Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 December 6

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December 6

-ence, -ency

Is there any difference in the meaning of words like resilience vs. resiliency, dependence vs dependency, equivalence vs equivalency? 135.180.147.13 (talk) 05:30, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

• The venn diagrams of these words is not a perfect circle, but it is often close. However, there are key differences. For example, one can say that the Isle of Mann is a Crown dependency, while one would never call it a "Crown dependence". I would say that while there is some considerable overlap, the -y form tends to be more concrete in meaning, while the -e form tends to have a subtly more abstract meaning. Most of the links here generally agrees. --Jayron32 12:05, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

• While -ence is preferably used for the property of being -ent, -ency is preferably used for something that has that property. For example, "Germany's dependence on Russian gas" is more common than "Germany's dependency on Russian gas". However, this is a soft rule. For example, the term resiliency is a pure synonym of resilience with no discernible difference in meaning.  --Lambiam 13:15, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Proofreaders are trying to hold the line but are slowly losing that battle. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 16:34, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Bah! The resiliency of proofreaders ain't what it used to be.  --Lambiam 02:57, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

There are also going to be difference in things like register and non-linguistic contexts which determine which of two nearly identical synonyms are appropriate. English is rife with these sorts of words whose definition is identical on the page, but where native speakers tend to have a consistent, if hard-to-define-in-words difference in usage. In fact, there's one: use/usage. The "-age" suffix adds little to "use" as a noun, and yet speakers within a language community will tend to use them in different contexts consistently. The Venn diagram between the two is nearly, but not quite, a circle, and the area of non-overlap is very nebulously defined. --Jayron32 19:07, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

According to Fowler, H. W.; Gowers, Ernest (1965). "-ce, -cy". A Dictionary Of Modern English Usage (Second ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 82.

"Among the hundreds of words corresponding to actual or possible adjectives or nouns in -ant or -ent, large numbers now present no choice of form: no one hesitates between avoidance, forbearance, admittance, magnificence, coincidence, or intelligence, and a form in -cy; nor between buoyancy, constancy, vacancy, agency, decency, or cogency, and a form in -ce. But in many cases it may easily happen that one has doubts which is the right form, or whether one is as good as the other, or whether both exist but in different senses: persistence or persistency? competence or competency? consistence or consistency?

When there is doubt about a word not given in its place in this book, and again when one is given without further comment than See -CE, -CY, it is to be presumed that cither -ce or -cy may be used; but three generalities may be added. First, that short words favour -cy, and longer ones -ce; it was not by design, but by a significant accident, that ail the -cy words given above as having no -ce alternatives were metrical matches for buoyancy. Secondly, that many words tend to use the -ce form in the singular, but -cies rather than -ces in the plural, e.g. irrelevance, but irrelevancies. And thirdly, that euphony often decides, in a particular context, for one or the other ending".

The article quoted does go into more detail, and is well worth reading. DuncanHill (talk) 22:03, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Ojibwe translation

I would like to add in the Ojibwe translations I made for this image, it can be seen in the second section of the stellar evolution (or: anang aanji-wiiji-gomaapii) article so that teachers may have learning materials in Ojibwe with graphics. I don't know how to make it myself, anyone willing to lend a hand in showing me how I can do it with freeware or is willing to copy and paste or at least help me turn it into a table on the article? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. 2600:1700:9758:7D90:1405:C3AD:F3A0:D1DB (talk) 07:23, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

M_SUN is a measure of mass, one solar mass, so this should be replaced by just M_giizis, or, using the astronomical symbol for the Sun (as we do in the text of our article Stellar evolution that uses this image), M_☉.  --Lambiam 11:36, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

* How timely! See xkcd for December 5 regarding this unit. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 05:57, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Bah! Humbug! Which astronomer worth its salt would use imperial measurements? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:14, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

A clearer and more convenient way to refer to the image's location is commons:File:Star_Life_Cycle_Chart.jpg. Sometimes with SVG files, you can add alternative translations just by editing the source text of the SVG, but this is a JPEG (a "lossy" raster format), so the process is more complicated. If you already know which text you want to add, then you should ask at an image help board... AnonMoos (talk) 11:40, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

For meaningful advice on free raster graphics editors that you could use on your computer, you should state the operating system (Windows, macOS, Linux). For example, GNU Paint is free but not available for Windows.  --Lambiam 12:13, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

High SI prefixes

Read the third paragraph of the "Double prefix" section of Metric prefix. It is saying that they propose kiloquetta-, megaquetta-, gigaquetta-, and so on. 10^60 would be quettaquetta, and 10^90 would be quettaquettaquetta. After that the SI prefixes just get too wordy for practical use. Has anyone made any proposals?? Georgia guy (talk) 21:47, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Going any further will become unpractical for practical use; everyone will have to look up all the time whether one quetzalcoatlwatt was defined to be 10¹²⁰ W and one godzillawatt was supposed to be 10¹⁵⁰ W; or, then again, was it the other way around? We are also running out of one-letter prefixes; we cannot reuse G for godzilla-. And, finally but most importantly, no one is discussing physical quantities of such magnitudes, so even if new proposals were practically usable, there is no practical need for their use.  --Lambiam 02:50, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

The metric prefixes smaller than 10^-15 or larger than 10¹² are barely used already. People just use scientific notation. We don't talk about stars of 2000 qg, but of 2·10³⁰ kg (which is about 1M_☉, also used as a unit). PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:20, 7 December 2022 (UTC)