Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 September 22

= September 22 =

Referring to countries/cities as "she"
I've just finished reading an excellent book: "The American Commonwealth" (2 volumes), written by the British jurist Viscount James Bryce, and published in 1888. In vol. 1, chapter 36, the author writes (about Switzerland): "she is a small country...". At the end of Chapter 3, footnote no. 15, he writes: "New York was reckoned among the smaller states...but her central geographical position made her adhesion extremely important". And see also in CNN website: "the way USA determines the means to protect her borders".

Is this usage common? where/which english dialects? HOOTmag (talk) 07:50, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * It's archaic and would not be used in English today. You often hear people referring to boats and ships as "she", but not cities or countries. --Richardrj talkemail 07:55, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * (ec) I don't believe this is common anymore. You only see it in "motherland" sort of contexts (and note that the poster on that CNN page is posting ultra-patriotic stuff, which fits that). Neither of the two Bryce usages would be said today (or, at least, they would raise eyebrows). And note that in the CNN page, saying "to protect its borders" would be just as acceptable; if anything, "her borders" is the marked form. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 07:56, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * John Howard quite often used female pronouns in reference to Australia during his career. Some thought this was further evidence that he was stuck in the 1950s.  Others liked it.  --  JackofOz (talk) 08:21, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * National personification. --Pykk (talk) 13:59, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * This usage is probably no more common in any regional dialect of English than in others. The usage is a stylistic variation possible (but uncommon today) in all regional dialects of English.  Marco polo (talk) 14:11, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It's maybe not quite archaic, but certainly old-fashioned, poetic. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 14:31, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * According to H W Fowler, the feminine should be used if the country is actively personified ("France has decided to withdraw her ministers from the conference", cf "The French Government has decided to withdraw its ministers from the conference"), but not when it's merely referred to ("France has an area of 674000 km2; its border with Spain is 623 km long..."). Tevildo (talk) 19:12, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * In the OP's CNN example, "her" is correct (well, more arguable-for) because of the personification involved in "determines". Fowler would not have approved of the Bryce examples (he didn't approve of the way in which many authors wrote, Marie Corelli in particular). :) Tevildo (talk) 19:16, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * A current question on another desk reminds me that female figures are usually used as personifications of nations, e.g. Lady Liberty, and those bare-breasted hussies Britannica and La Marianne. It's no great distance from there to female pronouns.  The French word "patrie", meaning fatherland, is of feminine gender.  --  JackofOz (talk) 20:15, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * So might it actually mean "motherland"? :-) 87.81.230.195 (talk) 00:22, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, "patrie" is related to Latin pater (father). And grammatical gender has little bearing on meaning. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 00:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * It's feminine in Latin too (patria). Adam Bishop (talk)
 * But my point is, whether it's grammatically feminine or masculine has nearly no bearing on what the word actually means. Grammatical gender in the Romance languages is almost entirely arbitrary. (For instance, French la poste [the post office] vs. le poste [the job, the position]&mdash;positions aren't inherently more manly than post offices.) r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 02:35, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I know all this. My comment was a failed attempt to be humorous, hence the closing smiley. However, one cannot help wondering whether, in such instances (or their inverse), there is any subconscious cognitive clash or emotional modification resulting from the contradiction between an overtly masculine/feminine word and its contrasting grammatical femininity/masculinity. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 19:36, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * That could be turned into an interesting EEG experiment by watching the left anterior negativity or N400 brain responses. Somewhat similar experiments have been done with, for example, pronoun references to nouns that are societally predisposed towards being male or female (for example, having an American subject read a paragraph that talks about "the doctor", "the doctor", "the doctor", and then later see the doctor referred to with the pronoun 'she'... even in the most educated, open-minded of subjects often show a "surprised" LAN response like what you would generally see for gender disagreement&mdash;suggesting we have deep-seated, unconscious gender stereotyping without even realizing it). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 14:04, 26 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I have seen a bande dessinée (possibly Achille Talon) in which a foreign character says something about ma mère patrie, i.e. 'my mother the fatherland'; so at least 87 isn't the first to find a feminine patrie funny. —Tamfang (talk) 04:57, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

IPA Transcription
Hi. I need a little help with IPA. Could anyone turn: "The coming week will feature ball lighting, skin lesions, and a runaway gasoline truck. Then things will get ugly," into symbols? 141.161.133.154 (talk) 14:55, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Please do your own homework there at Georgetown University. +Angr 15:03, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Also keep in mind that the transcription will vary slightly depending on your regional accent. IPA chart for English dialects should be very helpful to you. -Elmer Clark (talk) 18:32, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm impressed by the precision of your local clairvoyant, and terrified by what this implies about your local environment. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 00:19, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, not a clairvoyant but somebody who knows which buttons to click to geolocate the poster. Click on poster's ID, this will take you to their contributions page. Then look right at the bottom of that page and click on 'Geolocate', it will not always identify with such precision. It does not work if the poster is properly logged in. 86.4.186.107 (talk) 07:24, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty sure 87.81 was referring to the OP's alleged prediction for the coming week's events, not your Angr+'s ability to run an IP traceroute.218.25.32.210 (talk) 08:48, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Correct, 218. If the latter, I would have further indented and placed the comment immediately after +Angr's. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 19:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

13-letter words
i need all words in english language with 13letters —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.193.197.5 (talk • contribs) 15:05, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

First get yourself a big piece of paper and a pen and go to this site,, click on the box for thirteen lettered words (don't fill in any boxes)and you will get a list of many hundreds - and in alphabetical order! Richard Avery (talk) 15:39, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Doing that does also give you some phrases that are 13 characters (including spaces) long, such as "a_question_of", but you can ignore such results. +Angr 15:45, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The last one-word entry is zygodactylous, but what does the first listed word, abastardizing, mean? ---Sluzzelin talk  15:58, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Probably derived from bastard: e.g. parents who abastardize their children, and the like. HOOTmag (talk) 16:07, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * sorry, google was set to "pages from Switzerland" and did not match any documents... found it now. ---Sluzzelin talk  16:14, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you sure that "the first listed word" there is abastardizing and that the "last one-word" there is zygodactylous? Just if you consider 13 letter words only. Generally, the first word there (excluding acronyms) is aah, and the last word there (excluding acronyms) is zyxst. HOOTmag (talk) 16:33, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Those aren't 13-letter words. +Angr 16:52, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * You've just repeated what I've just written (see my second sentence above). HOOTmag (talk) 17:05, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Aaaaaaaaaaaah would qualify. :) →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 16:59, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * FWIW the first and last in my OED are abdominoscopy and zymogluconate. There are about 10,000 listed there, but that includes compounds.--Shantavira|feed me 17:08, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * (@HOOTmag: I was talking about words within the frame of this question and its first two answers. I.e., all 13-letter words in Richard Avery's database. not shorter or longer words, not words in other languages, not words stored in other databases. ---Sluzzelin talk  17:16, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Get a list of words you find acceptable, get grep for Windows, or find someone to run this in bash: cat wordlist | grep -i '^[A-Z]\{13\}$'

let me know if you want to tweak it. Shadowjams (talk) 07:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah. Before seeing that, I did

grep "^.............$" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
 * and got 14937. (I can never remember how that \{n\} syntax goes.) —Tamfang (talk) 05:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)