Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 July 31

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July 31

Apartment property classes

I was reading apartment, and I noticed that apartments are classified by classes so investors and real estate brokers can assess the quality of the property. But my question is, is it possible for a very old property to be very luxurious and desirable? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 01:24, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

How old is very old? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

30-40 years old. Can a 40-year-old luxury apartment be Class A if it's well maintained and updated? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 01:52, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Who knows but 84 year old apartments can cost $71,277,500. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:07, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

30-40 equals very old? Judging by the section to which you refer, anything older than 1977 is in the lowest class, which doesn't make much sense; 740 Park Avenue is an exception, of course, but tons of 41-and-older buildings can be found in rich or middle-class areas and considered to be on par with the rest of the area. The section has no sources whatsoever, and its unusual conclusions make me question its trustworthiness. Nyttend (talk) 02:42, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

With housing, age alone doesn't mean it's in bad shape, as long as it's maintained properly. Parts of the White House were built over 200 years ago, but it isn't ready for the wrecking ball quite yet. StuRat (talk) 05:57, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I know a guy who did some electrical work in the White House a while back, not in one of the fancy parts of the building that the public or the bigwigs ever see. He said the out-of-sight parts were as decrepit as hell. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 07:46, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

That paragraph lacks sources, so I wouldn't trust it too much. But actually, I think this whole discussion is based on misreading the article. It says class A properties are "usually less than ten years old" and class B "can be 10 to 25 years old" (my italics). The modality in those sentences should indicate that all the age ranges are approximate; the verbs have been changed in the later sentences for stylistic reasons. Read as a whole, the section indicates that the age ranges are approximate. In addition, it says these grades are used by investors. I think that's very important context: you might buy a Victorian mansion in need of loving care and attention as a residence, but many (most?) professional investors getting into properly will be asking their broker for 400 units with a particular rental return. These classifications are for bulk buying and older properties are not investment grade (to borrow a term from another market). Matt's talk 09:46, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Jehovah's (W/w)itnesses

I was under the impression that members of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society typically referred to themselves (in print) as "Jehovah's witnesses", i.e. they're people who had witnessed the work of Jehovah, but not some sort of status as would be conveyed by a capitalised "Witnesses". However, https://www.jw.org/en consistently uses "Witnesses": not just in lots-of-caps bits like "OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES" or "How Is the Work of Jehovah’s Witnesses Financed?", but also in a normal sentence, "You are warmly invited to attend all three days of the upcoming convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses." The same usage appears in a prominent subpage, https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses.

So, was I wrong in believing that there's historically been a preference for "witnesses" (i.e. "Witnesses" has long been common), or has there been some sort of switch from "witnesses" to "Witnesses" in recent years? Nyttend (talk) 01:50, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I, personally (being 60), have no recollection of ever seeing the name written (in the UK) either by the Society itself or by a third party (e.g. in a newspaper report) with anything other than a capital 'W'. While my experience is of course in no way definitive, it leads me to ask if you have any evidence of the lower-case 'w' being used by any Reliable Source. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.204.182.36 (talk) 04:36, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I've never witnessed it being lower case here in Canada. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:04, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Nyttend -- they're functionally and organizationally (and in most countries legally) a separate denomination, and I don't know what purpose there would be for trying to deny this (as an uncapitalized "w" would suggest). Before they were a fully-separate denomination, they were actually known as "Bible Students". Of course, the real problem in the name is the word "Jehovah"[sic], which never existed in the Hebrew language in that form, and originated as a mistake... AnonMoos (talk) 08:17, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

You can blame King James for that oddity. And, yes, it's a capital W. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

"Jehovah" originated (or started to be popularized) among Christian Hebraists of the 16th century who didn't know as much Hebrew as they thought they did. It actually only occurs seven times in the KJV (three of those occurrences in place names). It wasn't until the late 19th century that a general-purpose Bible version with liberal use of "Jehovah" was published... AnonMoos (talk) 08:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

"YHWH's Witnesses" just doesn't have the same ring to it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:02, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Are you sure the mistake is unintentional? Old Testament literalists might be reluctant to say "Yahweh" - I wonder if the term is viewed as an alternative to saying "Adonai" or "Lord" or whatever. Wnt (talk) 11:38, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Wnt -- Yahweh originated as a scholarly/linguistic reconstruction in the early 19th century. It does not directly come from Jewish tradition, and was not in the mix in the 16th and 17th centuries. If Christian Hebraists of the 16th century deliberately applied the vowels of one word to the consonants of another word, creating a strange mish-mash (Yehowah or in Latinized form "Jehovah") which never existed in Hebrew, then they were still doing something rather bizarre which it's hard to characterize as not being a mistake... AnonMoos (talk) 15:29, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It wouldn't have, because faithful Jews would have considered it a grave sin to say God's name out loud. The final irony is their assumption that YHWH is God's name. It isn't. It's merely the response God gave to Moses when asked what His name is: "I am that I am." No human knows wha6 God's actual name is - assuming He even has one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:38, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Not so, Baseball Bugs. The response is recorded as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎, ehyeh ašer ehyeh [ehˈje aˈʃer ehˈje] "I am who I am". It is certainly arguable that YHWH is derived from the root HYH of "ehyeh", but it is neither the same word nor a regular derivative. --ColinFine (talk) 12:50, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

The triliteral roots h-y-y and h-w-y are probably variants of each other (only differing by a semivowel). The root h-y-y is used to form the common verb meaning "to be" in Hebrew. Modern reconstructions of the pronunciation of YHWH commonly assume that it's an inflected verb form of h-w-y (following a common Semitic name pattern, where Isaac is originally a verb which means "he laughs" etc.). The hypothetical reconstructed form yahweh could mean "he is" or "he causes to be", or several less likely possibilities. The pseudo-form yehowah (i.e. Jehovah) of course has no assignable meaning. P.S. If you're attempting to transcribe Biblical Hebrew pronunciation, you shouldn't leave out the glottal stops [ʔ]. -- AnonMoos (talk) 13:16, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

In any case, it's not God telling Moses what His name is. But over time it came to be treated that way. That's why the RSV translated it as "I am that I am" and then just "I am". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:23, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

As I misunderstand it: the original four-letter word is customarily written in the Torah with the vowel-points for ə-o-a, as a reminder to substitute the word ǝdonaj ('my lord') for that which must not be uttered. Not knowing that tradition, it's natural to read it as jǝhowah. —Tamfang (talk) 05:54, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

It could be considered a relatively easy mistake to make if you're poring over a Hebrew Bible manuscript with the help of a basic symbol pronunciation cribsheet (probably grossly inadequate by the standards of modern linguistic phonology), but you're not aware of the finer points of Jewish recitation traditions, and you're not actually talking to any Jewish scholars (or you don't trust anything that Jewish scholars say to you). However, that doesn't do anything to change the fact that it's a major blunder which leads to a useless result (or "the bastard word...obtained by fusing the vowels of the one word with the consonants of the other" as it's called in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2nd. edition, 1978) edited by F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone ISBN 0-19-211545-6). AnonMoos (talk) 07:02, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I've never seen anything by outsiders that used "witnesses"; I was simply asking about a preference for "witnesses" in official Society publications or by its members. Nyttend (talk) 11:36, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Their website uses the capital W.[1] As it happens, I have a relative who's a member, and they use the capital W. It's a part of the title. To lower-case it would be like writing "church of England" or "Roman catholic". Or "New York yankees". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:27, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It used to be lower case, then changed to upper case at some point in the 1970s. 203.63.198.211 (talk) 15:52, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It was being spelled with a capital W in newspapers in at least the 1940s. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:24, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

"The" Hague

Is there a specific reason The Hague always includes "The"? Are there any other "The" cities? — 107.15.152.93 (talk) 05:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The article explains some of the reason, and at least a few come to mind: The Dalles, Oregon, The Woodlands, Texas, and The Valley, Anguilla. --Golbez (talk) 06:21, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Not to mention that, translated literally, El Paso means "The Pass" and Los Angeles means "The Angels". --Golbez (talk) 06:23, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The article is not explicit, but apparently, 'The Hague' translates as 'The Wood'. With Los Angeles being the outlier, the examples are named after a geographic feature. — 107.15.152.93 (talk) 07:02, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The definite article also exists in the original Dutch, Den Haag. The name may literally mean "the wood", it is better translated as "The Hedge in the sense of "an enclosure", as explained in the article's history section. This article also has more background.--Jayron32 12:13, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

France has Le Mans, Le Havre, Le Touquet (which is not a city), and no doubt others. Oporto includes the definite article in the English version of its name, but not the Portuguese. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 07:15, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Countries and important cities are prefaced by the definite articles "o" and "a" in Portuguese but are not part of the name. Hack (talk) 13:03, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

• Other places that always include the definite article (either English or another language) include The Villages, Florida, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Las Cruces, New Mexico, The Gambia (definitive article is always part of the country name), The Bronx, The Plains, Virginia, 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, La Rochelle, France, and probably many more. There are also many Arabic-origin place names that begin with "Al-" which is the Arabic definitive article. --Jayron32 12:22, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The odd thing about The Hague is that it is not "The Wood" or "Den Hague". —OP:dynamic IP=2606:A000:4C0C:E200:E14F:DD6F:CFA5:F319 (talk) 16:35, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure why that is odd; English rarely translates place names directly. Le Havre is not called "The Harbor" and "Los Alamos" is not called "The Cottonwoods". --Jayron32 16:39, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Odd in the sense that it uses the English article + Dutch noun. (OP:2606:A000:4C0C:E200:E14F:DD6F:CFA5:F319 (talk) 16:52, 31 July 2017 (UTC))

Not so unusual. For example, the German Air Force, which we called "The Luftwaffe". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:55, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

However, note that the article name is Luftwaffe and not The Luftwaffe. OP:2606:A000:4C0C:E200:E14F:DD6F:CFA5:F319 (talk) 17:14, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Language is not a consistent system, and should never be expected to be. "Why does this weird thing happen here?" can only be answered with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Yes, there are standards. Yes, sometimes they are disobeyed. Whatchagonnado? --Jayron32 17:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Tangent Warning! — To me, the oddest English placename translation is Cologne, Germany. Before my first (pre-internet) visit to Germany (English: "Land of Germs"), I went to a repository of bound text files and made a mental note of places to visit. Near the end of my visit, I realized that I hadn't been to Cologne yet, and couldn't find it on a map (that I acquired after arrival), but I knew it was a major city -- where is "Cologne"? Eventually I figured it out, or was told. —OP:2606:A000:4C0C:E200:E14F:DD6F:CFA5:F319 (talk) 17:40, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Much of Western Germany is like this; the region was contested so often between France and Germany (and going back further to when they were both part of Francia) place names often had a French and German version; for various historical reasons the French version of the name was often used for the English name; more egregious than Cologne is Aix-la-Chapelle, which until fairly recently was the common English name for Aachen. Even cities that are not particularly close to France are known by their French names, i.e. fr:Nuremberg. Whether a name is known in English by the German version or the French version probably has more to do with the size and importance of the settlement; the larger and more often a place name has been used the more "linguistic inertia" the form has, which is why Cologne has persisted. --Jayron32 17:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I see your Cologne, and raise you a Leghorn. --Golbez (talk) 18:18, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Also Flushing is quite amusing. But when Johnny Foreigner stops calling London Lontoo (Finnish) or Rondon (Japanese), we might think about using the right names for their cities (see List of names of European cities in different languages). Alansplodge (talk) 18:49, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

[2]. In reality, no bus goes from Flushing Meadows to the World Trade Center. (Flushing Meadows Park is New York's 4th biggest park). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:01, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Then there's Prague, a French version of Praha. And the Russian capital, which we call Saint Petersburg (rather than St Peter's City, perhaps) is still known by the Russians in its German form "Sankt-Peterburg". At one time it was given a more Russian name, Petrograd, but they dropped the Sankt/Saint part. If they had gone the whole hog, it would be something like "Svyatoy-Petrograd". All very weird and interesting. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:11, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It became "Petrograd" around the outbreak of the First World War (if I remember rightly, the rationale was that Germany was now an enemy) and remained thus until being renamed "Leningrad", so the time periods for "St. Petersburg" are 1703-1914 and 1991-present. Nyttend (talk) 00:40, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

The Pas in Manitoba. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 01:41, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

La Paz (the peace). The Bronx. Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:14, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

There's no definite article in Lizard Lick. There's not much of anything there. There's a damned fine burger joint in nearby Wendell, however.--Jayron32 03:58, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Lizard Lick is a place name that's funnier than Flushing though. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:23, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Not nearly as funny as Coxsackie though. --Jayron32 13:20, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Very Lolworthy AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:37, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

We have an article Exonym and endonym... -- AnonMoos (talk) 02:23, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

We also have a raft of articles like Estonian exonyms, potentially endless collections of trivial illustrations of the obvious fact that each language adapts borrowed words, including foreign place-names, to its own phonology and orthography. —Tamfang (talk) 06:00, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I would just like to mention that in English, most country names also don't use an article, eg. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Germany, France, Australia. But there are a few exceptions, such as the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which always get a definite article. – b_jonas 20:57, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

That's because the core name is either plural or qualified by an adjective, or both.

• Plural: Bahamas, Comoros‎, Maldives, Netherlands, Philippines, Seychelles
• Qualified: Central African Republic, Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Ivory Coast, Republic of the Congo, Republic of Ireland, Republic of Macedonia, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic‎, United Kingdom, Vatican City
• Both: British Virgin Islands, Caribbean Netherlands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, United Arab Emirates, United States, US Virgin Islands

But then there are countries that seem to fall into the above groups, but which do NOT take "The":

• East Timor (or Timor-Leste), Equatorial Guinea‎, French Guiana, New Zealand, Northern Cyprus, South Africa, South Sudan, Western Sahara, Western Samoa

And then there are countries that do NOT fall into the above groups but DO take "The":

• The Gambia (the "The" is an inherent part of its name), Ukraine, and still occasionally Lebanon.
• During the Falklands War some media persons insisted on referring to Argentina as "The Argentine", but that affectation seems to have died a natural death.

The above is not necessarily comprehensive or accurate for all dialects. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:40, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Jack, not an affectation. I know people (not "media" people, just ordinary ones, who are mostly rather old) who still call Argetina "The Argentine". The reason is given in Argentina: "In the English language the country was traditionally called "the Argentine", mimicking the typical Spanish usage la Argentina[32] and perhaps resulting from a mistaken shortening of the fuller name 'Argentine Republic'. 'The Argentine' fell out of fashion during the mid-to-late 20th century, and now the country is simply referred to as "Argentina"." --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 12:48, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

JackofOz, your OR is a good effort, but goes in the wrong direction. This is one of those things that people who learn English as a second/foreign/other language learn as a rule, but 'native' speakers never think about. The rule is that if the head noun (which is usually the last word) in the name is a common noun (island, republic, kingdom), then country names take the definite article. If it is a special noun (a word that only has a meaning as the name of one particular place/person/thing), then there is no definite article. All but one of your cases fitted that rule at some point in their history. The exception is "The Gambia", which takes its name from the river, which follows the rule that special nouns in river names always take the definite article ("Death on the Nile", "the Amazon", "the Yangtze", etc.). In some cases, the link between the rule and the name requires some explanation:

• Some names have an implicit "X Islands", even it was never in common speech (this covers most of your plural group)
• "Netherlands" was obviously originally "Nether Lands" (as in the Low Countries)
• "The Argentine" was originally +Republic, as Dweller has explained.
• "The Sudan" and "the Ukraine" used to be used with an article because those words originated in common nouns. Ukraine was originally 'the borderland' (compare Krajina, from the same root - why those articles aren't throughly wikilinked is beyond me). The Sudan originally referred to an area much larger than the present states of that name, and had a similar meaning to Sahel.

The best account of all this is Michael Swan's Practical English Usage. Matt's talk 17:21, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

"Argentine" from the Falklands war onwards was also used to mean "belonging to" the country (i.e. in place of "Argentinian"). 92.8.219.206 (talk) 19:48, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Those that Jack lists as Qualified all contain either a generic (Republic, City) or a water feature that would take the article if it were not used as a country name. In the list beginning with East Timor, the modified noun is a proper noun that would not take an article on its own either. —Tamfang (talk) 20:20, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Question about WSJ source

Could someone with the relevant access tell what the title and date of this article is? Hack (talk) 12:58, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The link is behind a paywall. Try WP:REX for help of this nature. Someone there can likely help. --Jayron32 13:07, 31 July 2017 (UTC)