User talk:CapnPrep

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[edit] The expression "conditional mood" in English grammar?

"In English, the conditional mood is a compound verb form consisting of the modal auxiliary verb would (or could, might, should) and the infinitive form of the main verb."

Isn't this suggestion that there is a conditional mood in English somewhat contrary to modern grammatical analyses? The various grammars I use (Quirk and several pedagogical texts) do not introduce such an expression. Furthermore, the first line of the article seems to imply that conditional mood and conditional tense are one and the same. Again, grammars do not show a conditional tense in their verb conjugations. Would it not be better and more accurate to say that in English in a clause expressing a condition the verb group takes a particular form involving a modal auxiliary.

That is more or less fine with me — go ahead and edit the article! (And start a discussion on the talk page over there.) "Conditional tense" was definitely not my idea. And in English, whatever you want to call this compound verb form, it is mostly used in the clause expressing the result, not the condition. CapnPrep 00:51, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] help needed

Hi. I'm looking for a linguist to add some rational input on Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_November_1#Category:Finland-Swedish. More specifically, i'm hoping you can help prevent someone who's either a hyphen fetishist or perhaps just loves debating from making WP disregard established usage among English-speaking linguists. Thanks! --Espoo 16:20, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm kind-of a hyphen-fetishist myself… Actually, I do agree with you about dropping the hyphen here, but it looks like this particular debate has gone beyond the "rational input" stage. CapnPrep 15:14, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, we can't have the category spelled differently than the article, so either one has to be changed. Would you be willing to add a comment saying that as a linguist you would use what apparently almost all your colleagues who are native English speakers use to designate this language, namely "Finland Swedish" without a hyphen? In fact, as the links i provided show, English-speaking linguists don't use a hyphen even in "Finland Swedish dialects".
Am i correct in believing that most double-barreled language names never get "language" glued on? --Espoo 17:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I actually know one Swedish-speaking Finn who is also a linguist who works on the languages of Finland, so this would be the person to listen to. And it turns out that they feel exactly the same way about it as I do: "I don't know! And, as you know, I really really don't care! I guess I would write it without the hyphen, maybe." And having looked more closely at the discussion, I would tempted to vote for the "Category:Finland-Swedish language" proposal (sorry). I would prefer it without the hyphen, but what can you do. It's a good compromise. And as you all have noticed, there is no coherent naming policy for these categories on WP, but there is a definite tendency to include "language" systematically (and as for double-barreled names, I know of at least Category:Scottish Gaelic language and Category:Old English language). CapnPrep 21:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I can understand that many linguists don't really care about spelling issues due to the modern professional attitude towards language variation and prefer to leave those discussions to less scientific and more dogmatic minds, but i'm quite sure that this does not normally extend to the technical terms linguists use because these are professional tools, and all professionals want to standardise these. (In addition, linguists in many countries have realised their social responsibility in helping to update many languages' hopelessly outdated spelling "systems" that have been naively sanctified due to linguistic misconceptions and cause incredible amounts of personal suffering and social injustice.) It's senseless to repeatedly spend time on thinking about how to spell basic terms in one's profession, and the problems caused by databases and lists not being consistent (in many languages, entries are listed differently depending on hyphenation!) adds to the nuisance.
In addition, as i pointed out in the discussion and hinted at above, the spellings "Finland-Swedish" and "Finland-Swedish dialects" seem to occur only in texts by linguists who are not native English speakers, so i'm quite sure that their English spelling habits are influenced by language interference. Nevertheless, i'm sure that none of them would add a hyphen to terms like "UK English", "US English", or "Quebec French" that they have not seen spelled as often or more often by non-native speakers (as is the case with the many texts by Finnish and Swedish linguists on this topic).
Generally speaking, i'm all for compromises, but i don't think it's a good idea adding "language" to double-barreled language names unless necessary. In fact, i believe that the addition should be made even to single-noun names only where necessary. I believe that the misnomers "Swedish language" and "Scottish Gaelic language" were caused by illogical reference to "English", which can mean more than the language. It seems that "Swedish" as a noun cannot mean anything except the language since the people are called "Swedes" by all native English speakers. It would seem that the same is true of "Gaelic", but i haven't studied that situation yet. It would seem best to take "language" off of the article and category Swedish language and all other language articles that only seemingly correspond to "English" and its ambivalence. Due to the clumsiness of names with many parts, this is especially true in the case of double-barreled language names that are not ambivalent. Do you know any triple-barreled language names? --Espoo 06:16, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wiktionary POS discussion

Over on Wiktionary, there is a discussion about "part of speech" headings/categories. Your assistance in explaining things would be appreciated.--BrettR 00:56, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I am not familiar with Wiktionary, but I had a look and the treatment of these substantivized adjectives is indeed wildly inconsistent across languages (and sometimes simply incorrect: e.g. for English, undead is listed as an uncountable noun). But everyone involved in the discussion seems to be on the same page, so I don't see what things need explaining? CapnPrep 17:17, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adposition

This article is great. --Kooky (talk) 00:17, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I can't take all the credit, but thank you! Drop by anytime! CapnPrep 00:43, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
The article you came up with has been thoroughly criticized by many users at Talk:Adposition, and for good reasons. I have scanned the article and I found at least two grammatically incorrect examples of Chinese and Japanese, and some of the examples actually seem somewhat dubious (though I don't know enough of the topic to feel I should put a fact-tag up). But most importantly, it's so convoluted and tries to say so much in such an unstructured form that it's hopeless for most readers to get through even part of it.
And please note that I'm a lingonerd myself and currently a student of linguistics at Stockholm university, so it's not just a problem for non-aficionados.
Peter Isotalo 12:40, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Feel free to do whatever you like with the page, obviously. Good luck with your studies. CapnPrep 19:27, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Determiners

I've split the determiner page into one for the word class and one for the function in phrase structure. Any thoughts you might have on it would be welcome.--BrettR 18:24, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me like one article was enough, mostly devoted to the syntactic category, and pointing to discussion of determiner function that could be located in the existing stubs Noun phrase and/or Determiner phrase. And "(class)" and "(function)" don't adhere to any established conventions for bracketed article names, do they? CapnPrep 13:18, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] aggression, agression

The French word "non-agression" that appears in Liaison (French) is spelled correctly, and should not be changed to (English) "non-aggression". If this is a problem, I can just replace it with another example or delete it (it's actually commented out at the moment, so it wouldn't make much difference). CapnPrep 21:08, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for that. I didn't look closely enough at the context and assumed it was meant to be English. I've made a note of it so I won't miscorrect it again. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:07, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

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[edit] Maundy Thursday - German word "Gründonnerstag"

Thank you for accomodating my changes (IP 217.233.42.121) to english language - I'm german and not so familiar with it. But there is one small thing I would like to change: There is no evidence for the existance of green vestments on maundy thursday, so it's just a hypothesis as another name for Gründonnerstag is white thursday - this does derive from the mass vestments - and observance/custom was quite regional in older Germany. FZiegler 10:50, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gender in English

Thanks for the references. You cut and pasted them from JStor? How? So quickly? Not typed? Thanks again. Alastair Haines 22:31, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] redirects

FUI. When creating/editing a redirect it is often makes sense to leave the edit summary empty. Then the history will show the default text, eg. "redirected to Coordination (linguistics)", see eg history of Subordination (linguistics). And while I am at this, I'd like to ask you to write a real article for Subordination (linguistics).

P.S. OK I concocted it myself. Please check for blunders (in particluar, whether Subordinator (grammar) is proper redirect). Me ain't no none expert. `'mikka 21:32, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Some related rant: I wasted,like, 12 hours, to nail down disambig issues with "coordination" (and not finished yet), and I am surprized to see that "subordination" seems to have far less mess. `'mikka 19:22, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for spending so much time on this. I'll have a look at the new Subordination (linguistics) page. CapnPrep 22:28, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Grammatical gender

You were quite right about that sentence. Thanks for having the patience to explain why. FilipeS 17:42, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. Looking forward to continued collaboration. CapnPrep 18:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] You deserve this

The Rosetta Barnstar
For your exceptionally fine contributions in the field of linguistics, and particularly your work on the Dual (grammatical number) article.
Duja► 09:54, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh wow, I have tears in (both) my eyes… Thank you! CapnPrep 13:46, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lorraine (province)

You had previously commented on the idea of merging Duchy of Lorraine there. Please check out a draft I made of what that would look like. Tocharianne 16:07, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Old french

Sorry guy, I was wrong; all my apologizes Saintongese (talk) 13:31, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Question for you

Hi, I was wondering about the warning that you left for an IP address earlier today. It seems that who ever had that IP address this morning had the same one I have now. (witch isn't suprising seeing that I'm at a college) My question is can IP's really be banned? I ask as I couldn't even get to wikipedia's site until a few minutes ago.

I just want to say again that vandal was not me, I just got that you have a new message tag before I logged in and saw it. Thanks! Ayls (talk) 20:11, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, IPs can be blocked. But as I understand it, this only means you can't edit pages; you should still be able to access the site. And if you log in as a registered user from that IP address, you can still make edits (unless of course your username is also blocked). Have fun. CapnPrep (talk) 20:18, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User:CapnPrep#topics

Could you turn your topics into links??? Peter Horn 00:26, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I could. Should I? CapnPrep (talk) 05:57, 17 March 2008 (UTC)