Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 July 1

= July 1 =

most run-on letters?
Hey, I'm trying to think of a word ("real-life" or composed of roots) with the most run-on letters, that is, the longest stretch of the same letters in a single word.

The best I've got is Zoo-ontology, though is suppose it doesn't really count, seeing as it's hyphenated. What's the best you guys (real lexi-nerds, I imagine) can come up with? Riffraffselbow (talk) 02:47, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Addendum: Let me qualify this by ruling out onomatopoeias of the "stick letters together" form. Let's really not go there. It makes me sleepy... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Riffraffselbow (talk) 02:56, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Here are some triple- and even quadruple-letter sequences, with some qualifications. --  202.142.129.66 (talk) 03:26, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * According to this, Estonian has the words jäääär, kuuuurija, töööö. All of those are compound words: jää, "ice" + äär, "edge" → jäääär, "edge of ice"; kuu, "moon" + uurija, "explorer" → kuuuurija, "explorer of the Moon"; töö, "work" + öö, "night" → töööö, "night shift". --Магьосник (talk) 03:57, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * This is one of our recurring questions, so I'm giving my recurring answer. The Manx word for "will eat" is eeee, which isn't even a compound. It's just a verbal stem ee- "to eat" with the suffix -ee (cf. Scottish Gaelic ithidh, which means the same thing). To make it even more fun, Manx for "she will eat" is eeee ee. +Angr 12:50, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Ooh, and Manx for "she will eat it" (where "it" is something grammatically feminine) is eeee ee ee. +Angr 14:21, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you sure that's not the sound made by something that a Manx is about to eat? Ghmyrtle (talk) 16:22, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Quite sure. No Manx cat could ever catch a dolphin. +Angr 17:01, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Eeek, that link has turned red. ---Sluzzelin talk  17:22, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Japanese has hoooo (鳳凰), though this might be considered unfair since it would more commonly be romanized hōō, and in Japanese phonetic characters it's written ほうおう. Japanese also has the well-known tongue twister すもももももももものうち, but that's several words, and も is "mo". -- BenRG (talk) 05:57, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Hard telling if this counts, but in The Road to Rio, Jerry Colonna was leading the cavalry and exhorted them to "Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:22, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * How about goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool in the words of a Latin American sports commentator? --Soman (talk) 02:40, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * That sort of nonsense was ruled out by the original poster, remember? --Anonymous, 03:51 UTC, July 2, 2010.


 * Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch has four consecutive "l"s (ells).—Wavelength (talk) 02:27, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh no it doesn't. It has two consecutive "double l"s.  The Welsh double l is not a doubling of single l, it's considered a different "letter" entirely, and would be counted as 1 letter, not 2. --  202.142.129.66 (talk) 03:40, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

This page may of interest. --Anonymous, 03:51 UTC, July 2, 2010.


 * Screw this, English is agglutinative - let's make our own!
 * Abraham Lincoln was the freeer of slaves. The slaves were the freeees of Lincoln. (free-er, and free-ee, a French-adopted "ée" now prevalent in English)
 * I've got a pimple with two pus-holes - one is oozing, the other is cooozing. (co-oozing)
 * We have discovered a giant aardvark. I shall call it... The Ultraaardvark!!!
 * The future of the mall's grand! The mall'll be the best ever! ('ll - "will" conjunction, a cheat)
 * And the grand finale...
 * There are too many callgirls advertised in the papers. What if we could discourage prostitution by sending people llamas instead? They'd be CALLLLAMAS!
 * Thank you, thank you, I will accept cash prizes. SamuelRiv (talk) 05:02, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * So, you're proposing to promote bestiality with llamas, are you? That gives the phrase "breakfast with beasts" a whole new meaning.  Somehow, I can't see the morals campaigners taking that one on, Samuel.  :)  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   07:15, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The use of Å in names could result in placenames such as Haaa, Blaaaasen, or Raaaaaaa. --Магьосник (talk) 20:43, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * But they maybe don't count, because in those cases the double a is not a doubling of a, but rather a romanisation of ‹å›. (The same matter as with Welsh, see 202.142's comment above.) --Магьосник (talk) 20:54, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The trouble with the above coinages is that English has a pretty strong prohibition against sequences of three or more instances of the same letter. Where such might occur, we either reduce it to two (as in fully not *fullly) or put in a hyphen (as in cross-section and cross-stitch, not *crosssection and *crossstitch). So an emancipator would be either a freer (already the comparative of the adjective free) or a free-er, not a *freeer, and a freedman would be a free-ee. A pus-hole could be co-oozing, not *cooozing. A giant aardvark would be an ultra-aardvark, not ultraaardvark, and llamas of the evening would be call-llamas, not *callllamas. And I will bet a silk pajama there isn't any three-l lllama. +Angr 18:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I was thinking of sequences of identical letters in words that are not compounds. Manx eeee, which has been cited above, is a wonderful one, because it has four consecutive e's. Romanian has the forms fiii, "the sons"; copiii, "the children"; geamgiii, "the glaziers"; etc. Also, if there is a Latin fourth-declension word whose stem ends with -u, its genitive plural form would end with -uuum. Does anyone know one? --Магьосник (talk) 19:09, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * My Latin is very rusty, but I doubt you'd ever find a triple u in a proper Latin word. The rule is to add -um, not -uum. Cornu (horn) is, from memory, a 4th declension word; its genitive plural is corn uu m, not corn uuu m.   --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   21:16, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * All fourth-declension words' stems end with -u (since the fourth declension is the u-stems), and the genitive plural simply adds -um to it to give -uum. And the Latin words that do have three u's in a row are standardized in modern spelling to uvu. For example uvula, which in theory would have been written VVVLA in Roman times, although the Oxford Latin Dictionary (which always uses u in lower case) spells it uuola, which most other dictionaries would spell uvola. +Angr 21:27, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I may not have been clear enough. I was meaning the root of the word, without that that changes for number and case. E.g. in manus what is always there in all forms is man-. Since it's a fourth-declension word, it receives an -uum ending to become a plural genitive, hence manuum, "of the hands". I can think of several second -declension words where the last letter of the stable part is a ‹u›. Let's take vacuus for instance. It consists of vacu- (root) and -us (singular nominative ending). But because it belongs to the second declension, in the plural genitive it gets the ending -orum to become vacuorum. If it belonged to the fourth declension instead, we would have vacu- + -uum → vacuuum for gen. pl.
 * As for cornu, it is one of the only three fourth-declension words that are grammatically neuter and therefore end with -u instead of -us in their base (i.e., nom. sg.) form, the other two being genu and gelu.
 * Please correct me if I'm talking nonsense. It's becoming late where I am. --Магьосник (talk) 21:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, without trying to sort out what "root" and "stem" mean with respect to Latin nouns (an issue on which historical linguists and Latin teachers disagree), we can say simply that there are no fourth declension nouns whose nominative singular ends in -uus (or -uu for neuters), so there are no nouns at risk of having a genitive plural in -uuum (or -uvum). +Angr 06:11, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Chechen alphabet
Why does the Chechen alphabet apparently use the Latin I, as shown in the table on Chechen language? It's especially strange since there's a Cyrillic version of the character, І, and all of the other letters are in Cyrillic. 70.162.12.102 (talk) 07:22, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * See Decimal I (Cyrillic). It existed in the original Cyrillic alphabet and is still used in several alphabets, not just Chechen . ---Sluzzelin talk  08:52, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, what Chechen has is not the Decimal I but the Palochka, which just happens to look the same. The difference is that palochka doesn't have distinct upper and lower case forms, and it's a purely diacritic letter, not a vowel (or even a consonant in its own right). +Angr 12:46, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Excellent catch. Sorry for misinforming. ---Sluzzelin talk  12:51, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * So the I and I in the table in Chechen language should be replaced with Ӏ and ӏ? Algebraist 13:28, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I guess so, in the Cyrillic table. The chart showing the Chechen Latin alphabet can stay as it is. I see from that article that I was mistaken in saying the palochka doesn't represent a consonant by itself; it does represent in Chechen when used alone. I also see from reading the article palochka more carefully a second time that the palochka does have a lower-case form, which was added to Unicode more recently than the capital form. (Incorrect statements above have been struck.) +Angr 13:50, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've replaced the Latin capital I's at Chechen language with the capital palochka. I didn't use the lowercase palochka because I don't know to what extent it's really used. The fact that Unicode didn't have it until several editions later than the capital palochka makes me suspect it isn't terribly common (just like Capital ß, which has a Unicode point but which you will almost never see in use in German). I checked the Chechen Wikipedia and they too use the Latin capital I in place of the official palochka. +Angr 14:13, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Etymology of Ælfwaru
At Template_talk:Did_you_know I am struggling to discover the etymology of Ælfwaru. Any help would be appreciated. --Senra (talk) 10:45, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Here it say that it means "Elf-protection", protection by an Elf.--151.51.61.119 (talk) 11:44, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Many thanks so --Senra (talk) 12:25, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, ælf does mean "elf" and waru does mean "protection" or "guard", but the conclusion from that that the name Ælfwaru means "protection by an elf" is probably not warranted. (Why not "protection from elves"?) Among the Germanic peoples, names were typically, or at least often, formed of two elements drawn from a limited stock of name parts, most of which were words in common use in the relevant languages (see our not-very-good article Germanic names and the article "Personal Names, Old English" here). Sometimes the combination of the elements seems to make some sort of sense, but often it doesn't. Although Ælf- is a common first element in Anglo-Saxon names, I think that few people who gave children those names were primarily thinking of elves, just as someone who names a girl Daisy today is probably not thinking primarily about flowers. Deor (talk) 12:38, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Very interesting and really information and useful. Much appreciated. Please look at the Ælfwaru article as it develops and also the Ælfwaru DYK discussion as it develops too! Not sure how this is going to end up but your input is helping, thank you. --Senra (talk) 13:57, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Another possible meaning would be "protector (guard) with elfish skills or powers". Marco polo (talk) 14:16, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Or something/someone that protects elves. +Angr 14:23, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Does anyone not think of daisies when naming their child Daisy? It may not be the most important reason for the name but not think of it at all? Protecting your child from the nasty baby-snatching elves would have been a thought in some parents' minds at least. See Changeling. Rmhermen (talk) 15:41, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I said "not thinking primarily". :-) With regard to Anglo-Saxon Ælf- names, I happened to notice last night that J. R. R. Tolkien was of my mind; in his instructions for translators of LoTR into other languages, he wrote that his use of "Elf-friend" was "suggested by Ælfwine, the English form of an old Germanic name (represented for instance in the Lombardic Alboin), though its analysable meaning was probably not recognized or thought significant by the many recorded bearers of the name Ælfwine in OE". Deor (talk) 16:32, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

French phonotactics
Are there any French words with nasal consonants in word-medial codas? --84.61.154.154 (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Mais certainement. +Angr 19:02, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Are there any French words with liquid consonants in codas of syllables containing a nasal vowel? --84.61.154.154 (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * branle, chambranle, genre, Manre. +Angr 19:08, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * That's our old troll friend from Essen. No such user (talk) 09:57, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Healthwashing
The term "Healthwashing" refers to such matters involving health such as listing unhealthy procedures under a label of healthy procedures as a means of whitewashing an unhealthy procedure which is unhealthy. I can not find a description or a discussion of this term in the Wikipedia. Is concept of "Healthwashing" above and beyond Wikipedia knowledge or comprehension? Decapage (talk) 22:19, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * More likely, the term is a neologism and articles about neologisms are very often deleted here at Wikipedia. See WP:NEOLOGISM.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:25, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * So then it is a matter of waiting for "Healthwashing" to appear in an "approved" dictionary before it can be included in a list of derivative or related terms to "whitewashing"? That seems in defiance of WP:Ignore unless the true purpose is to curtail awareness of a relevant application of the term "whitewashing". Decapage (talk) 01:39, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * It seems a little unreasonable to interpret the absence of a very newly coined word (one which I for one have never encountered before) in an encyclopaedia ongoingly compiled by entirely voluntary effort as a conspiracy to conceal knowledge. Since you're concerned about the matter, Decapage, what's stopping you adding some appropriately referenced text about "healthwashing" to the Greenwashing article. I would have suggested the Whitewashing article but I see that that article refers solely to a very particular (and in the current context inappropriate) meaning of the term rather than its more general one. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 05:25, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * As a matter of fact a colleague came across the term while doing a Google search and posted it to the Related terms section but found it reverted, then further edits blocked along with his access denied despite citing the reference and invoking WP:IGNORE. He suggested in the discussion with the administrator or bureaucrat guarding the article that a specific reference should be left out to require readers to do their own Google search on the term in response to WP:NEOLOGISM. Before being blocked he managed to post the entry without a specific reference to the article discussion page. Someone else might want to take the chance of posting a copy of that entry to the Related terms section in the Greenwashing article. Under the circumstances deferring to a Google search is a better response to WP:NEOLOGISM than giving the reader nothing. Otherwise implementing policy as though it were hard and fast takes priority over pointing the reader in the direction of new knowledge or usage as if the Wikipedia is the final edition of a printed publication or written in stone. 71.100.0.7 (talk) 07:11, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I support not cluttering existing articles with references to neologisms, mostly because as an encyclopedia, neologisms aren't notable enough for us to mention. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:37, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The question appears to follow from Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 June 24 (last line).
 * —Wavelength (talk) 02:14, 2 July 2010 (UTC)