Language desk
< March 23	<< Feb \| March \| Apr >>	March 25 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 24

footnotes and punctuation

Should a footnote be placed before or after punctuation? I thought it made more sense to put it before, but it looks better from an esthetic standpoint to place it after. Which one is right?flagitious 04:20, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

For Wikipedia. In general I'd say wherever it is the least distracting without becoming contextually confusing. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:37, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Footnotes also covers the subject in depth, and provides cross-links to other WP:MOS details. The illustrations, and usage I've seen here, indicate after punctuation. But a general guideline would be as Reisio said above. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:40, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! flagitious 05:00, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Is sometime redundant here?

In the article Marine Midland Building we cn find the statement The bomb ... was placed ... sometime during the evening. In my view, sometime during can be replaced with in. The main argument for this is that in both formulations the event is tied to the same time interval. But the word sometime seems to signal a perceived lack of preciseness. So, one version says This is the time period that the event occurred in. The other says This is the time the period that the event occured in, I think you expect me to constrain the event to a shorter time period, but I am not able to do that. My view is that in an encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia, we always try to provide as good information as we can and we should assume that the reader expects this. Thus the sometime is redundant in this context. Am I right in this?

Actually I think "sometime" should be in the sentence, indicating that the exact time is not known and may never be known. I think the addition of "sometime" to the sentence has added some precision and some value to the sentence. Personally, I am uncomfortable with the word "sometime" as an adverb in the past tense, for some reason, and I would always say "at some point" in order to avoid it; but that's just me. Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:54, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "sometime" signaling "a perceived lack of preciseness" is precisely the point. And if the source says "sometime during the evening", that's how we should say it. It reminds me of a minor issue that arose recently where someone died "of natural causes". They wanted to simply say "died" because "of natural causes" was "too vague". But it's what the source had. It's not up to us to "improve upon" the sources with our own spin. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:01, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Vowel trapezium and the Bark scale

According to Ladefoged, (for example, in this book on page 130), humans don't hear vowels in a linear scale, and a vowel trapezium such as the one at right reflects vowel space such that "...frequencies are spaced in accordance with the Bark scale, a measure of auditory similarity, so that the distance between any two vowels reflects how far apart they sound." This is different from a linear formant chart like the one on the left. The latter is easy to do (for example, in microsoft excel), but I'm not sure how to convert to the trapezium. Our article Bark scale doesn't help me out in this regard. Anyone know the trick to this? — Æµ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 05:58, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're better off using something more like the Mel scale these days than the Bark scale. The article has a link to conversion. Alternatively, converting the axes to a log scale is a reasonable substitute for most purposes (if it worked in my thesis, then you can use it too :P). Steewi (talk) 07:29, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

economically and financially active

Ann is laid off, is eligible for government aid (e.g. Jobseeker's Allowance), and stays on the dole for a few months, watching soaps. She goes onto government statistics as economically inactive. Bob is laid off, is ineligible for the same aid (perhaps he has savings), and volunteers for charitable activities, helping kids learn to read, comforting the dying at a hospice, coppicing trees on a nature reserve. Does he count as economically inactive? He is contributing, but not earning money. I see that both are financially active, in that they continue to spend money, on groceries if not on plasma screen TVs. BrainyBabe (talk) 07:17, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think I'm right in saying that "economically active" includes those in receipt of JSA, but excludes those not receiving any form of employment-related benefit. So Bob is economically inactive but Ann isn't. The definition is not universally accepted, and the EU seems to have different definitions here, counting only people who are active in the production of goods or services. I couldn't find on a Google search a definition which included people on benefits, however, a Google search for "define economically active" does include them! --TammyMoet (talk) 08:49, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right, Tammy. Economically active is defined in the EU (and also in the ILO?) as working (whether employed or self-employed) or looking for work. Ann, as a long-term, discouraged job-seeker, should be receiving some targeted help to get her back into the labour market. Bob might be well advised to take some part-time paid work alongside his volunteering so that his national insurance contributions are kept up. Itsmejudith (talk) 13:09, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. We don't seem to have an article on economic activity (which redirects to economics); let alone economically inactive. It seems kind of vague, though. Any governement definitions (from any government)? Or those of NGOs? BrainyBabe (talk) 07:23, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When I posted what I did above, I did a comprehensive Google for "economically active" which came up with many websites. Some of them were UK local authority websites: some of them were EU websites. However, there only seemed to be two real definitions in use: the EU one being the one "active in the production of goods or services". I'm sure your Google-fu will outdo mine! --TammyMoet (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delight, opposite of de-light

A newcomer to English could easily analyse "delight" and come to the view that it means 'de-light', i.e. a removal of light, a darkening. But that's sort of the opposite of what happens to a person's face when they're delighted - it "lights up".

I'm after some other examples of this sort of thing: where the apparent meaning is the opposite of the real meaning. Any ideas? -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:05, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Proscribe"? Since "pro" as a generic preposition means "in favour of", but to "proscribe" is to forbid. And indeed, to "forbid" something does not mean to be "for" it. Lfh (talk) 11:16, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if this fits your request, but I was always delighted by the word "predate": to pray upon and to pre-date! --151.51.62.111 (talk) 11:18, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's actually to "prey upon". Saying "pray upon" would altar the meaning. :-) StuRat (talk) 14:09, 24 March 2010 (UTC) [reply]

What about "until" and "unto"? They look like they should mean the opposite of "till" and "to", but instead they're synonyms of them. And "unless" doesn't mean "more"! +An gr 11:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

All good. I just thought of "denude". That should mean to clothe, but it doesn't. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:30, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

All words that start with in-, since it usually means un- but sometimes means en-. Hence inflammable doesn't mean fireproof and incrustation doesn't mean crust-removal... and inconsistent doesn't mean super-uniform. And the im- words, too: to be immortal doesn't mean to be on the verge of death, to be imprisoned doesn't mean to be set free. 213.122.38.148 (talk) 11:37, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. I remember an episode of Simpsons with Dr. Nick Riviera exploding a can marked "INFLAMMABLE" with a firecracker, and saying, "Inflammable means flammable? Ugh, what a country!" Kingsfold (talk) 18:03, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also, depredate is the same as predate. Or maybe denominative, deprivation, disgruntled. Usually, an antibody is good for your health. --151.51.62.111 (talk) 12:34, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some odd examples: Best is usually the antonym of worst, but they both mean to beat (as in battle), so can be synonyms. Also cleave can be the opposite of itself (to join in marriage, or to split). — Tivedshambo (t/c) (logged on as Pek) 14:28, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What's the matter with "disgruntled"? Being gruntled is a good thing. 86.21.204.137 (talk) 14:38, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=delight. -- Wavelength (talk) 18:36, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How about "ravel" and "unravel"? When I was a kid I always thought "extraordinary" was a strange word, because "extra" often means "very" but "extraordinary" does not mean "very ordinary". And, though the prescriptivists here (including me) will shudder, I've heard people use "unthaw" and "irregardless" to mean "thaw" and "regardless". —Bkell (talk) 18:55, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Irregardless of poor usage, try not to overexaggerate. :) This discussion sounds familiar, as I think the opposite meanings of "cleave" came up some months back. The explanation, typical of English, is that two different words with opposite meanings merged into one. OK, Webster time... "Extra" doesn't mean "very", it means "outside" or "beyond". "Ravel" comes from a word meaning "loose thread", and to "ravel" means to "tangle". Hence to "unravel" is to "untangle". "Disgruntle" is kind of an odd one. It comes from Middle English words "dis-" meaning "apart" (derived from the word for "two", i.e. split into two parts); and the little used "gruntle", meaning "to grunt" or "to grumble". In this case it's used to indicate "to make ill-humored or discontented". I can only guess that "grumbling" implies almost keeping silent, but when you're disgruntled, you're openly angry. "Proscribe" literally means "to write before" and is a synonym for "prohibit (in writing)". "Prohibit", in turn, means "to hold before", related to "inhibit", and from the well-known habere, "to hold" or "to have" (hence habeas corpus, etc.), so the famous expression from weddings would presumably be rendered in Latin as habere et habere. "Delight" comes from Latin words that basically mean "to allure from". That prefix "de-" has many variants, all having to do with "from", some meaning "separating from" or "not", others meaning "derived from". Hence the amusing near-opposite meanings, "delight" vs. "de-light". "Denude" is to render nude. From nudum, the Latin, via French. Interestingly, in Spanish, "nude" is desnudo, which suggests "denuded", although they use a different expression for that. In baseball, a "strike" is a swing a miss (or a called strike if you don't swing at a pitch in the strike zone). If you actually strike the ball, it could be a hit or an out, or a foul ball. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:28, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if this counts, but I've heard that if a play or movie is critiqued as a "bomb", that's a very good thing in the UK and a very bad thing in the US. Oddly enough, in the US we use "blockbuster" as a good thing, despite the fact that a "blockbuster" is a type of bomb. Also, the modern expression, "that's the bomb", meaning something good or hip or whatever. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:31, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Another example could be descript. Present is just the opposite (a present is usually pre-sent). Moreover, for astrophysicist antimatter does really matter... --151.51.62.111 (talk) 22:42, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the comments here are verging on the material treated in the articles Auto-antonym and List of auto-antonyms in English (the latter seeming to me to stretch things a bit), which the OP may want to peruse. Deor (talk) 22:52, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. And maybe find the previous reference to "cleave". Or I'll look for it. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:59, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Uhhhhh... 'delight' is not 'de-light', and does not have 'light' as a root. delight is a spelling transformation of the french delitiere meaning 'to charm'. use your etymological dictionaries, people! --Ludwigs2 23:34, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "to allure from", as I said earlier. :) I'm also not sure "de-light" is a real word. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:59, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please re-read my question, Ludwigs2, and understand the context. I was talking about someone whose knowledge of English is rudimentary and who could quite easily come to the mistaken idea that it means the opposite of "light" (v.), as de- is often used this way. -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 01:04, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If someone with a rudimentary knowledge of English asked that question, I would point them to a good etymological dictionary. we are here to correct people's mistakes when they make them, not speculate on what further mistakes they might make. sorry. --Ludwigs2 07:43, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Then read my 2nd para: I'm after some other examples of this sort of thing: where the apparent meaning is the opposite of the real meaning. It's not necessarily related to what newcomers - or oldcomers, for that matter - would think; that was just an illustration of how someone might form this erroneous understanding of what "delight" means. I'm just after some other examples of the general phenomenon, and some very good ones have been provided, for which I thank the providers. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 08:03, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The capacity for misunderstanding is literally infinite. I could just as easily ask whether kabul was named after cable television, or whether kidneys are somehow linguistically related to baby goats. --Ludwigs2 09:59, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Right, but only a very small sub-set of the set of all possible misunderstandings are words that mean the exact opposite of what someone might conceivably think they mean. A kidney is decidedly not a baby goat, but neither is it the opposite (whatever that means in this case) of a baby goat, so it doesn't fit my criteria. For the record, I was never suggesting that "de-light" is a word; I was using that as a way of showing how someone might falsely, but not unreasonably, deconstruct "delight" and in the process make 1 + 1 = 59. I'd really appreciate a more positive response to my question. If you're just going to pick it to pieces, well, that just leads to the destruction of delight. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:38, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But even in your original example of de-light, the "apparent" meaning isn't really the opposite of the actual meaning, as the apparent meaning is "darken" (or possibly "remove an animal's lungs for food"), not "make miserable". +An gr 12:13, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which is why I said "sort of the opposite of what happens to a person's face when they're delighted". Sheesh! -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:59, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll just point out that if I travel to see a total solar eclipse and get the good weather I need to be able to see it properly, I'll be... delighted. --Anonymous, 00:03 UTC, March 26, 2010.

Unless, of course, if viewing conditions are ruined by bad light. :) (Funny expression that - "bad light"; it's not as if the light has done anything wrong. We should be saying "bad clouds stopped play" or "the horizon stopped play".) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 02:58, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We do say "bad weather". Bad light and bad weather are not moral judgments about those phenomena, they are merely "bad for us" in a particular circumstance. And not necessarily really "bad", just "inconvenient" or "unusable". (Although hurricanes and tornadoes are really bad for us, i.e. destructive.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:13, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Deja vu all over again...

This is the one I was thinking of: [1] Meanwhile, here's a pretty similar question from around 3 years ago:[2] There are a few others also, pointing out the same oddity about "cleave", all of which I found by searching the archivers for that word. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:17, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology of shar, tsar etc.

I've been looking at the etymology of shah, and trying to work out if it's related to the similar words tsar, czar, etc. The former is a Persian word, whereas tsar and czar apparently come ultimately from Caeser, which also led to Kaiser. Does anyone know if the Persian word is also ultimately derived from the same source, or is the similarity coincidental? — Tivedshambo (t/c) (logged on as Pek) 14:34, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, the similarity is coincidental. As Shah#Word history explains, shah comes from the Old Persian xšāyaθiya meaning "king". It's related to Sanskrit kṣatra (see Kshatriya#Etymology). Tsar/czar comes, as you found, from Caesar, which is a Latin family name that only came to mean "emperor" because the first Roman Emperor (Caesar Augustus) happened to be named that. The family name (technically a cognomen) allegedly comes from the verb caedo "to cut" because an early member of the Caesar family was born by cesarean section, but that may be a folk etymology. +An gr 14:46, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I saw the derivation for the Persian word, but was wondering whether xšāyaθiya had come from the Latin (or vice versa). I wasn't aware of the caedo derivation - thanks. — Tivedshambo (t/c) (logged on as Pek) 14:54, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've heard another folk etymology for caesar, that it is related to "caesaries", "hairy", because one of them was particularly hirsute. Anyway, Persian and Latin are both Indo-European so there probably is a Latin word that is etymologically related. The OED says "xšāyaθiya" is related to "ktasthai" (to acquire) and "kektesthai" (to possess) in Greek (listed under ktaomai in LSJ), but I don't see any Latin equivalents...it's probably something totally unexpected. Adam Bishop (talk) 19:19, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Pokorny gives derivatives of the root "kþē(i), kþə(i)" only in Indo-Iranian and Greek, so it doesn't appear that any Latin cognates are known.

Tivedshambo, there's really nothing in common between 'shah' and 'tsar', apart from the vowel; and nothing in common between "xšāyaθiya" and "caesar". --ColinFine (talk) 08:08, 25 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]