Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 December 28

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December 28

Bokeboke = ?

What does the Japanese loanword bokeboke mean? NeonMerlin 00:37, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Guessing from some contexts in which it appears (for example here or here), something like "blurring" or "fuzzy state".  --Lambiam 10:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's a loanword bokeboke. It's native Japanese vocabulary, written in katakana because it's being used like a sound effect. It's a variant of bokeru, which means to be blurry or unclear (or senile). -- BenRG (talk) 23:48, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Parts of speech

Consider this sentence: "He speculated that visitors could have been fooling around and might have taunted the animal and perhaps even helped it get out by, say, putting a board in the moat." In that sentence, what part of speech is the word "say"? ... and why? Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 07:27, 28 December 2007 (UTC))

It can be classified as an adverb; see item 11 here. Why? Because people who classify parts of speech assign the category "adverb" whenever they are at a loss what other category to use :). In this context, "say" means "for example"; you can substitute "perhaps" or "possibly", which are generally classified as adverbs.  --Lambiam 10:29, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Not always; sometimes people assign the category "particle" whenever they're at a loss for which part of speech to call something. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 13:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

OK. That makes sense. Thanks for the replies. (Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:08, 28 December 2007 (UTC))

For whatever it's worth, I would have read "say" as a paranthetical ellipsis for "let us say" (and hence "say" is a verb); I agree with User:Lambiam that this is an adverbial clause. Marnanel (talk) 20:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I cannot agree more with Marnanel. By the way, the grammar category adverb is so strange. It includes from bare adverbial modifiers (like not) that just affect verbs or adjetives, to words such as thus, which modify the discourse flow and link entire propositions. Pallida  Mors 21:17, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

For me, an adverb is a word that can answer one of the questions Where? When? or How? (or potentially Why? though I can't think of a single word that could answer the question Why?). Since "say" in the example doesn't answer one of those questions, I'm disinclined to call it an adverb. I still say it's a particle. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 21:33, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Any mother knows the single-word answer to the question "why?" - it's "because".  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 21:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again to all! Very helpful info. Thanks! (Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:13, 29 December 2007 (UTC))

Latin

Please explain to me the following sentence from Copleston, vol. II, p. 433: ... the Correctorium Fratris Thomas ... called forth a series of Corrections of the Correction, such as the Apologeticum veritatis super corruptorium (as they called the Correctorium) ....--Omidinist (talk) 09:49, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that the word Corruptorium, literally "that which is corruptible", is used here facetiously to mean something like "a repository of corruptions". Leaving this word untranslated, the whole comes out as "Defence of the truth against the Corruptorium".  --Lambiam 10:46, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Lambiam. Omidinist (talk) 12:22, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Hindi and Sanskrit

What Difference is there between hindi and sanskrit.(as i see both are written in same script devanagri) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.94.153.78 (talk) 10:39, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

French and Latin are also written in the same script, in this case the Latin alphabet. While that does not necessarily indicate they are related, French evolved from Latin, now a "dead language". Likewise, as is stated in our article on Hindi, it is believed that Hindi has evolved from Sanskrit, another dead language. But, just as for Latin and French, the differences in vocabulary and grammar are considerable; if you know one language, you will not necessarily understand texts in the other language. Devanagari is not the only script used for rendering Sanskrit. Historically, Sanskrit was not associated with any particular script, and the prominence of devanagari in that respect is relatively recent. Also, Urdu is essentially the same language as Hindi – they are definitely mutually intelligible – but uses a form of the Perso-Arabic script.  --Lambiam 11:19, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Well answered, Lambiam. To be strict about it, though, Hindi does not have Sanskrit as an ancestor. It is, of course, a language of the same group as Sanskrit, but its direct ancestor is one of the Prakrit languages – Indic vernaculars that evolved not from the learned and cultured Sanskrit language, but parallel to it. Wikipedia does not cover this well, and I can't immediately find any good ruling on the matter in any of the relevant articles. (See Languages of India though, which offers a cautious formulation. And Indo-Aryan languages has the details sorted out best of all.) Clearly, Hindi draws on Sanskrit as a source for new words, just as all modern European languages draw on Latin, and just as its sister-language Urdu tends to draw on Arabic. Also, I don't think it's right that the devanagari script and Sanskrit are only "recently" associated. Finally, while Sanskrit may often be described as "dead", it is of course still very actively used as a liturgical language. Some few families in India do still speak it, and documents are still composed in it much as the Vatican still composes in Latin. Probably more often and with greater zeal and confidence, I conjecture.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 11:53, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Quite. Sanskrit terms are still used a lot in Buddhism (even "western" Buddhism), as there are no English equivalents for many of the key concepts.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 12:20, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I quoted our article, which stated that this "is believed", an apparently not literally incorrect but possibly misleading formulation. But do we know for a fact that Hindi is not descended from Sanskrit? As the language of the Rigveda, composed roughly between 1700–1100 BC, early Vedic Sanskrit goes back to that period. The earliest known Prakrit texts are from the period of Ashoka, who reigned from 273 BC to 232 BC. Could not Vedic Sanskrit, in the course of its evolution over more than eight centuries, have split into a literary form, Classical Sanskrit as enshrined by Pāṇini, and a collection of vernaculars collectively known as Prakrit, just as early Latin evolved in parallel into the Classical Latin of authors like Cicero and a collection of vernaculars collectively known as Vulgar Latin, which gave rise to the whole gamut of Romance languages, from Romanian to French?  --Lambiam 13:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[Lambiam, I moved your last contribution to the end, to keep things in logical and temporal order.] Impressive and nuanced as they are, the Indic articles in Wikipedia are sometimes vague about the names of the relevant languages. So are most other sources. The term Vedic Sanskrit is itself revisionist, I think. Perhaps it is better referred to as the language of the Vedas, or simply as Vedic – as it often is, in fact. On another of your astute points, I say this: it should not be surprising if the earliest surviving Prakrit texts have a later date, since Prakrit is a term applied more to evanescent spoken versions of Indic and less to "classical" literary versions. Conversely for the term Sanskrit. Neither of these terms "carves nature at the joints" (Phaedrus, 265e). Both are invented, and applied in a culturally conditioned way. You mention Cicero's Latin and the Vulgar Latin spoken in the streets. Quite rightly. What neither of us would want is to give either of two false impressions: that modern Romance languages descend from Cicero's Latin, or that Hindi descends from Paninian Sanskrit. I'm sure we agree on that.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 20:24, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

It is surprising that none above considered Hindustani language which is indubitably the "ancestor" of Hindi, though Hindutva fanatics would not have it so. 59.91.253.185 (talk) 08:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Anonymous, I think the reason is that the fact is too obvious. We know that the languages Hindi and Urdu are closely connected, and about their relation through the less distinguishing term Hindustani. The original question of interest could be put alternatively in terms of the relation between Hindustani and Sanskrit. The answer? Hindustani does not have Sanskrit as a direct ancestor.

I note that Hindustani has a misleading sentence near its beginning:

This leads one to infer that Hindi was derived from Urdu; Hindi is Urdu written in Sanskrit [sic].

Tsk. That is seriously mixed up. I have remarked above: "Impressive and nuanced as they are, the Indic articles in Wikipedia are sometimes vague about the names of the relevant languages." I fear that the article Hindustani is a little less impressive, and lot more vague.

As an interested outsider, rather than one who edits those articles, I would love to see them rationalised and cleaned up in their taxonomic details. For a start, there appear to be too many running in parallel, sometimes with only obscure and tenuous relations holding them together. A pity, because so much good work has obviously gone into them individually. So it seems to me, anyway.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 09:14, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

That mixed-up sentence was added very recently; in fact, it was the last edit to the article. I've undone it.  --Lambiam 18:05, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Good work, Lambiam. (Just notice that I had your name wrong, earlier. Fixed it now.)

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 21:09, 29 December 2007 (UTC)