Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 December 23

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December 23

IPA / Phonetic Spelling

I'm trying to improve an article (San Marcos, Texas), which currently does not specify proper phonetic spelling. The name itself is derived from the Spanish name for Saint Mark.

Natives of the area almost unanimously pronounce the name cUstom, whereas people who have only read the name sometimes interpret it as cOast.

In short, the correct native pronunciation is as follows: Sandwich Market customer

I had come up with /sæn mɑːrkʌs/ based on what I saw at Help:Pronunciation. Any expert input would be appreciated.   — C M B J   10:15, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd go with /sæn ˈmɑrkəs/ since the second syllable is unstressed. (It's thus Sandwich Market custodian.) —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 11:52, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Goldfish

How do you say "goldfish" in Welsh? I haven't found any dictionary which shows this word. Thanks. -- Danilot (talk) 15:04, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Y Geiriadur Mawr (ISBN 0-85088-462-4, ISBN 0-7154-0543-8) gives [eurbysg, pysgod aur] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help). The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru confirms the reality of both terms. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 15:46, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd tend to go for pysgod aur (pysgodyn aur in the singular), though to be honest I can't recall anyone using either term - we just called them goldfish! -- Arwel (talk) 16:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

components of verbs

Verbs in Latin (and English) all have person, number, tense, mood, and voice. Are there any languages that don't have any of these, and more interestingly, are there any that have any other aspects to verbs? [side note: also to anyone who saw this at the computing desk: there is some weird kind of redirect from the language page to the computing page, so I got tricked into putting this on the computing page, and I've now removed it (I think) and posted here, correctly. Please delete it from computing desk if it shows up there, thx.] The ibis in the corner (talk) 16:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, English has aspect as a verb property. I work: present tense, simple aspect. I am working: present tense, continuous aspect. I have worked: present tense, perfect aspect. French would translate all three examples as 'je travaille', as French conjugation has no aspects.

I've read that Chinese verbs have no tense, and Vietnamese no person. True? Rhinoracer (talk) 17:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Swedish verbs have no person either, but they almost always require the presence of the personal pronouns. -- Danilot (talk) 18:16, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I haven't found an article that properly answers this question, to my surprise. There are many different categories by which different languages classify verbs and verb phrases. Indo-European languages generally distinguish the categories you have listed, and also aspect; but other languages may not distingish all of these (for example, there are no verb forms in Chinese language, Japanese language or modern Scandinavian languages such as Swedish which distinguish number or person.But they may distinguish other propertes. For example, Japanese verbs distinguish polarity (affirmative vs negative) and respect. Many North American languages have affixes in their verb forms that indicate a number of things we don't usually think of as properties of the verb, such as: the general shape of the objects involved (flat vs long and thin, for example); whether movement is involved; whether the action takes place with conscious intent or not; whether we know about it from direct experience, hearsay, supposition, or general knowledge.

Incidentally, it is not clear that English verbs have mood or voice. It depends on whether you regard these categories as applying to synthetic verb forms or to analytic phrases. In Latin grammar these are almost all expressed by single words, whereas in English most verbs have only four different forms ('walk', 'walks', 'walked', 'walking') and it is not necessarily helpful to describe each possible combination of a verb various auxiliaries such as 'was being given' in terms of tense, mood and voice as though it was Latin. --ColinFine (talk) 18:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Creole languages generally do not mark any of these in the verb forms themselves. Person and number are "implied" by the subject, while tense, mood and aspect each are indicated by the presence or absence of a grammatical marker; see Syntactic similarities of creoles#TMA verb system. Although traditionally called "auxiliary verbs", and for some creoles derived from lexical items that are verbs in a donor language, there is nothing specifically verb-like about these immutable markers.  --Lambiam 19:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand that at least some linguists reserve the word "tense" for verb forms that don't use an auxiliary verb, and say things like "English has no future tense" because we express it as "He will go". It seems a silly distinction to me, but that's just my POV as an interested amateur.

On another point, Rhinoracer refers to the distinction between the simple and continuous (also called progressive) tenses as "aspect". I found this confusing because I have only heard the word "aspect" used to express the distinction between the simple and perfect tenses (also called imperfective and perfective, I think). In English the perfect tenses are those that use a form of "have" as an auxiliary: simple "I go, I will go, I went" vs. perfect "I have gone, I will have gone, I had gone". Aspect in this sense is a feature of all Indo-European languages that I know anything about. It may be formed using an auxiliary verb more or less as in English, but in Russian the perfective and imperfective tenses use different stems -- and are considered forms of different verbs. (See Russian grammar#Verbs.) Latin tends that way also, although the forms are considered parts of the same verb: there are regular ways to change the verb to form the perfect tenses, but many verbs do it irregularly.

I see that Wikipedia considers grammatical aspect to embrace both distinctions, which is inconvenient because if we had separate names for them then we could say that French, for example, has verb forms that express ___ (perfectness) but not ___ (progressiveness/continuousness).

--Anonymous, copyedited 19:22 UTC, December 23, 2007.

Classical Arabic has no tenses, just perfect and imperfect aspects. You have to figure out what the implied tense is from context and other words and particles. Modern spoken Arabic takes care of this by using various prefixes. (Classical also has 13 persons and three numbers, each with its own suffix and/or prefix!) Adam Bishop (talk) 19:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Distinguishing between definite and indefinite conjugations is one of the challenges when learning Hungarian as a second language. ---Sluzzelin talk 20:48, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Don't forget about telicity. Lantzy ^talk 22:29, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Re inflected vs periphrastic tenses: I very strongly prefer to restrict 'tense' to mean specific inflected forms, though I am aware that many people do not make this distinction. One reason for preferring to make it is that I can find no morphological or syntactic criteria for distinguishing 'he will go' from 'he may go' in English, yet one is called a tense and the other is not. (Obviously there is a semantic difference, but not all languages make any distinction between them see: some distinguish past from non-past, but only realis/irrealis in non-past verb forms). This is why some say English has no future tense.

Re different senses of 'aspect' - as you say, there are two related but different distinctions which are sometimes conflated under the term. Bernard Comrie in his book 'Aspect' is quite clear that the term refers to the 'internal temporal constituency' of an action, ie. whether it is regarded as complete or continuing. He discusses the perfect/non-perfect distinction, but avoids calling it aspectual. --ColinFine (talk) 01:18, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, aspect in Comrie's sense - i.e. perfective/imperfective - is very much more commonly distinguished than perfect/non-perfect. It is generally reckoned that Proto Indo-European had aspect as a more fundamental distinction than tense, and tense only appeared later - exactly as in Hebrew and Arabic. Now even languages like French and English which do not distinguish perfective and imperfective stems in the way Baltic and Slavonic languages (and incidentally Georgian) do, nevertheless distinguish aspect in at least some forms: thus in French the perfect ('j'ai vu') functions as a simple perfective past, in contradistinction to the imperfect ('je voyais').

The perfect/non-perfect distinction, on the other hand, is often not systematically distinguished. Thus French 'j'ai lislu' and Welsh 'dwy wedi darllen' can mean both 'I read' (past) and 'I have read', but not 'I was reading'. It seems to me that there is a tendency to lose this distinction in American English as well - forms like 'did you see the movie (yet)' would normally be 'have you seen the film (yet)' in British English. But I may be extrapolating too far here. --ColinFine (talk) 01:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Colin: "j'ai lu" rather than "j'ai lis" is perfect. "Je lis" is present. Past historic is "je lus". (correct but inappropriate)
On the matter of "only inflected forms are real tenses", please consider this. The Croatian standard form of "I will see" is, in certain sentence constructions "vidjet ću". The Serbian standard is "vid(j)eću". The pronunciation is the same (if the Serbian speaks Jekavian dialect), and it is just a matter of the orthography. Is the Serbian a future tense and the Croatian not? Bosnian uses both spellings. (See [1] 2.1.1.3.1) Who can say whether they are using a real tense or not? SaundersW (talk) 10:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The English language has only three verbal tenses: past, present, and future.

These tenses are inflected by the following aspects: simple, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous.

Please don't muddy the waters by citing exotic moods or invoking the eccentricities of modal auxiliaries! ---

To return to the OP's questions: there are indeed moods in other languages with no direct correspondance to an English mood, though translation remains possible.

Some languages have a Frequentative mood, where an action or state is represented as repeated and/or fragmented; near examples in English could be chat and chatter, or glow and glitter.

As I understand it, Classical Greek has a particular jussive mood to express wishes, separate from the ordinary subjunctive; I have a dim memory (to go with my dim mentality) of Robert Graves stating that the sentence "If only you two thieves would drown yourselves!" could be expressed in three words in Classical Greek. (We can also note the implication of a dual number, and of an inflected reflexive voice...O moi ego!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rhinoracer (talk • contribs) 22:15, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

To reiterate Lantzy's brief comment: the aorist in Classic Greek indicates telicity: ie that an action has been accomplished and remains accomplished. To some extent this is the difference between "I have locked the door" (and it remains locked) and "I locked the door" (but somebody may have come along and unlocked it), but English does not make the difference very well. SaundersW (talk) 15:03, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

"Why" in German

How would you write "Why I Study Latin" in German? I mean it as a title (an abbreviation, I suppose, of "The Reasons Why I Study Latin"). I've guessed Warum Ich Studiere Latein, but it looks odd to me. Is this kind of construction even possible in German?

Thanks, Daniel (‽) 22:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

In German - like in Latin - you put the verb at the end. Another problem of the sentence is that "studieren" is not quite equivalent to "study". "Studieren" means normally "attend a university". So, I would suggest - "Warum ich Latein lerne" as a better translation. Mr.K. (talk) 00:10, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

In this case you put the verb at the end, but not in general: Darum lerne ich Latein!  --Lambiam 00:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Generally speaking, the conjugate verb is the second word in main sentences. In subordinate sentences, it's kicked to the last position. --Taraborn (talk) 01:13, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

So the best solution would be Warum ich Latein lerne? Thank you all very much; especially for the tip about studiere. Daniel (‽) 21:30, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that would be correct. I'm not proficient in German, though. --Taraborn (talk) 22:44, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I would have said "Warum Latein lerne ich".--ChokinBako (talk) 18:35, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Maybe should you then some German Grammar study instead of Latin to learn.  --Lambiam 21:07, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

This is Greek to me all! "Warum ich Latein lerne" is, of course, the correct construct.

A native of the Roman province of Noricum, aka --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 21:58, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, from Star Wars, my German learned, I have....--ChokinBako (talk) 08:30, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Isn't the correct sentence "Warum lerne ich Latein?" unless it's something like "Ich weiß, warum ich Latein lerne." (Or am I just another strange Finn?) --84.248.153.173 (talk) 10:44, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

That would be the question "Why do I learn Latin?" Intended here is "[This is the reason] why I learn Latin" = "[Das ist der Grund,] warum ich Latein lerne". Another good title in German would "Darum lerne ich Latein" = "That's why I learn Latin". —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 11:23, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a subtle difference between

• Warum lerne ich Latein ? and
• Warum ich Latein lerne ?

Example 1 is a straight question, somewhat unusual, as it is reflexive, but totally OK if it were to be "Warum lernst du / lernen Sie Latein ?".

Example 2 is, almost always, a header for a set of answers to a preceding (or implied) question, where you state the application of your knowledge when understanding the etymology of modern English, in studying medicin, in reading Vergil and Augustine and so on.

Example 2 may be a topic for an essay at school, but it may also be used in a conversation, where you repeat the original question before you state your answers. It is formally a question, but actually a lead in to a set of answers (as Angr pointed out above).

In the WP article on wh-movement there is a section on pied piping, which probably is the term applicable to example 2. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 13:18, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

There's no pied piping in either one. Example 1 is a direct question and example 2 is an indirect question. I don't think example 1 is pragmatically particularly strange, though; people ask themselves "Why am I doing this?" all the time. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 13:28, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I would use "Weshalb" instead of "Warum". 195.35.160.133 (talk) 16:43, 27 December 2007 (UTC) Martin.

Thanks again to you all. Yes, I meant it as a leader for a set of answers; it's the topic for the presentation section of my GCSE German oral: I do, contrary to what someone above suggested, study German (as well as Latin and Ancient Greek). However, the grammar learnt for GCSE standard is little, and I (as ever) bow before the breadth and depth of your knowledge in these matters, o reference deskers. :) Daniel (‽) 22:19, 30 December 2007 (UTC)