Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 October 4

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October 4

estoy un perrito regazo or soy un perrito regazo

my boyfriend is under the impression that it is estoy un perrito regazo, not soy un perrito regazo when stating "i am a dog". his teacher has apparently convinced him of this even though i am fluent/literate in spanish however i do not know how to give a breakdown of the technicalities/grammer rules to explain the difference between using soy/estoy, i.e. soy un perro, or ¡estoy enojado con my novio por que no me cree! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.187.238.14 (talk) 06:55, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

The difference is between essive and stative senses, although of course there are exceptions and nuances. This article might help. Maybe what your boyfriend means to say is "Estoy como un perro". By the way, if he's trying to say that he's a lapdog, that's "perro faldero", not "perro regazo". LANTZY^TALK 07:36, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, sentences like estoy un perro... are basically ungrammatical. If your boyfriend is thinking of a lapdog, as Lantzy explained, you may well say estoy como un perro faldero... or estoy hecha un perro faldero... (or hecho for males). Both soy como un perro faldero... or soy un perro faldero... are also possible, though the meaning differs with the former sentences as explained in the article quoted by Lantzy. Pallida  Mors 11:22, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Prohibitive mood in passive voice

It says in the article untranslatability:

Irish allows the prohibitive mood to be used in the passive voice. The effect is used to prohibit something while expressing society's disapproval for that action at the same time. For example, contrast Ná caithigí tobac (meaning "Don't smoke" when said to multiple people) uses the third person plural in the imperative meaning "We do not smoke" while with Ná caitear tobac, which is best translated as "Smoking just isn't done here", uses the autonomous imperative meaning "One does not smoke".

I don't understand Irish, but I gather from the text that Ná caithigí tobac means "You people, do not smoke!" and Ná caitear tobac means, roughly, "Smoking must not be done here!" or "One must not smoke here!". Is this correct? If it is, then Finnish has a similar feature: Täällä ei tupakoida means "One does not smoke here" but Täällä älköön tupakoitako means "One must not smoke here!", although many Finns consider this form archaic. JIP | Talk 10:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Caithigí is 2nd person plural imperative and caitear is an impersonal imperative. Capturing the distinction in English is difficult, but Ná caithigí tobac could be literally translated into German as "Rauchen Sie nicht!" (or "Raucht nicht!" in the familiar plural form), while Ná caitear tobac is closer to "Es wird nicht geraucht" (or rather "Es werde nicht geraucht" using the subjunctive to indicate a desired state of affairs rather than a simple fact). More idiomatically you could translate Ná caitear tobac into German as "Nicht rauchen", as German uses the infinitive as a kind of impersonal imperative. I've made some corrections to what the article says about Irish. —Angr (talk) 12:45, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

So is ná caitear tobac grammatically an imperative command form? The German translation you give above, es wird nicht geraucht, is technically an infinitive, although the intended meaning is a command. Neither English or German has a grammatical passive imperative, but Finnish does, as I have written above. From what you wrote above, I gather that Irish also does, but I'd like to be sure about this. JIP | Talk 19:43, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

"Es wird nicht geraucht" is technically not an infinitive but an indicative, which is why I said "Es werde nicht geraucht" might be a better translation (German uses the subjunctive to function as a 3rd person imperative). Ná caitear tobac is an imperative, but you can only see that because it uses ná. The imperative caitear is identical in form to the indicative caitear; the only difference between them is which negative particle they take (the negation of the indicative would be Ní chaitear tobac). But caitear isn't a passive, strictly speaking, but an impersonal. Tobac is not the grammatical subject of caitear (as it would be in an English passive like "Tobacco is smoked") but its direct object; it's more like "(someone) smokes tobacco". Since this is a negative imperative, it amounts to "May (someone) not smoke tobacco". Come to think of it, an even more literal German translation of Ná caitear tobac is "Man rauche keinen Tabak". (This construction is common in German recipes, which traditionally began with the words "Man nehme", as in "Man nehme ein Pfund Kartoffeln...".) But it's convenient to translate the Irish impersonal with a passive, even though they're syntactically different, so if you were translating Irish into Finnish you might well translate the impersonal imperative with a passive imperative. —Angr (talk) 21:51, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Adj-N mismatch

What is the technical term for when, in an Adj-N phrase, the noun is "incongruent" with the adjective in that it lacks some feature the adjective requires, as in "the honest umbrella" or "the careful castles" (in both examples, the adjective requires that the noun be sentient).

There is a fancy term for it, "something-or-other error" I think, I noticed a few days ago that WP has an article on it. I just can't find it right now. rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:34, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Category error. Algebraist 17:37, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

That's it! Thanks, rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:38, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

However, note that such formations are category mistakes only when analyzed in a vacuum. It is possible to imagine contexts in which each phrase is a valid example of hypallage. "Careful castle", in particular, invites a hypallagic interpretation even without context: the palpable anxiety of the defenders on the morning before a siege. In literature, even the most incongruous pairings are permissible if they produce the desired effect. Consider the opening lines of "The Circular Ruins": "No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night..." Out of context, "unanimous night" is fully as incongruous as "honest umbrella", but it would be misleading to describe it as a category error. Such is the importance of aesthetic effect, interpretive fertility, and the delimiting effects of context. By the same token, one can easily devise a context in which "honest umbrella" makes sense, or is at least amenable to interpretation: "Whenever it rained, the cadets let themselves be drenched as a point of honor. Only Franklin, the girliest cadet, dared to carry an honest umbrella." Contrived, I admit, but you get the idea. LANTZY^TALK 03:37, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I am already quite familiar with that; even in the realm of brainwave responses to words in sentence contexts, there is ample research showing that discourse context can reverse the usual effect of so-called category errors (see e.g. Van Berkum, J. J. A., Brown, C. M., Hagoort, P., 1999. Early referential context effects in sentence processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. J Mem Lang. 41, 147-182; and Nieuwland, Mante S., and Van Berkum, Jos J. A., 2006. When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse. J. Cog. Neurosci. 18(7), 1098-111). I was just looking for a memory jog because I forgot the fancy semantic term for this (most psycholinguistic studies on this just call it an "incongruous" or "anomalous" or "mismatching" condition). rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:19, 5 October 2010 (UTC)