Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 April 24

= April 24 =

Australian marsupial names
Are the names of the wombat and numbat etymologically linked? Both obviously from Aboriginal languages, Wiktionary describes wombat as coming from the Dharug language, but says nothing more about numbat. Oops, forgot to sign Rojomoke (talk) 11:52, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Oxford Lexico says it's from the Nyungar language. Both Dharug and Nyungar are part of the Pama-Nyungan languages family.  -- Jayron 32 12:26, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * From The Action Plan for Australian Mammals 2012: "Other common names: Numbat is the Noongar Aboriginal name, pronounced 'Noombat' by Noongar speakers (Abbott 2001a). For western desert Aboriginal names, the most widespread of which is 'Walpurti', see Burbidge et al. (1988)." --Lambiam 19:02, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * What I'd really like to know is if the suffix -bat has a particular meaning. Rojomoke (talk) 03:43, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Or perhaps -mbat? --Lambiam 12:31, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Stephen Wildish has an amusing pseudo-Venn diagram with three circles labelled "Bat", "Wom", and "Man", and the words "Wombat", "Woman", "Batman", and "Batwoman" in the intersections... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 13:04, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * It's here. Alansplodge (talk) 12:02, 27 April 2020 (UTC)


 * For wombats, a look at Wombat tells us the name has gone through many changes over the years, including several forms that don't end in mbat. It also describes the Dharug language, from which the name is derived, as "now nearly-extinct". (A fate common to many of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages that once existed in Australia.) Then there is also the genus name given to wombats of Vombatus (with a V). This all makes looking for certainty in the derivation of the word a fairly challenging task. HiLo48 (talk) 01:31, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

The naming of the introductory year of a person's life
Why do we refer to the introductory year of a person's life as their first year of life rather than as their zeroth year of life? Futurist110 (talk) 21:26, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Your first holiday starts when you leave home and finishes when you get back. Your first year of life starts when you are born and finishes on your first birthday. You wouldn't count ten buns by calling the first one "zero" and the last one "nine", or at least I hope not. Alansplodge (talk) 22:04, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * See Counting. In traditional terminology, "Jesus rose on the third day", because Friday was the first day of his death, Saturday the second, and Sunday the third, though the interval between Friday and Sunday is two days.  Computer programmers often adopt a zero-based approach, but it hasn't had much influence on general language... AnonMoos (talk) 22:10, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * It is incorrect that computer programmers count from zero. They offset from zero. This comes up with a sequential array of objects. The first one has an offset of zero from itself. The next one is offset by 1. The next one is offset by 2. Nobody is "counting" from zero. They are simply telling you how many times you have to slide over to get to a specific object in the array. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 12:23, 28 April 2020 (UTC)


 * That's why newborns ages are typically referred to in months at least until they turn one year old. You could say their age is "0 years", which is how old US census sheets sometimes reported them, but that just means they're a newborn. If you turn 21 on July 1, on June 30 you are still 20, but you're in your 21st year of life. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:21, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * You may also be interested in zero-based numbering. It has a lot of advantages over 1-based, enough that programmers and mathematicians at least consider using it in certain circumstances, but it has not evolved in any natural language that I'm aware of, probably because the concept of zero requires a certain level of sophistication of thought.
 * There's also a regrettable possibility for confusion. If I tell you I want the zeroth element of an array , you know what I mean, but if I say I want the first one, do I mean  , which would be the "second" one in nonspecialist speech, or  , which maybe I should have called the "zeroth" one?  Hard to be sure. --Trovatore (talk) 23:22, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * The first page of a book is numbered 1. When you turn to it, you're at Page 1. But if you haven't even read the first word on Page 1, you may as well not be there at all. When you've read the first sentence, you've made a certain amount of progress on Page 1, but there's more to go. You keep reading, and in due course you reach the end of the page. You can now claim to have finished Page 1.
 * So, your experience of Page 1 is not an instantaneous moment in time, it's a period of time lasting anywhere from a half a minute to 5+ minutes, depending how quickly you read, how thick the text is, how incomprehensible it is, causing you to keep on going back and re-reading sentences, and so on. It's the same with years, only it takes everybody the same time to complete a year. You enter Year 1 the moment you're born, and Year 1 continues until you reach Year 2. Your experience of Year 1 lasts precisely 1 year, but you're in Year 1 the entire time, just as you're on Page 1 the entire time it takes you to read it.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  06:14, 25 April 2020 (UTC)