Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 April 2

= April 2 =

Japanese questions
From this story of the Nikkey Shimbun I would like to discuss these sentences I put in Google translate.
 * " "キト日本人学校が０３年に閉校し、補習授業校となって以来初めての〃大人数〃だ. "" - Does this mean the Supplementary School (Hoshuko)'s population increased after the day school (Nihonjin Gakko) closed in 2003?
 * "「せっかく勉強したい子供たちがいるのに、断ったら生徒がいなくなる」と父兄が話し合い、根上校長も方針を転換、昨年度からスペイン語での補助がいる児童も参加できるようにした. " - Does this mean the school began admitting students who speak Spanish??

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 06:06, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

０３年 COULD BE the Heisei year ０３, around 1991,. It means the school became a supplementary school and for the first time the population was an Adult count.

The second one is, they enabled with the principal's policies change, for children to be assisted with or in Spanish, since last year. --maybe the children speak Spanish or they are learning and need help with spanish.Jondel (talk) 15:07, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help! WhisperToMe (talk) 14:05, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The effect of the 'in' prefix
What effect does 'in; have when prefixed to words such as valuable, flammable, and infamous? Does it create any difference at all in meaning, no matter how subtle? Or does it have no effect at all, and these words are truly synonymous, with or without the prefix? If that is the case, why would these variants evolve? Thanks. asyndeton  talk  21:50, 2 April 2015 (UTC)


 * 'Valuable' and 'invaluable' are different. Valuable means just what it says: it can be valued, in the sense that a price can be put on it.  But invaluable means it is beyond price.  A human life, for example, is invaluable (outside of contexts such as slavery); while a house, no matter how luxurious, is only ever valuable, because there will always eventually be a seller and a buyer, for which a price must be agreed. Even if a house is passed down through many generations and is never sold, it still has to be valued for insurance and other purposes.  A value will be assigned to it.
 * 'Famous' and 'infamous' are different. Famous is a positive attribute, infamous a negative one.  Infamous means notorious, or famous for the wrong reasons (criminal history, etc).
 * 'Flammable' and 'inflammable' are pretty much synonyms, and there is much online discussion about why they are both used, and whether or not there's the faintest nuance of difference between them. For most people, there is none.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:07, 2 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I'd say "famous" is neutral, not positive. You can say "He was famous for his alcoholism", for example, which is not positive, except perhaps to his bartender. StuRat (talk) 05:32, 3 April 2015 (UTC)


 * "Invaluable" is pretty much a synonym for "priceless", which likewise doesn't mean it's free, it just means it's beyond putting a price on. The base definition of "famous" is "celebrated", and the "in-" means "the opposite of". To "inflame" would have been better evolving as "enflame", since it would avoid the ambiguity inherent in the "in-" prefix. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:46, 2 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Agreed. 'Inflammable' means 'can be engulfed in flame'. 'Flammable' means 'can create flames'. I also agree that 'enflammable' should have been better, but the pronunciation is not very different. KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( もしもし！ ) 23:05, 2 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I have never heard of such a distinction between inflammable and flammable. I wonder which dictionary might back it up. In my idiolect (which I do not claim is anybody else's, but might be), inflammable meant/means "(dangerously) burnable"; however, those people who don't already know it can easily misparse it by analogy with inedible and so forth, and thus flammable was introduced (or more likely reintroduced or revived) with precisely the same meaning but minimal risk of misunderstanding. Time permitting, I'll check the OED; in the meantime, the Ngram viewer shows trends compatible with this. -- Hoary (talk) 23:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Inflammable and flammable both mean capable of burning (rapidly and dangerously, by implication). As EO notes, the term "flammable" is used to avoid the apparent ambiguity in "inflammable". The root of both is the Latin verb for setting on fire, and while some may make a subtle distinction, gasoline trucks that used to carry the word "inflammable" now carry the word "flammable". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:35, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The OED suggests that flammable is a century or more younger than inflammable. It doesn't hint at any distinction between their meanings. An interesting quote there from the British Standards Institution: "In order to avoid any possible ambiguity, it is the Institution's policy to encourage the use of the terms ‘flammable’ and ‘non-flammable’ rather than ‘inflammable’ and ‘non-inflammable’." -- Hoary (talk) 00:47, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * On inflammble and flammable, a good discussion is here. As the respondents above have said, the in- in invaluable and infamous is privative (i.e., means "not"). Invaluable means "not valuable", not in the sense of "worthless" but in the sense of "unable to be assigned a value" (i.e., having a value beyond calculation; compare immeasurable, "having an extent beyond measurement"). Latin fama, which provides the root of infamous, could mean "reputation", so Latin infamis meant "lacking a (good) reputation". Deor (talk) 00:06, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Anecdote alert: When I was training a new (foreign) staff member a few years ago, I thanked him for his 'invaluable work' on a particular job, and he wasn't very happy, so I can understand (the opposite of 'derstand') there can be some ambiguity, especially if you are 'telligent' (i.e. 'not intelligent' (double negative)) enough to think about it. KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( もしもし！ ) 05:24, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Did you make yourself overstood? —Tamfang (talk) 06:41, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * KT, next you'll be telling us there's a difference between the rpice of something and its avlue. :)  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  06:49, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, they don't call me the 'Cunning Linguist' for nothing - they have to pay for it. :) KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( もしもし！ ) 08:11, 3 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Latin has two prefixes written in. In French they became in and en, implying that in Latin they had long and short vowel respectively.  The former is negative; the latter means ‘in’, ‘into’, or sometimes ‘intensely’.  Compare inflammable (directly from Latin) with enflame (through French). —Tamfang (talk) 06:39, 3 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Different pronounciations in Latin? Hmm.


 * In my Cassell's New Latin Dictionary (1968 edition), The entry for the prefix in- meaning "not" does not mark the vowel I as either long or short, presumably meaning either that scholars aren't sure how it was pronounced or that it was pronounced differently in different words. The preposition in (meaning in, into, etc.) is marked as having a short I; but there is no separate entry for in- as a prefix with this meaning.


 * Then there are 30 pages of entries for individual words beginning with in-. Skimming through those pages, I find that the dictionary consistently marks the I in in- as short when in- is followed by a vowel or by H and then a vowel; but when in- is followed by a consonant, the I in in- is not marked as long or short.  (This includes the case where in- is followed by I and then a vowel, as this I is a consonant, believed to be pronounced Y in Latin and becoming J in English.) This applies regardless of the meaning of in-.  For example, if something is uneven, it's inaequalis with a short I (and in- meaning "not"), but if I make it even, then I inaequo it, also with a short I, but with the other meaning of in-.  (Which if I was an ancient Roman would probably bother me the same way that "inflammable" does in English.)


 * --65.95.176.148 (talk) 18:03, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The absence of length marking in the words with a following consonant in your dictionary would probably be due to the fact that in these words the in- syllable would be metrically heavy (or in classical terminology, "long by position" independently of the actual length of the vowel itself, in which case you couldn't deduce length from behaviour in poetry. However, my old school dictionary tells me that there is a pattern slightly more complex than what Tamfang said above: both directional and negative in- are short most of the time, but both are long if the following syllable begins with [f] or [s], so it's both ĭncipiō and ĭncertus, but īnferō and īnfirmus. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:27, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * At some point in high-school Latin I was taught that any vowel becomes long when followed by -ns- (for example, genitive mentis with short E vs. nominative mens with long E). Perhaps the same applies to the less common combination -nf- and they didn't mention it. --65.95.176.148 (talk) 00:50, 4 April 2015 (UTC)