Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 March 17

= March 17 =

Don't quote me on this, but I need help.
What are the rules on punctuation inside and around quotations. I'm not talking about whether the comma goes inside or not, but something more comprehensive regarding complete sentences (with various punctuation marks) followed by something like "she said." Clarityfiend (talk) 01:18, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Here ya go. -- Jayron  32  02:48, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Not quite comprehensive enough. Only one example shows the "he said/she said" after the quotation. That helps, but doesn't cover the case where a line ends in a period. Is it replaced by a comma? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Can you give an exact rendition of what you are trying to write? We can help you if you can do that.  -- Jayron  32  04:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * "This is a statement," he said. "Is this a statement?" she said. Are these two correct? I.e. a period is replaced by a comma in the former situation? Clarityfiend (talk) 10:05, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * He said "As a computer scientist, I feel uncomfortable with ambiguity and inconsistency. The first full stop is inside the quotes. Now I end the final sentence." (logically, it should be 'Now I end the final sentence.".', ending both the quoted sentence and the overall statement. Typographically, that just looks wrong. Another possibility  to consider would be  'Now I end the final sentence".' --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Our quotation marks article is pretty comprehensive. Note there are differences between British and American practice.--Shantavira|feed me 09:16, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I see that it's sort of covered in quotation mark, but not as explicitly as this. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:05, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I had similar questions when I first started writing fiction, and opened a few popular works of fiction to see how they handled direct speech. They were all consistent and from that I assumed correctness. BTW I use double quotes for direct speech and single quotes for everything else that needs to be in quotes. Sandman1142 (talk) 12:52, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Is a ghoul a good metaphor?
"Insomnia deprived him of all sleep and left his eyes bloodshot and his hair tousled. A glance of him reminded us of a ghoul." I am not sure if "a ghoul" here is a proper metaphor. I want your judgment on it. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.249.231.102 (talk) 03:36, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The original meaning of ghoul was one who stole bodies from graves and sold them to scientists (back when body donation was illegal). So I don't think they would necessarily look like that.  Try zombie (def #5). StuRat (talk) 04:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It's not a proper metaphor because it's not a metaphor at all. Other than that quibble, I've got no problem with it. Ghouls have acquired the connotation of being rather nasty looking. Clarityfiend (talk) 04:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Actually, the original term was an Arabic demon that robbed graves and ate corpses. The English sense or grave robber comes from that. Rather than ghoul, for a simile I'd say something like "he was like a politician after a weekend bender." μηδείς (talk) 05:28, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * A metaphor (q.v.) would be "We glanced at this ghoul". Also "reminded us of a ghoul" suggests that we have actually seen a ghoul to be reminded of.--Shantavira|feed me 09:23, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * How about "he looked like death warmed over". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:56, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd write "His total insomnia gave him a ghoulish appearance," followed by details if needed. —Tamfang (talk) 19:05, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

American and British English, native and nonnative speakers
According to the "English language" Wikipedia article, 58.5% of native English speakers are from the US and 15.8% are from the UK. So I assume American English is the dominant variety among native speakers. What about nonnative speakers? Is British English the dominant variety among nonnative speakers? I guess that because the table in that article shows the countries with most nonnative speakers are India, Pakistan and Nigeria, all former British colonies. I am also a nonnative speaker from a former British colony, Singapore, and I find American English confusing. --220.255.2.68 (talk) 12:38, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It may depend on who you count. Those former British colonies probably have more people who were formally taught (British) English, but US cultural influence through movies and songs has taught many people around the world some (American) English.  So, the non-native US English speaker pool may be wider but shallower. StuRat (talk) 12:50, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The Indian and Pakistani folks I've worked with tend to use British spellings, such as "favour". A very small sample, but might suggest a trend. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * During my school years in South Africa (another former British colony) we only used the OED. Somebody backing up the spelling of "color" citing Merriam-Webster would be considered a smart-arse. 196.214.78.114 (talk) 13:56, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I know a South African teacher in Taipei who, in order for his Taiwanese child pupils to understand him, must use an American accent all the time. Presumably American spellings follow.. --89.242.206.103 (talk) 15:22, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The figures in the Wikipedia article are very innacurate. For example it gives the poulation of the USA as 267 million - that's about the population in the 1960's.  USA population today is about 317 m.  It gives the population of Australia as 18m; it's actually 24 m.  Correcting all the errors in population for each country but keeping the same percentage in each population as native English speakers results in about 70% of the total being accustomed to American English.  For countries that have populations raised in another language but taught English in schools and having English as the language of instruction in colleges and universities (e.g., India), the situation depends on what you consider as English.  Natives of the Indian sub-continent think they speak and write English, but it is in fact a set of dialects much more different from British English that is American English.  And I'm not talking about accents. I worked for a few years for a certain very large USA-headquartered manufacturer of earth moving equipment, writing service manuals.  The company had a style guide aimed at getting service manual authors to write in a form of English meant to be most readable to all "English" educated speakers.  It specified American spellings, avoidance of certain multi-syllable words, and a simplified grammar.   You could not write "When starting a cold engine, warm it up for 5 minutes before applying loads and use the time to check all gauges."   You had to write:  "Warm up a cold engine for 5 minutes.  Do not load an engine until it is warmed up.  During warm up check all gages." 121.215.154.87 (talk) 15:28, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Gages, are you sure you're remembering that right? That's an acceptable variant spelling in the US, but definitely secondary.  The usual American spelling (and I think the usual spelling in all English varieties) is gauge, weird as it is. --Trovatore (talk) 08:17, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * No, it gives the population of English speakers in the U.S. at 267 million. It may come as an unpleasant shock that many people in the U.S. are not native English speakers.  The U.S. Census Bureau notes that 19.7% of the U.S. population uses a language other than English in their homes: .  As of the most recent estimates, the U.S. population is 317,706,000; that gives a value of 255,117,000 for the number of native English speakers.  So the value of 267 million is probably not all that far off.  The value will change some depending on how one counts things, and when the counting is done, but both of those figures (255 mil or 267 mil) seem well in line with what I would expect, given the population of the U.S.  -- Jayron  32  15:43, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The table doesn't say what you think it says, and it's a mess. Where is the 317 m figure in it?  The article states in text above the table that the number of native English speakers is 226m - same as the First Languge column in the table. The Percent of Population column has the figure 95%.  226m / 0.95 equals 234m - not a figure cited elsewhere.  Perhaps it should be 226 (native speakers) + 42m (2nd language persons) divided by 0.95, which equals 282 m, close to the figure in the last "Population" colums, but far from being right. 121.215.154.87 (talk) 00:13, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * In past decades in India, people sometimes learned English in the context of a set of conventionalized equivalences where English sounds not typically found in Indian languages (such as [f], [θ], [ð], some vowels, etc.) were often replaced by sounds more typically found in such languages (including aspirated stops, retroflex consonants, etc.), accompanied by an intonation and prosodic timing that was also more Indian than English. Some people were quite proficient in written English, or conversing with fellow Indians, but had difficulty making themselves understood to people from majority English-speaking countries.  Of course, nowadays high-tech call-center workers and others are taught English very differently... AnonMoos (talk) 17:49, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * J. C. Wells' three-volumes Accents of English breaks the language up into North American dialects and "Insular" dialects which includes speech in Britain and all other (colonial) varieties outside the US and Canada and their sphere. This seems reasonable.  Americans find Indians and South Africans to have "British" dialects, and no amount of movie influence seems to have changed this.  Recent professors of Spanish (from Spain) and Russian (from Ukraine) I have dealt with find it easier and more prestigious to learn a "British" dialect, while better for general communication (both understanding and being understood) to learn an "American" dialect.  I'ma 'gree widda, a'ight? μηδείς (talk) 19:48, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * 121.215.154.87, you deny that people from the Indian sub-continent speak English, despite what they think they're speaking. That's a somewhat paternalistic view, I think.  My partner was born in Sri Lanka, and moved to Australia at age 22, becoming an Australian citizen 2 years after that.  He's turning 50 in a couple of months, so he's been an Aussie longer than he was ever a Sri Lankan.  But he still has his strong Sinhalese accent and SL-English vocabulary, which on the whole is much like mine except for certain notable differences (e.g. all tag questions are "isn't it?"; New Years Eve is never called that, it's always "31st night"; etc). One day when I was first getting to know him, I asked him when he'd first learned English.  My assumption was that he spoke mainly Sinhalese at home, and maybe knew some rudimentary English but really only used it as his main language after he moved here.  Well, I was shocked to see the offence written all over his face when he responded "I've been a native English speaker all my life.  And a native Sinhalese speaker".  He reminded me his late mother was even an English teacher.  It isn't up to others to decide that, because it doesn't match their own English in every detail, the English these people speak is not English at all but at best a dialect.  There are far more people speaking sub-continental English than that which the Royal Family speaks, so which one is the real dialect?  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:09, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Jack, it seems to me that you and I are agreeing. The "English" that your partner learnt is different to the English I learnt or that which a Brit learnt or that of an American.  But British English (or at least British English as was in years past) is the origin of all these dialects, so I consider that variants of it, such as American English, Indian subcontinent English, New Zealand English, etc are indeed variations, and not the genuine article.  It happens that a retired high school teacher has moved in on my street.  Although Indian, she taught English in Malaysian schools for many years, moving here on retirement.  She actually speaks very clearly with a very slight "British BBC" accent, and that is very different to how Indians normally speak.  I'll ask her what she thinks about English variants, next time we meet shopping. 121.215.154.87 (talk) 23:52, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * No, we still disagree. You can't pin down any single one of the multitude of Englishes that are native to Britain and say that it alone is the original language and all others are variations.  It just isn't that simple.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:37, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * First, while some English speakers in South Asia are certainly native speakers, my experience suggests that native speakers are a very small fraction of the South Asian population. My experience in southern India, where English is the lingua franca rather than Hindi, was that fewer than one fifth of south Indians were anywhere near fluency, and for most of these English was a second or third language.  Still, there are a lot of Indians and no doubt millions of Indian native speakers of English.  It would be interesting to see well-defined numbers. My second point is that British English (whatever that is) is not the "genuine article" of English.  Instead, every version of natively spoken English is equally valid.  Each is descended from Old English through various regional dialects in medieval and early modern Great Britain. This point has been made here several times before, but most American varieties of English are more conservative than Received Pronunciation and are closer to the "genuine article", if by that is meant the English that was spoken in Great Britain before the language spread beyond that island.  In other words, the English of southern England has diverged further from Shakespeare's English than American English has diverged from that source. The language belongs to everyone who speaks it. It isn't the sole property of those who happen to live where standard English first developed but who speak a variety that the developers of that standard would have difficulty recognizing.  Marco polo (talk) 01:18, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The number I've heard for actual native speakers of English in India is astonishingly small, something like a quarter of a million. I don't seem to be finding it right now.  The reason I say "astonishingly" is that the educated class in India almost all seem to speak English, often quite well, and will use it among themselves even when there is no need to communicate with non-Hindi-speakers, which is an unusual pattern for a second language. --Trovatore (talk) 17:41, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, but that's why ethnologists and linguists and demographers and people that care about this stuff ask what language is spoken in the home. That is, what are people speaking at the dinner table or shouting through the bathroom door telling people to use the air freshener or telling their children bedtime stories.  Most people who do the counting consider this "home language" to be a person's native or "first" language.  That may be why most Indians, even those very fluent in English, are not considered native speakers.  When they go home to visit their mother, they still carry on dinner table conversations in a language other than English.  -- Jayron  32  01:54, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * A bit off topic, but a friend thought she spoke Spanish in the home, until she first formally studied the language in her teens and was shocked at the difference. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:15, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Impel incorrectly listed as "Not a word" in wikipedia
Impel is listed as "not a word" in wikipedia. That is incorrect. Impel means: To urge to action or to drive forward; propel. This is according to The American Heritage Dictionary. I got into a discussion with my husband on this word and the above was what he found on Wikipedia, where he always goes. I knew that it was a word and what the meaning was, so I checked my dictionary and I was right. Please correct you information. Sally R — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sradon (talk • contribs) 20:59, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a dictionary. Accordingly, we don't have an article on 'impel' - where have you seen it listed as 'not a word'? It is defined on our sister project Wiktionary: . AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:04, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Are you saying that Impel does not exist? μηδείς (talk) 22:01, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Perhaps her husband misunderstood the deletion log at Impel. "Redirect to a non-existent page" does not mean "not a word".  It meant that someone told people searching for impel to go to a different encyclopedia article—one that either nobody had ever created, or that had been deleted.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:24, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I think I know what the confusion is here. The Wikimedia software has a large number of configurable options, which are set per-project.
 * One of them is whether titles are case-sensitive in the first letter. In Wikipedia (or English Wikipedia at any rate), titles are case-sensitive in general, but not for the first letter; the first letter is internally upcased.  So foo takes you to Foo.
 * Wiktionary, on the other hand, uses fully case-sensitive titles, including the first letter, which is useful because it allows you to distinguish proper names and proper adjectives (for example, wikt:Polish is a different entry from wikt:polish).
 * So if there's no Wiktionary entry for wikt:Impel, it doesn't mean the verb impel is not listed, just there is no proper noun Impel, or at least not one anyone has bothered to make an entry for. --Trovatore (talk) 23:44, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Sounds sort of plausible, but on examination I think it doesn't hold water. I googled Wiktionary, then searched for "Impel".  It gave a drop down menu with various words starting with "impel", including "impel" itself.  Easy.  Then I googled "Wiktionary Impel" and it took me straight to the entry for "impel".  If it hadn't done those things, the usability of Wiktionary would be seriously impaired.  Many people use caps unnecessarily, or use lower case where caps are required, and they would all be excluded from many legitimate Wiktionary searches, and that would be a terrible pity.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  08:57, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * True enough, and anyway the original question makes no mention of wiktionary. Still, if through my error some readers are better informed than they were about the behavior of the two sites, then I offer it humbly in a spirit of sacrifice :-) --Trovatore (talk) 20:42, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That's the beauty of the ref desk. The by-products that come our way are often of more interest than the formal answers.  They are the rich, dark, aromatic molasses compared to the official refined white sugar.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  01:54, 20 March 2014 (UTC)