Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 September 28

= September 28 =

Lexical words consisting just one short vowel
Is there any language which has many lexical words - nouns, verbs and adjectives - consisting just one short vowel, like English article a, Dutch pronoun u and Swedish preposition i? 40bus (talk) 09:46, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * French has as, est, haut and eu. Three of these are parts of verbs which are often used as auxiliaries, but they have lexical meanings as well. ColinFine (talk) 09:57, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Hey, Colin! It goes a lot further than that, at least with your second example word. Consider these: ai, aie, aient, aies, ais, ait, eh, es, est, et, haie, haient, hais, hait, and hé. Mathglot (talk) 23:35, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * See wikt:Appendix:Words that comprise a single sound. --Theurgist (talk) 10:16, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * English: One letter words: a dictionary. —Kusma (talk) 10:35, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Technically, whether the Swedish i has a long or short vowel would probably depend on it being stressed or not. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:25, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Italian has a, e, i, o but not u. A = to (as in "going to"), E = and, I = the (male, plural), O = or. --80.104.99.96 (talk) 11:36, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * also ha, ho, forms of avere (with silent h to distinguish them from their homophones). —Tamfang (talk) 07:01, 6 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Spanish: a = to; e = and, instead of y, when preceding a word beginning with an "i" sound; o = or; u = or, instead of o, when preceding a word beginning with an "o" sound; y = and. i is used in the name of the letter y: i griega. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:26, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Polish has six one-letter words (four single vowels and two single consonants), all of them either conjunctions or prepositions: a (and), i (and), o (about), u (at), w (in), z (from, with). In archaic or dialectical texts you can also come across k, a contraction of ku (towards). — Kpalion(talk) 12:46, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I meant nouns with just one short vowel, not pronouns, conjunctions or prepositions. --40bus (talk) 14:21, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * You originally said nouns, verbs and adjectives, and I (unlike the other repliers) gave you three verbs and an adjective. But now I look at it, I recall that haut is a noun as well. ColinFine (talk) 15:18, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * In Spanish, the five vowels also serve as their own names: ¿Aarón se escribe con una a o con dos?. Y wouldn't fit your question since its name is i griega or ye. --Error (talk) 15:25, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * @Error. I think that's actually fairly common, cross-linguistically, but that might be stretching things. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:48, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Corss-linguistically, probably, but, in English, the names of the vowels are not short but long or diphthongs. --Error (talk) 22:13, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes. The English names are "long". In Spanish, at least, the names of the vowels are "short" except for i griega for "y", although that "i" is also short. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:30, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I’m never clear on what people mean by “short” (see Vowel_length for why) but once you decide which vowels you are counting, Theurgists’ link should help you a lot – I see multiple languages in there with more than one noun entry, including eight in each of Japanese, Mandarin and Vietnamese. (The only English noun I can think of that fits the “short” table is awe. There are other nouns in English made up of a single vowel which might interest you if you’re not so worried about that length issue: eye; in certain dialects, ear, air, oar, ore, heir, hay, hare; and comparable to Error's comment re Spanish, the names of letters such as an A on an exam, his mouth formed an O, etc. And for French besides ColinFine's haut, add the nouns an, haie, eau, os, un, août, œil, etc... 70.67.193.176 (talk) 17:50, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * All three scandinavian languages have the word 'å' (/o/ or /ɔ/), meaning 'river' (wovel length mostly depending on stress in these languages). Both Swedish and Danish also have the word 'ø' (/ø/, Danish) or 'ö' (/ø/, Swedish), meaning 'island'. In Norwegian, the personal pronoun, first person singular have dialectal forms 'e' (/e/), 'æ' (/ɛ/) and 'i' (/i/). In Norway, there are also at least two places of some size called Å, also used as a surname, but they will usually have a long wovel (/oː/). --T*U (talk) 08:16, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Arguably, both å and ö/ø tend to be both long and stressed, at least in Swedish. There's an archaic Swedish preposition, å, that's generally pronounced with a short vowel, though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:30, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

holier than thou
I thought yesterday it had to be: X is better than me / and not (as was written): X is better than I. And I had an online look at grammars and they supported "me"; but now I think nonsense; I was wrong. THAN takes the nominative, not the accusative or does it?--Ralfdetlef (talk) 20:27, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * "Than" is not a preposition, and does not take a case. Sentences often follow it: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din" vs. "I saw him more clearly than I saw her".  Than with only a pronoun following it is elliptical, and theoretically the case of the pronoun should depend on its role in the implied full sentence. AnonMoos (talk) 20:48, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Moos is expounding an obsolete prescription. If you say "than me" in that sentence, as most people do, then "than" is a preposition. --174.95.81.219 (talk) 04:00, 29 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Whatever -- I am not a prescriptivist, but was simply expounding a test to cut through the confusion and help someone think logically about the matter (though I realize that the rule is not always applied in practice -- notice the word "theoretically" above?). If "He can see you more clearly than he can see me" is elliptified to "He can see you more clearly than me", the "me" is 100% logical in this context.  And even if "You're a better man than I am" is elliptified to "You're a better man than me", that does NOT necessarily mean that "than" is a preposition -- the pronoun could be disjunctive in this use (as in "It's me" etc). AnonMoos (talk) 10:13, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
 * P.S. I didn't see your link to article "than" at first (not too sure why Wikipedia has an article on the word "than"), but I don't take the assertion there too seriously -- if "than" is a preposition, then it's a Schroedinger quantum flickering preposition. AnonMoos (talk) 17:35, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
 * There are many, many words in English that can be different parts of speech in different usages, and there's nothing Schroedingeresque about it. Claiming that "than is not a preposition", when in fact it is regularly used as a preposition, is not "a test to cut through the confusion", it's just perpetuating an error. --174.95.81.219 (talk) 21:06, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The fact that common usage is "He is taller than me" doesn't prove that than is a preposition; it proves that me is a disjunctive pronoun, not an exclusively accusative pronoun, like French moi (where Il est plus grand que moi is the only acceptable way to say it – *Il est plus grand que je is ungrammatical). Other disjunctive, non-accusative uses that are common in colloquial speech but decried by prescriptivists include "John and me are going to the movies" and "Who turned the dishwasher on? — Me." —Mahāgaja · talk 09:37, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * French has three forms -- subject clitic "je", object clitic "me", and disjunctive "moi" -- where English only has two, so some things aren't quite as obvious in English as they are in French... AnonMoos (talk) 22:14, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The lack of logic is evident in the case switch in the collocation between you and I. You'll not hear, *between them and we. There is also the reverse case switch in, Who is there? – It is me. --Lambiam 12:16, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Is you unambiguously oblique in this case? (No pun intended?) I find it somewhat ambigiuous since you looks the same in both the nominative and the oblique. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
 * For all English pronouns with a visible case distinction, prepositions take the oblique case: between me and my peers; between him and me; between us and them; between them and the nearest trees. --Lambiam 15:48, 3 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Lambiam -- "Between you and I" originated as a hypercorrection, while "me" in "It's me" is a disjunctive form (as discussed above).  By the way, in the rather formal construction without a contraction, people may still use "I", perhaps referencing bad old plays where characters walking on stage said things like "Captain, it is I, Ensign Pulver" (the only example I can find with a quick Google search).  It's only when the contraction occurs that using "I" instead of "me" sounds quite strange... AnonMoos (talk) 23:14, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
 * @AnonMoos I thought "it's me" was ungrammatical.  My parents used to say so. David10244 (talk) 06:33, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
 * @David10244 Only in the prescriptivist sense, I assume. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:57, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
 * "It's I" is hypercorrect, I got that; but "It's me" has been ruined for me by the oh-so-funnyism of "Me too". But, "me" has simply replaced "I" as 1st. P. Sg. in a lot of non-cringy sentences.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 18:53, 7 October 2022 (UTC)