Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 May 7

= May 7 =

translation to Venetian please
Hi - I have an awkward name for a university I'd like to have Venetianised please - it's 'University of the Glass Bridge of the Ca'Foscari' - thanks for any attempts. Adambrowne666 (talk) 08:20, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm confused. Do you just want it in the Italian language (which is what they speak in Venice, Italy) ?  Or are you looking for a specific modern or archaic Venetian accent ? StuRat (talk) 08:23, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I always assumed they had their own dialect - I might well be wrong - in which case, yes, Italian would be great, thank you. Adambrowne666 (talk) 08:33, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, Venetian is quite different from standard Italian. Linguistically it's not even a dialect of Italian. "Ca' Foscari" is, itself, Venetian. You might be waiting a while if you need a native speaker of Venetian though... In the absence of that, the best I could suggest is to start with the Italian, then use a Venetiain dictionary (Google turned up this but I can't figure out how it works) to substitute the words? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 08:56, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * There is a Venetian language article on vec:Universit%C3%A0_Ca%27_Foscari...so now all you need to figure out is "glass bridge". Adam Bishop (talk) 10:44, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Good thinking Adam! Using a similar method, I looked up vec:Ponte de Rialto, which suggests that bridge is "Ponte", and compared vec:Muran with it:Murano, which suggests that glass is "véro". Now all you need is to figure out the cases for "de/del" in Venetian to string these words together. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 17:44, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Building on that, I think it's probably "Università del Ponte de Véro de ła Ca' Foscari". That was clever to think of using Murano. Lesgles (talk) 18:31, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I love you guys (nongenderspecific)!!!Adambrowne666 (talk) 22:51, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Does anybodies really talks this ways?
Occasionally I meet a fictional character who, to signal his uneducated status, attaches –s to too many words. My primary example is the plumber in Dead Winter; I think I've heard Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel do it, as well as someone or other in Futurama.

But in real life I've only heard it from a couple of Vietnamese immigrants, who were hazy about verb agreement.

So is this real? —Tamfang (talk) 09:22, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * There's the word "anyways", which seems to be an American counterpart of what I know as "anyway". The first time I heard the -s version was from an American-born Australian whose father is a university professor and whose mother is Vietnamese.  He was from Ohio, if that matters.  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  09:30, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Newfoundland English typically uses only one verb conjugation, the one with the s (normally the third-person singular in "standard" English) - "I wants", "you wants", etc. (This probably comes from Irish English or some other England English variety.) Adam Bishop (talk) 10:41, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * In South Africa, people whose home language is not English often do this - especially with nouns that are already plurals. e.g. I sheared my sheeps. I took my cattles to the kraal. I caught 3 fishes. 196.214.78.114 (talk) 14:16, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Sheep and fish are endling-less plurals, for different reasons I believe (I think the one is original, the other is by analogy). Tamfang didn't specify which kinds of words, though; if they did, that might help. Drmies (talk) 14:18, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I have heard people with loose-fitting dentures sound like they are adding an "s" to words. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:51, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm reminded of the punch line from an early Bill Cosby bit, parodying a hair tonic ad, which I think went like this: "Now let's compare combs... yours is blue, mines is orange... now let's go get us some womens!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:22, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * That would be perfectly accepted in Harlem, but there are two things going on. The extra ess on mines is in analogy to yours, not a pluralization.  And the extra ess on womens is a hypercorrection, adding an ess where unnecessary to approximate a more standard form. μηδείς (talk) 12:47, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Semi-related, one of the relatives of one of the rescued women in Cleveland yesterday referred to the four as "womans" or "womens", I'm not quite sure which. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:23, 8 May 2013 (UTC)


 * No idea if it's real, but another fictional or semifictional character who does it (in this case as a sign of being a nonnative speaker of English) is Spiro in My Family and Other Animals. Angr (talk) 21:27, 8 May 2013 (UTC)


 * some nordics folks froms swedens or norways speaks english this ways. Gzuckier (talk) 05:33, 9 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The real answer is just down the road a ways. --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  20:08, 9 May 2013 (UTC)


 * By the way, Tamfang, Cletus's speech is exaggerated, but it is pretty much accurate, in that they don't have him say things one would never hear. μηδείς (talk) 20:40, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Elision in Latin

 * Hello,


 * is a diphthong or are other double vowels in Latin elided?
 * As example:


 * Eae accinunt --> Ea'accinunt ?
 * Ii accinunt --> I'accinunt ?

Greetings HeliosX (talk) 13:05, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * First, eae → ea would not change the syllable count. Elisions often have to be reconstructed as having occurred in poetry, in order to make the text scan according to the poetic metre used, but such elisions are rarely written when they occur across words (unlike the situation in ancient Greek). AnonMoos (talk) 15:19, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The diphthongs in Latin are never broken up, so if there is elision, the a goes as well: "e-ac-ci-nunt". In your second example, ii is not a true diphthong, so the first i is not affected, but the second i can be elided just like any other vowel: "i-ac-ci-nunt". As AnonMoos said though, this is not indicated in the writing. Lesgles (talk) 18:10, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * So to summarise, a dipthong is treated as a single long vowel (I think) but a double vowel is just two vowels. IBE (talk) 02:32, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Looking for a word that has this meaning...
Basically a rhetorical or moral statement that isn't actually true. For example,

"Fighting never solves anything"

The statement isn't true, fighting has solved many disputes and conflicts in history, but the statement is used for rhetorical/moral purposes. Is there a word that describes this kind of statement? ScienceApe (talk) 15:48, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Aphorism? No aphorism, AFAIK, is strictly true 100% of the time.  -- Jayron  32  16:06, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The closest thing I can find is thought-terminating cliché. Incidentally my own favorite example is, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looie496 (talk) 17:42, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Platitude (especially in combinations like "reassuring platitude") is a decidedly uncomplimentary term (in comparison with "aphorism", "maxim", etc). I've also seen such phrases described as "literary pablum". Tevildo (talk) 18:02, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * That is a most disconcerting cliché, if not somewhat dangerous if use carelessly. There exist plenty of counterexamples - try mercury poisoning, cocaine use, diabetes, ... Need I say more? Plasmic Physics (talk) 23:40, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Ayn Rand was fond of the word bromide to describe a false or cliched platitude. It's a little dated, and I have only heard it used once or twice outside her non-fiction. μηδείς (talk) 20:20, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * There's a great 1946 "music video" of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelley dancing to "The Babbit and the Bromide" (sequence from Ziegfeld Follies (film))... AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Hmm, in a very convoluted way, killer phrase comes to my mind, as well as the concept described in Spiral of silence...in German we would probably use "Totschlagargument", killer argument. Lectonar (talk) 21:01, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Pablum, pablum, intellectual pap. Bus stop (talk) 23:51, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Bromide is definitely dated, but I think it is more common than Medeis suggests. I get the feeling there isn't an exact term, but the words given should offer you plenty of alternatives for the basic gist. My own favourite is "hard work never killed anyone." What happened to slaves then? Or the people who built the Panama canal? IBE (talk) 02:38, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * As Ronald Reagan (allegedly) said: "They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, why take the risk?" AndrewWTaylor (talk) 08:28, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Seems to me the best answer to the claim that "Hard work has never killed anyone" is "Arbeit macht frei" 64.201.173.145 (talk) 12:08, 8 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I spend my life vapidly vacillating between "Many hands make light work" and "Too many cooks spoil the broth". --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  12:18, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * My personal bugbear is "The medium is the message." It's so obviously untrue, but I suppose "The medium is often as important as the message and very occasionally more important than it" isn't so snappy. Tevildo (talk) 19:36, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Couldn't agree more. That saying is just total nonsense. 86.167.19.50 (talk) 02:15, 10 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Arbeit macht frei was simply a lie, not an aphorism. μηδείς (talk) 12:44, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Unless you take "free" to mean "dead". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:21, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * How is that? In normal society, it probably is somewhat true, sounds like something Rousseau might approve of.
 * It wouldn't make sense to say "work makes you dead". Even in the death camps, it wasn't work that killed people, it was homicidal Nazis that killed them. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:37, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I guess you never heard the expression "worked to death". Meanwhile, just today, you have this convicted murderer calling death "the ultimate freedom". And in a sense she's right: The dead have no problems, no worries. But not a lot of fun, either. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:30, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Editors/Censors
I have trouble reading nonfiction books now because editors hijack the text to make it what they want it to be. For example: I've been trying to convince my parents that this is editors' doing and not authors', but it's been like trying to sway a rock to get my point. Please prove them wrong. (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:30, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Only "coauthor," without a hyphen, is valid.
 * Only "Hughes's," with an extra S, is valid.
 * What? How could you possibly know whether an author or editor did it?  Are you certain that no author would ever under any circumstances write that way? Looie496 (talk) 17:38, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * In order to prove that, it would have to be true. It isn't, so we can't. The English language did not drop down on a cloud out of Heaven, endowed with a unique standard of correctness. It's a matter of consensus, and on these topics there is no full consensus. Even highly-respected standards are no more than the opinions of highly respected groups or individuals, not some form of absolute truth. You are wrong, and unless our parents are arguing that only the opposite of your position is correct, they are probably in the right. AlexTiefling (talk) 17:50, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * If the OP "has trouble reading" text just because of its punctuation variances, he might have a larger problem than just parental issues. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:17, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


 * See Style guide. Proofreaders and editors do alter manuscripts, not only to fix undisputed errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation (authors do make them!) but also sometimes to make the text conform to a publisher's house style.  Some authors accept this process (scientific journals, for example, generally insist on compliance as a condition of publication).  Others object, and you will find plenty of anecdotes about authors who have rejected or negotiated on this kind of editorial input, with varying degrees of success.  Your difficulty is that your preferred versions of coauthor and Hughes's are neither definitive nor authoritative.  You have no idea whether the author's original preference coincided with your own or whether an editorial change has been made; any printed authority you can produce to support your preferred version can almost certainly be contradicted by a different, equally authoritative source; and in a decade or two usage may have changed again anyway.  This is why I can bid you goodbye instead of good-bye (I draw the line at wishing you alot of luck, although in fifty years or so some authority will probably have already declared it an acceptable variant.  Thus it goes.) -  Ka renjc 12:18, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Karenjc, you are my heroine. Your barnstar is in the mail.  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  21:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)