Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 March 12

= March 12 =

a fit of unbearable coughing?
Can it be "a fit of unbearable coughing", "an unbearable fit of coughing" or "an unbearable coughing fit"? Would you tell me which of the three is better? Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.128.168.202 (talk) 04:19, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * They all work, and "an unbearable fit of coughing" seems the least marked to me. μηδείς (talk) 04:27, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * An unbearable fit of coffin? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:27, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * "It isn't the cough that carries you off, It's the coffin they carry you off in". --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  18:13, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There was a TV ad here selling their cold remedy for those with a "cough and cold". When I heard it, I thought they said a "coffin cold", in which case they should get to the hospital emergency room immediately ! StuRat (talk) 21:58, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Pergament paper
Context: art catalogue descriptions of ink drawings. Is there a material called "pergament paper" in English used with this medium and technique? I suspect some faux ami translation from the Hebrew when I encounter the Hebrew נייר פרגמנט (niYAR pergaMENT) translated as "parchment paper" - which we see associated in English with baking paper, either as a synonym or perhaps the preferred term in British English. The German word pergament is evidently what's called parchment in English. Any elucidation would be appreciated. -- Deborahjay (talk) 08:58, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Parchment ultimately comes from the name of the city of Pergamon/Pergamum, so they are really the same word. But I've never heard of parchment paper being used for anything other than baking. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:20, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Aha. So a web search on "pergamon paper" finds this most often as a translation of the Latin Charta pergamena, and eventually I arrived at paper vellum which strikes me as the most likely (and possibly even correct) answer. -- Deborahjay (talk) 10:50, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Next is how to decide whether the term for such paper with the properties of vellum is "paper vellum" or "vellum paper"? Web hits e.g. art glossaries seem to favor the latter, also in the commercial context: customers seek a kind of paper, not a kind of vellum. Is this a valid justification? I don't have an unabridged dictionary available. -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:17, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I have no idea about the specific art term, but "vellum paper" would definitely be the correct term from a grammatical/syntactical point of view. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:41, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Spanish help: Political controversy involving a Mexican school
Here is a quote from the following article:
 * "Denuncian presion de SEP." Diario Reforma. November 15, 1997. News, p. 4. Informe Académico, Gale Group# GALE|A129878062

"Indican padres de familia afectados que Limón Rojas injirió en la decisión de revocar la inscripción a su hijo al Liceo Japonés El Secretario de Educación Pública, Miguel Limón Rojas, sí influyó para que se expulsara un alumno de preparatoria que fue acusado de abuso sexual, del cual fue exonerado, en agravio de un niño de primaria que es compañero de uno de los dos hijos del titular de la SEP, que estudian en el Liceo Mexicano Japonés, informaron integrantes del Consejo Directivo del colegio. Inclusive el subsecretario Benjamín González Roaro, quien también tiene dos hijos estudiando en ese instituto, advirtió en una carta dirigida al presidente del Consejo Directivo, Takuro Otsuda, que debido a "denuncias graves irregulares, que afectan el rendimiento escolar de los alumnos del Liceo Mexicano Japonés", exigía la salida de dos integrantes del Consejo, o de lo contrario el colegio se haría acreedor a diversas sanciones, como retirarles su incorporación a la SEP.""

So does this mean that some politicians tried to defend their decision to expel a student who was accused and exonerated of a rape? If I am reading this correctly, there is criticism of officials who had students enrolled in the school, right? WhisperToMe (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

infinitive verbs
Can I say "They pick young elm seeds to cook them as food at home."?Similarly, is "She put a fish in the pot to boil it." correct? I'm not sure about the infinitive verbs in the two sentences. I need your advice. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.249.209.240 (talk) 13:48, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, both sentences are good English. Ehrenkater (talk) 13:50, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * "She boils a fish in the pot to clean it" might be more problematic. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:57, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * How is that comment relevant? I can't see any relevance to the original question.  Marco polo (talk) 15:45, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The construction also uses an infinitive. I'm suggesting that the original suggestion is much better, as it's less ambiguous. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:53, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * But the question wasn't about ambiguity, it was about a usage of the infinitive in English. Almost any usage can result in ambiguity, but the questioner wasn't looking for help with that. My concern is that we don't want to confuse English-language learners who are looking for simple answers. Marco polo (talk) 18:46, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * You're quite right, although infinitives seem to need special care. Happy to remove if this will help. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:54, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It's okay. We've clarified that the comment didn't imply a problem with either of the questioner's sentences.  Marco polo (talk) 00:21, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The use of the infinitive is right, and necessary after "in order". But the direct object pronouns are redundant and sound foreign, and should be omitted: "They pick young elm seeds to cook as food at home." "She put a fish in the pot to boil." μηδείς (talk) 18:13, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

For bilingual speakers
As many bilingual speakers know, when you speak to someone who is bilingual in the same languages, you often end up speaking in one language, but occasionally using words or phrases from the other, when appropriate. I am curious about this: if both languages have grammatical case and gender, are you putting the foreign word in an (approximately) correct case and with appropriate adjective-noun agreement, or are you using it as if it was an indeclinable word of default or random gender? For the purpose of this question, let's exclude cases where one of the languages is English (as it basically has no such properties) and pairs of closely related languages, like Serbian/Croatian, or Scandinavian languages, etc., where the word doesn't feel like a foreign word. Also exclude cases where the word or phrase is a recognized borrowing, like Déjà vu in English, it has to be some random word not normally used in the target language. So I am especially curious for pairs in different families, like Germanic-Slavic, or Romance-Germanic, but something like French-Spanish would do as well, I think.

Here I am interested in spontaneous language production (i.e. what you actually say on the spot), and also in what you would do after some deliberation, e.g. in writing. I think Commonwealth-era Polish tended to use Latin like this, even in writing, and I think Imperial Russian did this to some extent with French, since in both cases all educated readers were assumed to be bilingual. I am curious if there were/are "official" rules, as to how that was supposed to be done. Of course, modern Russian declines foreign nouns if they look "masculine", but that's not the sort of rule I have in mind, since it's explicitly designed for monolingual speakers.

(Note: I am trilingual myself, but I have no language pair where this would apply.) --Ornil (talk) 21:07, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * P.S. I want to explicitly exclude grammatical number and natural gender (e.g. if the word is a name of a person, or gender-specific, like actress), since these are semantic properties, and I expect all languages to preserve these. I am interested in strictly syntactic properties. --Ornil (talk) 21:15, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I am not good at formal grammar or syntax, so please bear with me if I have misunderstood the question.
 * Excluding grammatical number and natural gender and thinking back to cases when speaking Spanish with Swedish foreign words, all the examples I can think of right now, I used it as an an indeclinable word as in ¿Tiene el ? (Do you have the book?). Here I would just leave out the determinate case (-en) from the Swedish word (bok-en). But in this case the determinate was already in "el" in spanish, so adding "boken" would have felt superfluous. Star Lord  -  星王 (talk) 22:16, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * A partial answer: The term used in linguistics is Code-switching and there are some examples in that article – I gather, however, that the specifics of what happens is going to depend on the specifics of the two languages (i.e., there won’t be a general pattern across all languages with grammatical gender, for example). Most corpuses of examples that I can find involve English as one language, but I did see this for Arabic-French (if interested and you don’t have access, you can request it at WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request). 142.150.38.159 (talk) 17:02, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, code-switching is the correct term. The answer is that the switching normally occurs between, not in the middle of syntactical units, i.e., phrases.  The exception seems to be for nouns.  So in English/Spanish, "the big dog, whose owner died yesterday, bit my nephew" could be broken up as ((The big dog) (cuyo dueño murió ayer)) (mordió a mi nephew).  Here the only switching within a phrase is "mi nephew".


 * Also, the use of a Spanish transitive verb with a human object requires the use of personal a. Once you've said mordió you are comitted to using the Spanish preposition a.  You cant say "mordió my nephew" or "mordió to my nephew", but you can say "mordió a my nephew".


 * Spanish verbs will still decline for number according to an english subject: "The soldiers mataron los caballos." Choice of number is set for the definite article by the number of the noun and by gender if it is natural: "los boyfriends".  But it's pretty arbitrary for other nouns.  She went to the movie could be "fue al movie" (masc) or "fue a la movie" if the user considers inherently feminine, as the word peli ( < película) is in Spanish.


 * There are no learned rules. Code-switching occurs spontaneously and unselfconsciously.  If there is a conflict, there will usually be hesitation and repetition "Ella fue al...fue a la peli."


 * Here's a brief unedited excerpt from a recent email I sent:"En la cuestion de grados, hay in los EEUU, nursery school, kindergarten, grades 1-12, and university, which is called college. Los grados 9-12 son 'high school'. Los años de 9th grade hasta 12th grade se llaman, en secuencia, 'freshman year', 'sophomore year', 'junior year' and 'senior' year, lo igual que los primer cuatro años de Universidad. Pues, when I was 18 I graduated from senior year of high school y me converti en freshman in college."μηδείς (talk) 17:58, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Basically I know all this, since I am also bilingual with English being one of my languages. The problem is that English has no gender, so when you substitute an English noun in a foreign language sentence, you have to make up a gender. What I am hoping to find is a case where you speak, say, Spanish and German, and you use a German word in a Spanish sentence. A German word would have a gender, and as a bilingual speaker you'd know what it was, so would you use it? And, if both languages that have noun case (so not Spanish or English), would you put the object of a sentence in an accusative case?--Ornil (talk) 21:08, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * A bit ridiculous to answer my own question, but I remembered something I read. In Henryk Sienkiewicz's Potop (the Deluge), there's this passage in the original Polish (which I don't speak, but can make some sense of):
 * a nie inna droga salutis reipublicae zostawała
 * which means something like
 * there was no path left of the salvation of the republic
 * where the italicized part is in Latin, and is certainly in genitive. I would guess that had it been in Polish, it would likewise be in genitive. So at least in one case they did simply treat Latin phrase as if it was Polish and obeyed Polish grammar. There's also this:
 * sama [i.e. herself] justitia fundamentum regnorum
 * in which clearly justitia is feminine, as it would be in Latin. Although, no doubt it would be feminine as a Polish word too. But I am very curious if anyone has similar examples from other languages. Ornil (talk) 21:28, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Ah. I am not sure whether this educated glossing would be considered code-switching or not.  That's usually a spontaneous conversational thing.  You do occasionally see multilingual article titles part in German, part Russian, or part Latin, all of which have three genders and at least four cases.  And I know from examples given when the issue was raised in class in German and Russian that the original gender will not necessarily be retained in a word that is borrowed into common usage in the target language.


 * Obviously nouns in -a are almost universally marked as feminine in most European IE languages. That would explain your example of "justice herself".  But even cognate terms like die Sonne and el sol don't necessarily retain the same gender between genetically related languages. In any case, I expect in educated case in literature you'll get high fidelity, but although some people will make an effort in English to keep at least number (alumnus sing. versus data, alumni pl.) no person in contemporary English is going to refer to the res in res ipsa loquitur as anything but an it, rather than the "appropriate" she. μηδείς (talk) 00:25, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I tried to skim War and Peace, looking for some interesting Russian-French mix which would be real code switching, since it mostly happens in dialogue, and I am sure Tolstoy is pretty accurate in capturing this sort of thing. It's very hard to find anything, since his characters tend to switch on sentence or at least complete clause boundaries. Unfortunately French doesn't have cases either, but I did see some part-Russian, part-French constructions that would be ungrammatical in Russian if you translated the French word into Russian, but would probably be grammatical (my French is very bad, so I am not sure) if you translated the Russian half into French. Unfortunately I can't find any examples of French-Russian sentence where there would be gender agreement, except in the cases where the noun in question is a person, and so has a natural (and the same) gender in both languages. I am hoping to find a word exactly like "sun" which has a different gender in French and Russian and see if is gets used in its French gender when a part of a Russian sentence, but no luck so far. Ornil (talk) 04:19, 15 March 2014 (UTC)