Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 April 27

= April 27 =

Quotation marks vs. italicized text; 'meaning' vs. 'which means'; comma vs. parentheses
I recently edited the first paragraph of Prodrome (diff), but now I wonder if an aspect of that edit helped or not. Specifically, I changed:

to:

What do you think?

This issue raised three questions for me:

1) Is it better to italicize the meaning or place it in quotes?

2) Is 'which means' better usage than 'meaning'?

3) Would a parenthetical expression work better?

Many thanks,

Mark

P.S. Also feel free to comment on the use of the more literal translation, 'running before', versus 'precursor'.

- Mark D Worthen PsyD  (talk)  01:44, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * 2 and 3) All are OK, but you do need one or the other. How you changed it seems wrong. StuRat (talk) 02:29, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I think the original was much better. The only change I would make to the original would be to use the Greek spelling πρόδρομος, meaning "precursor". —Stephen (talk) 04:12, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * That change would leave anyone who doesn't know the Greek alphabet unable to tell how much the word was changed when it came into English. Looking at four actual dictionaries via http://www.onelook.com (Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Oxford, Collins), I find that they all write prodromos and not πρόδρομος, and I think it makes sense to follow that practice. --76.71.6.254 (talk) 22:06, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Italics is generally used for foreign words, so use it for prodromos and put the meaning in quotes. I'd use "meaning" rather than "which means" because it is shorter, but that's just personal preference.  One other consideration: does Greek use prodromos to mean what English means by "precursor", or does it just mean literally "running before"?  If the former, I would suggest    If the latter,   (As an aside, I just realize that "precursor" is also literally "running before", in Latin). Iapetus (talk) 09:21, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * WP:Manual of Style says
 * Use italics when a word or letter (see Use–mention distinction) or a string of words up to one full sentence (the term panning is derived from panorama; the most common letter in English is e).
 * This implies that both podromos and its English equivalent should be italicized. Loraof (talk) 15:22, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that giving a definition is an example of use, not mention. I much prefer the style with quotation marks for the definition. --76.71.6.254 (talk) 22:08, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, that seems to be the recommedation in the Manual of Style; see the first bullet point in MOS:WORDSASWORDS. Deor (talk) 22:38, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Y'all are awesome. :O) Thank you very much! (I edited the sentence to:    - Mark D Worthen PsyD   (talk)  03:34, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * In your example "precursor" is a meaning, while panning and panorama in the MOS are both words as words, so Loraof's advice is not correct.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:20, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * In some linguistics books that I've read, the word in question is italicized and the gloss is in single quotation marks. —Tamfang (talk) 09:05, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

In addition to the MOS, the rules are quite simple:
 * 1) Words as words and letters as letters are always in italics if written in Latin script.
 * 2) Non-Latin scripts are not set in italics as they are already contrastive enough within a Latin-script text, no need to emphasize.
 * 3) In more journalistic and ordinary styles italics are often substituted by double quotation marks, which is not recommended in Wikipedia.
 * 4) Meaning (gloss) is formatted in three ways:
 * a) Academic: single space then the meaning in single typographic quotation marks (Wikipedia opts for the typewriter apostrophe). This usage is common in academic writing and dictionaries.
 * It is derived from the Greek word prodromos 'running before'.
 * b) Prosaic: comma, space, then the meaning in double quotation marks (in British English single quotation marks, which is not recommended in Wikipedia). Between the comma and the meaning there can usually be descriptive words like which means, meaning, etc. This style is widespread in other than academic writing.
 * It is derived from the Greek word prodromos, meaning "running before".
 * 5) An even more prosaic style is using the cliche "from {language name} for" followed by the meaning with or without quotation marks and usually without mentioning the original source word.
 * It is derived from Greek for "running before".

--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:55, 29 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Wow! Thank you so much. :^)  - Mark D Worthen PsyD   (talk)  19:30, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Accent vs dialect
Is the only difference between dialect and accent that dialect refers to the language of a group of people while accent refers to a spoken language of a foreigner who is trying to imitate the speech of the native population? In the United States, for example, there is the General American dialect. If a foreigner from Mexico were to speak American English, then he may carry a Mexican accent. Okay, but what about a US-born, English-speaking person who moves to the United Kingdom? Will he be speaking UK-English with distinctive UK vocabulary to facilitate communication and an American accent, or will he be speaking American English because of the way he pronounces things, not by the terms he uses? Or how about a native speaker from Wuhan, China, who moves to Beijing, China, but when trying to speak the standard Mandarin in Beijing, he may pronounce things as if he would in his native Wuhan language? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 13:07, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has articles titled dialect and accent (sociolinguistics). The first article contains this sentence "Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation (including prosody, or just prosody itself), the term accent may be preferred over dialect."  which matches how these terms are used: Accent refers to purely phonological differences (pronunciation of specific sounds) while dialect refers to differences in word choice as well (i.e. "petrol" in UK vs. "gasoline" in US).  There's some overlap between the two terms, as dialects and accents may change; for example, New England English has it's own unique vocabulary (words and phrases like "bubbler" and "frappe" and "bang a uey") but it also has a distinctive accent (non-rhoticity, vowel raising and backing, maintaining the Mary-merry distinction and the comma-mama distinction).  Another important principle is A language is a dialect with an army and navy, which is to say that there are not always clear definitions here, and these differences get fuzzy around the edges.  -- Jayron 32 13:18, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

50.4.236.254 -- The word "dialect" is used more often than "accent" in linguistics (among linguists, "accent" usually means pitch accent), but in ordinary non-technical English, the word "dialect" can have derogatory connotations (referring to non-standard speech of rural hayseeds etc.), as in dialect spelling. The differences between major varieties of Chinese go far beyond what most people (linguists or non-linguists) would commonly refer to as ordinary accent or dialect variations... AnonMoos (talk) 13:38, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, I didn't really mean a person from Wuhan speaking Wuhanese in Beijing. I meant a person from Wuhan who attempts to speak Beijing Mandarin, but pronounces certain things differently, like failing to distinguish ch and c. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 13:55, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * AnonMoos, Wuhan is actually a good example because the Wuhan dialect is classified as a variety (or dialect) of Mandarin, i.e. they both belong to the same first-level variety of Chinese. OP, in non-technical English, a native speaker of the Wuhan dialect, when speaking the Wuhan dialect, would be using Wuhan pronunciations, vocabulary and grammar. When speaking standard Mandarin with a Wuhan accent, he or she would be using more-or-less standard Mandarin vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, but with some pronunciations that are non-standard, for example in the way of intonation, or pronuncing (pinyin) ch as sh, or zh as j. If the Wuhan native is speaking with mostly standard Mandarin vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, but substitues one or two Mandarin words with a small number of similar, but different, Wuhan dialect words, that would normally still be regarded as speaking standard Mandarin with a Wuhan accent, rather than speaking the Wuhan dialect. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 15:50, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * The OP asks whether "accent refers to a spoken language of a foreigner who is trying to imitate the speech of the native population", with the implication that this might be the only meaning of accent. But no: while in common usage to say that someone speaks with "an accent" often means a foreign accent, by the article accent (sociolinguistics) an accent ... is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. So everyone speaks English with some accent. For example, a Midwesterner born in and still living in the US Midwest speaks with a Midwestern accent, just like most of those around him.


 * As for the difference between an accent and a dialect, and elaborating on Jayron's quote from that article, the same article also says "the word 'accent' may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often "accent" is a subset of "dialect"." Loraof (talk) 15:41, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I thought accent was a relative term, like indigenous. A population is indigenous, because it has been there longer than later populations. And accent is, what I formerly thought, used to describe any non-native speaker. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 17:40, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Then you though wrong(ly). Yes, most non-native speakers of language 'A' will speak with one or another "foreign accent" depending on their native language ('B', 'C', etc.) and even their native dialect within it – though some may achieve a near-perfect 'A' accent – but various native speakers of 'A' usually also display a variety of dialects and accents relative to each other.
 * To summarize longer explanations above, accents determine the precise sounds within particular words, but dialects involve the use of different words and often some different grammar. Further, even within the dialects of a language there are usually different registers, which are like sub-accents and sub-dialects but are (mostly) dependent on how formal or informal the speaker is being.
 * The term 'dialect' as applied to Chinese languages can be deceptive. The word became widely used in translation (to English) from the beginning of the 20th century to refer to often mutually unintelligible varieties of particular Chinese 'languages', which elsewhere in the world be called separate languages within a language family (for example, the Mandarin and Cantonese 'dialects' are about as different as French and Italian, which are of course both members of the Romance language family. The picture was then further confused by the politically mediated desire to portray all aspects of China as more unified and uniform than they really were, and the forced use of Mandarin characters to write other Chinese languages, however different. There is a recent trend in Linguistics to refer to these mutually unintelligible varieties as 'topolects' rather than 'dialects.' {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.249.244 (talk) 18:43, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * 90.217, you refer to "the forced use of Mandarin characters to write other Chinese languages, however different". I wasn't aware of the forced nature of this, and I'd like to read something about it, but I can't find anything in Chinese characters. Could you supply some references? Thanks. Loraof (talk) 19:17, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I think 90.217 is taking the concept of "Chinese as multiple languages" just slightly too far. "Written Chinese" is not specific to Mandarin. It is true that there is one "standard modern (written) Chinese", which is based on standard Mandarin, and for pragmatic reasons most educated Chinese speakers, regardless of their native variety, choose to write in that standard. It is not a top-down, political imposition as such, although of course it suits the current government to promote the Mandarin-based standard. However, the standard is intellible to a large extent in most varieties of Chinese. Further, when suitable for the audience, it is perfectly possible to write anything from tabloid gossip pieces to works of literature in written Chinese to record a variety other than Mandarin - for example The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai which is written in Wu. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 22:01, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * It is forced insofar as schools in most of China only teach the Chinese characters or hànzì of Modern Standard Mandarin, aka Standard Chinese or Putonghua, which are a somewhat evolved and recently simplified version of Classical Chinese characters, and after a certain level only teach using Putonghua rather than the local topolect where different. This is not a problem for native speakers of MSM, but speakers of other Chinese (i.e. Sinitic) languages/topolects are only taught the same characters, which are often a non-optimal match for their own l/t. Furthermore, such l/ts have many words, not used in MSM, for which there are no corresponding MSM characters. It is quite common for a highly literate speaker of Cantonese, for example, to say a perfectly well-known Cantonese word or phrase but be entirely incapable of writing it in hànzì (though they could do so in Pinyin using roman letters if the context allowed – for many official purposes use of Pinyin is not permitted).
 * This is difficult enought for speakers of one of the Varieties of Chinese (other than MSM itself) which belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, but the approximately 300 languages spoken in China include members of 9 other language families, which are even less related to MSM. Although these languages are variously tolerated in everyday use, official signs (such as road signs) are increasingly displayed only in MSM, or in attempted transliterations of the actual local language using MSM characters on the rebus principle.
 * For very extensive and erudite discussions of these points – and the resulting problems for literacy in China, I suggest consulting the current and archive sites of the linguistics blog Language Log (links available in that article), whose regular posters include experts in Chinese (of several varieties and eras) and education in China. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.249.244 (talk) 05:07, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * 90.217, I think you are under a misimpression which confuses the significant variation amongst varieties of spoken Chinese with the mostly singular set of written Chinese characters. When you say "Chinese characters or hànzì of Modern Standard Mandarin, aka Standard Chinese or Putonghua, which are a somewhat evolved and recently simplified version of Classical Chinese characters", I detect a misimpression that modern Chinese characters are different to classical Chinese characters. You may have confused the distinction between simplified and traditional characters, with the distinction between modern (or vernacular) Chinese and classical Chinese. If these misimpressions stem from your reading of "experts" of Language Log, I would recommend that you stop using that source and find a different source of information on the Chinese language(s). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:26, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * No, I am not confusing the separate evolutions of the many spoken Sinitic dialects/topolects/languages (considerable, resulting in often complete lack of inter-intelligibility) with that of the single* set of written characters (much less, but not insignificant). Nor am I confusing the recent adoption of some simplified characters, to which I also referred earlier, a minor point though needing to be taken into account. Many characters have somewhat changed from the classical period, which is partly why modern readers literate in Standard Chinese find Classical Chinese texts difficult to read – perhaps about the same difficulty as a modern English speaker reading Chaucer in the original, I suggest.
 *  *  Though there are, for example, characters that are used in written Cantonese but not in MSM.
 * With respect to Language Log, are you seriously suggesting that the likes of Professor Victor Mair are not experts? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.249.244 (talk) 21:00, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * 90.217.249.244, you should probably stop now. The difficulty of reading classical Chinese for a user of modern Chinese is not related to changes in the characters, but to changes in their meaning and in the grammar of the language. Whoever gave you that idea is ... not an expert. HenryFlower 21:57, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

PalaceGuard008 -- From everything I've read as a linguist, 20th- and 21st-century modern standard written Mandarin Chinese (based on Beijing spoken language) is not close to being neutral between major modern varieties of Chinese. By the nature of the writing system used, it's generally neutral in pronunciation of course, but there are a number of other differences that occur. That's why the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set exists and we have an article on Written Cantonese... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:09, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd advise to read two good pieces by Victor Mair which cover the issue quite well.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:04, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Define language
What is this language? Can someone transcribe/translate? --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:58, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what language it is but the song is Heartbeat by South African singer Zain Bhikha (the video is on YouTube. Adam Bishop (talk) 18:22, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Er...wait...is it Rashid Bhikha? Adam Bishop (talk) 18:23, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The lead/main lyric is in English, the sample the OP linked is of the backing vocals, in Zulu. BTW Rashid is Zain's son. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:07, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, what lyrics I can find certainly fit isiZulu and it is definitely one of the Nguni languages. Unfortunately the audio is not very clear, and I have not been able to find a long text that is not corrupted by English and Arabic influences. If  has a source, a link would be nice. μηδείς (talk) 19:14, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * @Adam Bishop: Thanks, I know, it must be obvious from the file name. I didn't posted the link to the whole song, as I'm interested only in this very small part of it.
 * @Roger and Medeis: Thanks, my suggestion was similar, Zulu or something, but I was not sure. Still I look forward to the whole text, it is just one sentence. May it be from some other song?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:20, 28 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I saw the header and was reminded of the following definition I noted down some years ago:
 * language: a non-obligate, mutualistic, endo-symbiont
 * (Morten Christiansen, Cornell University, quoted in a New Scientist article by Michael Kellock; re-quoted by Murray Waldren, Weekend Australian, 1-2 Feb 2003, That's Language: "Close the obligate", Review, p. R9) --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:07, 29 April 2017 (UTC)