Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 March 25

= March 25 =

Putin tulee kylään
Russian sources, such as here, translate Finnish book title "Putin tulee kylään" as "Putin is coming to us" ("К нам едет Путин"), but Google Translate has it as "Putin is coming to the village". I don't speak Finnish, so which one is correct? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 00:32, 25 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Both. While the literal meaning of the Finnish noun kylä is "village" (a small settlement in a sparsely populated area), it is used idiomatically for any private place, typically someone else's home, which someone is visiting. So the best translation is perhaps "Putin is coming to visit you". --Lambiam 09:39, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * "Putin comes to visit", I think? Present indicative mood. Card Zero  (talk) 15:26, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The English present continuous form is coming is also in the present tense and indicative mood: it is stated as a fact, not something that might happen. Unlike English, Finnish usually does not indicate a continuous aspect explicitly. It shares this with many languages; the English phrase I'm coming! is expressed in French as je viens! and in German as ich komme!; turning this in the other direction into English I come! is generally not the most appropriate translation. As we can see above, Google Translate gets this aspect right. I added "you" to express the fact that the idiom is used for visits to someone's home, not for state visits and such. --Lambiam 17:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * As a non-native speaker, I believe that the French would say j'arrive rather than je viens: although "are you coming?" is tu viens? Also, Revelation 22:12 Siehe, Ich komme bald - "Lo, I come quickly" (KJV). MinorProphet (talk) 09:21, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

What's a dead metaphor?
I've just added a lot of metaphors to the article. There was a comment at the top of the list demanding every item have a reference: but only one of the existing items had a reference. And I suppose really it means that the reference should say "such-and-such is an example of a dead metaphor", but only a handful of my additions have a reference like that.

What I discovered when searching for references:

Card Zero (talk) 14:09, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Columnists bloviating about language in magazines will say anything, such as that "dead metaphor" is a dead metaphor.
 * "The fifty fatal flaws of essay writing" is a book that gives a list of cliches, e.g. "avoid like the plague", and calls them dead metaphors.
 * P. Newmark, who wrote books in the 1980s on the subject of translation, says a dead metaphor frequently relies on the universal terms used to describe space and time, such as field, line, top, bottom, foot, mouth, arm and so on.
 * Those may not sound like metaphors at all, but some sources say dead metaphors have ceased to be metaphors ... or not, because the same source quotes somebody else's example of "she is very cold (emotionally)" as a dead metaphor: "from this alternative point of view ... the difference between dead and conventional metaphors becomes fuzzy".
 * Yourdictionary.com starts its article about dead metaphors with similar examples, leg of a trip and body of an essay, but then goes on to give lots of examples which closely match those in the article and are probably due to WP:citogenesis. However, many of them were never in the the article, so perhaps this is a good source? This kind of "dead metaphor" refers to obsolete technology or forgotten customs. Unfortunately the question of what is or isn't forgotten is highly debatable, so it might be wrong to include, for instance, pull out the stops, given that pipe organs and organists still exist.
 * Then there's oddities such as balls to the wall, which is obscure only because most people never encounter aircraft engine controls, or groundbreaking (listed by yourdictionary.com) which is to do with construction. There's also laughing stock, which Wiktionary says is not about being put in the medieval stocks and laughed at, but is merely a somewhat obsolete sense of the word *stock* as in "supply".
 * The first reference in the article (Pawalec) is a long pdf which doesn't seem to contain any examples. It does however reference Winfried Nöth at one point, so I guess I could look at his "Handbook of Semiotics". I already have one example from Nöth: News magazine: originally magazine meant "storehouse". In this conception of a dead metaphor, the meaning has to have shifted so that an original meaning is forgotten. I think he's saying that this is a matter of degree, which may help with disputes about the inclusion criterion. We may recall the original meaning for rhetorical purposes, or ignore it: so pull out all the stops would count after all.


 * What the article calls "literalization of a metaphor" should be called "lexicalization of a metaphor". This is the opposite of literalization, which means taking a lexicalized metaphor literally, a technique used by comedians to create a punchline. Searching for "lexicalized metaphor" instead of "dead metaphor" may help. I expect Caitlin Hines' "What's so easy about pie?" contains more examples than easy as pie. --Lambiam 17:04, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm sceptical of a number of the examples in the article, and in the sources. Most of those look to me to just be regular metaphors.  Just because people are unlikely these days to have to literally hold their horses, or hear a broken record, doesn't mean they cease to be metaphors.  As examples of truly dead metaphors, I'd nominate describing someone as having a good (or bad) temper or humour - these being references to metallurgy and an ancient medical theory respectively.  Iapetus (talk) 10:15, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The head and the members of an organization. The body of an article and a note at the foot of a page. The hands and face of a clock. The legs of a trip. One reason why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up : wasting time on endless navel-gazing when direct action was required. --Lambiam 08:06, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Place of articulation
Can there be so-called post-uvular or pre-pharyngeal consonants, similarly there are post-velar / pre-uvular and post-palatal / pre-velar consonants? For example, post-uvular / pre-pharyngeal voiceless fricative would be [χ̠ ] or [ħ̟], and voiced version would be [ʁ̠] or [ʕ̟] --40bus (talk) 17:58, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Articulation is a continuum, so finer and finer gradations can be made if you want to, however, I know of no language that uses such sounds as distinct phonemes and not as allophones of an already existing phoneme. Which is to say, while one can make symbols or names for such sounds, if no language exists which makes such a sound a distinct unit of meaning-making (which is to say, there is no language which has a minimal pair of words where such sound distinctions matter), then there's no purpose in describing such sounds as worthy of note.  -- Jayron 32 14:48, 27 March 2023 (UTC)