Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 June 23

= June 23 =

How is Ø written?
First, by analogy: in French, ô can be written "o" or "os" when one does not have access to special characters (say, anything other than the 26 letters a-z). Similarly, the German ü can be written "ue".

Is there a similar convention for Ø in a Danish context?

CRGreathouse (t | c) 03:36, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, Danish and Norwegian can write Ø as "oe", which is actually preferable to a mere "o", because Ø is regarded a separate letter, unrelated to O.
 * Similarly, Æ is represented as "ae", and Å is represented as "aa".
 * In some placenames and family names, these special characters can remain spelled out descriptively if there is a long orthographical tradition regarding the respective name. For example, the town of Aalborg would have been spelt Ålborg, had it been a recently coined name.
 * The Danish and Norwegian alphabets go like this: ABC...XYZÆØÅ. If you make an aplhabetical index of Danish towns, you should have to list Aalborg at one of the last places, because that placename begins with Å, not with A. --Theurgist (talk) 03:53, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you, that was what I was looking for. I suspected it would be "oe" but didn't want to go on just a hunch. CRGreathouse (t | c) 03:56, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I added that information to Ø where I had originally gone to find the answer (before coming here). Does that look OK? CRGreathouse (t | c) 04:05, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * But note that alternative spellings like this are language-dependent. Just because German 'ö'and Danish 'ø' may be written 'oe', does not mean that 'ö' in other languages may be written that way. --ColinFine (talk) 18:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed, in Finnish it most certainly cannot be written that way, and I am quite confident it can't in Swedish or Estonian either. How is it in Turkish? J I P  &#124; Talk 19:57, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * We had a question about "Umlauts in Turkish" recently. Few special characters among world languages are standardly written out in a descriptive manner. I can think of German and Scandinavian Ä, Ö/Ø, Ü, Å, which can be written "ae", "oe", "ue", "aa"; ligatures Æ, Œ, which can be written "ae", "oe"; Dutch ligature Ĳĳ, which can be written IJij or "y"; Serbo-Croat Đ, which can be written "dj"; Esperanto Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ, which can be written "cx", "gx", "hx", "jx", "sx", "ux"; and of course characters that are unrelated to any of the basic Latin letters: German ß, which can be written "ss"; Icelandic Þ, which can be written "th"; Azerbaijani Ə, which can be written "ä". Most other special characters are typed just by omitting their diacritics when technical availability is an issue.
 * This could be somewhat different in SMS language and chat alphabets, where one can write in any way they like, as long as they will get understood. Thus, Romanian Ț can appear as "tz" and Albanian Ç can appear as "ch", but those spellings are non-standard. --Theurgist (talk) 22:00, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * "First, by analogy: in French, ô can be written "o" or "os" when one does not have access to special characters (say, anything other than the 26 letters a-z)." No, it can't. If you can't type ô, then your only option is "o." Never "os." This happens quite often, actually, as the French do not like to put accents on capital letters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.189.220.19 (talk) 09:59, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

speaking foreign words in Swedish
What phonetics would one use when transferring foreign words/items into Swedish, for example, a product such as Hersheys or Clorox, a celebrity name such as Justin Bieber, a video game such as Pokemon, and characters such as Froslass, Latias, or Milotic? Those are just some random examples72.235.230.227 (talk) 07:56, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Personally, I'd go with the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's not intuitive, but at least it's standard as well as unambiguous. Other schemes tend to suffer from the latter problems, especially for a language like Swedish. Bear in mind that nowadays, the proportion of English speakers in Sweden is so high that most don't bother to describe anything English phonetically. Gabbe (talk) 09:44, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Can you at least provide a list of Swedish letters with the phonetics that each letter makes? 72.235.230.227 (talk) 10:46, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This would be a tough task, for example because in Swedish nine vowel letters represent 17 vowel phonemes and a few more allophones thereof; moreover, there are about twenty different ways of spelling sje-ljudet, although most of them only occur in some loanwords that have retained their original spellings. I can try to construct for you a simplified schematic table that can show you the basics if you so request (but this won't be in the next few hours, I'm afraid). See also Swedish phonology. --Theurgist (talk) 12:22, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It is impossible to provide "a list of Swedish letters with the phonetics that each letter makes" because, as in English, a written letter may be pronounced in very different ways, and vice versa. See "ghoti" for an illustration of this kind of irregularity in English. Gabbe (talk) 12:58, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Cockle' pills ? Stays ?
Hello, experts ! A.C. Hobart (later known as Hobart Pasha) while running the blocade in 1863 & stopping over in Nassau, declared ironically he was carrying in the holds of his steamer Don : "one  thousand pairs of stays .... five hundred boxes of Cockle's pills, and a quantity of toothbrushes". What are "Cockle's pills" ? I assume it has nothing to do with bivalves, nor scots sweets, nor Lolium temulentum (or has it ? ) - and "stays" ?. Thanks a lot beforehand Arapaima (talk) 10:31, 23 June 2011 (UTC).


 * Stays normally means corsets, but I see from the disambiguation page that they also have a nautical meaning.--Shantavira|feed me 11:18, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This (about 2/3 down) suggests it's a type of medication. Would seem to fit the context. There are more if you Google "Cockle's pills" e.g. this. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 11:26, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The reference to "pairs of stays" strongly suggests corsets rather than nautical lines. Corsets came in two pieces that were laced together. Marco polo (talk) 20:30, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * For those struggling with the concept of "anti bilious pills"... in the days before refrigeration and "use by" dates, people often gave themselves food poisoning. This was known as a "bilious attack" (ie an excess of bile) as the cause was usually unsuspected. Nowadays, we'd call it Salmonellosis. Alansplodge (talk) 21:33, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * My mother always refers to someone vomiting, for any reason at all, as a "bilious attack". She also refers to a man having anal sex with a woman as "committing homosexuality on her" (not, I hasten to add, that this is a normal topic of conversation with her, but it has happened).  How quaint we can become when we euphemise everything.  :) --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  02:44, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks to all for "lighting up my lantern" as we say in France. For the Cockle's pills, I notice that against indigestion (which for us means over-eating) we still had here some years ago some oral medication ( named "Shoum") containing herbs extracts (like the Cockle's pills) & also chloroform (CHCl3) as a "liver stimulator" ...At least the Cockle's pills are said in their advertisement to be free of mercury (Hg)...They didn't prevent anyway Hobart Pasha from catching yellow fever in 1864, which put his blocade-running job to an end ( @ Jack of Oz :  we call it here "to use one's woman the italian way, or the turkish way" ...No offense ment to those great & interesting cultures, of course, it's just a gallicism ...T.y. Arapaima (talk) 08:25, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

"methods of" vs "methods for"
Is it "methods of generating electricity" or "methods for generating electricity", or either? --129.215.5.255 (talk) 14:00, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I think both are correct depending on context. "We explored several methods of generating electricity" would seem to mean that you learned about how electricity might be generated.  "we explored several methods for generating electricity" would seem to mean that you attempted to generate electricity rather than just learn about it. 24.38.31.81 (talk) 19:30, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Merriam-Webster gives examples of both ("method for growing tomatoes", "method of doing things"), and I can't see a difference in meaning between the two, so both should be fine. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:25, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Two sets of brackets coming together like this (blah)(blah blah)
Is there anything dictating what should happen when two sets of backets come together as above? I was under the impression the it should be (blah; blah blah) but someone has told me to separate them out to (blah)(blah blah). --129.215.5.255 (talk) 14:03, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * MOS says, "Avoid adjacent sets of brackets. Either put the parenthetic phrases in one set separated by commas, or rewrite the sentence". To what extent Wikipedia's manual of style applies in the real world, I don't know. —Angr (talk) 15:25, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * As a professional editor in the real world, I would never allow adjacent sets of brackets (parentheses). Marco polo (talk) 20:33, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Me neither. But if I ever did, I'd certainly have a space between them - (blah) (blah blah).  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:05, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * We can use adjacent parentheses in mathematical expressions, for example, (x + 1)(x - 1) = x2 - 1.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 21:11, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * [I am correcting the equation.—Wavelength (talk) 21:14, 23 June 2011 (UTC)]

When it comes to statutes in Britain, the convention is to put a space between adjacent parentheses. See, for example, "Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997" and "Local Government (Gaelic Names) (Scotland) Act 1997". Gabbe (talk) 21:39, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Sorry. I meant I would never allow adjacent sets of parentheses in prose. Of course they can occur in technical contexts. Marco polo (talk) 00:33, 24 June 2011 (UTC)


 * You can search online style books at http://www.onlinestylebooks.com/home.html.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 19:14, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Practical Drawl
What is the best and what is the correct way to answer "Are they ready?" Now, in practice it seems very laborious to say the former and less so the latter.
 * "One of them is ready."
 * "One of them are ready."
 * "One'f 'em's ready."
 * "One'f 'em're ready."

Thanks Wikipedians! Schyler ( one language ) 22:53, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The first is correct. The "is" agrees with "one".  Read it as "One...is ready" (One...are ready doesn't work).  -- Jayron  32  23:50, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Then why does it feel so unnatural? Schyler  ( one language ) 00:00, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Because the plural "them" comes between the subject ("One") and the verb ("is"), so the temptation is to make the verb agree with the word closest to it ("them"). I don't think there's a technical term for this - "false attraction", perhaps?  Fowler's article on the subject can be read here. Tevildo (talk) 00:35, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * See the articles on agreement in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage online on Google books. They refer to a "principle of proximity", otherwise called "blind agreement", which causes a verb to agree with the nearest preceding noun regardless of whether the noun is the subject: this occurs sometimes even in good writers (though normally at a greater distance between subject and verb).  (Regarding the original question, "one" plainly agrees with "is", as already stated). --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:34, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * "One of them is ready". "Two of them are ready". Both of those seem completely natural to me. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 10:59, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, but that's not Schyler's issue. He wants to know why "One of them are ready" is not correct.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  12:30, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
 * As to the second part of the question; it depends on your local dialect. Here in London, we'd say: "One ov'em's ready" but in Glasgow it might be "one o' thae's ready" (apologies to any Scottish readers if that's not quite right). Alansplodge (talk) 23:32, 24 June 2011 (UTC)