Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 February 9

= February 9 =

Exact definition of "tenfold"
If a company is giving out a 6-cent dividend and then announces a "tenfold" increase, is the new dividend 60 cents (an increase ' ten times as much as before) or 66 cents (an increase ' ten times the previous value)? I believe it is the former, and Wiktionary's entry for -fold backs me up, but said entry is unsourced, and others on a message board I'm active on are claiming it should be the latter. Can someone clarify which one it is and provide sources to back it up? jcgoble3 (talk) 21:56, 9 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Mathforum - "what does a twofold increase mean?", with sources. --NorwegianBluetalk 23:06, 9 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you. jcgoble3 (talk) 23:13, 9 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Britney Gallivan has shown the true meaning of tenfold (and twelvefold). Clarityfiend (talk) 03:20, 10 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I didn't even think about that, even though I've watched the Mythbusters episode about it several times. jcgoble3 (talk) 04:44, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Male and Female Words
Are some words deemed to be more male than female? Are some phonemes/sounds aligned more closely to one gender or another? (This is not a query about the patriarchal pattern of power in language, or a tangent into her-story, but more an aesthetic question.) Are there theories from academia or the arts regarding this issue? How does English (if at all) reflect the gender allocation of many other languages? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.175.131.253 (talk) 22:52, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Many languages have grammatical gender, however English doesn't have a very robust system of grammatical gender. There is some (see Gender in English for a synopsis), especially for things like some occupations (e.g. actor/actress) or familial relations (brother/sister) which are intimately tied to biological gender.  However, there isn't generally any grammatical gender distinctions for inanimate objects.  -- Jayron  32  23:10, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Are you asking if the "br" sound in "brother" might be more masculine than the "st" sound in sister, just as an example? Falconus p t   c 23:18, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, there is the thing that a LOT of English voabulary comes from French, which does have obvious gender markers, so there can be certain word endings or letter clusters which we associate with one gender or the other, but this is a secondary effect of the French borrowing. For example, words with -ess or -enne have a feminine association because they derive from French words which have a feminine grammatical gender.  -- Jayron  32  00:12, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Or because most of them apply to women. —Tamfang (talk) 09:00, 14 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Some English speakers refer to countries as female. For example, they say: "US is in North America, and her neighbors are Canada and Mexico"; and likewise 77.125.248.100 (talk) 00:35, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure, but I think the OP isn't asking about grammatical gender so much as whether there is gender-based equivalent to the Bouba/kiki effect. If so, I'm not aware of any such thing, but maybe someone has done research on it. Angr (talk) 01:02, 10 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Can 58.175.131.253 perhaps provide an example of a "word" or "phoneme" or "sound" that might be "aligned more closely to one gender or another" in English? Bus stop (talk) 01:12, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I can give one from personal experience, assuming I've got the gist of this. Personal names ending in -a sound female (including mine, which is unfamiliar to most, and I'm male). And this probably goes back to Latin, where (nearly?) all singular nouns ending in -a are feminine. Personal names ending in -us or -o on the other hand will probably be assumed male. - file lake  shoe  01:39, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You were correct to say nearly. The nouns you are describing are called first declension, and most first-declension nouns are feminine.  The exception first-year Latin students usually learn is agricola, "farmer".
 * There are several Italian masculine personal names that end in -a, though: Andrea, Nicola, Luca.  At least the first two tend to be women's names in English. --Trovatore (talk) 02:48, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Now that's interesting.. Nikola and Andrea are common male names in a lot of Slavic languages too, and our articles seem to suggest they came to be used erroneously as female names in English because the -a ending sounds feminine, not because of any separate etymological root. I guess the Italian names were a result of an -s being dropped? - file lake  shoe  19:00, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * There's also Nikita, traditionally solely a male name (e.g. Nikita Khrushchev). But in the West, it's been misappropriated for use almost exclusively for girls.  And presumably simply because it ends with an -a.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  09:52, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The OP may be interested to read about the Bouba/kiki effect. The jump to gender is not far. BrainyBabe (talk) 02:16, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Not to be confused with the Bourbaki effect, where people avoid transfinite induction for no good reason. --Trovatore (talk) 03:03, 10 February 2012 (UTC)


 * There is good reason to think that the association of "-a" with feminines is entirely cultural, and ultimately arbitrary. Indo-European "-a" stem nouns are usually feminine not only in Latin, but also in other languages, including Greek and the Slavonic languages, so names in "-a" are usually feminine in these languages as well (though in Russian hypocoristic names usually end in "-a" for both males and females) . However, in Indic languages the IE vowels 'e', 'o' and 'a' all fell together as 'a', so an ending in '-a' ceased to be distinctive of the declension class that was usually feminine, and a name ending in "-a" is just as likely to be masculine as feminine - perhaps more so: insofar as there is a distinctive ending for female names in Indian languages, it is '-i'. --ColinFine (talk) 12:42, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It is probably arbitrary; in fact, it only takes a vowel shift to create almost the opposite system. In Gothic, long â became ô and short o became a; consequently, many feminine nouns have nominatives in -ô where Greek and Latin forms have -a/ê (tuggô: Lat. lingua, qinô: Gr. gynê, aíkklêsjô: Gr. ekklêsia), while nouns in -a are often masculine (manna etc.). Iblardi (talk) 20:41, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In Hebrew most of the words which are considered feminine are ending, when in singular, with sound "-a", and when in plural, with sound "-ot" --77.127.61.143 (talk) 16:50, 10 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The "t" is the real feminine marker in Hebrew, and shows up in the construct state and suffixed forms even in the singular (while certain feminine words have the "t" in all forms). AnonMoos (talk) 01:35, 11 February 2012 (UTC)


 * In Sanskrit, a-stem nouns (cognate to Latin first declension) have long ā and o-stem nouns (cognate to Latin second declension) have short ă (which is usually silent in Hindi). —Tamfang (talk) 09:18, 14 February 2012 (UTC)


 * However, if any vowel ending is associated with human-referring feminine forms in Sanskrit, it's probably "i"... AnonMoos (talk) 10:17, 14 February 2012 (UTC)