Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 April 5

= April 5 =

Why "on" a day?
Why do we say "in (the year) 2024" or "in April", but "on the 5th (day of the month)" or "on Friday"? This is true in written as well as spoken English: something can happen "in" (but never "on") a year or a month, or it can happen "on" (but never "in") a specific calendar day. My question is: why do days get "on"? They are intervals. One would expect them to get "in". 2601:18A:C500:E830:E417:9481:2EF6:E7D (talk) 06:16, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Just a guess (no reference, but someone might dig one up soon): Months and years are celestial: lunar and solar events occur above us and we are within the celestial sphere, but day events are terrestrial upon which we live. A bit of a tangent, but this query about being "in" reminds me of the prophetic song In the year 2525" written in 1969. I was only about nine years old then... Modocc (talk) 08:06, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Is there a perceived precision about a single day as opposed to a longer period? There is a similar period v. point contrast between "in the hour before dawn" and "on the stroke of midnight". -- Verbarson talkedits 12:43, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Also you do something "at" a time. "I will clean the clock on Thursday at 12:32. I last cleaned the clock in March". Interestingly the words are used similarly for location. "I will be in London tomorrow. Meet me on Oxford Street, at the corner with Duke Street".
 * So it seems to be due to precision. In, meaning sometime/somewhere within, is least precise. On is more precise, good enough for many purposes. At is even more precise, for when an exact time/place is needed. --2A04:4A43:901F:FD76:D137:1356:B6C6:AD97 (talk) 12:55, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * We also do things "in the night", "at night", "during the night", or "on the night of April 1st". Not sure what any of the explanations here have to do with any of it. Also, any naturalistic explanation can essentially be contradicted by the inevitably many counterexamples from other languages (or, as seen, from English itself). If all these idiomatic prepositional phrases originally descend from real metaphors of location, that origin's ancient and probably unrecoverable.
 * Browsing around for further reading, The Preposition Project is a repository for understanding English use cases for purposes of NLP. There's an interesting reddit thread which mentions that a chapter in Croft 2002 Typology and Universals covers the few correlations among languages in prepositions, but I haven't reviewed this. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:58, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Words for perfection
I realize this comes off as a shower thought (because it probably is), but I just had an experience at my local market that made me question reality. All of this comes down to timing: I just so happened to be at the store right after a local farmer delivered limes that were picked off the tree that day. (I should add that citrus grows very well where I live, and the local industry has recently invested quite heavily into it after years of wondering what to grow after all the sugar and pineapple disappeared, so we are in the process of perfecting citrus crops of all kinds.) Anyway, I bought a few, thinking how lucky I was, and got home, washed them, and started slicing them up. Because I happened to buy them when they were just picked and ready for sale, I have to say, I have never seen or tasted a more perfect lime. Which got me to thinking, why are there so few words in English to describe the perfect thing, yet hundreds of ways to describe faults and defects? Is this just a quirk of English, or is this an extension of the negativity bias that has impacted the language itself? I came here only because I was unable to think of any words to describe what I experienced. It's as if it transcended language itself. Perhaps language cannot go where perfection resides? Viriditas (talk) 08:51, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * By the Anna Karenina principle there is only one kind of perfection, but an infinity of ways to miss the mark. Doug butler (talk) 10:26, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:flawless lists ten words with similar semantics. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:42, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * In my part of the world, some commentators tend to say things like "most unique". I don't endorse such gruesomeness. HiLo48 (talk) 10:46, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Roget's Thesaurus (1953 ed) runs to 63 words/phrases for perfection (including all parts of speech), 86 for imperfection. A crude measure, as it includes many close concepts and colloquial phrases (for example, why does 'right as a trivet' denote perfection?) I was surprised not to find pristine listed under perfection. -- Verbarson  talkedits 12:37, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, "pristine" has more of feel of "unchanged from its origin" than "without flaw". At least to me.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 16:24, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It's a sliding scale from 'the ne plus ultra of limes; to 'utterly contemptible specimen of citrus fruit' etc., there are plenty of comparatives in between. Take your pick, as it were. MinorProphet (talk) 22:29, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Rishi Sunak has said the behaviour of the Israel Defence Force in Israel is becoming "more intolerable."  I don't really get the syntax of that. 2A00:23D0:443:BB01:EC7D:7F9E:B865:32A8 (talk) 15:13, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Do you find "less tolerable" easier to parse? I think they should mean the same, but I agree that Sunak's version does smack of "more absolute". -- Verbarson talkedits 16:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Qandil Mountains etymology
Why are Qandil Mountains called Qandil? It comes from Qandil (قنديل, 'candle'). But is it because the mountains look like candles? Or is it related to Kandil? (tonight is Kadir Gecesi, that's why I got interested in this...) a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 20:54, 5 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Is it possible that the name actually comes from Kurdish, Persian or another local language, which coincidentally sounds something like 'Quandil', rather than Arabic which is not originally native to the region? Elsewhere it is a common phenomenon for a newly dominant language to re-render local names into something similar sounding but with a different meaning to the original. How old is the name? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 151.227.130.213 (talk) 07:28, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Kandil also comes from the same Arabic word. While the latter is usually romanized qindīl, there is a dialectal variant qandīl. In Kurmanji the word in the name of the mountains is the same word as used in a variant name of Berat Kandili: Şeva Qendîlê. So this is clearly of Arabic origin. The word قندیل (qandil) in Persian is a loanword from Arabic. It is also the name of a village in Iran (not near the Qandil Mountains). --Lambiam 12:05, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
 * So what were the mountains (or region) called prior to Arabic speakers being there? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 151.227.130.213 (talk) 20:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
 * That information might not necessarily have been preserved. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:28, 6 April 2024 (UTC)