Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 August 11

= August 11 =

Polish Tenses
My friend was telling me, he is Polish, that in Polish they have 4 tenses, past, present, future and future-future. I do not understand this, acn some one shed more light on this for me, my friend said that he was unable to explain it to me as it is needed in Polish speach, and without speaking Polish it is difficult, and has no equivalent in English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.172.58.82 (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * There's no such thing in Polish. Perhaps he meant czas zaprzeszły, or the pluperfect tense, used to refer to an event that has been completed before another past action (so it's more "past past" than "future future"). It is, regrettably, rarely used in everyday speech. — Kpalion(talk) 17:45, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * English does have a Future-Future tense:


 * Simple Future: He's 18, and has just started his studies at the university. He is going to get his B.A. within 3 years.
 * Future-Future: When I'm 18 I will be going to get my B.A. within 3 years.


 * HOOTmag (talk) 18:01, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Polish has no equivalent of the going-to future tense. There's only one future tense in Polish (czas przyszły), although formed differently for perfective and imperfective verbs. — Kpalion(talk) 18:14, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

title of German mathematical paper
Tarski's undefinability theorem refers to "Einige metamathematische Resultate über Entscheidungsdefinitheit und Widerspruchsfreiheit", Akd. der Wiss. in Wien, 1930, by Kurt Gödel. Can someone with a mathematical background please translate that title to English? Thanks. 67.117.147.249 (talk) 18:16, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The English title seems to be "Some Metamathematical Results on Completeness and Consistency". The translator was the late Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, a German born American mathematician, conductor and lawyer who also translated some papers by John von Neumann.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 18:40, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * As Martin Davis puts it in his review (JSL 55 (1990), no. 1, 342–343): The translator chose to translate the difficult “Entscheidungsdefinitheit” as “completeness.” Certainly the notion is precisely what today is called the completeness of a theory. Gödel presumably had a reason, however, at the time he wrote, for avoiding the term “Vollständigkeit” which is the proper German for “completeness”; probably it was to distinguish this sense from that in his dissertation. An alternative would have been “decidability”; but that translation also has its difficulties. — Emil J. 14:22, 12 August 2009 (UTC)