Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 May 30

Language desk
< May 29	<< Apr | May | Jun >>	May 31 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 30

Preferred pronouns in non-English languages

Living in the US, I've noticed a preference for non-"traditional" pronoun usage in transgender individuals (i.e. pronouns other than "she/her" or "his/him"). Some of these are new inventions (e.g. ze/zir/zem, if I remember correctly) and some are not (e.g. "it/its"). In some other languages such as Chinese or German, there are clear corresponding, relatively gender-neutual analogies to the latter case, but in others, such as French, I don't think there are words that currently exist "outside" of the feminine/masculine binary (which I assume is what the usage of such "preferred pronouns" is trying to achieve). In those languages, what (if any) methods are used to achieve results similar to the ones in English? --Morningcrow (talk) 13:43, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I've seen an example from a German speaker using Z-initial pronouns. This risks some confusion with the awfully-similiarly-pronounced feminine singular, polite second person plural and third person plural forms (zie vs sie), but it has at least been tried. I've not seen anything similar for French, and given that every single thing in French has a binary gender, I don't know where you'd start. AlexTiefling (talk) 14:00, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Starting points: try our article Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#Romance_languages. If you can think of a page title you would have looked for, trying to find this, we can create a redirect so that future searchers find it more easily. Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is also interesting, although slightly tangential to your question.

I found a small discussion with French-speakers present, here: [1]. They suggest that it's less sensitive in French, but I suspect I could also find discussions of English-speakers who don't understand what the fuss is about in English, so I wouldn't give it too much weight.

It looks like some non-binary French-speakers find it frustrating, and typically have to default to the masculine, although there are attempts to create new terms: [2], [3]. 86.146.28.105 (talk) 14:20, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Chinese doesn't have gender-neutral pronouns (that refer to humans) in writing, but in speech, all third-person pronouns sound the same. There's no way to tell the person's gender from grammar alone.

Gender is such an integral part of French that it's impossible to make gender-neutral overnight. Every noun, including abstract ones like "peace", has a gender. The gender is often completely unpredictable: "war" is feminine, for example, whereas "perfume" is masculine. The gender of a noun is not necessarily the gender of its referent: a "person" is always feminine, even when the person is male. Adjectives change based on the gender of their noun, as do articles (the/those) and sometimes even verbs. Impersonal pronouns (like "it is raining") always use the masculine.

Making French gender-neutral is not as easy as changing one pronoun; it has to involve a drastic overhaul of the grammar. That said, there are many people who try to make French less male-dominant. See [4] for one attempt. --Bowlhover (talk) 16:43, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Hence why I was wondering about French specifically - I couldn't see any way the issue of gender in terms of grammar might be avoided . I realise that Chinese doesn't have gender-neutral pronouns that refer to humans either, but since part of the cases I'd seen in English involved use of "it/its" as a personal pronoun I was less interested in that specific case. --Morningcrow (talk) 19:02, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

The genders could be called A and E; then there would be nothing very strange about war being in A and perfume in E. They are just arbitrary groups of nouns. I've never understood why people attach so much importance to certain nouns referring to male and female humans that they insist on naming the entire grammatical categories after them even when (as in French) there's nothing else "feminine" or "masculine" about those categories. -- BenRG (talk) 22:43, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, it is a language intended for use by human persons, so I don't think there's anything particularly surprising about nouns referring to human persons being given heavy importance. In any case, there are lots of situations where grammatical categories are named after a specific instance of them. For example, the dative case is so named, I believe, because it's the case given to objects of the verb dare, "to give", but there are lots of datives that have nothing to do with giving. --Trovatore (talk) 00:37, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

(Direct) objects of the verb dare take the accusative case just like direct objects of other verbs. (Indirect objects take the dative case, but this is the same for other verbs which have an indirect object with the sense "to or for someone or something"). Your correct in your statement that "dative" derives from dare - it was a calque from Greek δοτική (according to the OED's etymology) which is similarly derived from the Greek verb meaning "to give" - but saying that objects of dare take the dative is misleading. Valiantis (talk) 03:21, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Korean solfeggio

Never mind. Question was based on a misunderstanding on my part.

I was surprised to find that the musical notes in Korean are not do, re, mi but 빨주노초파남보 (bbal, ju, no, cho, pa, nam, bo). I didn't find anything about this in our article solfeggio, and I also didn't find anything about it in the Korean wikipedia article ko:솔페지오, whose title is just a transliteration of "solfeggio". Does the Korean system go by a different name, and is there some other term I should be searching for? Is it derived from the European system but with completely different names for the notes, or does it have some other origin? It would be interesting to add something about this to the article, if sources can be found. --Amble (talk) 17:10, 30 May 2014 (UTC) Does the article Music of Korea lead you anywhere interesting? --Jayron32 18:38, 30 May 2014 (UTC) I haven't found anything there or linked there that's related to solfeggio or 빨주노. Do you have anything specific in mind? --Amble (talk) 20:23, 30 May 2014 (UTC) Sorry, misunderstanding on my part. I missed a context shift and thought these were musical notes when they're actually just short names for the colors of a rainbow. --Amble (talk) 22:12, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

artificial languages

When people talk about artificial languages I have to wonder, isn't English an artificial language as well? It was made by humans and animals in nature don't speak it -- 21:19, 30 May 2014‎ User:Wpytgdp

By artificial, people generally mean constructed language, that is, one that is deliberately devised, with neat, precise rules of grammar. Esperanto is the best known example. English, on the other hand, developed gradually and haphazardly. As a result, its grammar is a bit of a nightmare, even for native speakers. Clarityfiend (talk) 21:31, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

(ec) The language philosopher Rudi Keller once made the point that natural languages are what he called a "phenomenon of the third kind", something that doesn't really fit into the dichotomy of "natural" versus "artificial" things. Or, you might say, the phenomenon of language simply shows up a weakness in our definition of "artificial" and "natural", because these terms can mean a lot of different things. If you take "artificial" to mean "anything made by humans" and "natural" to mean "not made by humans", then of course language is artificial. However, normally we mean something else by these terms. An "artificial" language is one that was created by humans intentionally, according to a systematic plan and design. That's the crucial difference. Normal languages are shaped by humans, and we all effectively keep shaping and re-shaping our languages and changing them – but we don't do so intentionally, with the conscious goal of creating a "new" language or changing one. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:37, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Tolkien had his Elves consciously propose and adopt changes to their language(s), to explain the existence of multiple Elvish languages descended from a common source; I guess he could not imagine that languages spoken by immortals would drift. —Tamfang (talk) 06:08, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Why do you think that English was made by humans? Natural languages have to be learnt by infants, but so does walking: they do both naturally and effortlessly. Languages change over time, and as a consequence are different from each other, and hence from place to place; but so are bird-calls. Certain aspects of languages are consciously made by people, but they are pretty marginal to language as a whole. --ColinFine (talk) 23:05, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Effortlessly?! —Tamfang (talk) 06:08, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

aluminum

Why do Limey say "allie-min-un" instead of aluminum? — Preceding unsigned comment added by KieraCameron2077 (talk • contribs) 21:40, 30 May 2014‎

We (Brits) don't. We pronounce aluminium the way it's written, with an I before the U, just like in the names of most other elements ending in -um, like uranium and thorium. AlexTiefling (talk) 21:46, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I want to dissasociate myself from the aggressive way the question was asked. However, the history of the word alumin(i)um is a bit of a sore point. Davy's original spelling well, actually not quite his original spelling; that was one no one uses anymore, namely alumium, but he changed it to aluminum is the one Yanks still use, and it was just fine; it converted the feminine alumina to a masculine form to mean the metal, nothing wrong with that. Platinum and tantalum also end in -um without the i.

If it weren't for the letter of an anonymous meddler to some journal, the whole world would call it aluminum, and that would be better. --Trovatore (talk) 22:00, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Or, according to our article, if it wasn't for a mis-spelt advert, America would still use -ium, as it did for most of the 19thC. DuncanHill (talk) 22:03, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

The ad used Davy's correct spelling. --Trovatore (talk) 22:04, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I blame Noah Webster, who introduced lots of comedy mis-spellings into his dictionaries. Unfortunately, most Americans didn't get the joke. DuncanHill (talk) 22:09, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Most of Webster's spelling reform did not catch on. I don't know whether that's good or bad; it's just a fact, and now they look extremely strange. See the history of the American and British English spelling differences article, or this discussion on the talk page. However, that has nothing to do with alumin(i)um, which was unknown (as such) in Webster's day. --Trovatore (talk) 22:14, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, wrong link for the talk page discussion. --Trovatore (talk) 22:16, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Here's the correct one: Talk:American and British English spelling differences/Archive 4#Obsolete spellings listed as "American" without explanation. --Trovatore (talk) 22:17, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Um, actually we're both wrong - he spelt it correctly in the first edition of his dictionary, or at least according to our Aluminium article. DuncanHill (talk) 22:18, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

You mean he spelled' it incorrectly. HTH. --Trovatore (talk) 22:19, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Nope, he spelt it correctly. Time will shew that I am right. DuncanHill (talk) 22:21, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Spelt is a grain. --Trovatore (talk) 22:23, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Spelt is the past tense and past participle of spell. I understand some foreigners spell spelt spelled. DuncanHill (talk) 22:26, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Don't cry over spelt milk! Lesgles (talk) 20:38, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Actually, it was the British who changed the spelling from "aluminum" to "aluminium".[5] This is just one of those language oddities, like the question of whether to pronounce "iodine" to rhyme with "line" or "lean". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:39, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Route - root or rout? In the UK it is root, in the US it can be either (that's eye ther not ee ther) :-). Widneymanor (talk) 07:18, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Route 66 (song) is pronounced "root", even by Americans such as Chuck Berry. Why was an exception made in that case? Was the TV show also pronounced that way? (I hardly ever saw it.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:46, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Meaning of a sentence

In English what does it mean when someone says "the goy know shut it down"? -- 22:38, 30 May 2014‎ User:Bg4u

That sentence doesn't make much sense. Where did you see it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:40, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean "They're gonna shut it down"?!? If so, "gonna" is slang for "going to" which is used to indicate future tense. "to shut it down" is slang for "to end" whatever "it" is. So "they're gonna shut it down" means something is about to come to an end. However, if I misread your Eye dialect or if you meant something else, I'm sorry, but like Bugs, I can't make sense of what you actually wrote, because that sentence has no direct meaning. --Jayron32 23:07, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, if you interpret know as the mandative subjunctive, it could mean "let the Gentile know shut it down". Still doesn't make a lot of sense, but when it comes to interpreting strings of words as grammatical utterances, when there's a will there's often a way. --Trovatore (talk) 23:45, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Why not "know" as "no"? Then it could be a reference, in broken English, to a Gentile who did not shut down a machine, for instance. Bus stop (talk) 23:47, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

(ec) I was looking for a way to interpret the written text as a grammatical utterance. Yes, I understand that that was probably not what the questioner was interested in. --Trovatore (talk) 00:11, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

In Hebrew goyim or "goy" means cattle and refers to non-Jewish people. "The goy know" means that non-Jews have become aware of ZOG and must be silenced (shut down) 208.105.74.232 (talk) 00:10, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

See our goy article. Goy does not mean cattle. It means nation. The Bible referred to everything that was not Israel as "the nations". In modern Yiddish, the singular goy has come to mean Gentile through a reasonably obvious linguistic process. --Trovatore (talk) 00:13, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. (Incidentally, Jewish daily liturgy refers to the nation of Israel as a goy.) Note, Trovatore, that the opening paragraph of article Goy is somewhat misleading (though not incorrect); the use of singular goy to mean "gentile" predates Yiddish by about a thousand years. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 19:18, 1 June 2014 (UTC)