Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 January 22

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January 22

Title question

Hey, would appreciate some insight to the correct usage.

What is the correct (or more correct) way of writing this title:

• List of minor <TV series name> characters
• List of <TV series name> minor characters

The "minor" can be basically any other word - "main", "supporting", "recurring", etc --Gonnym (talk) 10:37, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

See List of minor characters in 24 for a way of getting around this problem. If you want to use one of your options, the first one is best. However you want to write it, the name of the TV series itself should of course be in italics. --Viennese Waltz 12:08, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

The 24 version is actually the one that is using an extremely different style than all other lists, so not really a good example. Question about your answer though, shouldn't the "minor" modifier be placed next to the "characters" as that is what it modifies? --Gonnym (talk) 13:14, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

No, "minor" is modifying the phrase "<TV series name> characters". For example, "minor Star Trek characters" are "Star Trek characters" first, and are "minor" compared to other Star Trek characters. Fundamentally, they are Star Trek characters that happen to be minor as opposed to minor characters that happen to be from Star Trek. --Khajidha (talk) 16:14, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Adjective#Order may be helpful. (TV Series Name is a noun adjunct here, playing the role of an adjective.) Loraof (talk) 16:25, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

English sentences where the past tense is not supplied contextually

Hi all, I'm trying to give my ESL students some listening practice with the past tense, but the only sentences I can think of are things like "Yesterday I got sick." Now the problem is that "yesterday" already cues the past tense, so they don't really have to listen very hard for "got". So can anyone help me out with a sentence where the past tense is not overdetermined? I don't want to just say "I went to the shops" or "I got sick" - this is kind of meaningless, so I want sentences with some real meaning (but simple all the same), but where, if possible, the past tense is actually indicated primarily by the verb, rather than being instantly obvious from the context. IBE (talk) 12:43, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

• Just find some present tense sentences and turn them into past tense(s). "Hi all, I was trying to give my ESL students some listening practice with the past tense, but the only sentences I could think of were things like "Yesterday I got sick." The problem was that "yesterday" already cued the past tense, so they didn't really have to listen very hard for "got". I didn't want to just say "I went to the shops" or "I got sick" - that was kind of meaningless, so I wanted sentences with some real meaning (but simple all the same), but where, if possible, the past tense was actually indicated primarily by the verb, rather than being instantly obvious from the context." Bazza (talk) 13:30, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, you're planning some sort of listening task with individual, context-free sentences. That's a bit weird. It would help to know more about what the students are expected to do and why, but in general something like telling a story would be a case where the past would be usual, without necessarily stating a time. Henry^Flower 14:57, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Simple past may provide useful examples. Loraof (talk) 16:31, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

That would be "yesterday I was ill" here in England. "Yesterday I got sick" is more American. Britmax (talk) 19:31, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Well, it depends on the intended meaning, doesn't it? My understanding was that "got sick" is British for "vomited". --Trovatore (talk) 19:44, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

I would say we often use "got sick" as euphemism for any illness, especially in the digestive system. As opposed to "was sick", as in "I called in sick". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:59, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

(ec) Almost right: the expression is "to be sick", usually with a sense of immediacy. So "I've (just) been sick" means I've just vomited; "Yesterday I was sick" can mean that I vomited yesterday but will usually mean "I was ill yesterday", especially in the context of being unable to work. I don't think we (in England) say "got sick" for getting ill: more likely "became sick", "became ill", "was ill". Bazza (talk) 20:00, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

It's perfectly idiomatic (in my English, at least) to say "I walked straight to the station and took the first train home" (without specifying the time), if the context has established the time. And the context may be inherited, as it were, from a previous sentence. For example, I might utter that sentence in response to the question "What did you do after we left the restaurant last night?" Therefore you might tell your students that they'll hear a number of answers to a variety of questions (which they won't hear). Some of these questions ask the speaker what he or she often does, routinely does, etc.; justifying answers in the present tense. Other questions ask the speaker what he or she did at a certain time: yesterday, the previous Tuesday, etc.; justifying answers in the preterite. And you tell your students that these answers (some to questions about the past, others to questions about the so-called present) will be jumbled up. More.coffy (talk) 06:26, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

How about: At the picnic, three people got sick. Or I got sick during the ceremony. As for "went to the shops," I've never heard that. Is it a way of saying "went shopping"? If so, then what about: While visiting my sister, we all went to the shops. Or During Mardi Gras I went to the shops. —Stephen (talk) 08:45, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

As an elderly BrE speaker and UK resident, I perceive the phrase "I/he/she/they went to the shops" to be completely unremarkable and commonly used, by myself and others: it has something of an underlying implication of going to a nearby group of small shops, rather than to a city centre shopping district. (Admittedly, in Scotland "Ah ganged fer ma messages" would be a common alternative.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.251.247 (talk) 06:27, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

l and r in Japanese

Since they don't tell them apart, could it well be 'kalate', 'lamen', 'samulai'?--Doroletho (talk) 17:44, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Why would it be, when Japanese speakers don't generally use an "L" sound? And they wouldn't usually be writing those words in the western alphabet. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:57, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

The point is that Japanese people do not "not use an "L" sound": nor do they use an "R" sound. What they do use is a sound which, like all sounds in human speech, has an acceptable range of variation in a given language, in this case Japanese. To Anglophone ears this means that sometimes it sounds more like "R" and sometimes more like "L". That it is more commonly transcribed into English orthography as "R" is merely a convention adopted for the convenience of non-Japanese, Latin alphabet-using persons.

It is commonplace for what is considered to be a discrete sound represented by one grapheme in one language not to map one-to-one to a discrete grapheme-represented sound in another. For example, compare the graphemes "p" and "b" which in English are considered "single letters" but which are each used to represent two sounds p & ph and b & bh, unaspirated and aspirated respectively (the "ph" here does not represent "f" as in "philosophy", but the aspirated "p" of "pill" as opposed to the unaspirated "p" of "spill"), whose difference English speakers rarely note consciously. In Hindi script these two pairs of sounds are each perceived as two different sounds and written as two different letters (प/फ and ब/भ) which are never confused. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.251.247 (talk) 01:53, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Doroletho -- Whether the Japanese sound in question is transcribed as "l" or "r" in English transliterations of the Japanese language depends on whether English-speakers consider it to resemble more the English /l/ sound or the English "r" sound. You might be interested in reading Boas' classic 1889 paper On Alternating Sounds (see Franz Boas#Linguistics)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:00, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

NB AnonMoos is (justifiably) simplifying matters when they talk of "the English 'r' sound". If you were a native speaker of some language other than English, you might well be surprised, even amused, to hear a native speaker of English say that a seeming miscellany of sounds were just trivially different variants on a single "r" sound. (There's also variation in "l".) As for the question of whether Japanese uses "l" or "r" for its [ɾ] (or close variant thereof), I suspect that the "r" is more a matter of a convention going back before Hepburn to Nippo Jisho and so forth: the Portuguese thought that the Japanese sound resembled their "r" more than it did their "l". You'll sometimes see "l" used where the conventions require "r"; as two examples, a porn starlet and a photographer have their names written Sola Aoi and Lieko Shiga respectively. More.coffy (talk) 06:03, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

According to Japanese phonology#Consonants the Japanese phoneme usually transliterated with ⟨r⟩ does often have lateral (l-like) allophones, so it's really only a matter of convention that we write karate, ramen, samurai etc. and not kalate, lamen, samulai. And yes, the native language of the speaker definitely plays a role. I heard a paper by a Japanese phonologist once showing that whether non-native Japanese speakers perceive the voiceless vowels as syllable peaks depends on whether the consonant cluster that would result if the vowel were missing is permitted in that listener's own native language. So [sɯ̥ki] 'favorite' is perceived as one syllable ([ski]) by speakers of languages that allow [sk-], but as two syllables by speakers of languages that don't allow it, and [kɯ̥tabarɯ] 'wear oneself out' is perceived as three syllables ([ktabarɯ]) by speakers of languages that allow [kt-], but as four syllables by speakers of languages that don't allow it. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:37, 24 January 2019 (UTC)