experience ears, especially the "ending of" part - that just looks silly and in my mind should be where conclude is used. I get the impression that the translator simply looked up the CHN word in a dictionary and just chose the wrong word. Conclude works - sometimes - as in the first example, but is the wrong word at other times - like in the second example.

OR, this is a common legal document convention that I am ignorant of - a reasonable possibility and the reason I'm driven to ask this question here... Thank you for any clarification you may be able to provide...218.25.32.210 (talk) 05:42, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In UK law, "formation" is the general term, although "completion" is used of certain types of contract, specifically those for the sale of real property (real estate). (I imagine this is where your translator went wrong). The actual process of creating the contractual documents is "execution". "Termination" occurs when the contract ceases to operate before it's fulfilled according to its terms ("fulfilment" might be better than "ending" in your translation). See Contract. Tevildo (talk) 11:00, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Quick follow-up - if your lawyers tell you to use "conclusion", use "conclusion". That's what they're paid for. :) Tevildo (talk) 11:07, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OP here, at home now. Thanks for the quick reply. This isn't a lawyer-related issue, it's just my boss looking at the PRC English version of the law that our policy is based on, and comparing it to my translation of the company's Chinese document, and asking me "why are you using contract composition when they say contract conclusion?" and me answering "because I think the government's official translation is wrong...61.189.63.208 (talk) 14:31, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If there's an official English translation of the statute, then it makes sense to use the language that's in the statute, even if it's not the word that would appear in an English legal document. I fear that saying anything else would stray into the area of legal advice. Tevildo (talk) 18:22, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would interpret it the same as you, but I can see why "conclusion" could mean the start of the relationship described in the contract. "Contract" can be a verb as well as a noun, the verb referring to the act of negotiating and signing the contract - that act is concluding when the relationship starts. --Tango (talk) 18:36, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the problems in a goevrning statute are the prerogatory rather than statutory as they appear. In social science, it also refers as ‘sanctimonious prose of the orthodoxy’ (not of the religious prose). A small firm may also have such prose. However, a written contract usually a statutory nature with of a prose like: The employment contracts shall comply with the principles of lawfulness, fairness, equality, free will, negotiated consensus and good faith. Nevill Fernando (talk) 23:53, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the Chinese translator went to an American school and is getting his own back for being told that "commencement" is at the end of the term. Sussexonian (talk) 15:31, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OED, s.v. 'Conclude (v)', meaning 11. "trans. To bring (a matter) to a decision or settlement; to decide, determine (a point, a case at law). b. To settle, arrange finally (a treaty, peace, etc.)." I certainly do not find anything odd about the phrase "concluded an agreement". But I agree that it could be ambiguous. --ColinFine (talk) 22:22, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's probably where it comes from - the _contract_ comes into existence when the _agreement_ is concluded. It's still not normal (or legal) English to compress that into "the conclusion of the contract", though. Tevildo (talk) 22:43, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Translation from Polish (?) Bulgarian

Could someone translate the following text for me? The information may be helpful in tracking the orthography of a name for an article, unlikely as the source may be. Note that copy-paste has not worked very well for many of the letters, but I don't know enough to make the corrections. The link shows the correct version, I hope:

Kaloyan-Atanasow izmyslil kompiuter zaedno z Clifforden Berry 1939 godina w Iowa State Uniwersity proektiral ustroistwo ABC (Atanasoff-BerryComputer) samo ima edin problem nikuga nie prorabotil taka 4e ako gleda6 6ol na Slavi te towa nie go kazacha estestweno a za Bulgary nie mi gowori gywiach tam i znam dobre kakyw narod sa i nikuga nikuga nie oceniawaj cal narod po niakolko chora ty si ot tozi typ chora kojto gywejat z minalo z towa si izbiwa6 kompleksy 4e w momenta ste naj .....sam si dowyr6y

Thanks. Bielle (talk) 16:27, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I can't read the language, but the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (which was not what we understand as a "computer" today) was built by John Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford Berry, if those are the names whose spelling you want. --Anonymous, 18:00 UTC, 2009-10-10.

Thanks, 208.76.104.133; I am interested in anything that casts light on the Atanasow/Atanasoff difference. Atansoff's father changed his name to "Ivan Atanasoff". I am looking for the exact form of his name prior to the change which seems to have originated at Ellis Island, and then was formally confirmed by him later. Bielle (talk) 18:18, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I presume you're aware that in Polish words/names written as "-ow" are pronounced (roughly) "-off", and that American officials at Ellis Island documenting immigrants (many of whom were illiterate and/or non-Anglophone) were apt to write down names according to their own orthography as they thought they heard them, without regard to those immigrants' own usages or preferences? 87.81.230.195 (talk) 19:03, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's Bulgarian, as is the name (Атанасов), which would usually be transliterated as "Atanasov". (Meaning "son of Atanas", a common Bulgarian name, itself derived from Greek Athanasios) The -ov ending is common in Russian and Bulgarian names. (Actually Polish names don't usually have it, they use -ski, but they do have a lot of people of Russian heritage, and in those cases it'd become "-ow", since 'w' is the 'v' sound in Polish) The "-off" transliteration isn't random, I believe it's a French transliteration variant that got carried over into English, esp. in the 19th century. E.g. the Orlov diamond was often written 'Orloff'. And inconsistently: an old edition of the Chekov play might read "Ivanoff, a play by Anton Chekov". Anyway, the original name here would definitely be written "Atanasov" in English today. --Pykk (talk) 19:31, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I assumed, rather than knew, about the "ow" sounding like "ov", and I did know about the Ellis Island informal name changes. (It happened in other places, too.) The Greek root for the name is interesting and something I did not know. Bielle (talk) 22:19, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I recently read an article (possibly linked from the RD!) asserting vigorously that the popular notion of Ellis Island as a hotbed of linguistic ignorance is a myth: there were translators on hand for Polish, Yiddish and so on. Of course, Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic, so the spelling would have to change anyway. —Tamfang (talk) 07:43, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just in case. . . while I am appreciative of the information provided above by so many, I would still like a translation if that is possible. Continuing thanks Bielle (talk) 01:59, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the title of you question to attract Bulgarian-speaking users' attention. I hope you don't mind. — Kpalion^(talk) 11:46, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not being a Bulgarian speaker myself, but it's Bulgarian written by a forum user who has a non-Cyrilic keyboard (see Volapuk encoding) which makes it look like Polish. It starts something like:

"@Kaloyan: Atanasov thought up [the] computer togethr with Clifford Berry in 1939 at ISU [and] planned to build the ABC but one problem, noone [or nowhere?] would take on the work" Why it is written on a Grand Prix forum in an article about Murray Walker I have no idea. Hopefully a proper translation will be along later! Sussexonian (talk) 15:25, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's nothing like Volapuk encoding (which I hadn't come across - thanks!), but what makes it look odd is the use of 'w' to transliterate Cyrillic 'в': this transliteration works for Polish and German, but in English sources we are more used to seeing it transliterated as 'v'. Incidentally, in Polish the ending cognate with '-ov' is '-ów', pronounced /uf/, not 'ow'. --ColinFine (talk) 22:40, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 11

Low German map

In the Low German article, the first image represents with yellow color the Low German speaking area. Now, it has two grey "holes" inside it. The norther one should be Saterland Frisian, but I don't know what the other one is. --151.51.3.194 (talk) 10:28, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's the Oberharz dialect of Erzgebirgisch. +An gr 10:56, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What is the standard pronunciation for the affix ‘stein’ that is commonly used at the front and back of some names of persons and places? It seems there is only one option if an ‘n’ is in the coda. That is /steɪn/. An approximate alternative is /staɪn/. Is this correct or is this an exonym from this dialect that a name like ‘Rothstein’ is commonly pronounced as /rɒθstɪːn/ (i.e. ‘stein’ as a 'stean' or 'steen' in the long vowels /ɪː/ or /iː/). Nevill Fernando (talk) 02:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You mean in the Erzgebirgisch dialect or in standard German? The standard German pronunciation of "Stein" is [ʃtaɪn]. "Rothstein" is pronounced [ˈʁoːtʰʃtaɪn] in German (though the pronunciation of the R varies from region to region).

According to the article, "Hohenstein" is pronounced [huːʂʈeː] in Erzgebirgisch, so "Rothstein" would be [ɰoːtʂʈeː] in that dialect. 195.50.180.194 (talk) 14:13, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The standards phonemic transcriptions that you provided seems to me a palatalized version than as to their actual representations either in German or in English. To my ears the fricatives ‘s’ in 'Stein' seems as an alveolar. But I do not know. Nevill Fernando (talk) 16:52, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Does grammar reflect the structure of the human world?

And does every human language have subject-object-verb? The Quicksilver (software) seems powerful because it is structured like grammar. Is there any more software that does this? 78.147.28.172 (talk) 13:47, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

--Sean 16:51, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

COBOL is pretty English-language/English grammar-oriented. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 20:56, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For an example of a human language that doesn't use Subject Object Verb, see English. In fact, all five other possible orders exist, although some are more common than others. See Subject Verb Object, Object Subject Verb, Object Verb Subject, Verb Object Subject and Verb Subject Object. -Elmer Clark (talk) 01:47, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I interpreted the question to mean not "Does every language use SOV word order?" but rather "Does every language have subjects, objects, and verbs?", to which my answer is: I've never heard of one that doesn't, but there are lots of things that I've never heard of. +An gr 05:32, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar is fossilized phrasing: when people say the same thing over and over again, it gets automated, and may eventually get reduced to a grammatical expression, like "I am going to do X" (originally meaning only physical motion toward a goal) becomes "I'm gonna do X" (intention of a goal). So it does reflect society and the human mind, but not directly. If you've ever seen Carol Burnett's elevator skit, where "Floor?" means "Which button would you like me to press for you?" (in the entire skit, I think no sentence is more than one word long), you know how expressive language can be without any grammar whatsoever.

There is no category of "subject" that holds across all languages, so if the word is defined precisely enough to be useful, there are lots of languages without subjects: ergative languages, for example, and those with Austronesian alignment, and even nominative-accusative languages where the nominative is not conflated with a grammatical topic role. "Object" is similarly variable across languages. However, all languages can say s.t. like "X hit Y", where X and Y have different grammatical roles (in some cases, only as suffixes to the verb "X-hit-Y"). All languages have verbs. It's not clear that all languages have nouns: in the Wakashan languages, and to a some extent in Salishan, every lexical word can function as a predicate, so that a word usually translated as "deer" might be more accurately translated as "it-is-a-deer", and the equivalent of "I shot the deer" is both two words and two clauses: "I-shot-it. It-was-a-deer." kwami (talk) 05:59, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is full of interesting stuff like this - well worth a read if you're interested in the topic. Mitch Ames (talk) 10:13, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Biblical name meanings

List of Biblical names gives the meanings behind the biblical names. So then where did Roswell Dwight Hitchcock get his list from? When and where did such an original list come from in the first place? Is there a prior list before Hitchcock's list? Why do we claim a biblical name on this list to have its meaning? --12.18.10.148 (talk) 21:29, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Moved from Humanities desk and edited to fit

I was going to suggest you ask the original author of the article, who presumably had access to the book - but that was an IP address that last posted in 2002. Have you looked in Google for the book in question? It's in the public domain, so it's entirely possible that the complete text - including footnotes and explanations, could be available online. Also, many books have the origins of names in general, and the names in the Bible are often Hebrew names whose meanings are well-known. Additionally, many given names have articles of their own in wikipedia. Elizabeth, for example. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 23:53, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your best bet, name by name, is the Jewish Encyclopedia, also on-line. By Hellenistic times, however, the etymology of Hebrew names was no longer in the forefront of anyone's mind.--Wetman (talk) 01:09, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would like further also on this and looking at Google Books does not seem to produce anything. Also the Jewish Encyclopedia website shown from the article does not seem show anything. However with my skills that might not be saying much other than I need further help. For example in the original question of the article List of Biblical names it says the meaning behind Jesus: Jehovah is salvation, deliverer, and help. Where did that come from originally and where did professor Roswell Dwight Hitchcock get that from? --12.18.10.149 (talk) 17:45, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Jesus" is etymologically the same name as "Joshua". According to the list, both names essentially mean "savior". That's a subtlety that not everyone seems to understand. It's not like they called Him Jesus just because they felt like it. God told Mary to give Him that name, and for a specific and obvious reason. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 17:47, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bugs -- is that really so? Do you have a source for that assertion? Was the original Joshua's mother contacted by God to call him Joshua as well? DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 02:42, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm talking about Jesus. I don't recall offhand where the O.T. Joshua got his name. "And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins." (KJV) →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 14:25, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see in the article List of Biblical names Jesus as: Jehovah is salvation; deliverer; help. Jehovah as self-subsisting. So I guess the end result is: "Self-subsisting is salvation." What does that mean? ALSO what does "deliverer" mean. Deliver what to whom? AND that of "help?" Help who with what? Dictionary "subsist": to exist, continue in existence, to remain alive.--12.18.10.153 (talk) 12:53, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It would be interesting to get a more specific answer to the above question. When I look in that list it shows Joshua as "a savior" and "a deliverer", not "the Lord saves." To me it looks like Joshua and Jesus meanings come out as the same. What is this of "Self-subsisting is salvation" and that related to the word "help"?--69.95.21.109 (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if the OP is asking for the origin of the word in the original language that gave rise to each name in the form we know it, and is thus why we claim a name mean thus-and-so. ~~If the OP is looking for the sources for the meanings, that might be better asked on the Language Desk were there is a lot of etymological expertise.~~ Bielle (talk) 20:10, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Jesus is just the Greek form of "Joshua", and was used in the original Greek New Testament writings; they would not have been seen as different names. (And means "the Lord saves".) As to the meanings of them all: many are given in the text of the Bible, or given as footnotes by translators. Many of the meanings will be obvious to language scholars, since they are formed from vocab words. I haven't looked at the WP article to see what meanings are given, but if you want to check any particular ones, then look in any footnoted Bible. Gwinva (talk) 22:46, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) Many biblical names are transparent in Hebrew. For example 'Nathan' is the Hebrew root 'n-t-n', which means 'give' (specifically, 'nat(h)an' is the third person singular masculine perfective of the verb on that root, so its primary meaning is 'He gave' or 'He has given'. The many names beginning with 'Ye-' or 'Yo-' are presumed to have a form of the theonym Yahweh, often followed by a recognisable root (eg 'Yonathan' - 'Jonathan' - meaning 'Yahweh has given). Clearly in one sense we cannot be certain of these: perhaps one of them is a borrowing of an unrelated word in another lost language: but as many of them form a self-consistent system, it would seem perverse to discard the obvious etymologies without strong evidence pointing elsewhere. --ColinFine (talk) 22:51, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some biblical names (esp. those of major characters in Genesis) have their etymology explicitly explained in the text. Some examples would be the names of Isaac, Esau, Jacob, all of the Twelve Tribes of Israel etc. Some other, later characters also have names that are explained in the text, eg Moses. --Dweller (talk) 14:14, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

However, the explanations of the names that are found in the text are very often folk etymologies. +An gr 14:23, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's your POV and not what the source says. If you believed Moses ever lived, there's no reason to doubt that his name derived from an obscure word for the verb "to remove". If you don't believe he lived, it's largely irrelevant what the origin of a fictional person's name was. --Dweller (talk) 14:32, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(EC) It's also quite possible to believe both that he existed, and that his name is the common Egyptian name element (also rendered as "-mosis" and "-mose") meaning "son" (or "formed of" or "has provided"), perhaps with an original preceding Egyptian-god element such as "Tut-" removed to accord with subsequent Yahwehist sensibilities, given his upbringing as the adopted son of an Egyptian princess. And if you don't believe he existed, its meaning is still relevant to interpreting the folk myths in which the character appears. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 15:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that's possible if you believed he existed but that the bible postdated his life by some considerable period of time. An interesting POV. The bible's own etymology employs a word which is probably Egyptian, given its singularity and the fact that it's ascribed to an Egyptian (not Israelite) namer, which doesn't strike me as particularly "Yahweist", if I understand that word correctly. The OT elsewhere isn't shy of giving us Joseph's Egyptian name, nor, to give another non-"Yahweist" example, the decidedly idolatrous name of Esther (as well as mentioning that her Hebrew name was Hadassah). --Dweller (talk) 15:55, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, both an interesting POV and a far from uncommon one: see the Documentary hypothesis, which broadly postulates (in its various versions) that some or all of the original sources of the existing Torah were first written down something approaching half a millennium after the purported events of the Exodus. Time enough for oral traditions to acquire both unconscious and deliberate distortions, such as introducing folk-etymological explanations and eliminating the foreign-god element from the name of a Yahwehist hero, bearing in mind that Yahwehist thought followed a trajectory from "Yahweh is our particular god out of the many that exist" through "Other gods are our/our god's enemies" to "Yahweh is the only god that exists." As to contrary instances, complete consistency of approach is unlikely in a body of texts derived from multiple sources variously compiled and redacted at various times. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 17:08, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why exactly would the existence of Moses render the writers of the bible immune from etymological error? Algebraist 15:31, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A N.T. reference that comes to mind is when Jesus redubbed Simon as "Peter", which means "Rock" - play on words with his "confession of faith", which Jesus also termed a "rock". →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 14:27, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 12

Term for scholarly or literary "detective work"

More specifically, what I have in mind is the art/science of tracking a fact, claim, argument or idea through various texts back to its source. For instance, let's say I read on some website that tigers like cheddar cheese. The website mentions a book as the source, and in turn the book mentions another book, and so on until-- following the citations-- I get to a firsthand account What would be the term for what I was doing? 69.224.112.30 (talk) 00:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Epistemology? Establishing provenance? Finding primary sources? Historiography? (This is specific to history, rather than, for example, science) Perhaps one of those articles has the specific term you're looking for. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:53, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Library research. -- Hoary (talk) 14:35, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In literary research, the activity of identifying the sources of specific stories or other elements found in literary works is often denoted by the German word Quellenforschung ("source research"), but I've never heard the term used for the more general sort of investigation you seem to have in mind. Deor (talk) 15:49, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Quellenforschung is also in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6^th edition. The headword is in italics, meaning "...although used in English, is still regarded as essentially foreign". Mitch Ames (talk) 09:23, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would call this "checking sources." John M Baker (talk) 17:19, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What is a word?

Uh... my sister and I have been discussing agglutinative, isolative, and inflectional languages, and it got me thinking... how do you define a word anyways? I already knew that linguists have basically no perfect way to define a "word". Various imperfect description methods are described on the word page, which concludes that "the exact definition of a word is often still very elusive", even after linguists do their best to consider the semantics, phonetics, and pragmatics of the utterance. So you don't always know whether a certain word/phrase is a single word or many. My question is, why don't we say that Mandarin Chinese is strongly agglutinative instead of strongly inflectional? After all, if each word is represented by a single character, why can't you read a sentence and say that it is all one word instead of six little words? And why can't Japanese be considered strongly isolative, with each of the affixes that make up a long word being its own word?

My initial guess is that, although there is no exact definition in a formulaic sense for a word there is some kind of more subtle mental definition, so that even if you can't follow simple rules you can "just tell" whether something is one word or many. But what if I'm wrong there too? Apparently orthography has a lot to do with how we think of words, especially when we live in a world where orthography is so fundamental (compared to people in the Amazon rain forest who never learn to spell yet speak languages that can be just as complicated as Latin). According to the word page, "ice cream" is supposed to be a single compound word linguistically, and is only spelled with a space in the middle because of its derivation from two separate words. Is it possible that the idea of a "word" is just an abstraction that came with the invention of orthography? Maybe French could have been classified as agglutinative if it has a different orthographical history ("Il y est allé" vs. "ilyestallé")?

In short, how, how, how do we know that Mandarin is isolative while Japanese is agglutinative? thx for any ideas Jonathan ^talk 04:08, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See English compounds#Sound patterns for how prosody in spoken English distinguishes a compound word from the phrase consisting of the same components as free words. Shanghainese has also come to have word stress in recent times (the first syllable's tone spreads over the multisyllable word and the subsequent syllables' tones are disregarded) but Mandarin and Cantonese do not, sticking with the syllable (= character in writing) as the unit. Nevertheless it is said to be an "ideographic myth" (search on that phrase) that Chinese is a monosyllabic language.

Japanese particles after a word are pronounced as part of the word, i.e. they are effectively case suffixes not independent words. Nevertheless romanized Japanese writes the particles as separate words. Japanese, Chinese and Thai are the only major languages that are written with no spaces in their native scripts.

Japanese verb/adjective endings usually are not independent words (though some that are written as part of the word in romaji descend from independent words in Old Japanese) and go in a fixed order. Chinese independent words with the same functions have some flexibility in word order.

French has indeed evolved - another suggestion by Johanna Nichols is that spoken, colloquial French is now at least partly head-marking, in contrast to traditional dependent-marking in European languages other than Basque language. --JWB (talk) 06:04, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Orthography definitely plays a role. And Chinese has lots of set phrases, which need to be learned almost like words. But there's more to it than that. In Chinese (well, Classical Chinese, anyway), you can use each meaningful unit on its own. In Japanese you cannot. A basic rule of thumb is: If you make a mistake while speaking, how far back to you have to go to correct yourself? That unit that you have to repeat in its entirety is the word. In Inuit, where "I bought some fish last night" is a single word, you really do have to repeat the whole thing if you mess up just the end. kwami (talk) 06:13, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Orthography indeed. Would a word counter count "alot" as one word, or two words misspelled as one? Maybe it's in that twilight zone where it's very commonly seen, but not yet accepted (afaik) by any dictionary as a legitimate word. -- JackofOz (talk) 08:15, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll find that most linguistic investigations of this kind of thing take orthography as little more than a first stage toward a definition of word. If we make the (dubious) assumption that "a" is a full-blown word (rather than a mere clitic), then "a lot", however (mis) spelt, will be two words, as these could easily be instead "an awful lot". More interesting is "a helluva lot"; clearly it's now so written because of convention (originally of the representation of macho dialogue in second-rate novels, I suppose), but if we were free to overturn convention, might it better be "ahelluv alot"? On reflection, I don't think it should: it seems to me that on the contrary "hell of a" is edging toward the status of indivisible adjective. -- Hoary (talk) 09:55, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your "basic rule of thumb" looks interesting, but I'm not sure it always works. "I'm going to the theater (doh!) cinema", could be accepted, but how about the following sentence: "This time you won't get away with beat (doh!) it!"... HOOTmag (talk) 09:09, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This rule of thumb looks very interesting indeed. Hootmag's tentatively proposed counterexample strikes me as odd for unrelated reasons that I'm too lazy to spell out fully; I'd say that "Next time you won't get away with murder (doh!) it" is OK though borderline (I'd guess because "it" seems phonologically inadequate to the task), while "Give the sandwich to it (doh!) him" is fine. In my idiolect, at least. -- Hoary (talk) 09:55, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How about: "We started together, but he beat me to him (doh!) it!..."? HOOTmag (talk) 16:25, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are certainly intermediate cases like a lot, which are in the process of lexicalizing. Also phonogically weak words which are half-way to being clitics. But it's at least enough to show the general typology of the language.

As for the counter example, if you get the part of speech wrong, you will normally need more context to clarify which word you're correcting. But if both words are grammatically correct ("beat him--I mean it"; "beat--I mean show--him"), then it usually works. kwami (talk) 16:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The problems are the circularities and similarities that sometimes undermine entire meanings, though they are necessary for continuum (like kwami points out).

On the question why a language is said to be agglutinative instead of strongly inflectional, the distinguishing factor is the ‘syntheses’ in a morphosyntatic element. That is, few lexemes can be a synthetic element. An inflection on the other hand is the morphological affixsation that is determined by the rules of syntax in a given lexeme.

On the concept that the idea 'a word is just an abstraction that cames with the invention of orthography', yes; it seems to be alike, or other way around like ‘An orthography is the abstraction of word’. That is, a word can still consist of a sign and its referent without its orthography; for example, protowords. Nevill Fernando (talk) 21:24, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You probably want to avoid basing your definition on a language's orthography, since a language may lump together or separate glyphs for any number of reasons. I prefer to think in terms of "lexemes" rather than "words" — a lexeme being a part of the language that is discreet and has its own meaning, such that it is worthy of inclusion in a dictionary. To take the Japanese example, particles might be bound to nouns in the strictest grammatical sense, but they still have distinct meanings and will be listed in the dictionary. Paul Davidson (talk) 13:33, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Small point, but I think this discussion has conflated two kinds of particle in Japanese. Kara is an adposition, o is a case-marker, ni can be either. Even o will appear in a dictionary but this says less about its semantic content than it does about lexicographic conventions. -- Hoary (talk) 14:00, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems the glyphs are simply the representations of time in many languages; the duration of the time of a grapheme as to its actual phonemic representation. It usually occurs between an onset and a rhyme or in a coda in general but for the vowels in particular. However, I am not sure on this.

About particles: They are just different lexemes in compound words and have varying syntactic rules in orthography than the regular compound words usually. Nevill Fernando (talk) 16:30, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A word is the lexographical or verbal representation of a discrete idea, concept, or reference. For instance, 'black' represents what we know as the color black; 'people' represents the discrete class of entities known as human beings; and Dave is a reference to the very complicated idea of 'Dave Smith from accounting'. Since Dave is such a huge concept, beyond anyone's reckoning, the best we can do is reference everything we know about Dave. It's like a pointer in computer science. Dave is walking around in the real world: we cannot fully internalize everything about him, but we can certainly fill out some brain patterns that account for who he is and why he does the things he does. Vranak (talk) 00:51, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Whew. ¶ You're conflating more or less regular words and names, a conflation that is at least controversial; and while, say, "black" and "blackest" or "Dave" and "Dave Barry" are discrete in some ways, they may not be discrete in others. I'm not at all sure that "Dave" is used in a natural language by referencing everything we know about Dave, or that words in a natural language are like pointers in computer science. ¶ For that matter, while "do" (say) is generally taken to be a word of English, I'm not at all sure that it represents any discrete idea. -- Hoary (talk) 04:59, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Off

I'm looking through a library copy of the book After the Off, photos by Bruce Gilden, story by Dermot Healy. Perhaps the dust cover explains the title but the former was junked before the book was ever lent out. The (remarkable) photographs show the spectators at one or more horse races in Ireland. Perhaps in part because of gimmicky typography, I have great trouble making any sense of the story, but as far as I've noticed it has merely a single, unexplained mention of "off", in "before the off". I know squat about horse racing and normally wouldn't much care, but I'm troubled by my inability even to understand the apparently simple title of a book in English. So: What would a/the "off" be in an Irish horse race? -- Hoary (talk) 12:44, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"The off" refers to the start of the race, e.g. some betting companies allow you to bet "after the off", or check out the usage here [2] Tinfoilcat (talk) 12:55, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

[ec] The search results I'm getting seem to indicate that "before the off" and "after the off" refer to bets placed before and after the race starts ("and they're off!"). None of the results I looked at gave a specific definition, which is why I haven't provided a link, but here's my Google search. --LarryMac | Talk 12:57, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Even in the United States, of course, racetrack announcers invariably say "And they're off …" to signal the start of races. Deor (talk) 13:02, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes they say, "They're off and running!" Like what else would they be doing? The fox-trot? But this business of betting after the race starts is curious. (1) Why would they allow it? and (2) How would you even have time to get the bet down? →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 05:27, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, of course. Thank you all! -- Hoary (talk) 13:07, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"0.57 second" or "0.57 seconds"?

See "0.57 second" or "0.57 seconds"?. ___A. di M. 23:34, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In English there are few absolute rules. That said, to me as an American, "0.57 second" looks more "correct", but "0.57 seconds" looks and sounds more "natural". I would say that neither form is clearly incorrect, so you can use either form. Marco polo (talk) 00:17, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Typically an American would say "1 second" and "n seconds" where n is any number besides exactly 1. Even "0 seconds". Why? I don't know. He's on third. :) →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 01:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Style guides universally recommend "0.57 second" (for the same reason that one writes "one-half mile", for instance, rather than "one-half miles"). Unfortunately, our template {{convert}} doesn't see things that way; if one enters 0.5 mile into it, it produces "0.5 miles (0.80 km)". Deor (talk) 01:10, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"One-half mile" would be the formal way to say it, but you're more likely to hear "half a mile", which does use the singular. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 01:29, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be a case where the spoken and written forms vary. Style guides may well recommend we write "0.57 second". But reading that out loud literally sounds, well, wrong. In my experience, people are much more likely to say "point five seven seconds". Possibly because ".... seven second" goes against the grain, even if the "seven" here represents only .07. OTOH, they'd say "point five seven of a second" (not "of seconds"). Would style guides recommend "zero second"? I'd be surprised. -- JackofOz, masquerading as 202.142.129.66 (talk) 02:11, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, as a speaker of Commonwealth/International english, 0.57 seconds both looks and sounds more natural (I don't know of anyonee who would naturally say or write "0.57 second"), though neither looks or sounds as natural as 0.57 of a second (which is grammatically and mathematically accurate - it is part of one second after all). This is also in line with "half a mile", which is likely a natural contraction of "half of a mile". The formal way to say that would be "one half mile", with no hyphen — which again is logical, since two half miles equals one mile, i.e., a "half mile" is an acceptable base unit of measure in itself. Once you include decimal places, it becomes clear that you are not using the "half" as the unit of measurement - 0.5 miles is therefore more appropriate. As such "one half mile" not really a fair analogy to the "0.57 seconds" case. Grutness...wha? 06:00, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's fine to call it "Commonwealth English", even though the English of Canada, part of the Commonwealth, is much closer to American English than to the British standard that is really the basis of so-called Commonwealth English. However, please don't call it "International", implying that American English is merely a national variety limited to the United States. Not only is a variety of American English used in Canada (if with mostly British spellings), but American English is the preferred form in Latin America as well as much of East and Southeast Asia. The British standard is a perfectly acceptable standard, but it is arrogant and incorrect to imply that it is the international standard.

Style guides for written text do not always reflect spoken English. On Wikipedia we write 13 October 2009 (or October 13, 2009) whereas I actually say "the thirteenth of September two thousand and nine". -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 13:57, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't it get confusing if you say "September" for the month we write as "October" on Wikipedia? +An gr 16:55, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why this was posted both here and at WT:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), but it's giving me vertigo. See my reply there, and let's decide where we want to have this discussion. —— Shakescene (talk) 06:19, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In English, we don't really have a plural, we have a non-singular: anything other than unity is "plural". "One-X mile" is an exception, possibly because of the word "one". kwami (talk) 06:27, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Dammit, I've just wasted many 0.57 secondses reading this. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:00, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There was a thread on this subject fairly recently in alt.usage.english (under the subject line "Zero points?"). Summary: usage varies. At least one poster said it made a difference whether the number between 0 and 1 was expressed as a fraction or a decimal. --Anonymous, 10:33 UTC, October 13, 2009.

That's pretty much my point above. Grutness...wha? 12:47, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The inconsistency is actually pretty consistent in [Californian] English: half a second, but 0.57 seconds; half a mile, but 0.8 miles; half an hour, but 0.75 man hours (a measure of labor required). DOR (HK) (talk) 05:32, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There may be some exceptions, but my understanding is that what you've just described is the norm across all varieties of English, all over the world. Which is why I was so surprised to hear Deor say above that "Style guides universally recommend 0.57 second". His/her analogy of "one-half mile" doesn't ring true with me. I'd be more comfortable with "one half-mile", but even that looks stilted and unnatural to my ears (and sounds so to my eyes). "He walked along for (a) half a mile ..." would be the usual way of saying it, just as "This company earned $1 million every 0.75 man hours last year" would be the norm. -- JackofOz (talk) 12:20, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

... and from a British English point of view, I agree 100% with DOR and JackofOZ. Colloquial British English seems to have one pence but this is frowned upon by most of us ( - it happened because of a need to distinguish between old and new pennies, and is not supported by the legend on the coin). What is this mysterious style guide that contradicts universal usage? Dbfirs 08:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair to Feynman and the style guides, the singular probably fits no worse than the plural in the formal, highly specialized scientific and technical prose they're using. "0.557 second" is a little stiff, stilted and unnatural in such contexts (say an article about the speed of light, ballistics or technical astronomy), but then so is "0.557 seconds". I wouldn't really want the Manual of Style to pronounce either way, except perhaps to say that the singular is uncolloquial, unidiomatic and therefore probably a bit awkward in non-technical articles directed towards the general reader or treating non-technical subjects like history, music or sports. —— Shakescene (talk) 08:46, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 13

English creoles

What English Creole is most intelligible to English speakers? HOOTmag (talk) 10:34, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe Middle English? (a creole according to at least some linguists I believe) Mikenorton (talk) 11:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think the consensus is that Middle English was probably not a creole, and even if it was, it is pretty unintelligible to modern English speakers, at least until you get the hang of correcting for the Great Vowel Shift. For speakers of American English, at least, I think that Gullah is relatively intelligible, if only because it shares some features with African American Vernacular English, which may itself be a Creole, in which case it is even more intelligible than Gullah. Marco polo (talk) 13:11, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Jamaican Creole isn't too bad. An important concept here is acrolect and basilect. The acrolects of most English creoles are intelligible enough, but the basilects of most creoles will be unintelligible to an uninformed native speaker (much in the same way that a Geordie speaker will be understandable to most outsiders when he wants to be, but will be near unintelligible in conversation with other Geordies). Steewi (talk) 00:50, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OP's comment: Thank you all! HOOTmag (talk) 09:04, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic

Can someone who understand Arabic please translate User:Ani medjool wikiped webpage. Thank you.

I'm the truth, and the truth comes from me.

Thanks to God (or rather: Praise to God).

HOOTmag (talk) 15:03, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

bejeebees

i have been in the states for ten years and think i heard of this word as in putting the b into someone as in making them frightened. does such a word exist, how is it spelt and where are its origins? thank you for your time looking into this —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.125.212.57 (talk) 17:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like you might be thinking of heebie-jeebies or bejesus. Some jerk on the Internet (talk) 17:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Have a look at heebie-jeebies. --62.47.139.68 (talk) 18:35, 13 October 2009 (UTC) Ooops, --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 18:36, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Only thing that seems similar to me is to "scare the bejesus out of" someone. --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 21:42, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, it's "bejesus". "Heebie-jeebies" has a slightly different usage: e.g., watching scary movies at night gives me the heebie-jeebies. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 21:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 14

Is there any living language, other than English, which makes a full distinction between: "in", "at", "to"?

HOOTmag (talk) 18:33, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Can you be more specific? German has three prepositions in, bei, and zu, but they're not used in exactly the same way as in, at, and to in English. +An gr 19:05, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Does English even do that? Adam Bishop (talk) 19:20, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"bei" doesn't mean "at". For more details, see my following post. HOOTmag (talk) 19:54, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I know any language that doesn't have those prepositions (or corresponding forms). Also, "in" is rather indistinct, since it's both 'into', i.e. the opposite of 'out', as well as 'inside' e.g. "in the house", as well as having a temporal meaning "in the morning". --Pykk (talk) 19:24, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'll be more specific: English distiguishes between "I lived in NY", vs. "I landed at NY". Similary: "I visited him in July", vs. "I visited him at 3 PM". Is there any living language which can make such a distinction? HOOTmag (talk) 19:54, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You are likely to have been studying French, in which some usages of all three English prepositions are covered by the French à. French is really the unusual case in assigning such a variety of functions to a single preposition. However, prepositions in one language rarely have exact equivalents in another language. For example, as Pykk points out, the English preposition in has a variety of functions, each of which could be handled by a different preposition in a different language. For example, the English phrase "in the room" would be translated into German as "im Zimmer", using the contraction im, built on the German preposition in. However, the English phrase "in the beginning" would be translated "am Anfang", using the German preposition an. So, in this case, German makes a distinction that English doesn't. Or, more accurately, German distinguishes among the functions of various prepositions differently than does English. This will be true when comparing English with any other language that uses prepositions. Of course, in some languages, the functions of prepositions are more often handled by case, but that is another matter. Marco polo (talk) 19:55, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To answer your second question, I think that it would also be possible to say "I landed in NY." Putting that distinction aside, the German translation for "I visited him in July" would be "Ich habe ihn im Juli besucht." "I visited him at 3 PM" would be "Ich habe ihn um 15 Uhr besucht" (or "...um 3 Uhr nachmittags..."). So German, like English, uses two different prepositions in these two cases. However, here too, German divides labor among prepositions differently. For example, the translation for "I spent the night at his house" would be "Ich habe bei ihm übernachtet." So German makes a distinction between um and bei in these two cases where English uses at. Marco polo (talk) 20:02, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When I asked my original question I wasn't thinking about (nor influenced by) French.

Of course, I'm aware of the various meanings of "in" in other languages, I'm just asking about whether there're other languages which (for example) make a distinction between "in NY" (e.g. "I lived in NY") and "at NY" (e.g. "I landed at NY"). HOOTmag (talk) 20:05, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)In talking about 'a full distinction', you seem to be assuming that there is some natural or logical significance to the particular set of three prepositions you have chosen. I suggest that there isn't. Every language divides up the 'space' of spatial and temporal relations in its own way. "At New York" is an utterly different relationship from "at 3PM" and it is a metaphor built into English (and many other languages) to use the same word to denote the two. Notice also that English uses 'at' for events (eg 'at the wedding') where one might equally reasonably expect 'in'. When the same word is used for the building and the event this is even odder: 'at the theatre' and (in the UK but not much in North America I believe) 'at school'.

The answer to your revised question is, Yes, of course. Russian is an example: 'в' and 'у' correspond quite well to 'in' and 'at', though I'm sure that their clouds of meaning don't abut each other at the same point as the clouds of the English words. --ColinFine (talk) 20:09, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Which one of 'в' and 'у' is more similar to "in"? HOOTmag (talk) 20:24, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"В" ("v") is more like "in" and "у" ("u") is more like "at". But of course, they're not used exactly in the same way as "in" and "at". "At school" is always "v shkole", never "u shkoly". "At work" is neither "v" nor "u", but на работе "na rabote" (literally "on work"). Additionally, "u" is used to form possessives, e.g. "I have a book" is "U menya kniga", literally "At me a book". Kpalion (for some reason, I can't log on where I'm sitting now) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.39.218.10 (talk) 08:29, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)In that case, I don't understand the distinction in English, although it is my native language. I'm not sure why you would say "landed at NY" instead of "landed in NY". The simple answer to all of your questions is that each language that uses prepositions has a unique system of dividing functions among them. So no other language will have a set of prepositions, each of which is exactly equivalent to a unique English preposition. Marco polo (talk) 20:10, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, let me put it this way: Do you understand the distinction between "in the airport" (e.g. "The plane was in the airport") and "at the airport" (e.g. "The plane landed at the airport")? HOOTmag (talk) 20:24, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I get that. German uses two different prepositions (in vs. an) in those two cases, but there are other cases where English would use two different adjectives where German would use just one, and there are cases where German would use two different adjectives, and English would use just one. Marco polo (talk) 20:31, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The choice of preposition there is simply due to the word for 'airport'. A boat docks at a port, therefore a plane lands at an airport. But the plane lands on the runway - there's no reason it has to be 'at'. One preposition English doesn't have, for instance, is the Scandinavian hos - 'in care of/at the place belonging to'. So they can distinguish between 'med Sven' ('with Sven') and 'hos Sven' ('in Sven's care'). --Pykk (talk) 00:14, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hootmag, I daresay almost every language makes this distinction. They don't necessarily do it with prepositions alone, but there are always ways of making the distinction. For instance, both Chinese and Uyghur distinguish between "in" and "at" roughly the same way, by attaching a locative to a possessive+"inside". For example, in Uyghur, to say "in the house" (and specifically distinguish from "at") it's literally "house-GEN inside-POSS-LOC", or "at the house's inside"). Chinese is roughly the same, just with different order (zai fangzi limian, LOC house inside). French has the pretty general à which can mean a lot of prepositions, but to express "inside" specifically they also have dans.

To is even easier to distinguish from in/at, since it's generally dative/directive whereas the others are locative. So, for example, Uyghur has a totally different suffix for it (-DA for locative, -GHA for dative), and Chinese has a different word (roughly the same idea; zai for locative, wang or xiang or several others for dative). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 08:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OP's comment: Thank you all! HOOTmag (talk) 09:04, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What are the easiest natural languages for studying by non-natives?

After having considered all possible difficulties, e.g. in phonology (variety of phonemes/sounds/tones etc.), in morphology (variety of affixes etc.), in syntax (variey of cases/prepositions, variety of possible orders of words, etc.), in lexicography (variety of terms/synonyms etc.), and in semantics (variety of meanings etc.), can we point at the "very easy" (so to speak) natural languages for studying by non-natives? Note that I'm referring to natural languages only, i.e. excluding Esperanto etc. HOOTmag (talk) 21:22, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It depends who the non-native is (ie, what background they have). French is easy for a Spanish speaker to study, but maybe not for a Chinese speaker. Turkish is easy for an Uzbek speaker to study, but maybe not for an English speaker. etc. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 21:57, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If I were a Chinese looking for an "easier" foreign language for studying, I would prefer Spanish to French (e.g. because of the phonology).

To sum up, The non-native I'm referring to is anybody whose native language is (linguistically) far enough from the foreign language they're going to study. HOOTmag (talk) 22:06, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It appears to me that languages who are easiest in some respect are hardest in others, e.g. Japanese has very easy grammar and phonology, but very complicated honorific system and spelling system; Italian and Russian have easy spelling but somewhat complicated grammar, and so on. (There are languages, such as French, which have complicated phonology, complicated grammar, complicated everything; but I don't know of any language with simple phonology, simple grammar, simple everything. Do you count creoles and pidgins as natural languages? If so, one of them might be it.) Anyway, the only languages I'm fluent in are Italian (my mother tongue) and English, and the only other languages I've ever "seriously" studied are French and Latin, so my knowledge of more "exotic" language is only stuff which I read somewhere on the 'net when I'm bored. ___A. di M. 22:25, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Creoles and trade languages tend to be easy to learn, with relatively simple phonologies and grammars. I can attest that I found Swahili, and African trade language (and possibly a creole), easy to learn. I have heard that Indonesian is easy, too. As for genuine creoles, I think Haitian Creole would be relatively easy for speakers of most European languages. There are several English-based creole languages that may be even easier for an English speaker. Marco polo (talk) 22:52, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OP's comment: Thank you all! HOOTmag (talk) 09:04, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any English word having double-h, except for "withhold" (and its derivatives, e.g. withheld etc.)?

I'm referring to "pure" (so to speak) English words, i.e. excluding new loanwords borrowed from exotic languages, etc., and also excluding onomatopoeia, and meaningless words, e.g. "ahh". So, is "withhold" (and its derivatives) the only "normal" English word having double-h? HOOTmag (talk) 22:02, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If you count compounds, there are plenty of words, like bathhouse. Without compounds, probably not. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:14, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Google shows more "bath house" than "bathhouse". HOOTmag (talk) 00:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I always hesitate about the spelling of threshold. I pronounce it "thresh-hold", but (without consulting a reference), I'm pretty sure it's spelt with one 'h'. —— Shakescene (talk) 00:08, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, one h. HOOTmag (talk) 00:21, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hitchhiker, of course, although that's usually hyphenated. Notice that the first H is modifying a preceding T, C, or S, while the second provides an aspirate sound (modifying, if you like to think of it that way, the succeeding vowel.) —— Shakescene (talk)

Google shows much more non-hypheneated spellings. HOOTmag (talk) 00:26, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Google is not a dictionary.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:31, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Both for bathhouse and hitchhiker, it doesn't matter which one google has "more" of; the non-hyphenated, non-spaced spellings still exist, and are still English words. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:43, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Correct, but I'm looking for a word which (like "withhold") is generally written as one word. HOOTmag (talk) 00:47, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

These words are "generally" written as one word, especially in the UK. They are also "generally" written as two. There is no one right way; both are possible. It just depends on the person. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:26, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of compounds starting with arch- and church-. Excluding words which are often hyphenated (ash-heap, fourth-hand, high-handed, rough-hewed, etc.), there are several rare words in -hood or -head (birthhood, pariahhood, muchhead, etc.), German borrowings or things named after Germans, like Hochheimer, Leichhardt, and Kirchhoff, some other foreign words like Wahhabi, etc. But it would seem that otherwise hh is obsolete in English apart from withhold. kwami (talk) 00:48, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If you're prepared to accept esoterica, there's the word feythhed, meaning "a (hostile) band of armed men, military might or force". It's from Middle English, but seems to have survived, if only to appear in lists of word oddities, as opposed to being actually used in practice. That also applies to plihht. This gives us boughhty and pathhypongathous, but there is precisely 1 google hit for the latter word, that very website, so it hardly seems to be a legitimate word. -- JackofOz (talk) 03:35, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

My old Webster's indicates "withhold" is a compound word. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 03:39, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The OED also has Tachhydrite.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:37, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Another answer is "roughhousing" and related forms. --Anon, 10:24 UTC, October 15, 2009.

OP's comment: Thank you all! HOOTmag (talk) 09:04, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 15

"Oink Oink" in Greek

Almost all languages have a special word which indicates the sound made by the pig. The only execptions (as far as I know) are the languages spoken by peoples among which the bacon/pork is a taboo (due to religious reasons), e.g. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu (all of which are main languages of muslim population), and Hebrew (being a main language of jewish population).

Surprisingly, there's also an unexpected exception: Greek! Why does Greek have no word for "Oink Oink"? Aren't there pigs in Greece? HOOTmag (talk) 00:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm curious to know how you determined these facts about Greece and about countries where pork is not on the menu. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 01:44, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See here. HOOTmag (talk) 09:35, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Let's not confuse religious taboos with "Oh my God! What's that? I've never seen anything like it before! What do you call it, a peg, er, pig? Wow." DOR (HK) (talk) 02:37, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, most of them haven't heard a pig grunt or squeal. But why? because they don't raise pigs, because their meat is a taboo! However, I would like to know why Greek has no word for "oink oink"! Bacon/pork is not a taboo in Greece, right? HOOTmag (talk) 09:35, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, most pork-eaters have never met a pig, either. --Sean 13:45, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So how do the English speakers know its sound is "oink oink"? They must have some tradition having started by some English speakers who did hear a pig, right? HOOTmag (talk) 18:15, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

From culture and media, I guess. I'm just saying a very small part of the population ever steps foot on a farm. --Sean 21:34, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Which culture? Which media? The English culture/media tells us that the pig's sound is "oink oink", and the French culture/media tells us it's "groin groin", and the Japanese culture/media tells us it's "boo boo", while the Arabic/Persian/Turkish/Urdu/Hebrew culture/media has nothing to tell us about the pig's sound. How come? because every media is based on culture, and every culture is based on tradition, and every tradition about the sound of pigs is based on some people (being "a very small part of the population" as you've called that) who simply heard a pig. That's what the English culture (about the pig's sound) is based on, and that's why the Arabic/Persian/Turkish/Urdu/Hebrew culture can't tell us anything about the pig's sound. HOOTmag (talk) 22:40, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I'm going to have to see a source before I believe that these languages have no word for the sound of a pig... -Elmer Clark (talk) 06:32, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See here.

Additionally, as a native Hebrew speaker, I can approve of the absence of "oink oink" (or any parallel sound) in Hebrew, although Hebrew does have a word for the pig, because it's mentioned in the Bible - as an animal which mustn't be on the menu... I believe that most native Hebrew speakers (including those who speak no other language) have seen a pig, mainly in photos etc. (there are no pigs in zoos visited by Hebrew speakers), but they simply haven't heard a pig! (how many times have you heard pigs in movies?), and I believe that the same is in Persian, Turkish, and other languages spoken by peoples among which the bacon/pork is a taboo, as you can see also at the website mentioned above.

However, I can't understand why Greek has no word for the sound of a pig!

HOOTmag (talk) 09:35, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Arabic Wikipedia says "قباع" (qabaa`a, I suppose) is the sound a pig makes. Not quite "oink", but rather guttural. Adam Bishop (talk) 08:11, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It means: "a grunt". As far as I know, Arabic has no parallel sound for the English "oink oink", although it does have a word for "grunting". HOOTmag (talk) 09:35, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hans Wehr, and Google for that matter, say it is specifically the grunting of a pig. Isn't that essentially what you're looking for? (Of course, Wehr also says it can mean the trumpeting of an elephant.) Adam Bishop (talk) 19:23, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, it's the grunting of a pig, that's what I meant when I wrote "a grunt" (i.e. a pig's grunt). But what's the sound made by the pigs when they grunt? The English/Italian/Spanish speakers claim that this sound is "oink oink". The French speakers claim that it's: "groin groin". The German speakers say it's: "grunz". The Japanese speakers say it's: "boo boo". Every language has its own sound for the pig's grunt (see here for other languages, and for other animals).

To summerize our issue, try to distinguish between the (existent) Arabic word for a "grunt" (made by a pig), and the (non-existent) Arabic word for the English "oink oink", i.e. for the French "groin groin", i.e. for the German "grunz", i.e. for the Japanese: "boo boo", i.e. for the sound made by the pigs when they grunt. Neither Arabic, nor Persian, nor Turkish, nor Urdu, nor Hebrew, have a word for the English "oink oink", although they do have a word for "a pig's grunt".

HOOTmag (talk) 20:16, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I recognize that modern Hebrew has been used as a literary language (in the sense of secular fiction/non-fiction), etc. for only about a century, but I would think that in some context on a rare basis, some Hebrew (or perhaps Yiddish) speaking writer had mentioned a pig or similar animal and the sound it makes? Moreover, as for the other languages mentioned, we should recall that not every one of their speakers is Muslim--might not Christian Arabs, etc. have their own word for oink oink? --71.111.194.50 (talk) 12:39, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yiddish? I'm talking about Hebrew speakers who speak no other language. I don't remember any Hebrew text mentioning the sound made by the pig.

The Christian Arabs who speak Arabic only, share the same problem with non-jews who speak Hebrew only. Their native language has no word for the sound the pig makes, due to the historical background of their native language.

HOOTmag (talk) 18:15, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure Greek has a word – there is one in the children's song "Kokoraki" as performed by Donald Swann. See [3] for an image of Swann's pronunciation notes. It looks as if he wrote "snort" :) but the transcriber has written "hrrr-hrrr" underneath. There must be an mp file out there somewhere. Best, WikiJedits (talk) 14:55, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As you've indicated, the writer didn't write the sound made by the pig. It's just the transcriber, who wrote "hrrr" in Latin alphabet; However, In this forum, somebody calling themself "Director CrisAK", cited (at: 14:09) the same song - but in the Greek alphabet, with the pig's sound: "hr hr hr" (or rather, in Greek alphabet: χρ χρ χρ).

Anyways, this website and also this website (the latter being also with an audio) give another version of the song (in Greek alphabet), and the sound given there is "gruis-gruis" (γρουτς-γρουτς), while another website gives (in a very similar version of the song): "guutsuu-guutsuu" (γούτσου-γούτσου), while this website, p. 9, gives: "gruu-gruu-gruu" (γρούγρούγρού), but in p. 10 it gives: "gron-gron" (γρον γρον) and also (ibid.): "grn grn" (γρν γρν). Another website gives: "nkrmuuf nkruumf" (γκρμουφ γκρουμφ), and also: "mpam-mpam" (μπαμ μπαμ). So now I'm really confused, with such a wonderful variety of the pig's sounds - according to the Greeks! HOOTmag (talk) 18:15, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Modern Greek γκρμουφ γκρουμφ would more naturally be rendered in English "gruf grumf", and μπαμ μπαμ "bam-bam" --rossb (talk) 23:06, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. HOOTmag (talk) 23:45, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unknown chinese fabric item

Hi all - not sure whether this desk or the miscellaneous desk is best for this one... my partner has an odd Chinese item which she bought at a second-hand shop fairly recently, and neither of us has a clue what it is. It is about 2.5 metres (8 ft) long and 30 cm (1 ft) wide, and shaped a bit likke a giant necktie, though constant in width throughout. It has a central red cotton panel with yellow seal-script writing printed on it, with the pictograms repeating regularly after every nine rows of six characters. This panel is flanked by two strips of calico. The back of the item is either heavy silk or satin. We have two questions: (1) what is it - it is purely decorational or does/did it serve a particular purpose, and (2) what does the seal-script say? Thanks in advance, Grutness...wha? (and Alice) 00:36, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The item is a table runner, a type of placemat common in both China and the West. The script is an old, stylized type of Chinese but I'm not able to translate (if, in fact, is isn't just pretty nonsense). DOR (HK) (talk) 02:41, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The script is called Seal script. It's not easy to read unless you've learned it specifically. I recognise some characters, but a lot of them are too difficult. Steewi (talk) 03:37, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They're all variations of the same character 福, which has a range of meanings related to auspicious things and good fortune. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.203.207.54 (talk) 04:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The quality of being altruistic

Is there a word in English meaning "the quality or state of being altruistic", something like "altruisticness", or even "altruisticity"? Thanks, decltype (talk) 07:41, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think a person who holds altruism as a high value and regularly practises it is exhibiting, well, altruism, rather than any of the words you suggest. -- JackofOz (talk) 07:59, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The OED doesn't give any noun other than "altruism", which as JackofOz says, has the sense the questioner seeks; the OED defines it as "Devotion to the welfare of others, regard for others, as a principle of action; opposed to egoism or selfishness." Is there any reason the questioner thinks "altruism" isn't the right word? --Nigelpackham (talk) 11:21, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm reminded of a Rowan Atkinson sketch - a politician is giving a speech: "We must have purpose! We must not be purposeless! We must not exhibit purposlessness! We must be purposelessnessless!" H W Fowler also condemns the sequence orient > orientation > orientated (as against oriented) > orientate (as against orient itself). "Altruisticness" is a defensible English word, but there are few cases where "altruism" couldn't be used instead of it. Agglutination is the technical term for the general process, but I don't know if there's a specific term for the formation of new words by agglutination in a non-aggultinative language. Tevildo (talk) 19:52, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here we have the word nesslessness used in a poem. (Australians may remember Tim and Debbie also using that word in one of their amaazing "Brain Space" radio episodes.) And here is a suggestion that words like rednesslessnessless and even longer concatenations could be constructed. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:12, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Altruisticism" comes to mind, following the pattern of "mystic" and "mysticism". However, I checked my old Webster's, and that's not a word either. It defines "altruism" as "devotion to the interests of others" (it comes from French autrui, a variation on autre, from the Latin alter). Noah further defines "altruist" as "one who practices altruism"; "altruistic" as "pertaining to or given to altruism"; and "altruistically" as the corresponding adverb. "Selfless" is a synonym for "altruistic". For the "state of being", one is "selfless" or "altruistic". One exhibits "selflessness" or "altruism". As someone said earlier. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots← 06:54, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unselfish, humane, and my favorite: philanthropic. DOR (HK) (talk) 07:25, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another German question - (be)fragen

What's the difference between fragen und befragen? AlmostReadytoFly (talk) 11:36, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Off the top of my head I would say it's the difference between asking and questioning (in the sense of surveys or interrogations, not in the sense of "doutbing", which would be "hinterfragen"). --80.123.210.172 (talk) 13:56, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I second that. Fragen refers to one question, and befragen to more than one, I think. --88.73.121.209 (talk) 15:01, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For fun only (macro-areal feature?)

This one just came to me off the top of my head--I'm only asking out of curiosity so don't feel obliged. I'm curious whether it's plausible that there's a macro-areal feature east of a certain longitude that causes Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Malay/Indonesian (I believe), and others, to lack an indefinite (and in most cases definite) article? --Dpr/71.111.194.50 (talk) 14:58, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's more interesting to put the question the other way round and wonder why some languages do have both indefinite and definite articles. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:40, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There's a map at Article (grammar) that may interest you. I'm not sure that indefinite articles are found only in European languages, but I think they are quite rare outside Europe. (World languages that originated in Europe, like English, French, and Spanish, are considered "European languages" for this purpose.) +An gr 19:47, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Angr. That map is quite interesting. I was thinking in geographic terms of the specific countries and didn't think to look there. By the way, nice analogy below vis-a-vis Francis and "Dutch" --Dpr/71.111.194.50 (talk) 21:16, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you from below (or down under in this case). :) -- JackofOz (talk) 07:15, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Frances

What are the origins of the name Frances? --Christie the puppy lover (talk) 20:01, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's from Italian Francesca, the feminine of Francesco, which was the nickname given to St. Francis of Assisi because his father did business in France. +An gr 20:10, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A latter-day comparison would be calling someone "Dutch", and that then becoming widespread enough to become a standard name given to children whose parents did not necessarily have any associations with the Netherlands. There are a few examples of people being nicknamed "Dutch" (Dutch Schultz comes to mind, although his parents were German), but it hasn't become a common given name the way Francis has. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A little off the track, but "Dutch" was a common synonym for "German" in the 19th century. Examples are the Pennsylvania Dutch, and public figures such as Honus "The Flying Dutchman" Wagner, and Casey Stengel, who was known as "Dutch" in his younger days. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots 20:36, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Japanese translation of martial arts title

What is the Japanese equivalent of the English martial arts title of "Supreme Grandmaster"? Thanks. --84.71.198.190 (talk) 22:40, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They are usually called 最高師範/saikōshihan. Oda Mari (talk) 04:31, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

October 16

Boccaccio

What are various spellings or variations of the name "Boccaccio"? 12.171.237.36 (talk) 00:07, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is often misspelled (by me) as Bocaccio or Boccacio, but that's not really a variation as much as it is just wrong. Adam Bishop (talk) 05:50, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Off with his/her/their head(s)!

How would one go about saying "Off with his/her/their head(s)!" in German?

Filosojia X Non(Philosophia X Known) 00:29, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

In this translation of Alice in Wonderland, the ~~Red Queen~~ Queen of Hearts says "Ihren Kopf ab!" (for "her head") and "Ihre Köpfe ab!" (for "their heads"). Deor (talk) 00:44, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks!!! Filosojia X Non(Philosophia X Known) 00:51, 16 October 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Philosophia X Known (talk • contribs)

To complete the series, "Off with his head" would be "Seinen Kopf ab!". Marco polo (talk) 01:19, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And if the ruler was seriously annoyed, would it be "Seinen Dummkopf ab!" as in "off with his fool head"? →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots← 07:52, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I realise you're probably joking, but still: nah, despite having "Kopf" in it, "Dummkopf" always refers to a person, not a head, so that sentence wouldn't make sense. TomorrowTime (talk) 09:26, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Enjoying someone's support

There are 252 million google hits for "enjoy support". That tells me that "to enjoy <someone's> support" is a very well-accepted expression. But it's hardly colloquial, not in my part of the world anyway. People usually talk about something or someone "having" support, or not. Except that I heard a local politician being interviewed on radio this afternoon, and he was talking about a proposed new casino. He was saying that such a proposal would need to "enjoy bipartisan support" to be a goer. He used that expression about 6 times in 2 minutes. Which got me wondering about the use of the word "enjoy" in this context. The only entities that can usually be said to enjoy anything are animate beings. How can an abstract idea, such as the establishment of a casino, be said to "enjoy" anything? Where did this expression come from, and why is it still used in certain registers but not others? -- JackofOz (talk) 07:39, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's used a lot when the support is the support of someone/something that would be seen as beneficial, and where 'enjoy' roughly means 'is lucky enough to have'. i.e., "the proposal enjoys the support of the charismatic Bill Clinton" or something like that. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 07:43, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is kind of an annoying media-hype term, yes? Regardless, my old Webster's gives two definitions of "enjoy": (1) To have satisfaction in experiencing, possessing, etc.; and (2) To have possession or use of; to have the benefit of. The latter would seem to fit the media usage, and squares with what Rjanag just said above. →Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots← 07:46, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I hear it quite often during pledge drives on my local NPR radio station. It's usually used in a sentence such as "NPR enjoys the support of Larsen's Biscuits". Meaning that Larsen's gave NPR or the local VPR affiliate some money to fund whatever program is on at the time. Dismas|^(talk) 09:44, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Third cousin twice removed

Does anyone know hot to say something like "third cousin twice removed" in French? Or if it's more complicated that that, is there any pattern in French for the "names" of cousins? Thanks for your time. 169.231.34.158 (talk) 08:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect anagrams of notable people's names

Here's your homework for the weekend.

I've been wondering lately (I do a lot of wondering, in case you hadn't noticed) whether there are any good examples of two notable people whose names are perfect anagrams of each other.

When I say "perfect anagrams", I mean that close is not close enough.

The people don't need to have anything in common other than notability, but if they do have other commonalities, so much the better.

There are many trivial cases such as John Andrews and Andrew Johns, but let's ignore them.

The more well-known both people are, the better.

You can use their full names or just their given names + surnames. Or any other forms by which they were commonly known. So, in JFK's case, you might come up with an anagram of John Kennedy (such as Donny E. H. Jenk, if such a person existed and was notable), or of John F. Kennedy, or of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Go to it. I expect a full list of answers on my desk by Monday morning. :) -- JackofOz (talk) 10:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 370: / Line 370: @@
 Does anyone know hot to say something like "third cousin twice removed" in French? Or if it's more complicated that that, is there any pattern in French for the "names" of cousins? Thanks for your time. [[Special:Contributions/169.231.34.158|169.231.34.158]] ([[User talk:169.231.34.158|talk]]) 08:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
+== Perfect anagrams of notable people's names ==
+Here's your homework for the weekend.
+I've been wondering lately <small>(I do a lot of wondering, in case you hadn't noticed)</small> whether there are any good examples of two notable people whose names are perfect [[anagram]]s of each other.
+When I say "perfect anagrams", I mean that close is not close enough.
+The people don't need to have anything in common other than notability, but if they do have other commonalities, so much the better.
+There are many trivial cases such as [[John Andrews]] and [[Andrew Johns]], but let's ignore them.
+The more well-known both people are, the better.
+You can use their full names or just their given names + surnames.  Or any other forms by which they were commonly known.  So, in [[JFK]]'s case, you might come up with an anagram of '''John Kennedy''' (such as [[Donny E. H. Jenk]], if such a person existed and was notable), or of '''John F. Kennedy''', or of '''John Fitzgerald Kennedy'''.
+Go to it.  I expect a full list of answers on my desk by Monday morning.  :)  --  [[User:JackofOz|JackofOz]] ([[User talk:JackofOz|talk]]) 10:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)