Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 April 10

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April 10

The role of nouns

Hi, I wondered when I saw some pharses like"company houses" and "Norway islands" what is the role of "norway" and "company. I mean they are not adjective,

And another thing, I have noticed that in some dialogs you are able to speak correctly wihout using the Definiteness "some", when you are speaking about plural and it is not specific thing. Exx8 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:11, 10 April 2012 (UTC).

The term "company houses" is common in my country, Australia, particularly in mining communities, to describe those houses owned by the mining company for use by their own staff. Haven't come across "Norway islands". I don't quite understand your other point. Can you give an example? HiLo48 (talk) 00:29, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Can be called a Noun adjunct or Attributive noun (first element of noun-noun compound). However, "Norway islands" isn't really conventional standard English... AnonMoos (talk) 01:05, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

This is a confusion over the term "adjective", as either the role a word plays, or as a specific part of speech. Under the first use of the word, 'company' and 'Norway' are "adjectives" because they modify a noun. Under the second use of the word, they are simply nouns, albeit nouns in an attributive role. The word "attributive" is also used for adjectives: in 'the red house', 'red' is an attributive adjective; in 'the house is red', 'red' is a predicative adjective. In 'the company house', 'company' is an attributive noun; in 'the house is company' ... well, you can't say that, which is one of the reasons nouns and adjectives are considered different parts of speech to begin with.

Very often when technical terms don't make sense, it's because they have multiple uses, and people mix up those uses without clarifying which they mean. — kwami (talk) 02:32, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

To tackle your second question: the question is not very clear, but I think you are asking whether "some" is compulsory for indefinite plurals? If that is the question, the answer is no, not usually. If you use a plural (or uncountable) noun without any article or quantifier it tends to be a general statement, about all the things, or the typical one. So "children like ice cream" is a statement about children in general: not absolutely every single child there is, but most children, or a typical child. "Some children like ice cream" is more limited and implies that there is a significant proportion of children who don't like it. --ColinFine (talk) 18:17, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

He remarried to

I saw this usage "He remarried to Martha ..." in Samuel P. Bush#Early life, and found the use of "to" odd. I would have expected "He remarried Martha ..." or "He was remarried to Martha ..." or a comma before "to". I searched the archives and came across Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 February 2#Remarrying, which touches upon the subject but doesn't say if it's right or wrong. Is this a old world usage? Jay (talk) 00:43, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

However, "He remarried Martha" might imply that this was his second marriage to the same woman, while "He remarried to Martha" makes it clearer that the second wife was probably a different woman than the first wife... AnonMoos (talk) 00:57, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Agreed, but the 'to' is still jarring, and doesn't sound like English to me. I'd go with either the passive or the comma, as Jay suggested. — kwami (talk) 02:36, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

If "remarried" takes a direct object, it can only be the person he was previously married to (and presumably divorced). This is not rocket science, but the way the English language works. If you're cooking and you reheat a dish, it can only be a dish you previously cooked or heated; it can't be some entirely new dish you haven't touched yet. Same principle with marriages. If it's anybody other than his previous wife he's now marrying, it can't be expressed as "He remarried Mary" because that misleads the reader into believing he was previously married to Mary, when he wasn't.

I agree with your conclusion but not your argument, which is about logic and therefore tells us very little about language. Next you'll be telling us that in order to redouble your effort you must already have doubled it. --ColinFine (talk) 18:21, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Also, we never say "He married to Jane", so why would we say "He remarried to Jane"? Now, we do say "He got married to Jane", but we still can't say "He got remarried to Jane" unless he was previously divorced from Jane. Some things simply cannot go together; you cannot merge "He remarried" with "He married Jane" into "He remarried Jane" or "He remarried to Jane". The first fails on the grounds of accuracy (except in the special case where two people who were previously married to each other are remarrying each other), and the second fails on the grounds of being non-English. You have to find some other solution. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 03:03, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

He remarried, to Martha. Nah, that doesn't sound right either. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:56, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

P.S. I think "remarried to" is more likely to be genealogists' jargon than "old world usage"... AnonMoos (talk) 08:57, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The confusion is fed by the fact that "married" has 2 meanings: (a) being in the state of marriage during a period of time, which could be 50 or more years; and (b) participating in a marriage or wedding ceremony, which occurs on a specific day. In meaning (a), we can say "For 35 years he was married to Isabel". The only way we can use the word "to" in meaning (b) is like "On 8 May 1972 he got married to Isabel". If you don't use "got", you've also got to dispense with the "to": "On 8 May 1972 he married Isabel", which would be more likely the construction used in good writing. So, barring the "got married to" construction, the word "to" is used only with meaning (a), but if you're simply stating that he married for a second (or later) time on a certain date and to a certain person, that's using meaning (b), which doesn't use the word "to". -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 09:09, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I've changed it to "He later married Martha". Angr (talk) 09:31, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

A wikipedia search of "remarried to" (within quotes) shows 804 results, of which I'm sure a good portion will be this genealogist usage. Jay (talk) 17:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

French R

Does Standard French use the fricative or approximant? They have the same IPA symbol, so I can't tell which it's supposed to be. --108.206.4.199 (talk) 03:27, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The French "R" is almost always a "trilled R", see Trill consonant, I believe that standard Parisien French uses the Uvular trill, though some varieties (notably Quebec French and the varieties spoken in New England that I grew up hearing) use the Alveolar trill or "rolled R" more commonly associated with Spanish, and others still use the more Germanic sounding "gutteral R". The article French phonology covers this and more, some of these forms are interchangable to the "French ear", i.e. in free variation. Free variation roughly means that exact pronounciation of "R" will change depending on which sounds surround it in speech, and these different forms are recognized by native speakers as the same phoneme. --Jayron32 04:45, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The uvular trill is considered a bit old-fashioned nowadays in French, it certainly isn't the most common one (and the alveolar trill would be considered a very strong regional marker, either of the south or Canadian). To answer your question: the fricative and the approximant both occur, but I have no idea which one is more common (and those two are hard to tell apart anyway). Have a look at this thread too. By the way, Jayron32's definition for "free variation" seems more like the definition for allophony. Free variation means that you can use either sound in any word, irregardless of the surrounding sounds (i.e. you can pronounce rouge as [ʁuʒ],[ʀuʒ],[ruʒ],[ɾuʒ] etc without it sounding strange). An example of allophony would be that the uvular-r is devoiced in French when it follows a voiceless consonant as in trois [tχwa]. --Terfili (talk) 10:23, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The devoicing suggests it's a fricative. It's always sounded like a fricative to me, but that doesn't mean much. — kwami (talk) 22:06, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

The chapter on French in the handbook of the IPA says that its "production varies considerably among speakers and phonetic contexts". The speaker in that analysis uses [ʁ], "that is sometimes reduced to an approximant [ʁ̞], particularly in final position". The chapter also mentions the uvular trill as "fairly common" and the alveolar trill "occurs in some dialects". Overall, I would say that fricative [ʁ] is most common today. --Terfili (talk) 17:12, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

captions

how di find archive movies with captions — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dancigcing (talk • contribs) 04:21, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Any particular "archive movies" you are looking for ? I'd try a Google search with the title of the movie, the year, and the language you want for your captions. Or you could search particular movie databases, like IMDB or Netflix. Note that captions are far easier to get if you view movies on DVD/Blu-Ray than they are on streaming video. With streaming, you often get no captions or it's set to one language, with no choice, while DVDs often have several choices for captioning. StuRat (talk) 04:31, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I need help in understanding these sentences.

What the meaning of "up and down" in these sentences? sent.#1.The bicycle uses a neuro-headset, commercially-available, and the headset does not know human ideas of “up” and “down.” sent. #2 A person has to train with the system of his own “up” and “down” thoughts, readable to the bike. What's the meaning of this sentence? "Miller was thinking of a reproducible pattern as he said, “I found the thing that works best for me is: I actually envision arrows, almost.” Thank you in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.240.243.100 (talk) 06:31, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

It's hard to answer this without seeing the full article. It probably refers to controlling some aspect of the bike's functionality, e.g. speed up or down. --Colapeninsula (talk) 08:35, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

"Up" and "down" simply mean "up" and "down", e.g. the concepts. The device in question (neuro-headset) reads your brain but since every person's brainwaves are different when they think of the concepts "up" and "down" the machine will have to be trained to recognize each user's unique brain-pattern. You put on that headset, and intensely imagine "up", and then you tell the headset "whatever it is you are reading right now, that's my way of thinking of 'up'; so next you read the same brainwaves, the intended command is 'up'." This Miller advises people to imagine arrows; it would just as well work with imagining trees, clouds, lizards, or toasters, as long as you teach the machine that "toaster" means "up" and you manage to think of exactly the same toaster next time (>"reproducible pattern"). Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 08:44, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

If your question concerns this bike, "up and down" refer to shifting the gears up and down. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 06:46, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Sindhi and Gujarati language similarities

Is there similarities between Sindhi and Gujarati languages like vocabulary or are they completely different because Mohd. Ali Jinnah of Pakistan spoke Gujarati with Gandhi and yet he was Sindhi? I am confused about these two languages. Please help me understand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.89.43.51 (talk) 20:29, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

(The OP was advised to ask this here, but it has already been answered at the Humanities desk. --ColinFine (talk) 21:01, 10 April 2012 (UTC))