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January 3

Windmills

I have just popped over here from the discussion at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous#Falling windmills. It took me some time to realise that the OP was asking about wind turbines, rather than a device that used wind to grind something. That IP editor geolocates to New York. The two respondents, both from the UK, used the latter term. Here in Australia, I can't recall wind turbines ever being called windmills. Is using the term "windmill" for a "wind turbine" largely an American thing? HiLo48 (talk) 22:44, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The term windmill is used for a number of things in America, including wind turbine (as Trump did recently), but the term "wind turbine" is still widely used for those electricity-generating structures. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:20, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I looked at windmill, and observed that it has two pictures of what I call wind turbines, diplomatically(?) using the two different names between them. (Have we begun to use Trump as the exemplar of good English language usage?) HiLo48 (talk) 23:26, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I call them windmills, and it has nothing to do with Trump. I just think "wind turbine" is not a great name. To me a turbine is a structure that has layers (generally plural) of vanes, and is ordinarily enclosed in a cylindrical wall. The power generators don't look like that at all; they look much more similar to classic windmills, and I'm not sure why we need another name. --Trovatore (talk) 23:35, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks (and I was joking about Trump; I hope Bugs was too), but your location brings me back to the final sentence of my initial post here. Is using the term "windmill" for a "wind turbine" largely an American thing? HiLo48 (talk) 00:13, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That I really don't know. I just think it's a better name than "wind turbine". --Trovatore (talk) 01:00, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. I don't think most Americans know what a turbine is. They look like windmills and that's one less syllable. Jmar67 (talk) 01:55, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"They look like windmills" Not to me. I've always visualised a windmill as a thing on a Dutch dyke, or a sort of similar looking thing used for MILLing grain. Neither of those look anything like a modern wind turbine. HiLo48 (talk) 03:44, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, but the wind-power gadgets don't look anything like anything I think of as a "turbine", such as a steam turbine or a water turbine or a turboprop. --Trovatore (talk) 04:30, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A fair perspective. In my youth, over half a century ago, I briefly worked in a maintenance gang in a coal fired power station, so yes, I know that kind of turbine. But just because those new fangled wind driven things look different shouldn't mean we name them after something else they don't look like. HiLo48 (talk) 22:47, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's a judgment call of course, but to me the power generators do look a fair amount like the grain-grinding windmills. The most common sort have two or three long blades, much longer than the radius of the central housing. The grain-grinding ones maybe most commonly have four? The other sorts of power turbines generally have a large number of vanes, either contained within the central housing or at least not greatly larger than it. I think the windpower generators look a lot more like windmills. But this is of course a matter of perception. --Trovatore (talk) 04:45, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Trump did, in fact, use the term "windmills".[1] I think of windmills as being used for pumping water, like on a farm or in the Netherlands. That contrasts with water turbines (such as the ones at Hoover Dam) and wind turbines. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:38, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience, "windmill" is the ordinary word for the things in the UK. --ColinFine (talk) 10:58, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience, "windmill" is never used for these things in the UK as it is the common name for a type of Mill with big sails on it. MilborneOne (talk) 11:04, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

windmill always conjours images of two huge great circular stones milling grain, powered by the wind for me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:41ED:BCB4:C707:D0ED (talk) 11:40, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, sure, but it's not like you see the millstones from outside the structure. Matt Deres (talk) 14:49, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, while I accept the various meanings and implications above, the first thing "windmill" makes me (someone who grew up in North America in the 1950s/60s) think of is one of these, with a large number of small metal blades. The windmill article says they would normally be used to drive water pumps, but I was under the impression they could also operate a generator to provide some electricity to the farm. --142.112.159.101 (talk) 09:13, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, of course, and this Australian should have remembered those things too. There were plenty of them here and they WERE called windmills. They did pump water. I can't remember them being used to generate electricity. Time has moved on, and most such pumps today in Australia are driven by solar panels. The old style are being preserved at least in a museum Penong, South Australia. If you want, you can pick up a miniaturised version for your garden on ebay. HiLo48 (talk) 22:17, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Without wanting to sound presrciptivist, the clue is very much in the name; a windmill is a mill powered by wind, a watermill one powered by water and so on. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:184E:B927:3C9:EA93 (talk) 12:55, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To make that properly prescriptivist, you would need to define "mill". In its presumably original form, it was a machine for grinding grain, but we all know the language has moved on. Our disambiguation page Mill isn't immediately helpful. It doesn't mention things used to generate electricity. It does contain List of types of mill, but that doesn't mention the electricity creating ones either, apart from linking us back to windmill, where this all began and where they do crack a mention well down the page. But that leaves us with a circular definition. HiLo48 (talk) 22:04, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here in northern England where we seldom see the ones with sails, some people do call the generators windmills, but wind turbines is the more common term. Dbfirs 14:59, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The cartographers at Ordnance Survey (the UK's official map makers) have three separate symbols; "Windmill, with or without sails", "Wind pump" and "wind turbine", which you can see here. Alansplodge (talk) 21:38, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well in the 19th century an American apparently invented this mostly lifting well water and called it a windmill and they became very widespread, so branching out from the dutch windmill has a history in America, which perhaps transferred now to these newer structures that also spin in the wind. Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:11, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's all in the mind, no? Deor (talk) 23:31, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Let;s just put some pictures in this answer. Rmhermen (talk) 18:56, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 4

The oo vowel

Why is the oo vowel sound (in the word boot) so rare at the beginnings of words in English?? (Ooze is one of the few words beginning with it.) Georgia guy (talk) 15:46, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean ʊu̯, u, ɵu̯, u̟, ʊu̯, ʉu̯, ɤʊ̯, ɤu̯, ʊ̈y, ʏy, ʉ̞u̟, ʉː, uː, əʉ, ɨ, ʊː, u̟ː, ɵʊ̯, or any of the other various sounds that <oo> in "boot" represents in all of the various English dialects? Anyway, words like "out" used to begin with /uː/ in Middle English but that sound evolved to /aʊ/ as part of the Great Vowel Shift. As for why that specific change happened, your guess is as good as anybody else's -- as I think other editors have summed up nicely here recently in these types of questions.--William Thweatt ^Talk^Contribs 19:29, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The dialect variant doesn't matter, but please note that it's likewise true that Middle English had the sound of English long o minus the w sound and that that sound evolved to the modern oo sound as part of the same shift. What makes it so that there are not many words that begin with this sound?? Georgia guy (talk) 19:43, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I thought that surely there would have to be OOdles of them, so I went to my dictionary, but you're right, there aren't. HiLo48 (talk) 22:51, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is clearly a case for WP:SOFIXIT. Georgia guy needs to invent oodles of new words that start with "oo", and get other people to use them! --142.112.159.101 (talk) 09:15, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's a few in Australian English, generally derived from Aboriginal languages. The best known is probably Uluru. But that can't really be said to be English. HiLo48 (talk) 10:56, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Please note that I want to know why. Georgia guy (talk) 12:31, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For what purpose? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:04, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why does wanting to know why something is the way it is need a purpose? Surely the pursuit of knowledge is a purpose in and of itself? Fgf10 (talk) 18:08, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's an interesting question that I want to know the answer to. Georgia guy (talk) 18:11, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a question that cannot actually be answered. We can describe how a language changed, but there is little to no hope of finding out what factor or factors may have caused that change. (And predicting such changes ahead of time is impossible.) The phenomenon is simply too complex to make your question meaningful. If we were to somehow rewind time to before this change happened and then let things proceed from there, there is no reason to expect that the changes to the language would follow the same patterns they have in reality. History is contingent. The "butterfly effect" and all that. --Khajidha (talk) 22:08, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For one thing, the OP's premise that it is "rare" is a subjective opinion. It's certainly much more common than English words starting with "ooo", for example. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:35, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What manner of comment is that? Are there ANY standard words in English that have a triple letter anywhere in them? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 15:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

He's claiming it's "rare". Compared to what? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:34, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Jack of Oz -- Some people prefer "freeer" and "freeest" as the comparative and superlative of "free", but these are apparently disfavored by dictionaries: [2], [3]. Then there's "agreeeth" (archaic bisyllabic form of the third person singular verb "agrees"). Otherwise they're all onomatopoeia ("brrr") or missing hyphens ("crosssection"), or creative/extended spellings ("yesss!"). --- AnonMoos (talk) 23:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And what about quadruple letters? Can one who is freed be said to be a freeee? --Theurgist (talk) 03:32, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The questioner is likely to find it more productive to seek why something is rather than why something is not. Eg: "Why do so many words having to do with order and authority start with the letter R?" is an answerable question, but "Why don't they start with X?" is not. Temerarius (talk) 19:12, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It also depends on what sort of meaning of "why" they're after. "What made this happen..." is unanswerable for the reasons noted by Khajidha above; language change is not a deterministic process, and so there is no repeatable and definable cause in that sense. If they instead are looking for "What happened before it", that is the sort of non-causative antecedents, we can answer that. Lots of historical linguistics is based on tracking what changes do happen; but the predictive power of such events is poor. --Jayron 32 16:09, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I once had a teacher from Boston, Lincolnshire who pronounced "human" as "ooman", but I expect that doesn't count. Alansplodge (talk) 21:43, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Back to the Great Vowel Shift: if there were words now starting in "oo", they would have been shifted there from words starting in the sound in modern "book", at least according to John McWhorter in his Words on the Move. We don't have any of those either, do we? --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 23:57, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wrong. The oo sound as in boot was the sound in go without the w sound at the end before the shift; that is, the word boot was pronounced similar to the way boat is today. Georgia guy (talk) 00:08, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Or to put it another way, similar to the way Boot is pronounced today in German. (From the general European perspective Old English had a phonetic spelling system :) 89.172.38.145 (talk) 07:43, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 5

Black Toon

In Chapter 7 of Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston it says:

In the meantime, Kirstie had escaped into the kitchen, and before her vassal gave vent to her feelings.

"Here, ettercap! Ye'll have to wait on yon Innes! I canna haud myself in.

'Puir Erchie!' I'd 'puir Erchie' him, if I had my way!

And Hermiston with the deil's ain temper!

God, let him take Hermiston's scones out of his mouth first.

There's no a hair on ayther o' the Weirs that hasna mair spunk and dirdum to it than what he has in his hale dwaibly body!

Settin' up his snash to me!

Let him gang to the black toon where he's mebbe wantit -- birling in a curricle -- wi' pimatum on his heid -- making a mess o' himsel' wi' nesty hizzies -- a fair disgrace!"

It was impossible to hear without admiration Kirstie's graduated disgust, as she brought forth, one after another, these somewhat baseless charges.

What does "Black Toon" mean? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:39, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Guessing "black town". Jmar67 (talk) 20:51, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Usually spelt toun: "Sc. forms and usages of Eng. town". Alansplodge (talk) 21:47, 5 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And I'll suggest that a "black" town is probably an industrial one, where a man mebbe wantit for factory work. --142.112.159.101 (talk) 07:43, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly Edinburgh, which was known as Auld Reekie because of its smokiness, though this was more from domestic fires than industry. The Archie (Erchie) Weir of the title was originally from Edinburgh. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 08:23, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is (or used to be) a Blackstone in Renfrewshire, which was apparently once "Black's Toun", which may have just been an estate (toun/ton/tun/toon in a place name can mean either "town" as in walled settlement or simply "manor" or "estate"). Perhaps that was where he was referring to. See [4] and [5]. See also here for a map and some background on the area; it once housed the Blackstone Pits, a mining and oil extraction interest once owned by one William Black, who's name may or may not be connected to it. --Jayron 32 14:41, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I also found "There is an old town of Stornoway, as well as a new one; it is a black town, and it is black enough". From The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, Containing Descriptions of their Scenery and Antiquities by John Macculloch (1824) p. 288. So perhaps it just means any run-down urban area. Alansplodge (talk) 17:42, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Some of these guess are rather wide of the mark, given the context. To translate, Kirstie talks about Archie "carousing in a carriage, with pomatum in his hair"; we're talking city slicker, not factory worker here. Henry ^Flower 21:37, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

She could still be referring to the city itself as "black" due to the factory smoke, but be talking about Archie going there and acting like a fancy "city slicker". --Khajidha (talk) 21:53, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 9

It's cold drinks signs in Japan

I fail to understand the name of this category "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:It’s_cold_drink_signs_in_Japan" at Wikipedia Commons. What does "It's cold drink signs in Japan" mean? How is that supposed to be parsed? The original Japanese name doesn't help as I don't understand Japanese. JIP | Talk 16:48, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at its parent category "Category:Food and drink signs in Japan", it's clear that the word "It's" should be removed. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:58, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That category is a little strange, since it contains a Unicode "smartquote" character, which is somewhat against Commons consensus, and also appears to be a poor translation from Japanese into English... AnonMoos (talk) 00:27, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Recommending_signs_in_Japan 89.172.38.145 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 07:39, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would put it to you that it is punctuation that is at fault, and that it should be read as, "Its Cold" Drinks sign in Japan. Thanks. Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:13, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 10