Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 January 8

= January 8 =

Technical initialism case
I've seen equally both DPI, PPI, CPI, WPM, CPM, etc., and dpi, ppi, cpi, wpm, cpm, etc. I read some MoS and searched the web, but could not find something definite. To capitalize or not to capitalize?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:36, 8 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Capitalization is the pre-internet standard for acronyms. Abbreviations, like etc., were not capitalized.  Nowadays we say LotR for Lord of the Rings, but ante textō the standard would have been LR. μηδείς (talk) 02:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)


 * If you're talking about usage on Wikipedia, WP:MOS specifies:
 * Acronyms whose letters are pronounced individually (which is what some call "initialisms", for example FBI, EU) are written in capitals.
 * However, if CPI is pronounced "characters per inch", then it's an abbreviation and not an acronym or (so-called initialism), and in that case the MOS gives no guidance, and neither do I. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 02:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * In the old days, capitals would have been used, but the trend is toward lower case when the meaning is understood. As a random example, I've often seen the usage "Muhammad (pbuh)" when in the old days it might have been (PBUH). ("Peace Be Upon Him") ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:46, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I meant initialisms as a particular case of abbreviations (in a loose sence). Especially technical initialisms. In a technically conscious environment one writes things like km/h, but it is no less frequent, especially in English, to write initialisms. But if with common initialisms (USA, EU) everything is more or less clear, things like those were mentioned as well as kmph/KMPH, mph/MPH and so on are not so obvious.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:18, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * km/h is a special case because SI units are defined by an international standard that partially specifies how to represent them in writing. If you spell the unit out in full then you're allowed to use whatever spelling your language likes, but if you abbreviate it, you're required to form the "symbol" (the standard uses that term rather than "abbreviation") specified in the standard.  While the standard (see chapter 5) does allow a few alternative forms (such as h&minus;1&middot;km) that you'll never see used in practice, kmph or KMPH is right out. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 07:04, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The standard states out "It is not permissible to use abbreviations for unit symbols or unit names, such as... mps (for either m/s or meter per second)", so I understand that in a SI environment such initialisms are not allowed, that I said at the beginning. But in less strict cases they are used widely (in Wikipedia, for example). But we here get a contradiction between the general rule to spell initialisms in uppercase letters and the tradition of technical literature, as it is stated again in the standard, that "Unit symbols... are printed in lower-case letters unless they are derived from a proper name". At least for now it's become clear why the variations such as dpi/DPI, mph/MPH, etc. exist.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:57, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

What languages uses the ASCII alphabet only?
Besides English (obviously), what language only uses the 26 +26 letters (lowcase + capital letters) of ASCII or a subset of these? --Llaanngg (talk) 11:14, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm sure there's more than a few. Malay alphabet comes to mind. You can probably check those listed at Category:Latin alphabets to see if any others fit your criteria.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 11:27, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * (EC) English does use diacritics to mark dieresis (naïve and the now rare coöperation being common examples) or foreign accents (café, animé) in a few rare cases, so I assume that you're making the same exceptions for other languages. Scots, Dutch and most branches of Malay since 1972 can all be written more or less with ASCII alone. You also have languages like German where the "accents" and unusual characters are just abbreviations (ä is shorthand for ae, ß is shorthand for ss) and you can write valid German using solely the ASCII characters (for example, übermäßig (excessive) can be written uebermaessig) which is what people usually do in URLs. Smurrayinchester 11:33, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Acute and grave accent marks are sometimes used to indicate pitch accent in romanized Japanese, but I don't think the accent of "anime" would ever be on the last syllable. I think the diacritic on "animé" and "pokémon" is there so people won't treat the e as silent. "Learnéd" is another example, I guess. -- BenRG (talk) 00:38, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Depending on your view on diacritics, English isn't an example either, see English terms with diacritical marks. Even Latin has at various times used the apex, not just the 26+26 letters of the Latin alphabet. —Kusma (t·c) 11:38, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Please see Language_recognition_chart for a hint, although the information there might be incomplete. &#x2013; b_jonas 15:22, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * See Rotokas alphabet.
 * In general I would look at languages that (1) use the Latin alphabet (2) have a very small phonological inventory (not the case of English, see next paragraph).
 * Now if on the other hand a language uses the Latin alphabet but its phonological inventory is too large to be accommodated by the Latin alphabet these are the possibilities: (1) not mark certain contrasts (ex. ironically Latin which does not mark long vowels, does not distinguish consonant i (j) and vowel i, consonant u (v) and vowel u) (2) use diacritics (ex. many European languages, Vietnamese) (3) use digraphs (ex. Latin again: ae, oe, English sh, ch, ou, oo, oy, etc.; since English is not phonological anyway it is hard to say where it fits in this scheme: e for example can be long (me), short e (let), silent (are) or mark a preceding vowel as long (fire vs fir), etc.) (4) introduce new letters (ex. Icelandic, Old English, German, Azeri). If it only uses option (1) and/or (3) it could still fit the OP's criteria.
 * Sometimes the phonological system of a language could make do with ASCII but doesn't due to various historical reasons, such as for example pedantic missionaries. For example why does Hawaiian use macrons for long vowels? Why not use say aa instead of ā for long ā and so on? Assuming there are cases where a long ā contrasts with two a short a in a row (i.e. one long syllable vs two short syllables) one could always have used the apostrophe: namely aa (long vowel) versus a'a (two short vowels; the apostrophe and its corresponding phoneme, the glottal stop, are called in Hawaiian an ʻokina) just like one distinguishes a succession of o and u as in koʻu ('my') from the diphthong ou as in kou ('your')? Incidentally: the apostrophe is an ASCII char. but does the OP consider that a language using the apostrophe as a full letter fulfills his criteria?
 * Contact Basemetal   here  15:40, 8 January 2016 (UTC)


 * From Danish orthography: Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an acute accent for disambiguation. But it has three non-Latin letters. Loraof (talk) 22:59, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Practically modern Uzbek uses only ASCII, but theoretically a proper Uzbek text should discriminate between the right single quote, which signifies a glottal stop, the left single quote which is the part of two digraphs (g‘, o‘), and the typewriter apostrophe which make a digraph into two letters (that is s'h means the two sounds s and h, but not the single sound sh). Many African languages like Swahili, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa, Ndebele, etc. (I would not list them all) also employ only ASCII. Quechua, Mayan languages, Hmong, Zhuang are other examples. I believe a lot of other less known languages of Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia, which have acquired their alphabets during the past 100-200 or so years, use only ASCII.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:32, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

IsiZulu does very well using various digraphs, but no accents or special letters. There are two "b" sounds, one /b/ as in English, the other /ɓ/ which is not common European languages. Since the implosive consonant /ɓ/ is much more common than the "plain" b, the implosive is usually written simply as "b" while the sound found in English is written "bh" (You will also find older texts that use "ɓ"). μηδείς (talk) 01:13, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

This question was asked on this desk in 2010, see the archive here. In a nutshell, we then managed to come up with languages such as: --Theurgist (talk) 01:53, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Latin (except in dictionaries, textbooks, etc)
 * Malaysian and Indonesian (Malay)
 * African languages such as Swahili, Zulu and Xhosa
 * Australian languages such as Warlpiri and Arrernte
 * lanuages with very limited phonemic inventories such as Rotokas
 * Greenlandic, except for Danish loandwords [note - and provided the text isn't older than the 1973 spelling reform]
 * all but one of the competing orthographies of Cornish
 * the former orthogrphies of languages such as Manx and Hawaiian
 * constructed languages such as Ido and Interlingua [note - Esperanto qualifies too if one sticks to the h-system or the x-system]
 * romanization systems such as Revised Romanization of Korean and Jyutping
 * some near-solutions such as Dutch and Uzbek
 * as well as a few other languages that don't really qualify.

Gender neutral terminology for "Man of the Year"/"Woman of the Year"
If you look at all the Time Magazine Person of the Year covers since 1927 (middle of the page) you can see that when the Man of the Year was a woman she was declared "Woman of the Year". In 1999 (starting with Jeff Bezos) it was decided to go for the gender neutral title "Person of the Year". Another possibility would have been to make "Man of the Year" a gender neutral title and apply it to men and women alike. But was that really a possibility in English or would that be completely at odds with the linguistic instinct of speakers of English? Would "Angela Merkel was Time Man of the Year 2016" genuinely set your teeth on edge? Contact Basemetal   here  18:53, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * It would have been ridiculed in 1927 just as it would be now. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:00, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * This is not exactly the same thing. Contact Basemetal   here  19:16, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Some folks might have their "teeth on edge", but more would likely label the publishers as idiots. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Because they thought the publishers who did that did not know the difference between a man and a woman? Contact Basemetal   here  19:44, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * That, and it's abnormal English usage. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:47, 8 January 2016 (UTC)


 * As an aside let me mention that in French prestigious titles are sometimes made gender neutral by using the masculine form for both men and women (e.g. Mme le Ministre, etc). But this usage is less and less prevalent, and more recently even those have begun to be genderized (M. le Ministre vs. Mme la Ministre). Ironically it seems that political correctness has pushed English in the direction of gender neutrality whereas the same tendency has made French go in the opposite direction. Nevertheless "Angela Merkel est l'Homme de l'année 2015 selon le magazine Time" would probably elicit the same reaction in French as Bugs's in English. Which is a pity. In French the "person of the year" is "la personnalité de l'année", which, incidentally, is not an accurate rendering. Contact  Basemetal   here  21:00, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we should go back to the good old Old English days when "woman" was invented to specify the kind of "Mann" who could be a wife. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:44, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Much of this has to do with the general public's pressure to bow to political correctness. At some point in the game -- I forget exactly when -- actresses demanded to be called "female actors".  Or some such foolishness. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:33, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Why would it be a foolishness to call actresses "female actors"? There's really no good reason for job names to be gender-specific. "Singers", "dancers", "musicians" are all gender-neutral. When was the last time you see the word "manageress" used? --98.115.39.92 (talk) 06:09, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I gave the answer above. Political correctness, in general, equals foolishness.  The word "actress" obviously refers to females in the acting profession.  And it has done so for the past umpteen years.  Now, all of the sudden, it's "offensive" for a female to be called an "actress"?  Get over yourself.  Nowadays, in today's politically correct (and fraught) environment, everyone is looking for (and manufacturing) reasons to "get offended" (i.e., to play the victim card).  And these "offensive" terms (such as "actress") are simply ridiculous.  I think these are called "first world problems".   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:33, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I didn't say anything about "actress" being offensive. I do challenge the idea that there's anything wrong with using "actor" as gender-neutral term. --98.115.39.92 (talk) 22:19, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * The issue is not that you personally as an individual deem the word "actress" to be offensive (which, by the way, I never accused you of). The film industry (and, I assume, the actresses themselves) initiated this idea that the word "actress" is offensive to females.  Once again, political correctness gone amok.  Calling a female who acts an "actress"  -- geez, who would imagine?   LOL.  Just another example of people wanting to be offended and wanting to play the victim card.  Same ole, same ole.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:14, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * "No good reason" is a matter of opinion. I imagine that a sizable number of [songstresses], [danseuses], and [muses] would disagree.   Also, try talking to a Wiccan about the "Mother-god," and see how seriously he takes you.
 * Pine (talk) 16:50, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I can't remember the last time I heard a female singer/dancer being referred to as a "songstress"/"danseuse", and I don't think "muse" means the same as a "female musician". While gender-specific terms for what people do do exist, it's by far the most common practice these days to use gender-neutral terms or to use terms in gender-neutral senses. I've never come across any woman manager/director/administrator having a problem with being referred to as such. Gender-specific terms are not per se a problem; it's the lack of gender-neutral alternatives that's a problem. If we don't interpret "manager" as necessarily a man, there's no need to look for or invent a gender-neutral word for it. --98.115.39.92 (talk) 22:19, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Because "actor" has, until recently, always referred specifically to a male person. If a female was being referred to, there was the word "actress".  That's why AMPAS, the Golden Globes et many cetera have separate awards for Best (Supporting) Actor and Best (Supporting) Actress.  Anyone who is so offended by this longstanding distinction is free to refuse nomination for these awards.  To my knowledge, nobody ever has - not on that ground, anyway.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  06:23, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * "Actor" has a connotation of being male only when referring to someone in the acting profession. In technical usage, "actor" is gender-neutral (and may not even be animate). Since most other "-er" or "-or" words for jobs (e.g. "director", "manager", "administrator") are gender-neutral these days, why not bring "actor" in line with the rest of them? --98.115.39.92 (talk) 06:39, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Hey let's get rid of mother and father too.Akld guy (talk) 07:55, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * That analogy only works if the word for mother were "fatheress". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:42, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * @ User:98.115.39.92: ... why not bring "actor" in line with the rest of them? - Because the role of a performer is fundamentally different from that of anyone else involved in a production. First, they're the only participants who are visible to the audience.  Second, they're the only participants whose role it is to "pretend" to be someone other than their actual selves.  They pretend to be other human beings, in the telling of a story about some aspect of human life.  Humans come in two main types: male and female (apologies to the intersex community).  Readers or viewers of a story want to know things about the characters: their sex and their name, for starters.  Now, would it be possible to stage a production of Hamlet in which the title role is played by a woman (Tina Turner, perhaps) and Ophelia is played by a man (Arnold Schwarzenegger, perhaps)?  Oh, yes, certainly possible.  Ridiculous? just as certainly.  Have you ever noticed in a movie, the opening credits give just the names of the actors (or perhaps the word "starring"), but anyone else credited comes with a label ("directed by", "music by", "cinematography by" ...).  When you see just someone's name on a screen, you know it's an actor or actress, not one of the many other people involved.  This is just another way in which these performers are distinguished from all the rest.  I don't think that any time soon - or ever - we'll be seeing male and female persons vying collectively for an "Academy Award for Best Actor".  There will always be separate awards for actresses.  That's because we care, and it matters, that this performer is a male and that one is a female.  We do NOT care, and it does NOT matter, that this cinematographer is a male and that one is a female.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:45, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Excellent post! Well said.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:28, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Actresses (female actors) are a sub-category of actors. Biology makes male and female actors more suitable for portraying different kinds of characters, but there's no fundamental difference in what they do (acting). There's no inviolable laws of nature that make it impossible for actors of one gender to portray characters of the other gender. Not that doing do requires advanced technology, but an actor portraying a character of very different appearance is more convincingly doable now than ever in the days of performance capture and hyperrealistic CGI. (This is not to say there shouldn't be separate awards for best actors and best actresses.) History supports a gender-neutral usage of "actor". In some languages, the word for actress basically is a combination of female & actor (in a gender-neutral sense); it is not at all unnatural to view actresses as a sub-category of a broader category comprising practitioners of different genders. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild Awards include several named "Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in XXX". I'm not saying that everyone needs to say "female actor" instead of "actress", but a gender-neutral sense of "actor" is good usage well-justified from different considerations. --98.115.39.92 (talk) 03:51, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Then why don't we have just one category for "acting", regardless of whether the actor is male or female? Yeah, right.  If that happened, you can just imagine the uproar from "female actors".  Cracks me up how they want to eat their cake, and have it, too.  Ridiculous.  Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:49, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * @ 98.115.39.92, you're being very inconsistent. If there should still be separate awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, even though we should not use the expression "actress", rather preferring "actor" for all acting performers regardless of sex - then why shouldn't there be separate awards for Best Male Screenwriter and Best Female Screenwriter, Best Male Director and Best Female Director, etc?  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:06, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Again, excellent point! I'd like to see a reply posted to your (very valid) question.  Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 22:09, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * It gets interesting when a man plays a woman, or vice versa. Hence, Linda Hunt as "Best Actress" even though her character in The Year of Living Dangerously is male. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:23, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * As Basemetal points above, it is interesting to see that the same political correctness in France turn towards the opposite fashion. Women are happy and proud to get names feminized, like for example being called an "actress" is considered a victory and an acknowledgement. In France we talk about Angela Merkel as "la Chancelière", and many Germans (and most German women) find it good and nice and they would love it to be spoken in Germany as "Kanzlerin" instead of "Kanzler". Akseli9 (talk) 08:59, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Different cultures. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:23, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Or simply different grammar? If this was only because French and German are gendered languages, that would help the questionning we had the other day, whether English is a gendered language or not? If English is not a gendered language, its political correctness will tend to be neutral, as opposed to the political correctness of a language where everything "needs" to be gendered? Akseli9 (talk) 01:30, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Cultures which more openly celebrate male and female. Keep in mind that America, at its core, is still Puritanical. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:47, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

The real problem as I see it is that, if only for historical reasons, the title "Woman of the Year" suggests an award intended for a prominent woman, while "Man of the Year" suggests an award intended for a prominent person who, in a sexist presumption, will probably be a man. However, because the other phrases have a long history of use, "Person of the Year" seems unfamiliar and comes across as an artificial expression. There's really no win. And even "Person of the Year" isn't really sufficiently general. Time has also given the title to inanimate objects and to large groups of people. Still another problem is the very fact that it sounds like an award (and the word "awarded" is often used by others in referring to it), whereas in fact Time has always defined it as being whoever "most affected the news" during the year&mdash;past "Men of the Year" have included Hitler and Stalin. All in all they would have done better to go with "Newsmaker of the Year", but even that sounds like an award. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 09:24, 9 January 2016 (UTC)


 * A side note, in 1988, Time—for the first and only time—bestowed a [Planet of the Year] award on Earth. So while they've now proven themselves above "sexism," they just may (one day) have to apologize to their extraterrestrial readers who'll accuse them of geocentrism.   :)
 * Pine (talk) 16:58, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Since the extinction of the word 'were' (barring compounds such as 'werewolf'), the main word for 'adult male human' is 'man' so when people see the word 'man', they assume they're male. Munci (talk) 07:00, 13 January 2016 (UTC)