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June 28

Chinese verbal particles and complements

I am learning Mandarin Chinese from Pimsleur recordings, which have the disadvantage of failing to fully explain grammar. The recordings indicate that, for the verb 到，the correct way to express action completed in the past is 是到的 (e.g., 我是到的), whereas for other verbs, the recordings seem to use 了 to indicate completed past action, so that I would have expected 到了 (e.g., 我到了). Does the 是 . . . 的 construction express a different aspect or other grammatical quality than 了, is the 是 . . . 的 construction specific to a certain class of verbs, or is there some other explanation for when each form is used instead of the other? Thanks. Marco polo (talk) 00:55, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

我是到的 is not idiomatic modern mandarin. If you are trying to express "I have arrived" I would expect "我到了", this can be varied to carry different meanings, e.g. "我已经到了" for "I have already arrived", "我早就到了" for "I arrived ages ago", "我到了北京站" for "I arrived at Beijing Station", and "我到[了]北京站了" for "I have arrived at Beijing Station".

If I heard "我是到的" in conversation I would assume that I heard "我是倒的", "I am [always / by nature] upside down", where 倒的 (or 倒着的) is an adjective rather than a verb, and which I imagine may make sense in some specific context. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 03:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

是。。。的 is used when you're not saying that an action happened, but giving some further information about some event that we already know happened. For example, if I were asking you how you came to Beijing (thus entailing that I already know you got to Beijing), you could say "我是坐火车来北京的", "I came to Beijing by train". rʨanaɢ (talk) 06:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh I didn't think of that possibility. So similarly, in the same conversation, to the question "so when did you arrive" you could answer "我是昨天到的", which is most naturally "I arrived yesterday" but is lexically something like "my arrival was yesterday" (from this perspective, Rjanag's example might be seen as soemthing like "my coming to Beijing was by train").--PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 07:20, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. This starts to clear things up. In fact, the utterance on the tape was "我是昨天到的". But how is that utterance different from "我昨天到了"? Would the first utterance be used only if the speaker and listener understand and/or have already discussed that the speaker had been away and recently returned? Marco polo (talk) 14:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the latter would only be used if you are recounting the fact without context (new information), whereas the former is used if you are giving clarification/details about an event that is already known (given information). In the most explicit example, if someone directly asked when you arrived ("你什么时候到北京的", "你来北京多长时间了" or something like that), you would definitely answer with 我是昨天到的. Of course, I don't think this distinction is maintained 100% of the time in spoken/informal language, especially if the other person is not directly asking you when you arrived—in some situations it might be a little fuzzier what part of the utterance is meant to be the "new" information and what part is meant to be the "given", so in those instances there may be a little more flexibility in which structure gets used. rʨanaɢ (talk) 16:15, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Question about the word "HAVE" in Latin

HAVE - House in Pompeii

Hi, I'm hoping someone here will know a lot about Latin and Ancient Rome. So anyway, I took this photo of a mosaic "Welcome mat" (for lack of a better word) outside a house (large villa) in Pompeii, back in 2009, when I was there. I want to know what exactly it means; now I know that the word "AVE" means Hail or Welcome, but what does it mean with a H in from of it? Is this just a spelling variation of AVE? Or something else? I've tried putting the word "HAVE" into online translators, but they just come up blank and I also couldn't find any reference to the word anywhere else (probably because Google thinks I'm just searching for the English word have).

Anyway, I was just reading the article on Ave and thought that my photo of the Pompeii mosaic might be a good picture for the article (and perhaps for the Pompeii article to), but since the spelling is different I wasn't sure how to proceed. So can anyone tell me if this means what I think it means and whether it's right for those articles? Thanks. --Hibernian (talk) 01:44, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

That's at the House of the Faun; our article has a photo of the same mosaic. Here's a dictionary entry for the verb in question showing that it was indeed spelled with an H at times.--Cam (talk) 02:41, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah yes, I remember the name of the building now, so does it mean the same thing as AVE? Because the description in the other photo ([1]) says it means "Translated to modern day English = Have (to own, possess etc)". Come to think of it that image is very low resolution, I think I should replace it with my own (it's a lot clearer to). Thanks for the info. --Hibernian (talk) 02:54, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

The uploader probably assumed "HAVE" was a form of the verb habeo which means "to have".--Cam (talk) 03:17, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I think I'll replace it then, with an explanation. --Hibernian (talk) 03:54, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

In Vulgar Latin at least, the "H" of Classical Latin was completely silent, so many less-educated speakers would not write H's where they should've been and added them where they shouldn't've. It may just be that the person who made that mosaic misspelled it. Voikya (talk) 04:09, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, that's definitely "Ave" with a silent H. There are other words spelled with or without an H in the classical period - "(h)abundantia", "(h)arena", for example. Adam Bishop (talk) 07:21, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps someone could link us to the Latin poem (by Catullus, I think) which records mock-horror at the dropping and adding of 'h's. 86.164.67.252 (talk) 11:23, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Haha, yeah, I forgot about that. Catullus 84. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:43, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I've answered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Latin#Question about the word "HAVE" in Latin, where this question was cross-posted. My answer is basically the same as Voikya's. —Angr (talk) 13:35, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the answers everyone, very interesting stuff. I put the photo on Ave and House of the Faun, I'll add that it is a spelling variant of Ave. --Hibernian (talk) 17:10, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Note that if Ave (the greeting) is from a Punic word for "to live" (root ḥwy), as has been argued (confirmation easily found on google books), then the spelling with H was the original one, and its loss was the distortion. The gutturals were being weakened and lost in Punic itself, though, so the variation may have been found in the original language as well.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 22:32, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Questions on meanings of some words from Mrs Amworth

I was reading Mrs Amworth by EF Benson and found some words confusing. Can anyone please clear my doubt. From this paragraph,

"The village of Maxley, where, last summer and autumn, these strange events took place, lies on a heathery and pine-clad upland of Sussex. In all England you could not find a sweeter and saner situation. Should the wind blow from the south, it comes laden with the spices of the sea; to the east high downs protect it from the inclemencies of March; and from the west and north the breezes which reach it travel over miles of aromatic forest and heather."

What does heather, downs, spices, inclemencies mean here? The definition provided by dictionary is difficult to fit here. For example, my dictionary says inclement means "stormy weather" or "merciless". How does this meaning fit here? Similarly what is the meaning of "spice" in this context? --111Engo (talk) 13:38, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Heather refers to a large group of plants, see Ericaceae and the heather disambiguation page for more. Down (or more usually downs) refers to hills. See North Downs and South Downs for examples. Inclemencies means exactly what you think; the downs are protecting the area from the worst of the March storms. The spices of the sea presumably refer to the pungent saltiness of air that's come in off the ocean. Matt Deres (talk) 13:46, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Spices of the sea refers to the smell of sea air, heather just refers to heather, a fragrant, downs are a landform in England. Inclemencies refers to bad weather in March ("comes in like a lion, out like lamb"). Could be worse; I grew up between an onion field and a sheep farm so I always "knew which way the wind blows" as well. Rmhermen (talk) 13:51, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I see why sheep would stink, but think an onion field would smell nice. StuRat (talk) 14:20, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

The terrain type could be called a heath or heathland in England, also note the "see also" section of that article for a variety of terms for similar terrains around the world. You may find one that you're more familiar with :) SemanticMantis (talk) 14:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Ashdown Forest is the largest Sussex upland meeting that description. The Winnie the Pooh stories are set there. Beautiful place, but I don't think the south winds bring any spicy scents from the sea. Itsmejudith (talk) 08:17, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

(Ashdown Forest containing Five Hundred Acre Wood, the basis for the fictional Hundred Acre Wood where Pooh and friends lived.) StuRat (talk) 13:13, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Here is a picture of Gill's Lap in the Ashdown Forest which may help you to visualise the scenary. The low vegetation in the foreground is heather, the taller yellow flowered one is Gorse. The trees in the background are Scots Pines. This is the hilltop in the Pooh stories; "by-and-by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the Forest called Galleons Lap". One of my favourite places on a sunny day, without too many tourists. Alansplodge (talk) 22:06, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Fussable Chasselais

Hello, dear friends, how are you all tonight? Well, I trust. Good. Then let's begin.

In the famous Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, they use the expression (sounds like) "very fussable". Was "fussable" a recognised word before then, and in which idiolects does it occur? I assume it means something like "so good, it's worth making a fuss over". Has it entered the lexicon? I can't say I've ever heard it used anywhere else.

What they're making a fuss over is a wine they call (sounds like) "Château de Chasselais". Is this a real brand? I've discovered Château de Chasselas, which has a vineyard as many French châteaux do, but there's no mention of any export trade. Is this the same thing, or were the Pythonists just making it up surreally as they went along? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 14:00, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Found approximately here. Also here. And here. Bus stop (talk) 15:00, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

This non-Yorkshireman, but one-time Yorkshire resident, thinks they're actually saying "passible . . . , very passible", which in this case is normal British understatement meaning "very good".

While I can't say anything definite about the name of the wine, it was in the UK a rigid convention on the (non-advertising) BBC channels never to mention a real-life brand name (except in a news context or similar), so in such fictional sketches, even if not originally for the BBC, most writers would automatically make up something plausible sounding. (This sketch (actually pre-Python) was pretty certainly scripted, not ad-libbed, even on the first of the several occasions it was performed (on an ITV (advertising channel) show, Bus stop's second link), so the writers may either have invented something that, by chance, comes close to a real châteaux that they'd never heard of, or deliberately varied a known name to retain verisimilitude. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.117 (talk) 17:04, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I've always heard it as passable too. HiLo48 (talk) 17:31, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

It is certainly not "fussible", which in a Yorkshire accent would have the vowel /ʊ/ as in "foot". I'm sure it's "passable". And on the 1948 show version they say "Chasselas", not "Chasselais". I'm startled! Looking at those clips, I can only conclude that I've never actually seen the sketch before. I've heard it certainly (I'm pretty sure it was on I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again before it was ever on TV), but my mental picture has always had the four sitting round a pub table in flat caps and scarves with pints in front of them, not DJ's and cigars. --ColinFine (talk) 19:57, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

How dumb of me; of course it couldn't have been 'fussable'/'fussible' in that accent. For approximately 40 years I've had the wrong idea about that word. That's quite some rut. Never too late to change, as they say. But maybe I'm not the only one to get it wrong. Fussible is a member of Nortec Collective, and most of them seem to have made up names, so I'm guessing they've misheard it too. If it's not a legit word, it should be, and I will now use it whenever the occasion demands. Thanks. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:29, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Colin, the flat-caps-and-pints version you remember may be from The Secret Policeman's Ball (1979), when (as the article says) it featured John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Rowan Atkinson. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 11:30, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it's "passable" - my source is The Utterly, Utterly Amusing and Pretty Damn Definitive Comic Relief Revue Book, 1989, which contains the scripts to many fine old sketches.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:52, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Korean text

What is the Korean text found in this image? http://web.archive.org/web/20070108093549im_/http://www.ntsb.gov/events/kal801/Kor_link.gif

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 17:13, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

It must be KAL801기 사고 청문회. --Theurgist (talk) 18:01, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much! WhisperToMe (talk) 18:11, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Also what is the full text at File:Kor banner1.gif? Part of it is "KAL801기 사고 청문회" but there is additional text. Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 19:08, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I think the text must be: 청문회에 관한 다음의 번역된 글을 읽기 위해서는 한글 소프트웨어가, 사용하고 있는 컴퓨터에 설치되어 있어야함니다. --Theurgist (talk) 06:03, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much! WhisperToMe (talk) 06:24, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

June 29

Wikisource template in Korean

Would anyone mind translating this Wikisource template in Korean?

• wikisource:en:Template:PD-USGov

You can use all or parts of Commons:Template:PD-USGov/ko in the one for Wikisource

Thank you, WhisperToMe (talk) 05:07, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Rockefeller University motto

What does the Latin motto on Rockefeller University's seal translate to in English? --Cybercobra (talk) 06:20, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

My (admittedly very weak) latin gives me "Science for the benefit of human growth", but I will defer to someone who is stronger in latin than I am. --Jayron32 06:23, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

"Knowledge for the good of humanity" - "humanum genus" is "human kind", humans/people/humanity. Adam Bishop (talk) 06:59, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah. See I was thinking "generis" as being cognate with "generate" or "genesis" rather than "genus". Good one. --Jayron32 13:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

It is indeed cognate with "generate" and "genesis" as well as "genus". Also "general", and more remotely both "kin" and "kind". --ColinFine (talk) 19:54, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, and gender, gentle, almost anything that starts with gen- (except for words related to the root for "knee", that's different). Also, the -gn- bit of "pregnant", I think. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:57, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Different alphabets/scripts/writing systems

Writing systems

I was recently trying (unsucessfully) to convince a friend that the Arabic alphabet/script is used for several languages, not only Arabic itself. That got me wondering how many different "writing systems" (is that the correct term?) there are in the entire world and how many languages are written in each of them? I'm aware that particularly Asia has many different alphabets/scripts and that Western Europe had standardised on the Latin alphabet many centuries ago while eastern European languages mostly use Cyrillic, but outside of that I'm fairly ignorant. Please enlighten me. Roger (talk) 06:57, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

As a starting point, see Alphabet and List of writing systems, which also gives you the map I inserted at right. Jørgen (talk) 08:38, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

You can show this to your friend: Arabic alphabet#Languages written with the Arabic alphabet. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 08:59, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Roger (talk) 10:31, 29 June 2011 (UTC) 

There's also Omniglot, a webpage about writing systems and languages, which of course has a page for the arabic script. (I didn't answer your question on how much the arabig script is used today to write non-arabic languages.) – b_jonas 12:39, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Distinct reflexive pronouns

Are there any languages other than English which have distinct reflexive forms for the first and second persons - i.e. using different object pronouns in the sentences "She sees me" and "I see myself"? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 09:34, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes. In Irish, reflexive pronouns take féin in the same way as English reflexive pronouns take -self, so Feiceann sí mé is "She sees me" and Feicimse mé féin is "I see myself". In Yiddish, there's just a single reflexive pronoun zikh which is used in all persons, so Zi zet mikh is "She sees me" and Ikh ze zikh is "I see myself". (I hope I've gotten the conjugation of zen "to see" correct.) I think the Yiddish pattern is also found in the North Germanic and the Slavic languages, but I don't them well enough to know for sure. —Angr (talk) 09:49, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Hungarian does have reflexive pronouns for all numbers and persons (magam, magad, maga etc), with declensions to all cases. These can be used in a way somewhat similar to "myself" in English, but they come up a bit less often than in English.

Also, you may want to see the translation section of wikt:myself, though of course that page alone won't tell you all about the usage of those words in foreign languages. – b_jonas 12:35, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone know if Welsh behaves like Irish? That could be another piece of evidence for a Brythonic substratum for English. Marco polo (talk) 13:54, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Oops. I see this is already covered here. Marco polo (talk) 13:59, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

First of all, your question is not about "distinct reflexive forms for first and second person"; a reflexive pronoun only appears in your second sentence ("I see myself"), whereas the second sentence ("She sees me") contains only regular pronouns—a reflexive pronoun is one which refers to the same person/thing as its antecedent. Also, there is no second person in any of your sentences.

Secondly (assuming that what you are trying to ask about is whether other languages have different reflexive and non-reflexive forms), many languages behave like English in this way. Mandarin Chinese adds zìjǐ after regular pronouns to make them reflexive (tā yǒu kàn wǒ vs. wǒ yǒu kàn wǒ zìjǐ), French similarly adds -mème after regular pronouns (although this is optional, it doesn't happen to cliticized pronouns) Uyghur uses öz plus a person marker as a reflexive pronoun (e.g., özi for third-person, özang for second-person, etc.). rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:03, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

@Angr re Germanic and Slavic: no, there's a difference between these groups, in that Germanic languages (all of them AFAIK) use first and second person pronouns for reflexive use, while the Slavic ones I know use the invariable "się" (that's the Polish word, but there are similar forms in others) for all persons. This isn't quite germane to the question though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ColinFine (talk • contribs) 20:02, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

My question is about distinct reflexive forms for the first and second person: reflexive forms, for the first and second person, which are distinct from the non-reflexive first and second person object pronouns. I know what reflexives are, I know what I'm asking, and everyone else knew what I was asking, so I don't appreciate your condescension. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 01:08, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

"She" or "Her"?

Telephone caller: "Is Mary there?" Response by Mary: "This is "she". Or, "This is her"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.91.89.34 (talk) 17:33, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

The least problematic would be "I am Mary." (I have always liked "I am she.") Bielle (talk) 17:42, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

How about I am I? Except then if you can avoid continuing with ... Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha, my destiny calls and I go, you're a stronger person than I am. --Trovatore (talk) 18:55, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

This is she also works. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | Say Shalom! 17:43, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

(ec) "It's Mary speaking" or "That's me" or "I'm Mary" would be preferable to either. But if you must restrict yourself to those 2 options, the first sounds toffy and pedantic (although it might work in a certain register), and the second is for colloquial use only (well, obviously ...). I dislike both of them and can't split them. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 17:45, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

It may be an Americanism, but I just say "speaking". It seems to work. --LarryMac | Talk 17:49, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Not an Americanism Larry - when I was trained as a secretary in the UK I was taught that "speaking" was the correct polite response. --TammyMoet (talk) 18:29, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

See predicate nominative, which describes this issue in some detail. Others have mentioned work-arounds, but that just dodges the issue. The crux is deciding if you care more about prescriptive grammar or descriptive grammar. For most English speakers, mutual understanding of either phrase will not be an issue, so it really comes down to taste. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:21, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

This is me. works quite adequately in informal speech; nevertheless, This is I. is far more proper. I'm not quite sure what the rule is apropos constructions such as I am I [sic], but I, for one, should say I am myself. Pine (talk) 20:16, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

It's not really an English construction, no. In Italian you render "it is {I/me}" with sono io, which could be literally translated "I am I", or perhaps just "I am", with the emphasis on I ("the one who is am I", or some such). I assume it's the same in Spanish (would be soy yo, I guess), which probably explains the choice of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance. --Trovatore (talk) 17:42, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

You're absolutely correct, Trovatore, the construction does exist in Italian and Spanish. But that is simply because verbs in Romance Languages are far robuster than those in English. (See here for what I mean by that.) Pine (talk) 19:01, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it was derived from Latin, which had a system of declension. That is, a noun has a different ending depending on whether it is a subject, a direct object, an indirect object, etc. Ordinarily, the accusative case is used for direct objects and the nominative for subjects. However, with forms of the verb "to be," the nominative is used for both the subject and the object. I know at least some Indo-European languages still have this rule. Some language people used to insist that English follow the rules of Latin grammar. That's where the now universally derided rule on split infinitives comes from. You can't say "to boldly go" in Latin, because "to go" is a single word. Similarly, some people would say that because the nominative is used with "to be" in Latin, the same should go for English. English doesn't even have noun cases any more, except with pronouns. I, he, she and they are nominative; me, him, her and them are accusative. So, "This is she." Of course, English is a completely different language from Latin, and there's no reason English should have to follow Latin rules. I don't think anyone should complain about saying "It's me at the door." -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:14, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, what the verb "to be" takes isn't called an object but a subject complement. The latter generally take the nominative, not just in Latin but, I think, in most languages with case distinctions. French and English are strange in this respect. I guess this has something to do with the transformation of the former accusative forms into "disjunctive pronouns" (that article discusses the issue of "it's me" reasonably), while the former nominative forms are now only used as clitics in French.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:41, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

C'est moi. μηδείς (talk) 01:32, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, we know how Louis XIV would have answered the phone.--Shirt58 (talk) 01:22, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

The redlink above should be Disjunctive pronoun. μηδείς (talk) 18:57, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Thnx, fixed it.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 22:09, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Chart of suffix-based verb derivatives in English.

Greetings. I've been trying to refine my knowledge of how one derives adjectives, adverbs, and nouns in the English language from verbs.

What really annoys me, though, is that most dictionaries and usage guides that I've come across, only list each verb's derivatives after its definition, and do not instruct the reader on any kind of pattern. Please don't misunderstand me. When it comes to adjective to adverb derivations (just add "-ly") and preposition to adjective derivations (just add "-most"), I have very little difficulty learning. But verbs—at least in Indo-European languages—are an entirely different animal.

After a few sleepless nights, I've come up with a chart of sorts that I believe depicts the pattern of verb derivatives in English. It follows immediately below.

eg. To comply

Finite Forms

Present Indicative /Present Subjunctive /Imperative, comply

Present Indicative (3rd Person singular), complies

Past Indicative /Past Subjunctive, complied

Adjectives

Present Participle [actor] complying Past Participle [recipient] complied

[actor] compliable [recipient] compliant

Adverbs

[actor] complyingly [recipient] compliedly

[actor] compliably [recipient] compliantly

Adjectival Nouns

[actor] complyingness [recipient] compliedness

[actor] compliableness [recipient] compliantness

Abstract Nouns

Gerund [actor] complying [recipient] [N/A]

[actor] compliance [recipient] compliability

Countable Nouns

[actor] complier [recipient] compliee

My question is simple: Am I "on the right track" to understanding how derivations work, or is there some other factor that I must consider?

EDIT: Forgot to add: Verb ==> Adjective: add "-ive," "-ent/-ant" [recipient], or "-able/-ible", "-ic" [actor].

Verb ==> Abstract Noun: add "-ance/-ence/-ency," "tion/sion" [recipient], or "-ment," "-ity" [actor].

I apologize, by sleeplessness is REALLY starting to show now!  :) Pine (talk) 20:54, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

It's actually quite complicated, and a lot of it seems to be lexically specified. E.g. one who acts is an actor while one who buys is a buyer.The suffixes that change a word's part-of-speech aren't always consistent. The only derivation that is consistent are the present participles (in -ing), past participles of weak verbs (in -ed), infinitives (in to ...) and 3rd person singular presents indicatives for non-modal verbs (in -s). Even noun plurals and genitive/posessives have some irregularities. There are common suffixes, but no reliable pattern; most people have to just learn each form from a given root as individual words. Wabbott9 Tell me about it.... 01:31, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is for the most part lexical, not grammatical. You are treating Latinate back formations as if they were necessarily productive. English is quite tolerant of neologisms. But you will produce a large number of inadvertantly funny forms if you take your inductions seriously. μηδείς (talk) 03:20, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

In particular, your "compliable", and all the forms derived from it, hardly exist. The OED lists two meanings for "compliable", but marks one as Obs(elete) and the other ? Obs. The meanings it gives do not agree with your "actor" - indeed, most words in "-able" are passive in meaning "able to be x-ed". I also do not recognised "compliedly", "compliedness" or "compliee" - and the last does not make any sense, since "comply" is not a transitive verb.

Applying an existing pattern to a different word does not necessarily give you a real word, and even if it does, it does not necessarily have the meaning you expect from how you constructed it. --ColinFine (talk) 19:23, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you both for the prompt responses.

I understand quite well that this is definitely lexical, and not grammatical per se. I cannot help but think, however, that—lexical differences notwithstanding—there must be some sort of grammatical order to it.

eg. one boy, two boys, etc.

-->But: one man, two men, etc.

Though differences exist (and not all of these constructions, as Medeis said, are productive) there is clearly some kind of pattern involved. Regarding the two verbs mentioned by Wabbott9:

eg. To act

Finite Forms

Present Indicative /Present Subjunctive /Imperative, act

Present Indicative (3rd Person singular), acts

Past Indicative /Past Subjunctive, acted

Adjectives

Present Participle [actor] acting Past Participle [recipient] acted

[actor] actable [recipient] active

Adverbs

[actor] actingly [recipient] actedly

[actor] actably [recipient] actively

Adjectival Nouns

[actor] actingness [recipient] actedness

[actor] actableness [recipient] activeness

Abstract Nouns

Gerund [actor] acting [recipient] [N/A]

[actor] activity [recipient] action

Countable Nouns

[actor] actor [recipient] actee

For these, the derivations form faily easily. But look at what happens when I try the irregular verb that Wabbot9 suggested.

eg. To buy

Finite Forms

Present Indicative /Present Subjunctive /Imperative, buy

Present Indicative (3rd Person singular), buys

Past Indicative /Past Subjunctive, bought

Adjectives

Present Participle [actor] buying Past Participle [recipient] bought

[actor] buyable [recipient] [?]

Adverbs

[actor] buyingly [recipient] [?]

[actor] buyably [recipient] [?]

Adjectival Nouns

[actor] buyingness [recipient] [?]

[actor] buyableness [recipient] [?]

Abstract Nouns

Gerund [actor] buying [recipient] [N/A]

[actor] buyability [recipient] [?]

Countable Nouns

[actor] buyer [recipient] [?]

Here—for the recipient derivatives—the best I could think were: buyative, buyedly, buyatively, buyedness, buyativeness, buyation, and buyee; all of which strike me as total, utter nonsense.  :)

———English is quite tolerant of neologisms. But you will produce a large number of inadvertantly funny forms if you take your inductions seriously.———

You are absolutely right, Medeis, but may this be particularly true of irregular verbs? To wit, are they, by their very nature, simply incapable of forming recipient derivatives (save, of course, for the past participle)?

EDIT: I saw your post, ColinFine. Perhaps "actor" and "recipient" are not the best words to describe what I'm suggesting. Indeed, "-able" does seem to suggest passivity. 2nd EDIT: Fixed an error in the table. Pine (talk) 20:24, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Of course there are patterns. When you encounter a word that seems to fit a pattern, you can - usually - deduce the structure and role of the word. But there are both exceptions and irregularities, and there are 'holes' in the pattern for particular words. Read Pinker's Words and Rules. --ColinFine (talk) 07:49, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

You may also want to read agglutinating language and Esperanto as well as Quechua language and Turkish language. μηδείς (talk) 18:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

June 30

German Warsteiner

What does it mean? I know that the -er means 'from', 'stein' means stone, and 'war' does not mean 'war'. But what does 'war' mean in German in this case? "Was"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiweek (talk • contribs) 00:48, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't know that it means anything. Warsteiner_Beer_and_Brewery sais that the beer is brewed in Warstein, Germany. So the name just means "from Warstein". Wabbott9 Tell me about it.... 01:38, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

According to Google Translate "war Stein" means "was rock". The article on Warstein doesn't give its etymology. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:39, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Often the etymology of town names isn't transparent. Often when one language comes to dominate an area, a toponym (placename) gets quite mangled in translation. The toponym Wabash (as in Wabash River) comes from a Native American language (the specific one escapes me at the moment) via French into English, and has nothing to do with the verb to bash, so it may be that Warstein isn't related to stein or the Indo-European root Hwes (where H is a laryngeal, not sure which one at the moment). Wabbott9 Tell me about it.... 02:51, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. I am reminded of one of one of the more accepted explanations of the etymology of Oregon (toponym), which holds that it has the same root as Wisconsin, which is not readily apparent from the modern names in any way. --Jayron32 03:05, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

The German article doesn't mention a meaning either. But the Wäster river flows through the town. Rmhermen (talk) 04:36, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

"Stein" in German place names generally refers to a castle (or similar fortified structure) on a rock. As Rmhermen says, it's conceivable that "War" comes from the local river. This paper by an amateur historian has some other plausible speculations relating to various forms of the German words bewahren (keep, save) and Wehr (army, weir). It comes to the conclusion that War in this context refers to a fishing weir, but the arguments are more intriguing than conclusive. Hans Adler 09:45, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

First of all it's important to note that Warstein lies in the traditionally Low Saxon speaking area which excludes the etymology from the modern German word 'war'. In Low Saxon the place is called Waosten. --::Slomox:: >< 12:29, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Is this quote real?

"...in The Jade Goddess, the twelfth-century Chinese fable, Chang Po says to his beloved, “Since heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I will not let you go.”" (according to a website) A variant from a Chemistry.com scientist says, "Since heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I was made for you." I somehow find them suspicious. Thanks. Imagine Reason (talk) 01:34, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Very suspicious, as he is unlikely to have had such a good command of English. However, I don't see why he shouldn't have expressed that sentiment: people say the most illogical things to their beloveds.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:33, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

It is real. It is taken from "The jade goddess" in Famous Chinese Short Stories translated and retold by Lin Yutang. The original Chinese story is 碾玉观音 collected in 《京本通俗小说》 or 《警世通言》. It seems to me that this particular plot is fabricated by Lin, the original story is different. --刻意(Kèyì) 11:28, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Which version of the quote is correct, or were both variations in the story? May I trouble you for a link, or at least the original quotes (in Chinese)? Thanks so much. Imagine Reason (talk) 11:43, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

see Abridged Lin's English story contains your quote or re-translated Chinese version of Lin's story, finally the original Chinese story in early Vernacular Chinese.--刻意(Kèyì) 11:54, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Reading the last link there, the original text, I can only find on page 10 of the word document, 秀秀道：“你記得當時在月臺上賞月，把我許你，你兀自拜謝［3］，你記得也不記得？” which doesn't really say what the English quote says. Imagine Reason (talk) 03:37, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

If the story is originally from the 12th century, then that must not be the original. It looks like it's been translated into modern Chinese or baihua. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

No, that is, I think, the original text. The whole paragraph doesn't look like baihua. Imagine Reason (talk) 12:41, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

More Korean help

This document:

• http://www.twayair.com/img/V2/main2/copyright.gif

Does it include an address? If so, what is the text of the address? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 07:30, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it reads 706-1 Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. --Sushiya (talk) 12:39, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! What is the actual Korean text (so I can copy and paste it)? WhisperToMe (talk) 19:29, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Parkinson's disease

What is the word which means "an inability to initiate movement"? Kittybrewster ☎ 12:06, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Akinesia. —Angr (talk) 12:25, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

-ling

The suffix "-ling" occurs in English in "earthling" and the rarely used word "hireling" and "foundling" and probably some others. If you search online dictionaries that match wildcards, with *ling, it includes "cling", "fling", "ailing", "killing", "rolling", "recycling" and lots of other things that are not instances of the use of that suffix. The same suffix occurs in German in "Häuptling" (chieftain), "Mischling" (hybrid, mongrel, or mixed-race person), "Feigling" (coward) and other words, and I have the impression that it's used more often in German than in English. Are there compiled lists of instances in English and German? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:27, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

For English there are some in wikt:Category:English words suffixed with -ling and wikt:-ling#Derived terms. Lexicografía (talk) 18:40, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

And for German there's wikt:de:Thesaurus:-ling. --Antiquary (talk) 19:00, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Lexicografia and Antiquary. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

A Danish poem by Halfdan Rasmussen begins like this: En kælling og en kylling og en killing der var tvilling tog til Kolding med en rolling for at købe for en skilling, meaning: a bitch and a chicken and a kitten who was a twin went to Kolding with a baby to buy for a dime. Also Danish yngling youngster, yndling favorite, svækling weakling, særling oddball, samling collection, gamling old man, ælling duckling, vælling gruel, and gnalling chunk of cheese. Bo Jacoby (talk) 19:11, 30 June 2011 (UTC).

This reminds me of German Säugling and English suckling — a baby feeding at its mother's breast. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Likewise, Dutch has zuigeling (suckling) and vondeling (foundling). The -ling suffix also appears in afstammeling (descendent), vertrouweling (trustee), huurling (mercenary), ouderling (deacon), tweeling (twin), eenling (loner), banneling/balling (an exile), dorpeling (village dweller), stedeling (city dweller), zwakkeling (weakling), nieuweling ('newbie'), vreemdeling (stranger), ellendeling (crook), hoveling (courtier), schipbreukeling (castaway), wellusteling (lecher), zaailing (seedling), krakeling (kringle).[2] Iblardi (talk) 22:35, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

EO has some general info:[3] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:47, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

One not covered above is endling. I can't claim any credit for knowing this. I was listening to a concert on the radio, and a new orchestral work by Andrew Schultz, called Endling, was being premiered. The commentator explained that the word means what our article says. Synchronicity is alive and well. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 13:09, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The opposite of that would be the first of a species. Hence the Biblical story of Adam, "In the beginling..." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:17, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, to be "in" the beginling, Eve would have to have been Bruce.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 13:27, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The rib was in the beginling, and God took that rib and created Eve, just before nightfall, and neither God nor Man has rested since. (How's that for a medley of good humor?) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:32, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the suffix dates back well before old English. One can find it, almost in the same usage, to words like Aetheling in the names of Old English and Norman royals such as Edgar the Ætheling and William Adelin where the word means "scion" or leading son of a notable family. Historically, those two Aethelings, the most famous, were both heirs to the throne who tragically never inherited.--Jayron32 16:11, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Earthling is also found in Old English, where it meant a plowman, rather than any inhabitant of Earth. Angr (talk) 20:22, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, alien plowmen, eh? Must have been ploughing/plowing the Champs-Élysées or the Campus Martius.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:50, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Did they start their fires with kindling? HiLo48 (talk) 03:44, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

What, use a small German child as fuel? That's a bit racist, isn't it. Children of any nationality should be fair game as fire starters.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:56, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

And then there is duckling and gosling. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sesquepedalia (talk • contribs) 13:21, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Very funny, but kindling comes from the frequentative verb "to kindle" with the -ing ending, and has nuthin to do with burnin no chilluns. μηδείς (talk) 22:35, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

With only a little feeling those kindling could be chilling. But I'm prattling.—— Shakescene (talk) 03:28, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you to all who replied.

Based on some of the above, I surmised that the verb "suckle" may be a back-formation from "suckling", which is "suck" plus "-ling". Then I looked in OED, and it says that "Possibly" that's where that word came from. Michael Hardy (talk) 22:59, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I am surprised the OED would even say possibly. The -le ending marks frequentative verbs--verbs of repeated or extended actio--e.g., from suck (once) to suckle (repeatedly) as in game>gamble grunt>disgruntled. If suckling came from suck-ling rather than suckle-ling it would mean a little suck, rather than a little sucker. μηδείς (talk) 21:42, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

July 1

Silent w in wh- words

At Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 June 27#Culinary advice - permitted? I’ve just discovered that the word whortleberry is pronounced "hurtleberry". I can see already it's going to be a crackerjack weekend. That's the only wh- word I can think of where the w is silent, other than "whore".

Are there any others, and is it possible that these 2 words could be even remotely related? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:45, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Whoever said that got the whole thing wrong. Mikenorton (talk) 08:59, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. Shit, what a goof-up. Crackerjack weekend, here I come. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 10:59, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Looks like you got it wholly wrong. --Jayron32 12:08, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't "who" have a silent w?194.176.105.39 (talk) 12:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I thought that my response had covered those two – I didn’t think that I had to spell it out. Mikenorton (talk) 12:42, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I have just noticed the three examples we have all have the letter "o" following the "wh". Are there any examples where the following letter is not "o"? 194.176.105.39 (talk) 12:23, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I was checking a few on Etymology Online, and it's not clear where the leading "w" came from, because most of the root words didn't originally have the "w". Meanwhile, we have the opposite problem when "wh" is following by a different vowel than "o" - the tendency to drop the "h". That is, to pronounce words like "what", "whet" and "which" as if they were spelled "wut", "wet" and "witch". (I'm not coming up with any normal "whu-" words just now.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:57, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

(ec) I think we know more than three now: whortleberry, whore, who, whom, whose, whoever, whole, whoop - and their derivatives (whorehouse, whoremonger, whorish, whoreson, wholly, wholesome, wholesale, wholemeal, whooping). Probably others. I did a quick scan of my dictionary and the only such examples start with who-. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 13:00, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I pronounce the w in whoop, except in the specific phrase whooping cough (pertussis). --Trovatore (talk) 21:27, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I even pronounce it then. That is, they sound like hwoop and hwooping cough, when I say them. StuRat (talk) 21:50, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Might be able to help with how the initial w came about. According to our article on wh, /h/ and /hw/ originally contrasted, but before rounded consonants /h/ rounded, merging the two (and where thus spelled "wh"). The /hw/ sound then lost contrastive rounding in the same environments, giving us the "silent w" in those words. My unsourced guess the reason they're all "who-" (many, originally, just "ho-") would be the Great Vowel Shift: things spelled "hu-" had a glide inserted with the shift, making the /h/ palatalized instead of labialized. Lsfreak (talk) 15:18, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The surname Whewell doesn't pronounce the first "w" (or at least William Whewell's name doesn't) even though the following vowel isn't an "o". Perhaps a proper noun isn't what you're looking for, but luckily the mineral whewellite is named after WW. The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that it follows the pronunciation of Whewell's name. In fact I now see it tells me that the interjection whew can be pronounced the same as the name Hugh, or alternatively with an initial "hw-" sound. --Antiquary (talk) 10:00, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

W is silent before o in the words two and sword as well, and for the same reason: after a consonant, the /w/ got swallowed up by the following rounded vowel. But in whole and whore, the w is unetymological; those words were never pronounced with /hw/, but have always had just /h/. Angr (talk) 15:56, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Why two and sword, but not sward, swathe, swaddling, swim, twitter, twit, twat, twelve, twenty? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:43, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Swathe, swim, twitter, twit, twelve, and twenty don't have a rounded vowel after the /w/, and the vowel of sward, swaddling, and twat was only rounded relatively recently in the history of English (the vowels of swaddling and twat are still unrounded, or unrounded again, in North American English). You didn't ask about swore and sworn, but the explanation I've heard is that they kept the /w/ to match the /w/ of swear. Angr (talk) 21:47, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

And what's with answer? --Theurgist (talk) 14:28, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Extended homonyms

Here's an interesting thing. I was reading a newspaper article and I came to this passage:

• It was great; the planets sort of lined up. But it wasn't all upside. The shy, introverted kid found the public demands trying.

When I first read it, the last 3 words (highlighted) made sense in themselves, but didn't seem to fit the context. Then the penny dropped. I was parsing them as:

• public = noun
• demands = verb
• trying = verbal noun.

That is, the public insists their would-be heroes at least try. It's a clunky way of putting it, but it still works.

But the way I should have read it was:

• public = adjective
• demands = noun
• trying = verbal adjective.

That is, the demands the public were placing on him were onerous.

Two very different but equally valid ways of interpreting the same sentence (were it not for the need to fit the context).

Naturally, I'm curious to find some other examples of a set of 3 (or more) consecutive words, where each of the 3 words exists as more than one part of speech, and there's more than one valid combination of these differing meanings, without changing the word order. It's like the extended version of a homonym, but is there a special name for this type of duplicate meaning applying to a whole phrase and also to every word element of the phrase, rather than just a single word? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 13:56, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean like Let Him Have It? A misunderstanding with perhaps the most tragic consequences.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:04, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

• Eats Shoots and Leaves? The gramatical term you are searching for is Amphibology. Another notable one is "Man eating cabbage seen at local diner" or some varient. Of course, we don't know from the grammar alone if this was a man who was dining on cabbage, or indeed if it was cabbage dining on a man. There are probably an infinite supply of these combinations. --Jayron32 16:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I think we're looking at syntactic ambiguity. Some examples there.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:13, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions so far. It is a form of syntantic ambiguity and, I guess, amphibology, but the examples given there and above don't seem to meet my criteria. "Man eating cabbage" is either unhyphenated 2-word verbal adjective + noun, or noun + verb + noun. Ignoring the word 'and', "Eats shoots and leaves" is either verb + verb + verb, or verb + noun + noun. Those do not meet my requirement that whatever the part of speech each word is in one case, it's a different part of speech in the other case. That must apply to all 3 words, not just 1 or 2 of them. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:39, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Noam Chomsky's famous example is "Fruit flies like a banana." Is it about the aerodynamic characteristics of fruit, or about the affections of small insects? Looie496 (talk) 23:34, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah, perfect. Thanks, Looie. "Fruit flies like" is either noun + verb + adverb, or adjective + noun + verb. Is there a list of similar examples, and what are these called? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 00:57, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

A variation, sometimes attributed to Groucho: "Time flies like an arrow / Fruit flies like a banana." Not quite the same idea, but also attributed to Groucho: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:34, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

There's also the ambiguity in the song "The Purple People Eater", about a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater. It turns out that the one-eyed, one-horned extraterrestrial is looking for purple people to eat. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:37, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Has the Singular Possesive Pronoun Gone the Way of the Dinosaur?

All,

I posted a question regarding the use of singular possessive pronouns at WikiProject Grammar, but I thought that some of the regulars on this list might have good input. Please join in the discussion if you have the inclination. Thanks! Ebikeguy (talk) 16:15, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The title of this section doesn't make sense (the words "my", "his", and "her" have certainly not gone the way of the dinosaur), but the issue that Ebikeguy really wants to raise is whether it is okay to use "they" and "their" to refer to individual people. The question brings out what is widely recognized as the greatest deficiency in the English language: the lack of a universally accepted way to refer to a single person without specifying gender. Looie496 (talk) 17:33, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

But why is it that this particular challenge has eluded everyone forever, when other words get created every day of the week, and become generally accepted almost literally overnight? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:26, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Come now, JackofOz, you should know the answer to that! It's easy to create a word like "blog" or "sexting" because you are not playing around with the basic elements of a person's language. Changing the word "the", "is", "he", etc is obviously going to be impossible within a lifetime, just as it would be literally impossible to merge the basic grammar of French and English to create a third choice for Canada. It doesn't matter who would choose what amongst "est" and "is", "le" and "the", etc. That choice itself would be an exercise in futility. On the other hand, if a community were to decide for Canada, overnight, that it would use American forms -ize instead of British forms -ise, that could immediately begin to be used by every single Canadian, if they marketed the change right. Just like there is the great story of a country LITERALLY overnight changing the side of the road they drive on - to a man, every single person, all at once, just starting to drive on the other side of the road in the entire country. But you could never get even a handful of people to start walking differently. --188.29.154.125 (talk) 23:47, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

You talk as if you know me, friend 188. You're not Loomis 51 by any chance, are you? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 01:00, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure this isn't the greatest deficiency in the language. There are plenty of other things people complain about (for example, the many exceptions to various "rules"), and anyway this deficiency seems to be common across many languages. rʨanaɢ (talk) 21:43, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I can't think of any other problem that has motivated such a diversity of attempts to fix it -- all unsuccessful. You might say the spelling; but I don't view spelling as a property of the language. Looie496 (talk) 23:30, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

That isn't actually a deficiency in the English language - as I understand it, there are actually *three* different, perfectly acceptable gender-neutral third-person singular possessive personal pronouns in English, although picky people come up with various reasons to dislike each of them. 1) "his" - the traditional choice, widely disliked because it's identical to the masculine-specific singular possessive pronoun, leading people to (incorrectly) conclude that a person using it assumes the default gender for people to be is masculine. 2) "their" - also widely and traditionally accepted (as in "back to pre-Shakespearean times"), but it irritates grammar perfectionists due to it also being used for the third-person plural possessive (although for some reason they don't seem to have an issue with "your" being used both for the second-person singular possessive and second-person plural possessive) 3) "one's" - generally disliked because it sounds stilted and stuffy - possibly because only stuffy people used it while everyone else was perfectly content with "his" or "their". -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 00:16, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

English finds a way, and that way is the singular "they", whether the purists like it or not. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:54, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

A 4th option is "it's", but this seems rather insulting. StuRat (talk) 04:39, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

I hope you realize you're practically begging for a comment from Cuddly3. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:52, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Yep, I 'spose so. :-) StuRat (talk) 05:06, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

There is no limit to how much could be said about this, but I will content myself with giving a pointer to an essay by Douglas Hofstadter called A Person Paper on Purity in Language, which played a part in forming my own attitudes. Looie496 (talk) 00:32, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow. Thanks for that link! LadyofShalott 03:03, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Hofstadter is far from my favorite writer, but that's powerful. My own conversion began when my strong-willed daughter, aged 3, objected to a story book we were reading (about a non-human character referred to constantly as 'he'), stating emphatically, "Maybe it's a she!" From the mouth of babes . . . -- Elphion (talk) 21:37, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Pre-Proto-Indo-European distinguished between not gender but animacy in nouns, and possessed the distinction between he/it and who/what with the terms he and who indicating animacy, not masculine gender. The Hittite language, which branched off Proto-Indo-European the earliest, never had a feminine gender or pronoun. The feminine gender is believed to have arisen by the reinterpretation of the -a ending of *gwena "woman", certain kinship terms, and various abstract nouns ending in -a as the laryngeal system decayed. Hence it is not "he" which is a gender-specific pronoun indication masculine, but "she" which specifically indicates feminine, while the older "he" simply means animate, and not specifically feminine.

Note that Proto-Indo-European has semantic pairs for words such as fire and water which distinguish between animate and inanimate (active and inactive) genders:

• egni vs. *pur "fire"
• apa/*akwa- vs. *wodor "water"

where the first term indicates an active agent and the second a passive substance in the neuter gender (das Wasser, das Feuer). See also the conservative Latin Adjectives of the Third Declension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Third_declension_adjectives with their often lack of distinction between masculine and feminine, and the common gender of certain Germanic languages.

The old pronoun system

he [+animate] it {-animate]

with the introduction of

she [+animate, +feminine]

causes the reanalysis

he [+animate not necessarily feminine] > [+animate +masculine]

The historic use of "he" as the default pronoun reflects this, as does the lack of any commonly reconstructable ancient feminine adjective system for Proto-Indo-European. The notion that this somehow embodies sexism is a rather historically facile modern misconception. If anything, the argument should be in favor of getting rid of the she pronoun, since it is the sexist neologism. μηδείς (talk) 20:14, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

To some extent, I think that's what singular they is doing -- introducing a neutral replacement for both he and she. Regardless of the linguistic history, there is no question that roughly half the population currently perceives he as non-neutral, and linguistic fiat won't change that. I think they is well on the way to becoming standard. In my lifetime it will not, of course, replace he or she in definite situations. Possibly down the road -- but only if the strong gender assumptions in our society become significantly less pronounced. -- Elphion (talk) 22:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have missed the point entirely, and are begging the question as to the objectionability of he. "He" is the neutral form, as 140.142.20.229 asserted above, and I explained at length. The word "they" is just as objectionable as "she" since it implies an untruth, the plurality of the subject. μηδείς (talk) 02:58, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Luckily, there is no indication that the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European were sexist at all, so we can stop worrying about this silly thing that only directly affects half the population. 173.33.235.50 (talk) 01:27, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Do you have some source other than, perhaps, this, 173.? Because however entertaining one's pretense at victimhood, it doesn't amount to useful scholarship. Knowledge is fun, interesting, and liberating. Try it some time. μηδείς (talk) 02:58, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that one can fairly say that "he" is gender neutral in modern English because the equivalent in Proto-Indo-European was gender-neutral, it's kind of like saying that modern English is actually in its correct form written in runes, because that was the correct way to record Old English prior to 800. Modern English and Proto-Indo European are not at all the same language, and they have not been for a very long time. The crux of the matter is, when you walk up to the average native English speaker and say "Who's he", they are not going to clarify by asking you "Who, the man or the woman?". People can argue that "he" is to be used when the gender is unknown, but I don't think in most circles (at least in my experience) that "he" is gender neutral, where the word "he" doesn't automatically convey an image of a male person. Uh-oh, I just looked up from typing (I'm at an internet café) and I think that someone just lost his skirt. Now, how many of you honestly thought of a woman when you read that sentence, even given that in most English speaking places, a woman is far more likely to be the individual in question? (just to be clear, I made that up, both about being in an internet café and somebody losing their skirt) Falconus^{p t c} 03:58, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

While I agree with your points, I don't think that the solution is to revert to the plural when referring to an individual of indeterminate gender. "They" clearly refers to multiple people, although this might not have been the case hundreds of years ago. "She/he" or simply "s/he" is an accurate, gender neutral solution to the issue. Ebikeguy (talk) 04:03, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I do know where you are coming from... I think that it is clear that "singular they" is not widely accepted in formal English at the present time, but I think that it is gaining a lot of momentum among my generation in the US at least (to me, in context, they is perfectly singular, and I don't even question the singularity of "someone lost their skirt"). It will remain to be seen whether the trend continues or reverses. I don't like the idea of using a pronoun for both singular and plural (ambiguity issues), and the word "you" also bothers me greatly in that regard (I use "y'all" wherever I can for that reason), but I think that a development of singular they would be an improvement, because in my opinion, there is no singular version of they in English ("s/he" works, until you try to say it. Then it's three words ("she or he"), where ideally we'd only have to use one). Maybe in 150 years the grammar prescriptivists will go nuts about "they'all" or "th'all" ;-). Falconus^{p t c} 04:22, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Arabic Dialect Comparison

Background...I'm taking Arabic I in the fall, and my textbook covers three dialects: Egyptian, Levantine, and Formal. However, I have a friend at my school who's on a foreign exchange program from Kuwait, where the "Gulf" dialect is spoken. I want to be able to converse with him as well as I'm able, so my question is, which dialect of Arabic is closer to the Gulf one? Egyptian or Levantine? I would assume (And we all know what happens when one assumes something...) Levantine would be more similar, since it is geographically closer, but honestly, hell if I know. Thanks! Bossadai (talk) 23:49, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Egyptian is the dialect most used on TV throughout the Arabic world, for dramas, comedies, music programs, and stuff, so if you use Egyptian you will definitely be understood by speakers of other dialects. Understanding them, however, may be a different matter.... --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:27, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

July 2

Borax

What is the etymology of glurch?Curb Chain (talk) 04:08, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not finding it in Google or EO, but it sounds like maybe a combination of "glue" and some other word. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:31, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

"EO" is a helluva way to abbreviate Bing, which contains neither the letter e nor the letter o in its spelling... 188.28.104.202 (talk) 04:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Etymology Online. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:50, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

If you follow the link in Borax where glurch is mentioned to Flubber (material), you will find an external reference entitled "Glurch Meets Oobleck". On the linked page, the "recipe" for glurch consists primarily of glue and starch. --LarryMac | Talk 16:17, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

"How do you call yourself ?"

Poirot uses this phrase instead of "What's your name ?" or "Who are you ?". So, is this a common way for Belgians to make this inquiry, or is it unique to Poirot ? StuRat (talk) 06:59, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

According to this list of how to ask “What’s your name?” in many languages, the French in France have 3 options:

* Comment vous appellez-vous? (How do you call yourself?)

* Comment t'appelles tu? (as above, but informal)

* Quel est votre nom? (What is your name?).

There’s no listing of what French-speaking Belgians say, so I assume they follow the French. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 07:55, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

The Romance languages in general seem to use that "How do you call yourself?" construct, e.g. Spanish, Como se llama? Philosophically speaking, the answer to "Who are you?" should be something about your spiritual essence or something. But we use it to mean "What is your name?" (i.e. "How do you call yourself?") Go figure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:51, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah, the Vorlon question. It's a pretty good question. The Vorlons themselves are bloody fascists though; not sure I like them any better than the Shadows, all things considered. --Trovatore (talk) 21:01, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

And for those who, like me, don't have the faintest idea to what your red link is referring, here is the question in question. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:10, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

A pity that you missed the show, Jack. Babylon 5 was simply astonishing; there was nothing like it ever before. It was the first ever science-fiction epic for television (or indeed in film, but that's kind of obvious; an epic for the big screen is simply not practical, and please don't tell me Star Wars). That it aligned nicely with my politics of course doesn't affect my critical judgment at all.

It clearly paved the way for the better-known reimagined Battlestar Galactica. --Trovatore (talk) 21:29, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

By comparison, in Russian it's "Kak vas zovut?", literally meaning "How do they call you?", but that's also the general passive construction "How are you called?". -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:57, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Subtle point: In Italian, mi chiamo Mike doesn't really mean "I call myself Mike" as that would be interpreted in English. The latter has an overtone of "I go by the name of Mike", which would be mi faccio chiamare Mike ("I have myself called Mike"). --Trovatore (talk) 21:05, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks all. If ever asked that, I will have to suppress my urge to give a smart-ass answer like "I dial my home phone from my cell phone". StuRat (talk) 16:23, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Literalists have trouble with such questions. I remember an incident from my childhood; I was 7 or 8. I travelled with my Dad from our home in the country to my grandparents' place in Sydney, an all-day train trip. My Mum and siblings remained behind. When we got there, Nan asked me how Mum was. Her exact question was "How did you leave your mother?". I answered "Er, by train?" (thinking, surely she knew that already). The question was repeated, as was the answer. Then I was given a severe talking to about being insolent to my elders. Later, Dad explained that Nan was asking how Mum was, and the question had nothing to do with transport arrangements. But how the hell was I, as a 7-year old Australian boy, expected to know the Scottish-influenced language patterns of my notoriously irascible grandmother who I saw about once a year? One wouldn't have to be an aspie to have trouble navigating such treacherous linguistic waters at such an age (no offence to aspies). -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:00, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

My brother had a similar experience. We had recently moved to a new state, Indiana, where they used words a bit differently. After a test, the teacher told everyone to "put your pencils up", instead of "down", so my brother held his pencil up in the air and got in trouble. StuRat (talk) 22:07, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Heh. We could go on all day, but one more. There used to be a grand Australian tradition that, when many people got together for a social occasion, each person would bring a plate of food, rather than the host having to do all the work and spend all their money. When people were asked to "bring a plate", they knew what to do. Well, many, many, many immigrants had experiences of being asked this, and obediently turning up with an empty plate, not sure why anyone would want such a thing, but "they do things differently in this country". They soon learned what it was all about. The "bring a plate" tradition seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs, unfortunately. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:25, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

We still occasional do that in the US, where it's called a potluck meal. I rather like those, as you get to try a wide variety of foods, but only have to prepare one. One problem, though, is that you get too many fancy dishes, like desserts, and not enough of the basics, like, say, peas, unless you have people sign up ahead of time under categories, and limit the amount of desserts dishes in this way. StuRat (talk) 22:45, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

StuRat, I first encountered put (something) up when I moved to Texas at the age of 9, but there it didn't mean "put (something) down" but rather "put (something) away". If a teacher had said "Put your pencils up", it would have meant "Put your pencils away" (e.g. in your backpack) rather than "Put your pencils down (on your desk)". And Jack, even now when someone asks me, "How do you find Germany?" I have to bite my tongue not to answer, "I just walk out of my door and there it is." Angr (talk) 22:45, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

In this case "away" and "down" were one in the same, in that the desks had an indentation at the top where pencils were kept, when not in use. StuRat (talk) 22:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Is that like hanging up the phone? – b_jonas 18:16, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

That is an interesting one, isn't it? I suppose that one made literal sense in the days of those vertical phones you see in black-and-white films, with a sort of a horn in front of your mouth and a separate earpiece that you took off the hook and held near your ear. When I were a lad you "hung up" the phone by laying it down on the receiver. These days you mostly "hang up" by pushing a button, but the phrase has not changed. I wonder if it will continue to be used when closing off a remote conversation becomes a pure mental act of will, rather than a physical motion of any sort. --Trovatore (talk) 19:16, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

And we still "dial a number" although we literally press a series of buttons. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:07, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

In German one says "Wie heissen Sie?" --- in effect "How are you called?", except that the verb is in the active voice.

As for "How did you find Germany?", I think Esperanto disambiguates that one nicely:

"Kiel vi trovis Germanujon?" = "How did you succeed in locating Germany?"

"Kia vi trovis Germanujon?" = "What did you find Germany to be like?"

Michael Hardy (talk) 05:48, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Likelyhood that old civilizations pronounced words the way we pronounced them?

I was just thinking about this the other day.

You know how some spoken languages are dead and no longer verbally spoken by anyone, and yet modern linguists and historians derive words (usually place names, or names of deities those people believed in) from preserved, old written texts of those civilizations? I'm specifically referring to languages that did NOT have any tiny "remainder" population of people at all who spoke them for centuries between -- languages whose phoenetic, spoken side hadn't been practiced for centuries or millenia.

I'm wondering this: let's pretend I have a time machine where I can travel back in time to anywhere in the world at any time. For example, say I go into this time machine to Egypt circa 2000BC and listen in on their conversations -- can it be said with certainty that they pronounce Osiris as literally "Osiris", or Ramses as literally "Ramses", or "Punt" as "Punt"? Or are the pronunciations we attribute the written words of extinct languages likely to be even more "filler pronunciations" than even "best guesses"? How does it all work? --66.235.32.202 (talk) 18:03, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

It depends a lot on the language and on how directly the words are transmitted to English. In your example, you can be pretty sure that Osiris and Ramses weren't pronounced the same in 13th century BC Egypt as they are in 21st century English, because those names were transmitted from Ancient Egyptian to Greek and thence to Latin and thence to Middle English, where they underwent the Great Vowel Shift on the way to modern English. Angr (talk) 18:14, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

For these particular examples, we can actually be fairly confident that they were not pronounced in Ancient Egyptian like they are in Modern English. These names have passed through numerous intermediary languages before reaching English, each distorting the pronunciation slightly, and even in these intermediary languages the pronunciations changed over time. For instance, Ramses' name is now typically reconstructed as having been originally something like Riʻmīsisu. Voikya (talk) 18:19, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Names don't even have to be old for there to be confusion. Differing languages seem to be enough even today. Rome/Roma and Paris/"Paareee" are well known examples. In my lifetime Peking has turned into Beijing, and Calcutta has turned into Kolkata. Heck, most Americans mispronounce the name of my city of Melbourne, Australia, and we allegedly speak the same language! (If it helps, we would pronounce it the same way if it was spelt Melbn.) How we can even pretend to know how ancient foreign languages were pronounced is beyond me. HiLo48 (talk) 21:51, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

.....and "lodge wives" is Australian for "large waves". Michael Hardy (talk) 05:50, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

"Hiawatha" was supposedly originally pronounced "hee-uh-waht-hah" and is typically now pronounced "high-uh-wathh-uh". And even within the last century, in American English, the word "record" has evolved from "rec-ord" to "rec-urd". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:56, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

With Ancient Egyptian, it's even trickier, since they did not usually write vowels. Hebrew doesn't either -- the optional vowel marks weren't even invented until the Middle Ages -- so we don't know how the Tetragrammaton was pronounced. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 03:49, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

The only way (so far as I can see) that we would pronounce those words exactly the same way today as they did then is if by some random twist of fate, we had the exact same sounds in our language as they did back then, which I find to be very unlikely. Certainly, some of the sounds we make would be in common, but other things would be very different. I can tell you from studying [modern] French that the phonetics are very different, even with so many common roots (a large portion of our vocabulary is French in origin). There are sounds that exist in French that we do not have at all in standard English, and vice versa. For example, the 'r' sound in English is miles apart from the French 'r'; they have no 'h' or 'th' sound (théatre would be pronounced kind of like tay-otr, but the vowels are quite different too). Even "excusez-moi" (ex-coo-zay-mwa) has been corrupted in English to the point that I have heard "ex-cyuse-me-wa" and "boo-coop" instead of "beaucoup" (boe-coo). All of those are approximations, as each of those two words have several sounds that don't really exist in English. In short, if French and English are so different even now, I very highly doubt that English speakers could properly pronounce most words from Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient Chinese, or Ancient Mayan, even if they heard them spoken by native speakers (guess you need your time machine) without A LOT of coaching.

Answering the OP's question on how it all works, i.e. how people know or guess how languages no longer spoken were pronounced. Very generally, one can say that people ultimately rely on connections with languages still spoken - through shared scripts, borrowings, transliterations and relatedness, plus knowledge about how languages tend to work and change, plus, in a few cases, contemporary linguistic descriptions. For Ancient Egyptian, for example, you have renditions into Ancient Greek, Akkadian and Hebrew, reflexes in Coptic and cognates in other Afro-Asiatic languages. In turn those ancient languages are known from connections with modern ones and/or contemporary descriptions (plus the actual preserved traditional pronunciations of Coptic and Hebrew, though these are far from identical to the pronunciations used at the time). Similarly, for Shakespeare's dialect of English, you have reflexes in contemporary English, the Old and Middle English predecessors, the Latin alphabet, internal evidence from rhymes, etc.. However, as others have pointed out, the conventional pronunciations of words used by people when they are speaking their modern mother tongues such as English will almost never be identical to the reconstructed ones. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 22:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

There is a book called Vox Latina, which is reputed to explain in some detail how it is known how the ancient Romans pronounced Latin words. Michael Hardy (talk) 05:51, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Arabic الكعبة kaʕbah, English cube

Are these two words etymologically related? 149.169.123.127 (talk) 21:39, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Unlikely. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:50, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

The word "ka'bah" is thought to be derived from ka'b, which means "cube",[4] but despite the similarity with Greek kubos, the existence of an etymological relationship between the two is apparently contested. Iblardi (talk) 22:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, cube is a borrowing from the Arabic. μηδείς (talk) 00:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Medeis, what is your source for that? Arabic as such did not yet exist at the time of the ancient Greeks, nor did the ancient Greeks have much contact with speakers of Ancient North Arabian or other dialects ancestral to Classical Arabic. Conceivably, the Greeks could have borrowed a cognate term from the closely related Phoenician language, though it would be good to have a citation for that, too. Marco polo (talk) 03:01, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I should have said possibly Semitic, and based only on vague memory. I remember reading the comparison at some point--but yes, that's not very helpful--and it may have just been speculation where I read it. The supposed Proto-Indo-European root *keu(b)- erected on the basis of kybos is not attested in Pokorny or Watkins or Mallory and Adams. The term is an obvious candidate as a wanderwort. Chance resemblance is possible--I haven't been able to find any cognates for kybos in Indo-European or for ka'ba in Semitic--although my resources in Semitic are limited. Maybe it is a fossilized greco-arabian Nostratic isogloss. μηδείς (talk) 18:28, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

LSJ has attestations for "kubos" all the way back to Herodotus, so it's certainly not borrowed from Arabic. Maybe Arabic borrowed it from Greek instead. Adam Bishop (talk) 19:33, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

My saying Arabic was sloppy and wrong, I was thinking Phoenician and remembering something I read 20 years ago. Any direct borrowing can be ruled out as geographically and phonetically unlikely. If there is a connection it must be from some older borrowing. That the word meaning a gaming die would be borrowed seems likely. But the lack of attestation in other languages makes random chance resemblance look likely. But even then, if neither form has relatives in closely related tongues we are left with the even more unlikely case of two strikingly similar neologisms.

I am reminded of the etymology of the word dog. The Basque word txakur doesn't look very much like dog, but in the context of the Georgian dzaghli and various dialect words for dog in the Mediterranean a substratum influence doesn't look unlikely.μηδείς (talk) 21:41, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Etymonline says 'dog' comes from a word that already existed in the O.E. period, 'docga', which was the name of a specific breed of dog. Was this breed prominent in the Basque region? Or perhaps the Caucasus? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:29, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

That's not a very good source. Dogca is a variant of dog, just as frocga and picga are varieants of frog and pig. That docga is attested in OE doesn't say where it comes from - which is not PIE. But words similar to tzakur are attested throughought the western mediterranean. The point is that the source of dog is probably related to the source of txakur and dzaghli, not that any one comes from the other. See also cachorro. μηδείς (talk) 00:40, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I think I should just point out that 'docga' is not a variant of 'dog' - 'docga' is Old English (with Middle English descendant 'dogge'), and 'dog' is the Modern English version. They are not variants of each other, and not interchangeable. As for sources, I would consider Etymonline, as a source that consistently quotes reliable sources (such as the OED), to be reliable, and many of us here on Wikipedia use it. Do you have any reliable sources for your statements about 'dog' above? I would like to see them, especially considering the majority of sources I have seen in 20+ years of studying comparative historical linguistics have all been consistent in not being able to say definitively where the word 'dog' comes from, and the ones that have offered explanations have tended to been isolated in their theories. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 09:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

July 3

Sas Thelimatos tou Emon - seeking translation.

A phrase / spell, used in conjunction with a ancient Greek Necklace that controls the wearer via overpowering suggestion.

Was a previous user question, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2008_July_10) but the user didn't have the correct spelling of the phrase. Was used in Season 3 Relic Hunter, episode 10 : All Choked Up.

If someone could translate it, I would greatly appreciate it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baelrath (talk • contribs) 02:58, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I believe the Greek is something like "σας θελήματος τοῦ εμον". Google Translate renders this as "you will of adhesion", but my best guess is that it means "your will is mine". I'm not sure it is actually grammatically correct -- or it could be that Google Translate is going astray by treating it as modern Greek. Looie496 (talk) 06:28, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

-Sweet, thanks. that would make sense. i tried doing a google translate but i couldn't get it to work. Baelrath (talk) 22:30, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

At and in

Please shed some light on the correct use of at and in.

• I saw a tiger at the zoo.
• I saw a tiger in the zoo.
• I met him at the restaurant.
• I met him in the restaurant.

Which one is correct and which one is wrong? --111Engo (talk) 08:46, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

It's English, where correct and wrong can be nebulous concepts, but I prefer at the zoo and in the restaurant. HiLo48 (talk) 08:49, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Please explain so that it becomes clear to me. Thanks. --111Engo (talk) 09:00, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

"At the restaurant" could mean on the footpath outside, or inside - whereas "in the restaurant" is more specifically inside. The tiger examples are virtually indistinguishable in meaning, and neither is wrong. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 09:12, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I interpret the tiger example the same way. That is, "at the zoo" could mean the parking lot, so we'd better say "in the zoo", unless we want to risk getting mauled. StuRat (talk) 09:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

So, for a general rule:

"In" = "inside".

"At" = "at the general location of".

Perform those substitutions above, and they should make the difference clear. StuRat (talk) 09:29, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I would say "at the zoo" and "in the restaurant." I have no idea why -- it just sounds right. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 10:02, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

This little blurb[5] might explain the subtlety on "zoo".[6] The animals are "in" the zoo (as residents), the humans are "at" the zoo (to visit). Although either one would be understood to mean that you saw a tiger in its cage while visiting the zoo. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:49, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

And in America we would be more likely to say "at" the restaurant, although we might say "in" the restaurant if, for example, we were staying at a hotel that had a built-in restaurant. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:51, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Hello everyone, I have found this which says at is used for a point and in is used for an enclosed space. But I think this statement is very naive. We say "Eiffel Tower is situated in Paris", not "Eiffel Tower is situated at Paris". But Paris is not an enclosed space. Right now I am even more confused. --111Engo (talk) 13:58, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Maybe not in a glass bubble, but still an entity with a boundary of some kind. A building being "in" a city is pretty consistent. The Empire State Building is "in" New York City and "at" 5th Avenue and 34th Street. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:13, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

That construct also helps explain the times we would say we're "at" the office vs. "in" the office. Keep in mind that in the Romance languages "at" and "to" are the same word (a in Spanish, por ejemplo, derived from the Latin ad) and indicate a point, relatively speaking. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:20, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

The differences are so subtle that English speakers don't always agree (for example, StuRat says "in the zoo" but I prefer "at the zoo"). "In", as 111Engo said, is used to specify where you are in relation to something (you are not on top of the restaurant, you are in the restaurant), and I always tend to think of "at" as being within a close proximity to a certain place, and not quite as precise. "I'm at the school" usually means that I'm inside the school, but could also easily mean that I am wandering around in the football field, or am standing on the sidewalk in front of the school. One note, in response to 111Engo; I would very rarely say that something is at a city, and when I do, I tend to think that it's parked just outside the city, so to speak. If the Roman legion is at Rome, I think that that are standing around the walls, seiging or preparing to attack, or whatever they are doing, not already inside the city. That being said, it's such a small distinction, as I say, and have heard other people say "Oh, I'm at New York City for the weekend", even though "in" would make more sense now that I am thinking about it.

The expressions with "in" are more specific, with "at" expressing general proximity and "in" specifying containment by some boundary.

But everyone knows that la tour Eiffel est à Paris, not in Paris. μηδείς (talk) 17:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

As others have said, it's subtle. But I believe there is a tendency to prefer "at" when the location is an institution or event as well as a location: at the opera, at the theatre, at the office, at the Houses of Parliament, at the station. But contrariwise "in hospital" ("in the hospital" in the US), "in prison". The opposition of UK "at school", US "in school", shows that there is unlikely to be any simple rule. --ColinFine (talk) 22:15, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Adding dates to people with titles

Is there a standard way of placing dates after names? Like in this example should it be: "John Bloggins, Lord Bloggins (d. 1333)", or "John Bloggins (d. 1333), Lord Bloggins"? I was going to add some dates to names in the body of an article and was wondering if there's a standard way of doing it.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 08:53, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Usually, just look at plenty of articles and follow the norm. In this case, follow James Callaghan rather than Dido (singer). The Wikipedia standard for someone who is a lord (usually Baron, Earl etc not vaguely Lord) is to include the title as part of the name, in your case "John Bloggins, Baron(etc.) Bloggins (d. 1333)" and in this case the born/died does not split the name in half. If you were going to write "John Bloggins (d. 1333) was a Welsh blacksmith and axe-murderer who later became Lord Bloggins", you would use your second example. Sussexonian (talk) 11:13, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I just noticed you said in the body of an article. But I don't think this changes my suggestion: if you are writing "John Bloggins, Lord Bloggins" in that style, and this may later become a link to an article titled John Bloggins, Lord Bloggins you would not want to place the born/died in the middle of the name. Sussexonian (talk) 12:13, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Sussexonian. Putting the date between the name and title does seem out of place. I'll put it after. It's just that I noticed it with the date in between in some ODNB bio a while ago, and it stuck out to me and made me wonder.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 05:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

English exam: Help!!!

Hey guys, I just ran into a bit of a problem with my English Comprehension exam, and was wondering if any of you were willing to help me out.

It isn't much - just a simple fill in the blank multiple choice question that seems to have more than one adequate answer. Here's the question:

Find the best answer that fits the blank.
Improving critical thinking skills requires a continous effort, one method of which is to ________________ before formulating an opinion. By comparing and contrasting the coverage of several news sources on a single issue, it is possible to identify bias in one direction or another. Furthermore, thinking critically about news stories also allows you to identify your own internal prejudices and understand how they affect your opinions. To think critically means to consider all aspects of a subject with an open mind and to avoid adopting a cynical or judgmental stance toward the sources of information. A true critical thinker is just like a jury member examining not only the facts themselves, but also the motivations behind them and how they were obtained
(a) discuss issues with other people (b) try to see things without prejudice (c) refer to multiple sources of information (d) choose the most trustworthy news source (e) trust your own experiences rather than the media

During the exam I chose (b) try to see things without prejudice, but I just found out that the correct answer is actually (c) refer to muliple sources of information. I can see why (c) can be the answer, since the sentence that comes right after the blank mentions the method of comparing and contrasting multiple news sources. But I'm not sure I agree with it though. Yeah sure, refering to multiple sources is definitely mentioned in the paragraph, but can it actually account for the main idea of the entire passage? In my opinion, the thesis of this passage is closer to thinking critically about every source, and considering every viewpoint of a subject without any prejudice, rather than refering to different sources. I mean, look at the supporting detail sentences that come after the blank: they're all pointing to eliminating your bias and try to see things objectively, right? Besides, there's no reason why (b) can't fit the blank: to me, the passage flows perfectly with (b) filling the blank.

The reason why I'm asking for help here is because I'm not as articulate and eloquent when in comes to explaining my thought process, and thought that if I could get gain support from native speakers or people who are more fluent and have much better reading comprehension skills than me, and can form arguments into persuasive writing, I'd have a much firmer ground to stand on when I go to my English teacher. I'm a Korean high school student living in Korea by the way. And this question apparently comes directly from an English Comprehension Exercise book that is definitely not included in our curriculum nor in our list of books we were supposed to study for the exam.

Anyone who thinks I'm right and is willing to help me out, please do so: I'm going to need every help that I can get. Just a few sentences (or longer if possible) will do. Love you guys. Thnx. Johnnyboi7 (talk) 09:31, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but your answer isn't right. When you "try to see things without prejudice", that means you don't form an opinion until all the facts are in. Thus, the sentence would mean "Improving critical thinking skills requires a continuous effort, one method of which is to not form an opinion until all the facts are in before formulating an opinion." That doesn't make any sense (obviously you can't form an opinion before forming an opinion). Also, the "one method" part implies that it's optional, but avoiding prejudice isn't optional to critical thinking, while multiple sources is. StuRat (talk) 09:45, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

It's always a good idea to approach exam questions in a structured manner. As with most multiple choice questions, there are two answers which are obviously wrong, two that are nearly right, and the correct answer. (a) and (e) are obviously wrong - the text doesn't mention discussion with other people at all (a), and (e) is the exact opposite of "critical thinking". That leaves us with (b), (c), and (d). (d) is an accurate summary of the next sentence in the passage, but it's not the right answer, as _choosing_ a trustworthy news source isn't a "continuous effort". (b) is wrong for the reasons that StuRat gives - if the sentence didn't have "before formulating an opinion" after the blank, (b) would be a valid answer, but, as it stands, (b) creates a contradiction. That leaves us with (c), which is the right answer. Tevildo (talk) 10:25, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

StuRat, I beg to differ: prejudice and opinions are similar but slightly different concepts.

According to Wikipedia, prejudice is " a prejudgment, an assumption made about someone or something before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy. The word prejudice is most commonly used to refer to preconceived judgments toward people or a person because of race, social class, gender, ethnicity, homelessness, age, disability, obesity, religion, sexual orientation, or other personal characteristics. It also means beliefs without knowledge of the facts[1] and may include "any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence." whereas "In general, an opinion is a subjective belief, and is the result of emotion or interpretation of facts. An opinion may be supported by an argument,....."

You see, while both do mean a sort of a subjective judgement you have towards something, prejudice plays sightly on a more subconcious level without any hard evidence or adequate facts, whereas opinions are on a more conscious level and have reasonable arguments to support it. Therefore, you could say that prejudice (preconcieved judgements) can grow into opinions (concieved judgement) through reasonable evaluation and analysis of evidence and arguments.

Besides, if you were right, how will you be able to explain this sentence in the above passage: "Furthermore, thinking critically about news stories also allows you to identify your own internal prejudices and understand how they affect your opinions." Understand how prejudices affect your opinions - this suggests that prejudice is not the same thing as an opinion.

Also, other than the second sentence, the other sentences all refer to considering every viewpoint of ""one"" source of information, not several. Wouldn't that mean that (b) can also be the answer? Johnnyboi7 (talk) 13:35, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I didn't say that prejudice was opinion, I said it was when you "form an opinion before all the facts are in". With this definition, the line in question becomes "Furthermore, thinking critically about news stories also allows you to identify your own internal tendencies to form opinions before the facts are in and understand how they affect your opinions." StuRat (talk) 07:19, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

This is very simple, you were taking a test on reading comprehension, not applied epistemology. The point was not to give the "true" answer as you saw it but the answer which best expressed your comprehension of the writer's intention--option C. μηδείς (talk) 17:32, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I would go even further than that - the objective is to get the answer that's on the answer sheet, not the "right answer" in some absolute sense. This is _always_ an issue with exams in the humanities, which the OP would do well to bear in mind. Tevildo (talk) 17:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Basic Japanese Counting

Ever since I went to live in Japan when I was 4-7 years old, I have had questions regarding Japanese numbers. I was put in a Japanese-speaking school, and learned that most people from where I lived (Hiroshima) counted from one to ten saying "ichi ni san shi go roku shichi hachi kyuu jyuu", but that there were alternate ways of saying the numbers four, seven, and nine, so that you could also count to ten saying "ichi ni san yon go roku nana hachi ku jyuu". So...

1. I find it strange that a language has two distinct ways of saying a basic number like 4. What are the conditions that allowed two simultaneous designations for the same number to prevail in the Japanese language for so long?
2. If your dialect has you saying "yon" for four, do you also have to say "nana" for seven and "ku" for nine? Or are there dialects that only use one or two of the three rather than all three?
3. Where in Japan do the majority of the people use "yon" instead of "shi", where do they use "nana" instead of "shichi", and where do they use "ku" instead of "kyuu"? Depending on the answer to question 2, there might be significant overlap between these areas. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.243.5.213 (talk) 15:15, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Did you look at our article on Japanese numbers? It has some details. – b_jonas 17:52, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

It's not unusual for a language to have different words for numbers depending on grammatical gender - French has un and une for 1, Welsh has dau and dwy for 2, tri and tair for 3, and pedwar and pedair for 4 (come to that, Welsh has two completely separate counting systems, decimal and vigesimal). -- Arwel Parry (talk) 22:50, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

It is difficult to tell the usage of those numerals as there is no rule. April is always Shigatsu, July is Shichigatsu, and September is Kugatsu. July fourth is Sichigatsu Yokka, not Shichigatsu Shi-nichi. But four seasons is always 四季/shiki and four-years-old is always yonsai. You just have to remember them. See also Japanese counter words. Oda Mari (talk) 07:43, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

There are two types of numerals in Japanese, native numerals and Sino-Japanese numerals, see Japanese numerals. It is not limited to "four", "seven", and "nine". Shi, shichi, ku are Sino-Japanese numerals; they are go-on readings of Chinese numerals of 四, 七, 九. Yon and nana are native numerals. Kyū is also a Sino-Japanese numeral but it is a kan-on reading of 九. So why these numerals are mixed into go-on numerals? Yo or yon is ued to avoid using shi because shi is homophone of 死 "death" (see also tetraphobia). According to ja:漢数字#日本語, João Rodrigues recorded such usage in 1604. For other numbers, it is recent development and it is not to be misheard. Shichi might be mishaerd as ichi or shi and ku as roku. Ōtsuki Fumihiko noted such usage in 1917. This is for Tokyo and according to another source, yon, nana, kyū was already used in Osaka in Edo period. --Kusunose 10:23, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

July 4

Swear word ? in unknown language

Hi, this probably a stupid question but anyway...years ago my Mum worked with a lady who was a recent immigrant to Australia. This lady did not speak English all that well, but she could speak it well enough to get by (working in the shoe factory where my Mum worked at the time (early 1950s)). Most of the other workers were young girls in their 20s, but this lady was easily the oldest (in her 60s) and often the butt of usually harmless jokes by the youngsters. She took it all in good humour, but when she got angry she would always snap at them, and say "Menni Metsa!" I don't know if that is the correct spelling of course! I have Googled this up and down but could not imagine what it might mean - and what language it might be. The lady was European - she was definitely not Asian, or African (although she could have been from North Africa - at any rate she had white skin and not dark). Does anyone have any idea what this means, or does the old lady have the last laugh and was just using a made up word? BTW when my Mum asked her what it meant she said it was a swear word in "her language" but left it at that 121.44.224.89 (talk) 06:32, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Places in 1920 Schleswig / Slesvig

After answering someone's question at WP:Reference desk/Humanities about 20th-century referenda to secede from a country, I got involved in converting some data at Schleswig Plebiscites (1920) into a table. But knowing almost no Danish and very little German, I got confused about the correct designation of the Amt or Kreis for places (greater than the central towns themselves) like Flensburg and Tondern which Wikipedia now (at least on the Danish side) translates as municipalities (e.g. Aabenraa Municipality). The article, clearly translated from German, or perhaps Danish, used District instead. It also used "spot" as a translation for "Fleck" for very small places like Augustenborg, which English-language Wikipedia now uniformly calls towns (rather than, say, locality, village or hamlet). Does anyone here know enough Danish, German and English, as well as enough about how Jutland was organized in 1920 (as opposed to today), to help me be more accurate and consistent? (I could cross-post this at the Humanities desk, but it's the linguistic aspect that seems to need more expertise.) —— Shakescene (talk) 06:50, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Quarterfinal vs Quarter-Final vs Quarter Final

Hi,

I am trying to find the correct (or most appropriate) way of writing 'Quarterfinal'. My personal preference is 'Quarter Final' as the phrase seems to be an amalgamation of 'Quarter' & 'Final'. However, all 3 versions in the heading seem to be acceptable.

When I search the phrase on google, 'Quarter-Final' seems to be most popular with 'Quarterfinal' the least used. My query has arisen due to the official Wimbledon Championships website. They use the 'Quarterfinal' version which I do not like.

Therefore, can anyone tell me if all 3 options are correct and which is the most commonly used. Is there a 'proper' way of writing it? If not, which way was the original? This very website uses all 3 by the way!

Thank you.

FingersLily (talk) 14:06, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

For American English, both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage prefer quarterfinal. For British English, Collins prefers quarterfinal while Oxford prefers quarter-final. Angr (talk) 14:19, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

(e/C) The recommendation of my Oxford Manual of Style (UK usage) is quarter-final, but it adds a note to say that it's one word (quarterfinal) in the US.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:23, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Translation from japanese

File:Jap writing - Cartoon something.jpg

Cartoon something?

What does the picture say? I know カートゥーン means "Cartoon", but I can't figure out the second word. It looks to me something like ワラムド (waramudo?). Thanks. ShoobyD (talk) 14:29, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Languages with different words for inclusive/exclusive we/our

What languages besides those spoken in the Philippines have different words for we and our depending on whether the person you're speaking to is included, like Tagalog's tayo/kami and ating/aming? 76.27.175.80 (talk) 15:22, 4 July 2011 (UTC)