Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 May 24

= May 24 =

X after X, plural or not?
Is it 'person after person come into the room' or 'person after person comes into the room'? The first seems more logical but sounds absurd. Ericoides (talk) 10:17, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * My interpretation: the term 'person after person' is synonymous with 'a series of people', so the concept is grammatically singular even though it is made up of multiple persons. Academic grammarians may have a different analysis. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.210.77 (talk) 15:41, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I tried a google books search of "person after person has" versus "person after person have" and got 487 versus 35 hits, and in most of the "have" hits "person after person" is not the main subject of the sentence, so "has" appears to be correct. TSventon (talk) 15:51, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * My interpretation is that it is a series of singular "person"s, and so takes a singular verb. (And I speak BrE, where I'm quite happy with a collective taking a plural verb). ColinFine (talk) 16:04, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * You're iterating the verb over each individual element of a set. Taking the singular makes sense. Folly Mox (talk) 19:04, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Taking it literally, a person comes into the room after another person (also comes into the room). —Tamfang (talk) 19:04, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Number questions
Two questions about numbers:
 * 1) Are there any languages that pronounce digits of a number individually, like 41 as "four-one" and 157 as "one-five-seven" in all contexts, not just when reciting e.g. phone numbers?
 * 2) Are there any languages which include intermediate zeroes to number words, like 105 as "hundred zero five"? --40bus (talk) 18:08, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * In English, when we talk about years we pronounce 4-digit numbers that don't end in 00 but end in anything from 01 to 09 as Oh. But when we talk about quantities, we don't use a special name for 0; we just say "one hundred one". (I doubt that there are languages that use a word for a 0 within a number. I'm sure all languages are like English in that zeros are understood by the names of the words in the places; like 101 is one hundred one but 11 is eleven. Georgia guy (talk) 18:24, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * In Britain, you're more likely to say "one hundred and one" or "one thousand and one", rather than the American usage which usually omits "and", although Americans are still likely to pronounce "101 Dalmatians" as "One hundred and one Dalmatians". I suspect (in a very amateur way), that this might have come long ago from immigrants whose native tongue omits the conjunction ("and") within numbers. But in my relative ignorance, I'll leave this to the real linguists, philologists and lexicographers. ☺—— Shakescene (talk) 19:20, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Chinese sort of does #2. According to this, the word líng (零) is used in contexts where there is are intermediate zeros in a longer number, so 101 is 一百零一 yì bǎi líng yī, literally "one hundred zero one" however it stands for "any number of zeros", so 1001 is 一千零一, yì qiān líng yī, literally "one thousand zero one"so 10,001 is yī wàn líng yī literally "one ten-thousand zero one" the líng here is standing in for all of the zeroes between the first and last yī.  -- Jayron 32 18:52, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * @Jayron32: That's because Chinese has a "shortcut" letting the next digit be the next significant digit, thus 一千一 means 1100. 一千零一 overrides this behaviour so that the second 一 has a value of 1, not 100. cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 22:13, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Loglan does both, but it's a constructed language so it may not be interesting. A number is pronounced as simply a sequence of digits. So zero is "ni", one is "ne", ten is "neni", one hundred one is "nenine", one hundred ten is "neneni", etc. CodeTalker (talk) 19:49, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
 * And numerous less successful languages do the same. —Tamfang (talk) 16:20, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Tongan, if you follow the 'telephone style'. --Theurgist (talk) 00:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)