Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 March 25

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March 25

macdonalds advertising in indian languages in san jose, california

i recently saw a bus ad for macdonalds in san jose, i'm used to seeing english spanish and even chinese and tagalog everywhere but know im seeing an indian languages which is it? is it hindi or tamil or punjabi those are my guesses, on another note in what languages does macdonalds advertise in the united states? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.198.192.120 (talk) 08:49, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Can you take a picture of it, or find a picture on the Net you could link to? It's impossible for us to know what language it is without seeing it. —Angr 09:38, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

We have Brahmic family of scripts#Comparison, a most useful resource. Take a look at that and you may be able to find out the answer. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 15:59, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Can't say for sure without seeing the ads, but if the ads are in an Indian language, they are most likely to be in Hindi (written in Devanagari script, which is shared by some other Indian languages). An easy way to recognize Devanagari: a horizontal line runs along the top and links the letters in each word. Aside: The irony in McDonald micro-targeting Indians in the Bay Araea is that it does not even sell its signature (beef) burgers in India. :) Abecedare (talk) 17:28, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

But without a picture we don't know that those ads were for its beef burgers - they could have been advertising their infamous vegetarian French fries! Well, maybe their McVeggieBurger. Rmhermen (talk) 17:33, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Or even the fish sandwich, chicken sandwich, or chicken McNuggets. Anyway, Punjabi also has the horizontal line running along the top. And according to [1] there are more Punjabi speakers than Hindi speakers in San Jose. But the third most widely spoken language there, after English and Spanish, is Vietnamese, which the OP didn't even mention. —Angr 06:37, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

That table is dodgy. There's Chinese separate from Mandarin and Cantonese, and Mandarin and Cantonese added together is much, much smaller than "Chinese" - sure there are lots of speakers of other dialects, but the numbers just don't make sense. Suspect that the original question asked for a write-in answer rather than multiple choice.

It's from the US census, so dodgy or not, it's probably the best info we're going to be able to find. I don't know whether the question is fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice, but it's definitely based on self-reporting by people who may have various nonlinguistic reasons for calling their native language by a certain name, or who may not realize (for example) that it's misleading for a speaker of Pennsylvania "Dutch" to say he speaks Dutch at home. —Angr 07:09, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Note that Devanagari (used for Hindi) is not the only Indic script with a connecting bar: Bengali and Gurmukhi (Panjabi) have it too, and likely I've forgotten at least one. —Tamfang (talk) 09:59, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Found a photo on the VTA Watch blog. As we speculated the ad on the VTA bus is in Hindi, and not for the burger ... looks like ice-tea to me. Abecedare (talk) 05:02, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

"There's" followed by a plural word

This construction has become extremely common, and I'm wondering if it's now considered acceptable in reference works. We hear it in advertising all the time: Come along to the Lower Charmville Culture Festival. There's rides for the kiddies, frog-boiling for the teenagers, and grand opera for the mums and dads. "There's" is short for "there is", and should only be used with a singular subject, in my view, but maybe usage has won the day.

My question was triggered by seeing "There's a lot of other little subtleties ..." in a post above, by an anon editor who seemed on top of his game. I didn't want to appear picky, and "a lot" could be construed as technically singular, although it seems more likely to be a mass noun, which would normally take a plural verb (e.g., "A lot of other little subtleties have (not "has") been recorded"). -- JackofOz (talk) 20:49, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

“There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip” is a famous phrase with a similar conflict.   Will Beback  talk  20:55, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I think this form exists in many languages. In classic Greek (I do not know about the modern) the singular verb with a neutral plural subject is quite common. In Italian it's also used, although maybe not considered very correct. ----pma (talk) 23:07, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Influences facilitating the inflation of "there's" + plural, might include those languages which use an impersonal form of "to have" or something similar, i.e. "it has rides" instead of "there are rides" (or "there's rides"). In these cases the verb remains singular, no matter whether the object is singular or plural. ("Es hat..." or "es gibt" in German, "hay ..." in Spanish, "il y a ..." in French). One thing less to think about when constructing sentences makes it easier, and maybe it also led some speakers to transfer this usage into English (and Italian "c'è" instead of "ci sono", etc.) ---Sluzzelin talk 01:15, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

For me, at least, this is phonological. I contract are to ’s rather than to ’re when it follows an /r/ sound, because putting two /r/ sounds next to each other is difficult to impossible. Thus I would say not only "There's rides for the kiddies" but also "Where's my glasses?" —Angr 06:33, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe it takes a teeny bit of effort to pronounce it clearly, but I'd hardly call it difficult, let alone impossible. Nevertheless, that might explain why they say "there's" before an /r/ sound. But what about all the other sounds: "There's apples and oranges in this basket", "Oh look, there's my parents" etc?. True, it's still easier to say "There's apples" than "there are apples", but is what's the easiest thing to say always the criterion? People seem to struggle through "the thesaurus of specific statistics on cholecystectomies performed on lugubrious prestidigitators" (a phrase I hear almost every day of the week), without making up new grammar, so why do they do it with something as simple as "there are"? -- JackofOz (talk)

That's because you're a non-rhotic speaker. For us rhotic speakers, pronouncing [ðɛɹɹ] is very difficult indeed, unless it simply becomes homophonous with [ðɛɹ]. If I did try to say "There're my parents", it would come out at best as "There my parents". I figure getting the agreement of the verb wrong is still better than leaving out the verb altogether. —Angr 10:05, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

That would certainly explain why those of the rhotic persuasion have gone this way. Even us who prefer not to rhotate have a hard time with "There are a number of ... ". Speaking of rotating, people employed in planetaria must dread having to say "There are a number of orreries on display here". That's all speech-related, where the rules can differ somewhat from written communication. I'm still mainly interested in knowing whether "there's" followed by a plural would be classed as unexceptionable writing these days. -- JackofOz (talk) 19:45, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Apparently so. Thanks, anyway. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:16, 30 March 2009 (UTC)