Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 August 30

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August 30

Why "Eastern seaboard" and not "East coast?"

The recent hurricane news talked about the "Eastern seaboard" of the US. I could not figure out why "seaboard" was almost always used instead of "coast," or "seacoast," "shore," or "seashore." I looked at Google News archives (hard to find these days) for 2000-2010 and found 9280 uses of "Eastern seaboard," most referring to the US, and most related to storms, and only 247 instance of "Western seaboard," with most referring to other countries. My Oxford dictionary says "seaboard" only dates only to the late 18th century, meaning "the line where land and sea meet," and a synonym for coastline or seashore. A "line" is not a "board," which in modern usage is a solid piece of material or a table. It did have an archaic meaning of "edge," but that likely went away before "seaboard" was coined. So why are the media so stuck on "Eastern seaboard" in preference to its synonyms? I looked for the first indexed use of "eastern seaboard" in the newspaper archive, and it is in a NY Times 1854 comparison of the weather in Kansas to that of the eastern seaboard. Thus it was not an 18th century term which remained in common usage from its coinage onward. Edison (talk) 01:00, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

WAG, but the east coast of the U.S. is known for its extensive continental shelf, which explains its extensive fishing grounds, and dangerous shallows (i.e. Georges Bank for the former, various Graveyards of the Atlantic for the latter). Shelf and board are synonyms (c.f. cupboard). So maybe that is the source; the Pacific coast is not known for as extensive of a continental shelf... --Jayron32 01:23, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

WAG? Wild-ass guess? Angr (talk) 05:53, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's what it means. StuRat (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I have no comment on this specific term, but note that, in general, US newscasters copy not only each other's stories, but even the choice of words used in a story. For example, after Amy Fisher was called "the Long Island Lolita" by somebody, everybody else used the same term. Their lack of creativity is amazing. StuRat (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

This is an interesting question. I searched a bit but could not find an obvious answer. But it seems somehow linked to that part of the country first colonized, the Atlantic coast and areas inland--as far as the Appalachians by some definitions, it seems. Britannica ([1]) points this out, and says the term is not "merely a geographic term" but also a historic one. In my quick search I also noted a number of other countries in which the term "eastern seaboard" seemed not uncommon, especially Australia. Our page Eastern states of Australia mentions the term "Eastern Seaboard". Is this a common term in Australia as well? If so, I can't help but wonder whether the connection with early colonization is relevant there as well. Also, a quick search on the term "western seaboard" suggests it might not be uncommonly used for the west coast of Scotland, and perhaps Ireland. Is that right? Pfly (talk) 08:59, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

See this spookily similar discussion from 2004. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 09:50, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, in everyday speech, east coast is at least as common as eastern seaboard in the United States. In fact, I think east coast is the more common term. Especially when the west coast is being contrasted, it is normally contrasted with the east coast. Eastern seaboard is more likely to occur in written and journalistic contexts. Marco polo (talk) 12:58, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

"East coast" is regularly used to describe large areas that are not literally coastal, but merely associated with the coast in a political or cultural sense. The term "east coast" may even be interpreted to exclude the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, since "southern" is commonly contrasted with "eastern". The term "eastern seaboard" is more literal and geographical, and relatively free of cultural and political associations. LANTZY^TALK 19:48, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I think it's simply a journalistic cliché. Like saying "concerned citizens" instead of 'random nosy neighbor #1', "canoodling" instead of 'on a date', "shark-infested waters" instead of 'tourist infested shark habitats', "community leaders" instead of 'richest people in town'... hey... this is fun. I could go on for hours. :D-- Obsidi♠n Soul 20:04, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Has anyone (other than native speakers of Spanish) said "Wow! I think that was a temblor!" when the house starts moving back and forth in an earthquake? So it seems to be just good-old journalistic cliché peddling. Maybe it was used from the late 18th century until the 1850's and Google News just doesn't pick it up in their indexing. Edison (talk) 22:40, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Georgian

How are you supposed to say words that begin with, say, eight consonants? It doesn't seem physically possible. --76.211.88.37 (talk) 03:09, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Consonant clusters are used in many languages to represent single sounds. Consider English, where we have such clusters as "ch", "th", "ph", "ck", "tch", "ng", "sh", etc. Its just a matter of learning which combinations of letters mean which sound. There's nothing peculiar to Georgian about this. --Jayron32 03:13, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Those aren't clusters in English, those are digraphs (and trigraphs in the case of tch) - groups of letters that represent a single sound. Georgian does indeed have consonant clusters - groups of consonant sounds - whose length is quite formidable, as do other languages in the Caucasus, as well as many languages on the Northwest Coast of North America. As for how people manage to pronounce them, well, children acquiring a language generally acquire it flawlessly simply through exposure to it; if you're an adult learning Georgian as a second language, you learn it the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice! 05:51, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Our Georgian language page cites just two words that begin with eight consonants and one with six. The wording suggests these may be the only examples. It also says that "many words" begin with three consonants but just "a few" start with four. Consonant-rich languages makes me think of some of the Pacific Northwest native languages, which tend to have a rich array of consonants and relatively few vowels. For example the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language and the Kwak'wala. In IPA "Sḵwx̱wú7mesh" is rendered [sqʷχʷuʔməʃ]. It was Anglicized in English as "Squamish". Too many consonants (and very non-English ones at that) for English speakers! Another notable example is the Halkomelem language, which has a very rich set of consonants. Our page points out that up to five "obstruents" can be clustered, as in [txʷstx̌ʷásʔal]. Pfly (talk) 09:23, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Those Georgian words such as gvprckvni are not pronounced as a single cluster with no release. Have a look at this thread on Unilang [2]. It's still unclear how exactly you're supposed to pronounce the word above, but you're supposed to group "harmonic consonants" together into separate clusters and release after each one. Not quite with a schwa or vowel sound, just a break as if you're starting a new syllable, something more like [g.vp.rts.kvnɪ]. The only reason it's considered one syllable is because a syllable has to have a vowel sound in it, to our ears it would sound like four. - filelakeshoe 09:48, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

"Speaks to"

When did this ghastly piece of management jargon first take hold? We have a senior TV executive claiming that the film Four Lions "speaks to that issue", i.e. 9/11. Various chancers in The Apprentice were heard to say that such-and-such a task "speaks to my skill-set". In these contexts it seems to be more or less a synonym for "is relevant to", which of course can't be used because it doesn't have that ritzy patina of management speak. Then we had James Murdoch the other week saying that he "can't speak to the arrangements with Mr Clifford", a usage that could easily be replaced by "talk about" with no loss of meaning. --Viennese Waltz 13:48, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

This is OR based on my own experience, but I don't think that this expression is originally or primarily management jargon per se. My relevant background is as follows: I have lived most of my life in the United States. I spent most of the 1990s immersed in academia on the west coast and have spent most of the time since then involved in various US corporate environments on the east coast and in the Midwest. I frequently heard the expression speaks to during my academic days on the west coast during the 1990s. I have not often heard the expression in corporate management circles since then. I associate it somewhat with the academic environment, but even more with the California new age environment of the 1980s and 1990s, which intersected with my academic world, with the world of Hollywood, and with the world of corporate communications, which has a major nexus in Los Angeles. To the extent that the expression has become part of global corporate English, I think it is most at home in public relations organizations, whose ideology has borrowed a lot from the west-coast-centered inspirational new age milieu. Think of eerily perky people standing in front of a room saying things like "You can create your own infinite possibilities." "Your sense of infinite possibility speaks to your connection with the life force." Ultimately, I would guess that the expression originated in statements like "Your sense of infinite possibility speaks to me," meaning "resonates with me". It would have been only a small step from that to "Your sense of infinite possibility speaks to the life force within us all," and so on. Marco polo (talk) 15:42, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Using Google Ngrams, I've used "speaks to the importance" as a proxy for the usage you describe. Here is the result. Marco polo (talk) 17:41, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

See http://www.onelook.com/?w=speak+to&ls=a and http://www.onelook.com/?w=address&ls=a.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:02, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

One more data point: I searched Google Books for citations of "speaks to the importance" that co-occurred with the randomly chosen year 1967 to see if I could find some early citations of the phrase. The citations earlier than 1985 that I found were all in academic works in the fields of education, psychology, or anthropology. So maybe my hypothesis above was wrong, and the term originated in the social sciences. According to Ngrams, it originated around 1960. Here is the earliest citation I found, in a bibliography on education published in 1965. Marco polo (talk) 18:26, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

What about "that speaks to my (your, his, etc.) condition"? That seems like a perfectly natural thing to say. Angr (talk) 18:38, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

The expression "speak to the motion" has long been normal in the jargon of parliaments and legislatures. It means a motion is before the chair (which itself is jargon for a certain matter is under discussion) and various people have their chance to have their say before a vote is taken. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 18:54, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

This Ngram confirms that the usage Jack cites goes way back. I apologize for my erroneous speculation above. This is surely the origin of this phrase, though its wider application seems to date from the 1960s. Marco polo (talk) 19:56, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

It looks similar to the phrase "attests to". Various facts, events, or inanimate objects, all quite incapable of speech, can be said to attest to some other fact. I'm sure in some cases "speaks to" serves exactly the same function, although "speaks of" would make more sense.  Card Zero  (talk) 21:09, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

How reliable is that Ngram thing anyway? If it's right, the phrase "talk to the hand" was as popular between 1905 and 1920 as it is today. Angr (talk) 21:54, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

If you turn down the "rounding" then it looks very much as if the whole thing is based on a dozen uses of the phrase, and thus your example is probably just a fluke. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 09:50, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

From the OED:

1610 J. Dove Advt. Seminaries 42, "I desire them therefore...to speake to these foure points."

1662 E. Stillingfleet Origines Sacræ ii. vi. §4 "Though it be a subject little spoken to either by Jewish or Christian Writers."

1735 Swift Let. to Middleton in Wks. IV. 186 "A Lawyer who speaks to a Cause, when the Matter hath been almost exhausted by those who spoke before."

1778 Earl of Malmesbury Diaries & Corr. I. 166 "Unprepared as he was for such a proposition, he could not, he said, off-hand, speak to it accurately."

1880 Daily News 19 Mar. 2/3, "I wish to call your attention‥to‥that allegation, and I shall endeavour to speak to it."

Curse Jonathan Swift and his newfangled management speak! They also have other 17th century citations. Hopefully this will be a lesson that if something appears a neologism to you, that is more likely because you are insufficiently familiar with the entire history of English letters, than because it has never been used before. --Colapeninsula (talk) 11:05, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Or just that I couldn't be bothered to look it up in the OED, which is right here on my desktop. --Viennese Waltz 07:37, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Correct or incorrect?

"Grown in the garden or in a container, capers make lovely specimens that can grow to a five-foot-high mounding shrub. The branches are long, with a sprawling habit, and look best trailing down a wall or over a rock. The plants have small, dark-green, rounded leaves that give an interesting texture to a garden. Because the flower buds are picked for their tasty pickled flavor, the flower is seldom seen. However, if a bud escapes the harvester, a two-inch or larger, white, delicate flower with dark pink or purple stamens opens. The plants are difficult to grow from seeds, as germination is sporadic and can take anywhere from two weeks to four months. Propagation is much easier and more reliable from cuttings."

Judging from the emboldened sentence, would it be correct to say that "the flower buds are eaten after being pickled"? Doesn't it mean that the flower buds taste like pickles, not that the buds are necessarily pickled in order to give them a "pickled flavor"?Johnnyboi7 (talk) 14:44, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Capers are eaten after being pickled. Pickled is a method of preservation, not a flavour. Rmhermen (talk) 15:54, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

[edit conflict] In fact, the capers used in the kitchen are the plant's pickled buds. A person who knows this will not mistake the meaning of the sentence you cited, which is not incorrect, but I can see how it might be ambiguous to others. The sentence should probably be edited to read "Because the flower buds are picked for their tasty flavor when pickled..." or "Because the flower buds are usually picked to make tasty pickles..." Marco polo (talk) 15:57, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that we can say that "pickled" is not a flavor. Almost anything pickled has a characteristic salty-vinegary-aromatic flavor. The flavor may have other components such as herbs, garlic, or chili, depending on the recipe, but the flavors of almost all pickles have some common components. Marco polo (talk) 16:02, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Also the word "tasty" would seem to be subjective and unnecessary.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:40, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree that tasty isn't encyclopedic style, though it wouldn't be out of place in some other kind of popular nonfiction. I wasn't assuming that this passage was meant for Wikipedia. Marco polo (talk) 18:36, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

"Tasty flavor" is in the same category as "cheap prices" or "cold temperature". It's applying the adjective to the wrong noun. Not a hanging offence, though. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 18:47, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Or when a "voice cries out". But most people are used to that. And things like "red color". Both are examples of tautological hypallage. Non-tautological hypallage is accepted as a rhetorical device. So it must be the tautology of "tasty flavor" that bothers us, not the misimputation of the adjective. LANTZY^TALK 20:00, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Meaning of mekonnen

In the article on Fred Hampton [[3]] Maywood is described as a mekkonen suburb. This is an extremely obscure term for an encyclopedia to use without a definition. More than an hour spent on search engine use shows that Mekkonnen (901,000+ entries) is a family name of Ethiopian origin, belonging to Haile Sellassie, among other. A few entries suggest it may also be a personal name. Three identically worded entries for Fred Hampton at different locations use the phrase 'mekonnen suburb.' I have tried slang dictionaries, my own collection of dictionaries, ebonics dictionaries, and dictionaries of African American Vernacular English with no success. I also tried the African-American cultural portal at the Chicago Public Library website, but with no more success.

I have been tempted to replace mekonen with blue collar, but I am sure that the word has a specific meaning, and I would very much appreciate hearing from someone who use the word.```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.193.101.113 (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree that it's too obscure to use here, at least without a link to explain it, but am not sure it means "blue-collar". If the meaning can't be determined with confidence, I'd just delete it rather than replace it. StuRat (talk) 18:38, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

The word was inserted by an anonymous IP. At best, the insertion was unhelpful. At worst, it was vandalism. I have deleted it. Marco polo (talk) 18:41, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

I notice the OP spells the word 4 different ways: mekonnen, mekkonen, Mekkonnen, mekonen. Is this significant? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 18:44, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Peking

Even though many languages have updated their word for Beijing to be more phonetically accurate (e.g. English Peking -> Beijing), why does French still use the outdated Pékin? --76.211.88.37 (talk) 22:54, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Why single out French? Something like "Peking" is still standard in German, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Spanish, the Baltic languages, Finnish, and lots of others. English is the only major European language that primarily uses "Beijing". LANTZY^TALK 00:32, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

I didn't realize that (French is the only other language I speak). Changed. --76.211.88.37 (talk) 00:39, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Why do many other languages still use some variant of "Peking" instead of the more phonetically accurate Beijing? --76.211.88.37 (talk) 00:39, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Probably for the same reason that English and other languages use forms such as Moscow or Athens rather than the phonetically more accurate Moskva or Athina. These are historical forms that have integrated themselves into these languages. Maybe the more interesting question is why English made the change. Marco polo (talk) 00:52, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

For the same reason that we call Deutschland "Germany", ja? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe in the late 70s the Chinese government requested that journalists start using the name/spelling Beijing. This kind of request doesn't always work, e.g. in the 90s the Czech government asked English-speakers to call their country Czechia. I also recall a brief campaign to promote the English usage of the name Turkiye for Turkey to avoid the negative connotations of the word "turkey."--Cam (talk) 01:55, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

And the military junta that now sits in Naypyidaw has had only limited success convincing the world to call their previous capital Yangon and their country Myanmar instead of Rangoon and Burma. Likewise the government that requested that Côte d'Ivoire be known only by its French name instead of translations of it like Ivory Coast and Elfenbeinküste. Angr (talk) 05:53, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

That's nothing. People are still calling Elizabeth II the "Queen of England", 304 years after there ceased to be a monarch of England. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 06:54, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

---

General article is Exonym... -- AnonMoos (talk) 05:20, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

There's a bit more to it. OP claims that Beijing is phonetically more accurate than Peking or Pékin. There is some truth to that if English is your native language. English j is fairly close to the corresponding Chinese sound (though not identical) and ei gives the diphtongal quality of the Chinese sound. But in German, j is pronounced differently, as an English y. The diphtong doesn't even exist in German, and is best represented by a flat long e. The sound represented by b is harder in Chinese than in English, and it can well be represented by p. The difference is that the Chinese sound is not aspirated, whereas English p is aspirated. Finally, the French nasal in may have been chosen to reflect the high tone on Chinese jing. The choice of k seems a bit odd; in German one could have used dsch, although that would have looked a bit silly. To summarize, Beijing, Peking and Pékin are basically the same name in different transliterations and can be said to have developed into different exonyms. Beijing is the Pinyin transliteration which is officially used in China today (though not in Taiwan). It may have been more readily adopted in the English-speaking world than elsewhere because it corresponds more closely to typical English correspondences between sounds and letters than those in other languages. --Wrongfilter (talk) 07:22, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

When I was in school, they used to give "Beiping" as another alternative pronunciation. What was up with that? Also, a Taiwanese former co-worker used to pronounce it "Beh-ZHIN", i.e. with the trailing "g" almost inaudible. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:15, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Beidging might be a better English spelling, but would be pronounced with a superfluous hint of "d". It's hard to get a "zh" in English, except in words like vision. French would be well suited to pronouncing "Beijing" properly, you might think. I speculate that westernised versions of far eastern names are more woody, and less tinny, to use Monty Python's distinction, and westerners find woody words more satisfying to say. This woody-tinny distinction exists formally, outside of comedy sketch shows - it's a poetry term, I think - but I've forgotten the word for it.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:30, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

On "Beiping" — When the Kuomintang gained control of the bulk of China they moved the capital from Beijing to Nanjing (a.k.a Nanking!). Since Beijing means "northern capital" they changed the name to Beiping "northern peace" which in pre-pinyin days was written Peiping in English.--Cam (talk) 12:35, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Beijing doesn't have a "zh" sound though; the "j" represents an affricate more similar to the English "j"-sound than to the French one. You do hear English speakers use a "zh"-sound in Beijing, but that's a hyperforeignism, just like using the "zh" sound in "Taj Mahal", "arpeggio", "adagio", etc.  Bugs, Beiping was a different name for Beijing using a different Chinese word as the second syllable, see Beijing#Etymology and names: "the name was changed from Beijing (Peking) to Beiping (Peiping) (北平), literally "northern peace", ... in 1928 by the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China.... [T]he character meaning "capital" (京) was deleted to reflect the fact the national capital had moved to Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province. [The] renaming was reverted... in 1949, when the Communist Party of China restored Beijing as its capital after the founding of the People's Republic of China." So I assume either you were in school between 1928 and 1949, or your teachers taught you the name Beiping later for the sake of backwards compatibility. Angr (talk) 12:59, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Or maybe they were just using an old textbook. Thanks for the explanation. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

One more observation on Peking: This was actually a reasonable transcription of the name Beijing as it was pronounced in the 17th or 18th century, when the second syllable in the name began with a sound something like [kʲ]. Since then, further palatalization of this sound in Mandarin Chinese has caused this initial consonant to be pronounced [tɕ] in modern Mandarin. In dialects other than Beijing Mandarin, the initial consonant in that second syllable may still be a velar stop. Marco polo (talk) 15:00, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Bugs, regarding your question about the pronunciation "Bei-JIN": many speakers from southern China and Taiwan do not distinguish between n and ng, and thus pronounce most ngs as ns (or sometimes alternate between them randomly). rʨanaɢ (talk) 13:55, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

and there is no "trailing 'g'". There is a different nasal consonant, the velar /ŋ/ as opposed to some other non-labial nasal. --ColinFine (talk) 21:40, 4 September 2011 (UTC)