Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 July 19

= July 19 =

leaving by the back door
In the sentence: "He left quietly by the back door, with as much dignity as he could muster." is "by" correct? My gut is mildly objecting and wants to replace it with "through" or "via". (My native ENGVAR is South African, the source of the sentence is British - probably what we now call "upper middle class" - from the 1950s). Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Native Brit here, I see no problem with that sentence. --TammyMoet (talk) 08:55, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Native USA'ian here. "By" is just fine there. I've heard and read it that way countless times. "Via" means "by way of". Just "by" by itself could be a shorter way of saying that. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:56, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Native Aussie here. It's fine by me.  Some people might prefer "through the back door", which if read literally would be quite painful.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  09:06, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * See File:1885 Punch three-volume-novel-parody Priestman-Atkinson.png for a little drawing of someone departing "through" a door... AnonMoos (talk) 19:18, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with all the above responses, that "by" is fine. But my introspection suggests a slight difference of meaning from "through" or "via". To me "by the back door" suggests that the back door is in a sense what he used to leave (tool, or method), as opposed to where he went through (route). I can't find any practical difference, but it has that feel to me. --ColinFine (talk) 09:11, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Native Brit here. 'By' is fine. It means 'using', basically. If you said 'he went home by car', that would make sense. If you said he went home through the car, that would mean he got in one side and got out of the other side on his wy home.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  09:18, 19 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Native ESL speaker here:o) The rest of the sentence would imply that the phrase “by the backdoor” carries some additional semantics.  The backdoor (as opposed to front door) would be the entrance / the exit for tradesmen, domestics and lower class nobodies.  Thus “leaving by the backdoor” may imply that the person is “sneaking out” in shame.  Knowing the source of the citation may help.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 15:22, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes and that may have been intentional on the part of the writer, especially given the second clause of the sentence. --TammyMoet (talk) 16:43, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Isn't the term 'native ESL' a contradiction? El duderino (abides) 09:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Cookatoo is from the little known country of Eslonia, who have reserved first language status for Eslonian, naturally, but use English as a second language. They're very insular, having no diplomatic links with any other countries.  They once opened a consulate in Estonia because they and the Estonians were sick to death of being mistaken for each other, but that only seemed to make matters worse, so they shut it down.  The 1992 World Cartographic Conference made it an item of the first importance to set up a working committee which is undertaking a scoping study to establish where exactly Eslonia is.  They're working feverishly to a tight deadline: they're required to produce their preliminary report by the end of 2025, with the full 200-volume report and recommendations to be submitted by 2035.  Watch this space.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:21, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Related Languages
I know that languages are grouped based on their roots, or presumed roots. Couldn't it be acceptable, however, to say that languages that have borrowed from each other are also related? KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 ) ( Chin Wag )  09:26, 19 July 2014 (UTC)


 * For linguists, it is rather important to keep these concepts apart, so we will typically insist that "related" can only be used in the genetic sense. In other cases we may speak of languages that have "converged", or of a "convergence area", a "sprachbund", or a language heavily "influenced" by another, and so on. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:40, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The distinction can be slightly blurry. Borrowing individual words would not make languages typologically related, but there are cases of languages adopting significant grammatical constructions from other languages when their communities are in contact.  So English is an unambiguously Germanic language but which nonetheless has a little bit of Celtic syntax and a little bit of Romance word formation. Peter Grey (talk) 17:36, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

KageTora -- before 1800, most educated people would have had little reluctance to say that English was vaguely "related" to both French and Dutch (though Joseph Justus Scaliger was already classifying European languages by their word for "God"), but since that time linguists have been able to discern several different and distinct ways in which languages can have similarities, and don't wish to lapse into earlier terminological confusion... AnonMoos (talk) 19:11, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I am quite aware of linguistics, having studied it for years. I was just putting forward a theory. Perhaps this is the wrong place, as it is not a forum for discussion. I was just wondering if anyone had any links to a book or something which had the same idea.

KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 ) ( Chin Wag )  23:13, 19 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Linguistics already has a long-standing genetic/genealogical analogy (mentioned by Fut.Perf. above), wherein one language can "give birth" to another, which then inherits certain traits and features of the "parent". I think the biological analogue of what you're describing would be horizontal gene transfer. A quick google of /horizontal transfer lingustics/ brought up this book, and this tantalizing scrap of what appears to be an abstract for a work in progress . Hope that helps, SemanticMantis (talk) 22:24, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Arab place name
Al Karak has the initial 'al' the article title, which I believe is a bit unusual among Arab place names in en.wiki. Am I correct? Is there a reason for this? A policy? trespassers william (talk) 21:11, 19 July 2014 (UTC)


 * It's fairly common, though there's inconsistency due to spelling the article "al" or "el", and separating it from the following word with a space or a hyphen, or joining the two directly together... AnonMoos (talk) 01:01, 20 July 2014 (UTC)


 * It used to be Kerak, but was moved, somewhat arbitrarily, I always thought. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)