Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 January 14

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January 14

Turkic languages and Cantonese/Mandarin Comparison

Uyghurs, Uzbeks and Turkmen live far apart from each other and separated by mountains and desert for a very long time. But these groups can still understand each other each languages today. If we compare the Cantonese and Mandarin, these two groups were separated by mountains, therefore they isolated each other for a long time. But the Cantonese is still not mutually intelligible with Mandarin today. Why is that the Uzbek, Uyghur and Turkmen languages can still be mutually intelligible with each other, and yet the Cantonese dialect and the Mandarin dialect are not? 174.114.236.41 (talk) 05:26, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

But the Cantonese is still not mutually intelligible with Mandarin today. Is that really so? I had to arrange an interpreter for a Chinese-speaking client of mine recently. I assumed he was a Mandarin speaker and I organised a Mandarin interpreter - but it turned out my client speaks Cantonese. This made little difference, as he and the interpreter were able to communicate quite effectively. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 05:36, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

@Jack: Many Cantonese speakers are bilingual, at least to some extent, in Cantonese and Mandarin. Likewise, many Mandarin speakers have been exposed to basic Cantonese through film, TV, etc. Communication can be possible between the two groups, but they are definitely generally considered not to be mutually intelligible.

@174.114.236.41: There are other factors beyond distance and length of separation that influence language change. I don't know the exact answer to your question, but several possibilities are 1) most Turkic languages have had an alphabetic writing system for a long time, which can help keep pronunciations more stable (at least for people who knew how to write, which was not always most people), whereas Chinese languages have not; 2) even with those geographical barriers, there has still been a lot of contact between these Altaic languages (think Silk Road), whereas I'm not sure if there was always as much between northern and southern Chinese languages. rʨanaɢ (talk) 07:27, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if Turkmen should be in the OP's list. Turkmen is mutually intelligible with other Oghuz languages (e.g. Turkish, Azeri), but I don't know if it has the same relationship with Uzbek and Uyghur (which are Uyghuric languages). Also, Turkmenistan shares a long border with Uzbekistan, so Turkmen is only really separated from Uyghur. The point still stands with Uzbek and Uyghur, I guess, since they have Kyrgyz between them, which belongs to yet another branch of Turkic (Kipchak, or maybe even Siberian). Rimush (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Varieties of Chinese are a continuum and not as distinct as, say, English and French. It may be that some Mandarin speakers and some Cantonese speakers would not understand each other, but if you pick dialects in closer proximity to each other, then you will find the same phenomenon. For example, a speaker of one of the northern varieties of Wu would, with some effort, be able to understand a spaker of one of the south-eastern varieties of Mandarin, and similarly on the southern boundary, dialects of Wu become somewhat similar to dialects of Min. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:58, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

As some more examples how Geography can make no indication on relatedness of languages; the Basques speak a language which is entirely unrelated to any of its neighbors, despite being in close proximity to them for hundreds and hundreds of years. In terms of relatedness, there's a closer connection between Spanish and Hindi, two languages seperated by thousands of miles, than there is beteen Spanish and Basque. --Jayron32 15:54, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Obviously, when you mean "relatedness" you mean linguistic "genetic" relationship, because Basque has a lot of Spanish loanwords and both languages have almost the same sounds. That means: 1.- a Spanish monoglot can pronounce almost non-accented Basque without having a clue about the language and 2.- He/she might be able to guess the meaning of some Basque words. Hindi would be very difficult to pronounce and it would be almost impossible to understand a single spoken word. An even more obvious example of this is English, a Germanic language, but so deeply influenced by the Romance languages that modern English is much closer to them than to its Germanic ancestors. --Belchman (talk) 20:51, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Also, I wouldn't say that the Basques speak the Basque language, since more than 85% are actually native speakers of Spanish. --Belchman (talk) 20:54, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

The pressure is...

Hello, is this sentence stylistically correct:

"The pressure is to become a sterotyped wife."

My friend's saying it's correct. But for me, as an non-native speaker, the combination of pressure and "to be" sounds kind of strange. Why isn't it something like "They are under pressure to become..." Thank you very much for your help! --Ummagumma002 (talk) 16:33, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

It could also be that (except that it's stereotyped, which was not your point): both sentences are grammatically correct, as would be half a dozen other ways of saying the same thing. English usually offers many ways of (correctly) conveying the same gross meaning, with the various different ways having different subtle nuances or stylistic characteristics. A particular version may be grammatically correct but inconsistent with the prose style of the surrounding text or the character of the speaker. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 17:22, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

It sounds strange to me also, because, logically, it it not the pressure that becomes the wife, but most native speakers would read this as equivalent to "There is pressure to become a stereotyped wife" or "The pressure is on her to become a sterotyped wife", without considering the sentence to be an error, especially if spoken with an appropriate emphasis and if the "pressure" had previously been mentioned. Dbfirs 17:51, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

It depends on the context, really. For example:

A. I'm resisting a certain pressure.

B. What pressure would that be?

A. The pressure is to become a stereotyped wife. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:19, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Infinitives can also be used as "noun phrases." It is not the pressure that becomes the wife but the pressure is in the becoming. In stylistic linguistics, we generally do not encourage expressing actions through nouns. We call this nominalization. Both the actions of pressure and becoming are treated as nouns here when they could become verbs as in "Stereotypes pressured women; women became good wives, wives who perpetuated a stereotype." That would be an example of a tricolon crescendo as the phrases increase in length from 3 to 4 to 5 words each. Nominalizations are discouraged but there are times to use them; the passive voice is discouraged, but there are times to use that; the tricolon crescendo is encouraged, but there are times when flowery rhetoric is best left contained. (Curses, did it again!) You were right to feel that the sentence is incorrect because stylistically it is. 24.38.31.81 (talk) 20:30, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

I sort of disagree with your conclusion. A sentence in isolation tells us nothing about the style of the surrounding context. Virtually any random collection of words can be made to fit some context. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:57, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Not directly related to your question, but I (from the US) would draw a distinction between "... stereotyped wife" versus "... stereotypical wife". I would use the latter ("stereotypical") if your meaning is that she's being pressured into conforming to the behaviors traditionally associated with a wife. I probably wouldn't find occasion to use the former (stereotyped), but if I did, it would be in situations where someone was drawing conclusions about her due to her status as a wife. (e.g. You have control of whether you are a stereotypical person, but it's others who determine if you are a stereotyped person.) So in those senses, "The pressure is to become a stereotyped wife" doesn't make much sense to me, but "The pressure is to become a stereotypical wife" does, and sounds grammatically correct. I parse it as "(The pressure) is (to become (a stereotypical wife))", meaning "unspecified persons are exerting pressure on her, and that pressure is specifically directed to induce her to conform to the common stereotypes associated with being a wife." -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 01:32, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for all your helpful replys (and sorry for the typo, it's stereotyped of course)! I think Jack of Oz's theory fits quite nicely because that quote was originally made in an interview. So it seems higly likely that this phrase was the result of a conversation like this. Thanks again! --Ummagumma002 (talk) 10:05, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

"-wise" vs. "-ise"/"ize"

Today I was looking at some of the source code made by our company, and I came across a function whose comment said it was doing data copying (and I quote) "piecewize". I had never encountered this spelling before, but I immediately realised it's an erroneous extrapolation of the "-ise"/"-ize" variation. But what is the root of the word "piecewise"? Does the ending actually come from the adjective "wise"? And what is the root of the words that really can end in "-ize"? I think it somehow comes from Latin, but I'm not exactly sure. JIP | Talk 23:02, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

One of the definitions of 'wise' is "way of being or acting; manner; mode; fashion", and this and other words such as 'likewise' and 'stepwise' use that meaning. It is very similar to the use of 'ways' in words like sideways (probably a similar derivation). Mikenorton (talk) 23:43, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Piggybacking off of Mikenorton's comment: compare, e.g., "piecewise", "stepwise", to phrases equivalent in meaning like "piece by piece", "step by step". rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:53, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

The suffix -ize is from Greek, and originally came into English on words formed within Greek. It has since been added to many words from many different origins. You are correct that '-wise' is a different suffix (from Old English) and there is no historical justification for a spelling '-wize', any more than there is for 'surprize'. However, historical justification is a rather weak argument in discussions about current use in any language. --ColinFine (talk) 00:17, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

That's true. "Recogni(z/s)e" doesn't actually have the -ize/-ise suffix either, etymologically speaking, but the distribution of the spellings "recognise" and "recognize" are the same as if it did. Pais (talk) 11:00, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

The way I read EO,[1][2] the similarity of "wise" and "way" is coincidental. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:53, 18 January 2011 (UTC)