Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 February 24

= February 24 =

"I Know You Want Me" Pitbull song question
So, after asking in the Entertainment Desk, I was told to ask this question here in the Language Desk, so as I was told to do so, here it is. Like I said in the Entertainment Desk, some time ago I was looking for different English translations for the Spanish sections of Pitbull's well-known song, "I know you want me". There's a certain part of the Spanish chorus that still has me confused. Forgive me for asking this, but in the song, is Pitbull really referencing fellatio or is he referencing something else when he says this part of the Spanish chorus?:

"Si es verdad que tu eres guapa

Yo te voy a poner gozar

Tu tienes la boca grande

Dale ponte a jugar, como?"

Thanks in advance for the help. Willminator (talk) 00:33, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * It couldn't be more obvious that he's talking about oral sex. "You really are fine / I'm going to give you pleasure / You have a big mouth / Come on, join the fun, huh?" He's referring to a mutually gratifying exchange, but fellatio is clearly on the agenda. This is obvious because "big mouth" is a pun in Spanish as well as English. It usually refers to a blabbermouth, not someone whose mouth is physically large. The only reason he would have for using the expression is to allude to oral sex. L ANTZY T ALK 20:58, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Natural language
From Zipf's law:"Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances..."Our natural language article uses the term to refer to languages that have developed naturally, in contrast to constructed languages. Is this the only standard sense of the word? Given the existence of texts such as Gadsby, which is written in a naturally-developing language but is very much unnaturally written, I can't understand how Zipf's law could properly be applied to it. Nyttend (talk) 02:42, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I might not be understanding your question correctly. Why do you think Zipf's law wouldn't apply to a text like Gadsby? r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 02:45, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

A single novelty novel does not a corpus make. It is trivially easy, though perhaps time-consuming, to write texts in which words are distributed in a non-Zipfian way, but this is no more a problem for Zipf's law than the existence of bonsai trees is to the principles of botany. As to what is natural and unnatural language use, certainly that is unnatural which a speaker or writer has to make an intense, concentrated effort to keep up, such as avoiding words that have e in them.--Rallette (talk) 08:22, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link; I misunderstood the concept of a literary corpus. I thought it was simply a piece of text longer than "a little bit", and definitely inclusive of the length of a book.  Nyttend (talk) 16:57, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Chinese reading question
Hi! About 北京盛事邦为文化传媒有限公司 It's ''Běijīng Shèngshì Bāng ? Wénhuà Chuánméi Yǒuxiàngōngsī'' But what is the character in the "?" - I can't tell which reading of that character is correct

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 18:51, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

北京盛世邦为文化传媒有限公司, not 盛事. 邦为= Bāngwéi or Bāngwèi. As I can not figure out any meaning of the combination 邦为, I will pronounce it as Bāngwéi which sound more harmony. --刻意(Kèyì) 19:27, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much! WhisperToMe (talk) 21:50, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Saxon element in Old English
The standard textbook story of English seems to be that Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (some Frisians and maybe some Franks, etc.) settled in England, mingling their speech together to form the ancestor of the various dialects of Old English which are eventually attested in our literary sources (these dialects being generally presented as later developments that took place among the speakers in England, not survivals of the linguistic differences between the various groups of settlers). Among these groups, it seems settled that Saxons were important (after all, Wessex, etc., bear their name).

This would all make perfect sense to me if the standard West Germanic family tree (same story in the stemma here) showed that Saxon and Anglo-Frisian branches had not yet parted at the time of the adventus Saxonum. In fact, however, it seems that Saxon and Anglo-Frisian are firmly believed already to have been separate branches at that time.

So can someone give probable answers to the questions that naturally arise from this.
 * 1) Did a distinctively Saxon-branch language come to England among the numerous "Saxons" about whose presence and cultural influence we read so much? When and where might any significant population have been using a language in England properly classified as Saxon and not Anglo-Frisian?
 * 2) If yes to the first question, did the Saxon elements survive in a way that leaves any mark on the language of any of our surviving Old English texts?
 * 3) Are we to imagine that there were Saxon elements that became obliterated? How? Did Saxon-dominated populations simply come to use the language of the Angles? Why? Do we believe that Saxon elements existed in a mingled tongue but were largely/completely eroded by the time of the surviving texts?

I realize I'm asking about a completely unattested phase in the history of English, but there has to be some plausible reconstruction of what could have happened, and I can't find one. Extra credit if you can repeat your answer at History of the English language and Old English, if enough of a RS has suggested a possible answer. Wareh (talk) 21:06, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No RS to hand, but my understanding is that different groups of people used the term "Saxon" to describe themselves, i.e. not everyone who called themselves Saxon between AD 100 and 600 was necessarily a speaker of the ancestor language to Old Saxon. A parallel can be found in Scots, whose speakers called their language Inglis long after it had split off linguistically from the language of England. But even if the "Saxons" who arrived in Britain with the Angles and Jutes were speaking a variety that was the same as the variety that later developed into Old Saxon on the mainland, the two languages were extremely close - even attested Old English and attested Old Saxon from several centuries later are clearly mutually intelligible. I doubt whether we have enough of the earliest stages of these languages attested to be able to answer your question 1, which makes question 2 also unanswerable. As for question 3, I don't think it's possible to say with 100% certainty that the attested Old English dialects are "later developments that took place among the speakers in England, not survivals of the linguistic differences between the various groups of settlers" as you assert. Heck, it's difficult enough to determine to what extent the dialects of American English developed in North America and to what extent they derive from the linguistic differences between the earliest English immigrants - and that was during a period when English was well attested and described. Another difficulty in isolating traces Saxon in Old English is the extreme conservatism of Saxon. Old Saxon is mostly characterized by the sound changes it didn't go through (no Anglo-Frisian brightening, no palatalization of velars, no High German consonant shift) or sound changes it shared with neighboring dialects (e.g. Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law). So the first task would be to find some uniquely Saxon sound change, and then look to see if you can find traces of it in attested Old English, but even the first step might be a lot of work. Could be an interesting Ph.D. dissertation topic for someone, though: Saxon Traces in Old English. Angr (talk) 22:23, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with Angr that the Saxons were a tribal confederation rather than a linguistic entity and that the confederation is likely to have included groups with variant but mutually intelligible dialects. The Angles may even have been one Saxon group. The questions you raise are apparently controversial and unresolved in historical Germanic linguistics. Here are links to two papers that might interest you:  and .  The second one argues that the differences between the Anglian and West Saxon dialects of Old English are due not to different geographic origins but to different waves of migration from the same region.  Marco polo (talk) 01:01, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for these intelligent answers (and for the further reading on OE dialects). I wonder now why we believe, and whether we really know, that Anglo-Frisian and Saxon split when the histories I link said they did (and not later, even after the adventus Saxonum). If, as Angr suggests, the Heliand-poet and the Beowulf-poet could have still made sense of each other's lays, then it is indeed very easy to imagine the speech of the "Seaxena" (if they were not Anglo-Frisian-speaking "Saxons") accommodating itself to the neighboring tongues over the few centuries before our texts emerge. Someone must have an opinion about what manner of "Saxons" they were who settled Great Britain; I'm still curious about all this, but now at least my curiosity is contained by your reasonable strictures. P.S. I'm assuming MP's "The Angles may even have been one Saxon group" means no more than "one member of the group of coastal Germanic tribes who identified themselves loosely under that name" (though I don't grasp the reason for speculating that this may be). Wareh (talk) 00:44, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Italics? Diacritics?
My friend, (who is totally a prescriptivist), claims that when it comes to orthography, a word may be written either in italics with all the accompanying diacritics (to indicate that you're using a foreign word), OR if you choose not to italicize (indicating that the word is English), then you can't use the diacritics because English, ipso facto doesn't have them.

As you can see from my abhorrent usage of commas in the above--proper grammar/usage isn't my strongest suit. Is he right about this? Or is this more of his prescribing nonsense?66.30.10.71 (talk) 23:56, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Neither. He is simply wrong. Foreign loan words in English can be spelled with diacritics, and are no less part of the English language. There is no prescription that foreign words must be italicised, although that is a frequent convention. "We went to the café" is fine as it is, while "We went to the café" looks, at best, pretentious. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:02, 25 February 2012 (UTC)


 * But honestly, Stephan, who ever spells that word with an accent in an English-language context? Leave italics aside; the major pretentiousness arises from spelling it as "café" rather than simply "cafe".  And the same applies to other fully-absorbed-into-English words like debut, premiere, role etc.  I'm squarely on the side of the OP's friend here, although I wouldn't go so far as to insist on italics to indicate a word is being used as a foreign word.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  01:08, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think this might be subject to cultural and temporal differences. I would expect diacritics in good quality books published in the UK. I think my British Dorothy L. Sayers editions have them even in mass marktet paperbacks. On the other hand, they have been hard or impossible to use with mechanical typewriters and ASCII, which has reduce their usage in everything that needs to be published quickly and cheaply. And especially the later has lead to incredible mountains of text. -Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:23, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Equally, if all the following nouns we borrowed from German should always be treated as foreign words, we'd have to capitalise them - but we don't: angst, dachsund, delicatessen, frankfurter, hamburger, hinterland, kindergarten, lager, lieder, muesli, nickel, pretzel, quartz, schadenfreude, schmaltz, schnitzel, etc. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  01:39, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The word "dachshund" contains two (h)aitches. See Dachshund.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 16:15, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't know, guys, don't you like to see a diacritic on naive? (So it doesn't look/sound like knave).  What about resume?  I know most people forget about the first e, but hardly anyone spells it without an accent at the end when they can't: otherwise it looks like "to resume". --80.99.254.208 (talk) 10:05, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That's the same argument as wanting to spell co-operate without the hyphen but with a diaeresis, so that it doesn't seem to be related to the word "cooper". But the solution to such issues lies in the context.  It has nothing to do with importing diacritics from other languages, merely because writers in those languages use them.  English has a huge number of homonyms - bow (archery) and bow (bend from the waist); row (use oars) and row (verbal dispute), to name 2 very simple examples - but do we ever for a moment consider adding something to the spelling to show they're pronounced differently in different contexts?  No, we don't; we're sensible people and we can quickly work out from the context which word is meant. Nobody has ever read "naive" and thought someone was being called a knave.  In any case, we've imported the feminine form of the French adjective, which we apply to all sexes.  We can do this because we no longer use the French word 'naïve' but the English word 'naive'.  To use the French word in relation to males would be a bad mistake.  Unless you use 'naïf'.  I have seen that used, but it's usually italicised to indicate it's a foreign word.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:55, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * An even stronger example is naïveté, because you'll always find the é in (unitalicized) English, whether or not the diaeresis is used. Wareh (talk) 01:17, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The New Yorker magazine is known for using diaeresis in English words like coöperate and reëlect. Pfly (talk) 00:55, 25 February 2012 (UTC)


 * See wikt:Appendix:English words with diacritics.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 01:20, 25 February 2012 (UTC)


 * So, does your prescriptivist friend not have a belovéd? -- Orange Mike &#x007C;  Talk  02:17, 25 February 2012 (UTC) was once referred to in the local newspaper as a "doting spouse"
 * It's spelled belovèd. :) 24.92.85.35 (talk) 03:14, 25 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I do use "café", not "cafe" or "café", and the version with the accent is the first given by Merriam-Webster, so I don't feel I'm being that pretentious. I also use "façade", which is only listed as a variant spelling of "facade", so maybe I am being pretentious there. While I get your friend's point, I don't feel that these two ways of marking non-naturalized words necessarily need to be linked. For me, italics indicate a greater degree of foreignness than the mere use of diacritics. Lesgles (talk) 03:47, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

I've used café, cliché and other words with é since as soon as I discovered I could quite easily create an é on my then new white macbook keyboard (about 5 years ago), it comes totally naturally to me. I don't think it's that uncommon for them to be used. As for diacritics "not being English", this is a personal style choice which as a prescriptive grammar concept is nonsense, since it is not reflected by A LOT of professional style guides. And as for italics, I assume names are exempt from this "rule", since I can't imagine anyone ever advocating use of "On December 18 2011, Václav Havel died in his cottage in Vlčice" or taking themselves seriously suggesting that "Václav" is not an English word unless respelled while Szczebrzeszyn is, this is an old rotten dead horse. - file lake  shoe  22:21, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In my opinion English is famous for having a diacritic-free alphabet, and we should stay that way. I never use diacritics when I write English. Now, if you're eating jalapenos as an entree in a cafe with your fiancee when you're launching an expose into naive people who break flambe out of pinatas as their coup de grace against Quebec - I can't really help you there. Inter  change  able | talk to me  00:52, 1 March 2012 (UTC)