Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 May 12

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[edit] May 12

[edit] Spear/Distaff or Paternal/Maternal?

What is the difference and which one should I use? 69.218.237.116 00:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

In what context ? StuRat 00:26, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
'Spear' and 'distaff' to mean male and female respectively are examples of metonymy; but while 'distaff' used to be commonplace, I don't think 'spear' was so common in this sense. 'Paternal' and 'maternal' for these purposes are examples of synecdoche, unless you are referring specifically to male and female as parents, in which case they are literal terms, but fairly high-register ones (compared, say, to 'fatherly' and 'motherly').
Any of these may be appropriate depending on the context and what effect you are trying to achieve. --ColinFine 07:55, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Children, Offspring, Infants, Issues, Progeny

What is the difference between the words that are mentioned above? 69.218.237.116 00:28, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

See Child, Offspring, Infant, Issue, and Progeny. -Elmer Clark 01:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Serbian sign at a church

I was recently at the Serbian Orthodox church in my area (which has a large Yugoslav community), and I saw this engraved into a stone on the side of a building in the church's annexe. It has a date - September 15, 1991 - and some of the Cyrillic letters look very old fashioned, like the sort of thing the Russians expunged from the alphabet after the revolution, though I could be entirely mistaken here.

Here's a picture of the sign, could anyone tell me what it says? —DO'Neil 01:04, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

They are ordinary Serbian letters, and transliterate as 'osvećenje temelja obavljeno'. I'm not sure what it means, but this page about Belgrade has the exact phrase in it, under the heading 'CRKVA SVETOG ALEKSANDRA NEVSKOG' ('Church of St. Alexander Nevskiy'!), and the context seems to be something like 'building completed in'. I note that 'temelja' appears in the Bosnian version of Five pillars of Islam, but I suspect the meaning is 'foundation' or 'building' rather than literally 'pillar'. --ColinFine 08:12, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
I think the phrase means something like "The inauguration ceremony of the foundation was performed on".  --LambiamTalk 09:17, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Serbian does have six(?) letters not used in Russian, and this sign shows three of them. —Tamfang 21:49, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
The sign literally says "Foundations were consecrated in 15. 09. 1991." Check out Consecrated#Consecration of a church. Shinhan 08:00, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shakespeare past tense

I'm reading Romeo and Juliet right now, and many past tense words are written with an "é." Using the word "belovéd" as an example, would I pronounce the "éd" as a separate syllable, or should I pronounce it like "belov'd"? bibliomaniac15 03:45, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

The accent has been placed there by the (helpful) editor to let you know that it should be a separate syllable, in order to fit the meter, so "belovéd" should be 3 syllables, not 2. If two were required by the meter, the same editor might let you know by writing "belov'd". - Nunh-huh 04:10, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Usually it's a grave accent: è, not é. In some editions of Chaucer's poetry, a dieresis diacritic can be used -- ё -- to indicate word-final E that wasn't actually silent, but counted as a separate syllable with respect to the poetic metres used. AnonMoos 16:35, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Tolkien, in spelling Quenya, used the diaeresis in that way (a point not grasped by all fans). —Tamfang 21:45, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
The New Yorker and I think also The Economist still do, for words like "coöperate". --TotoBaggins 12:03, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Re Chaucer, mentioned above, the matter of his meter is quite controversial. In Chaucer, it's a safe rule to pronounce any final e written (in the best manuscripts) except for cases of elision (and it's the degree to which elision should be applied to regularize his meter that's controverted: the number of stresses per line may be fairly regular, but there seems to be some freedom in adding extra syllables between them), so I'm not sure that such diaereses are either helpful or widely used in Chaucer texts. But I'm no expert on this. Wareh 13:57, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "at a loss" vs. "at loss"

What is the difference in meaning between "at a loss" and "at loss"? or Is it that only the fist one is grammatically correct? Thanks 196.12.53.9 10:47, 12 May 2007 (UTC)Vineet chaitanya

At a loss literally means: "at less than cost". If you sell goods at less than cost, you are making a financial loss. To be at a loss for something is further idiom for being utterly flummoxed at how to arrive at the desired something – usually a solution to a problem. In both cases it is unusual to omit the article a before loss, but not unreasonable to do so in "telegram style", as used for instance in newspaper headlines. There is no separate specific meaning for "at loss".  --LambiamTalk 12:16, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
My gut says the short form is less likely to be used in the second sense. —Tamfang 21:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Then you must be a ventriloquist! My gut agrees with your gut, and so does Google search: #[sell at a loss] : #[sell at loss] = ~47000 : ~97; #[we were at a loss] : #[we were at loss] = ~29000 : ~27, or (relatively) more than twice as infrequent.  --LambiamTalk 22:38, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation as well as information about frequency of use. 196.12.53.9 05:24, 14 May 2007 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya


Does not "at a loss" mean something like you forgot about what you had been talking about all the time, so you stopped and started thinking about your last words, and said "Fellas, i'm at a loss."? or maybe there is another term for that. What do you think? Correct me if i'm wrong. 210.5.95.46 18:53, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

It does. I think Lambiam covered that above, when he said '... being utterly flummoxed at how to arrive at the desired something'. --ColinFine 22:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] English to Latin Translation

How do you say:

"This is my mother" in Latin?

I can't decide if "my mother" goes in nominative or genitive.

Hic est meae matris. Hic est meus mater —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.15.52.92 (talk) 20:10, 12 May 2007 (UTC).

Haec est mea mater.
Only the possessor takes the genitive: "my" (mea) is genitive but "mother" (mater) is nominative. (It doesn't help that "my" is a genitive adjective rather than a standard genitive.) Also, haec and mea need to be feminine to agree with mater. --Ptcamn 20:30, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

If "my" is supposed to be genitive, then shouldn't it be "meae"?

There's nothing genitive at all about mea: mea is a possessive adjective in the nominative case. (You would only use the genitive, meae matris, if you wanted to say "of my mother"). --Lazar Taxon 20:59, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

As I said in parentheses, the genitive adjective complicates things. Meus/mea/meum, in its various forms, serves as the genitive of ego; it also happens to inflect for case to agree with the possessed noun. --Ptcamn 21:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
No, the genitive of ego is mei. Mea is not a "genitive adjective" but rather a possessive adjective (the term used by my Oxford Latin grammar and every other source I've seen). --Lazar Taxon 21:19, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
This is just terminology. My translation is still correct, isn't it? --Ptcamn 21:25, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, your translation is correct. ;-) --Lazar Taxon 21:26, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
While correct, a more common word order would be Haec est mater mea.  --LambiamTalk 22:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] name this gesture

One day a neighbor, seeing me get into my car, asked – in gestures – whether to move her car out of my way. I responded by showing her both palms, waggling each hand as if trying to clean a window between us, signifying that she shouldn't bother. As I drove away, I thought: is there a word for that gesture? (I thought of jazz hands but the oscillation mentioned there seems to be on a different axis.) —Tamfang 21:40, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I cannot find this listed in our Hand gesture article – which suffers from a lack of source citations, and is unclear about the (presumably limited) cultural scope of most gestures listed. While I have not been able to find a name for this two-handed window-cleaner gesture, the basic meaning of the gesture as I know it (in which the hands move in mirror motion) is: I decline the offer.  --LambiamTalk 23:05, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
how bout calling it a double-moutza...that one seems close. With the wiggling, maybe a howlin-double-moutza-burgerGabenowicki 23:25, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I always thought the gesture meant to show you cleaning off a chalkboard, so "deleting" an offer. StuRat 05:29, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I would call it a "never mind" gesture, and google shows a few relevant hits for "never mind gesture" and "never mind wave".--Pharos 06:44, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Let my correct that. The phrases "dismissive wave" or "dismissive gesture" (the latter of course often a figure of speech) seem most common. There's some discussion of this category of gesture here.--Pharos 07:01, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
Too broad; if I see "dismissive gesture" in a narration, my mental image has the character holding the hand out with thumb up and flapping it in a direction perpendicular to the palm; chasing away a fly rather than wiping a vertical surface. —Tamfang 07:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
This reflects a problem also seen in identifying symbols: should the name describe the form (shape) or reflect the function? Several symbols are in use for logical and, so don't use and sign when you mean the wedge-shaped symbol ⋀. A case in point among gestures is the designation beckoning sign; different cultures use different gestures for beckoning, and what functions as a gentle beckoning gesture in one culture may not work (and come across as rude) in another. For such reasons, it is (in my opinion) better to use descriptive names (with or without cheese, but go easy on the onions).  --LambiamTalk 10:45, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Along these lines, while reading part of the Vorkosigan Saga I noticed that the phrase palm-out gesture kept occurring, and wondered what the hell it meant. For two senses of "mean". —Tamfang 03:52, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

With cheeseGabenowicki 08:41, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scottish 'sh'

I've noticed several Scottish people pronounce 's' as a 'sh', much like the s in spiel or sport in German. Ally McCoist and Sean Connery are known to do it. The phrase "You're a sight for sore eyes" is often attributed to Connery.

How widespread is it? I've often wondered if it was a regional thing - e.g. is it more noticeable or common in Glaswegians than Highlanders? And is it derived from nature or nurture? Thanks for any answers/suggestions. Sʟυмgυм • т • c  23:27, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

They did parody Sean Connery's reverse lisp (if I may call it that) in Celebrity Jeopardy (Saturday Night Live). bibliomaniac15 00:27, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
I think it's more of a Glaswegian thing, but I'm no expert on Scottosh accents. There's a story (probably an urban myth) that lots of people in Glasgow had their teeth taken out (replaced with dentures or something), and the children imitated the sound their parents then made. Drmaik 09:19, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Well with their taste for Deep-fried Mars Bars it's not impossible ;) 137.138.46.155 11:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
To sthart with Shean Connery is (originally) from Edinburgh, sho doesh not have a Glaswegian accshent, i think Ally is from Glasgow, but speaking as a Scot, the Sh sound is more to do with a speech impediment rather than a regional accent, The Namesh, Manster Perry-mankster 13:38, 15 May 2007 (UTC)