Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 January 25

= January 25 =

"Wie geht dieses Spiel?" (II)
(restored from archive)

How would you say that in English, e. g. in the context of a child asking another one about how to play a certain game?--Hubon (talk) 01:48, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * "How do you play this game?" is how I would say it. † dismas †|(talk) 01:57, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, or "How is this game played?" although children are less likely to use a passive construction. μηδείς (talk) 02:06, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay, and what about: "How does this game go/work?"--Hubon (talk) 02:07, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * They are both cromulent in your context, although "how does this work" is more often applied to toys/devices or even strategies and bets than rules themselves. I bought my mother a can opener with a gear system that allows her to get more torque, so opening cans is easier on her joints.  But she complains she can't figure out how it works, not how it goes. μηδείς (talk) 02:17, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Are you travailing to embiggen your lexical éclat with cromulent? --2606:A000:4C0C:E200:C03A:9D20:31EF:82F7 (talk) 03:52, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:03, 15 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I prefer crapulent.
 * Some listeners may correctly assume it to be a metabolistic dysfunction but are briefly puzzled. Crapulent is a perfectly Krabappleate word. QED.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 18:09, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It seems you've really opened this discussion out, Medeis. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:31, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You say evasion, I say avoision. μηδείς (talk) 23:42, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Ladies and gentlemen – oyez, oyez, oyez – ye shall not get off the track, please! ;-) ;-) Joking aside, would then "how does this game go" be the more idiomatic solution? Or do ye know anything whatsoever else that yethink cromulent to embiggen my linguistic distinction...? ;-)--Hubon (talk) 19:14, 17 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Without any further context, either phrase is on its own equally grammatical and possible as an ordinary sentence. The trick comes down to things like Three-card Monte, where "work" means you are asking how the trick is pulled off, or watching a movie with a card game, where an impatient person who hasn't seen the movie yet asks another person who has, "How does this game go?"  In the second case he wants to know the outcome of the game, not the rules.


 * The mistake is thinking that there is a one-to-one correspondence or a dichotomy outside of a certain context. In some cases the words will be interchangeable, in others only one word could fit, and in yet others either word could be used, but with different implications.  I'd keep in mind that go focuses on destination, while work focuses on overall structure.  In most real and complete games the rules and the goal are only abstractly inseparable. Or consider the possible analogy cheat:work::win:go. μηδείς (talk) 21:14, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks! So, to sum up, I'd like to ask once more: What would the most simple and natural equivalent to German Wie geht dieses Spiel? (referring to a request of being informed about the rules of a game) I'm asking because it still appears a bit unclear to me what would really be regarded as an idiomatic expression in this context... Best--Hubon (talk) 20:42, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Correct common translation was already given. "Wie geht das xy" is the typical german paraphrase used to ask for an introduction to the concept of "das/es" and the common, similar english paraphrase is "how does this/it work". --Kharon (talk) 00:18, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm very sorry for being late, but this issue is still giving me somewhat of trouble (interposed question: Can I say that?): To be concrete, in "Wie geht dieses Lied?" I'd say that only the use of "go" (but not of "work") would be suitable ("How does this song go?")! Or would somebody object? So one might also be on the safer side asking "How does this game go?", mightn't one? (I do apologize for my persistence, but I like to get to the bottom of questions like that) Best--Hubon (talk) 19:59, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It sounds like you're changing the question slightly. If I were to ask about a game, I'd say "How do you play this/that game?" but a song is not a game. So I might use "How does the song go?" or if I wanted to know specifically about lyrics, I would say "What are the words to this/that song?". Does that help? † dismas †|(talk) 20:36, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * ( I was about to say exactly the same as Dismas above until I clicked edit and saw the it had already been said. ) Is the question about what it is possible to say grammatically, or about what a real child is likely to say?   D b f i r s   20:43, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * "Somewhat" is an adverb, it modifies adjectives. Proper English would be, "I am still having (some) trouble" with the some optional, as it is implied unless you say you are totally confused or you understand completely. μηδείς (talk) 23:54, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The OED does permit the "somewhat of" construction, including a John Dryden cite "somewhat of mournful ...", but it does say "now rare".    D b f i r s   20:21, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The meaning of the "somewhat of mournful" phrase is quite obscure, and given Dyrden died in 1700, I am not sure he's a good example for someone trying to learn modern idiomatic English. In any case, mournful is still and adjective, not a noun, as is trouble.  A longer contextual quote from the OED would help, otherwise I stand by my proscription; somewhat does not modify nouns in the sense questioned above. μηδείς (talk) 03:04, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree that the somewhat of construction is not to be recommended in modern English, but there are more than a hundred cites using it before a noun in the OED. Most of them have a definite or indefinite article before the noun, but here are a few without:  "There is somewhat of Articulateness in every voice and sound" (F Bamfield, 1677); "your question hath in it somewhat of embarrassment" (Scott, 1820); "somewhat of meaning and force" (J L Wilson, 1884) The most recent (with indefinite article) is "Because it is cumbersome and somewhat of a misnomer" (K W Weiler, 1978).    D b f i r s   13:22, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The OED examples are especially helpful.  It seems the meaning has narrowed, or shifted a bit.  I would find "there is something of articulateness" acceptable, if not a bit forced; somewhat like the speech of George Clooney and John Goodman in O Brother, Where Art Thou?  "Somewhat of a misnomer" is still natural, if formal.  But neither without the article is something you'd hear outside of a literary or period piece at this point. μηδείς (talk) 17:02, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Picture of the Day
Wednesday's feature was Bathsheba, one of the ancestors of Jesus Christ. One sentence, taken directly from the article, reads "As Bathsheba was already married to a soldier named Uriah, David attempted to recall Uriah so he would re-consummate his marriage." Is this a made - up word? So far as I am aware, a marriage can only be consummated once. 92.2.72.206 (talk) 13:12, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The term is in wide use. See here.  Many users have access to the full Oxford English Dictionary (which requires membership).  Hopefully one of them will be along soon to provide the OED entry on the word.  -- Jayron 32 14:32, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually,, the online OED hasn't got an entry for "reconsummate". --ColinFine (talk) 17:34, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Excellent. Thanks!  -- Jayron 32 17:43, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * EO likewise doesn't have an entry for "reconsummate", but the meaning of "consummate" would seem to allow for the possibility of reconsummation. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:05, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Just as an aside (actually, this aside may be more important than the points already raised), the concept being ignored here is the concept of Productivity. In linguistics, a morpheme is productive if it can be combined with other morphemes to make novel words which are understood without needing to be defined to native speakers.  Specifically, the prefix "re-", meaning "to do again", is productive in English because it can be added to words and the word thus created doesn't require further definition.  It's a valid word because the listener doesn't mark the word as particularly odd or uncomfortable.  The existance or non-existence of the word in a dictionary is unimportant as to the validity of a word; merely that speakers and listeners are natural and comfortable in using it.  "Re-" formed words are highly understandable, and in general, perfectly cromulent.  Dictionary writers, as hard as they work, are still a limited resources, and while the good people at the OED are the best at what they do, they still don't always document every valid English word, simply because they haven't had enough time to do so.  Usage at google ngrams shows that reconsummate began appearing in print prior to 1960, and has enough usage to be legit.  -- Jayron 32 12:10, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Could this be linked to the recent change in stress from con'summate to 'consummate? 80.5.88.48 (talk) 11:31, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * See Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 April 1. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  11:37, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Wow. We gotta get out more.  Ten years later, and it's still the same people... -- Jayron 32 13:45, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

past tense of 'to eat'
I have recently seen three sentences in novels where 'eat' was used as the past tense of 'to eat', instead of 'ate'. This wasn't in dialect speech, but in normal narration. The first time I thought it was a typing error, but I saw it again in the same novel and then again in another. And these novels were both by 19th Century British authors (Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy). Was this the case, that back then the preterite was 'eat', and when did this change to the modern 'ate'? Thank you. ZygonLieutenant (talk) 21:56, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The OED, under "forms" says " pa. tenseOE–ME æt, (ME æat), ME et(t, ME–15 ete, ME at, (ME hete), ME eet(te, 15–16 eate, 16–18 eat, 15– ate". So it acknowledges past "eat" up to the 18th century, but not 19th. As it happens I am currently reading Wuthering Heights on an e-reader, so it was easy for me to search the text for "eat" and I found no instances of it used as a past tense. I wonder if your text might have a misprint? --ColinFine (talk) 22:12, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

I thought it was a misprint the first time, but am sure I saw it again later in the same novel (Wuthering Heights). Or perhaps I misread the sentences (although I did stop to go through again carefully). The other novel was Jude the Obscure - they are both Penguin Classics editions. --ZygonLieutenant (talk) 22:31, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * And since when was spit the preterite tense for spit? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:35, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * What chapter and page of Jude the Obscure? I'd like to take a look in my copy. Loraof (talk) 23:11, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Spit as the past tense of spit is the older form. I have not seen evidence of spat earlier than about 1800. —Stephen (talk) 00:54, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * One for your album then: "When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground..." (John 9:6 in the King James Bible). --Antiquary (talk) 12:57, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Earlier in various versions of the bible (John 9 v6) "he spat on the ground" in Tyndale, King James and Douay-Rheims. Spitted was also sometimes used in the past, and spit elsewhere in the bible.   D b f i r s   13:01, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Eat is the regular way of spelling the past tense of eat, when it is pronounced ETT. We were cautioned at school in Australia in the 1950s against using the ETT pronunciation (which still obtained amongst older speakers, especially of British RP), and to always say ATE. Spit is regular US as past tense of spit. Djbcjk (talk) 04:07, 26 January 2017 (UTC)


 * on the above claim, . In my (Southeast England) English the past is invariably pronounced /ɛt/, which I always spell 'ate': I cannot recall ever having encountered it spelt 'eat'. --ColinFine (talk) 19:17, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah right, so not an ancient song then, just a US/UK difference. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:04, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * At first I thought there was an Australian/UK difference in the past tense of eat, but I assume that Djbcjk meant that the spelling eat as the past tense is less common in Australia. It is normally spelt ate pronounced /eɪt/ here in England, though there are dialectal variants.  D b f i r s   13:02, 26 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Project Gutenberg's version of Jude does not contain any past tense "eat"s that I can find; it does use "ate". HenryFlower 08:57, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * And even though it has "spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust" it has no spit or spat. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:31, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Joke told by my high-school Latin teacher. Brutus:  How many eggs did you have this morning?  Julius:  Et two, Brute.  It's possible that she was old enough to remember a time when the /ɛt/ pronunciation was common in the United States. --Trovatore (talk) 20:11, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * "et" is used as the past tense among southern Appalachians (i.e. hillbillies). -Arch dude (talk) 00:55, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, should have said, Eat could be the regular way of spelling the past tense of eat, when it is pronounced ETT. At least, you should consider that pronunciation when you see anomalously "eat" as the past tense or p.p. of eat in old publications. Djbcjk (talk) 03:59, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Some 19th-century dictionaries noted this. See the British Chambers's Dictionary, its 1st edition, as well as its 2nd edition (25 years later), where the past participle eat = /et/ tagged as obsolete. Also the American Century Dictionary said the same. Note two of them did not give the /et/ pronunciation of ate, that is the change of writing /et/ from eat to ate may be seen as an innovation of the late 19th or the early 20th centuries.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 09:49, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The IPA /et/ is not really a possible English pronunciation at all. Presumably you mean /ɛt/? --Trovatore (talk) 15:09, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The /ɛ/ phoneme (aka the "dress" vowel) is transcribed as /e/ by numerous dictionaries, so yes, that's obviously what he meant, and there's nothing wrong about it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:12, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * There's an expectation that what appears between slashes is IPA. There's nothing wrong with other systems per se, but they're not usually written between slashes.  And if it's meant to be IPA, then it absolutely is wrong. --Trovatore (talk) 15:23, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Tell Daniel Jones that. Hint: many varieties of British English have "dress"-phonemes that are pretty much intermediate between (cardinal) [e] and [ɛ], so the choice of which symbol to use for them is pretty much arbitrary. Also, it is a wide-spread practice to use "e" and "o", as the more readily available symbols, as phonemic or wide phonetic transcriptiosn for pretty much anything in the mid range, as long as the language you're describing doesn't have an explicitly more close alternative with which the sound is in contrast. Just as you can use "a" for pretty much any open vowel, not just the open front one which IPA defines as the cardinal point for this symbol. And yes, all of this is perfectly valid use of IPA. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:34, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Before the revision by Gimson in the 1960s the IPA for English (designed by Jones) was rather simplistic, they even did not use /ɪ/ or /ʊ/, though they used /ɛə/. /e/ > /ɛ/ is Upton's revision. See here.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:28, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * (1) I was rather lazy to enter /ɛ/. I thought such niceties were not important in the current context anyway. (2) In a standard transcription there is no actual difference between /e/ and /ɛ/ as long as we do not transcribe the diphthong /eɪ/ with /e/. Actually the realisation of the DRESS vowel may vary greatly across dialects, speakers and contexts, so both /ɛ/ and /e/ are correct. (3) To avoid any confusion and to indulge my laziness I've used respelling within quotation marks in my following comments.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:19, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * OK, fair enough Lüboslóv and Fut.Perf., I suppose there's no minimal pair to distinguish them. I personally just think of /e/ as the sound in German gehen, which sounds more like /eɪ/ than it does like /ɛ/. --Trovatore (talk) 19:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You're right, at least in contemporary RP (other accents may differ) the DRESS vowel is opener than it was some 50 or 100 years ago. Exactly this was the reason for Clive Upton to change /e/ to /ɛ/. But many continue to use /e/ due to the tradition, in particular dictionaries by Cambridge (D. Jones & P. Roach) and Longman (J. C. Wells), while Oxford dictionaries usually follow Upton. See some details here.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:05, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * In Peter Ladefoged's book A Course in Phonetics, there's the following passage:
 * (quote)
 * The transcription used in the first part of this chapter is not, strictly speaking, a simple phonemic transcription. The symbols in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 distinguish all the oppositions that occur in actual pronunciations of English words. But these are not the underlying segments. There are several ways in which we could change our notational system into a more abstract one that uses a simpler set of symbols.
 * One way would be to not show the differences in length between pairs of vowels. Our present transcription indicates the differences in both quality and length in the vowels in a pair of words such as “bead, bid” [ biːd, bɪd ] or “fool, full” [ fuːl, fʊl ]. But the differences in length are entirely predictable from the differences in quality. The symbols [ i, u ] can be said to represent long vowels, and the symbols [ ɪ, ʊ ] short vowels (perhaps with an additional stipulation that we have been tacitly assuming: [ i ] in unstressed position as in “happy” is not long). In this way we would eliminate the length mark [ ː ].
 * Alternatively, instead of not showing the length difference, we could regard the quality as predictable from the length and not show the quality difference. In this case, the vowel [ i ] would have the value appropriate for the vowel in “bead” when it occurred before a length mark as in [ biːd ]. But it would have the value appropriate for the vowel in “bid” when it occurred without a length mark, which would then be transcribed as [ bid ]. Remember that there is nothing sacred about the phonetic value of a symbol. Some phoneticians transcribe “bead, bid” as [ biːd, bɪd ] as I have been doing in this book so far, while others transcribe these same words as [ biːd, bid ]. Using the same principle, they might transcribe “cooed, could” not as [ kuːd, kʊd ], as I have done, but as [ kuːd, kud ]. Finally, “laid, led” would not be [ leɪd, lɛd ], but [ leːd, led ]. In this style of transcription, the differences in quality are treated as if they depended on the differences in length. The symbols / i / and / u / would be said to represent higher vowels when long, and the symbol / e / would be said to represent a diphthong in these circumstances. This style of trasncription uses an additional symbol for length, but it more than compensates for that by eliminating the vowel symbols [ ɪ, ɛ, ʊ ].
 * (end of quote)
 * I also remember reading elsewhere in that book – or probably somewhere else because I wasn't able to find it skimming quickly through the book – that generally in broad transcriptions, when the particular language does not phonemically distinguish between two particular sounds, the symbol is favoured whose shape is most akin to a letter of the Latin alphabet (so given that there's no contrast between /e/ and /ɛ/ in Spanish, the sole Spanish "e"-like phoneme is represented as /e/, and the English "r" is usually represented as /r/ even though it's more of a [ɹ] phonetically). --Theurgist (talk) 12:53, 30 January 2017 (UTC)


 * We have an oxymoron here:. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 11:19, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * ... and the 1526 Tyndale translation of the bible has "Thou wentest in unto men uncircumcised and atest with them." (which would be went and ate in modern English), and the Coverdale bible of 1535 had "Ate vp soch thinges as were vpon ye altare".   D b f i r s   12:09, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * No doubts. Never claimed the opposite. My thought was that when some pronounced "ayt" they always spelled ate, and when others pronounced "et" they always spelled eat, but pronouncing "et" and spelling ate at the same time (that is the variant past tense written form eat was abandoned, but the pronunciation has survived) was an innovation somewhen around 1900.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:39, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I did wonder if that was what you were saying. The OED just gives three options for the pronunciation with no indication of preference by spelling: "pa. tense ate, eat /eɪt//ɛt//iːt/. pa. pple. eaten /ˈiːt(ə)n/" without a comma to indicate correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.  Can anyone find any rhymes to check the correspondence through history?  My local dialect retains /iːt/ sometimes, so that's how I would pronounce the past tense spelt "eat" as in "he eat it yesterday", but I would only expect to see that in text written in dialect, not in modern formal English.   D b f i r s   16:40, 27 January 2017 (UTC)