Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 June 27

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June 27

IPo

What is IPO title?174.3.103.39 (talk) 03:48, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

This explains what IPO is (a sport that involves training dogs) and what the three IPO titles are, although it doesn't say what IPO stands for. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:49, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

This site says IPO stands for International Police Organization in a dog-training context. Karenjc 16:00, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Sport

What is extreme tag?174.3.103.39 (talk) 04:56, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Seems to be a form of free running where one person chases another. Brad Beattie (talk) 08:25, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

need a simple definition for response latency

"They wanted to know his response latency regarding dates." Does this mean his memory of the dates? I am stuck, thanks for any help.

This is an academic article about response latency, which seems to be something measured by public opinion researchers. It is defined there as "a measure of attitude accessibility"; in other words, it measures how quickly and easily a person can provide an answer when asked to state his/her attitude to something. Karenjc 16:13, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

More generally, the term is used to describe the time interval between stimulus and response in a wide variety of fields including psychology, computer science and advertising. Mikenorton (talk) 16:27, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

mixing moods

It struck me that a sentence like Bring a bowl and I'll fill it is a bit odd, in putting an imperative verb and an indicative verb in parallel. Is such a construction forbidden in some languages? —Tamfang (talk) 17:56, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Πα βω και χαριστίωνι ταν γαν κινήσω πάσαν. Da mihi ubi sistam, cœlum terramque movebo. Donnez-moi un appui et un levier et je soulèverai la Terre. Give me a lever and I shall move the world. Dadme un punto de apoyo y moveré el mundo. Gebt mir einen festen Punkt im All, und ich werde die Welt aus den Angeln heben. Дайте мне точку опоры, и я переверну Землю. Dammi un punto d'appoggio e solleverò il mondo. Geef mij een plaats om te staan en ik beweeg de aarde...

So, you can easily compare the famous Archimedes sentence quoted by Pappus of Alexandria in a lot of languages, switching the article lever to the various local wikipedias. The translation is not always the same, but the imperative + indicative seems to be a common feature, as far as I can recognize them. pma (talk) 23:00, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Isn't the form "Bring me a bowl and I will fill it" imperative + imperative"? I assumed that "I'll" was "I will", and thus imperative and not "I shall" which is simple future indicative. The original text of the Archimedes quote may say otherwise, but I also assumed that the "correct" form of it in English was "Bring me a lever and I will move the world" which is also imperative + imperative. The problem is that "I'll" is the accpted abbreviation for both "I will" and I shall". Or has formal English grammar moved away from this distinction? // BL \\ (talk) 16:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

No, it is not. First-person singular form of imperative simply does not exist, by the way. --131.114.72.186 (talk) 17:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

At any rate, κινήσω is future indicative, not imperative or anything imperative-like (like a hortative, jussive or optative). +Angr 17:59, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Imperative mood is used when issuing commands or invitations, Bielle. The imperative counterparts of "I will fill the bowl" would be "Fill the bowl" (meaning, You, you there, fill the bowl! - 2nd person), "Let him/her/them fill the bowl" (3rd person) or "Let us fill the bowl" (1st person plural). It can also be used in 1st person singular - "Let me fill the bowl". -- JackofOz (talk) 22:12, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

But who is the subject of "let me fill the bowl"? Not the first singular I hope, unless it is a case of double personality :) I think that the existence of the first person singular of imperative is really difficult to defend, logically. --pma (talk) 15:50, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Let me answer your query this way: The subject of an imperative is always "you", no matter who'll be doing the action. When we say "Let him/me/us/them", we're not asking for permission; it's simply a standard locution to get around the fact that the 2nd person is the only case where we can directly issue a command ("Go now!"). In any other case, there's a fiction that we're talking to "person A" about person B. The command is being directed at person B, but indirectly through "person A". So, "Let me entertain you", "Let her do the washing up", "Let there be light", "Let us pray" and "Let them eat cake" are said as if we were speaking to someone and commanding that person to let me/her/it/us/them do the thing we're talking about. In every case, the formal subject is "you". This "you" does not exist in reality, except in cases like "Aw Mum, let me do the washing up, pleeeese" (an extremely likely scenario.) -- JackofOz (talk) 23:16, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

After reflecting a little, I found very interesting Tamfang's observation. Indeed this construction, imperative and indicative future in coordinative conjunction, seems odd to me too, in its primordial, anacoluthical roughness; though it's apparently common in many languages. My feeling is that this is in fact a very ancient form. I suppose that as soon as our language is advanced enough to express order and will, you can tell me: "man, give me bananas, and I will give you flints". We can find a lot of more concrete examples in the Iliad (maybe Homer wants to render the roughness of the personal relations in old times). Achilles to Agamemnon, (A,127): "But now give her (Chryseis) back to the god, and we’ll give you three or four times as much". --pma (talk) 21:37, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course, JackofOz and others are quite right. I must have been having a "senoir moment" in vocabulary when I typed the "imperative + imperative" in any earlier comment. I was confusing the "shall, will, will," that is simple future, indicative with "will, shall, shall" which is . . . ? I want to write "imperative" again, but that isn't correct. Am I thinking of a mood of "command" or "declaration" or "intent" or . . . ? "Coloured future" is not a description I have ever seen before, and I am sure this form (will, shall, shall) had a name. Is there anyone old enough to remember? Our article Shall and will says that "will" is used in all persons in the simple future. That's not in my rule book, but is it now the case? And thanks, Angr, for the reference back to the Greek. // BL \\ (talk) 23:34, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Allahu akbar in Iran

Allahu akbar is an Arabic phrase, right? So why would protesters in Iran shout this phrase? Is the phrase the same in Farsi? If not, why would they not use a Farsi equivalent of the phrase? --76.91.63.71 (talk) 18:15, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't know much about Iran, but Arabic is a sort of intra-language for all muslims (kind of like Latin used to be for Christianity) - it's sometimes also used in Bosnia in a religious context, and Bosnian is even farther away from Arabic than Farsi. TomorrowTime (talk) 18:32, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Arabic is used as a lingua franca throughout the Muslim world, but its use as a common liturgical language is more relevant here - your example of Latin for Christianity is entirely to the point. Furthermore, a few religious formulae such as 'Allahu akbar', 'Deo gratias' or 'Shema Yisrael' are known to most people in the relevant community even those who do not have a command of the language. --ColinFine (talk) 18:45, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Surely you mean inter-language. —Tamfang (talk) 21:53, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

No, actually I did mean intra-language. But then, I'm not entirely sure if the use of the prefix in this case is really correct, and CF's "lingua franca" does the job of describing what I had in mind better, so... TomorrowTime (talk) 22:17, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Based on the idea that 'intra-net' means 'a network that can only be accessed by privileged members (i.e. company employees)' I would deem 'intra-language' to be incorrect, as there are non-muslims that speak Arabic, too. --211.198.250.173 (talk) 02:25, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

If Arabic is used between persons whose native languages are, say, Turkish and Bengali; as Russian can be used between Estonian and Kazakh, Spanish between Nahuatl and Quechua — are these all "intra" rather than "inter" because they're primarily used within former empires? —Tamfang (talk) 15:28, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean, "Bosnian is even farther away from Arabic than Farsi"? Both the Bosnian/Serbo/Croatian and the Farsi languages are Indo-European languages, with no relationship to Arabic. Do you mean geographically? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 18:59, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Persia was directly conquered by Arabs (which Bosnia never was), directly borders on Arabic-speaking areas, and has almost 7 additional centuries of exposure to Islam as compared to Bosnia, so the overall cultural context is somewhat different. The Persian language was also a kind of secondary classical language of Islam (traditionally, many non-Persian Muslims read Persian poetry in the original, and Persian was used as the language of administration of the Mughal empire, even though generally neither the rulers nor the ruled spoke it natively). AnonMoos (talk) 19:12, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

We don't seem to have an article about the use of Arabic in Persian...there is Persian_vocabulary#Arabic_influence but it doesn't say much. There is a lot of borrowing both ways. "Ayatollah" is Arabic too; the Flag of Iran has "Allah" and "Allahu Akbar" written on it; Majlis is also Arabic. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:26, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

With obvious risk of repetition of a point already proven above, is it strange that American Jews say mazel tov to each other? It is by no means odd for Iranians, or any other Muslims, to use the phrase Allahu akbar in any context, be it political or private. Muslims throughout the world repeat this phrase in every prayer. That said, there are some 'farsized' Islamic terms, for example the greeting Khuda Hafiz. I'm not a linguist, but I'd suspect the term khuda is pre-Islamic. --Soman (talk) 13:22, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

TH

Hi I'm italian. I watched this video on youtube in order to learn how to pronunce correctly the th sound (this sound doesn't exist in italian and italians approximate it with /t/, /f/ (voiceless) or /d/ (voiced)). In this video native speaker Dave Sconda pronunces "thank you" with the "th" sound similar to a /f/ (with the tongue between teeth) and states that the pronunciation /tenk ju/ is wrong. However, watching the movie La vita è bella dubbed in english, I've noticed that Roberto Benigni's dubber pronunced the th sound in "thank you" like a /t/! Why does Dave Sconda pronunce the unvoiced th similar to /f/ with the tongue between teeth while Benigni's dubber pronunces it /t/ (or a similar sound)? What is the correct pronunciation between the two?--93.44.93.134 (talk) 19:55, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

The pronunciation of most characters in the dubbed film is slightly nonstandard (presumably they are intended to sound like Italians speaking English), but all the /th/s that I heard were correctly interdental. Part of the problem is that (I believe) Italian /t/ is more forward than English alveolar /t/, between English /t/ and English /th/. —Tamfang (talk) 21:52, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Benigni's dubber is Benigni, isn't he? --78.13.140.73 (talk) 23:56, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

That would explain it! —Tamfang (talk) 21:47, 1 July 2009 (UTC)