Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 June 3

= June 3 =

Does "all but X" have two opposite meanings?
"All but" has been discussed before, the answer was that it means "almost". Yet, Freedictionary.com lists these two meanings:


 * almost In some places, bus service has all but disappeared.
 * everyone or everything except those mentioned All but the weakest plants survived the hot weather.

The latter sounds familiar because it's used the same way in Dutch ("allesbehalve", "everything except"). There's a set of things (plants) for which something is true (surviving the hot weather), except for the mentioned subset (the weakest). "All"="all plants", "but"="except".

The first example seems to be doing the exact opposite. It seems to mean "bus service did many things, but disappearing is not one of them". Maybe the literal sense is something like "bus service did its very best to disappear by becoming unpopular, limited to Mondays, etc. except it hasn't totally disappeared yet"? Joepnl (talk) 02:34, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Pretty much as you say it. Another way to explain it would be "Bus service is so poor that the only thing that it has left to do is disappear." Mingmingla (talk) 04:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * (ec) The sense of it is that, for some patrons, it really has disappeared so, while the the service still exists per se, for those affected customers, it may as well not exist. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  04:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Chinese text on map
In Matteo Ricci's 1602 map of the world, there is some explanatory text in the South China Sea. It seems that the location of modern-day Spratly Islands is labelled Wanli Changsa (万里長沙), corresponding to the modern Vietnamese name for the islands (Trường Sa). What does the text corresponding to modern-day Paracel Islands say? What's the long explanatory text in the middle of the South China Sea? DHN (talk) 07:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Punctuation
Are there any languages without punctuation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.116.25.10 (talk • contribs) 16:57, 3 June 2014


 * Well, in Chinese (and, it seems, other East Asian languages), punctuation was adopted from Western languages in the 20th century. Thus, before then, Chinese was largely written without punctuation: see "Chinese punctuation". — SMUconlaw (talk) 09:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Punctuation is not a property of languages: it is a property of writing systems. Many languages are not written, so of course they are without punctuation. (This is perhaps nitpicking; but people who think about language in our society almost always think of written language, but this is a limited and very atypical kind of language). --ColinFine (talk) 09:32, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Indeed. Please see Punctuation.--Shantavira|feed me 09:35, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * In English the written punctuation relates to pauses of various length in speech. So, does any language exist which doesn't make pauses which convey meaning ?  So it would sound like: "I am going to the store now later I am going to the beach by the way my car needs an oil change". StuRat (talk) 15:54, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I doubt it very much. But "the written punctuation relates to pauses of various lengths" is an oversimplification (and possibly untrue). Among features of prosody roughly encoded by punctuation, pitch contour is at least as significant as length of pause. --ColinFine (talk) 17:15, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes. Stu, being of a scientific bent, has a logical cast of mind (a very good thing per se, generally speaking) and likes to categorise things in a black-and-white way as often as he can. I'm sure that explains his take on the spelling of the third person neuter singular possessive pronoun its as it's (presumably on the pseudo-rule: There's a one-to-one correspondence between the possessive case and apostrophe-s) .  The approach may work well in many contexts but, as you say and this example makes all too clear, it can lead to oversimplification and downright error.  English is internationally notorious for its features that defy logic, analysis, consistency or sanity.  But it is what it is (or, if one prefers, it's what it is) and must be met in the quiet places of our minds as a friend and an equal, warts and all, and loved unconditionally, not something to be conquered on the field of battle and capriciously molded to wrong-headed irrelevancies like logic. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:29, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * StuRat cannot reconcile his claim here that "the written punctuation relates to pauses of various length in speech" with use of the apostrophe in normal English contractions to show not a pause but Elision. A child's education begins at a disadvantage if it learns from a sub-literate adult about a pet: "don't pull it's tail". 84.209.89.214 (talk) 00:59, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I think the thing that makes its/it's such a hard thing to learn is that the Saxon genitive is normally formed by adding apostrophe-s (neither a pause nor an elision, but just the way that possessives are marked). So it's actually very natural to think that the genitive of it should be it's; why shouldn't it be?  The only reason I can think of is that then it would not be distinct in writing from the contraction of it is, but it's difficult to construct a sentence where that ambiguity would matter (and anyway the contractions of it is and it has are already identical). --Trovatore (talk) 01:13, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Which is why it was decided/agreed/consensified many, many years ago that it's refers only to those contractions, and not to the possessive pronoun. To a logician, "don't pull its tail" may make little sense without the apostrophe, so why don't they spell knife as nife, or eight as ait?  I'll tell you why.  It's because they are perfectly happy with these and a myriad of other accepted ways of doing things in our language that make no immediate sense to an outsider.  Why, then, do they make a single exception in the its/it's case?  I've seen many so-called sentences written without any hint of punctuation, no caps, run on sentences, spellings like "cant" and "dont" and "im" and all the rest - but they still go out of their way to insert an apostrophe into its, where it is actually NOT required.  This word seems to have become hallowed ground, where so many of the other features of written English have been thrown away as so much unnecessary rubbish.  Such a strange phenomenon.  Also, it's not a hard thing to learn.  But to learn something, it has to be taught properly, and that's where we're sadly lacking these days.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:06, 6 June 2014 (UTC)


 * StuRat -- I think it would be better to say that written English has a mixed logical/intonational punctuation system, which works reasonably well most of the time, but which doesn't and can't capture all relevant features of spoken language, and which is not so precisely defined that every combination of a written sentence and intended meaning has one and only one acceptable punctuation... The punctuation system of Hebrew Bible manuscripts is preoccupied with grouping words together into phrases and phrases together into larger phrases in order to help with interpretation and ceremonial recitation of the text. AnonMoos (talk) 08:44, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * How are written languages limited? Unwritten tongues are (lacking the stabilizing effect of writing) mutually unintelligible with their version 2 generations apart (and/or 10 km away). Also (assuming unwritten=small, being spoken by close-knit, presumably very high-context cultures) they are extremely baroque to the point of being virtually unlearnable by outsiders (it's a common misconception that "primitive people speak primitive languages"). They may have 177 gender suffixes but have to loan concepts like "tractor". And there are only so many things one may need to relate living a village life. This is very un-PC to say except when it's about medieval Europe, but premodern pre-state people don't know anything about anything, are superstitious, mostly live nasty, brutish and short lives and it's romanticism to assume they have a richer experience than us with science, complex social structure and whatnot. Asmrulz (talk) 19:36, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that you have a deep understanding of linguistics or anthropology. There's very little correlation between most aspects of linguistic typology and civilizational level (or whatever you want to call it).  Many peoples living in small  villages in the forest have a quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of most species prominent in the local environment and/or useful or dangerous for humans, a knowledge which helps in their survival -- and it could be argued that human memory capabilities evolved in part for this purpose... AnonMoos (talk) 09:01, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I lost a client because she didn't understand why I translated a student's essay with question marks, when, to the client's eyes, there were none. My explanation of why Japanese uses sentence-final particles to indicate questions or not went on deaf ears, and she hasn't spoken to me since. The student, however, won the competition the essay was for, having been translated by someone else, who presumably either gave the client the same reply as me, or just left out the question marks.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  16:29, 4 June 2014 (UTC)