Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 October 17

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October 17

Origin of the name Awkwafina

What is the origin of the name Awkwafina as in movie credits — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.241.206.235 (talk) 00:12, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Sounds like they are imitating Aquafina. SinisterLefty (talk) 00:14, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Assuming you mean this Awkwafina, she talks here about having a distinctive stage name, but does not say how she made it up. --76.69.116.4 (talk) 01:49, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Is there a term for this sort of "double superlative?"

Our article Carol Yager contains the curious claim:

Yager lost the most weight by non-surgical means in the shortest documented time: 521 lb (236 kg) in three months.

This is more or less nonsensical due to the use of two superlatives - even if you charitably take it to mean "lost the most pounds per day," I don't think someone who lost 6 pounds in one day would be considered to have broken this "record." An even better example is the (possibly apocryphal) former motto of New Madrid, Missouri - "the biggest town closest to the fault line," which it seems could be equally validly claimed by a town of 5 people sitting directly on the fault or by Tokyo. Is there a general term for this kind of nonsensical "double superlative?" (And no, it's not double superlative, which is commonly used but refers to something else entirely). -Elmer Clark (talk) 03:11, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Just in general I'm amazed at the type of nonsense claims made even on news shows. For example, the weather report might say "It's twice as cold as yesterday". What could that mean ? Half as far from absolute zero ? SinisterLefty (talk) 03:39, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

They probably (?) mean that if it got to, say, 50 degrees yesterday, then today it would only reach 25 (which is half as warm, not twice as cold, but whatever .....). I agree it's meaningless, because I assume it supposes that 0 degrees is the coldest the weather could ever possibly get. But how do they describe it, using the same rigidly correct mathematical principles, when it goes below zero? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:35, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

It's only half as warm on an absolute temperature scale like Rankine or Kelvin. It's not right to say that on a relative temperature scale like Celsius and Farenheit, because a substance at 25 C does not have half the warmth as the same one at 50 C. Strictly speaking a substance with half the warmth of something at 50 C would have a temperature of -112 C, which is about the coldest weather ever measured on earth during human history. --Jayron32 12:19, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I realised that after I posted it. I was trying to point out the folly of the language being used. I mean, if it got to 100F yesterday, but only 75F today (which is still nice and warm), nobody would ever say it's "four-thirds as cold as it was yesterday". They wouldn't even say it's it's "three-quarters as warm as it was yesterday". But when it comes to the media making drama out of anything and everything that comes their way and making a total atrocity of our beloved language along the way, "twice as cold" is fair game. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:02, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

I would not call that a double superlative. ("Git thar fustest with the mostest" includes something I would call a double superlative). The expression you quoted basically means "lost a very significant amount of weight in a strikingly short amount of time". I don't see that it's more nonsensical than a number of other constructions in English or almost any other natural language... AnonMoos (talk) 05:03, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Yeah I addressed the fact that this isn't actually what's generally called a "double superlative," I just couldn't think of any other term for it (hence the question). And sure, I get that it means that in a broad sense, but "the most weight in the least time" is a much stronger and (seemingly) more precise statement than just "a lot of weight very quickly." -Elmer Clark (talk) 15:15, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

As it stands, that seems to suggest two quite independent criteria were being satisfied. (Not unlike "line up alphabetically by order of height", which is truly nonsensical, as those two are generally impossible to satisfy simultaneously.) Your source is saying: A. of all the people who've ever lost weight non-surgically, she lost the most; and B. of all the people who've ever lost (a significant and defined amount of) weight non-surgically, she lost it in the shortest time. A might be provable, but I rather doubt B is - unless you're talking about weight loss per time, in which case they'd need to collect vast amounts of data from all over the world, involving the records of millions of people, in order to do a sensible comparison of weight loss rates, not just raw weight loss and not just time. Clearly, such a rigorous examination is out of the question. So, they've cut to the chase, and turned "lost a very significant amount of weight in a very short time" into "lost the most weight in the shortest time". This seems like a case of the gratuitous double superlative. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:51, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

"Line up alphabetically by order of height" could mean to line up by height, but in case of a tie, go alphabetically. (It could also be taken the other way around, but for there to be a tie alphabetically, either two people would need to have the exact same names ("John Smith" ?) or you would need to use first or last names exclusively.) SinisterLefty (talk) 18:37, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

French nasal i sound

Why does French nasal i (that is, in the in combination) have the sound of thank rather than think?? Georgia guy (talk) 13:57, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Because of a systematic lowering of nasal vowels in French after the spelling conventions were set. See Phonological_history_of_French#Nasalization. In the Old French period, Latin /i/ before a nasal became nasalized. In the Middle French period, the nasal consonant stopped being pronounced. In Modern French, the /ĩ/ lowered to /ẽ/, then /ɛ̃/ then /æ̃/ (with a different further development in Quebec). As for why - I don't think we can really explain language change, it is just a natural phenomenon that happens. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 15:24, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Just to add on to what 70.67.193.176, language change does not have a "why". Linguistic change over time is essentially random and arbitrary in the sense that there are no meaningful scientific laws that can be developed in a predictive manner that could tell us why a change happened. We can say what changes did happen, and in some cases can come up with some conjectures and hypotheses on why they may have happened, but insofar as these processes are not repeatable, there's no way to really say why they happened. here at about 3:00 is a linguist discussing the Great Vowel Shift in a fairly well-done video for Wired (magazine) where he explains that we don't really know why such things happen. They just do. As he says in that video "If there is one thing we know from the field of linguistics, the scientific study of language, it's that linguistic change is essentially arbitrary." --Jayron32 15:55, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- French got rid of nasalized high vowel sounds ([ĩ],[ũ]) quite some time ago, and now only has mid ([ẽ], [œ̃], [õ]) and low ([ã]) nasalized vowels. The vowel conventionally transcribed as [ẽ] actually seems to have a nasalized [ɛ] allophone after [i] or [j] (i.e. bien) and a nasalized [æ] allophone elsewhere (i.e. vin) in Standard French pronunciation, as far as I was ever able to tell... AnonMoos (talk) 15:30, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

I learned that nasalized vowels sound lower (more open) than oral vowels with the same articulation, and this causes people to articulate them like the oral vowels they sound like, so they gradually get lower and lower. But I couldn't provide a ref offhand to back that up. — kwami (talk) 00:44, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Payment method: "Vaucherni So’mda Sotib Oling"

Hi there, to buy some etherium coins its possible to use the payment method "Vaucherni So’mda Sotib Oling". I would like to know which language is this, which country is this from, what does this "sentence" (if it is one) means. Thanks--46.167.62.33 (talk) 16:31, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Okay I have tried google translate and it says its usbekian / from USBkistan. The problem now is, the sentences say "buy Voucher in Soum". I looked up what is Soum, its a city in Africa. I doubt it that a person from USBkistan do fly to Africa to buy some Vouchers... Can you help me out? Is this an african language which google misunderstood and accidentally say its usbekish but its another language? --46.167.62.33 (talk) 16:36, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Soʻm is the currency of Uzbekistan. --Theurgist (talk) 18:49, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

The "-da" part is likely to be a case suffix in a Turkic language such as Uzbek language, probably a locative (although I haven't found a good online grammar to confirm this). "voucherni" could be an accusative form (assuming "voucher" is a loan from English). "sotib" looks like a form of wikt:sotmoq 'to sell', probably a form cognate to coverbs in -ip/ıp in Turkish (satıp). "Oling" looks like an imperative form of wikt:olmoq 'to take'. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:15, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Excellent piece of detection, Fut.Perf.. Wikt:soʻm indeed shows soʻmda as locative, and also -ni as an accusative suffix. --ColinFine (talk) 09:14, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Ethereum Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 09:35, 18 October 2019 (UTC)