Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 December 15

= December 15 =

Deponent verbs
Are deponent verbs only found in Indo-European languages? Between that article and a little guesswork it kind of looks like they're a fluke of PIE development, but I'm wondering if that's the case or if they show up in other families as well. I.e. it doesn't seem likely that an agglutinative language would have grammatically passive, semantically active verbs, a passivizing affix - I'd think - would just drop, instead of having to add a whole mess of non-(medio)passive conjugations like in PIE. Lsfreak (talk) 06:55, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not the most polished paper, but you might be interested in reading "Deponency: definitions and morphological typology to accompany the online Surrey Deponency Databases". Perhaps look at the entries of the Database for Finnish, Japanese, and Hebrew too:, & .  And maybe you can find other interesting entries in there. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 08:58, 15 December 2012 (UTC)


 * In Hebrew there are deponents formed from the Niph'al stem (usually the passive of the Qal stem), and "deponents" (if you want to call them that) from the Hitpa`el stem (usually reflexive or reciprocal or subject-affecting intransitive verbs), but no deponents from the other two passive stems (the Pu'al and the Hoph'al, the passives of the Pi'el and Hiph'il respectively), as far as I'm aware... AnonMoos (talk) 17:26, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

The "O'" in names
I've seen many names such as: Mike O'Hara, Johnson O'Keefe... or even Jack-O'-Lantern. So what does the "O'" in those names mean? Thank for your help(s).
 * MatthewMiles127 (talk) 11:38, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * See Irish_names. --Soman (talk) 11:44, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Wrong section. See Irish names. --ColinFine (talk) 11:56, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I would guess that the use as a common name prefix does not come directly from the "grandson" meaning, but rather from the use of the plural form Uí + X to mean "descendants of X", which was then used as a kind of clan name (e.g. Uí Néill). The singular Ua/O would have been formed from the plural clan name, rather than directly as "Grandson of X"... AnonMoos (talk) 17:21, 15 December 2012 (UTC)


 * In northern English dialect, the O' just means "of", and names were sometimes constructed in this way just meaning "son of". This is now rare here.  Will-o'-the-wisp, Jack-O'-Lantern, Jack o' Lent and Tom o' Bedlam derive from this English usage, but I agree that modern surname derivation is almost always from the Irish.    D b f i r s   17:36, 15 December 2012 (UTC)


 * (Edit conflict) But in Jack-o'-lantern, the o' is short for "of". It's commonly found in the Lowland Scots language but also as a way of writing other dialects. Well known examples are John o' Groats, Tam o' Shanter, Cock o' the North and Will-o'-the-wisp. Alansplodge (talk) 17:43, 15 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Forget not the Heavenly Coffee, Chock full o'Nuts. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:52, 24 December 2012 (UTC)