Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 December 11

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December 11

Ambiguity?

As I am not a native speaker, I would like to seek clarification, whether the following statement is ambiguous:

Admin A. threatened to block user B. for removing links to XY to win a content dispute.

I think the underlined part could be understood in two different ways:

• User B. removed the links to win a content dispute.
• Admin A. used the threat to win a substantive argument.

Thank you for letting me know how you interpret this. Leyo 08:22, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

You are correct. The sentence is ambiguous. For the latter meaning the sentence should begin "In order to win a content dispute, admin A..." Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:10, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

@Leyo: Unambiguous wording for the two meanings you require:

1. Admin A. threatened to block user B., for removing links to XY to win a content dispute.
2. To win a content dispute, Admin A. threatened to block user B. for removing links to XY.

Bazza (talk) 13:45, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Leyo -- This is very similar to what linguists call "preposition attachment" ambiguity. For example, in the sentence "John saw the man with the telescope", did the man have a telescope, or did John use a telescope to see the man? Wikipedia doesn't seem to have much about this... AnonMoos (talk) 13:51, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Both John and the man may have had telescopes? Martinevans123 (talk) 14:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

In which case, John saw the man with the telescope with a telescope. Unless he saw him using the man's own telescope, which would mean that John saw the man with the telescope with the telescope. — Kpalion^(talk) 16:24, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I guess that old joke about the rabbit and the rifle also exists in English as well, and not only Swedish... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:40, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know." -- Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:45, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

We have Syntactic ambiguity which includes among the examples yours with the telescope. 2.53.172.189 (talk) 10:27, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for turning that up (all I could find was a computational parsing article). Variations of the telescope sentence have likely been used by linguists for many years... AnonMoos (talk) 00:18, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your answers. I used your confirmation concerning the ambiguity there. --Leyo 01:10, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Which fruit, flies like apples?

Answer: None.

Which fruit flies, like apples?

Answer: All.

To sum up: All depends on where you place the comma. In your example, it depends on whether the punctuation is:

Admin A threatened to block user B for,

removing links to XY to win a content dispute.

or:

Admin A threatened,

to block user B for removing links to XY,

to win a content dispute.

If there are no commas, the first interpretation is a way more reasonable, the second one being very unlikely, because the last part to win a content dispute is attached - to the middle part removing links to XY - rather than to the first part Admin A threatened to block user B for.

HOTmag (talk) 11:39, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

There's always Lynne Truss. Bazza (talk) 16:53, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

@Leyo: English sentences often have a lot of ambiguity, which is mostly not a problem due to context. An interesting application of this is a construct called a garden-path sentence, which is a sentence in which a reader is likely to make a wrong initial parse, and then have to back up and read it again in a different way to grasp the meaning. Read these examples, and see what you understand by them:

• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• The old man the boat.
• The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

These are all perfectly grammatical sentences in English, but may be difficult for a non-native speaker of English to follow. Working on the assumption that you know German, try this one:

• Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen, denn sie sind aus Holz und im feuchten Keller gelagert worden.

See how that works? English is particularly susceptible to that type of ambiguity, although it exists in other languages. Mathglot (talk) 08:40, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Sinitic rhotics

Is there any Sinitic language which has an alveolar trill /r/ or alveolar flap /ɾ/ as their rhotic? Most Sinitic languages I have seen do not have any rhotics at all, and Mandarin has retroflex approximant /ɻ/. --40bus (talk) 12:30, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Truly lackluster sourcing, but apparently the dialect of Mandarin in Dangyang, Hubei does? fun video for the citation, at least. Remsense留 12:39, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Wasn't expecting a Spanish language video, but at least that made me understand almost everything with my rusty school Spanish... It would be interesting to hear that promotional dialect song mentioned in the video. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:34, 11 December 2023 (UTC)