Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 January 10

= January 10 =

correct usage of want/wants in Spanish - querer or querremos?
In English, to verb "to want" has a somewhat odd usage (seems like, anyway - do any other verbs act like this?): the plural form (wants) in used in singular situations (I want a boat), while the singular form is used in plural situations (They want a boat).

So, my question is, is this rule the same in Spanish? In the sentence "The dictator wants a canal," for example, would the correct translation be "El dictador querer un canal" (singular) or "El dictador querremos un canal" (plural). Now, I realize that I'm probably making some horribly basic grammatical mistake here, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is and the one applicable-looking hit on google won't load. Please halp, thanks! --Cerebellum (talk) 02:15, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * In English, wants (like the -s form of almost all other verbs) is used in the present tense only as a third-person singular form ("He/she wants …"); want is used for the first-person singular ("I want") and second-person singular ("You want") and for all the plural persons. You seem to think that -s is a plural termination for verbs, as it is for nouns, which is not the case. In any event, Spanish has its own verb conjugations, and the third-person singular of querer (as in "The dictator wants …") is quiere; queremos (note spelling) is used only in the first-person plural ("We want …"). Deor (talk) 02:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, gotcha. Thanks very much!  --Cerebellum (talk) 03:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * "Querremos" (with r doubled) means "we will want". See querremos - Wiktionary.
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 05:40, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Short forms of names
What's the linguistic term for conventional short forms of names, like "Bill" for "William", or "Bob" for "Robert", or "Volodya" for "Vladimir"? I'm pretty sure there's a Wikipedia article on it, but I can't remember what the word is. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 06:19, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * See Hypocoristic. -- Wavelength (talk) 06:40, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you! That's the one. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 07:29, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Alveolar approximant in German
Does anyone have any reference to which German dialects use the alveolar approximant in speech, and in which positions the letter "r" is actually pronounced that way? (The article on en:wikipedia has no references, specifies no dialect, and gives the example Rebe). The German article doesn't even mention German dialects, but the German article on Shibboleth says that Germans in the upper Lausitz, Siegerland and Wetterau pronounce the letter "r" as an alveolar approximant [ɹ]: "Rahm" as [ɹaːm]. als:Alveolarer Approximant isn't referenced either. It also mentions the Siegerland and gives Franz Müntefering's speech as an example, and the article also says that younger speakers have replaced it with an uvular trill. In my ears Müntefering's alveolar approximants sound close but a bit different from the English or American approximants. If anyone has a reliable reference, I'd be very grateful. ---Sluzzelin talk  08:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, this Uni Stuttgart pdf file and this Uni Köln pdf file both mention the Siegerland with reference to Kohler, Klaus J. 1977. Einführung in die Phonetik des Deutschen Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, page 165 in the 1995 edition. I still wasn't able to find anything on alveolar approximants in the other regions mentioned above (Upper Lausitz in Saxony and Wetterau in Hesse. ---Sluzzelin talk  15:31, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Off hand I could not point to any German dialect that uses the "English r" although as you noted with Mr. Müntefering there are versions that get close. German "r" sounds tend to be a bit more toward the front and even the "throaty" versions involve more tongue action than e.g a U.S. one.  (Sorry no sources, strictly OR observation.) Check out audios at  -  -   -  Lisa4edit (talk) 15:42, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Lisa! I will check out the stations as soon as I have a chance (no audio currently). ---Sluzzelin talk  19:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

It's prominent in Herborn (that is, ['hɜɹ boːɹn]) - try the soundbites on this page from a village just south of Herborn. Having grown up there, I can also vouch for the Wetterau, but there it's more or less interchangeable with the trilled [r]. Check out de:Adam und die Micky's famous rendering of the Runkelroiweroppmaschin' (for the uninitiated: "Runkelrübenrupfmaschine"...) - to my ear the second /r/ (in "roiwe") is a [ɹ] in the first chorus, [r] in the second. Maybe Angr would care to transcribe the song...--Janneman (talk) 12:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you; Janneman! I enjoyed the soundbite aus dem kloane Döɹfche Höɹschböɹg, and the "English R" is very clear and distinct. Not sure I hear what you heard in the Runkelwoiroppmaschin' (though I heard something :). I guess there's no way around a library or bookstore in order to specify and reference the mentioning of German dialects in the article on alveolar approximant. ---Sluzzelin talk  18:02, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Is vs. was — is there a right answer?
At the Computing Reference Desk, I just wrote
 * In earlier versions [of the Python programming language], print is a statement that starts with the keyword print.

I hesitated a little before writing that, trying to decide whether to use the present tense or the past tense. In this case, the earlier versions of Python are still in active use and not necessarily considered superseded. I think the present tense can be justified by logic. However, a sentence like
 * In earlier ..., X is ...

sounds funny to me. My question is: Is my choice of using the present tense correct? Is there a single correct answer? And if not, what tense would you use? --98.114.98.136 (talk) 14:12, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The question you should ask yourself is whether you think the statement has relevance in the present compare:
 * This 18th century captain is known throughout the southern seas as a swashbuckling pirate. (You are relating a fact about people's knowledge now.)
 * This 18th century captain was known throughout the southern seas as a swashbuckling pirate. (You are telling us about a historic fact.) You could say this if people in the southern seas still think so, but this fact is not relevant to the point you are trying to make. You could also use this form if they changed their views/ no longer know this captain.
 * So "In earlier versions ...was a statement" could be read to mean that the print statement has meanwhile been changed, even for earlier versions.  For the case that you are focusing on past events, I'd use "used to be" here.
 * The form "in earlier versions ... is a statement" means that this fact still applies to all earlier versions you'll encounter today.Lisa4edit (talk) 16:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Another option is to say "was and is", indicating that this was both true in the past and remains true today. StuRat (talk) 08:21, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

latin question about cases and time
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their helpful answers to my previous question on Latin. I can't usually get back to the internet within the few days it takes for pages to get archived, or at least transcluded so they can't be edited. Thus, I have to thank people in advance, or belatedly, as here.

Secondly, I have another question that arose when I was reading the Vulgate, as thoughtfully linked by Wavelength. I've learnt that with time, you use the ablative for time when or within which, and the accusative for duration. All of the examples in Genesis 11 look like durations to me, so why are so many put in the ablative case? For example:

20 vixit autem Reu triginta duobus annis et genuit Sarug 21 vixitque Reu postquam genuit Sarug ducentis septem annis et genuit filios et filias 22 vixit vero Sarug triginta annis et genuit Nahor 23 vixitque Sarug postquam genuit Nahor ducentos annos et genuit filios et filias 24 vixit autem Nahor viginti novem annis et genuit Thare 25 vixitque Nahor postquam genuit Thare centum decem et novem annos et genuit filios et filias

Here, clearly enough, ducentis septem annis (v21) is ablative, as are most of the words relating to time. Yet this is not followed consistently, so centum decem et novem annos in verse 25, in the accusative. What's going on here? Thanks again in advance, It&#39;s been emotional (talk) 18:16, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I can't answer your question entirely, but I noticed in my translation of the Bible (The New American Bible), some of the translations with the ablative are for age, like v20: Reu was 30 years old when he became father to Sarug (more literally: Reu lived; at 30 years, he became father to Sarug). However, this explanation doesn't seem to work for v21 and others where it's not at an age but clearly a duration. Perhaps Adam Bishop will be by soon and clear this up more.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 20:00, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Ha, actually I avoided answering, in the hope that one of the other Latinists would have a better response. My first thought was, well, it's the Vulgate, and it often contains strange Latin characteristic of Late Antiquity. By then, the spoken and written languages probably already differed enough, and education was poor enough (due to the enormous social and political changes occurring at the time) that surviving texts can seem almost unintelligible. Some authors from the era, say Gregory of Tours or Augustine, are very difficult (to me, anyway). Vulgate Latin is actually quite easy but it's certainly not Classical; here I would expect the accusative, but despite the mix of accusative and ablative, it is still clear what the verses say, which is true for the Vulgate in general. Other possibilities: scribal errors (since the Vulgate as we know it was edited in the 16th century from the many thousands of ancient and medieval manuscripts with their many thousands of different readings); or a quirk of the original Hebrew which Jerome attempted to translate literally, as he often did (which is the source of many other strange un-Classical phrases). Adam Bishop (talk) 07:10, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a lot to all. For once I'm back in time, :P. Very interesting information, Adam, :) It&#39;s been emotional (talk) 17:18, 11 January 2009 (UTC)


 * My answering was delayed by my desire to provide the best answer that I could. Probably the best explanation for discrepancies in the Vulgate is simply multiple errors by Jerome and others.  I have seen numerous linguistic inconsistencies in the Vulgate.  You can find out more about this by reading Vulgate, and even more by following the links.
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 22:47, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Looking at Woodcock's "New Latin Syntax", p. 37, section 54, I find: "Nevertheless there are isolated examples, even in classical Latin, where the ablative seems to be encroaching on the function of the Accusative of Duration. [examples from Cicero and Caesar]. From the time of Livy onwards this use of the ablative becomes more frequent. [example from Livy where ablative alternates with accusative, both of duration, in the same sentence]. It is to be noticed, however, that the verb in all these examples is in a tense of completed action, so that the ablative may denote the limits within which the action was completed." This use in the vulgate seems to be a natural extension of the same, and the verb "vixit" is similar to Woodcock's examples of "praefuit" (Caesar), "ierunt" (Cicero), and "se gessit" (Livy). Similarly, Bennett's "New Latin Grammar" reports (section 230), "Occasionally the Ablative denotes duration of time." Gildersleeve and Lodge identify this situation as one of the time-within-which being extended "to cover both extremities", and says it's rare until the post-Augustan period. Tb (talk) 04:52, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

ancient greek and modern greek
Hi, I've done some research on this one, and gained a rough idea from the net, but I'm wondering if anyone can enlighten me further, especially with any personal experiences. How close is Ancient Greek (esp. the Attic dialect, which I think is roughly that of Plato and Aristotle, but not Homer) to Modern Greek? I'm wondering if a Greek person could read the archaic version after, say, a quick crash course in vocabulary and grammatical changes, or if it is more like confronting a foreign language armed with some familiarity. Is it possible to compare to how earlier versions of English sound to us, and if so, what would be the approximate equivalent for a native English speaker - what stage of our historical language would present the same difficulty? I know this is complicated by the fact that most Greek people study Ancient Greek in school, so I'm wondering roughly how things go without the benefit of this. Thanks again, It&#39;s been emotional (talk) 18:41, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I can't answer you directly, but when I learned Greek at school 30 years ago, my teacher told the following story about himself: he decided to spend the summer in Greece after finishing his degree course, and so flew to Athens from where he was going to explore the country. So he went down to the port and asked someone whom he presumed to be a local, what time the next ferry was. Said "local" then said to him "you're English, right?" And somewhat taken aback, he answered in the affirmative. This "local" turned out to be a fellow Englishman who'd been in Greece a few years, and told him that he'd actually said "O Slave! What time does the galley set forth?". This gives a bit of a flavour of the difference. At a guess it would be like speaking in Shakesperian English in today's London. --TammyMoet (talk) 18:49, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Continuing from what TammyMoet already said, a Latin teacher who also taught Ancient Greek told me that the difference between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek is like the difference between Latin and Italian, so significantly different. Just breezing through the Ancient and Modern Greek WP articles, I noticed that Modern Greek lacks the phonemic long vowels that Ancient Greek had, which alone would make them a little hard to mutual understand (if that were the only difference), and that's just a single example.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 19:39, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

One factor is that orthographic continuity masks some fairly radical phonological changes (as is also the case with some other languages, such as Icelandic). Ancient Greek words which have been carried over into modern Greek are written with the same letters, but they're often pronounced quite differently -- the word for short would have been [brakʰüs] in ancient Greek, but is [vraxis] in modern Greek, and both are spelled βραχυς. There are a lot of other changes between ancient and modern Greek (elimination of the dative case, simplification of verb conjugations, vocabulary replacements, etc.), but there's still significant commonality. AnonMoos (talk) 23:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * People I've known who've studied both Ancient and Modern Greek have also suggested the Latin/Italian analogy to me. Certainly Latin and Italian are not at all mutually intelligible.  Maybe an Italian without any prior exposure would get a vague sense of the meaning of Latin, but I doubt that there would be real comprehension.  As for the analogy to historical predecessors of Modern English, my guess would be some form of Middle English, probably an earlier form than Chaucer, since Chaucerian English has already lost Old English case and gender, whereas Ancient Greek preserved case endings and other inflections lost in Modern Greek.  Marco polo (talk) 04:36, 11 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Italian and modern English have completely eliminated all true noun case inflection, while modern Greek retains three cases (nominative, accusative, genitive), etc. The similarity between ancient and modern Greek shouldn't be exaggerated, but I think that a modern Greek could approach the ca. 100 A.D. Greek New Testament with a greater chance of some degree of basic comprehension than a modern English speaker could approach an Old English text of ca. 800 A.D. (when the earliest substantial connected English-language texts begin to be attested) -- though part of this limited comprehensibility would be due to conservative orthography covering up sound changes, as explained above. AnonMoos (talk) 09:09, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Totally interesting stuff, folks! It&#39;s been emotional (talk) 17:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll come at the question from the other direction -- I don't know Modern Greek at all, but can read Ancient Greek moderately well. I tried looking at the Wikipedia front page in (Dhimotiki) Modern Greek and found that I can get a sort of gist of what is being said, albeit in part because much of the vocabulary (names, events, and such) is cognate with English rather than Ancient Greek. A fair bit of the grammar appears to have changed, though, and I can't really follow sentence structures. I ran across an older text in Katharevousa Greek some time ago and found that a good deal more comprehensible; though I didn't know the vocabulary, the grammatical and syntactic structures looked familiar.
 * After having read Ancient Greek for many years I eventually got some one-to-one tuition in the modern language. My tutor, a Greek, was a very educated man with a very formal approach to grammar, and had studied Ancient Greek at school. But he was completely unable to read any passage of Ancient Greek that I placed in front of him - and I didn't try anything ambitious such as Homer, just 4th Century Attic and the New Testament. Moreover he flatly refused to believe my account of basic grammatical rules (would not believe, for example, that in Ancient Greek a neuter plural noun takes a singular verb). Going back much further to when I was first learning Greek, during my gap year I travelled in Greece and was on a train reading Thucydides. With typical Greek curiosity my co-travellers all pored over the book and could make absolutely nothing of it. My own experience suggests that a knowledge of Ancient Greek enables one to get more quickly into the modern language, in that the alphabet (even allowing for pronunciation changes) and vocabulary is very familiar. But the basic grammatical structure is completely transformed, and a modern Greek would be baffled in particular by the verb structure of Ancient Greek, which has a richness and subtlety that in the modern language has given way to smoothness and flexibility (the ubiquitous use of na and tha has replaced an entirely different structure). Even in Chaucer's English, which is as far back as I can go, the basic structure of the language, and most of the vocab, is recognisable to a modern reader, but this is not the case for a modern Greek looking at, say, Plato or the Koine.Maid Marion (talk) 16:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * If a neuter plural noun doesn't take a singular verb, how would he explain panta rhei? [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 18:20, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Good point AnonMoos - I wish I had thought to ask him!Maid Marion (talk) 08:40, 13 January 2009 (UTC)