Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 May 16

= May 16 =

"I work/study at (the) London Business School."
Hi. Should there be a "the" in front of "London Business School"? I have asked two native speakers and received two different answers, so now I am confused. Or is both possible? Or a UK vs. U.S. difference? 80.71.142.166 (talk) 07:08, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Both are correct, but the inclusion of "the" would be more usual in that context. Shantavira|feed me 08:19, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I would include "the" (native English English speaker). Bazza (talk) 08:38, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi, I had this exact discussion some time ago. The consensus was that it was indeed a UK vs. U.S. difference.  The most common example cited was of "going to the hospital" (U.S.) and "going to hospital". (UK). It’s never been properly explained to me why the UK drops "the" in this example and the U.S. does not. Viriditas (talk) 10:26, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * They're different cases, Viriditas. Both AmE and BrE drop the article for some institutions (prison, school, church), but they disagree on hospital. This tells us nothing whatever about how to refer to a particular named educational institution. ColinFine (talk) 17:52, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Either seems fine to me. I can think of parallels to both versions: we say Boston College, but the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:37, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Language is often messy and will fool you into a false sense of security with its rules and patterns. It has just enough rules and patterns that, when something doesn't fit the rule or pattern, it will confound people who try to fit it into one.  Sometimes, we just say things a certain way for no particular reason at all, it just kinda happens, and there isn't any predictable reason for it.  -- Jayron 32 11:57, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I attended City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, and later got a degree from the University of San Francisco. "The" is never used when referring to the first two schools, but always when referring to the third. Cullen328 (talk) 22:03, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Hunterian transliteration scheme
There is currently a pre-move discussion about the proper naming convention for a Wikipedia article about a popular food item from India. The common name of the food item was previously moved to a new name based on the editorial page move rationale of aligning the new name with the "Hunterian transliteration scheme". Unfortunately, I am as dumb as I look, and I have no idea what this is. Can anyone explain it in terms of English names for Indian food, and explain to me the difference between this and other schemes for the same word in English? Viriditas (talk) 09:25, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * We have articles on Hunterian transliteration and IAST, two schemes which I think would produce different results for, for instance, chapati. I think the Hunterian transliteration makes the first grapheme च into "cha" and IAST makes it "ca", and the actual pronunciation in different words might be better represented one way or the other. Out on a limb here though. Card Zero  (talk) 10:00, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Thank you. Follow up question for anyone who can answer it: why would it be the case that a popular Indian food around the world (in other words, not an obscure or unusual food) would not use Hunterian transliteration? In this particular case, the food is commonly known as "aloo tikki", which is changed to "alu tikki" using Hunterian transliteration.  But what was it before (as "aloo"), and why is this more common? Viriditas (talk) 10:19, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * "Aloo" is the form exclusively used in the UK wkere Indian food is something of an obsession (like this for example). I imagine that the traditional transliteration system devised by William Jones (philologist) in the late 18th century is to blame. Our article says that the Hunterian system wasn't adopted in India untilWikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages after independence. We already have half a dozen other "aloo" articles. Alansplodge (talk) 10:42, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * See also COMMONNAME. Alansplodge (talk) 11:10, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Alansplodge -- I doubt that it was a transliteration at all; rather, they wrote down the sounds that they heard using English spelling conventions, ignoring (or not even knowing) the Indic writing systems. There are lots of those in Hobson-Jobson ("blighty" etc etc)... AnonMoos (talk) 21:19, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I may be not much of a linguist but there was definitely a system; Tipoo Sultan is now called Tipu Sultan for example. Alansplodge (talk) 21:48, 17 May 2022 (UTC)


 * There may have been an official system for government correspondence, but when it came to "blighty" and names of dishes, and a bunch of other stuff in Hobson-Jobson, it was not necessarily applied... AnonMoos (talk) 22:09, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you everyone for giving me a small clue. I will add it to my large clue bat reserved for self-flagellation moments such as this. With that said, moving forward, what is the recommended best practice for dealing with Wikipedia naming conventions when we have two competing titles, such as a common name and a name that uses the preferred transliteration scheme? This is more of a theoretical question as the current issue has been fixed. For example, I know that house style is to prefer the common name, so Wikipedia will generally default to that choice, but I am also aware of several exceptions that have changed the outcome of this decision in past move discussions. I don’t want to go into those examples right now, but I can foresee issues with defaulting to common names and ignoring the preferred transliteration. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is this: if I’m starting out creating a new article title, should I default to the preferred transliteration? And where would I go to find such a concordance? Viriditas (talk) 00:21, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Perhaps that is a conversation to be had at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages. Alansplodge (talk) 21:51, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

But- prefix getting the number 4
The prefix but- has an etymology related to butter. How did it get to be associated with the number 4?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:59, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * As the article IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry says, "The names of the first four alkanes were derived from methanol, ether, propionic acid and butyric acid, respectively." So the prefix comes from the name of butyric acid (which has a chain of four carbon atoms) and was used in naming other compounds with chains of four carbon atoms. Deor (talk) 16:10, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Right, it really has nothing to do with the number 4 in general. It's specifically about four carbon atoms joined together with nothing in between.  It's true that after butyl, you get the possibility of radical names based on numeric prefixes (pentyl, hexyl, etc), but note that some of these have alternatives that are not based on numeric prefixes (e.g. pentyl is also, and perhaps more frequently, called amyl). --Trovatore (talk) 18:15, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I have PRODded the article. --Trovatore (talk) 18:31, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Likewise meth-, eth-, and prop-. --Trovatore (talk) 18:40, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Your PROD got removed, but I redirected the lot to IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry. If anyone in the future has something more to add to the articles, with references, to make them actually contain more than a one-sentence definition, they can do so.  No information is lost in the redirect, as the target contains all of the same information in a more efficient manner.  -- Jayron 32 11:54, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm the one who removed the PROD, because there's a series of pages about chemical prefixes and they are plausible search terms, but redirecting the pages seems sensible, as I noted in my edit summaries at the time. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 13:04, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I think they should be deleted, frankly (along with the entry in the navbox). There is no such thing as a "prop-" prefix, for example.  There's arguably a word root, but we don't generally have articles on those. --Trovatore (talk) 16:19, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Strictly speaking, it's a morpheme, which is fine; we have a word like "morpheme" because sometimes bits of vocalizations have meaning, and those bits of vocalization don't always fit into an "-fix"-type categorization. "Prop", however you categorize it, is unambiguously a morpheme.  It is also unambiguously not worthwhile to dedicate a whole ass article to it; everything useful about it (and all of the other such chemistry-related hydrocarbon words) can be stated in a sentence or two.  -- Jayron 32 17:41, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I just don't see it as worthwhile to have it as a separate search term. "Prop" can mean too many other things, and "prop-" strikes me as kind of a strange search, especially given that most occurences of "prop" in a chemical context don't have a hyphen.
 * In any case the corresponding row in orgchemsuffixes badly needs fixing &mdash; right now not only does it have the untoward hyphens, but it's called "counting axial atoms", which is nonsense. They're specifically carbon atoms (admittedly it's not clear what other kind of axial atoms you could have in an organic compound, but that's not of the essence; if you could have four "axial" nitrogen atoms in a row in an organic compound, you obviously still wouldn't use the "but" morpheme).
 * And it's not really "counting" either. The corresponding substances were found in nature and categorized by their properties; their structures were elucidated later.  --Trovatore (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Spanish, Romance/Latin and Indo-European languages conecepts of mortality
What happens when you die in Spanish? Technicalrestrictions01 (talk) 16:01, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * If you die in Spanish, you die in real life. --Trovatore (talk) 17:56, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Are you asking about Spanish beliefs of death?
 * Asparagusus  (interaction)  16:38, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Lo que pasa es que estas muerto. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:06, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Please explain what you mean by this... Technicalrestrictions01 (talk) 17:54, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * "What happens is that you are dead." --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:59, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi, Wiktionary: morir#Spanish says:“From Vulgar Latin *morīre, from Latin morī, present active infinitive of morior, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *mer-.” Check out Wiktionary: Proto-Indo-European/mer- for the Proto Indo-European meaning (die, disappear) and its descendents and their meanings in other Indo-European languages. Check out Wiktionary: mortuus for the forms and meanings in Latin (die, decay) and other Romance languages. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 17:58, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Doing research on Spanish conjugations:
 * "How do you say it here? Morí or Murí? ["I died"]
 * Well, when we are dead, we don't say pretty much anything.
 * --Error (talk) 22:29, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * What happens when you die in ASL? Luvstalk (talk) 14:42, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * You make several gestures. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:24, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Welsh ff and ph
Is the general difference that ff is used in words of non-Greek origin and ph is for words of Greek origin?? Georgia guy (talk) 21:39, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note 2 to the table in states: "The digraph ph – which indicates the aspirate mutation of p (e.g. ei phen-ôl) – may also be found very occasionally in words derived from Greek (e.g. Pharo), although most words of Greek origin are spelt with ff (e.g. )."  --Lambiam 05:28, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * See also Colloquial Welsh morphology. Alansplodge (talk) 21:53, 17 May 2022 (UTC)