Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2006 November 13

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Language desk
< November 12 << Oct | November | Dec >> November 14 >
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.


Contents


[edit] November 13

[edit] Sod this for a game of soldiers!

Sod this for a game of soldiers! Where does this phrase originate and what does it mean?--Light current 00:34, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It's London Cockney in origin, a variation of 'Sod this for a lark'. It's a term of exasperation, meaning that something is not worth the effort or the trouble, the 'game' in question being for children. I think no amplification of the term 'sod' is necessary on the assumption that thiis is universally understood; but, if not, it comes from the Old Testament. Clio the Muse 00:44, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] O!, or, oar, oral...

Is there a term for a series such as O!, or, oar, oral, polar, portal, caltrop, tropical, where each word contains the letters of the last plus one new one? Also, can this particular series be continued any further? NeonMerlin 04:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I can't find anything after tropical, but I can go from caltrop to pectoral and pectorals. --Kjoonlee 04:55, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Pectoralis? (Found in Pectoralis major muscle.) --Kjoonlee 04:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Also: tropical->pictorial->pictorials->piscatorial. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 05:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Heh, neat, but is that allowed? up to tropical, no letter had been used twice. --Kjoonlee 07:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Since you haven't yet come up with the name of the game (the original question, remember?), you can pretty much make up the rules as you go. DirkvdM 08:06, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
NeonMerlin did say "one new letter." --Kjoonlee 09:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
But did NeonMerlin say "one unique new letter" ...I'm getting way over my head here --WikiSlasher 13:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
There is tropicals, which according to the OED means "tropical clothes". Lesgles (talk) 22:23, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] a bit of latin?

Maybe the following is Latin (or maybe not):

  Nihil Obstat. Temigus Lafort S.J.D. Censor

Can anybody offer a translation? Not sure of the context; perhaps from a book's title page. -R. S. Shaw 07:57, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

See nihil obstat. Temigus Lafort would be the name of the censor, and I suppose S.J.D. would make him a jesuit.--Rallette 09:48, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Is the censor's name possibly not Temigus but Remigius Lafort? ---Sluzzelin 11:53, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Indeedy, a fellow named Remy Lafort seems to have censored quite a few books in his day, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, and the abbreviation after his name is not S.J.D. but S.T.D., sacrae theologiae doctor.--Rallette 12:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
That's a very unfortuante abbreviation:) --Ornil 20:07, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Absque labore, nihil!--Light current 23:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Education in mother tongue

Is there an article in Wikipedia which mentions the pros and cons of children being educated in their mother tongues? I googled and it led to huge essays and PhD thesis. -- Wikicheng 08:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

You might need to define your terms first. Since mother tongue is the language a child learns first, you could say that by definition all children are educated in their mother tongue, at least to start with. Are you thinking about their parents' language(s)? Or having to change languages when they go to school? Or what?--Shantavira 09:39, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I meant the education in school. Let us say that the family of a child usually converses in Kannada, which is the mother tongue. Now the question is whether it is better for the child to study in the Kannada medium (because it is the mother tongue and the environment in which the child grows, mainly at home speak Kannada) or English, which is considered the Lingua_franca and as all the higher education (College, for example) is available mainly in English. I am not asking for an opinion or a debate here. i just wanted to know if there is an article available in Wikipedia on this :-) --Wikicheng 13:11, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there is an article on this at present. In the UK it's pretty much taken for granted that children should be educated in English. Having kids arrive for their first day at school and not speaking any English is already a huge problem that would only be compounded by trying to educate them in any other language, even supposing teachers that spoke thier language could be found (and there is a teacher shortage generally). Quite what happens in bilingual countries I am not sure.--Shantavira 13:23, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

In multilingual countries like India for example, by the time the child starts formal education, he/she is likely to be familiar/conversant with two or three languages, other than English. English is introduced only in schools. But unfortunately, the higher education is mainly in English. -- Wikicheng 13:31, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

In the US, this is an issue, particularly in the South-West, such as California, where a substantial portion of the population is Hispanic. My feeling is that they should be taught in Spanish only long enough to learn English, say one year. Then, they should learn in English. The alternative is to allow two distinct language groups to diverge to the point where they no longer have enough in common to want to remain in the same nation. Canada seems to be close to this point between the Francophones and Anglophones, and I would like to avoid that situation in the US. There's also the future of the kids to be considered. In a US restaurant, for example, people who only speak Spanish might get a job as a dishwasher or busboy, while, if they were bilingual, they could get a job as a waitperson or manager. StuRat 21:53, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I can't find anything specifically about it on Wikipedia, but Multilingualism and the articles it links to might offer some ideas. Skittle 23:03, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks to all of you. Multilingualism was fairly helpful -- Wikicheng 04:03, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] APPOSITIVE ---- A MODIFIER?

1. What is an appositive? Do appositives also modify adjectives?

2. Among the three subordinate clauses, namely adjectival, adverbial and nominal clause, only the first two mentioned are modifiers because accordingly the nominal clause does not modify anything in the sentence. Nominal clauses function like one-word noun (subject, direct and indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative and appositive). If it functions like an appositive, as in The belief that there will be nuclear war is widespread then it is also a modifier since it modifies the word before it.

Compare:

Adjectival Clause: He is wearing the hat that he bought in the Philippines. (The adjectival class that he bought in the Philippines modifiers the noun hat.

Nominal Clause: They did not believe the fact that

3. If appositives modify the noun before it.. Then, can we still consider the following nominal clause as an appositive? The word evident, I think, is an adjective. Do appositives also modify adjectives?

It is evident that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.

If not what function does that clause have?

Thank you so much..

Re 1: See Appositive. An appositive as a noun phrase modifying another noun phrase.
Re 2: I think you're right. If someone claims nominal clauses cannot serve as modifiers, this is a good counterexample.
Re 3: To me the nominal clause here is the true subject of the sentence, as in: "That the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is evident."
 --LambiamTalk 17:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How do you pronounce "Dromiceiomimus"?

How do you pronounce the word Dromiceiomimus? An IPA transliteration would be fine… I'll add it to the article if someone answers. Cheers! bdesham ★ 15:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

"Dromie-kayo-meemus"? 惑乱 分からん 16:14, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I have no idea — it's probably so rarely used in spoken language that it doesn't have a standard pronunciation — but the c is almost certainly soft ("s" not "k"). --Ptcamn 18:51, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
According to [1], "drom-i-SEE-o-MIEM-us", which in IPA would be somthing like /dɹɒmɪ'siːəʊˌmaɪmʌs/ in RP. Probably - I'm usually wrong about these things. -- the GREAT Gavini 19:18, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree. Or in GenAm, /dɹɑmɪ'sioʊˌmaɪmʌs/. That guide is interesting reading, by the way. Lesgles (talk) 22:17, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I added /dɹɑmɪˌsiəˈmaɪməs/ to the article. --Kjoonlee 05:12, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On confusing countries

I can't count how often people from abroad have confused the two countries Sweden and Switzerland in conversations held in English. Most recent example, paraphrased from memory:

Where are you from?
I'm from Switzerland.
(very next sentence) Cool. So tell me, what's Sweden like?

I'm not making this up and I've discussed it with Swedes; some of them have had similar experiences the other way around. I'm curious as to whether people from other places have experienced this confusion too (Slovakia/Slovenia?). It needn't be limited to nations, for example, do people from U.S. states (Mississippi/Missouri, Idaho/Iowa) or from certain cities often get mixed up with citizens from far away places as well? Thank you for sharing your experiences. ---Sluzzelin 17:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm from Sweden, and when I traveled to South Africa, one guide I had generally converted all values in South African Rand to Swiss Franc, it was rather confusing, since at the time, I think Rand and Swedish Krona had about the equal value... 惑乱 分からん 18:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
What I want to know, is why Swedes often mispronounce Switzerland as "Sveitsh" instead of "Schveits"? --BluePlatypus 00:19, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Possibly the same people who pronounce (and write) "schnitzel" as "snitchel". JackofOz 05:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
In Chinese, Switzerland is 瑞士 (ruì shì) and Sweden is 瑞典 (ruì diăn). As you can see, both of these countries share the same beginning syllable. This similarity is also shared by languages that derive the name of these countries from Chinese, such as Japanese (スイス and スウェーデン), Korean (스위스 and 스웨덴) and Vietnamese (Thụy Sĩ and Thụy Điển), so I bet those people who are confused are speakers of those languages. On another note, I think Australia and Austria are sometimes confusing. DHN 17:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

(After e.c) Thanks for your very interesting reply, DHN. Actually, in my personal experience, it was mostly U.S. Americans, and mind you not uneducated ones, who confused the two so far. What always puzzled me is that, though it's true that both begin with Sw, one of them ends in -land and has three syllables while the other doesn't. (I've never heard anyone confuse Switzerland with Swaziland, e.g.) I'm still curious about other examples of placenames getting confused in English conversations. ---Sluzzelin 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't seem the Japanese and Korean words for Sweden and Switzerland are derived from Chinese, rather from different European languages. (The Japanese word "Suisu" is possibly from French and "Suweeden" is possibly from Dutch, I might guess.) The kanji and hanja for these words are probably Chinese-derived, though.... 惑乱 分からん 18:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I doubt hanja have ever been used for S and CH – they probably wouldn't be used now, anyway. Generally, hanja of country's names can also be Japanese-derived, e.g. ‘Germany’. Wikipeditor 03:51, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Some Americans also confuse Austria with Australia, Iraq with Iran, and Osama with Saddam with Obama. Edison 17:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Australia and Austria confusion is common - I can kind of understand it, the words are only one syllable different, but man it grates. Being told I speak English very well for an Austrian is just as annoying as being asked if I rode a kangaroo to school - I have to say it is only Americans who make these mistakes in my experience. It could be worse - Nigeriens must have a hard time :) Natgoo 18:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Not really related, but you can all have a giggle at my expense: I often find myself referring to 'Canadia' after having mentioned 'Canadians'. mat_x 20:24, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Add to these "Dutch" and "Danish", although I guess the actual countries are rarely confused. Lesgles (talk) 22:19, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
This is just my personal theory, but i would say the fact that you don't often hear people confusing 'Swaziland' and 'Switzerland' is due largely to Swaziland being a relatively unknown nation, at least for Americans. Africa just has way too many different countries with way too many 'exotic' names for most Americans to keep track of. You can't get confused about Swaziland if you'll never heard of it.
I have heard people confuse Denmark with the Netherlands, though, mostly because of the irregularity of the adjective form of the latter word (they associate 'Dutch' with Denmark, since it's the only country in that region whose name begins with a D).
'Austria' and 'Australia' cause confusion more often in written language than in spoken (in my experience). It's not that people don't understand the difference, it's just that they read too fast or they don't pay attention to the context or whatever, and their brains automatically fill in the 'al' when they come across 'Austria'.
As far as Americans mixing states, again in my personal experience (as someone who lives in America), that's fairly rare. Probably you can chalk that up simply to the fact that Americans know American geography better than international geography. I can remember someone mixing Iowa (where i live) up with Idaho on one occasion, but he quickly corrected himself. ~ lav-chan @ 20:18, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Then there's Dominica and the Dominican Republic, both located in the Caribbean, and both of whose nationals are known as Dominicans. It must be particularly confusing for Dominican priests from these countries to explain where they're from. ("I'm a Dominican priest from the Dominican Republic". "Oh, if you're a Dominican, you must be from Dominica". "No. Let me explain it one more time .. Oh stuff it, God bless you, my son".) One of Australia's greatest corporate criminals, Christopher Skase, became a citizen of one of these countries, but I've never yet been able to establish with absolute certainty which country it was because the media sometimes say it was one place and sometimes the other place (probably without even being aware of the existence of the other). JackofOz 04:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

In the late 1990s, I happened to be perusing some kind of statistical report from the US State Department, which managed to show the number of visas issued to the citizens of Dominica that was greater than that tiny island's entire population. A footnote sheepishly explained that yes, due to a clerical error some of the numbers reported for Dominica pertained in fact to citizens of Dominican Republic (which of course has a 100 times Dominica's population).
Does this count? I live in California, and wanted to rent a car in Arizona. I called (don't know where the call center was), and asked if I could take the car to New Mexico. I was told "no, the car must remain in the United States". Bunthorne 05:05, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
When I was in Ireland someone gave me a ride. I told him I was from the Netherlands, and after a while he started talking about all the problems we have with the bloody Israelis. It turned out he thought I was from Lebanon. Big disappointment. He thought he had picked up a really interresting hithhiker, but I was merely a Dutchman. :) DirkvdM 05:33, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
He probably couldn't make head or tail of your "Dutch brogue".  :) JackofOz 05:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Isn't there a lake in Sweden that is said to be connected to some lake in Switzerland :) ...Evilbu 00:05, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

People from the east coast of the U.S. (those for whom "there is no life west of Chesapeake Bay") do mix up the names of Ohio, Iowa, and Idaho, and aren't always convinced there's really a difference. There are tee-shirts poking fun at this that say "University of Ohio, Iowa City, Idaho". And, while we're on the topic of how well Americans understand the geography of their own country, there are dozens of anecdotes of people from New Mexico being thought to be "foreigners". The most recent one I heard was of someone from New Mexico trying to get tickets to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, only to be told they had to contact their country's Olympic committee. —Angr 08:01, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, at least they didn't ask how the Olympics could be held on a sunken island. :) But let me come to the defence of USians for a change. Europe is about as big as the US in population and until a few years ago I had never heard of Moldova (nor had I a clue that there was a European country that had a parliamentary democracy with an absolute majority for the Communist Party). And the US is even much bigger physically. So to most USians states at the other end must come across as rather foreign. (Which is an indication that it really shouldn't be one country, just like the EU should never become a superstate, but that's a different issue). DirkvdM 07:41, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

In the UK (and probably even more so outside) many people seem to have extraordinary difficulty distinguishing Oxford and Cambridge. Which just shows that cultural association plays as big a part as phonetic similarity, hence people confusing Switzerland with Sweden rather than with Swaziland. --Blisco 11:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of "score" as a unit of 20.

Does anyone know when in history people started using the word "score" to refer to units of 20 (i.e. "Four score and seven years ago...")? If a probably origin for the term cannot be guessed, I would still appreciate evidence of the term's use as far back as possible. 208.200.8.168 17:35, 13 November 2006 --luvhistory

The Online Etymology Dictionary at [2] says "score" comes from an ancient word for "twenty" and for "cut" so perhaps people made a mark on a stick for each 20 sheep that was counted. They might have usede a counting rhyme like eeny, meeny miney mo to enumerate each one in the 20. Such rhymes have supposedly been traced back to pre-Celtic Britain. "Score" for music or for sexual conquest came much later. Edison 17:56, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
The OED says "Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a ‘score’ or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty." The earliest recorded written reference is from the year 1100, so it's a very old word (from Old Norse). --Shantavira 18:02, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
(after e.c.) Also, check out: score at the American Heritage Dictionary, sker- at the American Heritage Dictionary and WP's article on Vigesimal. ---Sluzzelin 18:05, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I think it's an Old Norse borrowing, related to "shear"... 惑乱 分からん 18:34, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I go along with scoring (cutting) the tally stick as a mark of 20. StuRat 21:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Just a litttle note. The rhymes tended to be more like 'Yan, Tan, Tethra' than 'Eeny meeny miney mo'. Skittle 22:46, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
That's Yan Tan Tethera Rmhermen 04:15, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I was thinking of. But the article cited lacks scholarly sources (published in refereed journals). Is there any scholarly analisis of them which could be cited in the article? Edison 14:53, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Too many prepositions

Funny how trying to learn a foreign language leads one (or me, at least) into questioning one's own. English allows ambiguity like "I write about houses in Sweden in notebooks", which it seems to me can be parsed as "I write (in Sweden) in my notebooks about the subject of houses", "I write (in my notebooks) about Swedish houses", and "I write about Swedish houses that are described in notebooks" and probably more. Is there a name for this? Are there languages where this can't happen, either because ambiguity is automatically considered wrong grammatically, or because the language structures prevents it from happening? Notinasnaid 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Loglan and Lojban are languages deliberately constructed to make such ambiguities impossible. As a digressions, when learning a foreign language, prepositions generally are a bitch, since they seldom follow any clear logic... 惑乱 分からん 18:39, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't think this has anything to do with prepositions in particular, but rather ambiguities of syntax. "I saw him using my telescope" has exactly the same kind of ambiguity. --Ptcamn 18:45, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Among those who write linguistic parsing software, it's known as the problem of "prepositional phrase attachment".[3]
Similar structural ambiguities are present in all natural languages. AnonMoos 18:45, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
See X-bar theory. Note, incidentally, that Loglan and Lojban are not consistent with X-bar theory, so either they are not human languages or X-bar theory does not adequately describe all human languages. (That leaves open the possibility that it adequately describes all natural lanaguages). --ColinFine 01:11, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, well, Loglan and Lojban are constructed languages without any natural evolution... 惑乱 分からん 01:15, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Weird Language/Spelling in Safari Browser-Only in the Wikipedia site

Re: Weird Language/Spelling in Safari Browser-Only in the Wikipedia site

Hi -

I prefer to use Safari, but every time I load a Wikipedia page I get strange misspellings. If I copy and paste an example, it turns into regular English. In the page I'm viewing, "n" turns to "m", and so on. Example: "Far testimg bleose use the sandbox imstead" shows up instead of: "For testing, please use the sandbox instead."

When I use Firefox, Wikipedia looks fine. I am running Tiger on a G4 Mac so Internet Explorer is out of the question as an option.

What have I done?

What should I do?

Thanks, gabrielle

Wild guess here, but maybe Safari is set to use a non-Latin alphabet (like Cyrillic), that lacks those sounds and converts n into m for example. --Wooty  Woot? | contribs 20:34, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Looks like a text read through OCR, although that probably isn't helpful... 惑乱 分からん 22:24, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

hi, set your browser to UTF-8/Unicode encoding. this is what wikipedia uses.

--- OKAY! And the answer is: Helvetica in my Font Book (Apple's font manager in OSX) was corrupt. Apparently, Wikipedia defaults to Helvetica and mine was funky. All good now.

[edit] Thinking Questions- Reading

What does a bridge,an orange, a yardstick, and friedship have in common? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.3.84.114 (talk • contribs)

This doesn't seem to be the sort of factual question that our reference desk is equipped to answer; it looks more like a riddle to me. If it is a factual question, can you clarify the context? -- SCZenz 02:17, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Are riddles actually allowed on the RDs? If so, Ive got a few good ones! 8-))--Light current 02:22, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Asking where a given riddle was from, and what the answer was in that source, would be fair game, as would other factual questions about riddles. Putting up a riddle and having everyone try to guess is a discussion—not what the RD is for. -- SCZenz 02:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Looked hard, but can't see anything prohibiting riddles in the Ref Desk rules. Asking "does anyone know the answer to this riddle ?" seems like a perfectly good RD question to me. Gandalf61 17:41, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
The letter r? --Ptcamn 03:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, but Id like to know what a fried ship looks like!--Light current 03:17, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
They often set sail along with a gravy boat. StuRat 04:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Ah the question now becomes obvious. Looking at the title we can see that this is a test of reading for young ones to see if they can identify common letters in the different words. So User:Ptcamn is correct and can progress to the second grade! 8-)
They are all nouns.--Shantavira 09:34, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Except 'fried' which is an adjective1 8-)--Light current 14:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Nothing rhymes with any of those words. Adam Bishop 22:28, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
That can't be it - "fridge" rhymes with "bridge". Molybdomancer 22:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

They usually ask the riddles on the Misc. Desk. Good to know we can move them over here from now on! -THB 04:50, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

  • They are all divisible by 13?hotclaws**== 14:39, 16 November 2006 (UTC)