Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 December 1

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December 1

Need help with (mock)-Hebrew and Spanish subjunctive

Below is one of my father's favorite jokes, which he recounts in English. I was texting it to a Spanish speaker and we got cut off. Two questions, (1) is the mock-Hebrew at the beginning of the prayer at all realistic, and (2), is the bolded text in the proper sequence of tenses? (Please ignore the lack of accents, question mars, and the use of h to indicate a tilde.)

Era un rabino de un pequenho pueblo en Inglaterra. No era muy rico, pero gano tanto dinero para mandar a su hijo a Israel cuando llego a la mayoria de edad. El hijo se quedo alli casi seis semanas. Cuando volvio a casa, dijo a su padre, "siento tener que decirtelo, pero me he convertido; ya soy Cristiano."

El rabino no sabia que hacer. Tenia mucha verguenza. Llamo a su hermano que tambien era un rabino en una ciudad mas grande. Su hermano le dijo, es secreto, pero yo tambien mande a tu sobrino a Israel cuando tuvo 18. Y despues de poco mas de un mes, cuando regreso, tambien me dijo que se habia convertido. "Vamos a consultar con el Gran Rabino de Londres," dijo, quien era un primo distante de ellos, muy famoso y de gran sabidura.

El Gran Rabino les dijo, no se como decirselo, pero mi hijo tambien estudio en Israel, y el tambien volvio cristiano, pero por (su respeto hacia mi) no lo dice a nadie. El primer rabino pregunto, que debemos hacer? El segundo dijo que tenian que rezar a Dios.

El Gran Rabino, en sus vestimientas mas santas, subio al tabernaculo, y en voz alta dijo, Adoneinu Hashem, Rey del Universo, le pedimos que nos avise....

En este momento ocurrio un terremoto breve, y sin herir a nadie, el techo de la sinagoga colapso a sus pies. Una luz los alumbro. Y del cielo la voz mas profunda que ya hubiese oido un hombre mortal les dijo, "Yo tambien tenia un hijo, y Yo tambien lo mande a Israel, El tambien paso 40 dias en el desierto.....

Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 03:56, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

"Adoneinu" is a perfectly good word, meaning "Our Lord" (literally, "our lords", plurale tantum), and it is used at times at least in hymns. But I've never encountered it as a term of address to the Lord; "Adonai" is what I would expect. My knowledge is limited though. --ColinFine (talk) 18:48, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

"Hashem, King of the universe" is an extremely common expression in Jewish liturgy (it occurs in almost every bracha) while "Adoneinu Hashem" probably occurs nowhere, as it means "Our Lord, My Lord" (Hashem replaces Adonai). הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 19:52, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, guys. If it's redundant, (I knew the literal meanings) I'll just use "HaShem, King of the Universe". The point is to be unmistakenly Jewish without being silly or offensive. Now, for the hard part, hubiese oido is a pluperfect subjunctive (assuming they call it in Spanish what I was taught in French) but I seem to have a plain pluperfect sense in the speech of some people. I only ever use the hubiera subjunctive, but my emphasis hear is on the pluperfect. In English, I'd be saying the deepest voice ever heard by mortal man" or "that any mortal man had ever heard." μηδείς (talk) 20:32, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

"Ribono shel olam" (master of the universe) is, I think, a common way of addressing God extempore, if it will sound Jewish enough to your hearers.

I get two relevant Google hits on oído por hombre:

Vieron cómo la bestia, en medio del más feroz rugido jamás oído por hombre o dragón, destruía de un solo golpe el torreón principal del castillo de Lostar. [1]

... como si fuera el mayor arcano nunca oído por hombre alguno... [2]

Those might be what you're looking for. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 00:21, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, jamas and nunca are being used in their positive sense as "ever" in those sentences, maybe that would have been a smarter move. The subjunctive also conveys the sense of ever:

From Luz Casal's Piensa en mi:

Piensa en mi cuando sufras; "Think of me when(ever) you suffer"

Cuando llores, tambien piensa en mi; "When(ever) you cry think of me as well."

μηδείς (talk) 02:49, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Meaning of endorse and endorsement

What is the meaning of endorse and endorsement in the following context: "Significance of Endorsement of Psychotic Symptoms by US Latinos. In US regional studies, Latinos frequently endorse psychotic symptoms associated with impairment and mental health service use, yet do not meet criteria for psychotic disorder." I did check endorsement but it didn't help much... Thank you! Lova Falk talk 08:49, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Looks like a mistake to me. From the context it seems like "display" or "report with" is intended, but I can find no definition of "endorse" that means those things. --Viennese Waltz 08:58, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Lova Falk is referring to this academic paper. The use is too deliberate to be a mistake; it must be some technical usage in psychiatry. Perhaps it is just an extended use of the word to mean "to confirm, sanction, ... vouch for". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:26, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! I'll ask my question also in the science desk, maybe someone with psychiatric knowledge will know. "Display" was also my guess, but I would like to know for sure. Lova Falk talk 13:28, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Googling the expression "endorse symptoms" turns up a whole bunch of hits. From the contexts, I gather that a person is said to "endorse" a symptom when the person answers "yes" when asked whether he or she has the symptom (as opposed to reporting the symptom unprompted). Deor (talk) 21:04, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Romance languages question

It clearly says in the article Romance languages are a group of languages descended from Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin itself is a dialect of Latin language. Therefore, I think Romance languages should be a branch under Vulgar Latin. As right now, Romance languages are classified as a branch of Italic languages, why? (Current classification: Italic -> Romance languages) That would mean Romance languages and Latin are both directly descendant languages of Italic languages, which they're not. I know that Italic languages were at some point the ancestral languages of Romance languages, but strictly speaking about the language hierarchy tree, it should be that Italic -> Latino-Faliscan -> Latin -> Vulgar Latin -> Romance languages. 146.151.85.206 (talk) 20:52, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Is the Dimetrodon a reptile?

The problem is the tension between a synchronic and a diachronic analysis. Vulgar Latin simply means Latin of the commoners, and has hugely different meanings over many centuries time. There's also Church Latin, and, not to be facetious, Wheelock's Latin. It's estimated that the Sardinian language started becoming distinct from the remainder of Romance as early as 300BC, while Ibero-Romance was largely one tongue with various mutually intelligible dialects until the Reconquista, a millennium later. As with all human concepts, how you decide to use them depends on the context you are using them in. Is the Dimetrodon a reptile? It's more closely related to mammals than it is to snakes and Crocodiles, and the latter are more closely related to ostriches than they are to iguanas. There's no correct answer to any of these answers unless one carefully draws one's criteria, and those are likely to be matters of convention, not intrinsic truth. See also, diglossia, another scary reptile. μηδείς (talk) 21:43, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't really get your points. Even if Vulgar Latin was pretty much Latin then the tree hierarchy should be Italic -> Latino-Faliscan -> Latin -> Romance languages, not Italic -> Romance languages. I think it makes no sense to jump directly from Italic to Romance languages. That would mislead many people, who see the tree hierarchy, into thinking Romance languages are directly descended from Italic, which is false. The only logical conclusion here is my proposed tree hierarchy. This is Wikipedia where anyone can edit. What if the current tree hierarchy is wrong? There is no reason not not fix the problem if it's wrong. And I agree that there may not be intrinsic truth to everything, but for any sort of classification whether for species or languages. There is the truth in it. Just because we don't know doesn't mean there isn't a truth. If we have a time machine and go back in time, we can definitely observe which one comes first, which is common ancestor, which one descends from which, and in the end we can draw a conclusive tree hierarchy.

However, as I'm reading about this from another reliable source, the problem can be fixed by changing this sentence quoted from the Romance languages article, "...are a group of languages descended from Vulgar Latin..." To be consistent with the classification it should be "...are a group of languages within Italic languages that derived from Vulgar Latin..." This means that Romance languages were original some languages descended directly from Italic languages and later on became Romance languages by deriving either words or grammar or whatever from Vulgar Latin. There is clearly a misuse of derived and descended. They're different words with different meanings that can't be used interchangeably (The Britannica has the correct usage here; it uses derived, not descended). Just like saying some English words are derived from French, but English surely isn't descended from French. There is serious problem with the wording in the article that can mislead the readers to some bad understandings. I may as well go head and fix it if there is no objection.146.151.90.2 (talk) 02:10, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the clarification. Again, the context and audience will matter. A chart can only convey so much. Again, Vulgar Latin is a very imprecise term, and if one considers Sardinian versus Old French we'ree looking at many centuries over which the differentiation occurred, not many branches originating at just one point. I can't draw a chart here, but usually you will see one that shows Italic, with several branches including Latin, the rest marked with daggers as extinct, and then the various Romance languages springing from Latin as if they all emerged at once.

It's up to the text to clarify that Latin and Vulgar Latin existed in a state of diglossia for a very long time, and that if we reconstruct the mother tongue of the Romance languages based only on existing evidence we don't get something that looks close to classical or ecclesiastical Latin.

If the concern is with treatment in a specific article, the discussion should be had there. Even then, just mentioning Italic, Latin, Vulgar Latin and the modern dialects would be far to simplistic, given the existence of Eastern, Western, and Sardinian Romance, as well as the split of Western Romance into the Italian versus the Franco-Iberian dialects, and the latter into Langue D'oil, Langue D'oc, and Ibero-Romance, depending on the terminology one likes. That all needs to be explained at length, and in multiple articles. The source I am using for Sardinian's age from memory is Harris & Vincent's excellent The Romance Languages. μηδείς (talk) 02:34, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

The problem is that the word Latin to most people means literary Latin, either classical or ecclesiastical Latin. It is not accurate to say that the Romance languages are descended from what most people understand as Latin. Instead, they are descended from Vulgar Latin, or spoken Latin. Medeis makes the interesting point that different branches of Romance diverged from what might be called metropolitan Vulgar Latin at different points. In this vein, classical Latin itself might be considered one of the Romance languages, since it diverged from early Vulgar Latin only with the development of literary Latin, a somewhat artificial and self-conscious construct influenced by Greek grammar in the time of Stilo, Varro, and Cicero, around the turn of the 1st century BCE. Early Vulgar Latin, sometimes called Old Latin, is therefore the Italic language ancestral to all Romance languages, including classical Latin. Marco polo (talk) 14:12, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

There's a possibly misleading implication there that Classical Latin developed grammatical complexity that did not exist in an earlier (Old Latin) stage. What became polished in Classical Latin were literary forms, such as wide separations between adjectives and the nouns they modified, not new grammatical forms. (There were also coinages, borrowings from Greek, apocolocyntosis, for example), etc. Classical Latin did not develop, for example, new case forms from Vulgar Latin. Classical Latin's case forms are retained from PIE for the most part, with some loss and simplification.

Vulgar Latin (if by that we mean proto-Romance) largely lost case distinctions except for a nominative/oblique distinction, and some traces of other cases in the pronouns, but not full systems. The Classical Latin verbs likewise did not develop out of the Vulgar Latin verb system. Although it's highly modified from the PIE system, the forms incorporating a -b- in the stem date to the Italic stage. A good comparison might be the speech of a middle-class Englishman from 1600. He didn't speak in rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter, but he used (or at least understood) the same grammar as Shakespeare. μηδείς (talk) 18:24, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I do not see any contradiction here. We call both Anglo-Saxon and modern English "Germanic languages", but neither it implies they're of the same age nor they has had no intermediate steps like West Germanic or Ingveonic. Intermediate steps may be important in some context or not in other one. Similarly we can call the Romance languages Italic, also we can characterise them directly as Indo-European. If you have your surname from your grand-grandfather it does not imply you have no grandfather and father.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:51, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Just to clarify my earlier post, I did not mean to imply that classical Latin introduced new grammatical categories or morphologies, though it may have resuscitated morphologies that were already obsolescent in contemporary common speech to fit a Greek model. Also, when I refer to Vulgar Latin, I do not mean proto-Romance, unless classical Latin is understood as a Romance language. Proto-Romance as described by Medeis is the Vulgar Latin of roughly the 3rd or 4th century CE, whereas Vulgar Latin existed long before then and was arguably, in the form of early Vulgar Latin (or late Old Latin), the common ancestor of classical Latin and the other Romance languages. Medeis pointed out that some believe that Sardinian diverged from Vulgar Latin as early as the 3rd century BCE. If that's true, then Proto-Romance, in the sense of the language ancestral to all Romance languages, can be dated no later than the 3rd century BCE, in which case it is also ancestral to classical Latin, and in which case it would not yet have lost the case distinctions that would collapse in Vulgar Latin over the next five centuries. Marco polo (talk) 22:01, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

That Sardinan began diverging so early does not mean that it was not still mutually intelligible with mainland Latin at that point, and does not set a date for the origin of proto-Romance, which under the normal meaning of proto- in historical linguistics, would refer to what is reconstructable only from modern dialects. At best, at 300BC, spoken Sardinian and spoken Latin would have some common ancestor in pre-proto-Romance, which is of undefinable time depth without recourse to archaeology.

At this point I'd just like to throw Vulgar Latin out the window as too vague a term to be useful in the OP's context.

I'll grant that formal education in rhetoric and Latin might have had a conservative effect in the way that editors here use whom and whence more often than the general population of English speakers. But I don't think that can be attributed to the influence of French.

Given that Greek only had four cases in full use, compared to five in Latin, an extremely different verbal system, and things like the dual and expressions with nested definite articles, it's hard to see what effect Greek had on influencing Latin other than vocabulary. Had Latin, for example, re-developed a dual under the influence of Greek, or switched from the ablative to the genitive absolute, that would be salient. But I'd like some sort of example where a form was borrowed from or resurrected due to Greek, or I am left asserting an unprovable negative. μηδείς (talk) 22:46, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Latin did borrow some grammatical constructions from Greek, but many of these are poetical or otherwise marginal. One example is the "Accusative of Respect". Lesgles (talk) 01:22, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Adonay adoneynu and therefore hashem adoneynu?

הסרפד how do you read the following verse?

יְהוָ֥ה אֲדֹנֵ֑ינוּ מָֽה־אַדִּ֥יר שִׁ֝מְךָ֗ בְּכָל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Contact Basemetal here 21:16, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

PS My question should be viewed in the context of Medeis's question (a previous section) and Hasirpad saying that "Adoneynu Hashem" was probably not found. I would have answered Hasirpad right there but I had to start a new section because for a short time Medeis's section had disappeared. Contact Basemetal here 11:58, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I was brought up Reform and we said "adonai" in all circumstances, but I think people who say "ha-shem" would say "ha-shem adoneinu" when not praying. "Adoneinu" is just "our lord", a description, not a name, despite its etymological relationship to "adonai". All subject to correction by those who know." —JerryFriedman (Talk) 00:08, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I think from a logical point of view it's better to view "HaShem" ("The Name") as a substitute for "YHWH" not "Adonay". After all the name we're talking about is the tetragrammaton not "Adonay" really. "HaShem" can only be said to be a substitute for "Adonay" to the extent that "Adonay" is itself a substitute for "YHWH". Therefore I don't see any reason to consider "Adonay Hashem" or "Hashem Adoneynu" as redundant: they would simply be ways to read "Adonay YHWH" or "YHWH Adoneynu". There are also numerous instances of "Adonay YHWH" in the Bible but I didn't think it was useful to mention those as I wanted to concentrate on the formula proposed by Medeis. Contact Basemetal here 11:58, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Just for reference's sake, that's from Psalm 8:2 or 8:10, you can listen to one version of it here (about 8 seconds in, just after "mizmor leDavid"). - Lindert (talk) 00:17, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

You can hear he reads "YHWH Adoneynu" as "Adonay Adoneynu" (which is what the niqud used on "YHWH" also indicates). But I'm curious how Hasirpad would quote this verse. Hasirpad comes from an Ashkenazi tradition. In this reading from Mechon Mamre, although the place itself seems to be connected with the Yemeni tradition (see here), the pronunciation is not really Yemeni but just Israeli with a general Mizrahi accent. Within that accent the reader also attempts to do the doubling of consonants resulting from the dagesh hazaq and that's it. But a true Yemeni pronunciation would make many more distinctions for example a distinction between dalet/tav/gimel w/ dagesh and dalet/tav/gimel w/o dagesh, between a khaf and a het, between a tav and a tet, between a vav and a vet, between a qof and a kaf, the tsadi would be pronounced as an s but an emphatic s and so distinct from the samekh, etc. etc. Those distinctions are not done in Israeli Hebrew and you don't find they are done in this recording. An interesting thing about the reading of the Psalms is that although the "musical" interpretation of the teamim (the book of Psalms along with two other books uses a different system from the rest of the Bible) was lost in the Ashkenazi tradition I've heard it was still extant in some Oriental traditions. In this recording the verse is of course not cantillated but read, and as I said, read in a manner that is not consistent with strict Yemeni practices. Whether the Yemenis are among those communities that preserved the cantillation of the Psalms is an interesting question I don't know the answer to. But how did you find this recording? I find no mention of any recordings at the main page. Contact Basemetal here 11:58, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Updated information regarding the recording: the recording at Machon Mamre and in fact all of the recordings of the Hebrew Bible that I have been able to locate on the net (though I must say I have not spent hours on that) go back to a recording made by Abraham Samueloff. Not only did Abraham Samueloff convert to Christianity but he doesn't even, gasp, pronounce the dagesh hazaq consistently Besides the dagesh hazaq, the distinction between dagesh qal and rafe (for those letters for which there is such a distinction in Israeli Hebrew) is not always made as the text prescribes. And there are yet other problems. Even though it was obvious the reader was not using a Yemeni pronunciation, I had assumed the reader was a Yemeni Jew who for clarity had adopted an Israeli pronunciation. But it became obvious this imperfect recording could never have been made by a Yemeni reader, even one who would have adopted an Israeli pronunciation. Btw, on some sites the recording of every chapter is preceded by someone saying the title of the chapter in French accented Hebrew before the reading of the chapter proper by Abraham Samueloff. Contact Basemetal here 01:53, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for all the info. Strange that there's no link on the main page. However, whenever when you select a particular chapter to read, e.g. Genesis 1, there's a link at the top of the page to the mp3. It's also there in the parallel English/Hebrew version. You can downloaded the recordings in bulk here. - Lindert (talk) 14:16, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Contact Basemetal here 14:22, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

When singing Jewish liturgical music, observant Jews substitute "Amonai" for "Adonai" and "Elokenu" for "Elohenu." This is anecdotal (from my personal experience in mainstream USA Jewish settings, e.g. UCLA Hillel ca. early/mid-1970s) and possibly doesn't reflect current or stricter practice. -- Deborahjay (talk) 06:09, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I have heard that too and also "Elokim" for "Elohim". I wouldn't be able to say what traditions exactly used these substitutes. Maybe Hasirpad would be able to say something if he's knowledgeable about practices other than his own. Contact Basemetal here 11:58, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I've hear "Amonai" from Sephardim and non-americans. I had never met any American that said it - everyone I know just says "Hashem". Interesting. אפונה (talk) 11:57, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Hasirpad (if Ashkenazi) would certainly say Hashem Adoneinu when not intended as prayer, and Adonoy Adoneinu when prayer (or Adoi---). I think that his problem with Adoneinu Hashem/Adonoy is that it's out of place to refer to our Master in the plural possesive and afterwards in the singular possessive which was already included in the plurar. However the opposite poses no problem - the second term expands on the first. However the objection is really not true anyway in case of this verse because since the real word is YHWH it has an entirely different meaning than Adoneinu. Only in pronunciation (b/c YHWH is never pronounced by observant Jews) is it "Adonai". אפונה (talk) 12:03, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

In the following verse "YHWH" is read "Elohim", as you can already tell from the vocalization (niqud), and this recording from Mechon Mamre leaves no doubt about it. (Thanks again to Lindert for having introduced to us this resource.)

יְהֹוִ֣ה אֲ֭דֹנָי עֹ֣ז יְשׁוּעָתִ֑י סַכֹּ֥תָה לְ֝רֹאשִׁ֗י בְּיֹ֣ום נָֽשֶׁק׃

Yet I suspect that here too Hasirpad in his Ashkenazi Haredi tradition would use "Hashem" to stand for "YHWH" when quoting the verse. Therefore I agree that "Hashem" has to be understood as standing for "YHWH" not for one of its substitutes "Adonay" or "Elohim", if that is your point. However as a consequence I consider Medeis's formula in his joke to be good non-redundant idiomatic Hebrew. Whether such a formula would commonly be used is of course another question. It is extremely uncommon even in the Bible. But uncommon does not mean redundant, incorrect or completely implausible. Let's not forget also that this was not a documentary about Judaism but a joke and that the context of a rabbi asking God for advice about his own son's conversion to Christianity is a highly unusual one and there would be no set formula for such a situation as there would be for brakhot, etc. That would at least make somewhat plausible the use of a very uncommon (but, again, not incorrect!) formula. Regarding the joke itself, I've heard it several times before, but always told by Jews. That it is apparently in origin a Jewish joke is somewhat amusing as it plays on the notion of Jesus being literally the son of God which is of course very remote from Jewish belief. Regarding other Jewish jokes adopted by non-Jews I suspect (but that's just speculation of mine for which I have to proof) that American so called Polish jokes originated in the Jewish stories about the imaginary city of Chelm. Contact Basemetal here 14:13, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Unclear Word

In the linked video, actress Anna Gunn is delivering her acceptance speech after winning an Emmy Award. At the 1:28 mark, she says "get your ..." and then utters a word that I have never heard before (English is not my first language). What is this word? how is it spelled? what does it mean? Hia10 (talk) 22:31, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrTTWj4WsuU

"Patootie". A funny term for "rear end" or whatever term you want to use. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:37, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

One's "sweet patootie" is also an outdated (early 20th century) U.S. slang term for one's Significant Other, darling, etc.; I've been known to refer to my wife that way within the past week; in my case, it's a deliberately affected archaicism. --Orange Mike | Talk 21:07, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

FYI, Patootie on the Wiktionnary. Cqui (talk) 10:04, 4 December 2014 (UTC)