Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 23

= March 23 =

Ambiguity joke meaning
"Ambiguity, it's the devil's volleyball." I assume this is a play on words. I don't understand it. What is the double-meaning? 209.149.113.5 (talk) 13:28, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Examples here:, 92.31.142.218 (talk) 13:40, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's a joke, per see, it's just meant to humorously convey the back-and-forth action that takes place when things are ambiguous and the disruption that ensues. Who would enjoy that? The Devil. What else has back and forth action? Well, lets of things, but I guess volleyball is as good as anything else. Matt Deres (talk) 14:07, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Is the OP aware of Bible proverbs like: "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playground", "An Idle Mind Is the Devil's Playground", or "Boredom - The Devil's Playgroung."? The play on words is because in volleyball, you throw something from one side to the other. --Doroletho (talk) 14:56, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I know the proverb as "The devil finds work for idle hands to do". 92.31.142.218 (talk) 15:07, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * From Proverbs 16:27 "fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum" (roughly "Do something, [or] the devil may always keep you busy.") Matt Deres (talk) 21:37, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * That's a very creative translation of the verse. KJV has it as "An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is as a burning fire." In general, the Bible has very little about devil, much less about his playgrounds, and all such proverbs are of much later creation. --77.138.191.65 (talk) 07:05, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * My mistake. The Latin above is not from Proverbs 16:27; it's from St. Jerome. Apologies. Matt Deres (talk) 12:31, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Indeed, there's no mention of devil or playground in the original, it just sound much cooler. According to Biblegateway Proverbs 16:27 is in English: "Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece" and their literal translation: “A worthless man devises mischief; and in his lips there is a scorching fire.”Doroletho (talk) 12:39, 24 March 2018 (UTC)


 * As I read it, the joke is that the meaning of a cryptic metaphor is uncertain, or, one might say, ambiguous. —Tamfang (talk) 07:35, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Millner and Miller
Is there any etymological connection between the last names of the 1994 Georgia governor candidates?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:52, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * We have a template that suggests that, but I'm a little skeptical. Surely milliner is more likely, though I guess that might also be connected to "miller". Matt Deres (talk) 21:40, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * One standard work on the subject is P. H. Reaney and R. M. Wilson A Dictionary of English Surnames (3rd edn., 1995), which doesn't seem to be on Google Books but luckily I have a copy. It calls Miller "an assimilated form of Milner."  Milner (or Millner) "may be an OE *milnere or a derivative of ME mylne, 'mill', hence 'miller'."  Also, since the name is common in northern and eastern counties, it "may thus often derive from ON mylnari, 'miller'."  That looks like a yes, then. --Antiquary (talk) 22:42, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The Millner family name dates back to the ancient Anglo-Saxon culture of Britain. The name comes from when an early member worked as a person who was a milner or more commonly know as a miller. The name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon name myln which meant mill. Milliner is a more modern word, not found in English until the 16th century - and deriving from Milan, which was known as a source of fancy goods. Most family names were established earlier than that. Wymspen (talk) 22:44, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * What about the name Mueller, then? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:35, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * What about it? Of German origin, see Mueller or Müller (surname). --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:03, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * It's German, sure. So, did it likewise come from Anglo-Saxon "myln"? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:44, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually, it looks like all those words derive from the Latin molina. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:46, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * "Anglo-Saxon", (more rigorously termed Old English), which Bugs surely realises though others may not, is of course a semi-artificial and after-the-fact label for the mixture of several related, partially mutually intelligible dialects of West Germanic dialects/languages (including also Frisian, Frankish and Jutish) spoken and ultimately merged by the invaders/settlers who moved from the continent to Britain over the course of the first millennium CE. As such, "Anglo-Saxon" words usually come from "German" rather than the reverse.
 * Since in deeper time Latin and German are both Indo-European languages descended from the same roots, many cognate words in both also share a common origin, rather than one being descended from the other, but because Latin penetrated the territory of other languages through the Roman's conquests, it donated vocabulary to them (as in this instance) and, subsequently persisting as the language of the learned long past its evolution as a vernacular into the Romance languages, it continued to 'donate' words to 'younger' tongues. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.218.14.51 (talk) 22:45, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * See also Meunier and Meusnier from meunier, a miller. Alansplodge (talk) 00:06, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Dangling modifiers
Many articles on grammatical concepts found in many languages have analogues in many other Wikipedias (see the other languages of Predicate (grammar), for example), as do articles on grammar errors, but to my surprise Dangling modifier has no other articles except Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and Swedish. Is this construct deemed non-problematic in most languages, or is it merely not interesting to people who write about grammar in other Wikipedias? Presumably it's not a problem in languages with a greater degree of inflection, since word order isn't a big deal if the inflection tells you what each word or clause is doing, but I know that more than four major languages besides English rely mostly or entirely on word order. Nyttend (talk) 22:46, 23 March 2018 (UTC)


 * I cannot read Chinese, Dutch or Swedish; but I can see what is intended to be an illustrative example. The Swedish article is about Swedish (or so I presume; it could be Danish or Norwegian for all I know). Only part of the Dutch article is about Dutch. The Japanese article (which I can read) and the Chinese article are merely about English, and look like translations of this or that version of the English article. &para; There doesn't seem to be anything inherently English about a modifier whose intended head is not immediately obvious from syntactic cues. Perhaps there is something specific to English (and Swedish?) about the attention paid to what were the mere peeves of the inexplicably respected purveyors of truthiness. -- Hoary (talk) 02:27, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The Swedish article is about Swedish indeed. You can tell because the examples use ä's and ö's, which neither Danish nor Norwegian alphabets have. --77.138.191.65 (talk) 07:00, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, thank you. When I commented earlier, I did so rather lazily. -- Hoary (talk) 11:22, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Comparing the Swedish and English articles (and being a native Swedish speaker), I would say that they describe only partially overlapping concepts. The Swedish term focuses on the end result of the ambiguity/error, while the English one is more focused on the sentence structure that leads to the potential problem. Not all occurences of 'syftningsfel' are caused by dangling modifiers, and not all dangling modifiers result in 'syftningsfel'. /Coffeeshivers (talk) 09:38, 25 March 2018 (UTC)