Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 14

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March 14

Полвечности

What is the Russian word "Полвечности" in English? I couldn't find its definition on the web, and Google translator just gives "Polvechnosti". --BorgQueen (talk) 01:14, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, вечность means "eternity", and вечности is the genitive case ("of eternity"). Пол- is a prefix meaning "half". So, полвечности would be "half eternity" or "half an eternity", and полвечности is the genitive ("of half an eternity"). Does that make any sense? Weird word. Where did you come across it? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:30, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, it makes sense in the context. It's from a short story -- part political satire, part magical realism. --BorgQueen (talk) 04:59, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Half an eternity. Infinity divided by 2? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:22, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

It's absurd, of course. But magic realism stories often employ absurd metaphors and plot devices. --BorgQueen (talk) 05:32, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Also, Jack, I do not know if such a word sounds strange for English, but in Russian it is a normal quite usable and known word[1], not a made-up one-time word, as one may suggest.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:42, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Really? I thought it was made up by the author as a gag, since it doesn't make any sense mathematically. --BorgQueen (talk) 07:03, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't know the context, but I'd be very surprised if mathematical rigour had anything to do with it. "Eternity" is not a term generally employed by mathematicians or cosmologists when discussing endless time.

If "eternity" can be used hyperbolically to mean 'a very long time' (and it can*), then half an eternity is still, er, a very long time (just not so long as a full eternity).

* "I was waiting for the kettle to boil, but it was literally taking an eternity, and I had to get to work by 8:45, so naturally I was literally exploding with rage and anxiety". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:36, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

A small correction to Jack's answer. Полвечности is nominative. The prefix пол- requires the second part to have the genitive form, but the whole construct acts like nominative. Compare also such examples as полдома "half a house" (Nom дома, Gen дома), полпути "halfway" (Nom путь, Gen пути), you never say полдом or полпуть. Such nouns are usually indeclinable.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:33, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Answer amended. Serves me right for using logic to work out the meaning of a meaningless expression. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:13, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Obviously, it refers to a semi-infinite period. --ColinFine (talk) 10:13, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Why doesn't that apply to words like полдень, полночь, полуостров? --Amble (talk) 05:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

It does, however, apply to wikt:полдня, wikt:полночи (referring to durations of time), and пол-острова ("half an island") --217.140.96.140 (talk) 09:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@Amble: Because полдень and полночь are two definite points of time ("midday/noon" and"midnight"), while полдня and полночи are two spans of time ("half a day" and "half a night"). Compare полдома where it is not some part of a house (say, its centre), but a half of it. Полу- is a slightly different prefix, that rather means semi-, that is полуостров is not "half an island" (it's пол-острова), but a "semi-island".--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:37, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Very informative, thank you. --Amble (talk) 14:05, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

@Amble: I'd like to add that in colloquial speech полдень and полночь are not strictly speaking two points of time but two spans as well but with much narrower limits. Say, we define our day be from 8:00 to 18:00, so you can walk around the city полдня (e.g. from 10:30 to 15:30), but you as well can make a break and take lunch в полдень, that is in the period from around 12:00 to around 14:00. You do not inform when exactly you took lunch but rather define the time limits of your activity. I believe it is the same in English with the distinction between "at noon" and "half a day". Though I remember, when I was a kid I learnt how to know the cardinal directions with your watch and the sun, and "the noon" was defined exactly at 13:00. However, the well-known for supernatural night beings midnight at 24:00/00:00 is a little trickier, as it is closer to the actual beginning of the night than to its middle.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:05, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

So "the noon" was 13:00 because the former USSR was on permanent daylight savings time? --Amble (talk) 05:56, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@Amble: No-no, for winter it must have been different, but I did not want to go into details, and I did not remember exactly what was written in that book about winters. But I've just now checked the time for noons some 20 years ago and it was at around 12:30 in winter and around 13:30 in summer. It appears they were not so wrong about 13:00. Now, of course, in Russia it is at around 12:30 all year round.[2]--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:12, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Полу- is a slightly different prefix, that rather means semi- -- it varies; wikt:ru:полуось is half-axle, and wikt:ru:полумера is wikt:half-measure. --217.140.96.140 (talk) 09:44, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I know it's complicated, see § 551, § 961, § 1026, § 1191.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:29, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Curiously enough, neither of the three addresses the nouns with полу-, such as the aforementioned полуостров, полуось, and полумера. --217.140.96.140 (talk) 12:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I did not directly adress those words, but rather provided some general idea. As for the words, even if they are translated into the English words that have the half- prefix, neither of them means a "half of something", but rather something that is not in the full sense of the word. Neither полуось is "half an axle", nor полумера is "half a measure", but an axle that is not entirely an axle and a measure that was not taken in full. Though from the technical point of view a half axle may indeed be interpreted as "half an axle", but I think in this case we do not cut the axle in two and name the parts, but rather the axle comprises two independent elements. In this case the native English prefix half- is equal to Latinate semi-. For the actual half an axle there is Russian пол-оси.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 01:04, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

• There's also a math error implied above. One could spend half of eternity (assuming time will not cease to have meaning when we reach the heat death) by spending only the pm hours, but not the am hours together, or, see Persephone and her half years in the underworld. μηδείς (talk) 20:01, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Neatest thing

as in You told me I was the neatest thing, thusly in Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now. I can guess what the phrase means, but can someone specify the time and place of this dated (I suppose) slang? It sounds odd to me, but then I'm not a native speaker. --77.179.76.62 (talk) 03:49, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

1950s and 1960s. My generation still says it, but the kids don't. "Cool" has overwhelmed it, along with many other once-groovy superlatives. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:24, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Try pre-1830 at least as a phrase for which the meaning would be reasonably applicable to people. Collect (talk) 15:38, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Dictionary.com gives an example: "That was the neatest thing I ever saw, the way he got into that saddle and deliberately put that pony at the window", which appears in Ted Strong in Montana (1915) by Edward C. Taylor. Note that "neat" used in this way is still very much an Americanism to British English speakers. Alansplodge (talk) 21:35, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Esperanto and English

Esperanto was invented as an international language. But why Esperanto? Why not English?

Bonupton (talk) 07:43, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Esperanto#History expains that it had been designed as a common tongue for "Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews". Why English then? --217.140.96.140 (talk) 07:50, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Mostly because using any existing language would import at least the culture associated with that language. The point was to have something new and neutral. --ColinFine (talk) 11:08, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Esperanto was intended to be the linguistic analogy to the metric system, only it never caught on widely. French was considered the universal language at one time, supplanting Latin, and in turn has been replaced by English. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:04, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I call on that one, Bugs. I'm not even quite sure what you mean by "the linguistic analogy to the metric system", but since Esperanto, unlike the metric system, was intended as an auxiliary, not a replacement for local languages, your analogy is suspect. --ColinFine (talk) 20:29, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I think what Bugs was getting at was that (like the metric system) it was intended to be simpler and easier to use. Alansplodge (talk) 21:42, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes. And indeed metric is considered "supplementary" in ordinary usage in America and Britain. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:05, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Of all languages extant, English is the greatest borrower - if a word in any language seems at all useful, English steals it with gusto. It is not that English is supplanting anything de novo - but every language is pretty much fair game for people speaking and writing English. J. K. Rowling exemplifies this truth - pointing out how much English borrows from Latin and other languages gleefully in the Harry Potter books. Aloha. Collect (talk) 15:22, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Collect, that's probably true (though I think it is often overstated: I don't think Japanese is far behind). But I don't see what relevance it has to the question, which was specifically "Why not English?" --ColinFine (talk) 20:29, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Seems like an odd question. You can't go around forcing everyone to adopt an international language or lingua franca at least not since 1984. It just happens naturally. Clarityfiend (talk) 01:33, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

But the question is not about forcing anybody; it's about why anybody thought that an invented language would be preferable to using English; which is a perfectly good question. --ColinFine (talk) 10:34, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Answers so far seem to have ignored the period when Esperanto was developed - the 1870s and 1880s. At that period English was far from being the dominant language it is now. Although Britain was a world power, the USA was still a bit of a backwater with little influence beyond its own borders. Europe was dominated by the then powerful empires (Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) and by France. None of them had much time for the English language: French was still the main language of diplomacy, while German was important in Science. While today we might think that English is the obvious choice as an international language, that has probably only been true since WW2. 109.150.174.93 (talk) 12:30, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

And Colin is speaking from an Anglo - centric viewpoint anyway. I would guess that the French, for example, would still think that French would make the best world language. 92.31.143.223 (talk) 13:13, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

At least one linguist has campaigned to make Proto-Indo European the "official" language of the European Union, arguing that this would drastically cut the number of inter-language translations needed. I foresee some obstacles to this scheme. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:32, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I'm sure the Finns, Hungarians and Maltese would strongly object! — Kpalion^(talk) 10:14, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Something no one has brought up is that one of the perceived benefits of an artificial language was that it's neutral. Britain at the time of Esperanto's creation was at the height of their empire with colonies around the world. Anti-colonialists or Britain's geopolotical rivals might object to using English. French, German, and Russian would face similar objections.

A native speaker is going to be at an advantage if his language is chosen at the medium of international communication. Esperanto was seen as more fair since everyone would be speaking it as a second language. And as a new language it would have no political or cultural baggage.

It could never remain perfectly neutral though. From the start, it had a Euro-centric bias with an outsized influence from Slavic languages. It became associated with internationalism, pacifism, secularism, socialism, and even the Baha'i faith. 71.246.201.134 (talk) 15:29, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Esperanto is a lot simpler to learn in a classroom than English is. This is by design. To be able to become the lingua franca, one of the ideas was that it was going to be easier to learn than any existing language, so that everyone in the world would easily be able to speak to each other in this second language. It is a lot simpler to learn in that context than any language I have tried. One problem is that is not easy enough for all to learn in, say, a week. Another problem for Esperanto was that a language is rarely learned out of context. One learns English much faster and better from family, friends movies than from class. Also, there is today, more than ever, a motivation to learn English for all the information on the internet and for research.Star Lord - 星爵 (talk) 20:35, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

• The problems with Esperanto are its lack of native speakers, its lack of a literature, and the fact that any two people who spoke, say, Latin, and a Germanic language and one other major European language would find it much easier to converse in some nonconlang they already had in common. This has happened to me many times, when I have spoken with Africans and Haitians in French (a second language for both of us) or in German with Slavs and Hungarians (a second language for both of us) and other central Europeans when we did not speak enough of each others' languages. While people still study Greek and Latin for a whole bunch of reasons, there's only one full-length movie of any notability in Esperanto, and while the up-front investment is small, it almost always relies on having learnt at least one Indo-European language besides your own and not in the same subfamily as your own. μηδείς (talk) 00:35, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

By coincidence, I watched that movie (Incubus 1966) on youtube a couple of weeks ago. Notable for starring William Shatner before he found fame in Star Trek, it's not a bad black and white horror story of sorts. Interesting for anyone who wants to hear spoken Esperanto. Akld guy (talk) 20:42, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I found Incubus (1966 film) neat as a curio, but once the novelty of hearing the Esperanto wore off I lost interest. μηδείς (talk) 22:20, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

What closed the deal for me to go see The Passion of the Christ was that it was entirely filmed in Aramaic and Latin. I remember thinking that the Italian actors playing Romans sounded very natural, as they might, in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that they anachronistically used the Church Latin pronunciation. But the Aramaic might as well have been Klingon. Not that I have anything to compare it to; maybe that's what it actually sounds like, but I doubt it.

How did they sound in Inkubo? I understand that real Esperantists criticized the pronunciation, but that's not what I'm asking; not was it correct, but did it sound natural. --Trovatore (talk) 01:19, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, Trovatore, the Aramaic language is not dead (here is a brief clip from the Maronite liturgy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mn6Ltcv978 which is presumably conservative in its pronunciation), and it's actually closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, although you are looking at a long period of separation from the modern dialects to their common ancestor. μηδείς (talk) 01:02, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

If you watch the film, you'll see that the speech is somewhat stilted. This is especially noticeable about 9 minutes into the film where two female actors are speaking over each other's shoulders and appear to be reading the Esperanto words from dialogue boards. Akld guy (talk) 05:21, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Parameters vs. arguments

In the context of computer programming, what is the difference between "parameters" and "arguments", if there is any? My own workplace makes a difference between the two, but that is based purely on technical details, which I can't reveal since I'm under an NDA. But I still feel that distinction is purely arbitrary and does not relate to the actual linguistic difference, and that's why I'm asking. (All this reminds me of a Star Trek anecodte: "Klingon function calls do not have parameters! They have arguments! And they always win them!") But still, what is the linguistic difference between the two? JIP | Talk 23:16, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Have you looked at Parameter_(computer_programming)#Parameters_and_arguments? - Lindert (talk) 23:51, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I once had an argument with a chef over the highly variable results when he cooked the chicken parm, which wasn't much of a value, considering. Since he ignored all my pointers, I vowed never to return to that address, and I never have, without exception. StuRat (talk) 00:31, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I think that was a wrong call and you should goto him again, interrupt what he's doing, and repeat the process until your suggestions register with him. Akld guy (talk) 09:44, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

This is a fairly standard distinction, not limited to computing. See, for example, the Astronomical Almanac for the year 2016, page B-87:

The table is to be entered with the local apparent sidereal time of observation (LAST), and gives the value of a₀, b₀ directly; interpolation, with maximum differences of 0'.7, can be done mentally. To the precision of these tables local mean sidereal time may be used instead of LAST. In the same vertical column, the values of a₁, b₁ are found with the latitude, and those of a₂, b₂ with the date, as argument.

I agree, and I vaguely remember the concepts coming up when learning about parametrics at school. OP, did you encounter parameters in the general geometry sense at school? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:39, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I know you said computer programming but maybe you'd like to know about how we think of it in math? Like in computer science, there's some arbitrariness, and some overlap, but also a customary difference. Think about things that move or change within a context vs. things that move or change between contexts. Arguments tend to be the former, parameters tend to be the latter. This is also the distinction of a variable vs. arbitrary constant [3]. If I write $f(t)=e^{ct+b}$, then I might plot f vs. t for a range of b and c, but I would not usually plot f vs. c. Sure, I can write $f(t,c,b)=e^{ct+b}$ and think of it as a function of three variables and no parameters, but that is a subtly different thing. Or rather, that is the same thing that we choose to think about in a way that subtly different than the other :) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:16, 15 March 2016 (UTC)