Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 July 15

= July 15 =

Speed climbing
What is "ethic": in lead?174.3.103.39 (talk) 00:32, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * An approach to rock climbing, with regards to which methods and equipment are permissable and which are not. For example, Sport climbing is different from trad climbing, and it would be silly to compare climb times between the two. Algebraist 00:56, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Magyar
Does anyone know what Ungaricae is?174.3.103.39 (talk) 09:31, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * "ungaricus" seems to be a variant of "hungaricus", meaning Hungarian; "ungaricae" is the feminine singular genitive form. I see a lot of references to "rex ungaricus" (king of Hungary) in texts online. --193.172.19.20 (talk) 10:00, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm Hungarian, and I can confirm that Ungaricae means Hungarian. --Ashenai (talk) 11:04, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Language
God morning if you please help me because i'm Portuguese and I want the WIKIPEDIA in Portuguese.

What can I do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Orquideas (talk • contribs) 11:57, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Here. Algebraist 12:00, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

"Whom" after "Which": would that be legitimate?
is no doubt a legitimate sentence. However, how about: Would this be a legitimate sentence? HOOTmag (talk) 12:04, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * "The country, of which the people - whom I love so much - are black, is Kenya".
 * "The country, the people of which - whom I love so much - are black, is Kenya".
 * I don't know quite what you mean by "legitimate", but I would never write either of those sentences, with their mangled syntax and unclear meaning. --Richardrj talkemail 12:09, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * "Legitimate", i.e. legal and permissible.
 * "Unclear meaning"? my very question is whether the second sentence really means what the first one does, while the first one is very clear, isn't it? Every part of the first sentence is clear, so why shouldn't the whole sentence be clear? "whom" and "are" refer to the "people", "which" and "is" refer the "the country", so what's unclear?
 * "Mangled syntax"? the second sentence may really have a mangled syntax, or may not, and this is exactly what my very question was about: does the second sentence have a legal permissible syntax. However, what's wrong with the first sentence? "whom" and "are" refer to the "people", "which" and "is" refer the "the country", so what's mangled?
 * HOOTmag (talk) 13:03, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It's a simple declarative sentence (fine), with a complete non sequitur phrase embedded in it (OK, I guess), with another complete non sequitur embedded in that. At that point, it becomes mangled. Algebraist 13:08, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about the first sentence, or the second one, or both?
 * Ok, "mangled", but is it legal? permissible? Is there any connection between "mangledness" and legality/permissibility?
 * HOOTmag (talk) 13:17, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by "legal"? I wouldn't sue anyone for using that sentence, but I might shout at them. Algebraist 13:23, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Legal, i.e. correctly constructed, i.e. obeys the formal syntactical/grammatical rules. For example, "For went am you mountain", is illegal (doesn't obey etc.), while "you've been climbing up the mountain" is definitely legal (since it obeys etc.).
 * Back to the two original sentences (appearing at the beginning of the thread), does the first sentence obey the formal syntactical rules? If it does, how about the second sentence?
 * HOOTmag (talk) 13:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * If by "legal" you mean grammatical, yes, it is. But it's difficult to parse and so cannot be recommended for any purpose in which you do not wish to alienate your readers. +Angr 13:34, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about the first sentence, or the second one, or both? HOOTmag (talk) 13:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * The second one, the one you asked about. The first one is also grammatical, and is somewhat easier to parse than the second. Easier still (to tie in with the discussion above) would be "The country, whose people - whom I love so much - are black, is Kenya". But even that is not particularly easy to parse quickly - listeners often get lost when you start embedding relative clauses inside relative clauses - so for both aesthetic and pragmatic reasons it would be preferable to recast the sentence so as to avoid the relative clause sandwich. But syntactically all of them are okay. +Angr 13:59, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Cheers, this is the kind of response I've been awaiting! So, although the second sentence is uneasy to comprehend (as I've always known), it's still correct, as far as the grammar only is concerned. Thank you for your clear response.
 * So now I can conclude that "whom" can follow "which", as it appears in the sentence:
 * "The country, the people of which - whom I love so much - are black, is Kenya".
 * So now we can proceed towards the following question: How about the grammaticality of:
 * "The country, the mountains of which - which I like so much - are high, is Nepal".
 * Would that still be grammatical when one changes "people...whom..." into "mountains... which...", thus having "which" after "which"? Note that I'm asking just from a grammatical point of view, not from a practical point of view.
 * HOOTmag (talk) 14:19, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, from a purely syntactic point of view those sentences are grammatical too. +Angr 14:33, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry but I'm still having a hard time following your reasoning in this thread (and also in the one above, for that matter). As Angr says, sentences of this kind are difficult to parse – in fact, I would go further and say that they are practically unreadable.  Now, if you're looking for an answer to the question whether the sentence "The country, the people of which - whom I love so much - are black, is Kenya" is grammatical, I would say that I don't care whether it is or not, because no-one in their right mind would ever write a sentence like that.  --Richardrj talkemail 14:38, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, you may not care whether it is or not, but syntacticians don't care about whether anyone in their right mind would write such sentences or not; they care about whether the sentences can be assigned appropriate syntactic structure (e.g. by means of syntactic tree diagrams) without violating the grammatical rules of English. When you study linguistics in graduate school, you get accustomed to judging the grammaticality, and analyzing the structure, of sentences that are difficult to parse and that no real-world English speaker would ever utter. +Angr 14:50, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You represent my position remarkably. By the way, as a linguist - I know very well all of that matter of syntactic tree diagram (I use it when I programme software for translating texts mechanically from one language into another), yet my mother tongue is not English, and hence my questions arise.
 * Anyways, I think that it's an important discovery: The English grammar (per se) allows to use "double which"! that's interesting - or even amazing, isn't it?
 * HOOTmag (talk) 15:22, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think that that is interesting. :D +Angr 15:29, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, the "double that" is a well-known phenonemon. However, my new discovery (thanx to the information you've supplied in response to my questions) is that also the "double which" is syntactically premitted. Wow, I like that! HOOTmag (talk) 15:35, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) I could--could I not?--not to be overly pedantic in how I think--think that through the use of em-dashes to embed parenthetical thoughts in statements like--like I said once--"Once I lived by--by the way, I like saying this--this park whose grass was greeener than any"--any word may--"may" included as well--well be grammatically "doubled" in the way described above. Pfly (talk) 08:05, 16 July 2009 (UTC)


 * It's not surprising to find a lot of other examples involving double words. However, I'm sure you'll never be able to find examples of double "the", or double "am", etc. without using quotation marks (e.g. in the sentence: 'I think that "is" is an essential word', etc.). My original thought was that the word "which", too, belongs to this set of words like "the", "am", etc., but later I found a rare example of sintactical construction which does allow to use a "double which", this being the discovery I've talked about. HOOTmag (talk) 09:12, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about "the", but couldn't you say: "I am--am I not?--Pfly."? Pfly (talk) 09:16, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, you're right, so the word "am" should be removed from the set of "forbidden reduplication". Instead of "am", you can put "a", or any other word which can't end sentences (except for "which"). HOOTmag (talk) 09:30, 16 July 2009 (UTC)


 * But why would you spend time assembling a list of words that have an accidental property of no theoretical significance whatever? --ColinFine (talk) 23:46, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Latin adjective
Hey all. I'm trying to mirror the name "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (and related), just with the latinised adjective "Colcestriensis", which means "relating to Colchester". I've never seen the adjective in any other form (i.e. declined), but before I just make up something which sounds decent, I thought I'd ask whether there was a "correct" way of putting the two words together. Obviously, the word "Encyclopaedia" was never used by the Romans, and neither was "Colcestriensis" (they called the town Camulodunum), but I still wonder. Any help appreciated! If it helps, modern usage of the adjective: Alma Mater Colcestriensis, sodalitas Colcestriensis. - Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 12:57, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You want the feminine nominative singular of Colcestriensis, which is, astonishingly enough, Colcestriensis. Both of the examples you gave: Alma mater and sodalitas are also feminine singulars, so they take the same form of the adjective as encyclopaedia. And even if the Romans didn't use those words, Latin was still used into the Renaissance, so it's not as if we're just making the words up. P.S. Even in British spelling, the word in your sig is correctly spelled "humorous", not *"humourous". +Angr 13:06, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. And yes, using the obsolete spelling of humorous was entirely deliberate *cough* because I, er, wanted to, er... - Jarry1250 [ humorous – discuss ] 13:37, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * That's okay then. I have nothing against mispellings as long as their delibarate. +Angr 14:01, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I thought he was saying he had lots of the fluid kind of humours. Tempshill (talk) 19:47, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Your funny, Angr. im not sure I can match that.  Its not easy to create that affect unless youve had lots of practise.  :)  --  JackofOz (talk) 08:19, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Euro in Slovenian
Why can't *euro be a Slovenian word? --88.78.8.180 (talk) 14:58, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * See Linguistic issues concerning the euro. +Angr 15:43, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Christiano in Romance languages
Why can't *christiano be an Italian or Spanish word? --88.78.6.57 (talk) 20:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

In Italian the h after the c has the purpose to transform its sound from (english pronunciation) ch to (eng.pr.) k. But this works only when ch is before e and i. In italian: ca=ka, ce=che (not se), ci=chi/chee (not si/see), co=ko, cu=ku/koo, che=ke, chi=ki/kee. Cha, cho and chu (as written forms) simply doesn't exist in native words (if you want to convey the same sound you have to write cia=cha, cio=cho, ciu=chu/choo). Also, before consonants, c has always a k sound and it's never written as chr, chl... regardless of etimology (this is due to standardization of the Italian phonology which is particularly corrispondent to the written form), so the correct term is cristiano (n.b.: the same rules are valid also for the letter g)--151.51.27.138 (talk) 21:28, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * In Spanish, the combination /ch/ forms the digraph ch, consonantic sound that is only followed by vowels. By the way, the article ch incorrectly states that the digraph is no longer a letter. It is indeed one, though it is treated as a digraph for matters of collation. Must correct that. Pallida  Mors  04:57, 16 July 2009 (UTC)


 * It's interesting that Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara named one of her sons "Christian". Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 18:23, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Words that exist only in a phrase
Is there a grammatical name for words that exist only in a phrase? At the moment, I can't think of a good example. These phrases aren't idioms or cliches but instances where a word in English is never seen - written or spoken - unless accompanied by its companion word. In a sense, the two words really make one word. Cheers, Wassupwestcoast (talk) 21:49, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Fossil word might be what you're thinking of - the article gives some examples. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 22:25, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes! Thanks! Cheers, Wassupwestcoast (talk) 22:33, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Foot-strut and scottish
How does scottish english have the foot-strut split, when (as I understand it) it was an innovation in southern english english? Did it leapfrog over northern england somehow? Or did scottish and southern english english happen to undergo exactly the same change at a similar time? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.72.132.111 (talk) 23:25, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * For extended discussion of such issues, you can look at the semi-classic "Accents of English" series by J.C. Wells. However, you should be aware that there's a kind of a quasi-standard or "educated" Scottish pronunciation which is very different from traditional local Scottish dialects... AnonMoos (talk) 10:06, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

the Hindi equivalent of fie! or pah!
I'm writing an indian character who needs to make an utterance of disdain - is there an equivalent of 'fie!' in Hindi?

Thanks,

Adambrowne666 (talk) 23:29, 15 July 2009 (UTC)


 * 'थू'(thoo) may be used. 121.242.23.197 (talk) 07:42, 17 July 2009 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya


 * Great, just what I needed, thanks, Vineet. Adambrowne666 (talk) 23:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)