Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 19

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March 19

Why does the simple adjective is called "positive"?

I know about 3 degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. What is the reason that it is called "positive" while others just refer to it as "adjective" only? 93.126.116.89 (talk) 06:02, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

All three forms are adjectives. There are positive adjectives, comparative adjectives, and superlative adjectives. --132.67.174.69 (talk) 10:10, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

93.126.116.89 -- some languages have negative inflectional forms of adjectives... AnonMoos (talk) 10:33, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Are you talking about languages like Japanese with for example akai = is red and akakunai = is not red? Basemetal 11:31, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes... AnonMoos (talk) 12:46, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Regarding "positive": How old is it in European grammar? If it goes back to Antiquity I doubt Romans and Greeks knew about languages with negative adjectives, and if they did, they were only concerned with Latin and Greek grammar. It could be a Latin (mis)translation or calque (loan translation) of a sensible Greek term. Think of accusative, finite form, etc. I'd bet you'd have a hard time trying to explain what's not finite about non finite forms. Not saying the term positive is definitely one of those. Just urging caution. Gotta first look at the history of the term. Basemetal 11:31, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Well, the original meaning of "positive" has little to do with being the opposite of "negative". It's the adjectival derivation of ponere, 'to place', and as such a loan translation of Greek thetikos, from the verb tithemi, 'to place', which also had the meaning of 'assert'. So the "positive" form of the adjective is the one used for simply "asserting" a property, rather than comparing it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:45, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

As in the verb "posit". 92.31.139.146 (talk) 11:59, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately I still do not understand it. Do you want to say that in English the adjective are positive? They have also a negative meaning such as "bad", "ugly" etc. So unfortunately I still don't understand the meaning of positive in this context. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.126.116.89 (talk) 03:27, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Saying an adjective is negative is not the same thing. Negative adjectives are negative because they have negative connotations: bad, mean, ugly, stupid, horrid, violent, angry, etc.; positive adjectives have positive connotations: good, nice, smart, wonderful, patient, calm, and so on. But when thinking of the forms of an adjective such as bad, worse, worst, we say that bad is the positive, worse is comparative, and worst is superlative. In this sense, positive means that this form merely asserts (posits) something about the noun that it modifies. A comparative adjective does more than assert, it compares. —Stephen (talk) 09:48, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

As an inflectional category, a negative adjective is one which negates the meaning of the base adjective (i.e. if the basic adjective means "red", then the negative inflection would mean "not red"). Calling words "negative" because their meanings impressionistically have somber overtones is a completely different thing... AnonMoos (talk)

ISO-8859-1

Could somebody shed light on the history of this?

My questions:

1) Why do the letters with grave go before the letters with acute (that is à is followed by á, etc., not vice versa)?

2) Why are ã between â and ä, and õ between ô and ö, while for the other letters circumflex is followed by diaeresis: ê ë, î ï, û ü? Would it not be more logical to place the letters with tilde at the end of the letter series?

3) Why are × and ÷ placed in the middle?

4) Why is þ between ý and ÿ?

I suggest this might have had to do something with sorting rules in particular languages (but it does not answer #3, though). But in Icelandic ð goes after á and before é and not after í, as in the standard (though there is my suggestion: they did not want to move ï to the next row and make it "solitary" from the other "i"s). I see at least some logic that they placed ý under í and ÿ under ï, so (as there is no ŷ) þ is there (actually, ŷ does exist in Welsh, but it seems the authors did not plan to cover the language with the standard).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:22, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Lüboslóv Yęzýkin -- For a long time, the standard was going to include "Œ" and "œ" for French, but at the last minute before finalization, a French representative said that the French didn't want them after all, so divide and multiply characters were hastily substituted in their place. And "ÿ" is where it is because it doesn't have an upper-case counterpart in the standard... AnonMoos (talk) 10:33, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Yep, the space taken up by "ÿ" is where the upper-case of the German eszett ß would go - but (at the time at least) this wasn't a standard letter, so it left an opening. Last year Capital ẞ was officially made into a real letter, so ISO-8859-1 is now a bit more incomplete. Smurrayinchester 10:50, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

AnonMoos, thanks, I've found the source where this story is covered. However, questions 1 and 2 remain open.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:20, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Conditional mood#German

Can somebody please have a look at that section? To me there seems to be some confusion there, as especially the moods / tenses mentioned do not correspond with the ones in Konditionalis#Würde-Form im Deutschen.--Converto (talk) 15:08, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Teachers who recommend parents to only speak the dominant language

I’ve read that teachers and school administrators recommend parents to only speak the dominant language to the children to prevent language confusion or whatever academic reason. My question is, how is this actually done? What if the parent just doesn’t know the dominant language well enough? Does this work well on parents who are at least conversationally fluent in the dominant language? What about parents who can’t speak the dominant language at all and allow the kids to manage two languages at the same time? And what time period is this? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 16:19, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

on the claim that teachers and administrators make that demand/suggestion. Where? When? Matt Deres (talk) 16:28, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I've usually seen better arguments for the parents speaking the less dominant language, on the grounds that everyone else is gonna teach them the dominant language. One lecturer in my education courses told us about how her kids didn't find out that she spoke English until they were almost teenagers. When feasible, she made them translate for her.

In fact, I've seen cases where the parents try to speak the dominant language (or the closest pidgin they can manage), screwing up the kid's fluency with it even later in life. One friend of mine speaks English like it's a second language, even though that's the only language he's known for his near three decades on the planet. Ian.thomson (talk) 16:43, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

And thinking on it, the worst case scenario I've seen for parents who speak their native language at home were kids who were fluent in English but only understood enough of a second language to know when they were in trouble. Ian.thomson (talk) 16:45, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

A recommendation to avoid bilingual exposure would certainly not be in line with the current consensus among educators and linguists, who overwhelmingly hold that bilingualism (including the situation where a heritage language is spoken at home and the dominant community language elsewhere) is a completely natural and healthy situation that children can deal with without any significant problems. This [1] may give some pointers both to the research and to practical advice for parents. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:57, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

If children grow up exposed to several languages, they don't get confused. We knew a family: English speaking mother, Spanish father, but living in France. The child had no problem handling three languages - it is a skill we lose as we grow up. Wymspen (talk) 19:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

For an immigrant family trying to learn English - or some other language - together it is ideal if they only speak the new language at home while learning. They learn faster together. Later they can switch back to first language at home. Legacypac (talk) 23:15, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

{{citation needed}} Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:40, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

That might work if they lived with a native speaker who was fluent in their language to help teach them. Otherwise, they're more likely to practice a unique dialect that could hinder their fluency in the long run. Guy in the anime club at my university went to teach in Japan, studied Japanese beforehand, lived with a bunch of other foreigners who also studied Japanese beforehand, and spoke Japanese with them to help each other practice. Came back complaining that Japanese people don't speak proper Japanese. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:16, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

[2] is a good anecdotal read on the subject. Bazza (talk) 10:54, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

In the United States, they asked the same question. The result was Lau v. Nichols, which ruled that the lack of supplemental language instruction in public school for students with limited English proficiency violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. →Σσς. (Sigma) 22:08, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

The question: I’ve read that teachers and school administrators recommend parents to only speak the dominant language to the children to prevent language confusion or whatever academic reason. My question is, how is this actually done? The general reaction above seems to be along the lines of No, that recommendation would be wrong; therefore it isn't made. As if a significant minority of teachers and school administrators didn't make bad recommendations! (Additionally, I wonder if "the dominant language" mightn't be a misunderstanding of or a typo for "their [i.e. the parents'] dominant language[s]", which might have very different implications.) I wonder about the apparent premise that there might be "language confusion". Is there evidence that, say, children in Germany whose first language is Turkish speak German strewn with Turkish words, or with Turkish verb inflections or whatever, under the impression that this is German? Or what else might "language confusion" mean? But even if "language confusion" (whatever this meant) were a complete myth, it wouldn't surprise me if many teachers believed in it. After all, many otherwise level-headed people people do subscribe to the strangest language myths. -- Hoary (talk) 23:00, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Future Perfect's link is a fair summary. The OP knows full well that academics promote this kind of instruction, which they would not do if it was harmful Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 March 7#Research paper about the history of the Chinese heritage language schools in the United States. Here's another study which discounts the theory [3]. 92.19.172.248 (talk) 12:19, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. I think that few people involved in serious research into bilingualism would tell parents sharing a single first language that differs from the dominant language in the society (and education system) thereabouts that they should avoid using the former with the child and instead always use the latter. However, informed thinking takes time to pervade schools. Moreover, people seem particularly reluctant to abandon the language-related myths and prejudices that they picked up in their youth: not infrequently, even "reliable sources" repeat the misunderstandings (which then of course find their way into Wikipedia). -- Hoary (talk) 22:53, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I think everyone here misunderstands the OP question or the OP has formed an unclear question. Basically, I'm aware that some parents, on the suggestion of teachers and school administrators or not, do avoid speaking their own native language at home. Some parents are afraid that bilingualism is bad for their autistic child or whatever. That's not the point at all in the OP. The actual question in the OP is concerned with the practical aspects of NOT speaking your native language to your child. If you are frustrated and your child is beside you and you don't want the child to hear you speak in that language, then I'd presume it must be very annoying to be forced to speak in a language that is foreign to you. And yet, I read stories about parents who do exactly that, and as a result, the children apparently cannot speak or even passively understand the language. But still, if the parent is speaking a language that he is not fully fluent in, it must be a pain trying to sound fluent. Also, parents may talk to themselves loudly in their native language and can be heard by the children. How can the children not catch this? Or do the parents make an effort to not speak the language in front of the kids? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 20:52, 23 March 2018 (UTC)