Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 September 21

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September 21

"The old rale"

In To Have and Have Not, the drunks at the bar have a short philological discussion about the phrase "the old rale", which is some sort of venereal disease. Which one is it? And, to continue their analysis, what's the derivation? Googling claimed it was derived from "ral", a ruffian. Tempshill (talk) 02:47, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Dictionary of American regional English Ral, rail, rale, "the old ral(e)" etc has it as syphilis. No word on the etymology though. --Pykk (talk) 04:27, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Letters which could be merged without creating homographs

Hypothetically, could the English language merge two of its written letters without creating any homographs? I mean, if you replaced both the letter m and the letter t with a single new letter, the words map and tap would have the same spelling. Likewise, merging the letter v and the letter z would leave crave and craze spelled identically, and merging c and k would eliminate any written distinction between lace and lake. But is this the case for every pair of letters? I can't immediately think of any words which would become indistinguishable if there was only one grapheme shared between the current letter j and letter z, for example... but maybe there are some. And for that matter, is there a linguistic term for such a lack of overlap in where letters appear? -- 203.97.105.173 (talk) 06:30, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

What about "jig" and "zig", assuming you accept "zig" as a word? ("Take off every jig!") It would affect some names too, like Jack/Zack, or zen/Jen. Adam Bishop (talk) 07:09, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Zane Grey would probably have taken rather strong exception to being confused with Jane Grey. (Greys' Dichotomy ?)—— Shakescene (talk) 07:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Just about anything can be done with English spelling, but more importantly, why would you want to make such changes? DOR (HK) (talk) 07:13, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting that you'd want to — just curious about whether the alphabet happens have ended up in such a way that you theoretically could. (I think at least some writing systems have, but maybe I'm wrong.) -- 203.97.105.173 (talk) 10:28, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Remember that over the centuries, the English alphabet has lost a couple of Anglo-Saxon letters that were once thought useful and indicative of distinct sounds (yogh and thorn), while adding J, U and W to the Classical Latin alphabet, which itself had added, reassigned or reshuffled letters like K, G, Y and Z from earlier alphabets. Speaking from near-total ignorance, I'd speculate wildly that even when they'd come to represent similar or identical sounds, two letters would be less likely to be dropped or merged if they would cause different words to spelled identically (e.g. VALUE and VALVE, both of which would have been spelled VALVE, or JAN and IAN, closer in meaning though no longer in pronunciation, both of which would have been spelled IAN, under the older alphabets that had no U or J). But the evidence may well weigh heavily against me. And as for J and Z, since they almost never represent similar sounds, what conceivably-useful purpose outside cryptography would be served by spelling Dixieland JAJJ or ZAZZ or #A## ? There's probably a sound reason why Scrabble has only two blanks. —— Shakescene (talk) 07:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there would be any problems with merging "Q" and "U" (and "Q" and most other vowels might work as well, but that's a little less clear). -Elmer Clark (talk) 07:48, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Unless you wanted to fly Qantas to Qatar to discuss Qinetiq 80.193.130.5 (talk) 10:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Are "Uantas," "Uatar," and "Uinetiu" already words then? -Elmer Clark (talk) 00:35, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

"And for that matter, is there a linguistic term for such a lack of overlap in where letters appear?" Complementary distribution would probably be the best choice. It means that two elements are never found in the same place at the same time. It's typically only used in phonology and morphology, but I think that's just because that's where the researchers are. It should apply equally well here. Indeterminate (talk) 11:08, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

In English, /h/ and /ng/ are in complementary distribution: h only ever occurs at the beginning of words, and ng only at the end. Thus, there is no overlap. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 11:19, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure h only ever occurs at the beginning of words, and ng only at the end? How about "abhor", "angry" (in which the "n" is pronounced /ng/)? HOOTmag (talk) 17:47, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

The way this example is usually phrased is that /h/ and /ŋ/ are in complementary distribution, since /h/ only occurs in syllable onsets, and /ŋ/ in syllable codas. So: (1) it should have read "syllables" rather than "words", and (2) in view of words like Hannah, I seriously doubt that anything like this remains true for graphemes in place of phonemes. — Emil J. 18:15, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. HOOTmag (talk) 18:27, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Yep, I meant syllable onsets and finals. Thanks for the correction. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:59, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I did a brute-force search on a dictionary file containing approximately 210,000 words, many of them obscure. Ignoring capitalized words and single-letter "words", there were only 7 letter-pairs where conflating the two letters did not produce any ambiguous words. In each case one letter of the pair was Q; the other one was A, F, I, J, O, X, or Z.

There were 4 more letter-pairs, also each involving Q, where only one pair of ambiguous words was produced. These were shoe/shoq, snudge/squdge, shoq/shou, and qeri/veri. Did I mention that this dictionary file included a lot of obscure words? Two more letter-pairs involving Q produced only two ambiguous word-pairs each: bere/qere and built/quilt, and qere/yere and quen/yuan.

For letter-pairs not involving Q, the fewest ambiguous word-pairs produced was 3, for U with either J or Z. At least one word in each of these pairs was obscure. In the other direction, the letter-pairs producing the greatest number of ambiguous word-pairs were A and O with 2,031 and D and R with 2,031. Of course, adding inflected forms might very well greatly change this result.

--Anonymous, 12:33 UTC, September 21, 2009.

That's really interesting. What did you use to write that (I assume you wrote some kind of program to analyze a corpus)? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 11:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

No, I said, I used a brute-force method on a dictionary file. Specifically, I just did:

   tr $i $j <words | sort - words | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 2' >out$i$j

for each of the 26C2 = 325 possible pairs $i $j of letters, and examined the 325 output files. Not an efficient method, but one that was trivial to write. --Anonymous, 19:21 UTC, September 21, 2009.

Are you sure there are 7 pairs only? How about the pair K-Q? I can't think currently of any "normal" word (i.e. one used in normal life) which contains a Q and which would have had another "normal" meaning - had the Q been replaced by a K... Anyways, your investigation is interesting. Good luck. HOOTmag (talk) 12:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

There were only 7 in this dictionary file, but I repeat what I said about obscure words. There were 6 hits for K/Q: qasida, qintar, qoph, quan, qubba, and quei, together with the obvious forms using K in each case. Several of these have Wikipedia entries under one or the other spelling only. --Anonymous, 19:21 UTC, September 21, 2009.

I was sure you'd been looking for proper English words. Unfortunately, all of the words you've indicated - are non-English foreign words which are just transliterated in Latin alphabet. If you take into account such a kind of "words", then I can promise you that there are no pair of letters that can be merged into one letter. HOOTmag (talk) 20:16, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, no, you can't...as he said earlier, even taking into account all such words that were widespread enough to make it into this dictionary, the pairs Q/A, Q/F, Q/I, Q/J, Q/O, Q//X, and Q/Z still work. -Elmer Clark (talk) 00:39, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Choosing this dictionary as the authority, is really a legitimate decision, However, It's too arbitrary for deciding whether a pair of letters should be merged universally into one letter. HOOTmag (talk) 07:36, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Nobody is suggesting that any letters "should" be merged. That would be silly. I just provided some data which should not be taken for any more than it's worth. --Anonymous, 05:17 UTC, September 23, 2009.

What if the King of England met the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty? (Okay, I admit Qing is not an everyday word, but still...) Duomillia (talk) 16:48, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Qing is a (Chinese) proper name. If you take proper names into account, then you can't find any pair of letters that can be merged into one letter: Once you say, for example, that Q-A can be such a pair, then I can give my new son the proper name Aueen, so that Queen and Aueen can't be interchanged...

Conclusion: proper names mustn't be taken into account!

HOOTmag (talk) 17:38, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Auran and Qural (in Somalia) are proper names, and aren't found as common words in the OED. However, if someone can find a common form of these words, they would double with quran (considered as a copy of scripture, like a bible), or aural. [Of course, Auran might have carefully checked to see that there was no common form of the word that might impair their trademark before adopting the name.]—— Shakescene (talk) 04:41, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Right, and that's why I think proper names shouldn't be taken into account. HOOTmag (talk) 07:36, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

What if I wrote a computer ai that was so smart it generated its own qi energy? Duomillia (talk) 18:22, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

You just join me by following my argument. I've asked "If Q-A can be a pair, then why can't Q-K be such a pair"? and now you're asking: "How can Q-A be a pair?" Welcome to the club... HOOTmag (talk) 20:16, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

¶ Postulating some plausible possibilities and checking them in the OED, I came up with FUITE and QUICE, which would double with QUITE and JUICE. The first is marked obsolete, and is essentially the same as "fuite" in modern French, meaning "flight"; the OED's citation of it first use is William Caxton in 1499, referring to "their fuite or flyinge". "Quice" is a variant of "queest", which the OED calls still current in some western English dialects for a ring-dove or wood pigeon. The OED also gives another rare, obsolete meaning of QUICE found only in "quice tree", meaning gorse or whin, with a citation (spelt differently) from 1490.
As for proper names, I'd allow them if they weren't contrived neologisms like HOOTmag's "Aueen"; and "Auran" would thus be on the edge (it wasn't concocted to break the rule, but it was designed partly to be a non-word or a new word). I have a greater problem when the two words mean the same thing as in QOPH and KOPH, because nothing is lost if K and Q were merged: the merged word would be spelt the same and mean the same thing. —— Shakescene (talk)

Thanks for all the very informative responses. -- 203.97.105.173 (talk) 03:19, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

¶ Having found something for Q with A (Qural/aural), F (fuite/quite) and J (juice/quice), I scanned (visually, not electronically) the OED for possible OUI combinations to match with QUI, and, while OUI and QUI themselves did not appear as hoped, I came up with a couple of obsolete word-forms that might work: OUIN (oven) and OUIR (over). QUIN to us is a colloquial term for Quintuplet, to rhyme with Twin; it's also another name for Pecten (a mollusc or shellfish). QUIR is an obsolete use or spelling of QUIRE = Choir.
¶ I, X and Z look much harder to postulate possible letter-combinations for, to match corresponding ones with Q. But there might be promise in the modern Chinese spelling system, where Q and X (as well as J) stand for different Chinese sounds that Anglophones hear (and Wade–Giles transcribes) as "Ch" or "Sh", as in Jiang Qing (Chiang Ching), Mao 's widow, and Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-ping), Mao's successor. Perhaps there are Chinese words whose current spelling differs only in Q/X that have migrated and naturalized sufficiently to be considered English words. —— Shakescene (talk) 07:11, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
¶ However, I found another town name, Fiq, referring both to a current town and zone in the Somali region of Ethiopia and to a town in the Golan Heights disputed between Syria and Israel. This of course, would duplicate with FIX were Q and X to be the same letter. As with Qural in Somalia, this is a proper name, so it wouldn't meet some people's criteria. If they (and the obsolete words OUIN, OUIR and/or QUIR) were admissible, that leaves I and Z as letters that could still be in theory be merged with Q with no loss of information. Anyone want to postulate a possible coincidence of Q with I or Z (which is how I came up with the previous examples to check)? —— Shakescene (talk) 18:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

(This is one of the most fun reference desk topics I've ever read.) --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 04:28, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Latin Translation

Could someone who understands Latin take a look at the Calends article, and translate the verse there that purportedly determines when the Calends occurred? Thanks. Rojomoke (talk) 18:08, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

The verse is not telling you when to find the Calends; they were always on the first of the money month. It's saying that dates were counted backwards from the Calends, unless they were counted from the Nones or Ides. The second-last day of April was named "3rd to the Calends of May" (just as today the time 9:58 may be called "2 minutes to 10", except that we can say 9:58 and they didn't have any other way of naming their dates). See Roman calendar. I'm rusty with Latin, but here's a rough translation:

The first day of the month, and which is called the Calends:

six it will give the Nones in May, October, July, and March;

but four in the remaining ones: the Ides, eight in any one.

From there all the remaining days are named to be Calends;

which are named numbering backwards from the following month.

In other words, the Nones were 4 or 6 days after the Calends depending on the month, the Ides 8 days after that in any month ("any one"); and after the Ides ("from there"), you named days by counting backwards from the Calends. --Anonymous, 19:42 UTC, September 21, 2009 (copyedited later).

Yeah, you see, I think Julius Caesar really did get that warning about the Ides of March. But being a busy guy, he forgot that old verse and assumed the Ides was on the 13th, like in most months. So he had all his praetorians around and was well guarded all day on the 13th, only to get stabbed by Brutus two days later! --Pykk (talk) 06:34, 23 September 2009 (UTC)