Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 September 11

= September 11 =

Red October pep talk
If James Bond's pep talk to the Russian sailors in The Hunt for Red October was all in Russian, would the Simon Garfunkel reference be lost in translation? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:992F:DDCF:CD34:2A70 (talk) 02:22, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * That's a 4'36" clip which I can't be bothered to watch all the way through to find the alleged Simon & Garfunkel reference. Can you provide an exact timestamp, or simply post the quote? By the way, even though that film stars someone who looks a lot like James Bond, it's not actually a James Bond film. --Viennese Waltz 06:45, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Here's the relevant quote: "This reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Well, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence." 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:992F:DDCF:CD34:2A70 (talk) 07:25, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Well in that case, it doesn't sound like an intentional Simon & Garfunkel reference to me, just a piece of lofty-sounding rhetoric. --Viennese Waltz 09:03, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Maybe either Bond or Simon & Garfunkel were making a reference to Jean Cocteau, since in 1940 he wrote a play for Edith Piaf called Le Bel Indifférent, English title: The Sound of Silence. But then again, probably not.  Alansplodge (talk) 21:58, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Interesting idea -- did the play have a "neon light that split the night", and were there "ten thousand people... talking without speaking"? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:992F:DDCF:CD34:2A70 (talk) 07:05, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * [un-indent] Well, intentional or not (and it probably was intentional on the part of the screenwriter, if not the character), it's still a name-drop, and what I want to know is whether it would work in Russian like it does in English, or whether it would be lost in translation? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:992F:DDCF:CD34:2A70 (talk) 07:05, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * the relevant bit in Russian is: "Ну, вскоре они опять будут трястись — при звуке нашей тишины." So at least purely semantically, it's accurate. As to whether the reference to Sound of Silence, the song (which I think this isn't - the song is about loneliness (YMMV) whereas the movie quote is about sub warfare) would be lost on the average Russian viewer: no more and no less so than any other pop-culture reference. 78.50.150.114 (talk) 16:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks! So, in Russian there's no song reference, and therefore no character contradiction, right?  (By "character contradiction" I mean that Bond #1 implies in Goldfinger that he dislikes the Beatles (he says that drinking champagne that's anything less than ice-cold is "as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs") -- yet, in The Hunt for Red October, he seems to make reference to one of Tom & Jerry's most Beatles-like songs, which by analogy he should dislike as well.)  And BTW, I agree that the sailors wouldn't get the song reference -- while Western rock music is indeed well-known in Russia (and has been even in Khruschev's time), it's pretty much an exclusive privilege of the urban middle class, whereas most of the enlisted sailors in the Soviet navy were (and still are) of working-class and/or rural background (as is the case in all armed forces everywhere throughout history), and so wouldn't know anything about it. 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:992F:DDCF:CD34:2A70 (talk) 03:04, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
 * You noticed that obscure Beatles reference but you didn't notice that Sean Connery is playing a Soviet Navy Captain in command of a submarine while James Bond is a British MI6 agent? As was pointed out above, The Hunt for Red October (film) is NOT a James Bond movie. The movie has no connection to the character created by Ian Fleming. The Hunt for Red October is a Jack Ryan movie and belongs to the same fictional universe as other movies based on the Tom Clancy novels such as Patriot Games (film) and Clear and Present Danger (film). It has nothing to do with James Bond.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 01:46, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Sure I noticed that -- but I prefer to think of The Hunt for Red October as a James Bond movie, because it would be just like him to steal a Russian nuclear submarine. ;-)  (This, BTW, is also a plausible explanation for Captain Ramius's Lithuanian background (unusual for a Soviet captain because in the USSR, Lithuanians were (often rightly) suspected of having separatist views and were not trusted) -- it could be that despite being fluent in Russian, he had an accent that he couldn't get rid of, and that's why MI6 decided to make him a Lithuanian from Klaipeda for his cover story.)  ;-)  And while it would be hard for a British agent to impersonate a Soviet captain, it wouldn't be impossible -- although it would require MI6 to fake some records in the Soviet Navy command! 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:3DB7:8D6E:A762:14CC (talk) 06:38, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * You can entertain your fantasies all you want, but this is no more a James Bond movie than is Get Smart. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:47, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Latin mono-syllabic words ending in -x

 * lex, nox, pax, rex, sex, strix, vox.

Are there others? --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  05:29, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like a bunch of them. I dowloaded dictpage.zip from this page.  Then I grepped through it using two regular expressions.    finds the undeclinable ones, in practice, whereas   finds the rest.
 * The undeclinable ones (interjections and adverbs) are bombax, ex, mox, and vix. There are 533 of the declinable ones.  Many of them are feminine descriptions of people who do things, like adversatrix (female adversary).
 * A few examples not in that category: alex (fish sauce), anthrax (cinnabar(!)), aspalax (an unidentified herb). --Trovatore (talk) 05:58, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Ah, thanks, but (a) I have no idea how to use grep, and (b) I was actually only wanting mono-syllabic words, which I omitted to specify. I've now done so.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  09:36, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Hmm. That's much harder to grep for.  If you like I'll e-mail you the list of 537 words, and you can look through it at your leisure. --Trovatore (talk) 09:40, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * That's fine. Or you can post a link here.  Whatever.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  10:21, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * At a quick scan, in addition to ex, mox, and vix already mentioned, you also seem to have missed lynx, dux, and pix. --Trovatore (talk) 09:48, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Also crux, fax, frux, and grex. --Trovatore (talk) 09:51, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I can think of arx, calx, nex, nix, nux, prex and, if you're counting proper nouns, Styx. I'm sure there are more. --Antiquary (talk) 11:45, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Also pyx and the word for 159, CLIX. :)  --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  12:00, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I think the Latin for the English pyx is pyxis, but perhaps that was included under your ":)". A little Googling also gives me faex, falx, lanx, lux (why did none of us think of that?) and merx. --Antiquary (talk) 12:12, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Most of the multi-syllable ones could be found with  (with   being replaced with the list of consonants).  The difference between the lists would give you the mono-syllabic words (plus perhaps a few polysyllabic ones, but a more manageable number to scan through).  I'm at work, so can't do this myself. MChesterMC (talk) 15:04, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Add flux to the list. 81.139.183.197 (talk) 15:10, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Afraid not, the Latin is fluxus. --Antiquary (talk) 15:21, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * This list has some that have not already been noted. -- Jayron 32 15:30, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * You can also search Lewis and Short's dictionary by any combination of letters, so you generate a list of 807 words ending in -x (although you'd have to look through the list manually to find monosyllabic ones). Adam Bishop (talk) 03:44, 12 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks to everyone who responded. Great material.  My initial list is looking pretty pathetic now.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:49, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Do verbs normally have more inflexions than nouns or other categories?
Across languages, is 'verb' the grammatical category with more inflections? Can a language exist where nouns or adjectives have more inflections than it?--B8-tome (talk) 07:42, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, it might depend on what you mean. More categories (conjugations and declensions)?  More possibly distinct inflected forms for a single lexeme (cases and tenses)?
 * Latin, for example, is generally taken to have five noun declensions but only four verb conjugations. But this is a little bit arbitrary when you consider "irregular" lexemes that actually fall into patterns (also the fifth declension is such a grab-bag that you can imagine just calling those nouns "irregular").
 * But there are more tenses than cases, even if you separate out the vocative and locative. --Trovatore (talk) 07:51, 11 September 2017 (UTC) (Oh, and of course once you add in person and number, it blows up quite a bit beyond that.) --Trovatore (talk) 07:54, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * That's the point. It seems that verbs have normally more forms than nouns, but maybe someone can come up with a counterexample.B8-tome (talk) 08:22, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * As Trovatore says, it depends how you define "inflections". For example, the Northeast Caucasian languages in general have very complex morphologies and the Tsez language specifically is said to have between 64 and 252 cases, depending on how "case" is defined, but in this paper (section 3), that number is narrowed down to just 18 cases. The verb system doesn't seem quite as complex, but again, it would all depend on how it was analyzed. Also, since you asked about the relationship "across languages", there are many isolating languages which do not inflect at all so obviously in those languages the verb doesn't have more inflections than the noun.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 11:59, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * In some languages, the distinction between nouns and/or verbs and/or adjectives is not clear cut. see for example https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-language-that-doesnt-have-nouns-or-verbs. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.61.201 (talk) 04:11, 12 September 2017 (UTC)


 * In some languages (including older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek etc.) adjective inflections are very similar to noun inflections, while in other languages (such as Japanese) adjective inflections are very similar to verb inflections. There are also "polysynthetic" languages where whole clauses can basically become a single word.  However, there I doubt that there's a language where the system of noun inflections is the same as the system of verb inflections... AnonMoos (talk) 04:46, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Fill out the blank space: X depends on Y, if and only if Y____ _____ X.
185.46.76.7 (talk) 15:33, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * governs --Viennese Waltz 15:48, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * If tax depends on salary, does this mean that salary governs tax? 185.46.78.132 (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, it governs the salary tax amount, and possibly also the salary tax rate (unless it's a flat rate tax). StuRat (talk) 17:08, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * How about "does not necessarily depend on". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:50, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * But the expression "y does not necessarily depend on x ", does not entail that x depends on y. 185.46.78.132 (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * It doesn't need to, as you've already said that "X depends on Y". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:56, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Hey, you pulled a fast one - you changed it to "if and only if", which it didn't say at the time I posted my first comment. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:58, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Once you ignore the "if and only if" part, you no longer have to suggest such a long expression like "y does not necessarily depend on x ". Instead, you could say "Sun is sun ", or "Trump is a man ", or any other true sentence. That's why I added "if and only if " (after I read you answer), just to prevent others (including you) from suggesting expressions like "sun is sun " or "y does not necessarily depend on x ", and the like. Actually, I was looking for an expression of the form "y___x ", which both entails that "x depends on y ", and is entailed by "x depends on y ". 185.46.78.36 (talk) 16:57, 12 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Or maybe "is a condition for" or "is a requisite for" or simply "requires". It depends of the exact sort of dependency you're referring to. Deor (talk) 16:29, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Due to your answer, I decided to strike out the word "adjective" in my original question. 185.46.78.132 (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * As for "requires" (Btw: I'm sorry for deleting your previous addition you've just restored. I didn't do that on purpose) : If tax depends on salary, does this mean that salary "requires" tax? I don't think so... 185.46.78.132 (talk) 17:03, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * As I said, the kind of dependency in question affects the word choice. If the tax/salary matter is what you're principally concerned with, then something like determines is probably what you want. Deor (talk) 19:21, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * "Affects" or "has an effect on"? AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:15, 11 September 2017 (UTC)


 * In task management terminology, the common term is "blocks". No such user (talk) 11:47, 12 September 2017 (UTC)