User talk:Ruakh/Archive 2

Appreciated!

Thanks for the clean up on the adaptive grammar article. Much appreciated!

-- QTJ 16:50, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

And thanks for the collaboration on the formal grammar article. It's very easy for me to slip into concision without realizing what the educated layperson will or will not grok at first glance. I think the article's coming along nicely. Thanks!

-- QTJ 01:41, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

You're the one doing most of the work; I'm just along for the ride. :-) Ruakh 02:46, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. RE: American and British English

Thank you, I was not aware of this. Needless to say, I am sorry if I offended you. I would like to mention, however, that American English is quickly becoming an international standard.

UBeR 03:50, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Homophora and endophora

I wonder if you would mind glancing at the articles for homophora, Talk:homophora, endophora, Talk:endophora, and exophora? On 21 October I corrected the articles for both homophora and endophora, after my "disputed" template and remarks went unanswered. One reason I hesitated is that it is just conceivable that some school uses homophora to mean self-reference. I found no support for that though, and corrected the articles to what I did find support for. O'RyanW (☺ ₪) 02:34, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for patching. I was worried, since I found the 2006-07-13 version of homophora self-contraditcory, and its examples went totally over my head. O'RyanW (☺ ₪) 19:22, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Clitics in the Romance languages

Hi. Regarding the revert you made at clitic from:

In the Romance languages, the articles and the non-prepositional object pronoun are all clitics.

into:

In the Romance languages, the articles and most non-emphatic personal pronoun forms are clitics. In Spanish, for example:

with the argument that "they're not all prepositional, either", I disagree with your change. While in some languages (French) emphatic pronouns may appear alone, each and every one of those appears after prepositions as well. Furthermore, subject pronouns are neither emphatic nor clitics.

So, I think my phrasing makes the explanation more accurate than the expression "most non-emphatic personal pronouns". Regards. FilipeS 20:54, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

The subject pronouns were actually the main reason I made that change; your version claims that subject pronouns are all clitics, which mine does not. (The subject pronouns are emphatic-only in all major Romance languages except French, and in French they're clitics.) Ruakh 04:55, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying to follow this discussion and am having some difficulty. I'm probably missing something, because the two formulations do not look logically incompatible.

The formulation the articles and the non-prepositional object pronoun are all clitics appears to me to make no claims whatsoever about prepositional pronouns, nor about subject pronouns. To disprove this statement one must show at least one example of a non-prepositional object pronoun which is not a clitic. Subject pronouns seem irrelevant to this end. Of coures, the statement could be correct but not adaquate — because of other clitics. In that case, why not keep the statement and add a further statement that forms X, Y, and Z are also clitics?

The formulation the articles and most non-emphatic personal pronoun forms are clitics appears to make no claim about emphatic forms, nor about non-personal pronouns for that matter. The key word is most, which I don't know how to evaluate. Can it be verified? Was a count made? Is it most in a list of all forms, or most in terms of frequency of occurance?

Two other questions trouble me: First the phrase in the Romance languages is rather blanketting. Exampls were given for French, Portugese, and Spanish. Were Italian, Romanian, Ladino, etc. taken into account? I suggest limiting the phrase to languages checked, something like: in the Romance languages, French, Portugese, and Spanish', ...

Second, the import of the word emphatic is unclear to me. Is it intended semantically or phonologically? Do the two necessarily go together? I notice that the article on clitics says: One characteristic shared by all clitics is a lack of prosodic independence. A clitic must attach to an adjacent word, known as its host. Is this a matter of definition, or was it discovered? In any event, while I have long thought that a clitic, as part of its definition, lacks phonologial stress, it seems to me that the phrase lack of prosidic independencee is a way of leaving open the possibility that some "clitic" be required to always carry more stress than its "host". How confused am I here?

I very much regret writing at such length on so many points; experience says that this often results in 90% being ignored and 9% being misunderstood! O'RyanW (☺ ₪) 06:52, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I was being stupid! I took "non-prepositional object pronoun" to mean "a pronoun other than a prepositional object pronoun", rather than "an object pronoun other than a prepositional object pronoun". Thanks for your comment; I understand better now. :-) Ruakh 14:00, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

"Emphatic" can be a term of art — in French, the pronouns that are ordinarily used as objects of prepositions can also be used disjunctively (with no role in the sentence, like the moi in « Moi, je suis d'accord », "Me, I agree") or as emphatic versions of other pronouns, especially subject pronouns (since the other pronouns are clitics; so « Il est fou » → « Lui est fou » is the shift from "He's crazy" to "He's crazy"). These pronouns are sometimes called simply emphatic pronouns for this reason. In the other major Romance languages, subject pronouns aren't clitics, so both subject pronouns and prepositional pronouns can be used emphatically. Ruakh 14:10, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

O'RyanW has explained the matter better than I ever could. Thank you! :-)

I would like to add an observation: you should be cautious about using terms such as "emphatic [or "stressed"] pronouns" when describing the Romance languages. There is a longstanding tradition of using such terms, due to French cultural influence, but, while they work well for French (where, as Ruakh has observed, one of the main factors in choosing between pronouns is stress) they are less adequate for other Romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, where syntax is more prominent than stress, IMHO. FilipeS 16:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Ruakh, I just saw your latest edit:

In the Romance languages, the articles and direct and indirect object personal pronoun forms are clitics.

but I'm afraid it's still not right. The problem is that prepositional pronouns -- which are never clitics -- can also represent objects. Regards. FilipeS 00:04, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, but that's not what's meant by "indirect object pronoun" etc. Ruakh 00:06, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I see your point, but why not just say "objective pronouns"? FilipeS 00:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

"Objective pronoun" is only a term I've heard applied to English, with its partial three-case (subjective/objective/possessive) system. In discussing other languages, more specific terms are typically used; either accusative/dative/ablative, or direct-object/indirect-object/prepositional. Are you saying that when applied to a Romance language, "objective pronoun" would mean a direct- or indirect-object pronoun, but not a prepositional pronoun? Ruakh 00:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

That's how I would used it, but I can't claim that it's standard practice in Romance grammars. (Actually, Romance grammars seem to cling on to obscure, unenlightening terminology like "oblique pronoun" and "circumstantial complement".) But perhaps you should scratch what I said, anyway. It's easy to describe the clitic pronouns in Spanish or Portuguese -- they're the ones that are neither subject pronouns, nor governed by a preposition -- , but it's more complicated in French. Take a look at French personal pronouns. I looked this up in a French grammar yesterday, and I think that for example all the indirect object pronouns are clitics, and all the disjunctive pronouns are stressed. Yet lui, for example, can be both! Compare for example Je lui ai dit with C'est lui qui m'a dit. FilipeS 19:01, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It's true that lui can be either an indirect-object pronoun or a disjunctive pronoun, but it would be very strange to emphasize it in its indirect-object use; ?« Je lui ai dit […] » is very unidiomatic (I'm almost inclined to mark it with an asterisk instead of a question mark). The usual thing to say would be « C'est à lui/elle que j'ai dit […] ». One could argue that indirect-object–pronoun lui and disjunctive-pronoun lui are identical cognates rather than a single word.

I think the bigger wrinkle is with nous and vous, which are identical in almost all forms. In particular, I think the line between « Nous faisons […] » (ostensibly-clitic subject nous) and « Nous faisons […] » (emphatic subject nous) is somewhat blurry.

Ruakh 19:45, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I see where you're coming from, now. I absolutely agree with you concerning lui: it's a stressed word when used as a disjunctive pronoun, but a clitic when used as an indirect object pronoun. But, you see, that's why I think the term "direct or indirect object pronoun" can be misleading: some people may read that and conclude that, since lui is an object pronoun, it is always a clitic. FilipeS 20:19, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

But doesn't that line of reasoning apply equally well to the "non-prepositional object pronoun" phrasing? Ruakh 21:29, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that is true. I guess O'Ryan was right, and examples should probably be explained one language (or two) at a time. My phrasing does work for Spanish and Portuguese alone, though. :-) FilipeS 22:13, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I only speak French and Spanish (and Spanish not well), but my understanding is that both your phrasing and mine do work for all Romance languages, except insofar as they imply that subject pronouns aren't clitics (which is valid except in French and perhaps its closest relatives, other langues d'Oïl and the langues d'Oc). Personally, I prefer my phrasing — I could easily see indirect object pronouns being thought of as "prepositional" and thereby engendering confusion in your version — but I guess you disagree. Really, I don't think it's a big deal either way. Ruakh 03:30, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the interesting explanations.

A question: non-prepositional pronoun taken by itself seems clear; to me it says any pronoun not preceeded by a preposition. However, indirect object pronoun seems less clear; there seems (I say seems since I don't have references handy) to be inconsistency in its use: Take the sentence, (1) He gave me the ball. I think everyone agrees that me in that sentence is an indirect object. But the sentence (2) He gave the ball to me is, I believe labeled up differently by different grammarians. Here for some (G1) to me is not an object of the verb at all, let alone an indirect object, since it is introduced by a preposition. For others (G2), in both (1) and (2) me is identically the recepient of the ball, a single role required by the verb give. This for (G2) justifies calling both me in (1) and to me in (2) indirect objects. (I think this presumes that adposition (pre- or post-) is (sometimes?) shorthand for detached case marker. Thus in (1) me is in the implicit dative case, while to me is in an explicit dative case.)

Here I find it interesting to look at the definition of indirect object in the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. This definition "ambivilates" between semantic and morphological/syntactic criteria. So it gives indecisive aid and comfort to both G2 and G1.

Amusingly clouding the question is the sence of the word indirect. I think I have seen it stated that indirect means not directly connected to the verb, that is, connected instead by means of a preposition. Thus only (2) contains an indirect object in the proper sence. How (1) is accounted for in this view I don't know.

In my own usage I have tended to be in G2. Take the well known example illustrating the destinction, nuclear vs. circumstancial: (3) They decided on the boat on the boat. The second on the boat is circumstancial (telling where), (non-nuclear); the fact that they must be somewhere is a requirement of the physical universe, not a requirement of English — the same nuclear sentence would be quite coherent without it. The first on the boat is quite different. It is nuclear (non-circumstancial); it labels the content of the decision, the primary recipient of the act of deciding. Stated or understood, this is a requirement of the notion to decide. Only a mystic, I think, could be incoherent enough to claim decisions without content. So I tend to consider that first on the boat an indirect object of decided, or alternatively, a direct object of the phrasal verb decided on.

At long last I am ready to ask about an example from Romance. It will be Spanish, since, aside from Miss Piggy's Moi?!? I don't know any French. Take (4) A mi me gusta el té. If I understand correctly here, me is indirect (and a clitic), and mi is prepositional (and not a clitic)? Despite my tendency to G2-ishness above, that seems a useful distinction to me — possibly because of having already studied some Spanish.

What is my point?? Just that the (unexpanded on) expressions non-prepositional, prepositional, and indirect maybe a little terse. Now I like terse, but I wonder whether a goal of Wikipedia articles isn't to be clear to those who don't know anything of the matter at hand?

Oh yes, the G in G1 ang G2 stands for the Group or Gaggle of people who like Grammar. (that includes me!)(;-) O'RyanW (☺ ₪) 07:08, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Hello again, O'Ryan. :-) Here's some feedback for you:

• I agree that "object pronoun" (or even "indirect object pronoun") is ultimately ambiguous in the Romance languages (at least some of them). This is because objects (of verbs) can be represented by prepositional or by non-prepositional pronouns, which are different from each other, unlike in English. For example, in Portuguese "I gave the ball to him", literally translated, is Dei a bola a ele, while "I gave him the ball" is Dei-lhe a bola. Not only are the pronouns used for "him" different in the two cases, but the latter is a clitic, while the former is not. We do, however, tend to regard both of them as indirect pronouns, as the two sentences are synonymous.
• My understanding of the meaning of "indirect object" (though I'm a layman in these matters) is that it is the beneficiary of an action: in the sentence "I gave him the ball", the ball is what is given, but "he" is who receives it. I understand that this may be difficult to grasp for English speakers, since the English language doesn't distinguish morphologically between direct and indirect objects.
• Your analysis of the Spanish example is correct.
• I guess the reason why I was uncomfortable with Ruakh's terms is that:

1. Yes, pronouns used for emphasis are always stressed words in the Romance languages; but
2. Not all stressed pronouns are emphatic. For example, all pronouns used after a preposition are stressed, but they aren't necessarily used for emphasis (I suppose this might be because the prepositions themselves are typically clitics). More often than not, they are not emphatic. And, in Spanish and Portuguese, subject pronouns are stressed, too, even though they are often not emphatic.

FilipeS 11:26, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The term "indirect object pronoun" is fairly well standardized when referring to French and Spanish, at least: it's me/te/lui/se/y/en/nous/vous/leur in French and me/te/le/se/nos/os/les in Spanish (barring loísmo and/or laísmo). In other words, it refers to the pronouns that represent indirect objects and that do not require prepositions. It's true that other pronouns — prepositional pronouns, non-personal pronouns, etc. — can be used with à/de or a/de to express indirect objects, but that's not how the term "indirect object pronoun" is used. (Don't ask me why; I assume it's a pedagogical thing.) Ruakh 14:43, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, but the problem (in French) is pronouns like lui and nous, which can be both indirect object pronouns (in which case they're clitics) and prepositional pronouns (in which case they're not). Anyway, I know we've been through this, and I don't wish to be too insisting. I'm sure I've already given you some food for thought. Regards, and thank you both again for the stimulating discussion. :-) FilipeS 14:50, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Semantic change

Your editings and the whole clean-up work are much appreciated. I intend to add new material tommorow. Shalom. Dr Moshe 16:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Glad to be of help. You're doing great work with the article. :-) Ruakh 19:46, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

In re eye dialect

Kudos for the good work that you did on the eye dialect article — and so quickly after I had tagged it too! Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 07:48, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) Ruakh 15:57, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: British vs. American spellings.

Hi,

I just wanted the article to be consistent. "Standardize" had already been written elsewhere in the article, before the occurrence of "standardisation". It just so happens that I am American, too, and standardise is considered wrong according to my Firefox. That is all. --Karch 15:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Links removed, stay neutral please

Please do NOT remove external links (Occitan page) only because you dislike it, if you believe that some informations are not relevant, do start a discussion and provide serious explanations. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.185.96.206 (talk • contribs).

Birthright Israel

Your recent contribution(s) to Wikipedia are very much appreciated. However, you did not provide references or sources for your information. Keeping Wikipedia accurate and verifiable is very important, and as you might be aware there is currently a drive to improve the quality of Wikipedia by encouraging editors to cite the sources they used when adding content. If sources are left unreferenced, it may count as original research, which is not allowed. Can you provide in the article specific references to any books, articles, websites or other reliable sources that will allow people to verify the content in the article? You can use a citation method listed at inline citations that best suits each article. Thanks! --Chabuk ^{[ T • C ]} 22:10, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Chabuk, thanks for your comment. I'm aware of the need to keep Wikipedia verifiable, and am looking for good references to support these claims. (I'm also aware of the need to attribute claims to specific people, rather than to the vague "many [people]"; I'm working on this as well.) In the meantime, since I think we can all agree that these criticisms have been made and are fairly common, at least among American Jewry, it makes sense to preserve this section in some form, albeit with all the {{cn}} tags that I made a point of including when I wrote the section. —Ruakh 19:37, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Your new version is O.K. (by me, at least). Thanks. —Ruakh 20:14, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

"Welcome" on My Talk Page?

Hello Ruakh

I've been editing Wikipedia for a while, but only registered a few days ago. I was surprised with a welcome and some useful links on my talk page from you soon afterwards. Thanks for that. I wonder, though, was that "Welcome" from you automated?

I thought it might have been personal since we had both contributed to the same article around the day I registered, but the slickness of it made it seem automated or at least pre-designed to me.

By the way, from the banners down the right of your page, I see that you and I started out life in close spacial proximity, if not timewise.Grammarmonger 12:47, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

- No, by "seeming automated" I didn't mean it in a negative way at all. It was a nice gesture and pointed me to some important guidelines at the same time.

I did a lot of work on that Adjectives page before I registered. I'm still not satisfied with it and I'll probably return to it. I so far haven't made large changes to many pages, mainly minor edits, but that page had an enormous error on it that needed fixing. Grammarmonger 10:56, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

x * y ;

Re: your comment on this character sequence having other possible interpretations in C++.

I would not claim to be an expert on C++ syntax but I cannot think of any other possible interpretations of x * y ;. Can you tell me what other possible syntactic/semantic interpretations can be given to this sequence. Thanks. Derek farn 02:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Since C++ allows operator overloading, it could be a call to a function with a prototype of the form operator*(type_spec, type_spec), where the type specifications are compatible with x and y, or to a class member function with a prototype of the form classname::operator*(type_spec) (possibly with const appended), where x is an object with that function available (either because it belongs to classname, or because it belongs to a class that derives from classname) and the type specification is compatible with y. In the case of multiple compatible overloaded versions of the operator, the C++ compiler must apply a fairly complex algorithm, based on the types of x and y and the properties of the various type specifications, in order to determine which function is the correct one. Now, you might think that this doesn't affect the parse tree — after all, no matter what function actually ends up getting called, we still have * of (x,y) — but since the compiler needs to choose from among the overloaded versions that have already been declared, and to ignore any overloaded versions that have yet to be declared, I'm pretty sure it must choose a version at parse-time. Even if that's not the case, and the parsing stage really is as simple as in C, the current description doesn't completely apply to C++, because the term "multiplication" doesn't necessarily apply to the behavior of the overloaded operator. —Ruakh 16:48, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think I would call overloading a different interpretation of x * y. While technically * is the multiplication operator, I guess it would not be in the spirit of a Wikipedia article at this technical level to use it in such a context without further explanation (the average reader is more likely to be confused that understand that the syntactic token was being referred to). Derek farn 19:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Accumulating nonsense

There was my fussy question. You have helped me to understand my fault. The discussion makes no sense anymore. It takes internet bandwidth and reduces readability. Why should it be preserved? --Javalenok 22:47, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

It was JRSpriggs, not I, who objected to the removal of the discussion; I objected only to the striking-out of my comments, since on the English Wikipedia a struck-out comment is a comment whose author has retracted it. (That is, your edit made it look like I had retracted my comments; I hadn't.)

That said, I do tend to agree with JRSpriggs; life is simpler if we leave discussions intact until the page gets overly long, at which point archive dead discussions. I don't feel nearly as strongly about it as (s)he seems to, though; in his/her place, I wouldn't have reverted the removal.

—Ruakh 00:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I addition to improved readability and network load, the lighter pages need less archivations. Keeping garbage on pages will archive unresolved issues which is extra nonsense. Nonsense is evil. Excuse me to producing it. But I do not understand why are wikipedians oppose to eliminating it. --Javalenok 12:36, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Plural yourself?

In Singular they, you changed the part that said, "others use the singular form themself analogously to the singular yourself," and you added, "This development was irrelevant in the case of you, since yourself was already in use as a plural when you developed its singular senses." Are you sure about this? I thought the 2nd person plural has always been yourselves, and that yourself was an innovation perfectly analogous to themself. --Lazar Taxon 14:16, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Pretty sure, yes: it's what the OED says in its entries on yourself and yourselves. (Incidentally, the story is fairly similar with themself and themselves; themselves started to emerge around 1500, replaced themself as the standard form around 1540, and completely obsoleted themself by around 1570. That said, this was long before there were uses of they that were so singular as to demand a formally singular reflexive/emphatic pronoun, such that themself is essentially a modern innovation that happens to have existed before.) —Ruakh 20:17, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh, okay, now I understand. Thanks for explaining that. --Lazar Taxon 20:34, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Catherine Bell

Jesus, did I happen upon that snops story just as it got posted or did the two of us just happen to read it at the same time out of some strange coincidence? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.165.38.83 (talk • contribs).

I follow Snopes.com's RSS feed (via http://syndicated.livejournal.com/snopes_dot_com/), which includes newly-updated stories. I don't know why that page was updated today, but that's how I saw it. :-) —Ruakh 22:58, 17 January 2007 (UTC)