Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 October 23

= October 23 =

Feminine pronouns
How many forms of feminine pronouns are there? Such as in English there is only the singular feminine pronoun, she. Do other languages have plural, dual (or even other?!) feminine pronouns?—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 12:57, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, feminine plural pronouns are found in many languages, e.g. French, Greek and Hebrew. - Lindert (talk) 13:14, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Category:Pronouns by language should have some useful articles for you. --Nicknack009 (talk) 13:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Some Indo-European languages have neutralised the masculine/feminine gender distinction in the plural, but many have not. By the way, English also has the objective her and the possessive her. --ColinFine (talk) 13:24, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * And "hers". So that's at least three distinct words (she, her, hers), which each play multiple grammatical roles.  English is a fairly "degenerate" language in that it no longer draws distinction between grammatical senses that other languages do; for example where English uses "her" for both the object pronoun and the possessive adjective, other languages would use multiple words.  -- Jayron 32 15:15, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, ok: "herself." StevenJ81 (talk) 15:53, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much with your help. Are there any feminine dual or other numbers? Regards, Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email)
 * Are you interested in the factor of Number only? I'm asking, because there is also the factor of Person. Japanese makes a distinction between Masculine and Feminine - not only in Third Person Singular (as in English) - but also in First Person Singular, so that boku and ore - are for First Person Singular Male, whereas atashi and atakushi (and also atai in Slang) - are for First Person Singular Feminine. Additionally, the Semitic languages make a distinction between Masculine and Feminine - not only in Third Person Singular (and Plural!) - but also in Second Person Singular (and Plural!); For example (the slash will be followed by the Plural form): anta / antum (Arabic) and atta / attem (Hebrew) and nǝssǝxa / nǝssǝxatkum (Tigrinya) - are for Second Person Male, whereas anti / antunna (Arabic) and att / atten (Hebrew) and nǝssǝxi / nǝssǝxatkǝn (Tigrinya) - are for Second Person Feminine. Additionally, note that the Semitic languages mentioned above make a parallel distinction between Male and Feminine - also in Third Person - not only for Singular but also for Plural. Btw, Amharic makes a parallel distinction - in Second Person - only for Singular: antä (male) and anči (feminine). HOOTmag (talk) 18:34, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am only interested in number. Thank you.—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 01:43, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * So, instead of your original question: "How many forms of feminine pronouns are there?", you should have asked: :How many number-forms of feminine pronouns are there?"
 * Btw, are you interested in Relative pronouns (represented in English by the words "who/whom") as well? I'm asking, because some Semitic languages make a distinction between Singular / Plural / Dual, for all genders - including Feminine, in the relative pronouns. For example, take the English relative pronouns "who / whom" (i.e. in Nominative and Accusative): They are translated in Arabic, by allatī (the a being short) for Singular Feminine (without any difference between the Nominative "who" and the Accusative "whom"), and by allātī (the second a being long) for Plural Feminine (again without any difference between the Nominative "who" and the Accusative "whom"), and by allatāni for Dual Feminine Nominative (i.e. "who") and by allatayni for Dual Feminine Accusative (i.e. "whom"). HOOTmag (talk) 08:16, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * No. I am interested in number (singular, plural, dual) only. Are there even more? (I'd think not.)—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 10:28, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * So I gave you the Dual Feminine, why isn't it appropriate? Anyways, you haven't told me yet whether you are interested in absoloute persons (e.g. "he" "it") only, or also in relative pronouns (e.g. "who", "which"). If you are also interested in relative pronouns, then you might be interested in the examples I've given you (from Arabic) for the Dual Feminine. HOOTmag (talk) 11:38, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * As for your new question: There are some languages having various numbers in pronouns (Singular, Dual, Trial, Few, Some, Plural), but none of them - which have more than Dual (and less than Plural) - make any distinction between Male pronouns and Female pronouns (even not between "he" and "she"). HOOTmag (talk) 11:56, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Lithuanian and Slovene are among the few Indo-European languages to have preserved the dual number, and they both have distinct masculine and feminine personal pronouns for the dual number. See wikt:Template:lt-personal pronouns/table and wikt:Template:sl-personal pronouns. This distinction is not found in Arabic, nor - I think - in any other one of the Afroasiatic languages, even though they do have the dual number and the feminine gender. There are other types of number as well - see Grammatical number - but, as HOOTmag says, you won't find any feminine pronouns of any other type anywhere. --Theurgist (talk) 01:14, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you all for saving me a lot of research!—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 09:33, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Sorry to bother you, but one more thing: Do the languages that you mentioned have grammatical gender in any form?—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 23:00, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Both Lithuanian and Slovenian have grammatical gender for Third Person in all numbers (Singular Dual Plural).
 * As for the other Persons: Lithianian has grammatical gender for Second Person Dual only, whereas Slovenian has grammatical gender also for both Dual and Plural in all persons (i.e. it doesn't have grammatical gender for Singular in both First and Second Person - unless you're addressing her in the Plural form in order to be polite). HOOTmag (talk) 08:48, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
 * No, I meant languages with more than Dual and less than Plural. Thanks for your help.—Eat me, I'm an azuki (talk · contribs · email) 09:05, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, the answer to your last question is: No. HOOTmag (talk) 09:47, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Most precise language?
Is there any language which has an emphasis on precision. All the languages I know of seem to be open to interpretation. Look at the Bible, the Koran. Each person who reads it understands it slightly different. If I say a tree has green leaves, what does that even mean. THe tree could have darkish green leaves. Bright leaves, it tells me nothing.

Now look at numbers, 1+1 = 2. Not 3. Not 30000. It's exact. So is there any attempt or has one been made to make a perfect language that is precise. Not open to interpretation thus leading to conflict and strife. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.195.27.47 (talk) 13:54, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * See Esperanto. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:07, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * You may also be interested in reading Umberto Eco's book: The Search for the Perfect Language in the European Culture, which is about such attempts and their necessary failure. --Xuxl (talk) 14:09, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Esperanto was supposed to be easy to learn and politically neutral, not unambiguous. Lojban may be relevant, but it still has words for things like "the color green", and that seems unavoidable. -- BenRG (talk) 18:57, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Call me a nostalgic, but I still prefer Loglan. --Trovatore (talk) 19:08, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't think you can properly equate ambiguities within a certain text with characteristics inherent to the language it was written in. For example, the author of the Quran could have provided more context in order to improve its clarity; it doesn't really have anything to do with Arabic as a language. You can make your sentence as precise as you like, if you don't think "green" is good enough, just say "pale green", "emerald" or any number of shades of green. It's just that often too much detail is unnecessary and distracting. A 100% precise language is not only impossible, but also undesirable. - Lindert (talk) 14:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I would take "precision" in language to mean that a given word has only one definition. And the OP's premise is flawed. If he says a tree has green leaves then it means it does not have leaves of some other color range. So it does tell him something. If he wants "precision", terms like darkish green or bright green don't work either. He would need to specify a number on the color scale. And that probably wouldn't work either, because if he gets close enough to a leaf, he will probably observe that the surface of a leaf is not necessarily one uniform color. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:40, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Even "1+1 = 2" is not infinitely precise. Those numbers only have one significant digit, which are fairly imprecise.  1.0 + 1.0 = 2.0 is more precise, but as writing an infinite string of zeros is impossible, expressing an infinitely precise mathematical expression is also impossible.  -- Jayron 32 15:12, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Nope, 1+1=2 is infinitely precise, as an abstract statement. There's no error involved, the successor function, when applied to one, gives you two, exactly and precisely, by definition and construction.
 * When you talk about significant digits, you're talking about something empirical, but that has nothing to do with the expression as interpreted via e.g. Peano arithmetic. The same string of symbols can be interpreted differently in different contexts, so it is true that "1+1=2" can be considered as imprecise if what we're talking about is e.g. slabs of butter at the market. If we want to claim that abstract expression "1+1=2" is not infinitely precise, then we also have to clarify that it is certainly not imprecise. Maybe it's better to say that precision just doesn't apply to equality when construed as it usually is in math. Put another way, if I write "$$\sin \pi/2 =1$$", you can't claim that's an imprecise statement, in fact the special angles are known in trig for the fact that they evaluate to nice exact numbers. You can claim that my measurement of a 90 degree angle is imprecise, but that's a different thing altogether. OP may like to read up a bit on ontology and epistemology, as well as perhaps semiotics. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:36, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Which proves the entire point: The blanket statement "1+1 = 2" is ALSO linguistically imprecise, because "The same string of symbols can be interpreted differently in different contexts..." is exactly what linguistic ambiguity is. QED.  -- Jayron 32 16:42, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * That's certainly not the point you were making above though, you were talking about significant digits, which is a very different thing from linguistic ambiguity. I will of course agree that strings can be interpreted differently in different contexts, that's why I wrote it. But within the context of the formal language of mathematics, "1+1=2" is both exact and precise, that's all that I wanted to clarify for OP. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:53, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Note also that "1+1=2" will usually be understood as a statement about the natural numbers, not the real numbers. The naturals are frequently thought of as a subset of the reals, and for most purposes this is a fine and useful thing to do.  But when you start talking about concepts like infinite precision, it's not really appropriate anymore.
 * Naturals and reals are quite different in concept. The naturals count discrete objects; the reals are best thought of as points along a line.  There is a point corresponding to the natural number 1, under a natural embedding, but it's rather different conceptually.
 * Every real number encodes an infinite amount of information. Even the real number corresponding to, say, zero.  That information is sort of repetitive in such a case, but it's still there.  A natural number does not encode an infinite amount of information. --Trovatore (talk) 18:33, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * You're all wrong. 1+1=10--William Thweatt TalkContribs 20:05, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
 * And if its me and my girlfriend, 1+1 makes 3, if its not twins ;-) --Cherubino (talk) 20:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Language is a way of expressing human feelings, thoughts and perceptions. Those are as imperfectly describable as the Mona Lisa or a great piece of music is.  The only way to ever truly experience my feelings is to actually be me (an experience I can thoroughly recommend, but there's only one place, and it's currently more or less taken).  A scientist would never spend any time trying to come up with the precise chemical composition of "dirt", it being so variable.  Searching for or trying to create a perfectly precise language is an exercise in futility.  (I trust I'm making myself perfectly clear, despite my choice of the stunningly imprecise English language.)  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:54, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * (Soil analysis is when scientists do attempt to precisely describe the chemical composition of dirt.)


 * As for the most precise language, I would expect the language with the most words might qualify, since that implies many words for each concept, with slightly different shades of meaning. Of course, a concept can also be described with multiple words, for even more precision.  If "green" or even "chartreuse" isn't specific enough, you can always specify precise frequencies of light.


 * Another example: One place English seems quite deficient in precision is in describing relationships, but you can make up for this with extra words, like describing somebody as the "daughter of your mother's brother", rather than just your "cousin".


 * The OP might also be interested in the Jarada, a fictional species in the Star Trek universe that attempted to avoid any dual meanings for any words, which required a huge vocabulary where even the slightest change in intonation altered the meaning: . When they signed a treaty with the Federation, then insisted that everything in the treaty be unambiguous, which required that the treaty be huge, in English.  StuRat (talk) 20:24, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't see how you can claim that English is imprecise in describing somebody as the "daughter of you(r) mother's brother" when you have used it to do just that. Bazza (talk) 21:43, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * As I said, you can compensate for this imprecision (lack of words meaning specifically what you want) by combining multiple words. Other languages would have a single word specifically for "daughter of your mother's brother". StuRat (talk) 04:43, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Stu, I was not talking about a small sample of dirt taken from one particular location at one moment in time, but all dirt, from all possible sources at all times. There cannot be a single formula that describes all dirt.  There cannot be a single recipe that applies to all "food".  Human experience is at this level of fantastic complexity and infinite variability.  Language is a human construct, and is inherently imperfect.  That is easily demonstrated by trying to perfectly translate a text from one language to another: it cannot be done.  One language is what a certain set of people have come up with, the other language what another set of people have come up with.  If both were perfect in their expressibility, they would long ago have merged into the same perfect language.  But one remains an apple and the other an orange, and the best we can do is treat them both as fruit and look for the things they have in common as bridges between them.  Or, I could ask a person who's never seen the Mona Lisa to read 20 million words describing it.  When they finally see the picture, it WILL be different, in ways subtle or gross, from the image they had in their mind from the written description.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:26, 23 October 2015 (UTC)


 * You might be interested in the development of similar ideas in Funes the Memorious and The Analytical Language of John Wilkins by Jorge Luis Borges. --Amble (talk) 23:52, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Another fictional example: this was one of the design goals of Newspeak. Iapetus (talk) 10:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Not exactly. Newspeak was meant to be reasonably unambiguous in its technical vocabulary, but many of its more emotionally loaded terms are specifically designed to hold two contradictory meanings at once (so that if someone needs to be unpersoned, you don't need to worry about the fact that you praised him as a "blackwhite duckspeaker"). "[Blackwhite] has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this." Smurrayinchester 07:01, 28 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, you can express colour unambiguously in English if you really need to – just define its emission spectrum. This is however far too specific for every day use, especially since we don't even perceive colour in an unambiguous way. Just look at Checker shadow illusion – depending on the context, you would be correct to say "Squares A and B are the same colour" (since if you were to print the image, you would use the same mixture of ink for both) and "Squares A and B are different colours" (since in the real world situation represented by the image, A is black(ish) and B is white(ish)). But one small thing that may interest you – Italian has an extra fundamental colour, and divides blue into "blu" (darker blues) and "azzuro" (lighter blues) (like how we have "red" and "pink"). In that respect, Italian is more precise than English (although of course, we can still say "light blue" and "dark blue" when we have to) Smurrayinchester 16:40, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Pidgin Languages
Hello

I am updating a grammar on an obscure pidgin language. I wanted to know if public domain books that are translated into a pidgin language can be copyrighted? Can new books written in a pidgin language be copyrighted? Prsaucer1958 (talk) 14:31, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Of course, the law depends on many things, most importantly on which jurisdiction you are in, but also upon how good your lawyers are. However, translations are generally considered to be derivative works, which have their own set of copyright rules.  You may want to research that topic.  -- Jayron 32 15:08, 23 October 2015 (UTC)