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October 24

Cuneiform

(Re-posting question from Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 March 11, hoping for one last chance to get it answered before the RD closes for good.)

Can somebody help me identify the characters on this tablet?

The left column looks like A AB BI A2 ALEPH U I, and the top of the middle column like AL MA GAR; but the rest of the characters are too difficult for me to match against the list of cuneiform signs.

According to the image description page, the sculpture is from the 1870s, and the success in decyphering cuneiform was in recent news at that time: Sir Henry Rawlinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1850 on account of being "The Discoverer of the key to the Ancient Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian Inscriptions in the Cuneiform character." The sculptor, Thomas Nicholls, and the architect, William Burges, probably couldn't read cuneiform (or other ancient languages) themselves; I presume the sculptor had copied a sample of cuneiform from some reference, same as he copied the Aramaic alphabet. (The sculpture in question is part of a group of five.) --132.67.171.83 (talk) 09:24, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Our list may not be that useful; you'd probably have to consult a publication from around that time, such as Carl Faulmann's Buch der Schrift. His list starts on page 69. There, "it, id eine" (about the 18th character on page 70, left row) seems a much better fit for the fourth character in the left column, which was presumably what you identified as "BI" (third character in your question). — Sebastian 12:31, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

132.67.171.83 -- Cuneiform in the Unicode standard is based on the early Babylonian forms of the signs. This has some advantages, but it isn't the form of the signs that was first deciphered, or which has traditionally been used in modern scholarly grammars. In July, I finished uploading the glyphs of a neo-Assyrian cuneiform font (which may be more relevant to your problem) as SVG files, but I'm only about 30% done with post-upload tasks of doing cross-checking and making minor corrections. You can see the SVG files at commons:User:AnonMoos/Gallery (Assyrian cuneiform)... -- AnonMoos (talk) 05:26, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

The character that looks like this: < could mean "ten," and likewise <<< could be "thirty". I'm no Assyriologist, but I believe a lot of cuneiform tablets are bookkeeping records. Maybe this could have been copied from one of them? Herbivore (talk) 14:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Turris Babel ædificationis adhortatio linguis sex

Athanasius Kircher adorns an illustration of the Tower of Babel with six banderoles containing the exhortation Gen 11:4. On each of these, there is small writing that might refer to the language, but unfortunately, is undecipherable due to the low resolution. What are the six languages? Obviously, there's Latin and Greek, and one of the two square scripts must be Hebrew. One appears to be Arabic, but then there's another script of Aramaic descendance that looks similar to Syriac, maybe Serṭā, but contains some distinctive letters that have no correspondence there, above all the Z turned right 45°, which I can't construct as a ligature, either. Is that used for Aramaic, or is the other square script used for that language?

Bonus question: If anyone here can write Akkadian cuneiform, it would be really cool to add that to the list. There's room to the lower left; I'm sure the venerable Master of a Hundred Arts would appreciate it. — Sebastian 10:53, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

You can view a high resolution scan at the Internet Archive here. In fact, maybe we should replace the commons image with a higher res version. - Lindert (talk) 11:11, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Wonderful! Now I can read the small writing with ease. It says in order:

1. T. Latinus
2. T. Græcus
3. T. Syriacus
4. Text. Hebræg [sic!]
5. T. Arabicus
6. T. Chaldai[cus]

That answers my main question. As for the cuneiform, the lack of replies to the previous question suggests that I may have to give up that hope. — Sebastian 11:38, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

The second Hebrew script, incidentally, is the Targum (specifically Targum Onkelos). הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 14:54, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. So, I understand, then, that the language is Aramaic. That was what I thought, since Chaldaic redirects to Biblical Aramaic, and I'm assuming that the phrase in that article "It should not be confused with the [...] targumim" might be a more recent distinction. — Sebastian 22:17, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

To clarify, "the Z turned right 45°" in the Serṭā fragment is the word ܠܢ lan --46.19.86.100 (talk) 04:48, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, I see how that makes sense from the Contextual forms of letters given for ʾEsṭrangēlā and Maḏnḥāyā. — Sebastian 07:18, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

By the way, there's a book about Athanasius Kircher titled "A Man of Misconceptions". His diagrams, and maps of Atlantis (with north on the bottom and south on top) etc. can be fun to look at, but I don't know that I'd place great confidence in things that he originated (his attempted decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was a fiasco)... AnonMoos (talk) 05:34, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Verb forms for people using singular "they" pronoun

Over at Candace Gingrich there's a disagreement over whether people who chose the singular "they" pronouns for themselves and what verb forms are to be used in sentences where the pronoun is not present' it it "Pat is a lawyer" or "Pat are a lawyer"? --Nat Gertler (talk) 14:00, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

"Everyone loves his or her mother" is obviously the correct form, but it's commonplace to reduce the construction to "their". There is no such excuse with the OP's example: "Pat are a lawyer" is wrong. 92.27.49.50 (talk) 14:08, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

The article now reads "Candace Gingrich were born..." and "Although Gingrich's sexual orientation were ..." Whatever gender she claims to be there is only one of her. Someone please change it back. 92.27.49.50 (talk) 14:19, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I see what the problem is. There is a sentence which now reads: "They served as the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project Spokesperson for 1995 and were named one of Esquire's "Women We Love" and "Women of the Year" for Ms. magazine." If you accept that a woman can be described as "they" that construction is correct, because the plural pronoun requires a plural verb. As explained above, that does not imply that there are two of her. 92.27.49.50 (talk) 14:27, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I've been trying to change it back; there's only been one other editor, the one pushing the "Candace are" usage, so I've come here to get the input needed to end the edit war. I have no problem with that last sentence you cited; it's those previous two. --Nat Gertler (talk) 14:34, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, and to justify themselves they claimed the construction was subjunctive - which is nonsense. 92.27.49.50 (talk) 14:39, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

There are always people in the world who will be offended by anything. So, instead of trying to please the world, just do what makes sense to you. In this case, the singular construct is a well known linguistic controversy. Some people insist that the form is legitimate. If you feel uncomfortable or believe that it is incorrect, then do what works for you. If other people criticize you for this trivial gender rule, then the problem is on them, not you. Keep in mind that there are languages in the world that do not put so much weight on linguistic gender and subject-verb agreement. Mandarin is one of them. In my own English writing style, if the gender is unknown and the subject is singular and personal, then I will either use "it" for an animal or object or "he" for a person. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 03:30, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Nat_Gertler -- In the speech and writing of some people, the "singular they" pronoun can have its own special reflexive/emphatic form themself (which some other people will object to), but the verb agreement manipulation does not sound like anything that happens in ordinary English... AnonMoos (talk) 05:42, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

I can't see why Wikipedia should be bound by anybody's personal preferences. If we know for a fact that the person in question is a woman, then we should refer to her as "she" rather than reinvent English grammar for her sake. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:19, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

We should use the gender the person self-identifies with, including the choice of pronouns they expect for themselves. If the person wishes us to use the pronound "they", then we use it. To do otherwise is to illegitimize their own identity. On the grammitical issue, we simply directly use the proper agreement for the immediate usage. Thus "Candace is" but "They are". "Are" is neither plural nor singular, and anyone insisting otherwise is ignoring the use of "are" in agreement with the singular "you". --Jayron32 13:25, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

It usually makes sense to use a person's self-proclaimed gender identity, rather than trying to do "original research" (and the necessary information for such research would not be publicly available in most cases, anyway). However, Wikipedia can't really use grammar innovations or attempted reforms of the English language in writing about people with non-standard gender identities. "Singular they" was created by ordinary English-speakers even before the 20th century, and has been slowly gaining in acceptability for many years, so there's little problem with using it more or less in the way that many people are already using it. However attempted innovative top-down "reforms" such as Sie and Ze and whatever, which would not even be understood by the great majority of English speakers, cannot be used in ordinary Wikipedia article text (only when actually explicitly discussing issues of pronoun reform). AnonMoos (talk) 14:03, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

"Singular they" has existed for a very long time in English, but not where the referent is a specific, known individual. It's used to refer to generic persons ("someone", "anyone"), or occasionally to an unknown person. Referring it to a specific named person is maybe not as much of an innovation as "sie" or "xe", but it's still a quite recent grammatical innovation that has arguably not entirely caught on. --Trovatore (talk) 02:18, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

There's certainly some truth in what you say, but slightly expanding the semantics of an existing construction is less of a leap than introducing a brand-new innovation which would feel unfamiliar and alien to English-speakers. One of the reasons why "Ms." caught on (when many analogous proposals didn't) is that many people (especially in the South) already pronounced "Mrs." as "miz", and often loosely applied it to unmarried women who were not youngish... AnonMoos (talk) 09:49, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Less of a leap, I agree. But still a pretty big one. Personally I still find the construction quite jarring, borderline ungrammatical. --Trovatore (talk) 05:46, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but the main question facing the OP here is whether "Candace are" or "They is" are ever appropriate constructions. They would not be. We would use the proper grammatical constructs. If Candace wishes referents to include an ungendered pronoun, then "They are..." is the only approrpiate construction here if we are to use a pronoun at all. The source of the controversy, forcing "Candace are" into the narrative, is just plain wrong. --Jayron32 15:37, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

To put it another way: English lacks a gender-free singular 3rd person pronoun (the choice we have is "he", "she" or "it"), and if we don't want to be gender-specific, we have no choice but to improvise, so we sometimes use the plural pronoun "they" in reference to single people. Once we've chosen to use "they", the verb must agree, hence it's "they are" and not "they is". But that's as far as it goes. Just because we've used a plural pronoun and associated plural verb to refer to a single person, that does not mean that we now use plural verbs when referring to that person by name. So, you could have: Candace is a lovely person. They are kind and generous. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:01, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

(ec) Phone operator to boss: "There's a caller who wants to speak to you." Boss: "Ask them to wait, I'm busy." In English, 'them' is the only option. Akld guy (talk) 01:22, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Your ec took over 4 hours to manifest. Must be slow ether in your neck of the woods.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:47, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

@JackofOz: The edit conflict was with Matt Deres' post below mine. It's quite strange. My post actually went through with no edit conflict, and then I noticed that his post was already there, below mine. I then added the (ec) to indicate that my post was made after his, since his appeared to disagreed with mine. In fact, his was made while I was typing out mine. The sequence begins here. Akld guy (talk) 19:24, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Maybe I missed it, but I don't think anyone has yet linked to singular they, which is pretty detailed and well-referenced. Regarding Jack's assertion above that our choices are "he", "she", and "it" when it comes to third-person pronouns, I submit third-person pronoun, in particular, the table here which suggests there are others (with varying degrees of general acceptance). Matt Deres (talk) 01:19, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

THanks folks. Just to be clear: I was well aware that "Candice are" was wrong; it's just one of those things that was so obvious that most sources would not even talk about it. I just needed someplace I could point the other editor to to show it was wrong, and this has been accomplished. --Nat Gertler (talk) 01:52, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Matt, I was waiting for this article to be linked here. I had great hope for such gender-neutral pronouns, which is why I created {{genderneutral}} in 2006. But since then, acceptance rather dwindled. Some three years ago, I spoke with a linguist about it, who said "we've lost that battle long ago". — Sebastian 10:11, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

The word battle is telling, don't you think? μηδείς (talk) 20:49, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

"You" is not singular. The singular form is "thou". Other languages don't have a hangup about the use of the second person singular pronoun. Different languages address the problem of inappropriate familiarity in different ways - French (like English) uses the plural (vous), German uses the third person plural (Sie) and Portuguese adopts a noun form a Sra. (the lady). 92.8.218.38 (talk) 15:23, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

92.8.218.38 -- either "you" is the 2nd person singular pronoun in modern English, or modern English doesn't have any 2nd person singular pronoun. The existence of "yourself" alongside "yourselves" would appear to be evidence that "you" can sometimes be singular (just as the existence of "themself" alongside "themselves" is evidence that "they" can sometimes be singular -- though of course "yourself" is completely standard and accepted English, while "themself" has a shakier status). AnonMoos (talk) 02:55, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Queen Victoria once complained that her prime minister William Gladstone "addresses me as if I were a public meeting." Foreigners point out that English people speak to their family and friends the same way. All languages (so far as I am aware) have a second person singular. English is no exception. It's used in churches (though less frequently than of yore) and in Yorkshire dialect ("Tha's Ripper, tha'" said the Bradford policeman who arrested him). The fallacy that "you" and its derivatives is singular is demonstrated by plugging "yourself" into a sentence - "You, yourself, are wrong" is grammatical, not "you, yourself, art wrong", or "you, yourself, is wrong". 92.8.223.3 (talk) 14:01, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

You have a preconceived notion that the verb form "are" can never be singular, but the linguistic analysis of English is simpler in most respects if it's assumed that "are" (and also "were") can be singular in the second person... AnonMoos (talk) 01:35, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

October 25

puit (fr)

Wikidata item d:Q42301898 has the French label "Pierre-Feuille-Ciseaux-Puit", for a game that's a variation of d:rock-paper-scissors. In this context, what's the English-language equivalent of the last French word? -- Deborahjay (talk) 10:23, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

It should be "puits", which is a well - the idea is that the rock and the scissors fall down the well, but the paper can cover the opening of the well (it's explained at fr:Pierre-papier-ciseaux, but in French of course). "Puit" is surely a typo; just guessing, but it's probably the common mistake that "puits" looks plural so the singular must be "puit". Entering "puit" into the French-English dictionary on WordReference.com takes you to "pur" for some reason, which must be the origin of the "pure" translation on Wikidata. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:34, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

The wikidata item linked to by the OP does have "puits" - it appears to have been mis-copied here. Wymspen (talk) 14:10, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

OP explains: Were you to view the sequence of edits on that Wikidata item, I believe you'd find that the restored 's' wasn't present when I posed the above query; it was corrected only after I received the reply. Furthermore, User:Adam Bishop was spot-on in assessing my process, right down to WordReference.com. -- Deborahjay (talk) 08:48, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Beard to the washing

Whilst reading a book about the mayors of Exeter,England,I found this sentence-'...[this mayor] never did any ill to any man, nor did he put his beard to the washing'. I have no idea what this refers to, Google hasn't come up with anything useful, so any ideas what this phrase means? Lemon martini (talk) 21:04, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Probably a variant of "to give one's head for the washing", an obsolete slang term meaning to comply, or to submit to a reprimand, in a meek manner. See the OED entry for "head" where there's a 1601 quote "Such a one as would not give his Head for the polling, nor his Beard for the washing"... AnonMoos (talk) 22:05, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nubia

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author whose first name is pronounced "Tah-nuh-hah-see" rather than the apparent "Ta-nuh-hee-si." The article says he was given an old name for Nubia, but the article on the country does not give such a name as having once been applied to it. When was Ta-Nehisi the name used for Nubia, and in what language?( Reliable source, please.) [http://languagehat.com/ta-nehisi/ a language blog suggests Egyptian. Is there some established transliteration system from that language which says it would be spelled Ta-Nehisi rather than Ta-Nehasi, where the third vowel is rendered the same way as the first vowel? The blog suggests it is somehow a phonetic transcription of southern Black American dialect, where a long "I" would be pronounced "AH." But that would mean a parent read it Nahisi, then someone wrote down the way it was pronounced, with a drawled long I as the penultimate vowel, rather than the way it was spelled. But the father was quite well educated, so this seems doubtful. Edison (talk) 21:50, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Reading through lots of offtopic chitchat at that blog, who would pop in but supposedly the father who gave him the name, Paul Coates, who said "... the pronunciation of his name was not of my doing. his name was given to me along with its pronunciation by Yosef ben Jochannan, who members of the Black community lovingly called Dr. Ben. he was one of our most knowledgeable elders. by birth he was Ethiopian, and was born into the Jewish faith. he was largely self taught as a historian and Egyptologist." So my question then addresses the correctness of Jochannan's transcription and pronunciation. Edison (talk) 22:08, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

It's in our article at Nubia#Nubia and Ancient Egypt -- "Nehset / Nehsyu / Nehsi — Nḥst / Nḥsyw / Nḥsj — Nubia / Nubians". If you want info on the exact details of ancient Egyptian vowel pronunciations, then you're probably out of luck -- ancient Egyptian orthography didn't provide any information about vowels directly, and modern conventional Egyptological transcriptions are often derived by changing Egyptian guttural consonants to "a", semivowel consonants to "i" or "u", and then semi-randomly inserting enough "e" vowels to result in a pronounceable-looking word... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:23, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

I certainly don't expect to learn exactly what vowel sounds were used in ancient Egyptian. Bu has the puzzling Coates spelling and pronunciation been seen in any scholarly article about Nubia, or is it original with him? "i" as "ah" in the next to last vowel, then :i: as :ee: in the last vowel. I do not dispute his right to pronounce his name however he chooses. Edison (talk) 12:32, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

If you search Google Books for the name, but limiting to the 20th century, you'll get some ghits [1].--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:00, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

The name comes from Yosef Ben-Jochannan as shown above, and his Wikipedia article shows that he is not at all a reliable source on history or Egyptology, so I will consider the pronunciation of the penultimate vowel to be based on a whim ofYosef Ben-Jochannanwithout scholarly basis. Edison (talk) 18:00, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Your "where a long "I", would be pronounced "AH"", Edison, is exactly what occurred to me as a plausible explanation. If Coates' father was from Carruh-LAH-nuh, it is exactly what I would expect. μηδείς (talk) 19:51, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Again here we have the problem of what is meant by a "long" vowel. (This came up in a recent question I asked, Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 11#Vowel length in "Samoa", that never got responses to my full satisfaction, but to be fair the ball was in my court and I had other things on my mind and never hit it back.)

When the term "long i" is used in the context of elementary education in the United States, it means something very different from vowel length as understood more generally. Specifically, the "long i" as taught to children here is the i of "ice", the one that "says its name". So "long" a, e, i, o, u are /eɪ/, /iː/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, /juː/ respectively. (Here I have used the length marker ː as seems to be conventional, though I still do not understand why it is used in phonemic transcriptions, given that English does not have phonemic vowel length.)

So we may have a bit of a misunderstanding — Edison apparently expects the "long i" to mean /iː/, whereas Ben-Johannan, from context, seems to be using it to mean /aɪ/. --Trovatore (talk) 21:55, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Ben-Johannan's pronunciation wouldn't necessarily matter; it would be how Coates' father (a different man) who named Coates pronounced the name. For example, Archie Bunker may have said eye-talian even if he was taught by people who said ih-tallian. This is groundless speculation though, so I guess I'll bow out. μηδείς (talk) 00:17, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Vowel length

Trovatore -- If you want to use linguistically meaningful terminology, then English can be said to contrast the "checked" vowels (which generally do not appear word-finally or directly before another vowel) and the "unchecked" vowels (which can). The unchecked vowels are divided into unstressed or reduced vowels such as [ə] on the one hand, and long vowels and diphthongs on the other hand. This system has some complexities in dealing with many British English accents (where unstressed [ɪ] is unchecked but stressed [ɪ] is checked), but works pretty well for many American accents (where the unchecked vowels other than [ə] are those in the fourth row of File:Initial Teaching Alphabet ITA chart.svg, while the checked vowels are those in the right half of the third row...) AnonMoos (talk) 03:13, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Well, I think that kind of makes my point for me. Four vowels appear in that chart with the length marker, namely /ɑː/, /iː/, /ɔː/, /uː/ — and those four never appear without it in the same chart. So for phonemic transcriptions, the ː seems completely useless, as it is never used distinctively.

So why is it used at all? I wouldn't really care, but it made it hard to get across what I was saying in the other thread about the pronunciation ['saːmoa], where the lengthening of the [a] is very perceptible to an Anglophone listener. --Trovatore (talk) 04:00, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

The transcriptions in the SVG chart are "broad IPA" (not really claimed to be phonemic as such) -- but one feature of the transcriptions that you're complaining about is that among stressed vowels, those written with a single symbol are checked (with [æ] counting as a single IPA symbol/character, of course), while those written with two symbols (with the second symbol being a following [ː] or diphthong offglide) are unchecked... AnonMoos (talk) 08:47, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

P.S. The chart omits complications with vowel + original "r" due to its purpose (covering the ITA alphabet, not English sounds as such)... AnonMoos (talk) 08:52, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

@Trovatore: I'm slightly upset that you have not got your answer for the previous question as I and Jayron really tried, though you didn't respond. So I'll repeat myself here. The vowel length is a reality in, at least, British English. When British phonetician Daniel Jones were inventing his IPA transcription for RP, he bore that fact in mind. And the length marks was essential, because he used the same letters for both short and long vowels. That is the pairs /ɪ/-/iː/, /ʊ/-/uː/, /ɒ/-/ɔː/, /ə/-/ɜː/ were /i/-/iː/, /u/-/uː/, /ɔ/-/ɔː/, /ə/-/əː/ up to the 1960s, when Alfred C. Gimson has decided to show both the quality and the quantity of vowels. In that respect the length mark may become indeed redundant. Particularly for American English, where the length is of no or lesser importance. And this is why American phoneticians like John Samuel Kenyon did not use /ː/. But for British English the length is still very important and perceivable. And as most dictionaries and learning materials are RP-centered, the most "accepted" English transcriptions use the length mark even for American English (leaving out the length mark for British English is out of discussion, as it is ultimately ought to be shown there).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:18, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

But it is not phonemic, even in BrE, correct? --Trovatore (talk) 19:44, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Ah, so maybe the historical stuff does help with that point. I think it's a great pity that the length mark was ever used to make that distinction, given that even in BrE it's obviously not a "pure" length difference. Let me rephrase:

• If you are familiar with the Samoan pronunciation of "Samoa", do you agree that the first a is drawn out much more than the a of "father", even when the latter is pronounced by a BrE speaker? Or are you willing to take my word for it?
• Is there any way to get that difference across in an IPA transcription?

Thanks, I do appreciate your efforts. --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

October 26

How did men become exclusively male?

Nowadays, people will feel offended when men is used inclusively. My question is, why do people think that "men" doesn't include them to the point that they insist on having a separate word just to indicate femininity? I mean, in Mandarin Chinese, no one feels offended when Tā is used. In fact, it is normal for a speaker to ask, "So, is this person you're talking about male or female?" because in spoken Chinese and historical written Chinese, the pronouns are all identical. And no one feels offended when they use the exact same pronoun Tā for men and women. Instead, the common way to express gender in Chinese is to add 男 or 女 characters or use relational terms (大哥 for oldest brother). To circumvent the traditional pecking order, sometimes English nicknames will be used like "Maria" or something strange like "Tomato" or "Young Boy". Somehow, for English speakers, the given name is most important, because that signifies the person's identity, and gender is part of that. For Chinese, it seems the reverse is true. That relationship (including gender) is priority, while given names are different and changeable depending on the situation. So, anyway, how did "men" become exclusively male? How come gender for English speakers is so intertwined with personal identity than one's relationship to other people? 64.134.39.74 (talk) 14:36, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

"Men" certainly referred to both sexes in the Book of Common Prayer composed during the 16th and 17th centuries; an example is in the Nicene Creed: “Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven...”. A Prayer Book Glossary says: "Man/Men- an inclusive term for all human beings". Alansplodge (talk) 16:39, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

[Edit Conflict] Gender in English and Grammatical gender may contain information of interest. See also Man (word)#Etymology. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.202.208.54 (talk) 16:40, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

By 1776, it seemed to not include women, as "All men are created equal" didn't intend to grant women equal rights with men, such as the right to vote. "Mankind", however, still has the broader meaning, as in "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". StuRat (talk) 16:44, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

The Declaration of Independence wasn't intended to grant anyone rights, but rather to dissolve a governmental relationship; it didn't grant anyone a right to vote (and in the early US, many men were not granted the right to vote, as many states limited it to white male property owners.) --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:59, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

One reason for the DoI E was so that all men could have equal rights, but not women. StuRat (talk) 17:30, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Stu, is this trolling, or are you seriously contending that the Department of Energy was instituted to strip women of their rights? Or did you mean the Department of Education? μηδείς (talk) 18:09, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

I mean DoI, of course. Now corrected. StuRat (talk) 23:12, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

That still leaves open the question of the Declaration depriving or denying rights to women. I see no evidence of this. μηδείς (talk) 00:09, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Not depriving them, just not declaring that women deserve equal rights with men. If it really meant that, then the total lack of any attempt to do so, such as granting women equal voting rights, once the American Revolution was won, would mean the DoI was either a lie or was largely ignored. StuRat (talk) 01:50, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

The Declaration of Independence is not an enforceable legal document, and in some respects stated aspirations rather than anything which was expected to be implemented immediately. For Abraham Lincoln's explanation of this, see http://www.bartleby.com/251/pages/page415.html ... Anyway, some women had the right to vote in New Jersey before 1807. AnonMoos (talk) 09:08, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

One thing I'm finding interesting is this Google Ngram result for the phrase "men and women" (the usage of which suggests a separation), which seems to drop off hard in the late 17th century, then regrow. --Nat Gertler (talk) 17:08, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

64.134.39.74 -- if you want to go back to the origins, then Old English had three separate words: wer with exclusively male reference, wīf with exclusively female reference, and mann, which basically meant "human, person" (a meaning reinforced by its similarity to the impersonal or indefinite pronoun man, which meant "one" or unspecified "they" as verb subject). AnonMoos (talk) 00:03, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

See Gender neutrality in English#Generic words for humans. --69.159.60.147 (talk) 07:43, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

October 27

Pronunciation of place names by soldiers

How did the English-speaking soldiers and officers during WWI and WWII know how to pronounce French, Dutch, German, etc. place names on their military maps? Were they taught a basic language course before being sent to Europe? Or were they taught only the reading rules? I could have only found some instructions for American soldiers [2][3], but it did not say anything about how to read French.

What about other times, how did they know how to pronounce place names in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:49, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

In the British Army, officers and better educated soldiers would have learned some French at school. In the First World War, place names in Flanders often acquired humorous nicknames that the ordinary soldiers could pronounce:

"Eetapps" = Etaples, "Funky Villas" = Fonquevillers, "Ocean Villas" = Auchonvillers, "Plug Street" = Ploegsteert and most famously "Wipers" = Ypres. War Slang Alansplodge (talk) 22:56, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

More often a case of Eat Apples, I think. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:01, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

And don't the British go out of their way to avoid pronouncing French words in the French way ? For example, the "filet" in "filet mignon" becomes "fill-it" not "fill-ay". StuRat (talk) 23:10, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

As a 60-y-o Brit, I've never heard "fill-it" used in the term filet mignon (though that pronunciation is of course close to standard in an English term such as "fillet steak"). It's the sort of thing one might say as a deliberate joke, but not as one's normal usage. It's more likely that a BrE speaker lacking any knowledge of French at all (which would be rare*), would spell the word "fillay", as they would have heard it.

* Under the National Curriculum, all state-school pupils must study a(t least one) foreign language between the ages of 7 and 14. This most often in the recent past comprises of or includes French (over 70%, see this), for obvious historical and geographical reasons. Non-state schools usually feature at least as much, if not more, foreign language study (especially if one includes Latin). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.202.208.54 (talk) 07:25, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. "Fillet steak" must have been the one I heard pronounced "fill-it". StuRat (talk) 11:43, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

I know nothing about the British pronunciation of "filet" (when I was in the UK years ago, I doubt that I ate any filet mignon, or that most of the people I associated with ate it very commonly ), but the UK does have some Anglified pronunciations which sound quite strange to American ears, such as [ɡærɪdʒ] (with stress on first syllable) for "garage" and [kwɪksət] for "Quixote". Then there are semi-Anglified compromise pronunciations, such as [ɡærɑːʒ] and [kwɪksoʊt], which don't sound quite as strange, but still stand out (with the first-syllable stress). I don't know which pronunciations of those words are most common in the UK now, but that's the kind of thing that StuRat was probably referring to. AnonMoos (talk) 08:34, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Shall we get back to the question? Alansplodge (talk) 11:39, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

My response was related to the Q, in that I doubt if many soldiers would actually care if they pronounced foreign place names correctly. They would just muddle through, and not worry if it sounds wrong to the natives. StuRat (talk) 11:45, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Probably right. The closest I got to a reference was BELGIAN TELLS HOW TO PRONOUNCE WAR NAMES ( Los Angeles Herald > 18 April 1918) but that seems to aimed at armchair generals back home. Alansplodge (talk) 12:59, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

A BBC Radio 4 newsreader was lampooned in the press after he pronounced the name of the London suburb of Pentonville (where the prison is) as Pon-ton-veel. A hapless Australian traffic reporter on L B C Radio referred to "congestion at St Pancreas". This led the presenter to remark "Dave in medical mood at St Pancras". 92.8.223.3 (talk) 14:51, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Too obscure. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:51, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
A visitor to Hawaii back in the 1950s was puzzled by a sign he saw, and couldn't understand why the natives couldn't tell him what "ee lee-kay ee-kay" meant. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:11, 28 October 2017 (UTC) So what did "ee lee-kay ee-kay" mean? —Stephen (talk) 12:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC) The sign actually read "I LIKE IKE". :) The point being that in Hawaiian, all syllables are short and are fully pronounced. The observer thought it was Hawaiian, when actually it was a campaign sign for Eisenhower. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:46, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

If you listen to the old song, Mademoiselle from Armentières, you will hear that the town name is pronounced very differently to the correct French version, with one less syllable and rhyming with "years" Wymspen (talk) 17:55, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Jack Charman has no Wikipedia article, but I imagine that here was his best shot at the upper middle class RP of 1915? But here's Line Renaud a few years later. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:32, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't expect that they should or could pronounce place names with native pronunciation. On the contrary, I'm sure they pronounced with Anglicized pronunciation, employing only the sounds of English. However, there are a lot of cases where spelling is counter-intuitive for English speakers. E.g. "ch" is pronounced differently in English, French, Italian and German; French has many peculiar di- and trigraphs like "eau" and many mute consonants; while in German on the contrary "au" is like English "ow", not like "long aw", etc. They could care less how to pronounce local names with native-like accent, still they had to communicate with each other somehow, like "go to village A, then to village B, bomb the enemy position on the street X in city C". And European languages are quite easy in that respect as many Americans (and others: Canadians, Britons, etc.) were acquainted with those languages. But I'm quite curious how they might struggle with Korean and Vietnamese, which are even more alien, though their Romanization might be more straightforward than, e.g., French. Looking over the map of Vietnam, I wonder how they pronounced those place names. Despite knowing the basic reading rules of Vietnamese, even I myself am not sure how I would pronounce them in English.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:48, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

It works both ways. A young girl was in the street with her family in Lisbon and looking in the window of the American library. She began reading the name: oo - nee - ted. That was when Edward Kennedy was a U S senator, but sadly this resource of the United States Information Service is no more (the British Council library has gone as well). 82.14.24.95 (talk) 19:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

This map of England for Polish forces has been going the rounds on Facebook the last few days. --ColinFine (talk) 13:25, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

October 28

p.9

Why are something like fifty percent of all instances of "p." or "pp." as abbreviations of "page" or "pages" (respectively) in Wikipedia articles followed by a number with no black space before it? Thus instead of

p. 9

we see

p.9

Michael Hardy (talk) 06:52, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps because they don't know how to use a non-breaking space.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 06:58, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

But they could still insert a space. Are half of Wikipedia users under the impression that that is standard usage? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:18, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that there should be no space between abbreviations and numbers—all over WP one sees not just "p.9" stuff but "15km" and the like. Where they are getting that impression I don't know. At least, if people use citation templates for refs, the templates will put a space after "p." or "pp." in citing page numbers. Deor (talk) 21:29, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

"15km" with no space is pretty much standard in British writing these days, whether it violates SI usage standards or not. I would expect "p9" rather than "p.9" there, though. --69.159.60.147 (talk) 03:58, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

And thus OP and anyone else reading along can easily fix these when we come across them. It doesn't bother me personally, but I do acknowledge the value of having and consistently applying our MOS. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:09, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Are all high-level languages translated into the same Machine Language?

C, C++, C#, Java - those are all high-level languages. Are they all translated into the same Machine Language? Is it possible to translate something from C++ to Java through Machine Language, or does the programmer have to think creatively in that language and create stuff in that language instead of doing any translation work? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 19:29, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

You might like to read the article compiler. The process is very different from translating between human languages. Each type of processor has its own machine code so the compiler must use only codes that the processor understands. It would be very inefficient to compile from one high-level language to machine code, then try to decompile to another high-level language because decompiling doesn't really create an easily readable version. Programmers would normally just translate from one high-level language to another using their knowledge of both languages. The structures are often different, so things may be done in a different way in different languages, just as in human languages. Dbfirs 19:50, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

• To expand on Dbfirs's response, there are some interesting variations on this.
  • Historically, Java, and Python and some Pascal types were not compiled into architecture-specific machine Language. They were compiled into the "machine code" for their respective abstract machines, which then "ran" on an interpreter, not on the actual hardware machine. A Java JAR file contains this "machine code" that can be interpreted (e.g. on a JVM in a browser) and that does not include the original Java source code.
  • Originally, C++ was not compiled directly. Instead, the C++ translator converted the C++ into C source code, which was then compiled into machine code.
  • GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) is a suite of compilers for many languages including those you mention. GCC front-ends compile all of the languages into an intermediate abstract "machine code". GCC backends generate machine-specific object code from this intermediate representation. For L languages and M machine types, GCC has L front-ends and M back-ends, not LxM separate compilers. -Arch dude (talk) 00:14, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

You probably want to ask that question at the computer desk rather than the language desk (which is for human languages). But generally, a program that translates one high-level language to another is called a transpiler. For example, Emscripten translates C and C++ to Javascript, so you can run C and C++ programs in your browser. Transpiler output generally looks like machine-generated gibberish, not anything that a human would want to have to study directly. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 07:03, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

October 29

Apostrophe usage

Which is correct (or are they both acceptable): "Adam and Eve's expulsion" or "Adam's and Eve's expulsion"? If the former is preferred (which I suspect), why does only "his and her expulsion" sound right, not "he and her expulsion"? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:42, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Either one could work, but "Adam and Eve" are often treated as a unit. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:00, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

"Adam and Eve's expulsion" and "Adam's and Eve's expulsion" are both grammatical, and I find both idiomatic (the former more so). ("Adam's explusion and Eve's" is also grammatical.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language points out a difference between the two: since Gilbert and Sullivan worked as a pair, #"Gilbert's and Sullivan's popularity" sounds odd -- much odder than "Verdi's and Puccini's popularity". *"He and her expulsion" is straightforwardly ungrammatical (as is *"him and her expulsion"). CGEL claims to be no more than a descriptive grammar, and so it's no surprise that its treatment of this matter (pages 1330 to 1332) doesn't attempt to explain why case-marking works differently with pronouns. The question interests me, but unfortunately duckduckgoing "case-marking english pronoun coordination" and the like doesn't bring up anything that promises to be directly useful; rather, there's a lot about "Me and Steve played tennis", "You must explain yourself to your mother and I", and similar nominative/accusative oddities. -- Hoary (talk) 05:32, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't quite follow your final sentence, but in any case I don't see the two sentences as the same. "Me and Steve played tennis" is "informal but grammatical"; "You must explain yourself to your mother and I" is just an error, and there is nothing to be said in its defense. --Trovatore (talk) 06:46, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Two kinds of wrong. Is one any more or less wrong than the other? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:07, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I think so, yes. "Me and Steve" has a long history (arguably comes from French). "To your mother and I" is a hypercorrection, which seems in some sense like the worst kind of error, because it doesn't arise organically from the language, but rather is a failed attempt to apply a misunderstood rule. --Trovatore (talk) 07:15, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

For me (for my idiolect), "to your mother and I" would indeed be a hypercorrection. I wouldn't call it the worst kind of error, because it doesn't affect the meaning in the slightest: if it's an error, it's entirely benign. I dare say it's a hypercorrection for you, Trovatore, as well. But this doesn't mean that it's a hypercorrection for all or even most of those who use it. The fact is, it's widely used. See for example the paper "Between you and I: Case variation in coordinate noun phrases in Canadian English" (doi:10.1075/eww.35.2.03pra). Moreover, for those (unlike you and me) who do use nominatives in [what are for you and me] accusative contexts, there appear to be rules governing which pronouns can be marked nominative (see CGEL). ¶ However, we're getting away from the original, interesting question. -- Hoary (talk) 07:45, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

What I meant in my last sentence was that when I searched for theoretical material about genitive marking (or not) of coordinated pronouns, I found little, but I found a lot about nominative/accusative oddities. My second example, "You must explain yourself to your mother and I", is ungrammatical for me, and so I'm not surprised if it's ungrammatical for you as well. However, there is plenty of evidence that constructions such as this are used by native speakers of English who do not thereupon correct themselves. For most of these speakers (writers), it's not possible to dismiss nominatives in accusative contexts as mere performance errors. There's a considerable literature about this; most of p.463 of CGEL is devoted to it. -- Hoary (talk) 07:26, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

You wouldn't say "explain to I", so "explain to your mother and I" is not correct. Similarly, you wouldn't say "Me went to school", so "Me and Steve went to school is not correct either, unless you're Tonto or are using poetic license in a song such as "Me and Bobby McGee" or "Me and you and a dog named Boo". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:48, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

No, I wouldn't say "Me went to school". In an informal context, I'd be quite happy to say "Me and Steve went to school". Moreover, corpora show that plenty of native speakers of English aside from me do say this. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is a dispassionate description of the English language; it notes that this is widely used (see pp.462-463, wherein examples are marked with a "!"). I don't have either the Comprehensive or the Longman reference grammar with me now, but I'd be surprised if they don't say much the same thing. (You might also look at the introduction to the paper "Between you and I": I provided the DOI, so this paper is easy to get hold of.) -- Hoary (talk) 08:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

It sounds hickish. Dizzy Dean used to refer to himself and his brother as "Me 'n Paul". The novelty of that was that it betrayed Diz's lack of education. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:50, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreeing with Hoary (as an aged Brit): "Me and Steve . . ." (or Steve and me . . .") is something I, despite being public-school educated (i.e. private school educated in US terminology) would and do say in casual or 'street' conversational register, but in any considered context I'd say "Steve and I . . ." (though never ". . . I and Steve . . .").

By "considered" I mean in any formal or semi-formal situation, or if addressing several people at once even if in a pub (assuming I'm a regular there). In the UK, using casual style in a more formal situation may earn some unstated distain from some of one's listeners, but using over-formal style in the wrong time and place (such as a rougher pub where one isn't known) could, possibly, get one's head kicked in, so it's important to know how formal or informal one should be in any given time, place and company. Note however that "Me and Steve . . ." is both natural and correct in some UK regional dialects. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195) 90.202.208.54 (talk) 13:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

English has no case in nouns. Apostrophe-es is not case, but a clitic. It goes at the end of the noun phrase. ("The woman I was talking to's dog".) With "Adam and Eve's expulsion", the clitic docks to the noun phrase "Adam and Eve". "Adam's and Eve's expulsion" is being treated as two noun phrases. The difference is as described above: If the two nouns are a semantic unit, they take a single clitic,, if they're semantically distinct, they may take two. If apostrophe-es were genitive case, both nouns would *have* to take it. Since English pronouns, unlike nouns, are inflected for case, you do need the genitive for both: "his and her expulsion".

Conjunctions (at least "and" and I think also "or") trigger the objective case of pronouns: "me and her went to the store". Your English teacher will "correct" you and tell you that's wrong (probably because you don't say it that way in Latin), but why does she need to? She doesn't have to tell you not to say *"her went to the store" or *"didn't her go already" -- no-one would ever say that, at least not in my dialect -- so why do people say "me and her" in the first place? Easy -- that's how English grammar actually is. We'd all speak that way if we weren't told not to in school.

The hypercorrection "between you and I" occurs because there is no case distinction in English pronouns when they're conjoined. When your teacher tells a child "her and me" is wrong, they go on to replace it everywhere precisely because there is no distinction in English, and to learn a distinction is an additional process -- effectively learning an element of the grammar of a foreign language, and not everyone gets that far. You'll also hear "They saw you and I" -- you can easily learn to replace the objective case with the subjective in "X and Y" phrases, but it's much more difficult to learn to sometimes use one case, and sometimes the other, according to artificial rules that you have to learn at school and that come naturally to no-one (practically no-one, anyway). Even if your parents made the distinction while you were acquiring English as a child, and never made a mistake in front of you, as soon as you go outside you'll hear the lack of distinction, and we pick up language from our childhood friends perhaps as much as we do from our parents.

— kwami (talk) 16:40, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

You're on the right track, kwami. It strikes me as a bit odd to say that "'s" isn't (or is) a case, but I agree that it isn't an inflection (which I imagine is what you meant) and is a clitic. I also wonder about the idea that coordinators (or "coordinating conjunctions" if you must) trigger the accusative (or objective) case in pronouns. I'd say that they license it. (My own hunch is that they remove any constraint on case-marking, so the pronouns default to accusative: note that the response to "Who wants more dessert?" is "Me!". But I'd want to consider German before continuing.) Perhaps there's a study somewhere of case-marking of coordinated pronouns by young L1 speakers of English. This hypercorrection (if it is hypercorrection) doesn't seem uniform across number and person: I'd be very surprised to encounter "They saw you and we", for example. -- Hoary (talk) 22:56, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

The use of "me" as an answer to "who wants?" is an example of the disjunctive pronoun, standard in French and the norm in colloquial English (American, at least). μηδείς (talk) 01:48, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Okey dokey. (If this weren't my semi-native language, I swear I'd go mad trying to master it.) Thanks. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:20, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

how do you say "been" if you don't use participles for the perfect?

I know a fair number of people who don't use participles for the perfect. They have just three TAM forms of the verb: past, non-past and progressive. For example, I heard "has went" for "has gone" in a 60 Minutes interview last week, and I've met people who do the same. (Presumably they do have "gone" in fixed expressions like "all gone", they just don't use it to form the perfect.)

But, what about BE? Is it an exception, the only verb with four TAM forms, with "has been"? (I don't mean fixed expressions like "how have you been?", but in productive use of the perfect.) Or do people use the past-tense form as they do with other verbs, for ??"has was"? I don't recall ever hearing that.

— kwami (talk) 16:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I am sorry, but whoever says "has went" is totally wrong. I have never heard a single native English speaker who speaks this way. The standard form should be "has gone". Please see broken English. I am aware that some people may use "is" instead of "am". (Example: I is good.) But that is not grammatically correct in the main branches of English, and native English speakers will think you're uneducated if you dare to speak that way. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 18:22, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I am a native English speaker, and an American who's actually been asked if I were English, and I sometimes produce that formation. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. μηδείς (talk) 01:44, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry μηδείς, which is it that you produce: "He has went" or "I is good"? And second question, you genuinely think it is correct, you don't say it to be funny? --Lgriot (talk) 13:46, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Lgriot: I said "has went" about a month ago, and laughed when I realized what I had said. I only produce it rarely, and not intentionally, usually. (It seems to show up in cases like "have you ever went" when the participle and the auxilliary are separated. I can't imagine ever saying "I have went to the store.") My late neighbor, however, (born ~1900) used it exclusively. I don't know where she was born, but it may be a regional or generational thing. My mother has also said it occasionally, and she was the one who pointed out that our neighbor said it exclusively. We all speak/spoke with a Delaware Valley accent natively.

I won't have time to look for an RS until dinner time, but this search of "Delaware Valley" "have went" shows well over a thousand ghits where the terms are used in the same text. μηδείς (talk) 15:25, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

"Uneducated" -- but that's precisely the point. You have to be educated into not speaking this way, which means that it's normal English. "Totally wrong" is a judgement call, like claiming American English is "wrong" because that's not how the Queen speaks. — kwami (talk) 07:13, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Huh? Are you saying people are born with the innate ability to speak bad English, and have to be educated to speak properly? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:32, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

No, he's saying that people will speak, without any formal education, the dialect of their environment (family, friends, culture). In most cases, Standard English (whatever form that is) is an artificial dialect and that the rules of standard English often have to be taught formally. Yes, some people will probably speak Standard English (again, whatever your local standard is) in the home, but large numbers of people do not, and they are not wrong. --Jayron32 11:18, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

“ and anyone dies when somebody shoots
and the sheriff arrives after everyone's went;
which isn't,perhaps,an environment

where you would(and I should)expect to find
overwhelming devotion to things of the mind.
But when it rains chickens we'll all catch larks
--to borrow a phrase from Karl the Marks. ” — E. E. Cummings, Ballad Of An Intellectual

--Trovatore (talk) 18:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• Never heard that. And I think I may have heard sort of the converse – “I been there”.

This also brings up the question of whether there are any other verbs like “to be”, with a mandatory past participle in this version of the vernacular. Loraof (talk) 18:29, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• Mandatory past participle in vernacular, along with “to be”: “to do” – I’ve never heard anyone say ?”I’ve did that”. Loraof (talk) 18:39, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• I think I've heard that, but would want to hear it again to be sure. The participle for the past, "I done it", is very common. But very many fewer Ghits than "has went", and most of those seem to be "has DID". — kwami (talk) 07:13, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

• Also in some people’s vernacular, we have “I done gone”, with a double past participle. Loraof (talk) 18:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• Not only do I hear his usage often (I had a neighbor who said it constantly, so much that we tittered when she said it) "has went" garners 505,000 ghits. The form "went" is indeed not just the archaic preterite but also the past participle of wend, hence the suppletion for gone in the perfect form is unsurprising. μηδείς (talk) 18:45, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I know a Jamaican lawyer who speaks like that to her friends - the accent makes it very difficult to follow but I understand some of it. Then she speaks to a client and switches into perfect upper - class English. See Jamaican language. 82.14.24.95 (talk) 18:49, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I'd look in COCA for "has [preterite]", and look through the resulting snippets for examples. I wouldn't be surprised to find "been" used by itself. NB in some lects (famously, in AAVE), there's a distinction between /bɪn/ and /bin/: a distinction that of course the spelling "been" usually blurs. -- Hoary (talk) 23:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I have heard Alan Shearer produce these forms quite a lot on national television, for one. "It would have went in". It′s definitely a Thing, and prescriptivists wailing about it being grammatically incorrect is all well and good but centuries of linguistic change prove that such wailing does not stop a Thing from being a Thing.

I think the process at play here is that the preterite and past participle forms (which are the same in most verbs) are reduced to one, one way or the other, in some people′s speech. For "go", "gone" is more often replaced by "went" than vice versa while for "do" the preterite "did" can be replaced by "done" (kids where I′m from will say "I done it, miss" when they finish a piece of schoolwork.) For "be", the first thing that will happen is that one of "was" or "were" will replace the other form entirely - in London people often say "I was, you was" and up north "I were, you were". There may be some dialects that have "I been, you been", perhaps in AAVE? (I recall reading that one dialect of Middle English used "been" in the simple past, too.) – filelakeshoe (t / c)  09:21, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

"Has went" and similar constructions are also normal in some Scots English dialects. Listen, for example, to racing driver Paul Di Resta commentating on Formula 1 qualifying and racing. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.202.208.54 (talk) 13:36, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

trouble pronouncing "one" like QE2 does

I saw a news item about British actress Claire Foy having trouble pronouncing "one" like HM QE2 does. I found a video[4] of HM saying this word ("One cause for thankfulness...") and it sounds like normal British English to me (US speaker). I didn't locate a sample of Claire Foy's rendition of this word to compare, but youtube audio of Claire Foy in a casual conversation (talk show appearance) has at most a slightly regional UK accent that I'm sure she can control while working. Can anyone explain why there would be difficulty? 173.228.123.121 (talk) 19:34, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Studies of recent change in English often mention change in QE2's pronunciation over the half-century-plus of her Christmas addresses to her "subjects". Foy is young and suppose she was chosen to depict a younger QE2. The video you point us to was made when QE2 was old. I know nothing about this film but presume that Foy is having trouble with QE2's pronunciation as it used to be. I think that if you look further on the interwebs you'll find samples of the latter. -- Hoary (talk) 23:04, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

The story that you linked to has a video where Ms Foy does her own and her queenly version (about 4 minutes in). I would expect the difficulty was not producing the pronunciation per se, but remembering to do so at the same time as doing the actual acting. Henry^Flower 10:29, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article on it is pretty short, but the concept one wants to look into to research this is Idiolect. An idiolect is a person's peculiar and unique way of speaking, and is tied not just to a person, but to a specific time and place. For example, until my early 20s I spoke in a rather heavy New England accent, but after about 5-6 years living away from New England, my accent moderated towards a more General American accent (with a few New Englandisms and pronunciations thrown in). The Queens own idiolect may have changed over the years, as several people have noted. --Jayron32 11:15, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

For an example of HM's earlier accent, see HM Queen Elizabeth II - Coronation Day Speech - 2 June 1953. See also BBC - Queen's speech 'less posh'. Alansplodge (talk) 11:24, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that last one was Jonathan Harrington in the Journal of Phonetics. It's reported by The Indi here. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:35, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Nancy Mitford has an amusing passage about two characters meeting in the 1930s: "Cedric made great use of the word 'one', which he pronounced with peculiar emphasis. Lady Montdore had always been a one for one, but she said it quite differently—'w’n'." AnonMoos (talk) 12:11, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

October 30

Consistent Historical spelling of Greek Letters?

Has the spelling of the spelled out name of the Greek Letters been consistent since Plato's time? For example, I would *guess* that Delta has always been Delta-Epsilon-Lambda-Tau-Alpha, but has Alpha always been Alpha-Lambda-Phi-Alpha, or was it *ever* Alpha-Lambda-Pi-Alpha. More specifically for what I care about, have any of the letters in the "consonant-eta" family "Beta, Zeta, Theta" *ever* been spelled as consonate-Epsilon-Tau-Alpha rather than the more standard "consonate-Eta-Tau-Alpha". (Also, was there ever a time when Psi would have been spelled Psi-Sigma-Iota rather than Psi-Iota?)Naraht (talk) 13:39, 30 October 2017 (UTC)