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November 12

Flour and Flower

Do these sound the same in your dialect? --71.142.84.90 (talk) 05:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Yup. (Wikipedia tells me I speak West/Central Canadian English.) Adam Bishop (talk) 06:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Certainly do, central southern UK. 86.4.186.107 (talk) 08:08, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Then, it sounds like it's probably the same in all English dialects. Any exceptions you know of? --71.142.79.136 (talk) 08:13, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Heh. The above reminds me of a linguistics department variation of the How to Hunt Elephants joke: "THEORETICAL LINGUISTS describe the first two elephants they run into, note that neither of them has fur, and pronounce this the "Smooth Elephant Constraint" (or SEC). At the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America the constraint is declared a universal after a five-minute discussion with no dissent." rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:01, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Sure. For me "flour" is one syllable while "flower" is two, just as the spellings suggest. But my speech is a mixture of different influences, so that doesn't tell you much. So I looked up "flour" in four of the dictionaries under www.onelook.com. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English shows "flour" with one syllable as US; looking at US dictionaries, Encarta shows only that pronunciation, Merriam-Webster shows it as either one or two without precedence (the schwa of the second syllable is just parenthesized), while American Heritage shows two syllables first and one syllable as "also". --Anonymous, 11:50 UTC, November 12, 2009.

They sound the same in London. Alansplodge (talk) 12:14, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Different in West Midlands. --TammyMoet (talk) 13:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed that people from slightly more upper class London backgrounds pronounce flower with a rather more pronounced W sound than flour, to the extent that the latter sounds like a combination of "fl"+"our". Having said that, the upper class tend to shun the w in "flower" too, but to a lesser extent. No sources I'm afraid so OR alert. --Dweller (talk) 15:44, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't understand much of our article on Received Pronunciation. Does it discuss this point? --Dweller (talk) 15:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Despite the dictionaries, they sound the same (two syllables) in both rhotic and nonrhotic pronunciations in New England and New York. Marco polo (talk) 15:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Similar sets of words include roil, royal; higher, hire; sigher, sire; sear, seer; dire, dyer; buyer, byre; lair, layer; mooer, moor; spier, spire; cuer, cure; vial, vile, viol; coir, coyer. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:27, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

What dialect(s) of English has lair and layer as homophones? In Australian English, lair rhymes with hair and layer rhymes with payer, and they're not even close. In fact, layer has two syllables in my lingo. Now, my Texan wife pronounced the "ai" and the "ay" of the two words almost identically, however layer has two syllables whereas lair only one. Curious. Peter Greenwell (talk) 10:07, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Mine, which is a variant of southern RP (British). But I know that a schoolfriend who also spoke RP did not have them as homophones, so I can only assume it's variable. Both are one syllable for me. 86.149.189.52 (talk) 13:03, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't agree on some of these. Eg mooer/moor. If you'd said Moor, more and moor, perhaps, but mooer is an oo-er word for me! I also would differentiate slightly between dire and dyer - for me, as with mooer, the latter has two syllables, but the former one. --Dweller (talk) 16:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

When I said "similar sets of words", I meant that they are similar to the set flour, flower in being potential topics of this type of question. However, they are also "sets of similar words", in that the pronunciations of the words in a set may be identical or nearly identical.

-- Wavelength (talk) 17:11, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

In the Australian English I speak, they're said the same. Peter Greenwell (talk) 23:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

They're similar, but not quite identical, in New Zealand - the "w" is stressed very, very slightly more than the "u" (but that may simply be a personal case, and I still have some residual Home Counties English in my voice). As for Australia, I suspect it depends whereabouts you are. There are several distinct Strine accents/dialects: to my ears at least, Breezebin and Seednee accents are harsher and rougher than Milbun and Ohbaht. Eddelide is softer still. Dunno about Perth or Darwin, but the best known residents of Canberra can only just handle the concept of language, poor dears :) Grutness...wha? 23:59, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

In defence of Kambra residents, I'll just say that the people to whom I believe you're referring, the politicians, are with very few exceptions only temporary residents of that fair city, who immediately wing their ways to their home bases the moment Parliament rises (usually Thursday afternoon), and come back the next week. Most of them wouldn't be seen dead there on a weekend - or at any other time - unless they have no choice but be there (which is more a reflection on them than on Canberra). For some of them, the first time in their lives they ever visit their nation's capital is after they've been elected to Parliament. And all they ever see of the city is Parliament House, their hotel or wherever they stay, the roads connnecting them, and the roads to and from the airport. On the basis of this, they proclaim that Canberra is not worth visiting. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I wondered if I'd get a bite from that tasty worm I dangled in the water :) Grutness...wha? 01:42, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

All good sport, mate. I just had to put the record straight about who lives there by choice (c. 350,000 people, most of whom have as little involvement in politics as they can get away with, and for the vast majority, none at all) and who doesn't.  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 01:52, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so maybe you phoneticians can explain this to me. Looking at wikt:flower, the US IPA reads /ˈflaʊɚ/, but the definitely sounds like it has the Voiced labio-velar approximant in the middle and an /ɹ/ at the end. Or am I just imagining it? I might be imagining the /enwiki/w/, it's such a small difference that I can't really hear it, but that really sounds like an /ɹ/. Indeterminate (talk) 08:41, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You're not imagining anything, you're just being thrown off by transcriptional conventions. /aʊ/ and /aw/ are equivalent, as are /ɚ/ and syllabic /ɹ/. The word could also have been transcribed /ˈflawɹ/ (with a syllabicity mark under the ɹ). +Angr 12:03, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

In the American midwest, at least, "flour" and "flower" are pronounced the same way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I came across when searching to see if has been discussed before a long time later. FWIW, flower and flour are normally pronounced quite differently in Malaysian English and Singaporean English. Flour is normally distinctly monosyballic something like flah (our Singlish article says /flɑ/). If you look at discussions involving Singaporeans or Malaysian, it's sometimes claimed the pronounciation is due to the British roots. However as discussed above in modern British English, the two are close to (or are) homophones AFAIK. Also in most other forms of English. At least whenever I heard it in Malaysia (which I admit wasn't that much), this was not the case. Not that I always asked them to pronounce flower, but even in the examples like the Cambridge dictionary, as well as any time on shows etc, the pronounciation of flour among British speakers sounds a lot like they would pronounce flower, which I didn't consider the case for the Malaysians. Edit: Found an example I think from Singapore of flour [1] Nil Einne (talk) 12:08, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

What is the German word for button, you know the ones with the pins on the back?

What is the German word for button, you know the ones with the pins on the back or what the British call a badge? Part of the problem is that there is no one English word to describe it and those that are tend to be used for other things, too. Overpush (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The German Wikipedia article for these sorts of things is de:Button (Ansteckplakette). Adam Bishop (talk) 06:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The Finnish girl's name Päivi

How is it pronounced? Pah-eevee? Rhymes with gravy? An .ogg sample or an IPA transliteration would be great, if either could be provided. Thanks in advance. Peter Greenwell (talk) 23:31, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

You're correct - it rhymes with gravy. In IPA - ['pʰæj.vi]. Steewi (talk) 06:08, 13 November 2009 (UTC)edited for formatting Steewi (talk) 06:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Finnish stops are not aspirated: ['pæivi]. — Emil J. 11:03, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

So, is the äi combo a diphthong? From the IPA you two have given, it seems there's two vowel sounds there, unless I'm reading things wrong. Peter Greenwell (talk) 11:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

That's what a diphthong is. +Angr 11:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

(e/c) The word has only two syllables, if that's what you are asking. Whether you interpret the first one as a diphthong [æi] (more precisely, [æ͡i]) or as a vowel followed by an approximant [æj] makes little (if any) difference; I followed our Finnish phonology article which calls it a diphthong. — Emil J. 12:06, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks all. Peter Greenwell (talk) 13:24, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

In what dialect does ['pæjvi] rhyme with gravy? (I pronounce gravy with an [ej] in its first syllable, not an [æj], myself.)—msh210℠ 18:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

November 13

苏荷

I am not very good at searching chinese phrase/words. Can you help?

苏荷靓仔威威

Translate.google.com says the above means "Soho handsome Weiwei". We are talking about a guy, so handsome Weiwei I get it but what does 苏荷 could mean? --Lgriot (talk) 14:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

苏荷 does mean Soho; without any further context, it's hard to tell what else this might mean. Can you provide the context for this phrase?

Also, good resources for looking up Chinese words include http://nciku.com, http://dict.cn, and http://zhongwen.com . rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:16, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The context is inside a gay publication, the photo of a young man with this caption. Could it be slang meaning "gay"? Did London Soho become so obvious that the word Soho has suddenly shifted to mean gay in Chinese?--Lgriot (talk) 15:38, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Can't it just be 'handsome Soho guy' (i.e., 'handsome guy from Soho')? Peking University's language corpus only turns up a few hits, most of which are about the district itself (苏荷地区 = 'Soho district'), google turns up mostly pages about bars or places, and Baidupedia's article specifically defines it as referring to NYC's Soho. According to this forum post, it also refers to Shanghai's soho ("最近，上海“苏荷”这一新名词颇引人注目，它指的是上海近年在旧城改造和产业结构调整中自然诞生的文化创意产业基地" -> roughly 'recently, in Shanghai the word "苏荷" has been attracting people's attention, it refers to the area in Shanghai's old town that has in recent years been developing a lot of culture/art stuff'). So as far as I can tell, the word is most commonly used to refer to a place itself... maybe in some of these contexts it has extended to mean something like "artsy, hipster, bohemian", which could also be relevant for your caption. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:46, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry forgot to say, the guy is from Schenzen if I understand well, nowhere in the west. Plus I have seen this qualifier on gay websites for other guys. I thought it was obvious, nothing as subtle as "bohemian", but I don't have that much understanding of the chinese gay world.--Lgriot (talk) 15:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

It might be; I'm not a native speaker so I'm less aware of subculture-y uses like that. A native speaker might be able to clarify more. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Is the Shanghai Soho around Suhujia, then? Steewi (talk) 01:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

A term for this class of words?

Is there a term for the specific type of adverb that can be formed by combining an adjective with a preposition? Example: whereupon, hereto, therefor, herein, etc. --BennyD (talk) 15:00, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Usually, that is the adverbial (or part of its function). The examples are adverbs. There may be a specifc term.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 16:28, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

On SyuRat’s comment (which is disappeared), lawyers do mistakes as we do like treating the adverbs (like of the examples) as adjectives. Those are difficult to detect in a context whether such closed class of words are consciously meant to be the modifiers of verbs or not.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 16:47, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll add my comment back in, which I had redacted earlier as not answering the Q, if only to show the correct spelling of my name: Sounds like lawyer-speak to me. Along with the needless use of Latin, and calling people by strange terms like "the party of the first part" instead of by their actual names. If they didn't do all this to confuse people, then people wouldn't need lawyers to decipher it all. StuRat (talk) 15:47, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I would have said 'prepositional compound', but I can't find anybody else using the phrase in this way, or a name for words of this type in either English or German. (There isn't an adjective in them, by the way: it's a preposition and a pronoun). There's some similarity with the Irish morphology#inflected prepositions in Irish and Welsh, but those really involve personal pronouns, whereas the Germanic examples all involve demonstrative pronouns. So no, there doesn't seem to be (a term) --ColinFine (talk) 17:41, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary sticks them in wikt:Category:English pronominal adverbs if that means anything to anyone. Nanonic (talk) 20:10, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

There are such words which are not archaic legalese, one of the most common being "nearby". "Forthright" might also qualify. —— Shakescene (talk) 22:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

And "forthcoming" which is (sadly) losing ground in the UK to the American "upcoming".Alansplodge (talk) 00:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

... a word that many people are now rendering as "up and coming", which has a completely different meaning. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

But "forthcoming" and "upcoming" do not mean the same thing—as far as I know, the latter is something about to happen (an upcoming event, etc.), the former is something about to be published or presented (a forthcoming article, his argument is forthcoming, etc.). More importantly for this topic, it's not made of prepositions ('coming' is a verb), and it's not an adverb (it's an adjective). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, you win on the adverb/adjective point, but in the UK, "forthcoming events" is a common phrase[2][3]. However, now even BBC reporters refer to "the upcoming meeting". I had never heard the word "upcoming" or seen it in print until about 10 years ago and it still grates on my ear.Alansplodge (talk) 16:51, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

The reason for many of these words was that historically basic prepositions didn't really directly take neuter pronouns as objects, so that compounds of "there"+preposition etc. were used instead. Modern German and Dutch still have a similar system (e.g. German daran, darauf, daraus, darin, darueber, darum, darunter etc.). AnonMoos (talk) 02:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

would

I'm not a native speaker of English, so this might be a stupid question, anyway: I stumbled over a passage in John O'Haras Appointment in Samarra: This guy "Al Grecco" is driving his car down a highway and passes another car whose driver he recognizes as Mr. Julian English. And then: Al also noticed that there was a woman in the car, slumped low in the front seat, low and as far away from English as she could get. That would be Mrs. English. I guess it means something like "This must be Mrs. English", but what is this "would" here in terms of grammar? Conditional or past tense? --77.185.228.115 (talk) 17:36, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

No, it's not a stupid question; but I'm not sure I can answer it in the framework of English grammar you may have been taught. I would describe that as the modal auxiliary 'would', used in its epistemic sense. Formally it is in the past tense (as opposed to "That will be mother now") but I don't believe in tenses in modern English, other than the present/simple-past distinction (for example, since I know of no morphological or syntactic test that distinguishes 'I will go' from 'I can go', I find it unhelpful to refer to one as a 'tense' and the other not). Incidentally, 'would' as opposed to 'must' implies to me that Al Grecco has just deduced who she is. --ColinFine (talk) 17:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

There's not really any formal grammatical distinction, "would be" is just something some people use in place of "is" in some situations. For example, if people at a party are waiting for John, who's known for being late, and then the phone rings, someone may say "That would be John". I don't think there is any tense issue here. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I always thought the phrase "That would be X" is just an idiom for "That person is X", while indicating that you are identifying X for the benefit of someone who doesn't know the person; and the phrase would not be used in the range of hearing of X. The phrase "That would be X" sounds formal, and I think it's usually used with a little ironic formality. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:07, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that there is a subtle difference in meaning among "That would be Mrs. English", "That must be Mrs. English", and "That is Mrs. English". "That is", in this case, would imply certain recognition. It would suggest that Al has met Mrs. English in the past and recognizes the woman in the car as her. "That must", in this case, would imply that Al is not completely certain that the woman in the car is Mrs. English, but he is fairly certain that it couldn't be anyone else. "That would", in this case, means that Al deduces that this is Mrs. English. He isn't completely certain that it is Mrs. English, it just makes sense that she is. Marco polo (talk) 19:37, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't see any real difference between "that must be" and "that would be", in this case. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

"Would be" can often just mean "is" with a little twist of attitude (and perhaps does in the O'Hara passage). If someone asks me "Who's that woman over there?" I might answer "That would be my mother." I might be conveying a bit of chagrin at her behavior or some other nuance that a simple "is" would lack, but I'm certainly in no doubt as to her identity. Deor (talk) 00:39, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Helping and Modal Auxiliary Verbs says that would can "express a sense of probability". -- Wavelength (talk) 19:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

My idea here follows with 'that must be' = 'that will be', both used in the sense of probability, but here 'would' is used because the whole situation is set in the past, and 'would' is technically the past tense of 'will', c.f. 'At the party I met the lady who would later become my wife' - we are not talking about a probability here, it's an actual fact that 'she became my wife' at some point after our meeting at the party. In the excerpt cited by the OP, Al Grecco has guessed that the lady is Mrs. English, but will later find out for sure. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 08:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't must in this context imply that you don't actually know Mrs. English and that you've determined this through deductive reasoning of some sort? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:23, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I thought that was what I and everyone else were saying here. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 13:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

November 14

How do English-speaking Canadians pronounce "Quebec"?

How do English-speaking Canadians pronounce "Quebec"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.49.12.245 (talk) 19:48, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

A lot of them seem to say something like kwa-bec. Pollinosisss (talk) 20:26, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

In Ontario people say either kuh-bek (more common) or kay-bek (less common), with the stress on the second syllable. Best, WikiJedits (talk) 20:28, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree, in Ontario it is something like "kuh-bek" or "kwa-bek". Something in between that, maybe. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:16, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with "in between"; I think it's "kwuh-BEK" with the W sound in the unaccented syllable faint enough that it gets dropped in rapid speech. When people are writing "kwa-bek" here, I think their A means a schwa, i.e. the same as I'm writing as "kwuh-BEK". (I live in Ontario and formerly in Alberta.) I don't often hear "kay-bek", and if I do, I consider that the person is attempting to pronounce the word as French. --Anonymous, 21:59 UTC, November 14, 2009.

Yes, "kwuh-BEK" is how we say it in British Columbia. The first vowel is schwa. I wouldn't say the 'w' gets dropped, though. The local city "Quesnel" is pronounced similarly. 220.29.16.77 (talk) 10:56, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

French é is a short pure vowel and may actually sound closer to English short i than to English ay. --JWB (talk) 23:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

See and hear Quebec pronunciation: How to pronounce Quebec in English. -- Wavelength (talk) 21:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

November 15

Snot

What is origin of this word plaese--79.67.82.206 (talk) 01:21, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

See [4], [5], [6], etc. A good resource for looking up word origins (known as etymologies) is http://www.etymonline.com . rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:24, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Dirty cities

There was a question on the Humanities desk about the town of Fucking, Austria that got me thinking. Can anyone name towns (in the Anglosphere) that appear normal to English-speaking people, but which sound amusing or filthy in some other language? So, I'm not looking for something like Dildo, Newfoundland and Labrador, which is amusing in English (and in Newfie), but rather something that sounds mundane to us and yet would elicit giggles from someone familiar with, say, Pashto or Portuguese. And, for additional points, are the residents aware of the situation, as the 104 people in Fucking apparently are? Matt Deres (talk) 02:15, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure there are lots of things, not just for placenames but for any proper nouns. For example, I've seen Chinese friends get tickled at my dad's name, Ben, because it sounds like a Mandarin word for stupid (笨 bèn). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

In Scotland, I drove through Ruskie, whose name is not terribly obscene in Polish, but it may be a pejorative name for the Russians (or a perfectly acceptable name for cheese and potato pierogi). — Kpalion^(talk) 10:07, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Not quite what you're looking for, probably, but two fairly well-known places in New Zealand have Maori names which sound innocuous enough in English but have less-innocuous names in their original language. Te Urewera, one of the country's national parks name literally means "The burnt penis". There's also Tutaekuri River, which translates as "Dog shit river". As for non-english placenames which sound amusing in English, my favourite is the Western Australian town of Koolyanobbing, which sounds to me like a way of saying "go take a cold shower". Grutness...wha? 10:15, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Again, not quite what you are specifically looking for, but there is Malacca. Ask a greek-speaker what that means! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 13:24, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The village of Knockin in Shropshire, England, is locally rather famous because the village grocery store has a large sign proclaiming "The Knockin Shop". In UK slang, a "knocking shop" is a brothel[7].Alansplodge (talk) 16:00, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

In Italian, the city of Chicago is pronounced as "ci cago" (chee-kah-goh), that means "I defecate in it". It's a common joke here :-) --151.51.20.160 (talk) 22:27, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

There's a place near Bolton called Nob End. I drove through it once, on my way to the unlamented (by me, anyway) Burnden Park. Nob End apparently is an SSSI - but sadly not because of its name. --Dweller (talk) 13:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

So...what does Malacca mean in Greek? —Akrabbim^talk 14:20, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

See malakas. — Emil J. 14:34, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

there is always Wetwang, too. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) 17:59, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Pen (writing instrument)

I've recently discovered that the word for "pen" in Spanish is pluma, which I would speculate is related to plumage, in that feathers served as (at least some of) the first pens in the form of quills. Can anyone a) comment on this speculation and b) provide traslations for the word "pen" in other languages that show a link to such a feather-origin (or another origin, as in stylus, which just means "pen") DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 15:52, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

In French, "la plume" can be a pen or nib. In English, a "pen" is also a male swan. I've always assumed that they were linked. A stylus was a pointed stick that Romans used to write on wax tablets. It can also mean the needle of a record-player.Alansplodge (talk) 16:05, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec) The word "pen" itself is from "penna", which is Latin for "feather". French has "plume", as in the famous phrase "la plume de ma tante". As you speculate, these all come from the use of quill pens. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 16:10, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

A french example that's even more famous: nom de plume. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:48, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

P.S. my dictionary (Chambers) says that the origin of pen=female swan is unknown. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 16:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Of course; a male swan is a cob. I apologise to any swans reading this.Alansplodge (talk) 19:15, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The German word for a fountain pen is Feder, which also means (and is cognate with) "feather". +Angr 16:41, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The Chinese word for pen, 笔, includes the Radical for hair, 毛. Since, of course, there they used brushes before they used pens. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:43, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

From the SOED: pen = writing instrument, has "ORIGIN Old French & Modern French penne from Latin penna feather, (pl.) pinions, wings, (in Late Latin) pen.". pen = female swan has "ORIGIN Origin unkn." Mitch Ames (talk) 23:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

(Not quite the same topic, but fun) The Uyghur word for "pencil" is قېرىنداش (qérindash), which is homophonous with the word for "relatives" (also qérindash). They come from entirely different words (the latter literally was something like "womb companion" or "person from the same womb", I don't remember the etymology of the former) but the pronunciations have happened to come together as a result of vowel harmony. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The Russian word for pencil is карандаш (karandásh).and it has one of the very few irregular plurals in Russian (karandashá, not the expected karandáshy). I wonder which language influenced the other. -- JackofOz (talk) 07:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

You can see the word declined at http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/карандаш. -- Wavelength (talk) 17:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The same page shows its etymology from two words meaning "black stone". -- Wavelength (talk) 17:10, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

At a guess, I'd suspect the Russian word is borrowed from some Turkic language whose word is cognate with the Uyghur word. That -ash ending looks very Turkic to me. +Angr 07:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems you're right - see Caran d'Ache and Caran d'Ache (company). I'd always assumed the Russian word came from the Frenchified version, not vice versa. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 11:11, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Slovene has two words for a fountain pen: nalivnik, which means about as much as "the fill-up [with ink] implement", and pero (or nalivno pero), which means straight out "feather" (or "fill-up feather"). Don't know about other Slavic languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if more of them simply used the word "feather" for pen. TomorrowTime (talk) 07:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Back to Spanish, the word pluma is directly derived from the Latin pluma, which means of course feather. The word estilográfica is also used. That last word derives from Latin stilus, which has been explained above. For ballpoint pens, the words are birome (cf. biro) and lapicera (in turn derived from lápiz, and this last one from Latin lapis, e.g stone). Pallida  Mors 19:14, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Wallachia

I've never heard the word pronounced (in English), so what is the correct pronunciation? Preferably in American English, neutral or New York accent. Also, I'm IPA-illiterate :D Thanks in advance. Rimush (talk) 17:23, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Kenyon and Knott give /wɑˈleɪkiə/; for the non-IPA-compatible, that's wah-LAY-kee-uh. +Angr 17:42, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Hm. Odd... I've only ever heard it pronounced wah-LAY-sha, but the questioner - and K&K - are using American English, so perhaps it's another US/Commonwealth English difference. Grutness...wha? 22:43, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, the thoroughly British Longman Pronunciation Dictionary gives /wɒˈleɪkiə/, which agrees with K&K (but shows that the first vowel is that of "doll", not that of "Dahl", in dialects that distinguish them). +Angr 07:47, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Comma before "and"

I have a habit, which I have been informed is a bad one (I'm in the UK). I write sentences like this:

• Tom reached his important hundredth birthday last Thursday, and we wish him luck for the future.

Where the first clause is considerably more important than the latter (as I've tried to make here) I put a comma before the "and." Have I picked this up off someone or something? And publication address this sort of comma? Thanks, - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 17:34, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Using a comma there seems completely natural to me, and I don't know by what "rule" it would be considered incorrect. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Serial comma may help. Essentially, it is one the many UK vs US differences. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 19:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Serial comma refers to a comma separating items in a list, not to a comma separating two independent clauses. The general rule of thumb is that if the clause following the word "and" could stand on its own as a grammatically correct sentence, a comma is used. In your example, "We wish him luck for the future" could be its own sentence, thus the comma is not only acceptable but also required. Keyed In (talk) 19:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Compound sentence (linguistics) suggest the comma is optional, now I look. Here is a second case, where I did use a comma (between the bold words) but I'm not so sure is correct:

• I spoke to Sally, who suggested that I ate something, and that I got some rest.

Clearly, the commas are not parenthetical, but I'd still feel the inclination to use one, where are pause would apply. Correct or not? - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 21:50, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Fully acceptable either with or without the comma. It seems that a lot of people are strangely keen on dreaming up their own odd "rules" of English and then accusing others of breaking these. -- Hoary (talk) 00:48, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh, Hoary, don't you know you should never begin a sentence with an adverb? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 04:48, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Completely missing the forest for the trees there, are we? That wasn't a sentence to begin with, adverbially or not, but a sentence fragment. You'll have to concoct a different rule for one of those, won't you now? —— Shakescene (talk) 10:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that British writing today is significantly more likely to keep the punctuation minimal than North American writing. So, while the comma before "and" is certainly optional in this sort of construct, I think British writers are more likely to prefer not to use it; and perhaps some people would elevate this preference to the status of a rule. --Anonymous, 05:43 UTC, November 16, 2009.

¶ I favour commas. especially between clauses containing phrases that might get misattached by the reader to the conjunction ("and"). It's not just a matter of indicating where a spoken pause might (or might not) occur. However, there are other problems with that sentence to my eyes, ears and mind:

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested that I ate something, and that I got some rest. ”

I would have written (or I hope spoken) it either as:

“ I spoke to Sally who suggested that I eat something, and that I get some rest. ”

or

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested that I eat something and get some rest. ”

I prefer the latter, because I think a comma after Sally is the more important break. The trouble with having two commas in that particular sentence, each of which would otherwise serve a good purpose, is that there's no hierarchy in English-language punctuation to tell you which is more important. Another workaround is to impose a little hierarchy with a different punctuation mark:

“ I spoke to Sally — who suggested that I eat something, and that I get some rest. ”

But, as always, there are subtle changes in emphasis and meaning with each change in phrasing and punctuation. So none of my versions may be an accurate reflection of the intended meaning. The only person who knows what would be closest to the original meaning is the original author or speaker. An omnibus example of several points above might be:

“ I then spoke to Sally, and she suggested that I eat something and get some rest. ”

The comma helps avoid the momentary reading that I "spoke to Sally and she".—— Shakescene (talk) 11:14, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The examples are interesting comma dilemmas in which each sentence elutes non-similar meanings, and that none of the sentence seems correct to guess what would be the closest meaning of the speaker. I guess the final clause is most likely the meaning with the strong comma.

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested that I ate something; and that I got some rest. ”

Why? There are few grammatical explanations.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 13:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Grammatical sidetrack

I'm sorry, but

(1) the semi-colon above just doesn't work in current Anglo-American punctuation. The usual hierarchy of stops is period/full stop [.], full colon [:], semi-colon [;] and comma [,], with the various dashes falling somewhere in between. Semi-colons introduce independent clauses, which may be started with coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, etc.) by non-purists like me, but not by absolute purists. However, "and that I get some rest" is not an independent clause because it's introduced not only by the co-ordinating conjunction "and", but also by the subordinating conjunction "that" dependent on "suggested" at the beginning of a previous clause on the other side of the semi-colon.

(2) "ate" and "got" in the two examples above are just plain wrong, which is why I changed them in my own examples. The only time they'd be correct would be if Sally were making suggestions about something that I was doing at the same time or that I had already done before we spoke — and in that case they'd usually be in the past perfect ("had eaten and "had got" [Br.] or "had gotten" [U.S.]), past progressive or perfect progressive (if those are the correct names for those tenses). For example,

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested that they had already eaten and got[ten] some rest. ”

or

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I'd been seeing another woman. ”

or

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I was seeing another woman. ”

or

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I saw another woman before I came. ”

or (better)

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I'd seen another woman. ”

If Sally were an unjealous woman who wanted to end our relationship without hurting me, then a totally different meaning would be given by

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I see another woman. ”

or

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I should see another woman. ”

or (permissively; "Set Me Free")

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I could see other women. ”

You could use the past in the dependent clause if was something I was doing at the same time, especially if it were customary, for example

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I ate too much and got too much sleep. ”

although it's possible that that meaning might be better conveyed with the past progressive:

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I was eating too much and getting too much sleep. ”

or perfect progressive (or is it the past perfect progressive?)

“ I spoke to Sally, who suggested [that] I'd been eating too much and [had been} getting too much sleep. ”

—— Shakescene (talk) 06:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

One sentence paragraphs

Hey there all,
What's with the entire heuristic idea that most professors feel that one sentence paragraphs aren't entirely incorrect? I read from [8] it says one sentence paragraphs are correct (so long as it meets the criteria). Is there a good rationale for this heuristic?
Thanks in advance! --Agester (talk) 19:15, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

It's unclear to me whether you're arguing for one-sentence paragraphs (where appropriate), or against them. Can you clarify your question, please. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm just merely trying to figure out why some feel one-sentence paragraphs are inappropriate for something like a college paper, and why (like the source I gave) would argue for it, in the setting of say journalism. Both are professional styles of writing. My professor personally hates single sentence paragraphs, where as, an article like that says it's okay (and I must admit I'm guilty for using one-sentence paragraphs).
In other words, there's conflicting arguments, just wondering what the real deal is, and is there a rationale for this. --Agester (talk) 20:35, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The heuristic method, applied to "normal" essays, would generally show that very infrequently a coherent point can be made in a single sentence. Had I not added this very second sentence, this may have been an exception. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 20:59, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The heuristic is best rationalized by the five-paragraph method of writing papers where each paragraph should make a claim, provide evidence for that claim, and provide analysis to show how the evidence backs up the claim. Of course, writing a five-paragraph essay is horribly formulaic, but it establishes the conventions and tendencies of essay-writing. I doubt you could accomplish this in one sentence unless this sentence was so long that you might as well break it up into multiple sentences. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]}

The best style guides, as I recall from a disagreement with my Portuguese teacher a decade ago, don't have a rule against one-sentence paragraphs. It really depends almost entirely on context. One-sentence paragraphs, if not watched very closely, can degenerate into a choppy, superficial style that doesn't fit most academic purposes. But remember that Hemingway and George Orwell (who, out of economic necessity and the political exigencies of his day, wrote many more essays than stories) were hardly averse to short paragraphs that reflected everyday speech and avoided disjointed breathlessness. —— Shakescene (talk) 11:26, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Writing styles differ by culture and for different audiences. As a bad example (non academic) single sentence paragraphs proliferate in Direct Marketing as they can be very powerful, if not over-used. Most cultures would see academic writing as more dry and therefore less needing of this kind of drama. --Dweller (talk) 16:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Mahmoud

How do you pronounce "Mahmoud" (as in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)? I heard something like "Makh-mood" on TV but I wonder if the "k" was actually supposed to be a glottal stop. 69.228.171.150 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:31, 15 November 2009 (UTC).

The article shows the IPA transcription: [mæhmuːde æhmædiːneʒɒːd]. So no, no glottal stop. --Belchman (talk) 21:03, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I think people are trying to pronounce it as the Arabic letter ha, which is /ħ/ in IPA. I don't know how to represent it with an English sound, it's like a deeper H I guess. It's not a K sound but it's sort of in the same general area of the throat. Adam Bishop (talk) 22:52, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

And of course, this sound does not exist in Persian. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 23:34, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

There's also the "kh", represented in IPA by /x/, as used particularly in loan-words and dialects. The best known example is probably the Scottish word "loch". Grutness...wha? 23:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

In Arabic, Mahmoud has a ha, like Adam Bishop says, but in Persian I think it might become a kha. Steewi (talk) 01:38, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

According to Persian phonology it is realized as a regular h. This does not occur finally in English or many other languages but you can approximate it by adding a vowel after ("ma ha mood") then repeating the word gradually reducing the vowel to as little as possible. --JWB (talk) 01:50, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! I didn't see any pronunciation info at Mahmoud and hadn't actually looked at the article [[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (which I had linked to only as an example of someone with the name). The audio sample there definitely has a softer "h" than the TV announcer I heard. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 03:50, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

November 16

the name of a test

A test having a number of wrong answers and exactly ONE correct answer is called a multiple choice question.

(     ) Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?

(A) Michael Jackson

(B) "Queen"

(C) Snow White

(D) Rin Tin Tin

Now what's the name of a test having a number of correct answers? I thought it may be called a "multiple-answer question".

(     ) Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land are NOT fairest of all?

(A) Michael Jackson

(B) "Queen"

(C) Snow White

(D) Rin Tin Tin

Wikipedia does not seem to have an article for this kind of test. -- Toytoy (talk) 04:52, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I have seen these called "multiple response" questions - Pollinosisss (talk) 05:02, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I would still call this multiple choice. From the first sentence of our article (emphasis added): "respondents are asked to select the best possible answer (or answers) out of the choices from a list." rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 05:09, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. It would still be a multiple choice test. Dismas|^(talk) 16:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I've had teachers refer to it as "multiple multiple choice" to distinguish it from standard multiple choice. (i.e. when explaining to students that they can't just circle the first correct answer they come across and call it done.) -- 128.104.112.237 (talk) 20:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows OS uses a parallel system of Radio buttons, where only one choice may be selected, and Check boxes, where one or more choices may be selected.

Poll + pollex

What do you say about the relationship between "poll" (as in voting, in that people might have used to vote with a thumbs-up or -down) and pollex. The Talmud speaks of the Temple priests putting their thumbs into a circle so that an eenie-meini-moe sort of lottery could be cast to see who would be honored with various tasks in the Temple service. DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 13:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Poll means "head" in Middle English from various Germanic languages[9] - a poll (vote) is a head-count. Pollex means "thumb" in Latin[10]. I suspect it's just a coincidence they sound similar.Alansplodge (talk) 14:08, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

WI-FI

What does WI-FI mean? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.199.17.44 (talk) 14:36, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Did you see our article Wi-Fi? +Angr 14:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

And, specifically, see this section: Wi-Fi#The_Wi-Fi_name. StuRat (talk) 15:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

...which says, in part, "The term Wi-Fi suggests Wireless Fidelity, compared with the long-established audio recording term High Fidelity or Hi-Fi." --Thomprod (talk) 17:51, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't intend any sarcasm, nor heartlessness, or harshness, by my statement, but perhaps we should just boycott questions that ask for a definition of a word or acronym/initialism/etc. that is very, very easy to find my typing into the Wikipedia search field? Then people would know to input a search rather than engaging in the time consuming process (for asker and answerer) of posting a question. Of course, I know this isn't the Village Pump. --Dpr 71.111.194.50 (talk) 18:22, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Our guidelines for answering questions direct us to "provide as much of the answer as you are able to" and to "provide links when available". I take these as instructions to give the answer to any question if it can be given briefly, as well as providing a Wikilink where possible. Of course, it would be better for the questioner to search for the definition him/herself, but since they have chosen not to do that, I believe it is our responsibility to either give an appropriate answer to a question asked in good faith or decline to post a response. --Thomprod (talk) 19:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

How do you pronounce years 2009, 2012 etc.. ?

Hello you all! We are French and we wonder how the English speakers do pronounce the years following 2000. The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century#Pronunciation is interesting but I read that you say for 2009 : "twenty OH nine" or "two thousand and nine". But I guess that one of these two pronounciations must be dominant. Do you have other ways to pronounce these years ? May be it's different from one country to an other ? Thank you for your help. --82.216.68.31 (talk) 15:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I don't say either of those, but "two thousand nine". However, I'm going to make a concerted effort to pronounce the years from next year on "twenty ten", "twenty eleven", and so forth. That wouldn't have worked for 2000–09, since "twenty hundred" sounds dumb, and "twenty one", "twenty two", ... "twenty nine" would sound like 21, 22, ... 29. +Angr 15:48, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

From 2000 through 2009, I use something like "two-thousand-nine". Anything above that, it is something like "twenty-twelve". That is just what is natural to me. Every once in a while I hear something like "two-thousand-twelve", but that is very uncommon. I have never heard "twenty-oh-nine". —Akrabbim^talk 15:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Northeast US here. And the only thing I hear on a regular basis is something akin to "two thousand nine". Dismas|^(talk) 16:02, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree that, in the USA at least, "two thousand nine" is most common. People don't speak so often about years in the future, so I don't think that a "dominant" pronunciation has yet been established for 2010 or 2012. I've heard both "two thousand ten" and "twenty ten" about equally often. I suspect that by March or April, one pronunciation or the other will have won out. Marco polo (talk) 16:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Whenever I hear someone talking about the movie "2012" They call it twenty-twelve. Googlemeister (talk) 16:23, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

As I recall, 2010 was called twenty-ten, too. +Angr 16:47, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

So it was. That was in 1984, of course. I was used to thinking of the first movie and novel as "Two Thousand and One: A Space Odyssey", so I automatically thought of the sequel as "Two Thousand and Ten" by analogy and was surprised to hear the other pronunciation (and also that the movie omitted the novel's subtitle). Similarly, early in John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar there is dialogue referring to the year "twenty-ten", and I do not believe that on first reading I realized that that was supposed to be the year. But today I certainly do say that this year "two thousand (and) nine" will be followed by "twenty-ten". --Anonymous, twenty-three forty-four UTC, November sixteenth, two thousand nine.

When I hear people talking about "two thousand and twenty-five"and the like, I always want to ask them if they think the Battle of Hastings happened in "one thousand and sixty-six". AndrewWTaylor (talk) 16:53, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

In the UK 'two thousand and nine'dominates --77.166.169.185 (talk) 16:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure that I read a newspaper article on this subject - The Daily Telegraph perhaps. They had consulted the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which in the UK is the absulute authority on time and date. Their opinion was that "two thousand and nine" was acceptable but that it MUST be "twenty ten". Unusually I can't a reference to it on Google, but there's a review of the arguments in the Wikipedia article for 2010.Alansplodge (talk) 17:20, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

You can listen to http://forvo.com/search-en/2008/ and http://forvo.com/search-en/2009/. -- Wavelength (talk) 17:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I was astounded to hear someone say "twenty three" recently, referring to the year 2003. (Or maybe it was another year this decade — I forget precisely — but the same idea.) (I, as others above, say "two thousand nine". I'm American.)—msh210℠ 18:36, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

This is discussed a little in our articles on 2010 and 2011. Apparantly, if the "twenty X" convention doesn't take hold for 2010, it will definitely do so for 2011 since "two thousand and eleven" is just way too friggen long. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I usually hear "two thousand nine" or "two thousand and nine". Charles Osgood is one broadcaster who is trying to establish what I assume he believes to be the correct way to say it, as "twenty oh nine". "Twenty nine" would be wrong. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:13, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Two thousand; two thousand and nine; twenty-twelve. (Seem to be dominant here in the UK.) Two thousand ten sounds like an americanism around here. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 19:18, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Do all awkward phrasings sound like Americanisms in the UK? Even if they aren't common in the US (like in this case)? —Akrabbim^talk 19:23, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Most. "Two thousand nine" also sounds American (although the "and" contracted to 'n' is not unusual). As for a rule, they either sound regional (particularly on the pronunciation of single words) or American. One could theorise it sounds correct but unusual in the UK, therefore it is a native but non-UK speaker, and therefore likely an American. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 19:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I think both Americans and Brits have a tendency to assign to the other side of the herring pond any linguistic phenomena that sound unfamiliar but not non-native. I've known German and Dutch people whose English pronunciation was so good you'd never know they weren't native speakers - except that everyone thinks they're native speakers of someone else's accent: the Americans think they must be British, and the Brits think they must be American (or Australian). I moved from New York State to Texas when I was 9 years old, and a girl my age there thought I must be from England because I didn't have a Texas accent. +Angr 20:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Heh. My ex-wife was born in Liverpool, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney. Her parents spoke Russian (and some other languages) but very little English. They wisely decided not to try to teach her English at home, but let nature take ts course. So, her first language was Russian, and she learned English only after mixing with other kids and going to school. But she learned so well and her words were so well-formed that people often asked which part of England she came from. She would answer "Liverpool". That seemed to satisfy them, even though she doesn't sound remotely like a Liverpudlian. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:17, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

This was anticipated by the movie released in 1968 which was usually called "two-thousand one: a space oddysey". As far as some self-appointed authority saying it "must" be twenty-ten next year; well, all the more reason to keep saying "two thousand ten". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:27, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

In line with the other things that have been said, that film is almost always called "Two-thousand-and-one: A Space Oddysey" in the UK. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 20:37, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, we say "two thousand and one", too, but we spell it "Odyssey" for some odd reason.  :) -- JackofOz (talk)

Drat. This laptop does not a have a speelchkere. That's at you too, Bugs. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 20:56, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Always had trouble with that word, "odyssey". I often heard "two thousand and one" in addition to "two thousand one". NEVER "twenty oh one". Unfortunately, the year itself is never stated within the film. It's only in the film's creators and the critics talking about that those usages are heard. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

If you could find an audio clip of Arthur Clarke and/or Stanley Kubrick stating the title of the film, that would be telling. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Angr: It's unlikely that Brits will confuse Germans for Australians - Germans don't understand rhyming slang!! Alansplodge (talk) 09:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation of comfortable

Is non-pronunciation of the second 'o' and putting the 'r' sound after the 't' in comfortable, making it sound like 'comftɘrble' the norm in the English-speaking world, or is my pronunciation non-standard? 20.137.18.50 (talk) 17:10, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Not pronouncing the 'o' is very common in England, but we don't put the 'r' after the 't', primarily because most accents of the UK are Non-rhotic and we don't pronounce the 'r' anyway. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 17:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Sudden shift from England to UK there - "Flatten all the vowels and throw the "r" away", huh? :) Grutness...wha? 22:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I started by speaking from England, where I am, and broadened my comment to include the rest of the UK. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 11:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Technically, I think you do put the r after the t, and then don't pronounce it. Otherwise you'd have something like "comfətbl". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. The '/ə/' in our pronunciation of 'comftəbl' is from the '-a-' in the final '-able'. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) 11:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah yes, that's also possible. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

According to the article on Metathesis, it's a "frequent pronunciation" --77.22.37.20 (talk) 17:26, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

My Oxford English dictionary has [ˈkʌmftəbl] as the RP pronunciation, and [ˈkʌmfərtəbl] as the US one. If [ˈkʌmftərbl] is common, it's apparantly non-standard. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I think it's pretty common in the US. That's how I usually pronounce it anyway. Rckrone (talk) 18:01, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't the OED is a good arbiter of what's "standard" in the United States, if there is such a thing as a standard. According to Webster's New World Dictionary, edited and published in the United States, the primary pronunciation of "comfortable" is [ˈkʌmftərbl]. It is quite rare here to hear any other pronunciation from a rhotic speaker. Marco polo (talk) 18:02, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

For this and similar questions, you may wish to see the appropriate Wiktionary entry.—msh210℠ 18:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't agree with Wiktionary's judgment that "comfterble" is unstressed and "comfortable" is stressed; I'd say that "comfterble" is colloquial and "comfortable" is formal. I for one would only pronounce "comfortable" in four syllables and with all consonants in their written order if I was being very careful and speech-conscious. My usual everyday pronunciation is "comfterble". +Angr 19:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

In the United States, at least, I think that the only context in which you might expect to hear "comfortable" with four syllables, according to the "formal" pronunciation (as suggested by Angr) might be in a rehearsed speech by a highly educated person such as a college president or the current president of the United States (but not the previous one). Marco polo (talk) 20:56, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, here in New Zealand it's [ˈkʌmftəbl] except in the far south of the South Island, where [ˈkʌmftərbl] is fairly common (the semi-rhotic Scottish-influence of the Southland burr plays a part in that - watch The World's Fastest Indian for Sir Anthony Hopkins doing a good job of imitating the Southland burr). Grutness...wha? 22:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

As of Ƶ§œš¹, if we have to use the same analogy, then we have to pronounce the word ‘college’ as /cʌledʒ/ (as closer as in Indian Enɡlish /caːledʒ/).

As of KageTora, it seems correct (I guess) that 'r' in most UK or US accents are non-rhotic except at the initial. That is, the initial 'r' is always pronounced (may be not the same way as in the IPA, but as a flap). Is this correct? --Mihkaw napéw (talk) 04:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't see where "as a flap" is coming from. And it's not true that most US accents are non-rhotic... more likely, most are rhotic (particularly, General American is). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

So how do you pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘rhotic’? You have two choices: a) as a tap or flap, or b) as a trill. However, the flap/tap is not the IPA of the US or UK English; a ‘trill’ is. Correct?--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 05:53, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

No, it's generally an alveolar approximant. I can't think of any situation where an American English speaker would trill an r, or pronounce it as a tap. Perhaps you are confusing English with Spanish. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 06:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

OK. What kind of alveolar approximant do you use for ‘r’? Do you mean /ɹ/? Can you perhaps reference this for ‘rhotic’ (from any phonetic dictionaries of UK or US)? I think the ‘r’ in US or UK English is the trill (but a short) if it is rhotic. If not, this can be an approximant (depends on the vowel in the environment). Correct?--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 11:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I mean /ɹ/. You will not hear US speakers trilling. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 12:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think they do (have to) but not a long drill like in other languages. Can you perhaps reference the /ɹ/ in 'rohtic' that the /ɹ/ is the phonetic transcription for 'r'? Thanks.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 12:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

From http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhotic , Of a phoneme, it has the quality of the said letter. This includes the sounds of the IPA symbols /ɹ/, /ɻ/, /ɚ/, /ɝ/, and some would say /r/, or has r coloring. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 15:30, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Mihkaw, I am an American, we don't trill r's. You can walk around the US for years and you won't find an American English speaker who trills their r's. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Otherwise, there would be no ‘r’ in the language, and the sound would be an approximant as in ‘car’ or ‘core’. If one does not drill or flap/tap, canot get the ‘r’ pronounced. To get an ‘r’ sound, the active articulator must drill or tap/flap. For example, if one pronounces ‘r’ of any word initials in English as in the word ‘rhotic’, there is very clear /r/ sound. Although, in a non-rhotic accent, the phonemes are not just /kaː/ and /kɔː/ for ‘car’ and ‘core’, but there must be approximants to hit the ‘r’ sound slightly.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 17:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, American English is a language that does not have /r/ _{(see General American#Consonants)}. God forbid. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I do hear American English spears use a flap in words like three and thrill, but that's not all speakers. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

My opinion is that a language which is non-rhotic sensitive produces in general even the ‘r’ sound as an alveolar trill (a short) in a word like ‘three’ and the ‘r’ as an alveolar-palatal flap in a word like ‘rhotic'. That is, in these environments, there isn’t any approximants in their articulations. However, in some other non-rhotic environments like in ‘rt’ or 'tar', the ‘r’ sound is stoped (but not completely). But I do not know the answer how; perhaps by an approximant or by a schwa plus approximant.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 20:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, your opinion is wrong and I don't know where you're getting these ideas. This is simply not how American English speakers pronounce these words, and if you think it is then you clearly have not listened to an American English speaker. Maybe speakers of your dialect pronounce things this way, but speakers of American English do not. Maybe later today I can upload a recording so you can hear the pronunciation. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm a native speaker of American English and I can't even make an alveolar trill sound if I try. Rckrone (talk) 22:45, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Chain conundrums, anyone?

I was reading The Game of Words by Willard R. Espy the other day. He mentions something called a chain conundrum, which is a sort of chain of puns that lead into each other. His example turns a potato into a beehive by calling a potato a specked tater, which is a spectator, which is a beholder, which is a bee holder, which is a beehive (or something to that effect). I was wondering if chain conundrums exist outside Espy. Does anyone know any famous ones or where to find them? Does anyone want to try their hand at making one up themselves (I'm so curious about these things!)  ?EVAUNIT^{神の人間の殺害者} 20:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

How do escape a room given only a table? Rub your hand until it's sore; use the saw to cut the table in half; put the halves together to make a whole; climb through the hole. Not exactly what you describe, but similar (popular in these parts). :) 22:10, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

For an extended version of the chain in the original posting, see this page. -- Wavelength (talk) 00:37, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I devised this 30-word chain, which contains both nouns and verbs: designs, draws, pulls, jerks, starts, introduces, presents, shows, spectacles, glasses, tumblers, jumpers, dresses, habits, customs, taxes, levies, levees, banks, stocks, blocks, bars, poles, polls, surveys, measures, bars, counters, adders, vipers. -- Wavelength (talk) 03:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

November 17

grammatical antipattern used in advertising

What's exactly going on in the commonly used scheme of writing advertisements with a bunch of sentence fragments separated by periods as if they were real sentences? The current WMF fundraising banner is an example: "Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure." I don't really know any linguistic mumbo-jumbo, but I'm looking for an explanation like "those 'sentences' are interpreted as having an empty category where the verb and object are supposed to be. The listener unconsciously tries to apply transformations X, Y, and Z to fill in the blank, without success; however, the expended cognitive effort hitting the lexemes in the fragments from all different directions to get some meaning out of the sentence makes the listener's emotional response stronger". The expended effort from such a manipulation attempt is of course precisely what makes those ads so damn annoying. Is this an understood phenomenon? Could I be onto something interesting? Or does it just sound like nonsense? Thx. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 05:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's interesting: you have said the verb and object are missing; I would say the verb and subject are missing. I would complete then as "Wikipedia is our shared knowledge. Wikipedia is our shared treasure." The fragments are noun phrases, but that article doesn't talk about what happens when they are used on their own, so I can really help. --Tango (talk) 06:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Well? We're waiting, Tango!  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 06:49, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

And now you've said that I can't even correct my typo because it would make you look crazy and, for some reason, that is frowned upon... Grrrr... ;) --Tango (talk) 07:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

But I am crazy, and proud of it. Didn't you know?  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 07:49, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Does ellipsis help? TomorrowTime (talk) 06:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Ellipsis (linguistics) might, though. ;) --Tango (talk) 07:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Damn. That's what happens when you don't check what you link to :/ TomorrowTime (talk) 08:56, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

They're not supposed to be sentences. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 07:38, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

This reminds me of the series of signs you sometimes encounter when driving into a French village. They usually look as if they were put up in the 1950s. Typically, first sign: Bienvenue à Montrond-dans-le-Val. Next sign: Son église XII siecle. Next sign: Son marché (samedi). Next sign: Sa piscine. Next sign: Son musée de poupées. (Translation: Welcome to Roundhill-in-the-Valley. Its 12th century church. Its Saturday market. Its swimming pool. Its doll museum.) The lack of verbs is the same as in the original example, but using "our" instead of "its" indicates a more subtle advertising technique, drawing the reader in. But in general, is it not typical of advertising to use slogans that are as reduced and punchy as possible? Itsmejudith (talk) 11:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think these kinds of ellipses are common in advertising where the missing words or phrases or clause for the sentence of the speech deemed to be understood by the audience (targeted audience in particular) as deictic elements.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 12:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Short phrases are often used in advertising. Their creators are trying to grab the reader's attention. Lengthy sentences are less likely to do so than a few short words. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:13, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

These are minor sentences. One could force them to be into the nominal sentence category, I guess. Pallida  Mors 15:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

And anyway, the rule is that complete sentences have to end with a period (or question mark or exclamation point), not that every string of words that ends with a period has to be a complete sentence. Seriously. Pais (talk) 16:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Should there be capital letters beginning words in the middle of a sentence, as in: "Wikipedia Is Powered by People Like You?" Bus stop (talk) 16:47, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

In terms of impact, they are supposed to enjoy similar benefits to sound bytes. They're snappy and help cut through what advertisers call "noise". Pithiness is attractive in modern slogans, tag lines, mottos, strap lines and the like, which is curious because historically (and even recently) there are some outstanding ones that are anything but pithy. --Dweller (talk) 16:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Would you believe... sound bites? --Anonymous, 21:56 UTC, November 17, 2009.

"Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure" is the presentation of two ideas, the second of which qualifies the first. Knowledge is easier to accept than treasure, in terms of Wikipedia. Having accepted knowledge, as what Wikipedia has to offer, we are ready to consider whether it is treasure that we find here as well. One is less likely to reject the treasure designation after having first found little to object to in the knowledge designation. Bus stop (talk) 17:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It occurs to me that "shared treasure" could use a "citation needed" tag. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:37, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure" : ) ←Bus stop (talk) 01:41, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and given that anyone can edit, anything can turn up in an article. So, as my old man might say, "we're using the term 'knowledge' advisedly." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Japanese translation

I'd be grateful if someone could translate this for me please. I believe it is a poem, possibly by or about Emperor Meiji (1852-1912).

• Asamidori sumiwataritaru ozorano
• Hiroki wo onoga kokoro tomogana

Many thanks81.156.126.150 (talk) 10:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's archaic Japanese, so I may make a mistake. Even a native might have trouble with it:

浅緑澄み渡りたる大空の

The clear, pale green sky

広き己が心ともなが

Would that my own heart were also so broad

According to this list of poetry, it was indeed composed by the Emperor Meiji. Paul Davidson (talk) 13:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much, and for confirming the Emperor Meiji authorship.81.156.126.150 (talk) 13:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There are a few typos in both the romanization and the corresponding Japanese transcription. Corrected parts in bold:

asamidori sumiwataritaru ōzora no

浅緑澄み渡りたる大空の

hiroki o ono ga kokoro tomogana

広きを己が心ともがな

Also note that this is hardly archaic. The poem is little more than a hundred years old. There are a few pseudo-classical constructions such as -taru and -ki (modern -ta and -i, respectively), but this will not hurt comprehension. An average Japanese elementary student should have no problem understanding it. (A comparison would be like using thee or whence in modern English.) The translation is decent. 115.128.71.142 (talk) 08:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting my typos. :) Paul Davidson (talk) 11:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm collecting words which can't end sentences (properly).

So far, I've got 12 9 (except for clitics & contractions like "it's, I'll"):

a = an, the,

but (However, see Deor's comment below)

and, or, nor,

my, your, our, their, + thy

But, my, if, or only occur finally in lexicalized phrases, not really on their own.

Any other suggestions?

HOOTmag (talk) 20:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Than, if, every (?),

But. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC) Oops, already there. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't agree with "as".

I'm going to a fancy dress ball tonight.

Cool. What are you going as?. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:45, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. I'm still looking for additional words. HOOTmag (talk) 21:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) As can end sentences when it's used as a preposition ("What is it known as?"), and so can but, at least when a bit of ellipsis is used ("Have you found any bones?" "I've found nothing but"). All of them can be used at the end of sentences when they're referred to as words ("In English, the definite article is the"), but that may be too trivial for your purposes. Deor (talk) 20:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• As for the meaning of 'as' , you're right.
• As for the meaning of 'but' , you're right; however, I wouldn't like to use ellipses.
• As you've guessed correctly, I'm talking about the meaning of the word: 'the' , rather than about the very word 'the'. One should distinguish between: the, and: 'the' (the former being the meaning of the latter).
• Anyways, I'm still looking for additional words.

HOOTmag (talk) 21:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh my! :P Rimush (talk) 21:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

but can still end a sentence, even without ellipses. For example, in the somewhat slangy phrase "doing everything but", as in "they didn't have sex, they did everything but". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

That is an ellipsis, it is missing "have sex" at the end. --Tango (talk) 02:38, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The idea, though, is that it's become lexicalized: if you know the phrase, I could drop the "they didn't have sex" and just say "they did everything but", with no context, and you'd know what I mean. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Every word can end a sentence; this sentence ends with "a". — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:28, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's meaningless to even ask the question if we allow citations and ellipsis. With this constraint, it's an interesting question. (There's also 'thy'.) Instead of just coming up with new words, let's also see if we can come up with normal sentences (clauses) that end with these words.

We also need to discern homographs and clearly derivational usage. If we can find the NOR in "NOR-gate" in electronics at the end of a sentence, or the nor of 19-nor steroids in organic chemistry, I wouldn't remove "nor" from the list.

I can't think of anything that ends in "than" off hand. kwami (talk) 22:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's not so much an issue of "can't end a sentence" as "heads/projects a phrase, and therefore needs something after it". Therefore, it seems that in English, things like determiners, co-ordinators, and complementizers (where they aren't homonymous...which all the English ones are, AFAIK) meet these criteria. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

But some of them can. If can end a sentence, as can as and but. So it's not quite so simple. If we take your class of words, which of them actually occur finally? And the possessive pronouns are bizarre too: we have two forms, one attributive and one non-attributive, though my is an exception even here. kwami (talk) 23:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

When can 'if' end a sentence? The only example I can think of is something like "The question is not when, the question is if", which is bordering on quotation (although maybe still acceptable). As for 'as' and 'but', in the 'as' examples above I would call 'as' a stranded preposition, rather than a coordinator, and in my 'but' example it's just part of a lexicalized phrase and is not part of 'but's normal behavior. As for the possessives, I assume that's just because one class of them behaves like a determiner (it projects an NP) and the other has noun behavior built-in. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

As if!

Yes, granted, 'if', 'but', and 'my' here are lexicalized phrases. That probably is a distinction we should note. (Can't end a clause unless part of phrase X.)

I wouldn't consider as as a prep and as as a coordinator as two words, but rather as two uses of the same word. Though as you mention with that below, this can st be a difficult distinction to make. kwami (talk) 23:38, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

(after four ecs) Kwamikagami's point about homographs is definitely worth noting. After all, the ancient Chinese Loulan civilisation was based around Lop Nor. I am, however, having trouble thinking of a sentence which could end in "every". Grutness...wha? 23:21, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think maybe the set phrase "all and every" might occur finally, but I'm not sure. kwami (talk) 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Somewhere a line needs to be drawn between which homonyms can be discarded and which can't. Take the word "that", for example. It really represents two or three different, homophonous, lexical items: that_COMP, as in "The dog that ate my homework...."; that_DET, as in "That dog ate my homework"; and a noun, that_N, "That is the dog that ate my homework".. The noun version clearly can end a sentence ("I want that."). The complementizer version cannot (I can't think of a way the determiner version can, either, although arguably that is part of the same lexical entry as the noun, since their meanings are the same even though their parts of speech are different). But should that_COMP be excluded because it happens to share the spelling and pronunciation of that_N? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There's also attributive 'no' (absolutive 'none') vs. interjection 'no'. This starts getting difficult: these are all historically related, and there's no clear line separating words from uses of words in such situations. kwami (talk) 23:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

In response to this and your earlier comment, it seems now that the issue is more one of grammatical categories than of individual words. It seems (so far, at least), that we can identify some grammatical categories that can appear at the end of sentences, and some that cannot. Then, for word X (which has multiple uses X₁, X₂, X₃, etc., and each of these uses is a member of some grammatical category), if all of X's uses fall within one of those off-limits categories, then we can say "this word can't end a sentence". On the other hand, if one or more of its uses falls in a category that can end a sentence, then we say "this word can end a sentence"—ie, if one use can end a sentence, then the whole word is covered. For instance, the only has the_DET, so we say it can't end a sentence. as has as_PREP and as_COORD, one of which can't end a sentence and one of which can, so we say the 'word' as can end a sentence.

Lexicalized phrases may create exceptions (i.e., when all of X's uses fall within 'cannot-end-a-sentence' categories, but X is part of one lexicalized phrase that can). But in natural language, there are always going to be exceptions, so that's ok. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it isn't a problem, it's just interesting in the playing-around-with-language kinda way like coming up with words that have no vowels, or no consonants, or no rhymes. kwami (talk) 23:53, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It may be pushing it, but: "You can't have both, it's either/or". Warofdreams talk 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's good. Again in a set phrase only. kwami (talk)

That's just an ellipsis again, though. It is short for "it's either that one or the other one". --Tango (talk) 02:52, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. It may have originated through ellipsis, but it's taken on a life of its own. S.o. who says, "You can't have both, it's either/or" isn't engaging in ellipsis the way saying "Although ..." is ellipsis; they're just parroting a set expression. kwami (talk) 07:31, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there any way of ending a sentence with "of"? Warofdreams talk 23:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"What's this a piece of?" As far as I know, any preposition can be stranded like that. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Good point. There may be exceptions - I can't think of a way to use "versus" like that. A few other thoughts: "whether", "although", "whereas". Warofdreams talk 00:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think those all fall under the heading of co-ordinating conjunctions, so as far as I can tell the list of categories is still determiners, co-ordinators, and complementizers. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

According to our article on grammatical conjunctions, "although" is a subordinating conjunction - and it appears "whereas" is, too. Again, according to our article on conjunctions, "whether" is a complementiser. Versus must be a preposition. Warofdreams talk 01:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, grammatically, we wouldn't expect any of them to end a clause. And formal words like "whereas" aren't likely to enter into lexicalized phrases the way "but" has. kwami (talk) 07:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you're trying to draw a bright line where there actually isn't one. Perhaps a question with a more verifiable answer is: what are the words that are least likely to appear at the end of a sentence when they appear at all? I'm tempted to fire up NLTK and find an answer. rspεεr (talk) 03:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Well yes, kwami acknowledged above that any word can end a sentence, and established some guidelines (i.e., excluding quotations, etc.) to make the question more meaningful. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

This is English. You can end a sentence with any word of your choosing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:33, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

And you can speak English with tones if you wish, but that doesn't make it a tonal language. Rspεεr, there are some words that people don't end clauses with. It isn't a matter of probability, it just isn't done. (At least, to the extent that if you were to say it that way, people would either expect you to finish your sentence, or understand that you're leaving off the end.) Of course, you could coin a phrase, and if it catches on, you have a new exception: take "Peel Me a Grape", whether "polar-bear rug" is a verb. kwami (talk) 07:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

You sound irritated by my approach. If you want to answer a question about what people do or don't do in language, you can either speculate, or you can refer to a corpus, and I chose the corpus. rspεεr (talk) 08:43, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not irritated, it's just that a corpus like Brown isn't going to come close to answering the question. It's worth a shot to see if anything interesting turns up, but, as you note, it suggests that "united" doesn't appear in final position--clearly not a reliable result. We're not asking for frequency data, but a grammaticality judgement. Granted, grammaticality judgements depend on frequency, but at much lower rates than this corpus is capable of detecting. (A million words is nothing compared to what each of our brains has processed in recent memory.) I suppose we could run each of the negative results past larger corpora, but there would still by words like 'thy' which won't show up because they don't occur in the corpus at all, and probably thousands of uncommon words for which the lack of sentence-final attestation is statistically meaningless. kwami (talk) 09:24, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

This is pretty much a nice microcosm of a 40-odd-year-old debate in psycholinguistics/cognitive science/neurolinguistics, between structural and statistical models. Townsend & Bever (2001), Sentence Comprehension, has a nice overview of it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 12:56, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Was that a response to me? Because I very much agree, which is why I wanted to rephrase it in terms of probability. Anyway, I just did this using NLTK on the Brown corpus. It's not quite a big enough corpus to answer the way I wanted, but here are the 20 most common words that never end a sentence in the Brown corpus:

an their its than our your because very during without every united until almost toward per although it's whether having.

Some of these are surprising, such as "having" and "united", because it's easy to construct sentences that do end with them -- they just don't happen in the corpus. And there are some clever ones much further down the list, such as "Rhode". rspεεr (talk) 04:01, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

What is it called when a word is used as a word type that isn't its natural word type, in an effort to defeat the original question: Example: I like the word 'and'. Would this be called noun-izing? Comet Tuttle (talk) 06:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Nominalization? 115.128.71.142 (talk) 07:34, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The use-mention distinction. rspεεr (talk) 07:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, good phrase. kwami (talk) 09:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Can't 'than' end a sentence? How about:

• I'm the only person you're older than.

hm?

HOOTmag (talk) 11:25, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I would agree. 'I am the only person older than whom you are' sounds ludicrous. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 12:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

"Properly" is a slippery concept in English. "Hey, I'm going to town. Wanna come with?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Which is grammatical only in certain German- and Yiddish-influenced varieties of American English. +Angr 16:13, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how this is a counterexample of anything. We already excluded prepositions from the list of categories that "can't" end sentences—in other words, any example of a preposition ending a sentence just supports what I proposed above. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:34, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

So does anyone have an example of a sentence ending with "versus"? If not, we haven't excluded them. Warofdreams talk 20:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Geek #1- So how would you say "A versus B" in reverse Polish notation?

Geek #2- "A B versus." 20.137.18.50 (talk) 20:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

That doesn't count, as it's in quotation (and not really English). versus may just be an unusual preposition and an exception to the rule. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 20:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

"John is the man my lawsuit is versus." +Angr 20:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

November 18

Is ‘lo’ or ‘laa’ the correct version for ‘law’?

The Cambridge online dictionary indicates that US version is ‘laa’, but we usually here this as ‘lo’ (from all medias). And the ‘l’ in ‘law’ doesn’t seem the ‘l’ of the IPA. Where am I wrong here?--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 04:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what type of transcription you're using, but the vowels such as those found in the words "law" and "lo" don't merge in pronunciation in any widespread quasi-standard type of pronunciation of English. Wikipedia has an article on Cot-caught merger; the resulting pronunciations are highly divergent from British quasi-standard pronunciations, but very prevalent in the U.S... AnonMoos (talk) 05:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

*laʊ > lɔ: > lɔ > lɑ. Perhaps your dialect does not merge /ɔ/ and /ɑ/. 220.233.133.226 (talk) 05:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

In RP it is pronounced /lɔ:/, with the same vowel as "caught". --Tango (talk) 05:31, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Rhymes with "jaw", "paw", "raw", "saw", etc. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Since you are asking about pronunciation, Mihkaw—and I'm inferring that you are not a native speaker of English—it might be best to stick to IPA. Other ways of describing vowels will only lead to confusion, since a given letter in an English word can be pronounced with different vowels in different varieties of English, all of which may be quite different from the usual pronunciation of that letter in another language. In response to your question, there are not really "correct" pronunciations in American English. Instead, there are common pronunciations that most people will understand, and other pronunciations (for example by English language learners) that people may not understand. You might call the second set of pronunciations "incorrect", but there is sometimes no single "correct" pronunciation. Law is a word with more than one pronunciation in different varieties of American English. Probably the more standard pronunciation is [lɔ:], which is identical to the British standard Received Pronunciation. However, a very common pronunciation, particularly in the American South, is [lɑ:]. I would say that this is the [l] of IPA. Marco polo (talk) 15:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think these are kinds of issues that many people struggle (though not very important to non-natives of English), and it is difficult to say that an education for highest degrees or even heights linguistic degrees helps them to solve these kinds of complexities. Of course, linguists themselves struggle to get these kinds of things strait. You might agree on this as well.

On the question, I think (using few analogies) even the American South accent is not /kɑːl/ for ‘call’ or /kɑː/ for ‘caw’. Interestingly, my friends Cindy and Shapiro, who are very talented orators, also pronounce ‘law’ as /lɑː/ (as stated in the Cambridge online dictionary), which is not custom to most Americans.

However, if the RP is /lɔ:/, then I do not understaned why the ‘l’ is an approximant.__Mihkaw napéw (talk) 17:00, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Which of the characteristics of an approximant (and specifically lateral approximant) is it missing then? — Emil J. 17:21, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

It would be surprising if your friends pronounce law [laː]. More typical is [lɑː]. And in the American South, I think you will find [kɑː] for caw. Marco polo (talk) 17:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I was wrong. Yes, it should be /ɑː/, and I now corrected the previous edit.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 18:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Translation From Polish

I've got a pizza here which I bought in a supermarket, and the instructions tell me to 'defrost pizza and then bake in oven,' and just below, 'avoid defrosting.' Now, this was admittedly confusing, so I decided to read the instructions in other languages, and they all seem to mean something like, 'take care when defrosting' (not sure why), but in Polish (where the pizza comes from), it says 'chronić przed rozmrożeniem.' What does this mean, and which is it closer to, 'avoid' or 'take care when'? --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 12:43, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Avoid. — Emil J. 12:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah! 'Chronić' can mean 'guard against' or 'keep from', so now it makes sense to me - not a language problem after all. Cheers! Additional question, then: is 'rozmrażać' transitive or intransitive? --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 13:23, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I would guess what they really mean is "defrost right before cooking, but don't leave it sitting out so long that it rots". Or, alternatively, they might mean "use oven on low to defrost, don't leave it sitting out to defrost". StuRat (talk) 14:52, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I've never encountered a frozen pizza that needed to be defrosted before baking, and what frozen food usually warns you not to do is re-freeze it once it's been thawed. +Angr 16:12, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think Stu was on the money with his first thought, although he went a little too far. It's not a matter of not leaving it out of the freezer so long that it rots; it's a warning not to let it defrost at all before it's ready to be cooked. And that warning would apply just as much to the store as to the buyer. -- JackofOz (talk) 19:55, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Link between "boreal" and "arboreal" ?

Do they share a root word ? The first means northern and the second means wooded, so they don't seem related (unless you're talking about northern woods, I suppose). StuRat (talk) 15:23, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

There is no relation. Boreal comes from the Greek Boreas, meaning "north wind", but probably originally meaning "wind from the mountains", ultimately derived from an Indo-European root *gwer-, meaning "mountain". Arboreal comes from the Latin arbor or "tree", probably deriving from an Indo-European root *erdh-, meaning "to grow or rise". Marco polo (talk) 15:57, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

"Don"/"Dan" river names

There are several rivers in Europe named River Don. In addition there are the Dnieper and Dniestr Rivers, and the Danube, all with a similar d*n root. Do these river names come from a common source, i.e. an Indo-European word meaning river or something of the sort? There is an etymological discussion of the river's name in the Dniepr article, but what about the others? 99.166.95.142 (talk) 16:36, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, all the river names you cite are derived from the IE root *dānu-, meaning "river". The names of the Danube and the Don in Scotland are Celtic in origin; those of the Dnieper, Dniester, and Russian Don are Iranian in origin. Deor (talk) 17:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

And the Russian Donets presumably also. +Angr 17:36, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Mispronouncing "et cetera" as "ek cetera"

What is the origin or cause behind this common mispronounciation in the US? I have also seen the abbreviation "etc." misspelled "ect." Would this be due to the same reasoning? Our article says, "A common use of the abbreviation is "ect", which is not supported by official English dictionaries..." I believe that's because it is wrong, but why is it "common"? --Thomprod (talk) 17:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Just a hypothesis here. The mistake in the written form probably isn't related to the spoken form. I doubt people make the mistake in pronounciation due to the erroneous "ect." because I don't think people consciously try to mimic the written form. Rather, I think it's because the English language has few words beginning with the "etc" sound, but may words beginning with the "ek" sound, such as exception, except, excerpt, etc. --71.111.194.50 (talk) 18:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Along the same line, I have even heard some teachers mispronounce "especially" as "ek-speh-shu-lee". No wonder our youngsters pick this up! --Thomprod (talk) 18:54, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

If you want the "stas-tis-tics" on this sort of thing, you have only to "ah-ks".  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 19:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The mispronunciation occurs in the UK, as well. I would suggest that the mistake in the written form is a result of the mispronunciation. And I believe that it's a mixture of lazy speech and a certain lack in education. For English speakers, it's much easier and more natural to form the "ek" sound, as 71.111.194.50 said, than it is the "ets" sound. Even the majority of people who do pronounce it "properly" are still pronouncing it wrong, as they turn it into one word, instead of the two that it is. Not to mention that "cet-er-a" turns into "setra". I make a point of pronouncing the two words correctly, and the reaction is usually that I'm considered stuffy and haughty or showing off. Maedin\^talk 18:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Maedin, I am reminded of the iconic performance of Yul Brynner as the King in the musical The King and I who ending many of his lines with a very well-articulated "et cet-er-a, et cet-er-a, et cet-er-a." --Thomprod (talk) 18:54, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Tones in Thai

Are there any dead syllables with rising tone in the Thai language? --84.61.166.115 (talk) 20:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC)