Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 July 28

= July 28 =

Small dispute on grammar in a sentence
I have a minor dispute on Triboelectric effect with @Ldm1954 that is entirely grammatical, see this diff: The dispute consists of a single word: has vs have. The full context of the sentence is The details of how and why tribocharging occurs are not as yet established science. One component is the difference in the work function (also sometimes called the electron affinity) between the two materials. This can lead to charge transfer as, for instance, analyzed by Harper. However, while this is part of the process, it does not explain many results such as the apparently contradictory ones mentioned above, which have/has been known for some time. On his user talk page, they have clarified that the "which" refers to the contradictions, yet he reverted my edits changing the "have" to "has" because The "has" refers to "it" which is singular. I want to know if the word should be "has" or "have". Aaron Liu (talk) 01:30, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * WP:WoT. Unfortunately User:Aaron Liu persisting in interfering, WP:1AM. Both User:Johnjbarton and User:SMcCandlish have asked him to stop, but he won't. Now he claims to know English as his second language better than a native speaker, while unfortunately not (by his own confession) being prepared to spend the time to understand the context. I have tried to explain what the sentence means, but he remains confused and won't believe me. Ldm1954 (talk) 01:44, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * N.B., nowhere do I state that "they" is my pronoun. Ldm1954 (talk) 01:53, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * And, I should also add, User:Aaron Liu removed the references from what he provided herein which significantly changes the structure/meaning/impact. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:03, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Which references? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:10, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I tend to use "they" the most; I used "his" before in the sentence but then did it out of habit, my bad. By the way, I've noticed that you have not set your gender used in messages and templates such as they, could you set it if you don't mind? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:10, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the humorous read, got me a good laugh. However, this is not related to any of the other disputes. This one is pure grammar. Users who have commented on the article talk against me do not automatically oppose all future changes by me. I don't think understanding the actual science is needed to correct a grammar error. I remain confused partly because you appear to have changed your response: You first said that "which" indeed refers to the contradictions, and then you said it refers to "it" which refers to the work function (n.b. verbs do not really refer to things, it is used by the pronoun which does refer). So which one is it? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:08, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * "contradictory ones ... have", not has. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:11, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Nope. It is not "contradictory", it is referring back to "work function". For reference, the "which" was introduced by User:Aaron Liu, please do not attribute it to me, Ldm1954 (talk) 02:19, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Ok, so firstly the "it" is only slightly ambiguous but since it says part of the process I don't think that needs to change. Secondly the "which have" used to say "as has" which does not clear up what was known for some time. I'm not sure how to make it clear without starting a new sentence/semicolon though, @Baseball Bugs do you have an idea? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:24, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * "...results [PLURAL] such as the apparently contradictory ones [PLURAL] mentioned above, which have been [PLURAL] known for some time." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:28, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I have rewritten the WP:WoT. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:34, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It was last updated 4 years ago. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:38, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Rewritten? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:44, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Try breaking it into two or more sentences and see how it works out. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:39, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Ldm1954 How about this? Remove the final part (starting with the “which have”) and change the work function sentence like this: Aaron Liu (talk) 02:46, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * One component known for some time is the difference in the work function (also sometimes called the electron affinity) between the two materials.? Also, I read have as being correct here, but honestly if the text is unclear even to a minority of readers, why not reword for clarity? For every single person editing in a preferred version, we should assume two orders of magnitude more readers thinking our grammar is off. Folly Mox (talk) 02:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * No. I have already completely rewritten the relevant text. The suggested edits are not right. The full paragraph is (with some broken refs):
 * The details of how and why tribocharging occurs are not as yet established science. One component is the difference in the work function (also sometimes called the electron affinity) between the two materials. This can lead to charge transfer as, for instance, analyzed by Harper. As has been known for some time,   the contract potential is part of the process but does not explain many results such as the apparently contradictory ones mentioned above.     Many careful studies have pointing out issues with the work function difference as a complete explanation.   There is also the question of why sliding is often important. Surfaces have many nanoscale asperities where the actual contact with other surfaces is taking place. This has been taken into account in many approaches to triboelectrification. Volta and Helmholtz suggested that the role of sliding was to produce more contacts per second. The idea is that electrons move many times faster than atoms, so the electrons are always in equilibrium when atoms move, which is called the Born–Oppenheimer approximation. With this approximation each asperity contact during sliding is equivalent to a stationary one, there is no direct coupling between the sliding velocity and electron motion. An alternative view (beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation) is that the sliding acts as a quantum mechanical pump which can excite electrons to go from one material to another, and another is that local heating during sliding matters, an idea first suggested by Frenkel in 1941. Other papers have considered that local bending at the nanoscale produces voltages which help drive charge transfer via the flexoelectric effect, with an alternative to the work function being that surface or trapped charges are important.  There have also been attempts more recently to include a full solid state description.   Ldm1954 (talk) 02:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't really get the difference, but we can leave it here now. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:01, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It's focusing on the contradiction (singular) rather than the results demonstrating the contradiction (plural). Card Zero  (talk) 03:03, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * So to be clear, is the difference that the known-for-long-time thingamajig is the contact potential, not the work function? Aaron Liu (talk) 03:52, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * However the prose for this paragraph shakes out, please bundle some of those references. Four citations in a row signal desperation and dubity. Folly Mox (talk) 04:41, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * This refers to WP:BUNDLING. (I'd never heard of it.) Card Zero  (talk) 06:01, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * He went ahead with a different change anyway which I also found clear. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:56, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * If as one of you says The "has" refers to "it" which is singular (I can't parse which one of you is on which side of the argument and it's all the same to me), then this is introducing a new, semantically unrelated clause. So the which is misleading. It could therefore be written and has been known for some time, or it could stand alone as a sentence: It has been known for some time. I suspect that neither of these makes sense in the context of the article and the intended meaning of the words, however. It sounds to me that it's the contradictory results which have been known for some time, and that the intended implication is that there is an unexplained mystery on hand which has had some longevity and is not merely a momentary mistake. As written, these results are plural, and indeed "many", so the word is have. Card Zero  (talk) 02:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree about the "which", that was added by User:Aaron Liu against my wishes. You are right about the mystery part, but it is the work function dependence that is being referred to. It matters a lot to see it with the citations in it. Ldm1954 (talk) 03:05, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Who would have thought this little piece of science could cause such sparks and friction? Card Zero  (talk) 03:09, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has the best humor. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:09, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I think it's the "contact potential" (previously incorrectly written contract potential) which is being referred to. Incidentally, I'm going to make the same change in contract electrification when geckos walk on water, I'm pretty sure that should be contact not contract. Card Zero  (talk) 03:24, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I already corrected the first "contact" -- I did not see the second one, thanks. Sometimes typos creep in when one is trying to get the sense/science/controversies adequate. Ldm1954 (talk) 03:27, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * In that construction as written above, there appears to be a "have" that refers to "results", not a "has" that refers to "it". If the latter was actually meant, then the entire sentence should just be rewritten. Maybe just rewrite it regardless, to make the dispute go away.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * TLDR; but what I see as the underlying structure of the disputed sentence is:
 * The difference in the work function does not explain many results. This have/has been known for some time.
 * --Lambiam 23:10, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * While you are right about the sense of the sentence, please close this, I rewrote everything some days ago 🙏. Ldm1954 (talk) 23:23, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Galatia in ancient Persian
How might the Sassanian Persians have called Galatia / the Galatians (i.e. Celts in Asia Minor)? Do we know if they had geographical knowledge of European Gallia / Magna Germania? Cheers The Great Zaganza (talk) 09:12, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems likely they had some knowledge of Western Europe; there have been Sasanian objects found in Britain, and Sasanian inscriptions appear to reference Hispania: . -- Jayron 32 11:47, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Galatia came under Roman rule in 189 BC and became a province of the Roman Empire in 25 BC. The Sasanian Empire arose in 224 CE, more than four centuries after Galatia came under Roman rule. It is not clear that there still was a recognizable Celtic-Galatian ethnicity in Sassanid times; rather than the region being named after its Celtic inhabitants, by that time the demonym for the population can be interpreted as derived from the name of the region. It appears a reasonable guess that the Persian name for the region was simply borrowed from the Roman name. --Lambiam 22:57, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

New questions
Also a new way to separate questions: subheaders.

Question A
Why does English not have ge- prefix in past participles, unlike German and Dutch? --40bus (talk) 15:00, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * This is present in Old English - see Wiktionary on Old English terms prefixed with ge-, and ge- in Old English - but absent in Old Norse, and I don't know why that is. Presumably it vanished in the transition to Middle English under the influence of Old Norse. Actually I found this |Stack Exchange discussion of the loss of ge- which says it turned into y- in Middle English (I should have spotted that). Several people there also mention the influence of Old Norse, without explaining how come Old Norse lost the ge- prefix. Etymonline mentions its survival in alike, aware, and handiwork. This paper Preverbal ge- in Old and Middle English explains its loss from (proto-) Old Norse in a footnote: What actually seems to have happened is that pre-tonic unstressed vowels syncopated, and most of the resulting consonant clusters were subsequently simplified by deleting the first consonant. This effectively deleted the entire prefix in most instances ... "Syncopated" is a fancy way to say "spontaneously went away", although we have an article on Syncope (phonology) if it helps. Card Zero  (talk) 16:40, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Gothic and several poorly attested East Germanic languages would have had ga-, so it was most likely a prefix found in Proto-Germanic before the North Germanic languages branched off, rather than a West Germanic innovation. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:09, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yep. In summary (because I like an excessively neat summary that I can wrongly internalize and remember), your proto-Viking ancestors spoke in a casual, slangy way that resulted in their dropping this entire feature of their grammar. Then during about 170 years of Viking rule (counting from the arrival of the Great Heathen Army to the death of Cnut the Great), the English had to deal with this, and they adapted their language to conform with it. Card Zero  (talk) 17:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Next to the Scandinavian languages, some West Germanic languages or dialects also form the past participle without the ge- prefix, notably Frisian and Northern Low Saxon. --Lambiam 18:16, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * One thing about "ga-" is that it was basically the only Proto-Germanic or early Germanic prefix which never attracted stress, so it's not too surprising that it was subject to weakening or loss in a number of later langugages. AnonMoos (talk) 21:16, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Question B
Does German have /æ/ sound in native words? --40bus (talk) 15:00, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Near-open front unrounded vowel has examples. German has large dialectal variety, which you should take into account when talking about sounds. --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:58, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Question C
Is there any modern Romance language other than Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian and Megleno-Romanian that has retained grammatical cases in nouns? --40bus (talk) 15:00, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Question D
Does English have genitive case in nouns? The form cat's or cats'. Why does Wiktionary not list these forms on entries and have noun declension tables? And can it be used on consecutive nouns like England' s king' s hat? --40bus (talk) 15:05, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * No, you can't really say English nouns have a genitive case. Look at the positioning of that 's: at the end of the group it belongs to. If I see a man arriving, who has a dog with him, I could say in English ‘I see the man with the dog's arrival,' not ‘I see the man's with the dog arrival.’ The 's is attached to ‘dog’, at the end of the noun phrase. In German, which has a proper genitive case, that would be ‘Ich sehe die Ankunft des Manns mit dem Hund.’ So ‘des Manns’ is in the genitive case, ‘dem Hund’ in the dative (because that's what you need after the preposition mit). English 's behaves more like a postposition, similar to ‘of’, but put at the end. English ‘whose’ can be considered a proper genitive. (Disclaimer: I'm a native speaker of neither English, nor German, but learned both at school.) PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:55, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The technical linguistic term is "phrasal clitic", not postposition in this context. AnonMoos (talk) 21:13, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm glad you included that disclaimer, because no native English speaker has ever been known to say "I see the man with the dog's arrival". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:56, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Fixed. (I just said it.) --142.112.221.64 (talk) 01:50, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree that both the English and German examples are a bit stilted. In the example below, with ‘the King of France's war’, a language with a proper genitive would put both King and France in the genitive. I looked for an example where the second part would not be a genitive (hence ‘with the dog’). PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:26, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The previous such discussion was at WP:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 January 20 82.166.199.42 (talk) 07:35, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * O sheltered youth! —Tamfang (talk) 16:24, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Genitive case has a carefully chosen native example illustrating the difference: One can say the King's war, but also the King of France's war, where the genitive marker is attached to the full noun phrase the King of France, whereas case markers are normally attached to the head of a phrase. In languages having a true genitive case, such as Old English, this example may be expressed as þes cynges wyrre of France, literally "the King's war of France", with the ’s attaching to the King. 185.24.205.63 (talk) 05:26, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The question is: can in Modern English, both King and France get 's? So France's king' s war. --40bus (talk) 17:04, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't see why not. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:27, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes. I've now added a citation at English possessive 147.234.72.52 (talk) 18:45, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Although that does seem rather clumsy and I (and I suspect most others) would say "the king of France's war" to avoid too many possessives. Alansplodge (talk) 13:25, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Either way works. How about some other constructs, such as "my father's mother's father"? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:37, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Or just "Father's maternal grandfather" and "The French king's war. There's often better ways to write things to avoid awkward phrasing or ambiguity.  Being locked into a specific phrasing that introduces awkward or hard-to-parse language is rarely useful for the reader.  Instead, seek equivalent phrasing that is easier to parse.  -- Jayron 32 15:06, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * 40bus, the OE construction survived into Modern English; search Google for "king's daughter of hungary" (with quotation marks) and you'll get heaps of ModE results.  republishes a 1908 text that used this wording, for example.  Aside from the spacing error, I agree that "France's king' s war" is right, but unlike Alansplodge I don't find it clumsy.  Also, "French king's war" can be different from "France's king's war"; in many contexts, Jayron32's wording is identical, but in the language of the kings in question, it wasn't, with the French-language originals for "king of France" and "king of the French" carrying an absolutist context and a constitutionalist context, respectively.  Nyttend (talk) 09:39, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Him is a pronoun, which in most (though not all) analyses is a subcategory of noun. Its genitive form is his. If pronouns are nouns, English can and sometimes does mark nouns for the genitive case. ¶ says above that "no native English speaker has ever been known to say 'I see the man with the dog's arrival'". I am a speaker of L1 English and find "I see the man with the dog's arrival" grammatical. ¶ Taking "the man with the dog" as an NP (and let's not complicate matters with the DP analysis), its closing "'s" does look like a clitic. However, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues against this and for "phrasal genitives" (pp 479 ff). -- Hoary (talk) 04:05, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh, I didn't claim it was ungrammatical. I just said that nobody has ever said it. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  04:58, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * (1) In Scottish English as well as common English. One version of Sir Patrick Spens includes these lines, although Wikipedia's version has what might be more logical, "the king's daughter to Norroway"
 * "To Noroway, to Noroway,
 * To Noroway o'er the foam;
 * The King's daughter of Noroway,
 * Tis thou must fetch her home."
 * The first line that Sir Patrick read,
 * A loud laugh laughed he;
 * The next line that Sir Patrick read,
 * The tear blinded his ee.


 * https://tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/poems/the_ballad_of_sir_patrick_spens.html
 * (2) There's an old joke about the writer or publisher who found that the books most in demand were about Abraham Lincoln, dogs, and medical doctors. So his surefire bestseller, appealing to all three readerships, would be "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" —— Shakescene (talk) 11:15, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Alan Coren's book Golfing for Cats was titled using the same logic. And the follow-up Tissues for Men was titled based on Kleenex sales outstripping book sales. Card Zero  (talk) 16:44, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Question E
Is there any Romance language where letter Y has a distinct vowel sound and never stands for a consonant? --40bus (talk) 15:05, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Question F
Why does Dutch not double vowels in open syllables? --40bus (talk) 15:05, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Vowels are doubled to show that they're tense. In open syllables, tense is the default, so there's no need to show. Better to save some ink. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:00, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
 * But double vowels are long. Despite this, they are doubled only in closed syllables, with next consonant is instead doubled in open syllables. If they are both long, they should also be doubled in open syllables. --40bus (talk) 17:07, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, the Dutch Language Union and several centuries of writing tradition disagree with you. In closed syllables, lax (I'll stick to lax and tense) is the default and tense is marked by doubling the vowel, in open syllables tense is the default and doesn't need additional marking. Actually, not just de default, the vowel in open syllables is always tense. If you want a lax vowel in an apparently open syllable, you double the following consonant, the first of which gets pushed back to the coda of the preceding syllable (it's ambisyllabic), making that syllable closed and the vowel lax. That's how we explain it to seven-year-old children and they have no difficulty applying that rule. PiusImpavidus (talk) 23:44, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The orthographic syllabification of spellen is spel‧len while that of spelen is spe‧len. I think, though, that this is more due to the orthographic conventions of Dutch than to phonemic considerations; using IPA notation, I think spellen corresponds to . So, rather than saying the vowel is lax "because" the syllable is closed, one could say that the syllable is spelled as if closed because the vowel is lax. The question is then, rather, how come Dutch authors developed the orthographic convention of doubling the consonant? For an alternative spelling proposal, see Steven Pemberton's "The Open Syllable". --Lambiam 08:56, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Note that the same convention is used for English (e.g. hater /heɪtɚ/ vs. hatter /hætɚ/) and German too (e.g. Hüte /hyːtə/ vs. Hütte /hʏtə/), as historically, in all three, lax vowels occurred in closed syllables, and tense vowels in open syllables. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 12:26, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Indeed, not so hard to find a Danish example too: hede /heːðə/ vs. hedde /heðə/ 82.166.199.42 (talk) 15:49, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * If you syllabify spellen as /'spɛ.lən/, you get the rather peculiar situation that lax vowels are allowed in open syllables, but only if it's not the final syllable of the word and the next syllable starts with a single consonant. If you syllabify it as /'spɛl.ən/, you get the problem that many native Dutch speakers use different allophones for /l/ and /r/ in coda versus onset position and use the onset allophone in this case. We have a section on ambisyllabicity, using English hurry as an example. It appears that Dutch, German and English (and other Gemanic languages) all use the same spelling rules here. If the doubled consonant belongs to both syllables, we have one for each, which is exactly how we explain it to children at school. As a spelling convention, it makes sense. PiusImpavidus (talk) 15:28, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary gives the Dutch pronunciation of ablatief as, that of acryl as , and that of april as . So in these phonetic renderings we also see lax vowels in open syllables that are not final and not followed by a single-consonant onset. From a morphological point of view, is  + , while  is  + . IMO the idea of a neat division of words into syllables consisting of onset+nucleus+coda does not fit Dutch (and other Germanic languages) well, offering no more than an artificial analysis strangely interacting with a (necessarily also artificial) orthography.  --Lambiam 09:06, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Syllabifying those as a-bla-tief, a-cryl and a-pril doesn't sound too far-fetched, but the initial vowel of those might actually be tense. That seems to happen in vowel-obstruent-liquid-vowel sequences, at least to my ear. Could of course be something local (I'm from the Riverlands in the Netherlands). Anyway, this is getting subjective. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:44, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * But none of you have said anything about that double vowels in closed syllables are long. In constrast, in open syllables, long vowels are marked just by same number of vowel letters as short vowels, but short vowels there are marked by double consonants. --40bus (talk) 19:11, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think it has been said, but let me try to make it a bit more explicit.
 * Open syllables have a tense vowel. There may be ways to analyse some open syllables to have a lax vowel, but there's always an alternative analysis that makes the syllable closed or the vowel tense. Moving a consonant back to the coda of the preceding syllable is one way and conveniently expressed in spelling by doubling the consonant. In particular, a word-final vowel or a vowel followed by another is always tense (or schwa). As you already know it's tense, there's no need to indicate this in spelling, so no double vowel these days. In older spellings, these tense vowels were doubled in open syllables, but the last of those were dropped in the 1934 spelling reform (except word-final -ee, to disambiguate from schwa).
 * That leaves the question why tense vowels were doubled in the first place. Historically, they were long vowels, so doubling made sense. The length difference has turned into a quality difference, but the double spelling remained. Any length difference today (in standard Dutch, some dialects may differ) is non-phonemic and a side-effect of the lack of a coda (or, sometimes, a side-effect of a following r). Without a consonant in the coda, more time is left for the vowel. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:44, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Once again pointing out that equivalent spelling conventions (⟨ee⟩ for /eː/, ⟨oo⟩ for /oː/, etc.) were originally used for English and German too (e.g. Meer, Moor); then the Great Vowel Shift changed the historically long vowels into the modern English free vowels. 147.234.72.52 (talk) 09:30, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
 * All transcriptions in e.g. Wiktionary have used length colon, so it would make sense if there is long vowel. --40bus (talk) 18:49, 3 August 2023 (UTC)