Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 July 15

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July 15

Questions

1. Does English have any verbs which use verb to be instead of to have in composed forms?
2. Does Spanish have dark L?
3. Does French have nominative case?
4. Is the thing that in English, "half two" is "half past two", not "half to", Romance influence? Are there any other Germanic languages that have same?

--40bus (talk) 14:40, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

"Half two"??? Where have you seen that? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:37, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

It's quite common in (colloquial) British English. On occasion I have managed to translate "half two" to German halb drei without a blink, which I'm a bit proud of. --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:45, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Or even non-colloquially:

...will sit on the 10th day of March instant, at half two in the afternoon precisely, at the Court of Bankruptcy in Basing-hall Street.

The London Gazette (1843) p, 792 Alansplodge (talk) 23:09, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- If you mean the perfect, then there are a few intransitive semi-archaic forms often associated with religion, such as "Christ is risen", "he is come", and possibly one or two others. Otherwise, not... AnonMoos (talk) 16:36, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Also, you can read about the case system of Old French at Old French#Nouns, but that was a number of centuries ago. AnonMoos (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

In my methodology, every language in the world have a nominative case. If a language has just one case (such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Malay), it has a nominative case. --40bus (talk) 17:29, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

You could argue that every language without a case system has exactly one case, which you could declare a nominative, sure. French doesn't really have cases, except some remnants in the personal pronouns, and is a nominative–accusative language. In which case you answered your own question. However, see ergative–absolutive language: this may not work so well for every language. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:18, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

User:AnonMoos, why do you say "Christ is risen" is semi-archaic? How is it different from "AnonMoos is awake"? Nyttend (talk) 21:27, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Risen is a verb (past tense of rise). Awake is an adjective, whose related verb is wake (woke, woken ...). Woke has latterly become an adjective, but that doesn't make awake a verb. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:32, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

But it's just a participle. If my wife asks me about the state of her unbaked bread, I could easily say "The bread is risen", and when I'm looking for leftovers the next day, she could tell me "The bread is already eaten" or "The bread is gone". Nyttend (talk) 21:43, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

"The bread is already eaten" is a present passive sentence, not a perfect active sentence, so it's irrelevant. In "The bread is gone", "gone" is an adjective (see wikt:gone#Adjective, sense 3). In "The bread is risen", "risen" feels like an adjective too, as you're describing the current state of the bread rather than saying what the bread has done, for which one would say "The bread has risen". But of course there's not much difference in meaning between "The bread is risen" and "The bread has risen", since the latter must be true in order for the former to be true. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:23, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Right. Nouns don't inflect in modern French. Verb conjugation is quite complex, and some times affects the normal rules for a gender modifications to adjectives ("les vies qu'il aurait vécues" for example) but that is as close as it comes and isn't the same thing as noun declensions in German and Russian Elinruby (talk) 21:03, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

1: I found plenty in the book I was reading last night in bed: “The banish'd Bolingbroke repeals himself,// And with uplifted arms is safe arrived// At Ravenspurgh.” Or doesn't Shakespeare qualify as English? PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:08, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

I rather think that the Paschal greeting, "Christ is risen!", owes more to tradition than modern language. It can be traced to two Biblical texts, both of which are given as "has" rather than "is" in modern English translations; see Luke 24:34 “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon." and Matthew 28:6 "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said". The corresponding verses in the 17th-century King James Bible both have "is" rather than "has". Alansplodge (talk) 19:11, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Kannada text

Could someone provide a transcription of this text? I've asked to have this image vectorised (it's a JPG), and the WP:GL/I volunteer says that we need a transcription. Nyttend (talk) 21:32, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

ಪದನಿದು ನುಡಿಯಲುಂ ನುಡಿದುದ

ನಯಲುಮಾರ್ಪರಾ ನಾಡವರ್ಗಳ್

ಚದುರರ್ ನಿಜದಿಂ ಕುರಿತೋದದೆಯುಂ

ಕಾವ್ಯಪ್ರಯೋಗ ಪರಿಣತಮತಿಗಳ್

According to Google lens. Folly Mox (talk) 22:56, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

In the first word, two letters become one other letter. The second letter of the second line is lost. Other than that I (unacquainted with Kannada script) see no errors, but watch out. —Tamfang (talk) 15:35, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Since the image source is a screenshot of the text, I tried running a Google search, and with it I found kn:ಶ್ರೀವಿಜಯ, the Kannada Wikipedia article on the text from which this is an excerpt. However, it looks like there are several transcription errors, enough that I'm hesitant to use the text on that article, in case it's not the same text as the image. I've reached out to a Kannada-speaking acquaintance in real life. Thanks! Nyttend (talk) 22:09, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

The lost second letter of the second line is also found in the first word of the original, but not in the Google lens version. In both cases, it corresponds to the letter ರಿ in the Kannada Wikipedia article.  --Lambiam 22:37, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah looks like ಱ has been obsolete for some time. No wonder Google lens didn't like it. Folly Mox (talk) 23:29, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

User:Nyttend, if your friend runs into trouble with the problem glyph, you can force it through html entities. ಱಿ yields ಱಿ. Folly Mox (talk) 23:37, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

ಪದನಱಿದು ನುಡಿಯಲುಂ ನುಡಿದುದ

ನಱಿಯಲುಮಾರ್ಪರಾ ನಾಡವರ್ಗಳ್

ಚದುರರ್ ನಿಜದಿಂ ಕುರಿತೋದದೆಯುಂ

ಕಾವ್ಯಪ್ರಯೋಗ ಪರಿಣತಮತಿಗಳ್

From the department of wait why don't I just do this right now? Folly Mox (talk) 23:42, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll see what she says; she's in Bangalore and uses Kannada daily (runs in my mind it's her native language), so I doubt she'll have any issues, but this will be great if I don't hear from her. Nyttend (talk) 22:20, 17 July 2023 (UTC)