Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 December 5

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December 5

Right royal

The expression "right royal" seems to get churned out by the media at the drop of a hat, particularly at times of compulsory joy ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), but as far as I can tell, it has no meaning. At least, nothing different from plain old "royal".

Some people are The Right Honourable while others are merely The Honourable. And there's The Right Reverend cf. The Reverend. So the word "right" has a certain defined place in these sorts of terms. But not with "royal". There is no "Right Royal Family", or "Right Royal Air Force", or "Right Royal Opera House, Covent Garden", or "Right Royal Society", or "Right Royal Mail", for example.

Can this apparently completely made-up expression be explained by editorial penchant for alliteration, euphony and irrelevant grandiloquence, or is there more to the story that is not revealed in my research? I've been hearing it most of my life, yet it seems not to be described anywhere. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 04:12, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I suspect it's related to the old prejudice that the left was "sinister", making right "above-board". StuRat (talk) 04:22, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Um, no. In this context, 'right' (in Brit Eng at least) just acts as emphasis (if it means anything at alll), as in "You've made a right mess of that", or "I was in a right pickle". Note that in both phrases, a vulgar Anglo-Saxon word of entirely different formal meaning, also used for simple emphasis, would have conveyed a similar message. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:56, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I think there is a relationship, but it's not as simple as StuRat's words might be read to suggest. I'm fairly sure that all the common sense of the word right — "opposite of left", "vertical", "direct", "true", "entitlement", "completely" — are etymologically related. --Trovatore (talk) 05:04, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

In Old English, riht meant "straight"; it had a separate word for "right (side)", swither. "Right" came to be used for the right hand, etc., probably because of its association with strength and correctness. But right continued to be used in other senses unrelated to the side of an object ("straight", "precisely", etc.). I'm sure the senses have influenced each other, though. The phrase Jack noticed is listed in the OED at "right, adv.", 7a & b,, "very, extremely, quite", ("Now usu. in nonstandard and regional use, or arch. in right royal"), with several quotations, including one from Shakespeare (Richard II i. ii. 231): "That braue Prince..Young, valiant, wise, and no doubt right royall." Lesgles (talk) 05:59, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

As with many phrases, its use would probably have become widespread because it had been used by Shakespeare. I'm surprised it's not included at wikt:Category:Words from Shakespeare. Ghmyrtle (talk) 11:53, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for all that good background. I often get the impression that "right" is associated with "royal", not as an intensifier as it is in "a right mess", but as a pseudo-formaliser, if I can coin such a term. When it's spoken, it's given the same sort of cachet as the right in "Right Honourable" or "Right Reverend" is, as if being "right royal" were somehow a higher degree of royalty than common-or-garden "royal". I fully expect that some people believe it is a recognised and formalised expression along the same lines as Rt Hon and Rt Rev. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 08:24, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Some may, but looking at some of your examples, I believe them to be attempts at humour. Googling for "the right royal" reinforces this impression, as most of the results are the names of parties and other events. Henry^Flower 10:23, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed Henry, the phrase is archaic, informal and humourous, usually found nowadays in tabloid press. It's a form of intensifier. --TammyMoet (talk) 10:41, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

EO indicates "right" originally meant "in a straight line",[6] and is akin to "regal". Hence to call something "right royal" is to call it "regal regal". The "right" part is not altogether archaic, as the southern U.S. expression "right much" is another way of saying "very, very much". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:14, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

That's the etymological fallacy, Bugs: if they do come from the same root, regal is more changed in meaning than right, so while glossing royal as regal is reasonable, glossing right as regal is plain wrong. --ColinFine (talk) 11:43, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

You need to read the EO entry a little more closely. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:15, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

It would be truer to etymology to say that regal is a specialized synonym of right than the reverse; rex and right and direct and regular all come from a root meaning something like ‘keep order’, that being a king's job. —Tamfang (talk) 05:12, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Does "right [adjective]" mean the same thing as, and come from, "downright [adjective]"? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:08, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Well yes, but not interchangeably. You can be "downright rude" but not "right rude", while you can be a "right bastard" but not a "downright bastard". Such are the vagaries of idiomatic speech. Curiously, the addition of the word "old" increases the number of possibilities (in London at any rate). There's a "right old knees-up"[7] (party), a "right old piss-up" (drinking party) or a "right old barney"[8] (argument) and so on. Alansplodge (talk) 02:37, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

It depends. In my local (Yorkshire) dialect "right" in this sense simply means "very". It were, for example, right cold today and there were a right long queue at the greengrocer's, with some right rude bastards in the queue.

You can very easily be right rude, and someone right rude probably behaved like a right bastard. In a Yorkshire accent "right royal" would simply mean "very royal"; whether there are degrees of "royalness" is, of course, debatable. The degrees of "reverendness" such as "Right Reverend" and "Very Reverend" have always amused me; are trainee vicars "A Bit Reverend", progressing through "Fairly Reverend" to "Mostly Reverend"?

It seems that you're Reverend as soon as you become a priest or deacon, then Very Reverend, Venerable, Right Reverend and finally Most Reverend.[9] Alansplodge (talk) 19:43, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

As for "Right Royal" this is pretty much a marketing term, along with "Elizabethan Banquet", the use of "Fayre" instead of "Fair" and "Ye" instead of "The". A "Right Royal Banquet" is bound to be far better than "A Royal Banquet", after all. Tonywalton ^Talk

Thanks to all. I can always depend on you, which is very comforting in a world full of such uncertainties. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 11:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

"Downright bastard" would be the normal American expression, and "right bastard" would be identified as British or be misunderstood. μηδείς (talk) 17:27, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

What is meant by this remark in the Japanese wikipedia article ja:壇ノ浦の戦い?

上杉和彦『日本の戦争史 6 源平の争乱』P224参照。なお安田元久は、「このとき義経は、当時としては破天荒の戦術をとった。すなわち彼は部下に命じて、敵の戦闘員には目もくれず、兵船をあやつる水手・梶取のみを目標に矢を射かけさせたのである」（『日本の武将7　源義経』人物往来社、1966年）という独自の見解を示している。根拠が不明であり仮説・推測の域を出ていないが、非戦闘員を射殺する義経の卑怯な戦法という解釈はここから生まれたと思われる。

--Inspector (talk) 06:56, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Yasuda said in 1966 that "Yoshitsune employed unprecedented tactics. Yoshitsune, not paying attention to the combatants, ordered his men to aim and shoot arrows at the helmsman and boatmen". The grounds was unknown and Yasuda's view was thought as hypothesis, but seemingly that was the beginning of the interpretation that Yoshitune's tactics was unfair as it was an attack on the noncombatant. Oda Mari (talk) 08:20, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Seems weird, though. If this book not criticize such tactics, how can it be "the beginning of the interpretation that..."? Unless other sources hold such views.--Inspector (talk) 05:01, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Wait a minute. Which one does the "The grounds was unknown and Yasuda's view was thought as hypothesis" refer to, the act of attacking helmsman and boatman itself, or the view that such tactics was unfair?--Inspector (talk) 00:32, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Kanji

Why does "circle" have the same kanji as "yen"? --128.42.152.220 (talk) 20:42, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

This character, with a Chinese or Chinese-derived pronunciation, was originally used not only in Japan but also in Korea and China to refer to the round (circular) Spanish dollar, which was in wide circulation in the region beginning in the 17th century. Marco polo (talk) 00:42, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Japanese yen#Pronunciation and etymology explains it. --Kusunose 02:01, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Vagueness of a language

Is it meaningful to speak of the "vagueness" of a language? Are people studying this? Is there a more proper word for it? Which languages are more "vague" than others? What I mean by vagueness is something like the following: in Japanese there is no plural, personal pronouns are not always used (and there is no conjugation either), etc. Understanding or translation will depend strongly on knowledge of the context. bamse (talk) 21:14, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

This is usually called ambiguity. I would not think that a language is any more ambiguous than another, unless it is just an impoverished language. I would think that you could simply be more verbose and thereby disambiguate. I don't know Japanese, so I can't say anything substantial in response to that; but I would just guess that Japanese people have no problem referring specifically to many people or things even though they don't have a plural. In Ancient Greek, just as there were singular and plural grammatical numbers, there was dual grammatical number which refers specifically to two people or things. But in English I have no problem referring to specifically two things, I can simply use the plural and throw in a "two", e.g., "Those two people were impatient." And ambiguity is relative. "Those people were impatient" is more ambiguous than "Those two people were impatient", and it is also more ambiguous than "Those women were impatient". But "Those two people were impatient" is only more ambiguous than "Those women were impatient" in relation to gender, but it is less ambiguous in relation to number. A language is going to differ from another not merely by substitution of words, otherwise it wouldn't be a truly different language, but just a code. And if that's the case, then necessarily one language is going to have ambiguities which are common to it but not to another language, as the words are going to refer to different sets of things. -Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 22:54, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Well said. μηδείς (talk) 03:23, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I've always liked the example for 'vagueness' in the English language that Jared Diamond pointed out in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: that in English, 'we' is inherently ambiguous, whereas in Tok Pisin, the 'pidgin' (actually a creole) of Melanesia, the words 'yumi' (from 'you-me') and 'mipela' (from 'my-fellows') - for 'you and I - along possibly with others' and 'myself and others not including you' respectively, resolves any ambiguity. As I've just discovered, the national anthem of Vanuatu (in Bislama, closely related to Tok Pisin) makes elegant use of this too, as Yumi, Yumi, Yumi is unashamedly inclusive, and "Yumi brata evriwan!" AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:46, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

The general name for this is inclusive vs. exclusive 1st person. (Wikipedia article "Clusivity", which I'm not sure is widely-used term.) -- AnonMoos (talk) 05:40, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

For the other side of the spectrum, see Lojban. Lesgles (talk) 04:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. An excellent cure for ambiguity... AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:50, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, lojban is only syntactically unambiguous. Semantically it can be extremely vague if you want. It's been a long time since I thought about lojban, but if I remember right the statement ko'a broda means something like "it/he/they/something(s) is/was/will be [unspecified]", and ko'a broda ko'e something like "it/he/they/something(s)-1 is-[unspecified-relation-with] it/he/they/something(s)-2", where the "unspecified-relation" could be anything, including "has no relation with", and the "something(s)" could also be anything, physical or abstract, singular, plural, whatever. There's a bunch more along these lines. The unspecified things and relations can be "assigned" (eg, ko'a goi la samantas. melbi = "Something-1, henceforth referring to 'Samantha', is beautiful."—or even "Whatever it is referred to by the name 'Samantas', henceforth known as 'something-1', is beautiful"), but they can be left unspecified, letting you say something like "a thingamajig is doing something", except vaguer. Tense is unspecified by default—essentially everything is unspecified unless explicitly stated. You could say lojban is vague by default. Pfly (talk) 05:45, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, well vague itself is a pretty vague word. :) Lesgles (talk) 01:28, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I think the general term you are looking for is the degree of inflectedness (which may or may not be a word, my English is pretty vague, at any rate). Latin and Greek are highly inflected; English much less so. There must be more, because of course, although you didn't state it in the question, there is ambiguity about vocabulary. When I went to France, my host told me there was no French word for light, in the sense "turn the light on". Obviously that's not quite true, but he was telling me it all depends on what sort of light. Maybe some fluent French speakers can debunk this if they like, but he said a desk lamp had a specific term, whereas in English I'm sure you would just typically call it a light most of the time. IBE (talk) 19:29, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

English has the largest active vocabulary of any spoken language. We tend to have a native, a Norse, a Norman, a Latin and a Greek word for things. We've got wains and wagons and vehicles as well as cars and conveyances. We have legal and lawful and loyal. Still yet again we have not only encore, but "still, yet" and "again" while French has encore, encore, encore. Of course some languages make specific conceptual distinctions English doesn't, like the Russian words for blue. But with our etymological twins and triplets and quadruplets and borrowing we make up for a lot of declensional ambiguity with conceptual precision. μηδείς (talk) 21:11, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting. I'm English and many years ago lived in Germany for around a year. The German people I spoke to said that English was an exceptionally hard language to learn because of the very subtly different words English had for things. A native English speaker would probably know that "wain", "wagon", "vehicle", "car" and "conveyance" looked like different modes of conveyance whereas a German speaker would call them all a "Wagen". My sister in law is of a Danish-Swiss background, though she's lived in the UK for decades, and would agree that we Brits have too many words for the same thing! Tonywalton ^Talk 00:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but both languages can still draw distinctions, what English does with a single word, German can append an adjective and neither language is incapable of unambiguously discussing a particular automobile. --Jayron32 03:46, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I am fairly uncertain that anyone made the point that German cannot be used to express things in phrases. The issue is that English has the advantage so far as number of words (wain, wagon, conveyance, vehicle) and the connotations they allow. English basically owns PIE through Germanic, Latin, and Greek, and a few on the side. As for a source look up *wegh at Watkins. μηδείς (talk) 04:14, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, but ultimately does it matter how a language arrives at that meaning? Different languages don't even agree on the difference between multiple-morpheme words and phrases, they're all organized a bit differently. All we know is that different languages say things differently. That's unsurprising. --Jayron32 04:23, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, yes, if you're looking at the subtleties of prose or poetry. Spanish love songs can skewer you, entirely changing the sense of a sentence, changing a verb from indicative to subjunctive by merely swaping its 'a's and 'e's [10]. Translations of Tolkien (which I think rank up there with Shakespeare) or Shakespeare for that matter simply come across as insipid in some other languages. Ancient Greek, with its ability to turn whole subordinate sentences into nouns, gives English a run for its money in subtlety. But it's simply a fact that English has the greatest of all wordhoards. Eulogize me in Russian. Condemn me to death in German. Insult my character in Spanish. Talk to me in English. μηδείς (talk) 04:59, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

A variant on "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse" I see. --Jayron32 05:02, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

For an example where a translation works real good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRMGYQfXrs. μηδείς (talk) 17:24, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm very sure that English has the same quantity of words as many other developed languages. The only difference is that it has the biggest dictionaries in the world as a result of the tendency of English lexicographers to collect all existing words. So we should say "English dictionaries are bigger than French, German, Spanish, Italian etc. ones", and not "English has many more words than others".--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:34, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't count on that. English probably does have a lot more words than at least the typical European language (I can't say about other continents' languages), because of the unique nature of English, being a combination of Latin by way of French, whose words tend to be multi-syllabic, along with various northern European languages, which tend to be clipped to single or few syllables. English is loaded with synonyms or near-synonyms that come from these two different paths, while Spanish, for example, is largely just Latin-based. The question somewhere here that mentions "no smoking" reminds me of an example: In English, you have the words "smoke" and "fume". The former comes from Old English smoca and the latter comes from Latin fumus. Their roots mean essentially the same thing, but they have subtly different usages in English. Spanish, however, has only the Latin-based word humo which comes from fumus (the "f" being softened to the silent "h", as with some other Latin words that begin with "f"). The English words "smoke" and "fume" as nouns both translate to the single Spanish word humo. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:45, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

And here I'm also sure there are thousands of examples where two or more Spanish synonyms are equivalent only to one English word. Standard Spelling Duden has 135,000 words, but Deutsches Universalwörterbuch has 500,000, that is comparable to English Oxford or Merriam-Webster, so it is quite possible to collect a half-million words if it's wanted to. Le Grand Robert has 80,000, so it may be falsely assumed that French is a "poor" language, but one should remember that French dictionaries tend to be not descriptive but prescriptive, so 80,000 are only the core "received" vocabulary. If one adds number of words of French technical, scientific, medical, juridical etc. dictionaries this 80,000 number will certainly rise up to 500,000.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:31, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Spanish is a hybrid like English is??? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:33, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks everybody for the very interesting replies. I was particularly interested in grammar, as certainly Japanese has some words/concepts which would be difficult to express in say English. bamse (talk) 23:29, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

No it doesn't. I work as a Japanese translator, and have been doing so for 9 years. All language depends on context. "Where is the kitchen?" for example, would not be replied with "Which particular kitchen are you looking for?" Also, yes, there are certain words and phrases which might be difficult for a beginner to translate, but after a while you get used to it. やっぱり is an example. It just means, "Yes, just as I expected". KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 07:11, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Who said "Languages differ less in what they can say than in what they must say"? —Tamfang (talk) 05:23, 10 December 2012 (UTC)