Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 November 22

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November 22

Does the Oxford English Dictionary mention same-sex marriage?

Could someone with access to the current (post-2000) Oxford English Dictionary advise whether it mentions same-sex marriage, and quote the relevant definition. The reason I ask is that:

• Our article on same-sex marriage claims that "The Oxford English Dictionary has recognized same-sex marriage since 2000", citing this article, but not the OED itself.
• I have the 2007 6th edition Shorter Oxford English Dictionary which does not mention same-sex (or gay) marriages at all.
• According to the Preface to the 1993 4th edition, the SOED "sets out the main meanings and semantic developments of words current at any time between 1700 and the present day".
• According to the Preface to the 2007 edition, "We have taken advantage of the work in progress for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary".

I.e., if the OED has included same-sex marriage since 2000, I would expect the 2007 SOED to include it also, but it does not. So now I’m trying to do two things:

1. Test (and possibly refute) my general assumption that any modern word in the OED would also be in the SOED.
2. Verify the accuracy of the same-sex marriage article's claim that OED recognizes same-sex marriage.

Mitch Ames (talk) 03:56, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

If the OED does include same-sex marriage, someone with access to it might like to add the OED as a reference to the same-sex marriage article, so that we have a direct citation, rather than only the current indirect citation. Mitch Ames (talk) 03:57, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

This is what the OED (current online edition) has as the primary definition of Marriage:

1. a. The condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony. The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex.

So the Slate article seems right. If you wish you can add this citation to the article. Abecedare (talk) 04:15, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like the language in the article needs to be tempered. Pointing out that "some people use word X to refer to situation Y" doesn't mean OED is 'recognizing' (which can be a codeword for 'endorsing') it. I myself am a proponent of same-sex marriage, but this kind of slanted language in an article just sounds like grasping for an argument. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:35, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, dictionaries are in the business of recording word-usage, not recognizing social constructs. A better way of phrasing the OED reference in the article would be something like: "Since 2000, OED has included 'long-term relationships between partners of the same sex' under its definition of the word marriage", or "Since 2000 OED has recognized that the word marriage is sometimes used to refrence 'long-term relationships between partners of the same sex'." Abecedare (talk) 04:45, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I definitely agree with that. Many advocates of same-sex marriage would consider the term "marriage" to be limited to the same type of officially recognized relationship that traditional "marriage" implies; the OED's "long-term relationship" seems to imply a less restrictive sense. Best to just quote what the dictionary says and leave the interpreting to the reader. --Anonymous, 07:33 UTC, November 22, 2009.

I would be inclined to leave dictionaries out of it. Does anybody dispute that the word is sometimes used that way? We don't need citations for simple undisputed facts. We don't cite a dictionary for every article to confirm what a key word in its name means. --Tango (talk) 15:18, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

It is disputed, though. In Australia, for example, marriage is legally defined as "the union of a man and a woman ...". Mitch Ames (talk) 00:26, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Legal definitions are often more restrictive than common usage; that is not evidence against Tango's claim. Algebraist 12:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Regardless of any "disputes" over the use of the term "same-sex marriage", both numbered points in my original post have been answered (thanks Abecedare). Incidentally (and again, independently of any "disputes") I shan't add the OED citation to the article myself because I never cite a reference that I haven't seen personally. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:47, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Unidentified symbol from a rebus

I came across this symbol in a rebus, that I and some colleagues were trying to solve during a break Friday. I don't have the source in front of me, so it's drawn from memory. I'm certain about the cross, the first (leftmost) loop, and the apostrophe at the top right, but not quite sure about the second loop. I've browsed through a bunch of symbols in the charmap utility of Windows, and looked at various unicode tables and tables of astronomical, astrological and alchemy symbols, without success. (The closest is the symbol for Saturn). Does anyone recognize this? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 10:13, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Could it be む? --ColinFine (talk) 12:00, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks like Japanese hiragana お (o) or maybe あ (a). 124.214.131.55 (talk) 12:02, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Japanese hiragana お it is! Thanks! I'll see how "o" works out in the rebus tomorrow. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 12:28, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Simple context-free grammar for English

I am looking for a simple context-free grammar (CFG) that can be used to explain the syntax of English sentences to, say, someone who's beginning middle school. The grammar does not need to be complete—simplicity is more important. It would be sufficient if it can explain the structure of maybe 95% of sentences encountered by the learner. The goal is to give the learner an understanding of the constituents of English sentences, and how simpler constituents build up to progressively more complex ones, eventually producing a grammatical sentence. Phenomena like subject-verb agreement, the case/person/number of nouns/pronouns, subject-verb inversion etc. need not be accounted for, at least not by the CFG itself.

I've seen examples of such grammars in books on natural language processing. However, the example grammars tend to be very incomplete and seem to have been designed to have just enough generality to explain the given example sentences. What I'm looking for is a learning tool that balances complexity (in terms of the number of constituent types and rewrite rules) on one hand, and generality and completeness of the other. (The trade-off is not precisely defined.)

Can someone help? -- 14:32, 22 November 2009 173.49.12.182

Due to syntactic research results established 50 years ago (Chomsky's Syntactic Structures etc.), it's pretty much impossible to have a context-free grammar which will accept 95% of sentences of English, unless it also accepts a vast number of "ungrammatical" sentences which are not English. What's wrong with just using a small "toy grammar" to demonstrate basic concepts? AnonMoos (talk) 14:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

(The OP responding to AnonMoos:) I'm aware of the result that English cannot be (completely accurately) described by a CFG, but I'm not writing a parser or grammar checker for English. My goal is much more modest: to come up with a relatively small number of rules that can help someone understand the syntactic structure of most English sentences, i.e. what words go together to form a unit, and how sub-units nest inside bigger units. It's OK if the grammar allows the subject and a corresponding reflexive pronoun in a sentence to have mismatched gender—constraints like that can be addressed outside of the CFG. The "toy grammars" I've seen in NLP books seem to be intended for illustrating how the syntax of English can be described using a CFG; communicating the syntax rules of real (meaning not a small toy subset of) English doesn't seem to be the goal. In my case, what I'm trying to help someone learn is not CFG as a theoretical tool, but the syntax rules of a real language, which is English. --173.49.12.182 (talk) 23:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Do you know who coined the word ‘context-free grammar’ and its intended meaning of the original author? If it was the meaning to say, for example, ‘simple’ (free from contexts, e.g. various types of phrases and clauses), then the rules of syntax is interesting and sufficient for middle schools. The GG (the context grammar and some complex syntactic rules) as we know today is the syntax theory that is available (but not sufficient) to explain how a sentence forms within the rules of the language.

As for as I know, there isn’t any syntax theory that is sufficient to honestly explain the rules of the language within the phrase structure rules until now . However, some linguists have achieved varying level of successes on this process.-Mihkaw napéw (talk) 17:30, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

(From the OP:) I'm not sure if the question was addressed to me; I do understand the technical meaning of "context-free". As I indicated in my response to AnonMoos's comment, I'm not looking for something that's completely precise—I believe any precise formal description of English will be way too complicated for my purpose. Can you suggest a CFG for English that's suitable for middle school-level learners? --173.49.12.182 (talk) 23:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know how much time you have to spend on it, but Liliane Haegeman's Thinking Syntactically is a good introduction to generative-transformational syntax that is not too theory-specific—i.e., it teaches the basics about phrase structure rules, syntactic trees, etc., without being too specific to GBT or any other theory. I read it when I was in college so I'm not sure how appropriate it would be for a middle-schooler, but I remember it as being an accessible introduction. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:44, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the basic syntax (phrases structures rules) is accurate enough for middle school learners if they are not confused with the sentences that are beyond their rules of phrase structure trees. And as the middle-school learners still have to learn the language unconsciously, the basic syntax can support their unconscious language learning, though not all the simple sentences can be taught within these syntax rules. However, if you are looking for something like Venpa (prosody syntax) or NSM (cultural scripts) as CFG, I do not have any cue about those.-Mihkaw napéw (talk) 00:34, 23 November 2009 (UTC)