Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 February 14

= February 14 =

What language is this?
File:PLTD Apong Ie Beuna.JPG has: Is this Acehnese, or Bahasa Indonesia? WhisperToMe (talk) 01:30, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * "PLTD Apong nyang jiba u darat yoh ie beuna"
 * To add, I found the phrase on the Bahasa Indonesia Wikipedia "Kapal PLTD Apung yang dibawa oleh tsunami sampai ke darat" - But that doesn't help me in telling me which language the first phrase is. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:40, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * (EC) I was just going to say it's not Indonesian, as I found the same phrase (in the 'Deskripsi', here. The 'author' of the picture is this user, and according to that userpage, (s)he is a speaker of Acehnese, as well as Indonesian (and Malay and English). You may consider contacting the user for verification. --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  01:42, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * The user's globally blocked, so I can't ask him. At this point I'll assume it's Acehnese, but I'm going to wait around to see what other people say. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:46, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Maybe ask an active editor listed in Category:Indonesian Wikipedians or Category:Wikipedians in Indonesia. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:04, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Not that this proves anything, but Google Translate from Indonesian to English could not translate most of the words in the phrase, which suggests that the phrase is not Indonesian. Marco polo (talk) 15:31, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Cheers, but we had already established that. --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  20:13, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind that although the Indonesian language is the official language of Indonesia, it is far from the only one. In fact, the Indonesian language article notes that most Indonesians speak a regional language (such as Javanese, Minangkabau or Sundanese, among others) in addition to Indonesian. Although it may not be in the Indonesian language, that doesn't mean it isn't in an Indonesian language (language spoken in Indonesia). -- 174.21.250.120 (talk) 16:04, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Ditto my comment above. --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  20:13, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Aspect vs Tense
I used to think the difference between aspect and tense was that aspect is constructed with multiple words and tense is constructed with a single word (example: present tense: I go; progressive aspect: I am going). However I just discovered that constructions such as "I have gone" and "I will go" are consider tenses too! (compound tenses, to be exact). So can someone explain to me the correct difference between aspect and tense? (Your article about aspect is a bit too technical). 72.128.95.0 (talk) 02:13, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Tense refers to when something happened with respect to right now (the time I am talking)--an item may have happened before I am talking, while I am talking, or is going to happen sometime after I'm talking.
 * Aspect can mean several different things:
 * Grammatical aspect refers to when the event happened with respect to some other event that is relevant (not necessarily the time I am speaking). For example, perfective aspect expresses that some event has already been completed before the other event that you're talking about. (e.g., "He did his homework after [he ate dinner]b" and "He will do his homework after [he eats dinner]b": in both of these sentences, event b is completed before the person does his homework, and thus is considered perfective...although English doesn't mark that with any explicit suffixes or anything; some other languages, though, such as Chinese, would mark both of these with the same marker, since Chinese stresses aspect more than tense. On the other hand, you could have "The phone rang while [he was eating dinner]b" or "He'll get the phone call while [he is eating dinner]b"; both of the events b there, regardless of whether they describe past or future events, are in progressive aspect because they are still ongoing when the other event happens; again, English marks tense in this situation, but other languages, such as Chinese, mark only aspect in this situation.) The paragraph at the middle of page 59 of this thesis offers a good explanation.
 * Lexical aspect refers to how the event unfolds through time (e.g., is it something that happens instantaneously, like "see" or "realize", or something that progresses incrementally, like "paint a picture" or "build a house", or is it not an action at all, like "be"). Page 19 of that same document (linked above) describes it nicely.
 * As for the issue of multiple versus single words, this varies across languages. In some languages, such as English, the distinction between tense and aspect has gotten fuzzy. Some languages explicitly mark (using suffixes or auxiliary verbs like "have" or "is") tense, some explicitly mark aspect, some explicitly mark both, and there are probably some that explicitly mark neither. To keep using Chinese as an example: Chinese generally doesn't mark tense (in the examples above, the bracketed phrases look the same in both past and future tense), it cares more about aspect, but it can express tense using adverbs&mdash;that is to say, for instance, a Chinese speaker can't say "I cooked a meal" because Chinese doesn't have a past tense marker like English -ed, but s/he can say "Yesterday I cook a meal". There is no one-to-one correspondence between tense/aspect and whether they are expressed using prefixes/suffixes/infixes or extra words. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 02:26, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Rjanag has explained aspect and tense better than I possibly could. However, I will offer a couple of remarks on how this works in English specifically.  Tense is really about time in relation to the present.  "I am going" versus "I went" versus "I will go".  Aspect in English can be about whether an action is finite or repeated: "I am walking to the market this morning" versus "I walk to the market every morning", or "I walked to the market yesterday morning" or "I have walked to the market every morning".  It can also be about whether an action is completed or whether the action is underway at the time of another action.  For example, "I walked to the market and saw Jane" (implying that you saw her after you had finished walking to the market) versus "I was walking to the market and saw Jane" (implying that you saw her while you were walking).  The pluperfect involves aspect:  "I had walked to the market when I saw Jane" versus "I was walking to the market when I saw Jane".  Most English verb forms involve both aspect and tense. You could say that "I was walking" is the past tense of "I am walking," even though both of these forms signal aspect as well as tense.  The marked form "I was walking" signals aspect, but the unmarked form "I walked" can also signal aspect, as in the example "I walked to the market and saw Jane".  In the present tense, this is even clearer:  "I am walking" is clearly the progressive aspect, but the unmarked form "I walk" generally also indicates aspect in that it signals habitual action.  Rjanag is correct that you cannot the presence of aspect is not signaled by the number of words.  Marco polo (talk) 15:28, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Sometimes in English the aspect of a statement is ambiguous and can be discerned only by context. A famous example is "He's working": this can be progressive aspect, meaning "He's at work at the moment" ("Can I speak to your husband, please?" - "Sorry, he's working; can you call back this evening?") or it can be habitual aspect, meaning "He has a job" ("My husband was unemployed for three years, but now, thank God, he's working.") Even though it's often claimed that English uses the simple present for habitual aspect (as opposed to the present progressive for progressive aspect), I don't think you can say "he works" in the second example. (This example is famous because in AAVE, the distinction is made as "He workin" vs. "He be workin".) —Angr (talk) 15:43, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Bernard Comrie says on p. 3 of : "aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation". --ColinFine (talk) 23:09, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * @Angr: I think I would except "he works" under that interpretation, in limited contexts. For instance "They both live in Missouri; she goes to school, he works." In most of these contexts I can think of, though, "he is working" would also be equally acceptable. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 23:35, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

summer chocolate
Have you heard of white chocolate being referred to as summer chocolate?Gsjeffries (talk) 03:18, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I have not. A google search suggests that "summer chocolate" is a plant. (Only one of the first several results is about chocolate at all, and it's not about white chocolate.) r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 03:28, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It's an ornamental variety of Albizia julibrissin, the Mimosa tree. Roger (talk) 16:23, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Intermediate versus open o
This refers back to this question.

I found a children's Winston dictionary at a library and it had the same pronunciation symbols. There was less detail in covering what each symbol represented, but all the symbols were there.

"Intermediate o" has sort of a triangle over the o and is the sound in cord and law, while "Open o" looks the same but is in italics. It is the sound in dog.

Every other pronuciation guide I've seen has the same sound for both. On the other hand, I shared an apartment while in college with a guy from Connecticut, and I encountered numerous people in college who pronounce dog and law differently than I do in North Carolina. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 19:10, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm not familiar with the phonetic system used by your dictionary, but the standard phonetic transcription system used worldwide today is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which can distinguish virtually every possible vowel sound. To answer your original question, variations in the pronunciation of the word dog seem to be a product of the Lot-cloth split, which resulted in words such as dog being pronounced with the same vowel as lot in some dialects and the same vowel as cloth in others.  The lot vowel also varies among dialects as a result of the Cot-caught merger.  Marco polo (talk) 20:46, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * The IPA symbols for those sounds (when differentiated) are, and . Lexicografía (talk) 20:50, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Kecskemét
What's the German name, if existing, of Kecskemét (Hungary)? --151.51.155.68 (talk) 23:55, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * All the German pages I've found using Google just refer to it as Kecskemét. Looie496 (talk) 00:17, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
 * The German spelling "Ketschkemet" gains a few hits on Google Books. The translation would be "Ziegengang" (goat's walk, or something like that), and I've found "Ziegenort", but only in inverted commas, so that would be a nick name at best. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:08, 15 February 2011 (UTC)