Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 January 2

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January 2

"Outside is snowing"

I just searched this on Google.

• "Outside is snowing" - This gets 68,800 results.
• "It's snowing" - This gets 593,000 results.
• "It's snowing outside" - This gets 347,000 results.
• "The outside is snowing" - This gets 4 results.
• "The outside weather is snowing" - This gets 0 results. But at least Google gives me the weather forecast.

Based on these results, the most popular expression is "it's snowing". The last two is likely grammatically incorrect. The 2nd and 3rd are definitely grammatically correct. But the first one gets a whopping 68,800. I am aware that there are a lot of bilinguals in the world (myself included), and bilinguals tend to think differently than monolinguals and use different terms than monolinguals. I am just wondering whether this is how a monolingual English speaker would say it. I mention "monolingual" because a monolingual does not really experience linguistic interference. SSS (talk) 03:39, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"Outside is snowing" is likely a mishearing of "Outside it's snowing", which itself would be less often heard than "It's snowing outside" but could still be valid English. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 03:56, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm in North America and I agree that "outside is snowing" is wrong. --76.69.117.217 (talk) 04:27, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"the last two is likely grammatically correct" is not grammatically correct. Furthermore the last two examples appear grammatically correct but the first is ambiguous with regard to the meaning of outside. The second implies that there is some form of weather that is not outside. Technically possible for some pedants who might want to refer to the ambience inside a large covered stadium, arena or large construction, but generally weather is not used in these circumstances. Richard Avery (talk) 09:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"It's snowing" and "it's snowing outside" are frequently used. The second one is kind of redundant (we hope) but it's still popular. Maybe it carries an implied "come here and look" with it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:59, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Bear in mind that Google result counts are not very meaningful.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 10:04, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

It's a reasonable guideline. The specific numbers might be suspect. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:07, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Could ‘Outside is snowing’ be part of a sentence? E.g. “the weather outside is snowing heavily”, “the weather outside is snowing”, “outside is snowing heavily”. That might explain how Google found it so often--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 10:38, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't think "the weather is snowing" as a statement would be used by a native speaker, except maybe in a slangy way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:43, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I agree. We don't say "The weather is raining", etc. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:45, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

The point missed so far is that verbs like "to snow" and "to rain" are impersonal. The only possible subject for such verbs is "it" - not "outside" or "the weather" or even "the clouds" Wymspen (talk) 14:58, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

• (e/c)I typed "outside is snowing" (with quotes) into Google Canada and got 58,500 hits. It's maybe instructive to note that many of the hits on the first page are either translations (the number one hit was to a Spanish translation page here, non-native speakers (on Reddit), or song lyrics, which frequently bend grammar to fit the music. In other words, it's being used in special cases, not everyday speech. Now, if I switch to look for the phrase in books, I get only 144 hits. The first one is a truncated quote from some frankly horrible doggerel and the second one is to The Foot Book, which does not include that phrase in it at all (and many of the other hits don't appear to actually have the phrase either, which hopefully proves instructive to those trying to use Google counts to mean much of anything when it comes to specifics) :-). Matt Deres (talk) 15:09, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

• Perhaps something with poetic licence, 'outside, tis snowing'. But other than that, I agree with Jack and others - don't say it (not to be proscriptive :)). Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:46, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"tis" - which should correctly be written "'tis" (with the apostrophe) - is simply a rather old fashioned shortening of "it is" which we now usually shorten to "it's" You really do always need an "it" as the subject of the verb "to snow" Wymspen (talk) 16:11, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes that is what tis is but that rather misses the point, if I were writing poetry, I could choose tis or is - it's poetry, lyrics, licence. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:25, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Words containing the same number of letters as their numerical value

Happy New Year to the world.

I understand the word "four" is the only word in English that has the same number of letters as its numerical value 4. Also, a sextet contains 6 people and 6 letters, and a decahedron has 10 sides and 10 letters.

There must be more of these curiosities. Over. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:18, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

The word "1" is written down with one sign only. Additionally, if you count decahedron (even though it's not a number), then what about: fifth, seventh... HOTmag (talk) 19:37, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

...or eighthly. --Antiquary (talk) 20:04, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Or "tri-" --Jayron32 20:30, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Try: "bi-". HOTmag (talk) 21:49, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Also "di-", "quint-" and "penta-". --Antiquary (talk) 12:02, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by the word "1", HOTmag. 1 is a number, not a word. The word representing that number is "one", which has 3 letters. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:00, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Same thing. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:02, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Not sure why you think "1" is not a word. Is "a" a word? If "I" (pronounced "eye") is a word, then why can't "1" (pronounced "one") be a word?

If I had been a Chinese being asked how many hearts I had got, I wouldn't have noticed the difference between - what you call the "word" answering that question - and the "number" answering that question, because the Chinese language has only one character (i.e. "-", pronounced "yee") that answers that question.

Indeed, there is a difference between a "word" and a "number", but that difference is not what you think it is. Actually, any word, whether representing a concrete object (e.g. a person), or an abstract concept (e.g. the answer to the question how many hearts I have got), is a set of signs, whether of some signs (e.g. the three signs "eye"), or of one sign only (e.g. the single sign "I". Please notice that any set may be a singleton, i.e. it may contain one object only); Whereas any number, is not a set of signs, but rather is an abstract concept - being an answer to the question "how many". Therefore, the answer to the question how many hearts I have got, must be a number, whereas the set of signs: "one", is an (English) word (that represents a number being the answer to that question), and the same is true for the set of signs "1": It's a (western) word (that represents a number being the answer to that question), and the same is true for the set of signs "-": It's a (Chinese) word (that represents a number being the answer to that question). HOTmag (talk) 08:53, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

What is the difference between one and 1? My 2c: We have a range of symbols we can draw on to represent and communicate concepts. Some - not all - of these symbols are called letters (a, b, c ... but not 7, $, #, +, %, & etc). Letters can be combined in all manner of ways. Some - not all - of these ways are called words (cat, dog, air ... but not xtdehqzsdwefsy). The expressions "There is one god" and "There is 1 god" mean the same thing, just expressed using different symbols. The first one uses words exclusively. The second one does not, since it contains the non-word "1". This is a distinction confined to written language, obviously, because if one spoke either of these sentences, the listener could not tell which of them had been chosen. But that's no different from the distinction between "2 + 2 = 4" and "two plus two equals four". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:56, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

The term "word" depends on context. In modern English, also email addresses, like a@a.com, may be regarded as words, even though they contain some symbols not contained in Latin alphabet. The same is true for 1@1.org. Indeed, in the 20th century, no word contained the symbol of a dot, however words could contain numerals. HOTmag (talk) 13:50, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

There's a bit of ambiguity in the problem, because some numbers can be written in a variety of ways in English (eg. "one thousand one hundred five", "one thousand one hundred and five", "one thousand, one hundred five", etc., the latter case raising the issue of whether commas should be counted). However I don't think any quibbling like this would produce a second result other than "four". You may be interested in reading about autograms. CodeTalker (talk) 19:57, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

• Yes, it's sometimes stated that "one thousand" is the first number (counting upwards) to include an "a" in it, to which I usually reply "What about one hundred and one?", which they usually do not accept as valid for some reason. Matt Deres (talk) 15:03, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps you'll accept a fiver? If not I'll give you a bunch of fives. --Antiquary (talk) 20:27, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

The indefinite article "a" has one letter and is usually associated with a singleton (many languages use the same word for "a/an" and "one"). --KnightMove (talk) 21:53, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

@JackofOz: Do calculations like 'sum of ten and five' (15 letters) count, of just words...? --CiaPan (talk) 22:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

11+2 = 12+1 and Eleven plus two is an anagram of Twelve plus one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.38.221.49 (talk) 22:38, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

We've established that only one Arabic numeral fits, but there are three Roman numerals, I, II and III. --Antiquary (talk) 22:43, 2 January 2018 (UTC) I forgot the Romans used IIII instead of the modern IV. --Antiquary (talk) 12:41, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

And cinco means 5 in Spanish. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]}

OK, we also have octagram, enneagram, hendecagram, dodecahedron, nonagonal, and tetradecagonal. There's a quarter of an hour I'm never going to get back. --Antiquary (talk) 22:57, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Still a few more dregs to be squeezed out of geometry: octangle, octagons and hendecagons. --Antiquary (talk) 12:02, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Quad, meaning 4 of. Akld guy (talk) 07:06, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Thinking of other languages I have studied: πέντε = 5 (in greek), vier = 4 (in German), motoba = 6 (in Lingala). There are none in French, Latin, Hebrew or Kikongo. You could also play about with Google Translate to work out some other languages. As a starter, 3 is tre (in Albanian), ሶስት (in Amharic), tri (in Bosnian), три (in Bulgarian); 4 is afar (in Somali); 5 is cinco (in Portuguese) ...... Have fun: there are only 104 languages to work through. Wymspen (talk) 11:40, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

I dimly remember that a sevener is a better conker than all sixers but not as good as eighters. --Antiquary (talk) 12:02, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

There are none in .. Hebrew -- yes there is Hebrew: חמישה (5) --82.102.169.113 (talk) 13:16, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Interesting: Google translate confirms that חָמֵשׁ = 5 but also gives your spelling. This may be because I learnt biblical Hebrew, rather than modern Hebrew. Wymspen (talk) 15:10, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

They differ in gender: see Hebrew numerals#Cardinal Values. If you prefer feminine, then there's ארבע for four. --194.213.3.4 (talk) 15:39, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

The word חמישה is in Modern Hebrew only. In Biblical Hebrew it's חמשה, having four letters only. 185.46.78.29 (talk) 15:54, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

More specifically, it's Ktiv hasar niqqud#Ktiv male, which is the modern orthography, but it's not specific to the modern language: Biblical Hebrew can be (and nowadays, frequently is) written in ktiv male just as well.

If you prefer ktiv haser, then שלֹשׁ for three would be a relevant example. And ארבע for four works whichever ktiv you choose. --194.213.3.4 (talk) 18:25, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

• On a related note, in Slavic languages the number 100, spelled sto or сто, contains the same number of letters and digits, three. --Theurgist (talk) 18:06, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

The same is true in Semitic languages. 185.27.105.156 (talk) 16:21, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

• Thanks all for your ideas. Let curiosity reign supreme in 2018. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:45, 4 January 2018 (UTC)