Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 May 6

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May 6

Dutchman in beer commercial

What is the guy saying at the beginning of this video? To me it sounds like "Dames en eregen, chama ginni!", which might indicate that my colloquial Dutch skills are lacking. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 00:05, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Dames en heren is the first part. Rmhermen (talk) 00:10, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh wait, it's "Dames en heren, we gaan beginnen!" Never mind. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 00:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

malay name

i am looking for a malay name meaning respect or peace. any suggestions? thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.121.36.232 (talk) 09:04, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

You might use "Izzati" (feminine) or "Izzat" (masculine). It means glory, honor, and prestige (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Transwiki:List_of_Malay_names#I).71.30.227.47 (talk) 21:13, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

"Enabling x to do something" - is x subject or object?

While checking a letter I came across this part of a sentence: "...enabling you and I to obtain consolidated valuations of your investments". Is "you and I" the object of the verb "enabling", or the subject of the verb "to obtain"? My internal pedant tells me it's the former and therefore should be 'you and me', but that just looks wrong. --86.129.220.98 (talk) 11:07, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

"You and me" is prescriptively correct, as the phrase is the object of "enable". The subject of "to obtain" is what syntacticians call (or at least used to call) "big PRO", a sort of mystical pronoun with no phonetic realization. +Angr 11:18, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

It doesn't look at all wrong to me. You're entirely right. "You and I" looks to me like simple hypercorrection. ¶ However, if you really want to look closely, matters aren't that simple. Consider "Me want to go there": other than perhaps in some very distinctive dialect, this is plain wrong (unless it's some kind of joke). However, one or other of "Jim and me want to go there" and "Me and Jim want to go there" is likely to sound a lot more idiomatic, and perhaps even fully acceptable for informal speech. Quite aside from hypercorrection (which clearly isn't involved here), it seems that coordinating (X and Y) does odd things to case assignment in English (and for all I know other languages as well). -- Hoary (talk) 11:24, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I have a private hypothesis that "me" in (colloquial) English is a disjunctive pronoun like French moi. Rather than being marked specifically as accusative (or "objective"), it's used whenever the pronoun is not the immediate subject of a finite verb; and when the pronoun is the immediate subject of a finite verb you use "I". So you say "I want to go there" because "I" is the immediate subject of "want", but "[John and me] want to go there" because the subject is the whole phrase "John and me". This is similar (not identical!) to French, where you'd use "je" in "Je veux y aller" but "moi" in "Jean et moi, nous voulons y aller". (I'm almost positive *"Jean et je voulons y aller" is ungrammatical in French.) Likewise, "John is taller than me" (where prescriptive use calls for the nominative "I" instead) is like French "Jean est plus grand que moi" (not *"...que je"). But "enabling you and I to obtain" is a hypercorrection due to pressure to say, for example, "You and I are friends" instead of "You and me are friends". +Angr 11:43, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

But more simply, the accusative is in English (though not in German or I believe in Dutch) something like the default case. Teacher to students: "Who wants a choccie bar?" Students: "Me! Me!" (In German, as I vaguely (mis)remember, [nominative] "Ich! Ich!") ¶ My French is terribly rusty and, well, bad; but for what very little it's worth my interlanguage won't accept *"Jean et je voulons y aller"; for me, and conceivably for authentic francophones too, "je" clashes violently with distinctively plural "voulons". Moreover, "je" and "me" are both better simply regarded as clitics, no? You can't reply to a question with either as a single-word answer; it must instead be "moi" (which of course is compatible with your account). In "Jean et moi, nous voulons y aller", "Jean et moi" is topicalized. In English too, a topic is accusative: compare "Me, I want to go there" and "I, I want to go there", which to me sound respectively deliberate (a proper topic) and merely repetitive (a duplicated subject). However, although "John and I, we want to go there" sounds a bit odd/prissy to me, it doesn't sound as bad/repetitive as "I, I want to go there". ¶ Oh dear, I have to leave the keyboard and do the dishes (from morphosyntax straight to bathos). -- Hoary (talk) 12:20, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the response - good to know my internal pedant was right. Another way if looking at it (in case anyone wants an alternative answer to my own question): if you change "you and me" to "us", then it's not only technically correct but obviously so, even to non-pedants. The context requires "you and me", though, so I ended up rewriting the sentence so the problem didn't arise (almost always the best solution).

In the case of the chocolate bar, can you talk about subject vs object in a 'sentence' which has no verb? Or to try a different tack, isn't "Me! Me!" short for "Give it to me! Give it to me!" rather than a direct answer to the question "Who wants this"? --81.136.143.173 (talk) 12:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

It's often helpful to replace the two pronouns by just I/me and see what seems natural: "...enabling I to obtain..." or "...enabling me to obtain..." - clearly (to me, anyway) the latter is the only possibility. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree with that analysis. But there's another factor involved here. Saying things like "enabling you and I" is very common, even among people who normally take care to always use the right word. It's almost become idiomatic to ditch the rules in this case. I've had verbal stoushes with people who know their grammar, who justify "you and I" on grounds that they consider have some merit. I'm yet to be convinced, though. Saying "enabling you and me" is not in the same league as answering "Who wants a choccie bar?" with "I!" rather than "Me!", but it's getting closer by the day. It's still in the melting pot, though, and fwiw I always use "enabling you and me". If and when it becomes considered pedantic to say that, I will drop it. Until then, I fight the good fight. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

@AndrewWTaylor: that argument has often been put forward. But what evidence have you for its validity? Number agreement does not look inside a coordination (i.e. the grammaticality of "John goes" and "Jill goes" do not imply that "John and Jill goes" is grammatical), so why should case? Joseph Emonds in his 1986 paper Grammatically deviant prestige constructions argues that no natural variety of English uses the case of pronouns in the way that (Latin-influenced) prescriptive grammarians insist on, because there is not enough evidence of grammatical case in the language to allow native speakers to acquire those rules. He suggests that the actual rule applied by native English speakers is something like 'use the subject form when the pronoun immediately precedes the verb under the same node (I haven't got the terminology right and can't remember the details; but for example this licences the unmarked (object) form in a coordination like "Jim and me went", because 'me' is inside the coordination, not at the same level as the verb.) If he is right, then the prevalence of hypercorrection is understandable, because the prescriptive rule requires grammatical information which is not available to unlearned native speakers, and so speakers will tend to substitute a different rule, for example 'the subject form must always be used in coordinations'. --ColinFine (talk) 23:48, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Fair (and interesting) points, Jack and Colin. Colin's "actual rule applied by native English speakers" reminds me of when I was a young child in church and was trying to work out the difference between "thou" and "thee", which I realised were both "church words" for "you". The best I could come up with at the time was that "thou" usually came at the beginning of a sentence and "thee" at the end. I didn't notice the analogy with "I" versus "me", and presumably had internalised most of the rules for those at an earlier stage. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 11:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Double comparatives

Everyone knows that a double comparative is no good. Thus: *My brother is more younger than me. But is having two comparatives next to each other always wrong? What if there are two types of biscuit on a table, identical in all aspects save size. My job is to work out which biscuits to order for a forthcoming event. I think the smaller biscuits are better, but that we should probably have some of the bigger ones as well. So I say to my colleague placing the order: "We should buy both types - but please order more smaller ones." To answer my own question, I think that I should say: "We should buy both types - but please order more of the smaller ones." But does anyone think one could drop the 'of the', thereby creating a kind of double comparative, and get away with it? Ta.62.25.109.195 (talk) 12:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

It seems like more in that example doesn't have the same meaning as in a phrase like "more happy." It has more of the meaning of "a greater number of," which might have an important distinction. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 13:31, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Edit conflict: "More" is not a comparative in your case, though. It could freely be replaced by "less" or "a few" or "some". It's an adverb, I think. (Not sure, grammar is not my forte.) TomorrowTime (talk) 13:34, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

The "more" does not refer to the "smaller" but to the "ones". So it's not a problem. Vimescarrot (talk) 14:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

In your case, the "more" implies that the smaller biscuits need to be made smaller, not that the number of the smaller biscuits has to be increased. So, in this context, leaving out the "of the" is wrong and it may lead to misunderstandings. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.93.6.97 (talk) 16:02, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't say leaving out "of the" is wrong, but including it certainly avoids any ambiguity. +Angr 16:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Uneffective

Someone just made an edit changing "not effective" to uneffective. As I was poised to hit the edit button to change it to "ineffective" as was struck by a doubt. Perhaps both are acceptable. Google proved less than helpful as some online dictionaries do define "uneffective" but Google suggest "ineffective" as a new search term. So is uneffective widely used or not? Rmhermen (talk) 16:55, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd love to write that this is one of those cases where one can be completely clear and unequivocal: uneffective is wrong. But perhaps it's never wise to be so firm. I would certainly correct uneffective to ineffective every time. I don't consider uneffective to be widely used except by genuine mistake and I'm pretty sure I've never heard it.GBViews (talk) 17:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

But see also litotes: "not effective" is not necessarily synonymous with "ineffective"—the former says that the attempt was merely not good enough, but the latter that it's not good at all. Compare e.g. "not loved" and "hated", where the difference becomes more obvious and strong._{(um, more obvious and stronger?)} No such user (talk) 06:57, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

It is a word! It can be looked up on Dictionary.com. Therefore, you do not need to change it, although you might want to avoid using it, in case people are not familiar with it.71.30.227.47 (talk) 21:01, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

The OED lists both un- and ineffective; in the case of uneffective it provides examples of use only up to 1670 or so, while it gives usage for ineffective up to 1898. I would change it if I ran across it, but don't foresee myself spending a lot of time hunting examples down. Wholeheartedly agree with No such user about the difference between "not effective" an ineffective, with the latter carrying a stronger meaning. I'd also note that at times ineffective can carry a bit of a moral judgment in its meaning: "treatment of the influenza virus with penicillin is not effective," vs. "General Funkenstein was a competent tactician, but an ineffective leader." Some jerk on the Internet (talk) 19:12, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Brown sauce

Reading through the Australian section of the bbq sauce article, I found the statement that "There are various sauces in the market from fruity to brown sauce." I thought it odd that gravy or roux would be considered as a bbq sauce but the link goes to a dab page with other options. Is Brown sauce an Australian term for steak sauce? Rmhermen (talk) 17:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

No. It means HP Sauce.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 17:27, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

So actually yes, as that article has "HP is a popular condiment...a brown sauce" (redirect Steak sauce). Rmhermen (talk) 19:50, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Kinda. Bear in mind that the following sentence states that "In the United States, as its name implies, the sauces is predominantly associated with beef, while elsewhere it is often used on a variety of foods". I've not once heard of HP sauce being referred to as steak sauce. Seegoon (talk) 11:49, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd never use HP Sauce on a steak. Salt, pepper, horseradish, mustard, yes, but not HP. I'd use that on sausages.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 11:10, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Masters thesis vs Master's thesis

There is a question on the humanities desk about whether the dissertation at the end of an MSc, etc., is a "Masters thesis" or a "Master's thesis". If anyone knows, could they please reply there? Thanks! --Tango (talk) 17:49, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Among those who regard apostrophes and their placement as important, I'm sure that "master's thesis" would be strongly favoured. Among those who don't think they are important one can expect to find "masters thesis". --ColinFine (talk) 23:31, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Searching Google in yale.edu and harvard.edu "master's thesis" seems more common than "masters thesis" (442 vs 283 hits in Yale but 2160 vs 585 in Harvard). The University of Oxford website in the UK has slightly more hits without the apostrophe, while for Cambridge the figures are almost the same. So it probably doesn't matter in general (even if "master's" makes more sense to me), although if you're at a university/college you could check which style is more common there. --Maltelauridsbrigge (talk) 12:02, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I did ask that you reply over there, rather than split the response. I'll copy your answers across! --Tango (talk) 13:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)