Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 June 24

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June 24

What does "had you controlled the cage" mean?

Jax met Cole, who got defeated in cage fight:

• Jax: You could've won today, had you controlled the cage.

What does "had you controlled the cage" mean? Here Cole got defeated then how Cole control the cage? Rizosome (talk) 06:41, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

It's a Counterfactual conditional, as indicated by the use of the pluperfect verb tense. (In some other languages, a subjunctive verb would be used...) AnonMoos (talk) 06:57, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I think that in fact the word had in this context can be analyzed as the past tense of the subjunctive of the auxilary verb to have, which has largely fallen in disuse but survived in this counterfactual use, representing the irrealis mood.  --Lambiam 13:26, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, in other words, "you didn't control the cage, but if you had, you could've won today."--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:01, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

It's getting a bit cute with the language, but fully understandable to a native speaker. It reminds me of something one of my history professors said about Huey Long: "He might have become president someday, had he not been assassinated." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:47, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

What the above answers haven't explained is the literary use of inversion for a conditional. Had you controlled means precisely the same as If you had controlled. Not many people would say it today in ordinary speech, and even in literary use it is very rare with any auxiliary except had, could, and should. But in books up to the 1950's you'd see even in dialogue sentences like "Should you see him, please tell him I called". --ColinFine (talk) 20:34, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

In the form "Should there be any doubt, ...", this is common enough today.^[1][2][3] Or in the non-apology, "Should I have offended anyone, I apologize."^[4]  --Lambiam 22:25, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Rizosome:, a classic example from Jane Austen, in which Elizabeth Bennett angrily refuses the offer of marriage from the rich and good-looking but haughty Fitzwilliam Darcy:

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chap. 34

Mathglot (talk) 10:26, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Sylow

The page for Peter Sylow gives the pronunciation as [ˈsyːlɔv], but on Forvo for example, it sounds more like [ˈsiːlɔv]. Could any speakers of Norwegian provide the correct pronunciation on the page? lammbda^talk 11:07, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

• I don't speak Norwegian but I do speak Swedish which is closely related to Norwegian, and in Swedish, the name would be pronounced just like it says in the article, in your first example. JIP | Talk 12:41, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
• One would regularly expect an orthographic vowel ⟨y⟩ in an open syllable to be realized in Norwegian as /yː/; cf. the pronunciation of syna. If you look at this vowel chart, you will see that the Norwegian /yː/ is much higher than, for example, the /y/ of Parisian French (and even higher than the French /i/!) and can easily be perceived as an /iː/ by non-Norwegian ears.  --Lambiam 12:59, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
• As Lambian says! It is difficult to "train" people with other language background to pronounce or even to hear the Norwegian y-sound. Going from German u towards German ü and then ask them to continue, they often cannot manage. Pushing them on to i can sometimes be a "solution". Several Norwegian dialects have complete or partial itacism of y. --T*U (talk) 17:20, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Swedish y̌

Our article on the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal notes that his name was pronounced Swedish: [ˈɡɵ̌nːar ˈmy̌ːɖɑːl] in Swedish. What does the y̌ sound like? Help:IPA/Swedish doesn't contain the y̌ character, and y̌ redirects to the Caron article, which doesn't have the string "swed" except in a reference to some Lappish languages spoken in Sweden, and which doesn't mention IPA usage. Nyttend backup (talk) 14:19, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I have no idea where the y̌ comes from, but it may be an attempt to describe the Swedish y sound, which is similar to the Norwegian y discussed in the section just above this. --T*U (talk) 17:24, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Help:IPA/Swedish has the caron in the lower right corner under "Suprasegmentals" (the dashed circle somewhat hides the actual accent). It represents tone 1 and there is a sound example for the Stockholm realisation of it (for an a, not a y). See also Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch--Wrongfilter (talk) 17:38, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

In that case, it is just nonsense, since Myrdal is pronounced with tone 2. --T*U (talk) 19:38, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

The ˇ is the standard IPA rising accent mark, it has no relation to Swedish orthography. /y/ in IPA stands for the close front rounded vowel, and /y̌/ would by that logic be an accented close front rounded vowel with a rising pitch. By coincidence, the close front rounded vowel is often written y in Swedish. 78.0.133.114 (talk) 22:42, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Blotto

Is "blotto" meaning 'very drunk' still used in the US? In the UK it's rather old fashioned, perhaps something from the 1960s, or 1970s at the latest. What is the etymology? Wiktionary says: "The verb sense "to be annihilated or destroyed" may be related to blot out." Thanks. 86.187.230.89 (talk) 18:47, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

My most recent exposure would have been Otto from the Simpsons. Frinkiac tells me it was season 4 episode 16's Duffless, which first aired in 1993. I may have heard it since then or in other contexts, but I can't recall many. Matt Deres (talk) 19:20, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Etymology.com has "drunk," c. 1905, from some signification of blot (v.) in its "soak up liquid" meaning.

A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (p. 99) by Eric Partridge says: Drunk: from ca. 1905. P. G. Wodehouse, of a drunken man, 'He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto.' Ex the porousness of blotting paper, possibly suggested or influenced by Romany motto, intoxicated.

Alansplodge (talk) 10:25, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Was certainly common in the US in 1930! Martinevans123 (talk) 10:52, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah it's still used, though not much. It doesn't sound old fashioned to me in the sense of having been more common in the past. Fwiw John "Bluto" Blutarsky's younger brother in one of the sequels to Animal House was nicknamed Blotto. 2602:24A:DE47:BA60:8FCB:EA4E:7FBD:4814 (talk) 10:59, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

I associate it with past decades when the attitude to drinking was a bit different, and there was felt to be a need for a rather large number of humorous or semi-humorous euphemisms for "drunk"... AnonMoos (talk) 09:34, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Maybe we have an unreformed attitude to drinking, but British English still has a multitude of those idioms. This page lists; trousered, blended, deafened, mangled, pissed, rat-arsed, and arseholed. This page has; beered up (or lagered up), bollocksed, wankered, whammed, slammed, smashed, mashed, and trashed. Others that spring to mind are; shit-faced, wasted, bladdered and langered. There are probably many more. Alansplodge (talk) 17:48, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

I was forgetting the immortal line; "I seem to have got a little plastered"! Alansplodge (talk) 17:55, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Not forgetting "completely trollied". Martinevans123 (talk) 22:58, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Britain has 3,000 ways to say ‘drunk’ includes the journalists' favourite; tired and emotional. Alansplodge (talk) 17:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Since language usage differs within countries, as well as by class, age and the politeness of the speaker, it might be difficult to answer the question. I thought btw that pissed is the most common English slang for drunk. Hammered might be a more polite word. Mind you, pissed means something different in U.S. slang. TFD (talk) 20:34, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

In South Wales we also have "asbestos" as in "asbestos a newt". As well as just plain "newted", of course. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:58, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Wiktionary link, surely incomplete, but entertaining. Personuser (talk) 00:02, 29 June 2021 (UTC)