Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2006 August 18

english usage
is it correct to use "on no account" or it should be "on no accounts" ?
 * On no account. -Elmer Clark 06:01, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * “On no accounts” is perfectly reasonable if you’re talking about a number of accounts, all of which share the lack of a certain feature being discussed – i.e. “The change password privilege is enabled on no accounts in this system”. But, if you’re trying to use the idiom, on no account should you ever say “on no accounts”, lest you be eyed with suspicion. — Jéioosh 09:02, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Naples 1545
Hi everyone, 2 kids, one from Naples ruling class, one from Venice merchant class, in the Naples of 1545. What languages do they speak? The Neapolitan speaks Nnapulitano, and Tuscan? (thanks to Dante?) and also Spanish? (thanks to Toledo?), while the Venetian speaks Venessian and Tuscan? Would they know Latin, or is it largely being phased out at this stage? What language would they write in? Would different social groups require different language spoken? Also, one last question, how similar are these languages to each other? Thanks to anyone who can help with this--BrendanD 05:07, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't know much else, but I think that the ruling class guy from Naples would know Latin. I'm pretty sure it was still a standard part of an upper class education well into the 1700's (and probably into the 1800's). The merchant probably wouldn't though, but I'm not as sure that he wouldn't as that the Neapolitan would. Linguofreak 01:55, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah, the good old days of Pedro Alvarez de Toledo. It sounds like the setting for a Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy. The merchant kid would most likely not know Latin, and I can't think of a convincing reason why either kid could be expected to speak Tuscan, unless they lived there for some time or something like that. Sufficient knowledge of Venetian to form a basis for communication seems actually more likely. If Bassanio managed to woo Portia without unsurmountable language barriers, surely your Tarzan and Jane can also find a way. --Lambiam Talk 03:29, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

But wasn't Tuscan dialect becoming established (thanks to Dante refusing to write in Latin)as the Lingua Franca (so to speak) prior to this time? I guess part of my question is 'how quickly did the use of Tuscan spread across the peninsula to become the unified Italian language that co-existed with dialects?--BrendanD 05:07, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I think around that time only among the cultural elite and then primarily as a literary language, for poetry and such. I don't know how old your kid from Napels is and what level of education may be expected – (s)he might also have been taught Spanish, Latin and perhaps French – but it would still remain a problem for your Venetian. --Lambiam Talk 09:38, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Word Choice
Good afternoon. I have a "plurality" question: Which is correct-headquarter levels or headquarters levels as headquarters should always be plural when used as a noun/adjective?Thank you for your quick reply as I am finalizing a memo at work.202.4.4.23 07:30, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Give the full sentence, please - the context is important. It should definitely be headquarters, but it might actually be level rather than levels. --Richardrj 08:17, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much for that bit of education. I have finalized it under my time constraint but the boss came back to me with the question. Both of us are second langugage users of English. The full sentence is: There should be coordination between the branch offices rather than a fair amount of exchange of communications at headquarter levels. (There are two company headquarters involved) He argued that headquarters should always be plural but I felt that this was used as an adjective, instead of as a noun. Pls. let me know. TY
 * I would put 'headquarters level'. Headquarters here is not really plural - it's just a word that happens to end in 's' (derived from 'quarters', meaning a place where one is quartered or stationed).  And it should be level not levels.  The fact that there are two headquarters doesn't matter - 'level' is used as a general, descriptive term. --Richardrj 09:20, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * totally agree.--K.C. Tang 09:26, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

French wiktionary
I've been trying to figure out how the French Wiktionary got to overtake five other wiktionaries within the space of a few months, and now has more articles than the English version with a fraction of the number of editors. It's quite an achievement, but how did they do it? Was one particular group of people responsible?--Shantavira 08:47, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I hope not the same way as the French Wikiquote :( — And there we're being overtaken by ... Oh noo! --Lambiam Talk  09:44, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well they always did haff vays off making people talk. --Shantavira 11:36, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Now, enough with the anti-German sentiment, already. 惑乱 分からん 12:26, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * As I understand it, they got permission to use the whole 1932 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, and are now in the process of merging the 1932 articles with previously existing ones. --Cam 14:50, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Here is a page with the legal details (in French). --Cam 15:01, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * As well as the Académie française, they (specifically Wikt:fr:User:Lmaltier and Wiktionary:fr:User:PiedBot) have had loads of automatic (often incomplete and misleading) uploads from other languages. Also, there is a bot at work which, when one word is translated into another language, those translations are given an entry in there own right. See Maroc for an example of this. --Dangherous 20:27, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm Lmaltier, and I am not a bot... I created many pages on country names, 100 % manually. There has never been a systematic policy to create a page for each translation, although I did it for country names. Lmaltier (talk) 09:50, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

grammar
I have a cow. My have a cow. I know the second sentence is incorrect. Now please explain what is the grammatical mistake ?
 * The word 'my' is wrong here. It indicates possession of something, and it needs to be followed by a noun to say what it is that you are possessing. --Richardrj 12:55, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * My cow-having? Don't have a cow, man! 惑乱 分からん 14:29, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Taking a look at English personal pronouns might be a good idea. — Gareth Hughes 15:12, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll try to give an explanation that an English learner could understand. It all has to do with the basic structure of English: Subject -> Verb -> Object (SVO).
 * I (subject) have (verb) a cow (object).
 * "My" can not serve as a subject by itself, because it must possess something, e.g. "My cow". Now you can use it as a subject:
 * My cow (subject) has (verb) a baby (object).
 * Simply speaking, "My have" is incorrect because "My" lacks a possessed noun, as Richardrj said above. freshofftheufo  ΓΛĿЌ  18:03, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Intense Questions

 * What would it be like if normal written English was replaced by the IPA? I've considered that, although there are many more symbols than English, they are entirely predictable. Do you think it would be easier to learn to write/read? Would spellings of words not be required to be commited to memory ? Would writing be inherently slower? Would keyboards be impractical? Let it be known that I am not very familiar with the IPA.


 * Why not peruse a copy of the Maître Phonétique in your local University library, and form your own opinion on the matter? AnonMoos 16:36, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't it depend on your accent? If you had english translated to IPA by a geordie, you wouldn't understand a word. Philc  TECI 23:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, that would maybe save us all from some PC constraints. Right now you could be accused of many things that you wouldn't appreciate if you were to change the spelling of a word to preserve some particular accents. -LambaJan 19:32, 21 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Is there a prefix to mark a thing's existence as a particular noun uncertain, due to lack of knowledge? Ideally it would be similar to "pseudo", but not definitely false. Example: "To the north you will find the ???-volcano", where "???" is the prefix and it is suspected but not fully known that the mountain being reffered to actually is volcanic.


 * "Faux" is sometimes used, but "Pseudo-" is already pretty pejorative in most contexts... AnonMoos 16:36, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd call it a suspected volcano, at least until you get splashed on the face with lava. :-) StuRat 18:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, in some languages, particularly native American languages, a speaker's attitude towards the truth or reality of a phenomenon is registered with a morpheme, called an evidential. As an example of an evidential in English is one use of like. He was like really stupid. is equivalent to saying He was what i might call really stupid. I'm like the only linguist I know who has come to that conclusion about like. I I haven't published anything on it. mnewmanqc


 * "Apparent", as in that cause of so many deaths the "apparent heart attack". &mdash;User:Tamfang, 22:02, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Another word is "putative" (commonly put forth or accepted as true on inconclusive grounds). -- Cat Whisperer 16:03, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Is there a word for an insincerely offered favour? An example could be: after a social event, offering to help wash dishes when you truly hope the host to refuse.

Help appreciated. Woodenbeam 14:50, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Pass; no, but there is the word 'putative'; no, but there is the phrase 'token gesture'. HenryFlower 15:01, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * On the IPA-for-English front: this isn't what IPA is designed to do. It is designed to represent the sounds of the world's many languages, and can do this at a number of different levels of complexity. A phonetic script for English (do we have English spelling reform?) would merely have to represent the distinct phonemes of the language without having to distinguish between allophones (we seem to be quite happy with &lt;th&gt; representing both [θ] and [ð]. On the other front: it could be a Grrek gift, with reference to the Trojan horse. — Gareth Hughes 15:08, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * And [θ] and [ð] are even separate phonemes, not allophones. But the contrast between them does have a low functional load. User:Angr 15:52, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * It would also depend on how narrow the transcription would be. Are you going to be so narrow that every dialect is different?  Would we only transcribe one dialect?  If we picked American English, would we write  and  or would we write  or .  Also, derivational word pairs like vagina and vaginal have completely different vowels in them but are spelled the same.  That might make for more confusion.  However, if a human being can learn to write Chinese, writing IPA will be no trouble. AEuSoes1 20:32, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * It's not a given that spelling should reflect pronunciation. The vagina/vaginal example is a good illustration of the fact that spelling is often not just phonemic but morphophonemic. You can't emphasize phonetic information without losing the sense of morphological connectedness.  &middot; rodii &middot;  22:33, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * There is an essential difference between phonemes and phones that tends to get overlooked in these discussions. IPA is meant to represent phones, not phonemes. It would make perfect sense (to me) if there was a standard representation for the phonemes of the English language. Wikipedia is seriously confused about this. For example, the article English phonology, section Phonemes, states: See IPA chart for English for concise and International Phonetic Alphabet for English for more detailed charts of the English phonemes. This is wrong. These charts don't show phonemes. --Lambiam Talk 20:38, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * True, but the same symbols are used. /θ/ instead of [θ], [tθ], and dental [t], all (sociolinguistic) variants of the same phoneme. mnewmanqc


 * I'm not sure what you're talking about, Lambiam. IPA does a very good job of representing phonemes.  That's why /phonemic slashes/ are an IPA standard.  What's a bit more difficult is getting the IPA to represent morphemes or archiphonemes.  Usually scholars modify IPA in an ad-hoc way to represent underspecified morphonemes.  AEuSoes1 22:40, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * If you know how an otherwise unkown word is pronounced in one dialect of English (you have a string of phones), you can make a reasonable guess how it will be pronounced in another dialect of English you are familiar with (you can transform that string into another string of phones). The question is: is there a common abstraction from which you can produce all these different phonetic realizations in different dialects by applying simple translation schemas? I contend that indeed there is. So, according to this idea, someone who wants to know how the word "hot" is pronounced in Yorkshire, first looks up the "common abstraction", and then subjects it to the Yorkshire translation. For New South Wales you apply the New South Wales translation schema to the same "common abstraction". To make this work across dialects you obviously need to distinguish phonemes that have coalesced in some dialects but not in others. And of course there are some genuine dialectal differences that can't be explained by different phonetic realizations of phonemes, but I maintain these are the exceptions that prove the rule. --Lambiam Talk 01:05, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm with Aeusoes here; I still don't understand why you say International Phonetic Alphabet for English and IPA chart for English don't show phonemes. Of course they do; they show them for three different dialects of English, in fact. But there is not one single set of phonemes that holds for all dialects of English. You can't say "here is the set of underlying phonemes for English, and all accents can be derived from it". You can come close to doing that for consonants (but still not perfectly), but for vowels you can't even come close to doing that. The different accents do have different underlying phoneme sets. User:Angr 05:16, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem with translation schemes is that words change what Labov has referred to as word classes, whose vowels are marked as variables in early Labovian notation between, sometimes. Egg can be pronounced with (ey) = or depending on dialect. Also, there are mergers that unite two different phonemes, such as the low back merger in the US that merges caught and cot so phonemes are not always the same across dialects. mnewmanqc


 * Thankyou everybody for giving me thinks to think about! As to the point of difficulty in dialect differences: Does anyone know If Maître Phonétique being (presumably) uniformly written as IPA in a specific dialect makes it difficult for speakers of other dialects to read it? I was thinking it would be possible, once fully capable with the IPA, to understand it as you would listening to a person with a different accent to your own. Failing that, a translation method might be great. And the "vaginal" example: The severance of useful links like this would be expensive to learning, maybe even daily comprehension. I don't know how to determine whether this would cause more trouble than unintuitive spellings. Woodenbeam 05:38, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * The problem with trying to get an English orthography that works for all dialects is that you have to go back so far into the history of the language to get anything close to "the" set of underlying phonemes that you end up with an orthography that's as bad as what we have now. The current system works pretty well across dialects, but is really hard to learn. This seems to be the trade-off in a written language. On one end you have an orthography where you can know exactly what an inscription is supposed to sound like when spoken, but where you can't tell what it means unless you understand the spoken language the writer spoke. On the other end you have orthographies like Chinese where the meaning is transcribed very well, but you can't know what it's supposed to sound like when spoken unless you know which dialect or language the writer spoke. Linguofreak 06:36, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I think it's clear if English were ever to have a "phonemic spelling", there would have to be different spellings for each major dialect. Ancient Greek did this; Aeolic, Doric, Attic, and Ionic Greek weren't spelled the same, because they weren't pronounced the same (and if they had been spelled the same, we'd never know there even were different dialects!). If English spelling were changed so that, say, the vowel of "thought" was spelled ô, the vowel of "lot" spelled o, and the vowel of "father" ä (or whatever), then Brits and Australians would spell "dog" dog, but Canadians and western Americans would spell it däg, while eastern Americans would spell it dôg. It probably wouldn't significantly worsen mutually intelligibility. User:Angr 07:35, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I doubt western Americans would spell "dog" däg. Rather, they'd keep "dog" as dog, and spell "father" as fodher (or whatever). --Ptcamn 08:35, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The differences between Aeolic, Doric and Attic are much more than differences in pronunciation. They are mutually at least as different as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. To find the common ground between British, American and Australian English you don't have to go very far. I did mention the fact that if one dialect merges some phonemes but another does not, you have to keep them separate in the common abstraction. But the translation giving rise to the merger is entirely consistent. It is not as if you have the merger for some words but not for other words. For the rest, the heart of the issue is somewhat similar to the distinction between graphemes and their realizations as glyphs in typefaces. What I propose is analogous to Unicode, where IPA is analogous to a collection of (codes for) glyphs. In most contexts you can point at a list of letter shapes and pretend they are graphemes. It is problematic for "l" and "I". Here we have a "merger" in some fonts but not in others. That does not mean we must give up the idea of a typeface-independent representation as graphemes. --Lambiam Talk 10:17, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * But there are splits and mergers that affect only some words and not others. In American English, class and mass rhyme; in RP they don't. In RP, cloth and Goth rhyme; for many non-cot/caught-merging Americans, they don't. In RP bath and dance have the same vowel (and, at least at the phonemic level, they do for many Americans too), but not in Australian English. In almost all accents of English, can the noun (metal container) and can the auxiliary verb (in its strong pronunciation) are identical, but for many people in the Philadelphia/New York area they're different. Most Brits use the "father" vowel in banana and the "trap" vowel in pasta, while most Americans do the opposite. And of course we can't forget tomayto-tomahto. And so on. Coming up with a new symbol for every instance like this would quickly get out of hand. User:Angr 11:11, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Its simply not the case that there is an underlying vowel-system which dialect-speakers could add their own modifications to in a predictable fashion. The permutations of what rhymes with what are not uniform. As Angr says, "class" and "father" have the same vowel for me, but they dont for Americans, for whom "class" rhymes with "mass". Whatever two symbols you invented for those two sounds, the word "class" would end up being spelt differently in the two countries.
 * BTW, the second vowel in vagina/vaginal are identical for many (most?) British speakers. Jameswilson 22:47, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Adeste fideles
In the carol Adeste fideles, what does "adeste" mean? It's translated into English as "come", but come is "venite". For some reason, I have a niggling that it might be cognate with "attest", but I could be totally wrong. And by the way, what's "laeti"? User:Zoe|(talk) 23:36, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Adeste is the imperative plural of adesse "to be present". So a somewhat mundane translation is "Make sure to be there". Laeti is the nominative plural of laetus "happy", "rejoycing". (It could also be genitive singular.) --Lambiam Talk 00:37, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. User:Zoe|(talk) 01:45, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * "Attest" is from the verb attestari, by the way. --  THE GREAT GAVINI  {T|C| # } 15:06, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Mimesis
In nature, an animal is called a 'mimic' when it evolves to resemble its prey, its predators, or its surroundings - but is there a related general term for the things that are mimicked? If the animal is the 'mimicker' (sic), what is the word for the 'mimickee'? I'm probably approaching this problem from the wrong direction, but I'd appreciate any help. Adambrowne666 23:51, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The word you're looking for might be 'model' or 'model species'.Sluzzelin 01:12, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know if there is a correct word in biology but you could try exemplar, archetype, prototype or original. MeltBanana  01:18, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks; both useful answers - nice to have some alternatives. Adambrowne666 01:33, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The term is "mimicry." (Sorry, confused)— [  Mac Davis ] (talk)