Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 July 15

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July 15

--ope, etc.

Consider first antelope, elope, misanthrope, and perhaps even hope itself. Fine English words.

Then, there are calliope, Penelope, Antigone, and epitome, all of which have four syllables.

What's the etymological or ancestral difference between words in each group, such that the final "e" is pronounced in one, silent in the other? And second, will the answer tell me how to pronounce, say, Asterope?

Thanks in advance to the linguists, among whose numbers I will never be counted... (Took one grad course on the subject, just to fill a hole, and consider myself lucky to have "escaped undamaged". :-) ) DaHorsesMouth (talk) 01:15, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

P.S. It is not necessary to add additional examples to the word groups.

OK so i think the latter group features words that had "e" at the end IN the original greek words from which they were derived. And in Greek you pronounce the final e as a syllable. The words in the first group either are not derived from Greek at all but even when they were the E was added on later, during the Middle English days.--Fran Cranley (talk) 01:49, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

They're not all from Greek. 'Recipe' is from Latin. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 03:34, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The distinction is made between words that entered English before the establishment of the Silent e convention (and thus, which have evolved to obey that convention), and those loanwords from other languages that do not have the Silent e convention. For the most part, if the final "e" is pronounced, its a loanword from another language where that "e" is pronounced, though "hypercorrection" screws this up sometimes in both directions; the car style known as a "coupe", refering to the automobile body style, is frequently pronounced "coop" in many dialects of English, despite the final "e" being pronounced in the original French. Conversely, the word forte meaning "personal strength" is usually pronounced "for-TAY" despite the fact that, in the original French, the final "e" is silent. Also bona fide is another one where we can't agree on whether the final "e" is pronounced (some dialects "bow-na-fayd" and others "bow-na-fee-day"). --Jayron32 04:07, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The piano is my forte. I've been waiting years to say that.  :) I've seen 'bona fide' spelt "bonnified". True story. Now just waiting for the back-formed verb 'to bonnify' to make its appearance. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 04:17, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I always assumed "forte" was from Italian. By contrast, "dilettante", is certainly from Italian, where the final e is pronounced, but is usually pronounced by English speakers as if it's French. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:43, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

"Forte" in French is just the feminine form of the adjective "fort" (strong). The equivalent to the English "forte" would be "force", so the English word is more likely borrowed from Italian. Dilettante also exists in French (borrowed from Italian), with the final e silent; I expect it reached English via French and kept the French pronunciation. --Xuxl (talk) 14:31, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Your expectations are at variance with the OED, which says English "forte" was formerly also written "fort" and pronounced /fɔːt/ (this is in a non-rhotic British pronunciation of course), and was borrowed from French; but makes no mention of French in its etymology of "dilettante". --ColinFine (talk) 20:31, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

although "forte" used in musical notation is certainly from Italian along with most of the rest of it. Rckrone (talk) 17:57, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Complexity of Japanese grammar

I've read contradictory opinions from random people on forums, blogs etc. that Japanese grammar is simpler than English, that it's more complex than English, or that it's simpler in some ways and more complex in others. Based on my beginner-level understanding of Japanese, its grammar seems quite a lot simpler to me than English, but it could be that I just haven't yet been exposed to enough "grown-up" Japanese. I guess this is a bit of a fuzzy question since there is (I assume) no exact way to quantity grammatical complexity, but is there any sort of consensus on this point amongst language experts? 86.183.1.14 (talk) 02:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Consensus (at least the consensus here whenever a similar question is asked) is that all grammars are complex, and in some languages some things are comparatively simple, and in some languages other things are comparatively complex. No language is universally simpler than any other. It seems like we would have an actual article about this, but I can't find one. Adam Bishop (talk) 09:17, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, perceived "complexity" of language is entirely dependent on your native language. You could say that Japanese grammar is markedly different from English grammar, which is true, but it's meaningless to say the whole grammar is "more complex". We do have an article - Difficulty of learning languages. - filelakeshoe 09:57, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

In my inexpert opinion, languages have both subjective differences in complexity (dependent on one's native language) and absolute, or objective, differences in complexity. Discarding the subjective differences, a comparison of objective complexity nevertheless ought to be possible. However, I am not sure how this would be done, and I am not sure if, as Adam seems to be implying, the answer would be that "all languages are about the same". For example, I don't know any Chinese, but I've read (more consistently, I think) that Chinese grammar is reckoned to be pretty simple (objectively). No? 86.176.211.64 (talk) 11:53, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm studying Chinese now. While I would agree that, when it comes to the usual grammatical parameters for European languages (gender, case, tense, mood, etc.), Chinese grammar is "simple", in fact there is greater complexity in areas such as aspect and causativity than I have encountered in any European language. Also, whereas European languages may have up to 3 genders for nouns, the system of Chinese classifiers means that Chinese nouns may fall into one of dozens (or hundreds, depending on the register) of classes analogous in some ways to gender. Finally, like other East Asian languages (though probably not to the same extent as Japanese), Chinese has a more developed system of register than European languages, with a large formal vocabulary that replaces the unmarked vocabulary depending on the social circumstances of an utterance. Marco polo (talk) 12:48, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, Japanese grammar is for the most part regular, with no irregular noun declensions, verb conjugation by person, arbitrary gender classes, or consonant mutations to learn. Its phonology is much simpler than that of Tlingit or Ubykh. The difficulty of the writing systems and the complexities of politeness are not properly grammatical issues. Anyone who thinks all languages are of equal complexity hasn't compared Spanish to Russian or Japanese to Georgian. μηδείς (talk) 13:25, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

How then is Spanish less complex than Russian, without comparing it to English? I know native speakers of Slavic languages tend to love waxing lyrical about how their language is so difficult and esoteric and mysterious compared to the next, and in my experience it seems to just be an opinion that isolating languages are simpler than fusional ones because they have less morphology. - filelakeshoe 15:19, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Phonologically, depending on the analysis, Russian has about twice as many consonant sounds and allows much greater complexity in consonant clusters; free stress combined with the case system and the phenomena of akanye and ikanye highly complicate pronunciation; there is no ambiguity in how to pronounce the written word in Spanish. Consider здравствуйте "hello" spelled zdravstvujte and carefully pronounced, roughly to the English ear. ZDRAHFST-vweetsyah. Compare this to buenos días.

The verb systems might be described as of equal complexity, but it is not possible to predict the form of the infinitive from finite forms in Russian, nor is there a way to know with certainty the corresponding perfective or imperfective verb form based on its counterpart.

Russian nouns have three genders in six cases and two numbers, Spanish has masculine/feminine and singular/plural with no cases and no essential difference in form between nouns and adjectives. The Russian case system is highly complex, both in its forms, with, for example, the word "tongue" being pronounced roughly yih-ZICK in the sing nom, iz-zick-YEH, in the sing prep, and in its governance, with, for example, the use not only of the singular and plural but also the genitive case depending on in number expressions. Adjectival case endings in Russian are not the same as nominal endings.

Compare: "The English language"/"In the English language", La lengua española/En la lengua española, Русский язык/В русском языке (Russkij jazyk/V russkom jazyke) pronounced ROOS-kee yuh-ZICK/VROOS-kuhm iz-zick-YEH. Note the Russian form involves separate changes in the endings of the noun and adjective and an opaque change in pronunciation of the noun based on the application of stress rules to an underlying stressless noun stem *yah-zick. μηδείς (talk) 18:10, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Subjectively, Russian strikes me as very rich in its ability to express full sentences with no more words than there are stems:

"The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" - 11 syllables

Дух бодр, плоть же слаба (dukh bodr, plotj zhe slaba) - six syllables

el espíritu está dispuesto, pero la carne es débil - 18 syllables

Russian is excellent for drama, I would love to listen to Shakespeare in the original Russian. Listen to the Devil in this clip of an adaptation of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Spanish delights me in the subtle implications of its verbs. It is especially suited to songs about broken hearts. Soy Infeliz, En el ultimo trago, Piensa en mi. μηδείς (talk) 18:53, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I am pretty sure Shakespeare wasn't originally written in Russian. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:07, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Then you have a lot to learn about "Shakespeare" -[1], [2]. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:24, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I wonder about that masculine singular ending красный for the plural expression Все книги; in the singular, книгa is feminine, of course. I'm not up on my Russian plural attributive adjectives, so you may well be correct with красный, but my gut says otherwise. If pressed, I'd go for the plural ending красны.-- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:47, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, красные. μηδείς (talk) 21:04, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

That sentence was rather artificial and had some deeper problems, so I changed the example to comparative translations of Matthew 26:41. μηδείς (talk)

Cool. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 23:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Shakespeare's Hamlet soliloquy, TaH pagh, taHbe', in the original Klingon.

CHN (Area west of Mississippi)

At zh:User:WhisperToMe/夏威夷州教育部 - How do I say "area west of the Mississippi River" in Chinese? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 08:10, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Literally, 密西西比河以西的地区. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 01:29, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

For "在(area west of the Mississippi River), 夏威夷州教育部是最古老学区", I would suggest "夏威夷州教育部是美国密西西比河以西最早成立的学区", literally "the Hawaii Department of Education is the school district with the earliest establishment in the US west of the Mississippi River", which is a little more idiomatic in Chinese (but not sure if there is a distinction between "oldest" and "first established" that I missed).

A comment on "是夏威夷州的教育部和夏威夷州的学区" -- the idea that a department of education is also a school district seems very strange in a Chinese context, and probably bears a little explanation. I would suggest something like "是夏威夷州的教育部，同时也指该教育部所管辖的、包含整个夏威夷州的单一学区" ("is the Department of Education in Hawaii, but also refers to the single school district administered by this department and including all of the state of Hawaii").

A final point - usually in Chinese a sub-national government department is called a 厅, not a 部, which I think this should be unless the Hawaiian government has a preference for its departments to be known as a 部. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 01:38, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for giving me the suggestions! I will add them into the proposed article on the Hawaii BOE.

In that case, http://doe.k12.hi.us/civilrights/Equal%20Educational%20Opportunity/EqualEducationalOpportunityPamphlet2009_ChineseMandarin.pdf has it translated with "部" at the end.

WhisperToMe (talk) 02:00, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

TRANSHIPPED - Meaning

Sir, Could you please explain the meaning of the word 'transhipped' which I happened to read a well reputed Indian news paper THE HINDU, and found no such word in the Oxford Dictionary.Kasiraoj (talk) 10:39, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

It means "transferred from one ship to another" - see this page at Wiktionary. The OED may possibly use the alternative spelling "transshipped".Gandalf61 (talk) 11:08, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I prefer the spelling with two s's. Otherwise it looks like it should mean "transferred from one hip to another" (e.g. a mother carrying a baby). Angr (talk) 11:41, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Me too. I prefer 'transsubstantiation' to 'transubstantiation', because I don't know what an "ubstance" is. Nor do I know what an "append" is, but apparently they're plentiful in some parts of the world because doctors are always performing appendectomies. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 11:49, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Haplology. μηδείς (talk) 19:08, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

No it's not. Angr (talk) 23:07, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The article haplology has no relevance to JackofOz's implied *appendixectomy > appendectomy? μηδείς (talk) 19:42, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I thought you meant the loss of "s" in transhipped and transubstantiation was haplology, which it isn't, but even *appendixectomy or *appendicectomy > appendectomy isn't really haplology (or "haplogy" as I call it) since the suppressed string isn't a duplicate of one of its neighbors. Angr (talk) 20:05, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Btw, I've never heard the word "appendixectomy" till now and so I couldn't have been implying it, although I have no control over what others infer. "Appendicectomy" is the word I had in mind. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:15, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Then your argument, Angr, is with the article and its source (Merriam Webster) which says the deletion "of one or more similar", not identical, "sounds". μηδείς (talk) 21:20, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't even go so far as to call the sounds similar. We're removing the /ɪ(k)s/ from /əpɛndɪ(k)sˈɛktəmi/, and I'm not seeing or hearing anything similar next to it. If it were /əpɛndɪkɛktəmi/, maybe. And whatever M-W says, I do think it has to be a syllable (or at least, the string deleted has to include a vowel and at least one consonant). Angr (talk) 21:32, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

So your points are, first, that as far as you can tell, /ɪk(s)/ and /ɛk/ are not even similar sounds, and, second, I should not have linked to the article haplology for the benefit of JackofOz because you personally (ignoring for the moment that the two -lo- sequences in your own example haplology are not pronounced the same) don't accept the phenomenon as existing unless it is the reduction of identical sequences, sources be damned? Well, okay then, to each his OR. μηδείς (talk) 23:39, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Looked it up in the OED Online. "Transhipped" is under the "tranship" entry. It also says less commonly transship. Two meanings are given: 1. To transfer from one ship to another; also transf., from one railway train or other conveyance to another. 2. Of a passenger: To change from one ship or other conveyance to another. Pfly (talk) 20:44, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Difference between accuracy, precision and resolution.

In an article about a South African missile testing facility there is a statement: "Fixed and mobile doppler radar receivers to track missile velocities with 3 cm/s accuracy". (BTW, it isn't a complete sentence because it's part of a list.) I'm not entirely happy with the word "accuracy" in that context but I'm not sure which of "precision" or "resolution" is the better option. For the record, South African English is my native language. Roger (talk) 11:09, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I think "accuracy" is fine -- the sentence sounds fine, grammatically -- maybe the word "with" is not the right one. What does "with 3 cm/s accuracy" mean? that if it printes 1040cm/sec, the truth could be that that missile is going 1043 or 1037 cm/sec relative to the ground, but not a single cm/s faster than the former or slower than the latter? 188.222.102.201 (talk) 12:24, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

To my US English ears, the phrase, including the word accuracy, looks fine. Of your two alternatives, I prefer precision, since I think the word resolution is associated with visual images, whereas this phrase refers primarily to data (even if they may be displayed visually). Marco polo (talk) 12:33, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

AIUI what the phrase is saying is that the margin of error of the radar's velocity measurement capability is 3cm/s. I've found this article - Accuracy and precision - which only serves to confuse me even more. Perhaps this question should be passed over to the science desk? Roger (talk) 13:09, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

If it's the margin of error, then I think accuracy is the correct term. Angr (talk) 13:26, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I think accuracy is more connotative of the concept of "degree of accuracy" than precision is connotative of the concept of "degree of precision". The sentence could be rearranged to include the phrase "degree of precision". But this is unnecessary with the word accuracy, so I think the sentence is well-written with accuracy as it is. What is the objection to the word accuracy used as it is in that sentence? Bus stop (talk) 14:00, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Here's the skinny on "accuracy" and "precision". Imagine you have a gun and fire 100 shots at a target:

• The gun can be said to be accurate if the bullets lie roughly evenly distributed around the bullseye. That is, once you average all of the distances from the center of your shots, the "center" of the pattern your bullet holes make is also at the "center" of the target. The two centers line up, so the gun is accurate.
• The gun can be said to be precise if the bullets lie close to each other. That is, a precise gun puts the bullets in a tight little pattern, while an imprecise gun places the bullets in a wider pattern.
• These two are independent concepts. Thus a gun that sprays bullets over a wide area, but the center of that area is at the center of the target is said to be accurate but imprecise. The converse, a gun that shoots a tight pattern where all the bullets strike very close together, but where that point is some distance from where you are aiming the gun is said to be inaccurate but precise.

The opening sentence is ambiguous, if we don't know whether the writer of the sentence meant accuracy or precision, there is nothing in the context to indicate the correct word. Consider:

• receivers to track missile velocities with 3 cm/s <BLANK>

• If you replace <BLANK> with "accuracy" you mean "The receivers are able to track missle velocities to within 3 cm/s of how fast they are actually traveling"
• If you replace <BLANK> with "precision" you mean "The receivers would track multiple missles all traveling the same actual velocity would show a spread of measurements to within 3 cm/s" without making any statement on how close the recievers read-out was to the actual velocity, just that actually identical velocities would show no more than 3 cm/s difference.

What we are left with is to take the writer at their word. If they wrote "accuracy" we can only assume they meant "accuracy" because there is nothing in the context to let us know they chose the wrong word. --Jayron32 14:42, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

We have an article on Accuracy and precision and Jayron seems to be correct. Resolution also comes up in that article. Bus stop (talk) 19:04, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

What's "skinny"? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:18, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

See the slang definition at skinny. Bus stop (talk) 20:27, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I got the meaning from the context, but was curious how it came to mean that, especially being an adjective and all. Skinny what? It might be rhyming slang for tip (skinny dip), but the link doesn't corroborate that. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:41, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I assumed the word skinny in slang use alluded to the leading edge of something. I figured it meant that by the time the fat portion reached the masses that thing would be old news. (Just a guess.) Bus stop (talk) 20:53, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The OED says "the semantic motivation in sense [the US slang thing] is unclear." Pfly (talk) 21:02, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I always think of accuracy and precision in terms of geographic coordinates, with precision referring to the number of significant digits (48.38638596, -121.38769874 being more precise than 48.386, -121.387), and accuracy referring to how well the coordinates map to the actual thing/location. Precision does no good if your accuracy is off. Pfly (talk) 20:57, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

If a robot is to perform surgery on a human being we are obviously going to be very concerned with its precision. This means that we want it to be very fine-tuned to distinguish between very small movements. We are not thinking about its accuracy because we don't think it is going to perform surgery on the head when it was cardiac surgery that was called for. Bus stop (talk) 22:18, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Speak for yourself, Pollyanna. "Surgeon operate wrong" gets over 5,000,000 hits on Google, and I know people, plural, who have personally corrected the surgeon on which limb needs operation themselves before surgery. Robots do not yet have any guilt or conscience or worry or shame. μηδείς (talk) 02:31, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, it is disrespectful to the family name of Christian Doppler d.1853 to spell it without a capital D. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:40, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

No it isn't (and my assertion has just as much force as your assertion). --ColinFine (talk) 22:06, 16 July 2011 (UTC)