Welcome to the language section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.

Select a section:

WP:RD/L

Want a faster answer?

Main page: Help searching Wikipedia

How can I get my question answered?

Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
Note:
- We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
- We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
- We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
- We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.

Ready? Ask a new question!

How do I answer a question?

Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines

The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.

November 4

Five questions

1. When has British English last had more native speakers than American English?

2. Why is word Canada not spelled by letter K, if it comes from word kanata?

3. If "four and a quarter metres" means 4.75, or 43⁄4 metres, how can a distance exactly one-third on the way from 4 to 5 metres be indicated? Is it "four and one-third metres", or 41⁄3 metres? "4.33333... metres" would seem too bad to write.

4. In which English-speaking region is the 24-hour clock in speech the most common? In such area, people would always read times from a 24-hour display as 24-hour times.

5. Does 12-hour clock have a written form in languages like German and French?

--40bus (talk) 11:31, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

how often do you dedicate to come up with these frivolous questions ?

don't you recognize how presumptuous it is of you to apportion with bold heading the subsections for answering to each of your question, and the required zone for contention between the contributors, and the practice of intense interpretation of the text, and,

to what end should i answer you, and, what is your purpose, not only in doing this, but in general ? 130.74.59.145 (talk) 21:16, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, 40bus is not the one who usually divides into subsections (check the page history). See here for my own previous annoyance, but 40bus is not as repetitive as he was then... AnonMoos (talk) 20:49, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the division is generally made by others, purely for practical purposes. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:15, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question 1

Last time I looked, the population of the U K was about 70 million and the population of the U S was about three times that. It's not too difficult to establish when immigration caused the population of the U S to equal and then exceed that of the U K - the problem is establishing how many are native speakers, which may be difficult or impossible to do. 2A00:23D0:D0F:E01:981A:FAE:EEA4:598F (talk) 15:22, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As the other anonymous reply notes, it should be easy to identify when the population of the US overtook that of the UK. And with sensible assumptions you could work out similar figures for just English speakers. I would think though that it happened when there was no distinction made between American and British English, which is a largely modern distinction, especially for the spoken language. A lot of the differences e.g. are to do with modern inventions such as cars/automobiles, motorway/freeway, or in modern uses of slang. Both are much more similar to each other than they are to the language spoken by Victorians. Spelling differences may have arisen earlier but you ask about speakers, not writers.--2A04:4A43:984F:F027:316B:EC1E:5955:64E2 (talk) 21:33, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

English people who visited British North America / the United States in the late 18th century commented that the marked local or regional dialects which existed in the UK had mostly kind of been smoothed out in the United States (though of course, that didn't mean that everybody in the US spoke what was then considered British standard English). In the 19th century, British pronunciation developments stopped influencing United States English, and some prominent regional dialects started developing within the United States (especially Southern vs. non-Southern). AnonMoos (talk) 18:03, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe another question, but I have never really understood how Southern American English originated. Somewhat arguably, Standard American English does seem to have originated mostly in Western British dialects, and Australian English comes more or less from convict cockney, but Southern American sounds very distinct. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Check out this link https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam033/2002073585.pdf The authors --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:57, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question 2

2: because before non-front vowels <c> and <k> were (and still are) equivalent, and the habit had not yet arisen of using <k> rather than <c> for foreign names. Compare wikt:Corea#English. ColinFine (talk) 14:14, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The word "Canada" was coined by the French from the original Iroquoian at a time when the letter "k" was hardly used in France, and before there was a formal writing system for Iroquoian. The choice of initial has absolutely no incidence on the pronunciation. Xuxl (talk) 14:28, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question 3

3. You can write "four and a third metres", 41⁄3m, or 4.3 m. (@40bus: Note your "four and a quarter metres" means 4.25 or 41⁄4, not what your wrote.) Bazza 7 (talk) 12:34, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@40bus: There is a mistake in your question. "Four and a quarter metres" does not mean 4.75m, or 4¾m, as you say – it means 4.25m or 4¼m. It means "four metres plus one quarter of a metre". Spideog (talk) 08:45, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question 4

In informal speech, I don't think people of any nationality favour the 24-hour clock. After all, on analogue clocks the world over the numbers only go up to 12. 2A00:23D0:D0F:E01:981A:FAE:EEA4:598F (talk) 15:22, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There are many english-speaking "regions" where qualifying times as "a.m" or "p.m" doesn't occur, such as on flight information displays at airports where 24-hour clock times are always shown. Philvoids (talk) 15:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And yet digital transformation is in progress. Simultaneously with it, some relational patterns are evolving. Do not get tricked by a specific cultural/linguistic/phonetic reluctance ( "..Teen Hour ?!! ) -- Askedonty (talk) 15:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

24 hour time is much used in the military (It's also known as "military time" in America). So I would guess the answer may be a region that's mostly or entirely populated by people in the military, e.g. British Indian Ocean Territory. AlmostReadytoFly (talk) 16:36, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In my (British) experience, it depends on circumstances. In a social or domestic setting, people usually express time in 12-hour terms, a.m./morning or p.m./afternoon/evening when the context is ambiguous, but in contexts involving timetable, such as bus and train times (whose timetables are given in 24-hour form) and perhaps things like office-diary bookings, 24-hour terms are usually or often used. Current and ex-military personnel (about 4% of the population), such as my Father, also often use 24-hour times with friends and family, sometimes jokingly but sometimes as an adopted habit: my father even uses the 'Zulu' terminology with me. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 17:17, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Austria or Switzerland? I have a memory that in the Chalet School books (set in the Alps, but I don't know at what period) the English-speaking pupils and staff would refer to times such as "sixteen o'clock". Or possibly this was just invented by EMB-D to cue the reader about exotic European timekeeping? -- Verbarson ^talk_edits 23:26, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Elinor Brent-Dyer had holidayed in the Austrian Tyrol (presumably in her late 20s) where the fictional school was (initially) located before starting the series in 1925, so would have known the local time conventions. The adoption of such terminology by English speakers living in the portrayed circumstances (which seem to have been set contemporarily), whether or not accurate, seems plausible and thus appropriate for a work aimed at an English readership and, given that some of her readership may actually have attended such schools or otherwise be familiar with the milieu, may well have been accurate, though corroboration would be nice. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.7.95.48 (talk) 17:25, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

24h time is common (but not universal) in French, in my experience. —Tamfang (talk) 21:11, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Same for Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg...I would say it IS almost universal there; also in France (except for those having immigrated from the UK or the USA). Lectonar (talk) 10:44, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question 5

In my impression, the 12-hour clock is the most common in informal conversation, such as in the title of the classic Western movie Zwölf Uhr mittags. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:58, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Of course in German you can have written orthographical representation of the spoken 12-hour times, such as "zwölf Uhr" or "zwanzig nach zwei", but if by "written form" 40bus meant a written numeric form, such as "2:20 pm", then for German at least the answer is basically "no". Such a numeric rendering is quite uncommon in German. You'd expect "14:20" in all formal written contexts, and there is no conventionalized equivalent for the "a.m." and "p.m." abbreviations you need for proper 12-hour rendering as in English. (In fact, there isn't even a concept corresponding to the English time intervals of "a.m." and "p.m.". "a.m." could be "nachts", "morgens" or "vormittags", but there isn't a single word easily subsuming all three of these, and likewise, "p.m." could be "nachmittags" or "abends", again without a convenient cover term). You do sometimes find 12-hour rendering in computing, if for no other reason that English-based software systems have user options allowing you to select either 12- or 24-hour time, and German localization then has to come up with something to implement both, but it's not something I as a native speaker would ever expect to actually see. For instance, if you choose 12-hour display in your user preferences on an iPhone, you get plain "2:20" without any indication of "a.m." vs. "p.m.", which feels positively weird. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:33, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See my answer to Question 4. I'm not convinced that Germany is any different to anywhere else [1]. 2A00:23D0:D0F:E01:981A:FAE:EEA4:598F (talk) 15:22, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Does Spanish have a written numeric form for 12-hour clock? I have seen that Spanish even uses the same "am" and "pm" as English. --40bus (talk) 15:31, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed they do es:Hora. 2A00:23D0:D0F:E01:981A:FAE:EEA4:598F (talk) 15:37, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This applies to the Hispanophone countries of Latin America, not to Spain. --Lambiam 20:11, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dutch is similar to German here. The traditional 12 hour clock is still used in speech (but not always) when the traditional form isn't too long and not too much precision is required. You may find the 12 hour clock in writing, fully written out in letters the way you'd say it, in works of fiction. Practically all other writing, including everything in numeric form, uses the 24 hour clock, midnight expressed as 0:00. In some 19th century railway timetables (last one I found was from 1899) you can find times in the 12 hour clock, sometimes with expressions like v.m. (voormiddag=a.m.) or n.m. (namiddag=p.m.). A timetable from 1928 uses the 24 hour clock, so I suppose the change happened in the early 20th century. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:30, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Even if most European countries writing in 24-hour clock, does any country use word equivalent to "o'clock", "past", "half" and to with number over 12? --40bus (talk) 06:33, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 6

"Only emergency exit"

This is the labelling of emergency exits in an office in a non-English speaking country. Do I get it right that this implies the specific emergency exit would be the only one - and the correct word order would be "Emergency exit only" only? --KnightMove (talk) 09:09, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree. --Viennese Waltz 10:34, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The word "only" can be confusing to non-native English speakers, since "only" can often have several possible positions in word ordering without changing its meaning, so that that it can end up being not next to the word or phrase whose meaning it modifies -- yet there are subtle limits as to how far it can move without changing meaning... AnonMoos (talk) 12:52, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If the message had been "This exit is only an emergency exit", the labelling would have been both unambiguous and grammatically just fine. A standard labelling transformation will turn this sentence into the label "Only an emergency exit". A very common transformation, seen als in headlines, is to remove a definite or indefinite article, resulting in an ambiguous label – the label before the article was removed could have been "The only emergency exit". Labels should ideally be unambiguous, particularly when used as warnings or for emergency situations, but application of common sense helps to find their intended meanings, as in the labellings "Shake before use" and "Keep away from children". Note that "Emergency exit only" is strictly speaking also ambiguous; "exit" can be the subjunctive of the verb "to exit", and the words can theoretically indicate that Emergency better not use the marked door to enter, but only to exit. --Lambiam 14:00, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I think you're overcomplicating things here. You cannot have an emergency exit that reads "This exit is only an emergency exit", it's just ridiculous. --Viennese Waltz 06:51, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If all else fails, look around that office and see if there are any other emergency exits. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:03, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

wait until you're instructed to carefully slip and fall down （小心地滑） 130.74.58.192 (talk) 04:58, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 7

Aqua vitae in Greek

How would you say aqua vitae ("water of life") in Classical Greek? Thanks in advance 45.140.183.21 (talk) 18:08, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hudor Zoes υδωρ ζωης (sorry I can't conveniently do accents and breathings the way I'm posting this)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:38, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, there would be possibilities of including the definite article (which is irrelevant for Latin). AnonMoos (talk) 19:45, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

With accents and breathing: ὕδωρ ζωῆς. The term occurs in Revelation 22:17.^[2] With the (neuter) definite article, it becomes τὸ ὕδωρ. --Lambiam 09:59, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot, all of you! 45.140.183.21 (talk) 13:00, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 9

Russian sectors?

I'm struggling a bit of how to differentiate 2 Russian words in English. In 1865 St Petersburg was divided into 12 часть (alt. полицейский часть), which were then further divided into 56 участок. What would be a good translation here for these two terms? Google gives quite similar meanings. I want to avoid the translation 'District', since it will create a confusion with the later raion term. I was thinking of 'police precinct', but google has that for 'полицейский участок'. Sector, division, section? -- Soman (talk) 11:33, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For example, see here https://books.google.at/books?id=LW9GAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PT73 --Soman (talk) 11:37, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Possible terms are borough and ward. See also List of terms for administrative divisions. --Lambiam 19:38, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 10

the χ from nowhere

Manichaeism is named for Mani. Where did the ch come from? —Tamfang (talk) 21:01, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The German and Greek Wikipedia articles on Mani report that there was an ancient Greek alternate name Μανιχαῖος, which they both claim (unfortunately without sourcing) came from Syrian "Mānī ḥayyā", 'the living Mani'. Our English article instead hints at two different possible derivations, but those don't sound very confidence-inspiring. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:31, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Syriac (Aramaic) theory, which appears to be well received by scholars, was first suggested in: H. H. Schaeder, "Urform und Fortbildungen des manichäischen Systems", Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, Vorträge 1924–5. (Teubner, Leipzig, 1927), p. 88, n. 1.^[3][4] --Lambiam 11:28, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The OED speaks of the name Mani being "Hellenized to Μάνης, a common name for slaves, and to Μανιχαῖος, allegedly (as recorded by St Augustine) to avoid the resemblance between Mani and μανία mania n.". --Antiquary (talk) 21:47, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 15

Is this OVS

In some books, I saw that quotations were formatted as [insert quote here], followed by the word “said” and then the name of the speaking character. Is this a form of OVS word order, as the ultimate subject is positioned last, preceded by the verb, and the quote (which takes the function of an object) is the first element written in the sentence? Primal Groudon (talk) 05:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Effectively, yes, but it results from V2 word order. This is the normal word order in Germanic languages and used to be the standard in English too, before it switched to mostly SVO. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:05, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Primal Groudon: See Quotation § Quotative inversion. Bazza 7 (talk) 10:13, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What's this Australian word: a "muster"?

Obviously she means "a great deal". But what actual word is this Australian woman uttering here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgUv_lQgOXI&t=104s (104 seconds into the video) 178.51.16.158 (talk) 09:44, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wikt:motza. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:51, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I found two pun-based proposed origins; matzo ("bread", meaning possibly from Yiddish) or mozzarella ("big cheese"). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:43, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's "motza". Here is an excellent in-depth explanation of it. HiLo48 (talk) 13:58, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Aren't the "alternative slang terms" pretty universal, though? With the possible exception of "stack". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:52, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That website sounds AI-generated to me. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:14, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is that a problem? HiLo48 (talk) 23:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If the AI considers general English words as Australian slang, its assumptions aren't fully valid. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:45, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it just seemed to me that the texts on that website (on several of its pages) showed the typical predominance of fluff, redundancy and clichéd trivialities and very low level of concrete information that's characteristic of AI-generated text. If you look closely, you'll see that it offers very very little in terms of actual facts. I'd say it's the very opposite of an "in-depth explanation". Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:32, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

↑+1 DuncanHill (talk) 12:55, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Claimed there to be from Yiddish motsa meaning "bundle" or "heap". I can't find an attestation (not as a mention but as a use) of such a Yiddish etymon (מוצאַ?). --Lambiam 11:53, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When a word should sound like another word, and people start saying it that way

What's this called? I just saw somebody saying *brumination for wikt:brumation, which apparently needs the extra syllable because hibernation has one. Card Zero (talk) 21:54, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That would be a form of analogical change. --Amble (talk) 22:13, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes. Flammable octopi, for example. Thank you. Card Zero (talk) 22:23, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect rumination might have played a bigger part here than hibernation, though. (Or at least a similar part.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:46, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The most specific linguistic term for this is "contamination", as on the linked page. A classic example of this is that the word for "nine" in the Slavic languages changed from beginning with an "n-" consonant to beginning with a "d-" consonant, since the following number word (meaning "ten") also began with "d-". AnonMoos (talk) 10:45, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/devętь. It calls this "dissimilation" (?) and mentions a similar effect in Proto-Germanic, leading to four and five starting with the same sound. Otherwise I suppose we'd say ~~pour~~ wour and five. But this regularization is a terrible instinct! Number-words that sound similar are really unhelpful! For instance, none, one, and nine. This is a subject area where mistakes get expensive. Card Zero (talk) 11:28, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And many Romance speakers have to watch their sixties and seventies. (A plot twist in a teenager romantic dramedy I watched in my Spanish classes, where the foreigner - I think a British expat - wrote down the wrong phone number.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:10, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Indo-European words for 4 and 5 were roughly kʷetwor and penkʷe, which allowed a fair amount of scope for contamination between the two. In Germanic, there's a rather complex path between reconstructed PIE and the attested forms; Slavic 9 is simpler... AnonMoos (talk) 20:37, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. The non-analogical result of word-initial PIE kʷ- in English is wh-. AnonMoos (talk) 20:39, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Card Zero As for what it is called, are you referring to a Malapropism? Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:56, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well no, to be pacific, those are correctly-formed words used in a context where they don't quite fit, such as "I hear footprints! Someone is encroaching!", or "I experienced their pleasure bi-curiously." I'm happy with analogical change, all I really wanted was a few other examples. Back-formation is related, but again slightly different since it coins new words from imagined grammar, rather than bending existing words into a more comfortable shape (while keeping the meaning the same). Card Zero (talk) 23:22, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

November 18