Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 August 14

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August 14

"Ya ponyo"

I've heard Russian speakers mention something that sounds like "ya ponyo" a lot. I figure it means "I understand". Is this standard grammatical Russian or some sort of contraction? JIP | Talk 06:43, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Contraction (or just slurring sylables) from Я понимаю (ya ponimayu), meaning "I understand". Note that the past (I understood) is "ya ponil" which is even closer to what you heard. --Xuxl (talk) 08:55, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

It's я понял, ya pónyal, meaning "I understood". The past tense here is perfective, so it means "I have understood", "understood", "got it", etc. If the speaker were female she would say "ya ponyalá", with the stress on the last syllable, so it would sound a bit different. --Amble (talk) 15:38, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Los Angeles abbreviation

Does the abbreviation for Los Angeles have periods or not? Would LA referring to Louisiana, therefore requiring Los Angeles to be abbreviated as L.A.? Thank you! John Vitzileos (talk) 21:53, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I don't think there's any hard and fast rule. In most cases you can tell if a person refers to the state or city by the context. Where it's not clear from the context, the full name is probably best. StuRat (talk) 23:29, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

This old one:

Q: What happens when the smog clears in Los Angeles?

A: UCLA!

←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:45, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

With the caveat that it's like to have lots of false positives in both directions, here is the Google ngrams analysis. L.A. (in all contexts, not necessarily meaning Los Angeles) predominated until the late 1960s, while LA took over after that. I'm sure some of the influence in those stats reflects the changing usage of the abbreviation of LA and L.A. for Los Angeles. Notably, however, both have remained fairly similar in usage, and neither existed much before the 20th century (i.e. before Los Angeles was a significant city) so, that indicates much of the usage is probably for the city. --Jayron32 03:01, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, one data point is that the 1980s–90s TV series was L.A. Law, but by 2010 we had Law & Order: LA. Deor (talk) 03:41, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Context is everything. Thus, Google Ngrams comparison of "L.A." vs. "LA" in Google-OCR'd books, etc. is meaningless in this context. What should I do here and now?.

Within a particular national/disciplinary context (e.g., en:Wikipedia, British newspapers, American trade books, various national scholarly standards in medicine, psychology, humanities, etc.) a recognized national/disciplinary guide to usage would be the best guidance.

From FAQ at Chicago Manual of Style:

Q. Based on CMOS 10.4 (“Use no periods with abbreviations that appear in full capitals, whether two letters or more and even if lowercase letters appear within the abbreviation: VP, CEO, MA, MD, PhD, UK, US, NY, IL”), Los Angeles should appear as LA, but this can create confusion between the city and the state of Louisiana. How then do you treat Los Angeles when you need to abbreviate it?

A. Los Angeles is also abbreviated LA. If you spell out Los Angeles at first mention, it’s not likely that readers will suddenly think you are talking about Louisiana when they encounter “LA,” but in any context where the abbreviation is potentially confusing, avoid using it.

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Abbreviations/faq0045.html

-- Paulscrawl (talk) 09:06, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Bryan A. Garner adds:

... the question often arises whether to place a period after each letter in an acronym or initialism. Searching for consistency on this point is futile. The trend nowadays is to omit the periods. Including them is the more conservative and traditional approach. Yet because an acronym is spoken as a single word (e.g., UNESCO), periods are meaningless. If an initialism is made up of lowercase letters, periods are often preferable: rpm looks odd as compared with r.p.m., and am (as opposed to a.m.) looks like the verb. But with initialisms made of uppercase letters, the unpunctuated forms are likely to prevail (as in ABC, ATM, HIV, IRA, SUV, URL, etc.).

-- Garner's Modern American Usage, ABBREVIATIONS, p.2 (Oxford UP, 2e, 2003) ISBN 0-19-516191-2

-- Paulscrawl (talk) 09:42, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

From a British point of view, I'd always take LA to mean Los Angeles. The inclusion or not of full-stops is a matter of style or personal preference; the BBC's guide instructs none. LA's use as a state abbreviation is virtually unknown; these are not used here and the same applies to all the rest with the possible exceptions of NY and DC. Bazza (talk) 11:52, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

All our articles on American states allow for abbreviations to be in all capitals or not - e.g. either GA or Ga for Georgia. However, only LA is given for Louisiana. Is this a mistake, i.e. is La a perfectly acceptable abbreviation? 5.150.92.20 (talk) 13:58, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

I would say they should all be uppercase only, as they are US postal abbreviations, and I believe they specify all uppercase only. There were other abbreviations in use before the postal service standardized them, though, and those were mixed case and often longer than 2 characters, typically the first syllable or two, like, like "Mich.", "Mass.", "Miss.", or "Calif.". "La." is listed there as an old abbreviation. To me, though, in general, 2 letter abbreviations really only seem natural for 2 word state names (like NC, SC, ND, SD, WV, NY, NJ, NM), and those would have been abbreviated as all uppercase even before the standard was set, although with periods. StuRat (talk) 14:06, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia usage is one thing (I, too, favor capitalized 2-letter US postal abbreviations when context clear or after first mention with parenthetical abbreviation). But some US newspapers use older abbreviations: e.g., La., Colo., etc. LA Times on La. and Colo. shootings -- Paulscrawl ([[User talk:Paulscrawl|talk]) 19:14, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

I read the article on postcodes. It says some of them are counterintuitive - some of ours are like that as well. IG, which I thought was Ingatestone, is actually Ilford and Barking. The codes are generally memorable - OX for Oxford for example, but since the London ones are based on the postal districts you might find a letter addressed to W1G 1AN winging its way to Wigan. The granularity is, I believe, the best in the world - each code maps to a block of fifty addresses. This is useful for security marking of valuables and production of statistics. It also means that a letter carrying only the house number and postcode will arrive. As a result of this, we have a "postcode lottery" where people who live close to each other can receive very different treatment from a service provider.

The Canadian postcodes seem structured very similarly to ours but I am unable to see how they work. Does anyone know, and what the granularity is? 5.150.92.20 (talk) 09:33, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

The first letter is a province/territory, or, for Ontario and Quebec, a particular region of the province or a large city in the province. The letters are essentially meaningless, they just go roughly in alphabetical order from east to west. The first number refers to a rural area if it's 0, and a city if it's another number. The other letters and numbers refer to successively smaller areas of the province/territory/city, down to the neighbourhood level, but they don't mean anything either. For example, my area of Ontario uses postal codes starting with N, and my city uses codes from N5V to N6P, with the final three letters/numbers referring to neighbourhoods or portions of neighbourhoods. Each code refers to maybe 15-20 houses, I guess, and typically one side of the street. So basically, it works just as you described for the UK - each code maps to a block of addresses, a package with only the house number and postal code would arrive properly, and we also suffer from "postal code lottery", it's just that the individual letters and numbers don't mean anything. See Postal codes in Canada for a fuller explanation. In fact there is one postal code that has a meaning - H0H 0H0, which is Santa Claus' postal code at the North Pole (although H is otherwise the code for Montreal and you'd expect the North Pole to use a code starting with X). He'll even write back if you send a letter using that postal code. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:33, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

The US has a 5+4 ZIP code system, where, if the additional 4 digits are included, the full 9 digit code describes one specific address or post office box. For this to work, it means each 5 digit ZIP must specify no more than 10,000 addresses/PO boxes. So, that makes the 5 digit ZIP code far less granular, and the 5+4 ZIP far more. StuRat (talk) 04:29, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

If I may add a couple of things:

• L.A. with two periods is always Los Angeles, never Louisiana. La., upper-and-lower-case with one period, is always Louisiana (old-style abbreviation, in the day pretty nearly always written with a period). La (upper and lower case, no period), isn't really quite right at all, but because of the small a can't be considered an abbreviation for Los Angeles. If you see that, it's probably Louisiana. (Yes, one sees "Ucla" in mixed letters sometimes. That's an exception.) Where the ambiguity exists is in LA, all caps, no periods, which can be both Los Angeles (in the more modern, abbreviation-with-no-periods style) or Louisiana (in the all-states-and-provinces-have-abbreviations-of-two-capital-letters-for-improved-automated-handling style).
• A ZIP+4 can actually refer to more than one physical postal address. The ZIP+4 of my home actually applies to all the houses on my side of the street on my block. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:04, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

• On your 2nd point, I wonder why. 9 digits is enough to specify a billion addresses/PO boxes, which would seem to be enough for the US. I suspect they just need to allocate them a bit differently, specifically by breaking your 5 digit ZIP code up into 2 or more. StuRat (talk) 15:35, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

The ideal was to "sort to carrier" - but (amazingly enough) the population of the density of the US is not very uniform. New bar codes are "sort to nearest sorting center" as the first consideration - instead of having the first two digits indicate the state alone. Collect (talk) 15:41, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

The traditional postal abbreviation for "Louisiana" was, indeed, "La" - The reason for going to all caps was the use of OCR equipment to read addresses - ZIP+4 "zone improvement plan" started in the early 1980s (tests were done earlier on the equipment used - much from Pitney-Bowes). The modern use of all caps was at the same time, although the equipment did not actually read the state at first. In principle,, the zip code was all that needed to be read. Later on, extended bar codes were placed on most mail in the US, and are still being changed [1]. Collect (talk) 14:53, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

The acronym ZIP="zone improvement plan" dates to the beginning of the ZIP code system in 1963. See ZIP code. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:02, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Mea culpa - I was around when it was first suggested, and saw the early letter-eating P-B machinery <g>. "ZIP" is no longer a registered trademark, thus needs no capitals <+g>. The "+4" was the part from the early 1980s" Collect (talk) 15:07, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

I was alive when it was first suggested, but I'm not sure I could describe myself as having been around then. <g back atcha> StevenJ81 (talk) 18:24, 17 August 2015 (UTC)