Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 July 22

= July 22 =

The word "Holey"
How should the comparative and superlative form for the word "Holey" (adjective: full of holes) be spelled? Places I find by STFW do not seem to agree. Thieh (talk) 03:24, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Wiktionary has "holier" and "holiest" at holey, but Collins English Dictionary has "holeyer" and "holeyest" at http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/holey. In this instance, I prefer the forms given by Collins, because they avoid confusion with the inflected forms of "holy".
 * —Wavelength (talk) 03:36, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd go with "holier" over "holeyer". Plenty of things are homophones, and people understand just fine, in the right context. Trying to avoid confusion like this would likely make more. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:40, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I find that "has more holes" avoids any confusion, even in speech. -- Jayron  32  04:01, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'll second that. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:09, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Thirded. I have also never seen Collins' suggestion before, nor any parallel construction in common use. As far as I know, all adjectives ending in -y form their comparatives in -ier and superlatives in -iest. AlexTiefling (talk) 09:22, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * (Slightly relevant to the holeyest things: Trypophobia, more holey examples here ) SemanticMantis (talk) 17:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * While we're at it, I've never liked that the atomic weights given for the various elements aren't whole numbers according to reliable sources; let's just round them off here at wikipedia, or avoid their use altogether. μηδείς (talk) 17:21, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I may as well second that, too. Crank boron all the way to 11. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:11, 23 July 2014 (UTC)


 * OneLook Dictionary Search mentions "boneyest", "feyest", "greyest", "riceyest", and "surveyest" at http://www.onelook.com/?w=*eyest&ls=a. Wiktionary mentions "clayier" and "clayiest" at clayey.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 19:17, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Cod is bonier than tuna. I don't understand how varying degrees of rice work, but I know "boneyest" is terrible. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:15, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

"Deceased"
I just watched an episode of the Antiques Roadshow filmed in Salt Lake City Utah. Two separate members of the public whose items were appraised used "deceased" in an identical manner that I'm not sure I've ever heard before. The first woman said something like "once my grandparents deceased I..." and then a man said "once my mother deceased I..." Note that even though they were not together at all, they were interviewed in the same segment (as they both brought in similar lamps), so there is a possibility the man heard the woman's usage, and then followed her lead in a way he wouldn't have if he hadn't just heard the word used that way. But anyway, two people saying this got my attention. Is this a common regional use? Is this common to any of you?--108.46.97.218 (talk) 04:35, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't use it myself, but I'm pretty sure I've heard it. It seems to be a revival or persistence of the archaic verb to decease, which the OED dates back to 1439: "Yf the saide Iohn decesse withoute heires". My guess is that it's not restricted to one region; it seems to be a logical choice for anyone who wants to express the formal or euphemistic tone of the adjective deceased using a verb (though of course the usual go-to is to pass away). Lesgles (talk) 05:20, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * It's like "departed". People who have departed are departed. You could say those who desisted are "the desisted", too. Not common. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:12, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * InedibleHulk—this was fun to discuss here. Bus stop (talk) 14:11, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh yes, joyful times indeed. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:27, 23 July 2014 (UTC)


 * 'Deceased' would seem to be less ambiguous and euphemistic than 'pass away', without breaking the 'never say die' taboo. (I can't say I much understand the taboo myself, but I've seen it in action a lot.) AlexTiefling (talk) 09:20, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Not as bad as "lost", though: "I'm depressed because I recently lost my wife ... I sure wish I could remember where I left her." StuRat (talk) 12:51, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, euphemisms. Actor: "I understand you buried your wife recently." W.C. Fields: "Yes, we had to. She died." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:05, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Stu, Oscar Wilde had great fun with "lost" in The Importance of Being Earnest. When Jack reveals to Lady Bracknell that he has "lost" not just one but both of his parents, she retorts: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune ... to lose both seems like carelessness". --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:01, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Decease and sist from discussing this any further. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:14, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Name of Asia
I noticed that apparently none of the Oriental languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai...) have a native word for Asia: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Asia#Translations They all seem to use derivations of the Hellenic word Ἀσία from the opposite edge of the continent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia#Etymology Did they really never elaborate a native term for their own continent or for a similar concept? Or was it replaced in recent times? --151.41.188.183 (talk) 13:49, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Asia is a Western concept. From the perspective of physical geography, there is nothing to distinguish Europe from Asia but a rather arbitrary, culturally defined line across the landmass of Eurasia. This line was part of the Western, Greco-Roman tradition but not the Sinitic tradition. To the Chinese, south and southwest Asia and Europe were lumped together as "the West." This is no less rational than lumping the 3/4 of Eurasia east of the Urals and the Bosphorus as "Asia." In premodern times, East Asians were not aware of any other landmasses comparable to Eurasia, so there would be no need to distinguish Eurasia with a name. Although Zheng He reached East Africa, it isn't clear that he recognized that it was part of a separate continent distinct from other lands he had visited in South Asia. The Chinese would simply have referred to Eurasia with terms such as 大陆 (dàlù), meaning "continent" or "mainland". Marco polo (talk) 13:59, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Boundaries_between_continents has a pretty nice discussion about the issue, and it largely confirms what Mr. Polo has said above. The perspective is largely a European one, and is also largely culturally based.  You can even see that, historically, the line has jumped around quite a bit, and with a bit of danger of being too simplified, Europe was where the white people lived.  The overland border between Europe and Asia generally included Slavic and Georgian peoples in Europe, but not Iranian, Turkic, Mongol, or Tartar peoples.  The tripartate division of the "world" into Africa, Europe, and Asia (as well as the now debunked division of people into Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid, i.e. people that live in Africa, Europe, and Asia) permeates Western thought for thousands of years, and it is largely based on the racial-cultural definitions as defined by European culture over that time period.  The physical geography definition of "continent" came about MUCH later than the cultural one, which is why many geologists and geographers prefer terms like "landmass" over "continent", as the word "continent" carries too much cultural baggage.  -- Jayron  32  16:47, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, and us British pee ourselves laughing about it, presumably because we are incontinent.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  17:17, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * "...Europe was where the white people lived"
 * Well, only if you consider Greeks to be white. --Bowlhover (talk) 18:11, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Greeks were typically classified as Caucasian. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:45, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I've always thought that Greece is quite far from the Caucasus. I wonder why the Argonauts sailed for the Golden Fleece if they could do it by land.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:26, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Long story short: although deriving from the Greek mainland, many of the Ancient Greek peoples and their allies, trading partners etc. were scattered over various other non-adjacent city states, areas and islands, often with non-Greek (and potentially hostile or non-cooperative) peoples separating them. Traversing such areas by land could be time-consuming, arduous and dangerous. It was generally easier (though not without its own hazards) to sail rather than travail, which was how many of the Greek 'colonies' were established in the first place. The semi-obsolete and much-misunderstood anthropological term Caucasian, though of course deriving from the Caucasus, was never intended to imply actual residence of that area, or for that matter a particular skin complexion. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 212.95.237.92 (talk) 12:51, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It was my sarcasm. I do not like the racial term "Caucasian" at all as it's accidental, outdated, unscientific, confusing etc. If we need a racial (or beter say, "phenotypical") term for "white people", Europid is much better (most anthropologists outside of the English-speaking world use this or alike term). Though for now more than a half "Europids" live outside of Europe (Americas, N. Africa. M. East, N. India, N. Asia), this type is most associated with Europe in general, and a great bulk of them have been lived there non-intermingled with other types for millennia.
 * And, of course, Ancient Greeks did not live in the Caucasus (apart from small colonies) and hence they weren't and isn't "Caucasians". They travelled to Colchis by see because it was the best way to get there in Ancient times.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:56, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Terms like Caucasoid, Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid, etc. were only fairly recently considered to be negative or out of date. They were at once time considered superior to the colloquial terms white, black, brown, yellow, red, etc. They were like euphemisms. And as often happens with the euphemisms treadmill, those terms likewise fell out of favor. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:36, 25 July 2014 (UTC)


 * People in the Middle East and North Africa are classified as white. Arabs aren't exactly black. (Some natives in Afghanistan look really white. Not sure if whites consider lighter-skinned people from the Indian Subcontinent white nowadays.) In some regions of Europe, especially in the south (e. g., Sicily), the natives do not look appreciably different from Middle Easterners; it's not like at the European side of the Bosporus people are blond and blue-eyed and at the other side everybody looks Chinese. (In fact, the whole southwest of Asia is inhabited by peoples who definitely do not look "Asian" in the sense of Chinese. I hate when people equate Asia with East Asia and act if everything in between Europe and East Asia did not exist.) So it's not that neat. (If it were, Europe would have to extend all the way to the Himalayas.)
 * As far as I know, the division Europe–Asia–Africa began in Ancient Greece. Europe was west of the Aegean, Asia the eastern coast ("Asia" originally only referred only to Asia Minor, i. e., Anatolia), and Libya (whence Africa) the southern coast of the Mediterranean. It makes only sense from the perspective of the Greeks. Funny enough, Crete was once considered to be part of Asia. Egypt too, possibly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:52, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The American racial categorisation is one of the stupidest things in the world I know. It always leads to confusion. Being for centuries a racist country but later rejecting racism passionately and thus being paranoid about everything racial, America still divides peoples by the most ambiguous outdated racist terms like "White" or "Black" or even worse "Asian". And after the racial taboo in science, physical anthropology is in abyss there, so it is most probably these terms will be used, unfortunately. If they banned physical anthropology as it is "racist" and they do not want use proper scientific categorisation (nevertheless, I wonder why even this scientific categorisation is needed in everyday life), why the heck are they using the outdated 18-19 century one?
 * I believe initially "white" meant "Anglo-Saxon" or "Teutonic" as most American people, who were neither Natives nor African slaves, migrated from the British Isles or Germanic North Europe. And they, being North Europeans, indeed were relatively fair-haired and fair-skinned, thus this term had some sense. But when immigrants began arriving from South Europe as well as M. East and India, this became obviously unacceptable. These people are swarthy but still anthropologically they are close to "Anglo-Saxons". And the only thing American bureaucrats have found out is to widen the definition and now we have "white" but swarthy Indians or Yemenis. And when this also became ridiculous, instead of dropping out races at all (as they know nothing about them, cannot define them properly and pretend to be an anti-racist country) they dug out outdated no less ambiguous "Caucasian" and added "Asian" for Far Eastern nations. Voilà, we have an absolute incomprehensible terminological mess.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:56, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Of course. Purely descriptive terms like "Europ(o)id", "Mongol(o)id" or "Austral(o)id" are not exactly racist as such, even if one may take issue with their accuracy or appropriateness in specific contexts. I have thought about calling these morphological phenotypes "Regional Ancestry Correlated Entities", i. e., RACEs in short. :-) I do find it annoying when you find yourself needing to employ cumbersome circumlocutions, whether in daily life or even scientific discussions, only because people exhibit a reflex-like distaste for these handy and for many purposes reasonably accurate terms. Racial phenotypes aren't going to go away anytime soon. Even with the most vigorous mixing humans aren't ever going to be a completely homogeneous mass as, even if we inbred semi-albinos from Europe disappear as a coherent group, the variation will not; the characteristics typical of this and other groups are going to surface time and again and blondes, redheads etc. are never going to disappear completely.
 * And face it, human phenotypical variation, prehistoric migrations and related issues is a fascinating topic to many people regardless of their political views. Instead of rendering it completely obsolete, archaeogenetics both enriches and corrects it. For example, some terms such as "Mongol(o)id" or "Nordic" correlate remarkably well with certain narrow haplogroups, while the number of lineages lumped under other terms such as "Negr(o)id" is far larger and so these handy terms conceal huge diversity – although this is hardly surprising given what we know about human prehistory now.
 * Racial classifications are hardly more arbitrary than those of other – even quite scientific – fields, such as colours, celestial objects, day and night, periods of history, dialects, vowels, music genres and other cultural phenomena, even tools, fashion or furniture. Or geographical objects such as seas and continents, of course: There is no objective solution, it's all culture-dependent. The concept "species" is no less controversial than that of "race". That's the nature of classification and semantics: reality is full of continua and complexities we try to handle with our reductionist categories. The concept of, say, "planet" is (as everybody should be aware of now) not based on a god-given objective fact of the universe, but an arbitrary human invention, with a long and confused history of its own.
 * That's the real fallacy (and quite harmful folly) at the heart of flat-out "race denial", as opposed to quite different issues that are only related to politics and economics and have nothing to do with the objective existence – or not – of race. In fact, denying classifications on the grounds of them being arbitrary to an extent is an inherently anti-scientific mindset, because science cannot do without classifications that are to some extent arbitrary, even if scientists try to avoid them more and more. "Racial realism" as a far-right movement is not really about the mere existence of races as a plain descriptive fact, after all. Non-white people are happy to acknowledge the differences as such and don't wish them to be eliminated or suppressed, only the associated harmful cultural baggage.
 * On either end of the political spectrum, colourblindness and tabooing of the subject makes people only more racist. Also, misunderstood "political correctness" is exploited by nationalists and other ideologues to manipulate (among other things) Wikipedia all the time to rewrite or suppress the nasty or inconvenient bits of history (often attributed to "white colonial history/science"). For example in the case of Mileva Marić, where Serbian nationalists and Anti-Semites team up with feminists to deny Einstein his true place in history. Or when Turkish, Indian and other nationalists together with well-meaning helpers gang up on Marija Gimbutas and absurdly impute white supremacist ideological motivations to her. Afrocentrism isn't made true by the oppression directed against black people, either. Science can inform politics, but politics should never inform science. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:35, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

151.41.188.183 -- I strongly doubt whether any nations or peoples adopted names for continents until well into historical times, because there's no reason to name a continent until you have explored fairly widely and are aware of more than one continent. The origin of Western continent names is that the ancient Greeks used the word "Asia" to refer to lands directly across the Aegean sea (i.e. "Asia Minor" or Anatolia), the word "Europe" to refer to mainland Greece itself and vaguely-known areas connected by land to the north, and the word "Libya" to refer to vaguely-known areas reached by sailing long distances to the south. These words were not at first continent names, because the Greeks didn't know about continents until they acquired broader horizons of geographical knowledge, after the three words had already been in use for some time to refer to narrower less-than-continental areas... The Romans substituted "Africa" for "Libya" ("Africa" in the narrower sense was the name of a province encompassing today's northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria), and that's how we got the three eastern hemisphere continent names (Asia, Europe, Africa). AnonMoos (talk) 20:29, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * As a personal observation, it seems to me that the Ancient Greek definitions of the continents were really a Mediterranian-centric definition, rather than Europe-centric. Essentially, they divided up the lands around the Med, using the major waterways as boundaries.  "Europe" was northern land west of the Bosphorus and the Don, "Lybia" was the southern land west of the Nile, and "Asia" was the land between.  I doubt that northern or central Europeans with little or no contact with the Med would have had the same idea of "Europe" and "Asia" - and probably even less so for people like the Scythians who lived in both. Iapetus (talk) 13:51, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

greek diacritics
At Yarmouk River, I added the ancient greek name in greek script. The problem is the first letter in the source is printed with a diacritic, and I don't know which one, or how to fill in the transliteration template. trespassers william (talk) 22:07, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Fixed it; it would be Ἱερομύκης, with a spiritus asper, as in the root hiero. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:15, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The template:transl is still empty. It never occurred to me this can be an originally Greek name. Surprisingly, no semitic older name is easily found. Do you have an idea as to what μύκης would mean in that context? trespassers william (talk) 00:00, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a Greek word wikt:μύκης, but it doesn't really make much sense here. The Greek name might well be a folk-etymological adaptation of a pre-existing native name, just like the "hiero-" in Ἱεροσόλυμα, the Greek name of Jerusalem, so I wouldn't be too confident that it has to be the original etymology, even if it happens to be the earliest attested form. Fut.Perf. ☼ 02:32, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * A "holy mushroom" could be a psilocybin mushroom, but it makes little sense as a river name (unless the region was known for shrooms, perhaps), I agree. It's probably of Semitic origin. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:21, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * OK, at least Amanita muscaria is apparently not actually endemic to the Middle East, but the Greeks themselves would have been well familiar with psychoactive mushrooms used in sacred ritual if speculations that the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries contained mushroom-derived substances are correct. In that case, "holy mushroom" is not such a random collocation, even if the association with the river may be purely phonetically motivated and unrelated to local circumstances. I recall other cases where ancient Greeks have clearly distorted foreign names and words as the result of folk-etymological re-interpretation. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:27, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, Robert Graves believed that the Amanita was in use . I should probably add that citation to the Eleusinian Mysteries article. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:03, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I can find several sources (including, apparently, the 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica) stating that the earliest mention of the Yarmouk is in the Mishna (Tractate Parah), as Yarmuk.  הסרפד  (call me Hasirpad) 03:29, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Though I can also find sources that say that the Yarmuk is Pliny's Hieromices, so ignore my previous comment. הסרפד  (call me Hasirpad) 03:35, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The Greek seems to me pretty clearly derivative of "Yarmuk" or some earlier version of that name. The Ἱερο in Ἱερομύκης mirrors that at the beginning of Ἱεροσόλυμα, pronounced roughly Yerushalem or Jeruʃalem in Aramaic. According to Koine Greek phonology, ύ was still pronounced 'y' (like a French 'u') at the time the first Hellenistic Greeks arrived to coin a Greek name for that river. The -ης at the end of the name was likely added so that the word would fit into the Greek noun declension scheme.  Very likely, the Greek word is derived from an earlier form something like Yerumuk/Jerumuk. Marco polo (talk) 20:13, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Here comes the pendulum. I had already seen in Yohanan Aharoni that Arar might be an old Egyptian name, but wasn't thrilled with two syllables, and two shady consonants (as r and l are conflated in Egyptian). But after jumbling some names, thought it ,might be convenient if there was an Arar Maacha or Aram Maacha. And then found hebrew, jstor page or eng weird site, relating to the execration texts. Now where to find an echo to the speculation? trespassers william (talk) 02:29, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Did Karl May know genuine Apache words?
Karl May's character Winnetou, described as Mescalero Apache, has a horse called Iltschi, whose name is explained as meaning "wind". Iltschi's brother Hatatitla, whose name is said to mean "lightning", is ridden by Old Shatterhand. Did he simply make these words up or are there really similar words with those meanings in Mescalero or some related language such as Navajo? He certainly got the general sound of Apachean languages at least vaguely right from what little I know of them, although Navajo phonology informs me that [u] is not present in Navajo even allophonically and there are no diphthongs. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:13, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Winnetou sounds more like an Algonquian word (like a mix of Winnipeg and Manitou). Adam Bishop (talk) 01:24, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There's also Winnebago (although Ho-Chunk makes me think the name may be etymologically identical with Winnipeg – see Winnipeg and Lake Winnipeg) and the Siouan-derived first name Winona. So this could really be the way the name was created. Perhaps the name is actually Algonquian, because it is translated as "burning water" and Winnipeg/Winnebago is also supposed to mean "muddy water" or "stinking water" respectively.
 * Karl May gives meanings for all the names. One gets the impression that the names are supposed to be actually real – and the context is very specific: Winnetou is not a generic Indian, he belongs to an identifiable ethnic group. May's descriptions are detailed and he gives the impression to have done detailed research. So you would expect that it's not all made up out of thin air.
 * I just thought there might be Athabascanists, natives or people with access to dictionaries in relevant languages here. Oh well. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:06, 26 July 2014 (UTC)


 * In Navajo, níłchʼi can mean wind and the holy wind or one of the holy people. See also Diné Bahaneʼ (Story of the People). According to one undergraduate thesis "that simple translation [i.e. "wind"] does not capture the word’s full meaning. For the Navajo, nilch’i is considered the means of life. It represents not only a god, or holy person, but also a means of communication, the act of breathing, and every Navajo’s soul. Wind is present in virtually all aspects of Navajo culture." (Della Hall, The Navajo Concept of Wind, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011). The Navajo word for Oxygen is níłchʼi yáʼátʼéehii, or "good air". (See also Navajo Wikipedia's article on O.) ---Sluzzelin talk  16:40, 26 July 2014 (UTC)


 * As for Hatatitla, the closest I found came from Nuu-chah-nulth: Via Haietlik ("lightning fish"), I learned that Tl'iihtl'iha means "lightning" (it's also the name of a legendary chief, according to Michael Harkin, Whales, Chiefs, and Giants: An Exploration into Nuu-Chah-Nulth Political Thought, Ethnology, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), p 322). I know nothing about this language or how its words are inflected and compounded, and there may well be a closer-sounding cousin in another Wakashan language, or it might be from a completely different language. Just throwing it in, because there is some similarity with Hatatitla. I didn't find anything similar in any of the Chinook Jargon dictionaries I found online, and Wiktionary's Chinook Jargon Appendix gives saghillie piah ("fire above") for lightning. ---Sluzzelin talk  18:00, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Cool, thanks for having a go at the question with online resources only! Too bad that there do not seem to be any experts around, but at least this confirms my suspicion that Karl May may have used real words. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:40, 26 July 2014 (UTC)