Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 May 10

= May 10 =

Forename pronunciation - Ion Trewin
How was Ion Trewin's forename pronounced? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 01:23, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Given the literary background of his parents – his brother was named Mark Antony – I expect the name was based on Euripides' play Ion, which is commonly pronounced, even though the Latin ecclesiastical pronunciation of the proper name is given by Wiktionary as /ˈi.on/, [ˈiː.ɔn]. In this video I hear [aɪˈɔn], with an unexpected ultimate stress. --Lambiam 07:56, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks - he pronounces Trewin contrary to what I would expect. It's a Cornish name, so tre 'win, not trew-in which he says (I can't write IPA but can just about read it). DuncanHill (talk) 13:03, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * See also Ion (name) (WHAAOE). Alansplodge (talk) 20:31, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

go strange places
as in "Trump’s latest Fox & Friends interview went strange places". Is there a particular reason why the expression comes without a "to" (not go to strange places, that is)? Put differently: is this accepted usage or a deliberate mistake, a caricature of illiterate speech, or Black English, a mild case kind of blackface maybe? --2A01:C23:5C08:7500:7E1A:D8F4:B261:827D (talk) 13:18, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * It seems to me a derivative of Going Places, which still does not solve your question. --Error (talk) 13:43, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * go places --Error (talk) 13:46, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Headlines are often abbreviated like that. I don't see what race has to do with it. "Go there" or "Don't go there" as metaphors have been in common usage in American English for decades. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:10, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I would say this response is off the mark - this usage is not restricted to headlinese, and "go there" is not a comparable "exception" to the rules - you can (and in fact must) always use "go" without "to" when the place you're going is a relative term (see also "go home," "go next door," "go upstairs," "go outside," etc.). But "places" is the only "normal" noun I can think of where you can use "go + [some location]" without "to" in between. So I can definitely understand why a non-native English speaker would assume this was somehow dialectical. But no, this is just one of a few exceptional cases where dropping the "to" is standard (but not strictly required). I would agree with Error that this must be an extension of the idiom "going places," even though the idiomatic meaning is not what is meant by the article. I can't find any information about how this came to be, but I would imagine that the idiom "going places" simply "trained" English speakers not to necessarily expect a "to" before the word "places" in any context. -Elmer Clark (talk) 17:21, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps a better way to think about it is that "to go [adjective] places" is itself an idiom, possibly originally derived from "to go places," but with its own, entirely different meaning of "to become [adjective]" -Elmer Clark (talk) 17:29, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * It doesn't mean "become". It's a metaphor for bringing up questionable subjects. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:46, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah that's a good point - an interview/conversation/event can go "strange places" or "uncomfortable places" or "questionable places" but I don't think anyone would say that it "went good places," for example. But at this point I've thought about it so long that everything sounds weird and I don't trust my intuition at all...hopefully someone comes up with an actual source, this seems like an interesting enough case that I've gotta imagine it's been studied. -Elmer Clark (talk) 17:50, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I googled "don't go there meaning". Here's one reference. I think it was the mid-1990s when I started hearing that "meme". This reference concurs with that timing. It's not something I use, but it seems to be more and more prevalent. I saw at least one "Simpsons" item with that saying, and it wouldn't be surprising if they either invented it or popularized it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:20, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I've thought about it so long that everything sounds weird and I don't trust my intuition at all...hopefully someone comes up with an actual source: You can look in iWeb (or of course in a different corpus at english-corpora.org) for the string, in which "_j*" is any adjective. (NB the notions in english-corpora.org of which words are in which syntactic category tend to be unenlightened.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:27, 11 May 2020 (UTC)


 * “Black speech” has nothing to do with iliteracy. In fact, it has its own grammatical rules that would make that title correct.Macy Sinrich (talk) 23:58, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Sanskrit, Hindi, and Proto-Indo-European
The article on William Jones (philologist) says that he launched the idea of Indo-European languages when he noted the similarity among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. But it says that he did not see Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) as being part of the same group. I don't know Sanskrit or Hindi, but it was my understanding that Hindi was, at least, closely related to Sanskrit, such that someone familiar with both languages would be able to see the similarities. (For comparison, if you knew both Latin and Spanish, you wouldn't need to be a linguistics expert to recognize that the two languages are related to each other.) Are Sanskrit and Hindi so different that William Jones would not have been able to recognize the relationship between them? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 16:51, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Although this might be difficult to quantify, I would say that Modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi are farther removed from Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) than Modern Romance languages from Latin. The sound changes that have taken place from Old Indo-Aryan to Modern Indo-Aryan are way more pervasive than those that have taken place in Romance (with the possible exception of French). For example, the North Indian surname Jhā is derived from Sanskrit adhyāpaka. In this respect, the relation of Latin to Romance can perhaps be compared to that of Old Indo-Aryan to Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit). Also, in the area of morphology, the Romance languages have given up case inflection, but the verbal inflections are still relatively similar to Latin. Modern Indo-Aryan languages, on the other hand, have completely restructured both their nominal and verbal system, with only very few vestiges of the Old Indo-Aryan inflections remaining.
 * That said, for someone trained in comparative linguistics, it should be obvious that Hindi is derived from Old Indo-Aryan, as can be seen, for example, from many inherited basic vocabulary items (to some extent, this is complicated by the fact that Modern Indo-Aryan languages have also borrowed vocabulary directly from Sanskrit). But of course the whole concept of comparative linguistics was not fully developed at William Jones' times – while his observations about Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek may have been pathbreaking, many of his other ideas seem rather silly by today's standards. --Jbuchholz (talk) 09:36, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
 * ,, you can read Jones' original words here. His conclusion was indeed that Hindustani had massively borrowed Sanskrit vocabulary ("five words in six, perhaps") but that the "basis of the Hindustani, particularly in the inflexions and regimen of verbs" had a different grammar, which led him to conclude that Hindustani was a non-Indo-European language with a Sanskrit superstrate. I can't find his explanation of Slavic. It might be a good idea to cite this book in the article, which seems like it's focused on secondary sources to the point that it's hard to find Jones' original texts, even though I imagine they must be mostly on Google Books. Blythwood (talk) 03:42, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you,, that is interesting indeed. --Jbuchholz (talk) 08:27, 17 May 2020 (UTC)