Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 July 9

= July 9 =

Name and position of a German woman on Birkenau camp staff
A survivor's memoir from the Birkenau concentration camp refers to an incident in Nov. 1942 involving a young woman (ca. age 22) on the camp staff, referred to as Aufzuchen or Aufsuchen Heisl (?). The source text is in Hebrew so I can only guess at the German. What would be plausible spellings, and what does the first word mean? -- Deborahjay (talk) 10:54, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The closest I can get is the term Aufseherin. Heisl (or something similar) may simply be the surname of the person.  Oops, there is Gertrud Heise, which may be the one.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 11:33, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Latin word for "square"
At Quadratic function it says: Quadratum is the Latin word for square. At Quadratic it says: Quadratus is Latin for square.

Should the Latin be quadratum or quadratus? Dolphin ( t ) 12:26, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Seemingly both forms exist, see wikt:quadratus and quadratum. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 13:56, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Both "quadratum" and "quadratus" seem to have been used in Latin for "square", but technically that is the past participle of the verb "quadrare" (to make something square), so that is really an adjective with neuter and masculine endings (and of course the feminine is "quadrata"). They were probably used as adjectives to describe something square, and not the noun meaning "a square". The Lewis & Short dictionary also gives "quadrus", "quadra", "quadrum" for the noun "square" (clearly masculine, feminine, and neuter forms of the same root). Adam Bishop (talk) 15:37, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * See Latin_declension; would not "quadratum" merely be an inflected form of "quadratus"? Nyttend (talk) 11:15, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Quadratus is masculine so the accusative would be quadratum, but quadratum could also be nominative if the word is neuter. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:23, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I would guess that the adjective (which must take all genders) came first, and the noun quadratum resulted as an ellipsis from a phrase meaning "a square thing". —Tamfang (talk) 07:52, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

On Stranger Tides
How do you recognize here whether 'stranger' is a simple adjective or a comparative adjective? Omidinist (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * "Stranger" where -er is not the comparative ending is a noun. It can be used attributively, as in "stranger danger", but is not an adjective as such... AnonMoos (talk) 16:12, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * In "on stranger tides" it could perhaps be seen as a null comparative (see that section) because no comparison is given. ---Sluzzelin talk  16:49, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * For those like me, who are not up to speed with 21st century culture (?) see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (apparently some type of cinematograph). Alansplodge (talk) 19:47, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'll go to the back of the class, it's an actual book: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. Alansplodge (talk) 19:50, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * And given that it is a book title (and what is more, a fantasy book) it may very well be intentionally ambiguous between the two meanings of "stranger". It smells like part of a quotation to me, but I haven't managed to find a source. --ColinFine (talk) 20:42, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * There is a famous collection of literary essays by J. M. Coetzee titled Stranger Shores, so I thought that might be a famous quote, but all I found is George Chapman's translation of the Odyssey, book IV, where Proteus talks about Ulysses "For he had neither ship instruct with oars / Nor men to fetch him from those stranger shores". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ---Sluzzelin talk  21:57, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Not to be confused with Stranger on the Shore. Richard Avery (talk) 07:42, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * OED says 'stranger' is both noun and adjective, and here are some quotations it provides for its adjectival case: 'her enchantment is removed..by means of a stranger prince' (H. F. Tozer); 'pardon me, O stranger knight' (Tennyson); 'I saluted him as one stranger gentleman ought to salute another..' (Waterton). Omidinist (talk) 03:49, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Such examples seem to me to be more a case of noun apposition than "stranger" being a true adjective. "Stranger knight" is a conventional phrase used to describe foreign members of the Order of the Garter... AnonMoos (talk) 07:25, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Anyway, regardless of the grammatical terminology, "stranger" + noun (where stranger is not a comparative adjective) can basically only mean "who is a stranger" or "who are strangers", and this meaning doesn't seem to make much sense in the phrase "On stranger tides" (though there could theoretically be an esoteric poetical reading, I suppose)... AnonMoos (talk) 08:13, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

The exact transcription for "quarter inch"
Let's say an American is searching online for a "quarter inch bolt", which of the following would they most likely type into the search engine?


 * 1) quarter inch bolt
 * 2) 1/4 inch bolt
 * 3) 1/4" bolt
 * 4) 0.25 inch bolt
 * 5) 0.25" bolt

Basically I'm interested in how fractions and United States customary units are transcribed during every day usage.

I tried Google, but Google results are more about how large multi-national corporations organize their data for search engine optimization purposes rather than American colloquial usage. Scala Cats (talk) 19:59, 9 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm Canadian, but I don't think that makes any difference except for having a greater possibility that I'll use metric. In typing into a search engine I'd try to anticipate how the sites where I expected to find these bolts would spell it, and also I'd have to think about whether the search engine would treat the " as a quotation mark.  I'd probably type 1/4 inch bolt first, anyway.


 * As to everyday usage, there's a divergence between two sorts of writing. There's writing by technical people or others who often deal with measurements; in that case I would expect all measurements to be given using digits, so it'd be a 1/4 inch bolt or a 1/4-inch bolt or a 1/4" bolt (or a ¼" bolt or a ¼″  bolt, or similar). In general writing by typical people, you are more likely to see words, so it's a quarter-inch bolt (or a quarter inch bolt if they're not strict about proper hyphenation). (I would not expect 0.25 to be used in any context except calculations or product labeling, and not necessarily even then.)


 * But all of this is based on my own experience, not references. I don't know where you would look for references to how this is written by most Americans in their everyday usage. --76.71.5.114 (talk) 02:20, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * In the odd circumstance that I were searching for such a thing, I wouldn't use any of those options. I might try <"¼ inch" and bolt> [but that's because I use extended characters a lot, and typing ¼ is almost as fast as typing quarter] or <"quarter-inch" and bolt>, but not <"quarter inch" and bolt> unless the other searches had failed — the hyphen is important.  Nyttend (talk) 11:10, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * As 76.71.5.114 says, posing this as a search engine exercise complicates things, because of the “ symbol – whether people use it or not will depend on whether or not they know that quotation marks affect search results, and that many search engines ignore hyphens.
 * One indicator is how the sellers describe the item, and that you *can* guesstimate using a search engine: "quarter inch bolt" returns 6500+ results, "0.25 inch bolt" about 8000 and "1/4 inch bolt" 62000+.
 * But best I can think of to answer your question is search for academic papers (use https://scholar.google.com) for a corpus study that includes both figures and numbers written as words. The trick would be finding a corpus representing everyday writing; if you use anything taken from books or journalism, all you will find out is how well those writers adhere to their publication’s style guide. 70.67.222.124 (talk) 14:09, 10 July 2017 (UTC)


 * For construction materials always use figures, and for US/Imperial fractional ones, it's always a slash-fraction for something said out loud as "quarter inch" or the like. Others above are correct that for other contexts, people are apt to spell it out: "I found a quarter-inch bug in my salad."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:03, 11 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Agreeing with Stanton, I'd expect to see quarter inch or quarter-inch [noun] written only where the exact measurement is inessential. —Tamfang (talk) 07:55, 11 July 2017 (UTC)