Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 October 17

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October 17

Overly-extended vowels in IPA

Is there a special symbol in IPA that indicates when a vowel is held for an overly-extended period of time, such as several seconds? Or do you just repeat the vowel symbol several times? I'm thinking of cases where you want to describe how a word is said in a particular instance. For example, when the Yankees win a game, John Sterling says on the radio, "Yankees win! Theeeeeeee Yankees win!" — pronounced /ðəəəəəəəə/ not /ðiiiiiiiiː/. Or, the word insane in the Crazy Eddie commercial ("His prices are insane!") is pronounced /ˈɪɪɪnseeeeeeɪn/, while in the song "Time Warp" ("But it's the pelvic thrust / that really drives them insane") it is sung /ɪnˈseɪeɪeɪeɪeɪeɪn/. Or am I doing it wrong? — Michael J 03:12, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

For most purposes you can either repeat the vowel, as you have shown, or repeat the colon, as in [ðəːːːːː]. Both are acceptable, and will probably be determined by the language you're working with and what you are doing with it. It's not necessarily useful to repeat the vowel, in many cases, because it may be ambiguous as to whether there are phonologically multiple vowels or a continuation of the same vowel. Context, of course will probably make it clear. Steewi 03:33, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

correct or ot not.

Respected Sir/Madam, I would like to know if the following sentences are correct usages of Eglish or not.
1. What beautiful girl!.
2. How beautiful girl is !.
3. If I should fail this time, I will try again.
4. We will meet tomorrow if it should not be very inconvinient to you.
5. I could do so, if I would.
I must tell you that the context of these sentences are not know to me. thanking you with regards sushama —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.12.53.9 (talk) 07:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Colloquial English would say:
1. What a beautiful girl!
2. How beautiful the (or that) girl is!
3. If I fail this time, I will try again.
4. We will meet tomorrow if it is not very inconvenient for you.
5. I could do so, if I wanted.
SaundersW 08:07, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

• That last one could also be:

5. I would do so, if I could. or simply 5. I would if I could. - Mgm|^(talk) 08:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

What i want to know is, whether the above given usages by me are correct usages or not. because i know the other colloquial usages suggested by you and i have come accross with these sentence which i wanted to varify. are such constractions possible(grammatically also). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.12.53.9 (talk) 08:58, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

1 is wrong because you need the 'a' between 'what' and 'beautiful'. 2 is wrong because you need 'that' (or 'the') between 'beautiful' and 'girl'. 3 is grammatically correct but the first part is rather formal, you might include the 'should' in formal written English but you would always leave it out of spoken English. In 4, 'should' is incorrect. I would rewrite the sentence as per SaundersW's suggestion, except that I would say 'not too inconvenient' (or, more simply, just 'convenient') rather than 'not very inconvenient'. 5 is incorrect - see SaundersW's and Mgm's possible rewrites. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 09:21, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 3 may be uncommon but it is not incorrect, it sounds rather old fashioned and formal though, and will invariably bring to mind Rupert Brooke's The Soldier and its famous first lines "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England". Cyta 09:57, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

A better way of writing 4 would be "We will meet tomorrow unless it is very inconvenient". -- JackofOz 10:01, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Alternatively, "We'll meet tomorrow if that's convenient for you." to avoid the double negative.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:15, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not convinced 3 is even grammatically correct. Shouldn't it be "If I should fail this time, I shall try again."? But then I've tried to work out the intricacies of shall/will before, and failed beyond 'I can hear a difference'. Skittle 15:26, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

See Shall and will, especially Shall and will#Current common usage jnestorius^(talk) 15:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The shall/will distinction has never been widespread in British English, and certainly is incomprehensible to many Scots. Unfortunately some teachers have tried to impose a particular usage. DuncanHill 15:40, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Intriguing. My teachers never touched on anything like that, since they were busy calling adjectives 'describing words' *sigh*. And yet, I can hear a difference. Skittle 16:03, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Hang on, are none of the distinctions considered widespread these days? Duncan, can you not hear the difference in meaning in the example given in Jnestorius' link "I will die! Nobody shall help me!"? Looking at the page I agree with the general differences, but think I shall have to stick to 'feeling', as it makes it sound overly complicated! But having heard that the differences don't apply elsewhere, I can see that the example given by the original question asker could be considered grammatically correct. Skittle 16:09, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I must say I tend to use will and shall in the manner of their Swedish cognates - shall for something that is going to happen, and will for something that is intended to happen. DuncanHill 16:12, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I doubt if anybody calling for help would really say "I will die! Nobody shall help me!"; the joke is an Englishman's and misrepresents the other dialect (not that I'm condemning it: it's only a joke). The actual difference would be between those who would say "I shall die! Nobody will help me!" and those who would say "I will die! Nobody will help me!" In my Irish idiolect, "shall" occurs in very few contexts, "shan't" not at all, and "should" occurs only as "ought to", "would be well advised to"; never as a near-synonym of "would". When I hear "shall"/"should" outside these contexts, it strikes me not as wrong but as somewhat genteel Home Counties talk. There are contexts where, rather than replacing shall/should with will/would, I would use a different construction altogether. jnestorius^(talk) 21:05, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh I wasn't suggesting that it was a realistic situation (would nobody just save them anyway?), but it featured in the article and I was intrigued by the thought that people might not hear any difference in meaning, even in such a construct. (And I'd assumed, probably falsely, that the guy was supposed to be trying to speak like the English people? Meh) Skittle 23:55, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I have only ever heard "I will die! Nobody shall help me!" as part of an English story about a German visitor to England who falls into a river and shouts it out. Those on the scene understand him to mean he wants to die, so they let him drown. Xn4 21:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

What is a person from San Marino?

Is a person from San Marino sanmarinese, as in our Category:Sanmarinese music, or sammarinese, as implied by Sammarinese lira? Or is either acceptable? Oldelpaso 17:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Both have a solid history of usage in English; a search of public-domain books in Google Books finds both in English [and Italian - see below] works of that vintage. Wareh 18:11, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The Italians use sammarinese. Xn4 21:23, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The OUP Dictionary of the World says Citizen of San Marino. DuncanHill 21:25, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Xn4's statement is true because it is in the present tense, and because contemporary Italian generally hates to preserve etymological spellings at odds with pronunciation. But the Google Books search I mentioned shows that, in public-domain books, sanmarinese was plenty common in Italian. Wareh 21:52, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

That makes sense. So in English we preserve the older spelling of the Italian word. For what it's worth, I'm more comfortable with Sanmarinese, in English. Xn4 22:53, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Fish strike

What's the word for when a fish comes to the surface to eat a fly? Keria 18:24, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Feeding? --Kjoonlee 19:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

No, it's a rise. Xn4 21:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much, thats it! I had a look in Wiktionary and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rise doesn't cover our use of the term. Maybe someone can add it (I'm not a native English speaker). Keria 09:28, 18 October 2007 (UTC)