Talk:Periphrasis

Quibble with table
Surely the English translation of stēllae would be the deciedly non-periphrastic "stellar"? Grutness...wha?  02:17, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Just came in to say the same thing. Given that two of the greatest minds of today agree on the matter, I'm removing it from the table.82.26.73.143 (talk) 16:01, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
 * No, "stellar" is an adjective. "Stēllae" is a genitive singular noun. It could also be translated with the non-periphrastic "star's", but "of a star" is an example of a periphrastic translation. —Angr 12:15, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Stellae. Unlike the other words, this form has two more meanings: stars (non-periphrastic), to/for a star (periphrastic). Both syllables in the word are long, so I'm not sure what the stroke over the first syllable is meant to indicate. Pamour (talk) 11:23, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * That the vowel is long by nature, not just by position. —Angr 11:44, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * That's right. It's a macron. Sometimes it's important. 208.54.85.141 (talk) 09:23, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Discussion of stellae
The above discussion points out something interesting about the problem with synthetic languages: possible ambiguities in meaning. Since the analytic languages, like English and even most Romance languages, are analytic, the meaning of the inflection in Latin may be difficult to determine, whereas the ambiguity is eliminated in the modern languages. Of course, there are undoubtedly ambiguities that occur even with analytical constructions. E.g., "a book for John" could be a book meant as a gift for John, or a book dedicated by the author to John. Usually, however, context clears up any possible confusion in these cases. 69.42.7.212 (talk) 00:55, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Context clears up the ambiguity in the synthetic languages too, though. Inside a sentence, it will almost always be clear whether stellae is genitive singular, dative singular, nominative plural, or vocative plural. —Angr 05:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)


 * More importantly, why are English and Latin compared, but no other languages? Is there something especially pertinent about English or Latin and periphrasis? The comparison doesn't even mention the active or passive periphrastic! And there are clearly plenty of examples of periphrasis in Latin that doesn't occur in English (consider "Noli amare," for example). Eebster the Great (talk) 05:10, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I suppose the reason only English and Latin are compared is that once periphrasis has been illustrated by an example, there's no need to keep repeating examples that don't add anything. This isn't supposed to be a complete list of all periphrases in all languages. (And I don't see that "Noli amare" is more periphrastic than "Don't love".) —Angr 05:56, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, nolo means "be unwilling" or "do not want" (la.Wiktionary translates it as "velle non" and velle as "Optare ut aliquid fiat."), rather than simply "do not" or "not." Thus, it literally means "Do not want to love." I see that as periphrasis.
 * Either way, I do think the page would benefit from more examples. Look at the article for Preposition and postposition, for example, which has examples in English, Latin, German, French, Polish, Mandarin, Finnish, Turkish, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Sanskrit, and references to Portuguese and the Niger-Congo family of languages. Eebster the Great (talk) 18:33, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Examples
Spannerjam, the article is full of examples. The tables contain examples. The trees further below contain examples. The one example you have added to the introduction does not make sense; it does not deliver an accurate impression (or any impression) of periphrasis. Periphrasis has to do with how functional meaning is expressed, i.e. via affixes vs. via function words. If you point out something you do not understand, I can clarify or change it, or I can add a specific example. I am going to revert back, but first I'll give you a chance to respond here. --Tjo3ya (talk) 15:14, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Aids to comprehension
This is a new concept to me, but two things not mentioned in the article seem to help. One is "For the term used in rhetoric, see Circumlocution." It wasn't clear to me, reading the opening sentences, that it's about using a bunch of words where one might suffice, but apparently, that's about the gist of it. The other was a consideration of "peri-", meaning "near", together with "-phrasis", which reminds me of "phrases". So periphrasis is using phrases (more than one word), sort of. It'll be a challenge adding "periphrasis" to my vocabulary, but I suppose it's a valid idea. For what it's worth, I rarely use "inflection" either. 172.56.27.10 (talk) 09:14, 10 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Periphrasis is an important concept for most syntactacticians and linguists in general. Establishing a solid understanding of periphrasis is a worthy endeavor for any aspiring linguist. --Tjo3ya (talk) 17:54, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

French example
I'd just like to point out that the French example is a literal translation that makes no sense. There is no such use of "heureux avec" in French. It should be something like "il sera content du temps".Amenemhab (talk) 09:42, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Will vs. -ed
Unless I have the wrong idea down, we can contrast affixes and periphrasis in English with tense.

he passed the ball vs. he will pass the ball she moved her car vs. she will move her car I created a song vs. I will create a song

If this is correct, then I think these examples would be very useful for helping others grasp the concept and I suggest examples like these be added to the article.

Questions posed in an article
I'm just curious if this form is appropriate for an encyclopedia article, which I would think it's supposed to be authoritative, or at least authoritatively describe any prominent scholarly differences of opinion.

From the Catenae section:

"Given this mismatch in syntactic form, one can pose the following questions..."

Should an article be posing questions? This sounds more like an academic paper, and perhaps was copied from one. Kentucho (talk) 14:35, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

rewrote lede
The article had a couple of problems. (1) It was too technical (and was tagged for that problem). (2) It only described one type of periphrasis. I've edited the lede in order to fix these problems and have deleted the tag.--2603:8000:8900:6E00:1EFA:8F1:B0D8:8C7F (talk) 22:47, 26 September 2023 (UTC)