Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 January 12

= January 12 =

Wright or wrong?
A question on the Science desk triggered a reminder of something I've wondered about: Someone who makes something is a "wright", as in cartwright. Something that has been worked is said to be "wrought", as in wrought iron. Is "wrought" a past-tense form of "wright"? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:48, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary says the two words are cognate: [ - root in Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). [[User:AndyTheGrump|AndyTheGrump]] (talk) 00:56, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * "Wrought" is the old past tense and past participle of "to work" OED. It survives today in specific senses with a sense of "work into shape" such as "wrought iron" or "he saw what he had wrought". Valiantis (talk) 01:36, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I wonder how it evolved from "werg-" to "wright"/"wrought" - except that the "gh" might have originated as a guttural "k". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:39, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Wrought is also the past tense of wreak: I will wreak vengeance --> I wrought vengeance. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  10:40, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Jack, where is your evidence that wrought is the past tense of wreak? As far as I know, wreak has always been a weak verb with the past tense wreaked. Deor (talk) 22:48, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * . --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  01:11, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * See also wikt:wreak, which compares wrought with snuck as strong past tenses with modern origins. --Trovatore (talk) 01:25, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The OED specifically lists "work havoc" and "wreak havoc" which effectively have the same meaning and cross references them to each other commenting that for "work havoc" "the pa. tense wrought [as opposed to worked] is common (though it is often interpreted as the pa. tense of wreak)." It does not give "wrought" as a past tense of wreak in any other sense than "To cause or effect (harm, damage, etc.)" and appears to be stating that this is a usage that has originally arisen due to confusion between two similar-sounding phrases with the same meaning as there is no historical/etymological basis for using "wrought" as the past tense of "wreak". (Of course, the fact that it is used in this way means it may be considered as acceptable for this particular sense of the word "wreak"). By the way, "wreak" has not always been a weak verb. It was strong in OE and strong variants (wrake, wroke, wrok) continued to be used up until the 18th C and (later in Scots) OED. Valiantis (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Is there any other sense of the word wreak? That's the only one I know. --Trovatore (talk) 01:55, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I appreciate many won't be able to check the OED link I gave, but they manage to come up with at least 8 distinct meanings. (I can't check the exact number as I'm not at home and don't have my log-in ID to hand, but I recall the one I was referring to was number 8). Valiantis (talk) 14:29, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Are any of the others ones that a highly literate person who's not a scholar of the history of English, might be expected to recognize? --Trovatore (talk) 22:21, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * (Now I have the access to check). Several are marked "Obs.", others have citations from relatively modern English (e.g. late 19th C), but mainly from poetry and often in verses that seem to be using archaic-sounding language for effect. The "cause (harm)" meaning would certainly seem to be the main modern usage, but the OED (to simplify) also recognises the senses of "to avenge" and "to give vent or expression to, to exercise or gratify (wrath, anger, etc.)" as non-obsolete but finds examples of "wrought" as a past tense only with the "cause (harm) sense".
 * Looking through the two entries, it appears they consider that "wrought havoc" was borrowed from "work havoc" because "work havoc" has an earlier citation (surprisingly not before 1900) than "wreak havoc" (not until 1926). However, I do wonder if the Wiktionary entry you link to is not closer to the truth: - the form "wreak - wrought" arising from a false analogy with "seek - sought" at some point a good deal earlier than the OED's citations, and then other speakers coming upon the form "wrought havoc (etc.)" and deriving the form "work havoc (etc.)" from that (but nobody writing it down in the present tense to confirm which verb they thought "wrought" was the past tense of so no citations for future lexicographers). Several of the citations for this meaning of "work" that pre-date 1900 are past tense or past participle (e.g. "the destruction wrought by the sea") so it's very much open to debate as to whether the writer believed he was using an archaic/poetic past form of "work" or what he believed to be the normal past form of "wreak". Valiantis (talk) 06:35, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Yeah, that sounds sort of plausible.  I have no idea how to check it, though. --Trovatore (talk) 08:29, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Wreak is from the same PIE root as work anyway. All of these past tenses/past participles in -aught/-ought (bought, brought, caught, ought [originally the past tense of owe], sought, taught, thought, wrought) come from cases where a Proto-Germanic [k] or [g] at the end of a verb root bumped up against the [d] of the past tense, and the resulting [k+d] and [g+d] became [xt], which it remained long enough to be spelled ght in Middle English before the [x] was lost with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. (Fought is an exception - it's an ablaut variant of fight; the [xt] cluster there was part of the root rather than the [x] being in the root and the [t] in the suffix.) Angr (talk) 10:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

ASCII Media Works
"ASCII" in "ASCII Media Works" should be read:


 * 1) A-S-C-I-I (ey - es - see - ahy - ahy);
 * 2) A-S-C-two; or
 * 3) A-S-C-the second.

Thank you :) --Aristitleism (talk) 08:34, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I've always heard it pronounced like "ass key", and our article on ASCII agrees. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 08:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * (after ec) Either by spelling out the letters, or by saying (roughly) "ass key" - your second and third options aren't possible because ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" - the two Is are letterss, not numbers. ASCII (company) has a pronouciation for the Japanese company that became ASCII media works, according to the article, they pronounce it "asuki" (which is a Japanese approximation of the "ass key" I gave above) -- Ferkelparade &pi; 08:53, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * It's either A-S-C-I-I (which is rather laborious) or "ASS-kee". It stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange", so there's no "2" involved unless someone's trying to be funny. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:29, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm... transcribing it "ass key" could be taken to mean there's a secondary stress on "key" and that "key" is pronounced with an aspirated k. I'd say ASCII is pronounced "asky". Sort of like "pesky" but without the "p" and with a different vowel before the "s". Angr (talk) 09:30, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes. It's not really distinctively "ASS-kee", but more run-together, as you say: "asky". This comes from trying to make words out of acronyms that aren't really intended to be words. Like EBCDIC, for example, which in my day was of course pronounced "EBBsuhdik". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:40, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * In my day, an acronym was by definition a word (note the -nym); so, AIDS was an acronym but HIV wasn't. Which is extremely weird since it's easier to say hiv than aitch-eye-vee, and the very strong tendency is always to reduce the syllables, and here's open invitation to do so - but no, we've all somehow abstained with HIV.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  10:37, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Someone once said that WWW is the only abbreviation that takes three times longer to say than what it stands for. Probably not literally true since English is stress-timed rather than syllable-timed, but still, "double-you-double-you-double-you" has nine syllables while "world wide web" has only three. Angr (talk) 10:54, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * That's why I render it "dub dub dub", when I say it at all, which isn't very often &mdash; ordinarily I just say "foo.com" instead of "www.foo.com". You almost always get to the same place typing foo.com anyway; not sure whether that's an official rule, but I've never seen a serious exception (meaning it takes you to a website controlled by a different party). --Trovatore (talk) 22:33, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * When I say it at all, I say "woo woo". Angr (talk) 01:29, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * "asky" doesn't work for some British-English speakers for whom the "a" in "ask" is long —, "AHSS-key". It's , so "ASS-key" might be better. And for the same speakers, EBCDIC is "ebb-SID-ik" with the stress on the middle short "i". Bazza (talk) 14:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * We just have to remember dear old Arthur Askey, pronounced "Arthur ASCII" as he was from Liverpool. Not all British-English speakers have a long "a" in "ask". -- Q Chris (talk) 14:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Bazza, that's precisely why I didn't say it was like "ask" + "-y". I said it's like "pesky" without the "p" and with a different vowel (namely [æ], regardless of how you pronounce "ask"). Angr (talk) 15:04, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

English pun on faithful
There's an old science fiction short story with the following synopsis (I don't know the author or title, nor the name of the characters, but I think I read it from the Galaktika journal).


 * Mad scientist Nicholas feels unrequited love towards Gwyneth, wife of the rival Mark. Nicholas invents a machine that makes perfect duplicate of any object. Once the machine is perfected, he uses it to copy Gwyneth so that he and Mark can have one of her each. But the copy is so faithful that she still loves Mark and wouldn't leave her for Nicholas.

My question is, how do you rewrite this synopsis such that it becomes a pun on the word “faithful”, suggesting both the meaning that the copy is exactly the same as the original, and that she's faithful to her husband?

For search: clone, precise

&#x2013; b_jonas 16:06, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I'd say the synopsis as you wrote it already contains that play on the two meanings of faithful. I wouldn't quite call it a pun, because the play is on two meanings of the exact same word, rather than on two words that sounds similar. Angr (talk) 16:09, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * It's a homonymic pun. It just lacks the cues that make you look for a joke (or perhaps "isn't funny", whatever that means). It's a problem that a faithful (as in exact) copy will love Mark because it is exact, right down to her romantic feelings, making the other meaning of faithful superfluous. Card Zero  (talk) 17:27, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Try adding this to the end: "So the question is, how to make a faithful copy that's unfaithful ?".  You might also want to use the words "fidelity" and "infidelity", although in English "fidelity" isn't often used to mean a good copy, unless it's of audio. StuRat (talk) 17:49, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * StuRat: good idea, I guess that would work provided I don't mention “faithful” before that question at all. Thank you all for the replies.  &#x2013; b_jonas 08:47, 13 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, that should work. I'll mark this question resolved. StuRat (talk) 04:39, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Eastern Arabic numerals
In hopes of shopping more effectively at my local Iraqi-owned market, I'm trying to identify and learn the numbering system they use on their hand-written signs. I ended up at the Eastern Arabic numerals article, and am now more confused after reading it than I was before. Could someone decipher the pedantic gobbledygook in the "North Africa" section for me? Is it saying that numbers are read from the smallest place to the largest (ie, "five hundred and forty two" is "two and forty and five hundred") and consequently are written the same way (245 instead of 542); but, because Arabic script is written from right to left, the numerals appear to untrained Western eyes to be written "the right way" while everything else is "backwards"?

Also, the Google is strong with me, but does anybody have offhand knowledge of a website that would be helpful in my number-learning quest? Or is the chart in the aforementioned article an accurate representation of the numerals I'll be encountering, such that, if I memorize that chart, I can go forth and confidently buy my markdown fava beans without a hitch?

Thanks! - Fullobeans (talk) 18:24, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Decimal-base numbers in RTL languages (like Arabic, Hebrew etc.) are written in most-significant-digit-leftmost order, just as in LTR languages such as English... AnonMoos (talk) 18:44, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * P.S. The "pedantic gobbledygook" is actually about partial correlations between the ordering of number-words in various spoken languages and written decimal numbers, which is not all that relevant to the topic of the article... AnonMoos (talk) 18:49, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, in Arabic, numbers, when "read aloud," are read from right to left. 45 is "five and forty," etc. Wrad (talk) 18:59, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Just like in German. 80.122.178.68 (talk) 19:21, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * And "four and twenty blackbirds". --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:20, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Is it the same as German? Because the literal translation from German would be "Five hundred two and forty." --Fullobeans (talk) 20:24, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yep, hundreds come first. Wrad (talk) 20:31, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I happen to understand German fairly well, although I don't speak it anywhere near natively. It is true that in German, tens and units are read right-to-left, in the opposite order to English, or my native Finnish. But this applies only to the relation between tens and units, or this relation multiplied by any power of one thousand. For example, 123456789 would be ein hundert drei und zwanzig millionen, vier hundert sechs und fünfzig tausend, sieben hundert neun und achtzig in German, meaning "one hundred three-and-twenty million, four hundred six-and-fifty thousand, seven hundred nine-and-eighty". Not "nine-and-eighty seven hundred, six-and-fifty four hundred thousand, three-and-twenty one hundred million". J I P  &#124; Talk 20:38, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually it would be: einhundertdreiundzwanzig Millionen vierhundertsechsundfünfzigtausendsiebenhundertneunundachtzig. Germans are so fond of long words they spell out numbers smaller than one million as one word. --Theurgist (talk) 01:03, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * This reminds me of the time I noticed that despite people from central and western Europe claiming Finnish has ridiculously long words, the word for "one-way ticket" is kertalippu (ten letters) in Finnish, but Einzelfahrschein (sixteen letters) in German. J I P  &#124; Talk 19:48, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
 * So let's say I went to the grocery store and stole the label off a very expensive loaf of bread, which the cashier has informed me costs $1,234. Then I sat down with my stolen label and translated each individual East Arabic numeral into a West Arabic numeral, without changing the order, as though it were a simple substitution cipher. Would the resultant string of West Arabic numerals read (left to right): 1234, 1243, or something else entirely? --Fullobeans (talk) 21:52, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The answer is 1234 (and "1243" is right out -- the only alternative answer that would make any real sense would be "4321"). AnonMoos (talk) 22:15, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Phew, that's straightforward enough. Thanks, everybody. --Fullobeans (talk) 22:54, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I've made an attempt at clarifying the passage in the Eastern Arabic numerals article which originally threw me for a loop. If anyone more knowledgeable on the topic would like to peer over my shoulder, please do. I've also added a ref which could be helpful. --Fullobeans (talk) 23:46, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

is 'liable to' standard English?
short and sweet. sounds like vernacular to me, but I see it in some of our articles. --80.98.112.4 (talk) 20:35, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Depends on how it's used, probably. If you don't stop eating that ice cream so fast you're liable to get a headache &mdash; that's informal.  But I'm sure someone can come up with a sentence that uses it in the sense of e.g. legal liability, and then it would be standard (not coming up with an example off the top of my head, though). --Trovatore (talk) 20:37, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Garner's Modern American Usage says "liable should not be used merely for likely. Liable best refers to something the occurrence of which risks being permanent or recurrent." So presumably he would disapprove of Trovatore's example sentence, but would approve of If you don't stop smoking cigarettes you're liable to get cancer. Whether Wikipedia editors need to feel bound to follow Garner's personal opinions is a different question. Angr (talk) 22:11, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * As an Australian, no ;-) HiLo48 (talk) 22:57, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Persons convicted of capital murder are liable to be put to death under the laws of the State &mdash; that seems completely standard for formal written English, if a bit grim. --Trovatore (talk) 22:23, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, it's certainly something whose occurrence risks being permanent. Angr (talk) 22:33, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * True, but the distinction I was making is more that this is "liable" in the sense of "being subject to a legal liability". Slight tangent:  I would pronounce this liable with three syllables, but the ice cream one with two. --Trovatore (talk) 22:36, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * If you write the wrong thing, and in doing so you right the wrong wrong, you're liable to be charged with libel. Luckily, the things that you're liable to read in the Bible can be quoted without fear of causing such trouble.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  00:31, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

The OED has no objection to liable in the general sense "likely"; it merely gives that sense as "dial. and U.S." Probably Garner would say it's "dial." even in the U.S. But the OED cites two American usage guides (Horwill 1935, Evans & Evans 1957) which illustrate its acceptable use in sentences where no threat of permanence or recurrence, or even "risk", seems to be implied.--Rallette (talk) 07:16, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Liable actually means 'legally obligated', so you can only use 'liable to' properly in a sentence like "John is liable to pay Jane $X in the event that…". Even there, though, most people would use 'liable for' (John is liable for a payment of $X…). 'Liable to' is almost always deep south vernacular for 'likely', usually in the sense of a personality characteristic ("John's liable to get a mite piqued at that there load a' hog-swallop") -- Ludwigs 2  23:47, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * What's your source for the assertion that liable "actually" means 'legally obligated' and for the assertion that using it to mean 'likely' is "almost always Deep South vernacular" (as opposed to anyone else's vernacular)? Angr (talk) 00:14, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The 'legally obligated' sense is just the first of three current senses given in the OED. The sense of 'exposed or subject to, or likely to suffer from' is equally valid, and has been used since 1593, with the related sense 'subject to the possibility of' cited from 1682.  The slight extension of meaning (considered slightly "improper" by some on both sides of the pond, but common in the UK and Australia) seems to have arisen spontaneously by combining these two other senses in many regions independently.  The OED cites a usage in Somerset dialect from 1888.  Is this before the earliest US usage?    D b f i r s   01:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)