Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 May 26

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May 26

Plural

What's the plural of fait accompli? Thank you. -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:49, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

"faits accomplis", in English and in French. ---Sluzzelin talk 04:53, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Now I know where to look next time. -GTBacchus^(talk) 05:12, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Hebrew memorial

We've had the draft text for my mother's memorial from the monumental masons, and it has פ״ט at the top instead of the פ״נ I expected. I wanted to know what this stood for, and went searching on the net. I've found plenty of instances of פ״נ and an explanation that it stands for פא נקבר (not sure about the spelling) "Po nikbar" - "Here is buried"; but I have found only a few examples of פ״ט, and no explanation. The mason was unable to tell me - he said it was a "female form", but though there are feminine forms beginning with "t-", they are with ת, not ט, and in any case would be imperfective. Can anybody tell me what פ״ט stands for, and why it is sometimes used? --ColinFine (talk) 09:19, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the abbreviations, but in the grammar of the Hebrew language niqberet נקברת is the feminine singular form corresponding to the masculine niqbar נקברת; these are what is known as Nif'al participle forms. The "t-" prefixed form would be tiqaber, and would mean "she will be buried" or "you (masc.sing.) will be buried". No idea where the ט comes from... AnonMoos (talk) 16:53, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't be: ColinFine is correct in that the letter "t" of the feminine prefix is ת‎ and not ט‎. More likely what's written below... -- Deborahjay (talk) 07:41, 29 May 2009 (UTC) Strikeout remark based upon misreading. -- Deborahjay (talk) 10:39, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I never said or implied that tiqaber had a ט (the reason why I didn't bother to spell it out in Hebrew letters is that the word of course has the wrong meaning for the gravestone context, so that I didn't bother...). AnonMoos (talk) 20:14, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually I might have found the answer. I couldn't find a root starting with ט in the Hebrew section of Segal and Dagut's dictionary that seemed to mean 'lie' or 'be buried', but I've just thought of using it the other way round, and under 'bury', as well as קָבֹר‎ it lists טָמׄן‎, though the closest entry in the Hebrew side is טָמוּן‎, glossed as 'hidden, concealed'. I guess that this is the passive participle (I've never seen it referred to as the Pa'ul, but I don't know why) and the feminine would be טְמוּנַה‎. I suppose therefore that פ״ט‎ stands for פא טמונה‎, which however would seem to mean 'here is hidden'! Now, why do some cemeteries (or possibly some sects, I'm not sure) use that form for women? --ColinFine (talk) 17:56, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

טְמוּנַה‎ is better understood as "has been lain" (i.e. placed, beneath the ground's surface) rather than "hidden." If possibly the פ״נ‎ is po nitman (here lies, in the masculine) rather than po niqbar (here is buried), the feminine equivalent would also start with the letter נ‎. The suggested ט‎-word begs the question: why different grammatical form for the feminine? (e.g. perhaps a halachic discrimination between the treatment of deceased men vs. women)? Your stonecutter may be aware of variants but isn't necessarily authoritative. Please consider: it's your perfect right not to agree to anything suggested to you that doesn't meet with your full acceptance and approval. It's good that you've been alerted to the difference. I suggest you find out about burial traditions and practices from rabbis of several Judaic streams (halachic and perhaps some of the more liberal), regarding the wording on gravestones that will suit your family. -- Deborahjay (talk) 07:41, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Words "philosophy" and "religion"

Is there any language that do not differentiate between the words "philosophy" and "religion"? --Mr.K. (talk) 10:16, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Did the ancient greek even have a "religion" (in our sense of religion ?)--Radh (talk) 14:59, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia says yes. +Angr 15:17, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

But not to my question. I imagined that in some Asian language the difference was blurred and they would say that "Buddhism is a "philoligion" "or something like that.--Mr.K. (talk) 16:24, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

The ancient Greeks certainly had religion, but did they have a word for it? I would expect so. --Tango (talk) 17:26, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

It's somewhat notorious that there isn't really any word meaning "religion" in the general abstract sense contained in the Hebrew of the Old Testament... AnonMoos (talk) 18:10, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Tango is right in that "philosophy" and "religion" in East Asian languages are modern introduced concepts, and there were concepts which encompassed both before the introduction of these concepts. Nevertheless, it was possible to separate the two, though not by the same delineation as we use "philosophy" and "religion" today. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:49, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I was right? I only asked a question... --Tango (talk) 17:19, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

*Tango's question posits a hypothesis that can be confirmed.

To elaborate, in pre-modern China, jiao 教 meant something like "doctrine", and can be used to refer to philosophies such as Confucianism (孔教) and religions such as Christianity or Judaism. A particular example is Taoism. Dao 道, "the way" or "the path", referred both to Taoist philosophy and religious Taoism, which were distinct but interrelated.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was some debate as to whether Confucianism was a religion or a philosophy. This was because in form, the rituals and doctrines which had been built up around Confucianism made it outwardly indistinguishable from religion, yet the contents of those doctrines were firmly secular. Conficius was not a god, except in the generic, ancestor-veneration sense of all dead people having a spiritual existence.

The distinction in pre-modern times, perhaps, was between supernatural philosophy and non-supernatural. Confucius, for example, famously "does not discuss the unexplained, superhman strength, rebellion, and the gods and spirits". As a result, the Empire saw no inconsistency in venerating Confucianism as the one, true political philosophy, while at the same time adopting a state religion (usually Heaven worship, but also Taoism or Buddhism at times). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:32, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Oops, I meant "Mr K", who referred to East Asia, not Tango... --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 08:09, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

So, the answer to the question would be no? Every society that has any "philosophy", distinguishes it from its "religion".--Radh (talk) 06:08, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Being "funny looking"

If you are "funny looking", you look like a funny person to be with or you look so strange that people want to laugh?--Mr.K. (talk) 10:26, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I've always heard it as the latter. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 10:30, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Either meaning is possible, but the second is far more likely, and without some context that points the other way, would always be taken; probably because being funny (i.e. witty) is not normally a property that is immediately visible in a person. --ColinFine (talk) 11:02, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

When ColinFine says "far more likely", he means about a billion times more likely. Tempshill (talk) 15:48, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree it is the latter, but it isn't necessarily "funny" as in "will make people laugh", it could be "funny" as in "weird" or "unusual" (there is overlap between the definitions, of course). --Tango (talk) 17:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

"Funny" is a compliment about someone's personality, while "funny looking" is a pejorative claim about someone's appearance. This is the fact that explains the junior-high joke "You're funny... [pause] -looking!" -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:46, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

A common way of explaining the different meanings of "funny" are "funny ha ha" and "funny peculiar". -- JackofOz (talk) 23:13, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Then there's FLK, or Funny looking kid.DOR (HK) (talk) 07:53, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The word lookism recently entered the OED, and is defined as discriminating against a person based on their looks, i.e. looking 'funny'. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 15:04, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

See Physical attractiveness stereotype. -- Wavelength (talk) 21:05, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

On yet another hand, if you look at me funny there's something suspicious in your manner. —Tamfang (talk) 21:40, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation of BIOS

How is BIOS pronounced? Specifically, is the S voiced or voiceless? In other words, does the second syllable rhyme with nose or with gross? +Angr 13:31, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I've always pronounced it By-oss (oss as in Oscar) - X201 (talk) 13:36, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Maybe this depends on culture, but where I live (US, Midwest) we pronounce it with a hard O, By-ose (ose as in toes). A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 15:49, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I live in Toronto and I also pronounce it with oss as in Oscar, paralleling both the mainframe and the personal computer usage of DOS. --Anonymous, 16:37 UTC, May 26, 2009.

I agree with Anonymous; that is the pronunciation I learned elsewhere in Ontario. Adam Bishop (talk) 02:21, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Parallelling words like kudos, which in my experience is always /kʲudɐs/ but I believe Americans are inclined to pronounce /kʲudoʊz/ and reanalyse as a plural. --ColinFine (talk) 16:05, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm British and I've always pronounced it (and heard it pronounced) like the "os" in "Oscar". --Tango (talk) 17:28, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Like A Quest, I live in the U.S. Midwest, and I've heard the o pronounced both ways (although we may be talking about three ways, since I pronounce it as /ɔ/, whereas I pronounce the first vowel in "Oscar" as /ɑ/), but I've never heard the final consonant pronounced as /z/. Deor (talk) 17:41, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

My IPA isn't very good, but I pronounce them the same, I think as /ɔ/. Oscar with a /ɑ/ sounds like an American accent to me. --Tango (talk) 17:52, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

The question doesn't seem to be about the vowels, rather the final s. I've always pronounced it with a voiceless /s/. This, rather than a vowel change, distinguishes it from the plural of bio. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:55, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

They're not really separable in British English. I can't think of an example of final '-os' pronounced like 'gross', even for foreign words and acronyms. It may be different in American. --ColinFine (talk) 18:05, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

According to this, it's /baɪ.oʊs/ (my emphasis).--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 18:34, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I think we're, at least in part, talking at cross purposes here. Angr (the OP), as well as the source supplied by el Aprel immediately above (and probably Aeusoes1), suggest that the second syllable of BIOS should be pronounced to rhyme with gross, whereas many people (myself, X201, Anonymous, ColinFine, and Tango) pronounce it to rhyme with floss. So far, A Quest For Knowledge is the only person who rhymes it with toes. (I apologize if I've misrepresented anyone.) There seems to be a significant variation in the pronunciation of the vowel, but perhaps not so much in the pronunciation of the final consonant. Deor (talk) 20:24, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, "gross" probably describes how I pronounce it better. ("Toes" has a bit of a "z" when I say it. I was thinking of the vowel sound and "toes" was the first thing that enter my mind.)

"Gross" is perhaps a bad example to use. Some people (most in my experience) pronounce it to rhyme with "dose", others to rhyme with "dross", "floss", "cross" etc. -- JackofOz (talk) 23:11, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all the answers. I was asking because wikt:BIOS just gives "bye-ose" as the pronunciation, and I didn't know whether to interpret that as /ˈbaɪoʊs/ or /ˈbaɪoʊz/. But it seems that /ˈbaɪɒs/ is another option. I'll change the Wiktionary entry to "/ˈbaɪoʊs/, /ˈbaɪɒs/". +Angr 06:20, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I've always pronounced it as (and heard it as) /'baiɔs/, both in the UK and in Asian countries. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 07:32, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

• My father always pronounces it like Bee-Os (os as in oscar) - Mgm|^(talk) 09:41, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Apostrophes

If a pen, say, belongs to someone is it "someones pen" or "someone's pen"? ie. is "someones" a possessive pronoun in its own right, or is "someone's" a personal pronoun with a possessive suffix? --Tango (talk) 17:24, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd go with the latter. The pen belonging to someone is "someone's pen". I don't think "someones" has any grammatical warrant, unless you're talking about a "special someone" who turns out to be "several special someones". That's pretty colloquial, though. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:48, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Except for "his, hers, its", you always need an apostrophe to describe the possessive/genitive in English, AFAIK. Corrections/additions are always welcome. :) --Kjoonlee 23:20, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Ours, theirs, yours seem to be a bit different. --Kjoonlee 23:22, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

No personal possessive pronouns take an apostrophe. The standard forms are: my, your, his, her, its, our and their (This is my book, your book, our book, its appearance, etc). The attributive versions are mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours and theirs. (These books are mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs, etc.) It's possible to use "its" attributively, but it's rare - That bone is its, where "it" refers to a dog, for example. This explains why "its" only ever takes an apostrophe when it's used as an abbreviation of "it is" or "it has". "It's" is a completely different word than "its", with a completely different meaning, hence it's spelled differently. Words such as someone, anyone, something, and anything are not classified as personal pronouns, so they take apostrophes when used possessively. -- JackofOz (talk) 02:49, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

They are actually indefinite pronouns, but it's true that they always take an apostrophe in possessives, as in, for example, "Is this meerkat anyone's?". They don't count as possessive pronouns. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 03:49, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

So personal pronouns have separate possessive versions, so there are no apostrophes, but there are no possessive forms of indefinite pronouns so they have to be formed with the standard suffix? If there any reason for that difference between the definite and indefinite pronouns? --Tango (talk) 20:09, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Like the whole sorry mess that is the apostrophe in English spelling, it grew up by a combination of usage, analogy, and arbitrary fiat. The "'s" derives from an Old English genitive in '-es' that only applied to some classes of nouns. It was generalised, and somewhere along the way the spelling was standardised to "'s" in the singular, "s'" in the plural. (I've not seen an account of how that distinction arose). The personal possessives are also in origin genitive forms, and here we can see that only some of them end in 's'. (Incidentally, "its" was invented in late Middle English: previously "his" was used). Beyond the fact that "his" is not simply an extension of "he", and so it would not make sense to use an apostrophe in it, I don't know of any principled reason why none of the personal pronouns take apostrophes: it's simply how it is. --ColinFine (talk) 22:19, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

See Saxon genitive. -- Wavelength (talk) 22:33, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

"It was generalised, and somewhere along the way the spelling was standardised to "'s" in the singular, "s'" in the plural. (I've not seen an account of how that distinction arose)." Surely it is not s' in the plural, but 's with the s dropped if the word already ends in an s? It's really just like a/an: you add or eliminate a letter to make things sound better. You don't go from cats -> catss' pyjamas (which would be adding s'), you might go from cats -> cats's pyjamas, but that is generally considered incorrect because it sounds wrong and isn't what people say. So you go from cats -> cats' pyjamas, with the ' showing the possessive without adding the extra s that you wouldn't say. The pyjamas of cats -> the cats' pyjamas. The pyjamas of the cat -> the cat's pyjamas. 80.41.18.94 (talk) 23:47, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I think you've misunderstood Colin, 80.41.18.94. He meant adding the "s'" to the stem of the word, i.e. the singular, to make the genitive plural. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 07:21, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

That's how I read him at first, but that wouldn't explain why he was viewing it as a puzzling distinction, or why he described the difference as merely one of spelling. In any case, the s in cats' is not from the '-es' genitive ending, but from the plural ending which is added before the genitive ending. The only bit of the genitive '-es' ending left in that is the apostrophe '. 16:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.168.10.46 (talk)

(outdent a bit). Yes, I wasn't quite clear what I meant. Perhaps it would be better to have said that it was standardised to "'s" in the singular and "'" in the plural. The thing to remember is that language - at most places and times in the history of humanity - is spoken language, and writing systems usually just play catchup. What I meant was that the "'s" vs "s'" distinction is essentially arbitrary - in fact the "s" vs "'s" vs "s'" distinction. I'm not saying that the choice of which form to use in a particular case is arbitrary (it's not). I'm saying that requiring the distinction, and the particular glyphs used to mark it, are arbitrary. They are an attempt to mark in writing a distinction which we manage completely without in speech. --ColinFine (talk) 00:11, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

That of course applies to all punctuation, not just the ones we're discussing. (Unless you're talking about Victor Borge.) -- JackofOz (talk) 22:46, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

No it doesn't. Most punctuation marks do represent distinguishable features of speech: chiefly pauses and intonations. They do so imperfectly, so you could not necessarily determine which punctuation mark was used, but for the most part you can tell where there should be one, and even where a particular one is not definitely required, a small set of marks from which it should be chosen. This is one of the reasons (not the only one) why I regard the apostrophe in English as part of spelling, not punctuation. --ColinFine (talk) 22:28, 2 June 2009 (UTC)