Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 November 17

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November 17

How do French speakers abbreviate GIGN in conversation?

I doubt they would say "Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale" every time they want to refer to the organization. Do they refer to it by letters (like English speakers and "CIA"), or do they treat "GIGN" as a word (like English speakers and "NASA")? 173.79.20.33 (talk) 15:25, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Sadly, Acronym#Non-English languages doesn't cover French. Maybe if you check the requisite articles at fr.wikipedia it may help? --Jayron32 16:01, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

We refer to it by letters, we say "GIGN" like English speakers say "CIA". We don't treat it as a word. Akseli9 (talk) 17:50, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm sure we're all disappointed to learn that you don't say le Gigne. —Tamfang (talk) 20:21, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

or "la Guigne"...:-) Akseli9 (talk) 20:26, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

A person who only gives attention to people who say negative things about them

Like let's say a person makes blogs or is someone famous/semi-famous. They can receive praise and adulation from fans, but they won't respond to those messages/letters/tweets. But if they receive negative attention/criticism/insults, they will respond or engage that person. Is there a word for this or a psychological condition? ScienceApe (talk) 15:55, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's a psychological (as in medical), but the general description of someone who only sees the negative in others or themselves or in life can be described as a misanthrope or a pessimist or a cynic. If you use a thesaurus for those terms, you may lead yourself to other similar terms. --Jayron32 18:42, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

In vs. out

How come "in" can be used as a preposition by itself but "out", except in the sense "through", cannot?? In other words we say "in the water", but "out of the water". Georgia guy (talk) 15:58, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Except it can. See definition 3 here. I can look out the window, for example. --http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/out here]Jayron32 16:07, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

No, the Merriam page shows "out" only as an adverb. "Out the window" is not accepted as good English. ----Ehrenkater (talk) 16:33, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Scroll down that page to ³out, the prepositional use. Deor (talk) 16:37, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Whose good English? "He walked out the door" is perfectly cromulent, and Merriam Webster, definition 3, already cited above, notes it as such. Are you claiming the dictionary writers are incorrect? What about Oxford, which notes the preposition use, and gives the example "out the door", seen here. --Jayron32 17:57, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

I'll agree "the bird flew out the window" with Jayron32, and mention that "He out the house" is rather typical for black American English. μηδείς (talk) 18:21, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

The last one, however, is a component of AAVE known as copula dropping, where the verb "is" is implied rather than stated. --Jayron32 18:38, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

The dropping of the copula is not at issue here; the dropping of of is. —Tamfang (talk) 20:23, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree with both Jayron and Tamfang. μηδείς (talk) 02:17, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

@Tamfang: It depends on if "of" is being dropped or not. The issue is whether one considers the antonymic pairs like "in/out" and "into/out of" and finds ways the usage overlaps. "I went in the door" and "I went out the door" are perfectly matched in meaning and sense and usage of "in" and "out" in the same way that "I went into the house" and "I went out of the house" are in their pairings. As English is imperfect, however, there's not always a direct connection between proper and comfortable English usage and systematic and ordered rules. Thus, what's really probably being dropped here is the "to" portion of "into". Because the sense of entering/exiting a space exists in "into" and "out of", while the sense of transiting a portal exists in the sense of "in" and "out". Consider the difference in sense between "He walked in the door" (meaning he passed the space defined by the doorway) versus "He walked into the door" (meaning he smashed his face into the object, because he moved as though he could enter the space occupied by the door). The thing is, English can often drop the "to" from "into" and not lose meaning. So I can say "He walked in the house" and it means the same thing to a native English speaker as "He walked into the house" (compare to the way that it doesn't work with "door"). Now, compare the same swapping with "out" and "out of" and it doesn't work: "I went out of the house" is NOT interchangeable as "I went out the house" in standard forms of English; the second seems awkward. But "He threw the ball out of the window" and "He threw the ball out the window" both work equally well. The whole point is that, yes, if English worked like a perfectly organized system, with no inconsistency, these problems wouldn't exist. English doesn't. It's messy, and has lots of "just because" rules for how it works. So, we have an imperfect way that the usage of "in" and "out" compare with each other, sometimes acting as prepositions or adverbs where the other word does not work as well. What are you gonna do? It is what it is. --Jayron32 02:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

"He walked in the house" may mean the same to a US person as "He walked into the house", but there are other countries containing native English speakers who find the former construction abominable and don't use it. Does it mean he entered the house through a door or does it mean he walked around inside the house? The meaning is usually clear from the context, but please do not imply that all native English speakers find the construction acceptable. Equally abominable is "He fell in the water". I'm sorry, but lazy US customs do not make for English that is acceptable everywhere. Please do not presume to speak for all native speakers of English based on what may be acceptable in the US. Akld guy (talk) 06:37, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

"Abominable" - that's for snowmen. Don't you mean "abominal"? KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 08:05, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Is that 1.meant to be funny, or 2.is your comprehension of English really that bad, or 3.are you deceitfully suggesting that I made a mistake so as to impress upon the unwitting that my point was worthless? I think it's no.3 and you speak with forked tongue. Akld guy (talk) 09:32, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

"Different than" is not identical in meaning to "wrong". --Jayron32 16:05, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Akld guy, I would agree with you, except that Little Jim of The Goon Show was always exclaiming "He's fallen in the water", not "… into the water". It always got a laugh, and I don't recall anyone ever complaining about the grammar of this decidedly British character. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:12, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

One character on one TV show is not an arbiter of how an entire nation speaks, let alone the way English is spoken in other nations. Akld guy (talk) 22:27, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

It was a radio show. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:06, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

You're correct, and I knew that because I'm old enough to remember President Eisenhower talking on the radio about peace in the middle east. I simply forgot what I was saying while cutting and pasting. You probably have no idea how incredibly difficult it is to cut 'n paste and Backspace on an iPad. Damn thing doesn't even have a Delete key. Akld guy (talk) 21:09, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

I do know how hard that is. Which is why I have never owned an ipad. A desktop, a laptop and a smart phone do me just fine, thanks. I've never been able to work out what I could do on an ipad that the other 3 don't give me. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:36, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

The answer to the question (as with almost all "Why" or "How come" questions about language) is "because that's the way it is". Usually you can give a historical account of how the situation developed, but there is usually no meaningful answer to "why". A parallel case is "in front of" vs "behind". "In back of" exists in American English but is almost unknown in British English; whereas "before" is almost exclusively used of time in current English (using it of space is now literary or archaic). On the other hand "behind" is rarely used of time. --ColinFine (talk) 10:02, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Languages, genetically far enough from each other, but phonetically sounding quite similar, to a foreigner's ear.

I thought about the pair: Russian/Portuguese (they really belong to the same Indo-European family, but I think they are far enough from each other, in terms of vocabulary, etymology, morphology, and syntax).

Also (I think) the pair Japanese/Korean (both being regarded as language isolates).

Maybe also the pair Spanish/Greek (again, they really belong to the same Indo-European family, but are still far enough from each other - from a linguistic point of view, aren't they?).

Any other examples? HOOTmag (talk) 19:59, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

• Please note that languages which have speakers who have frequent contact with each other will have some cross contamination, in terms of phonology, vocabulary, and structure. Even though Japanese and Korean are technically isolated, historically (unless they aren't), that doesn't mean that those languages will not feel influence from their close neighbors. Close cultural connections between the Japanese and Koreans would naturally lead to some crossover between their languages. As another famous example, Romanian is traditionally considered a Romance language, but one with considerable influence from its slavic neighbors. You can read more about this at Stratum (linguistics). As far as why languages may sound similar to you, I'm not sure I could answer that directly, except to direct you to concepts like Pareidolia, whereby your brain creates patterns out of randomness: in this case your brain has created a connection between two languages (like, for example, Russian and Portuguese) which do not share any actual connection. This is a function not of the sounds themselves, but of human neurology. --Jayron32 20:13, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

About Slavic influence on Romanian, see also Balkan sprachbund and, for that matter, Sprachbund generally. —Tamfang (talk) 20:31, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Any other examples?

Reminds me those brief moments when Finnish sounds Italian to French ears. Mainly at the end of a phrase when a Finn asks something, it somehow sounds "Italian-like", of course if you don't listen too carefully to the words themselves. Akseli9 (talk) 20:37, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

• When I had read only the title of the thread, the pair Portuguese/Polish struck me immediately, due to their nasal vowels, penultimate accent, and plethora of fricatives. I'd also mention that Hungarian and English strike me as extremely similar when at the threshold of hearing, for example. This seems primarily due to the frequency of closed syllables in both languages. Swedish and Finnish also strike me as similar, although I have not heard nearly as much of those as the first two pairs I have mentioned. The similarity seems more prosodic than phonemic, think of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets and skip to the second half of this video to hear som of the Kalevala. Of course for all I know, neither actually speaks the language. μηδείς (talk) 02:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

To my ear, Armenian and Turkish sound very similar and I have to listen very carefully to figure out which one is spoken. I think it's a question of proximity having influenced stress patterns and shape of vowels towards convergence, because, linguistically, the two are absolutely unrelated. --Xuxl (talk) 09:14, 18 November 2015 (UTC)