Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 September 15

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September 15

DMZ - Pronunciation

How do British people pronounce 'DMZ'? I have only ever heard it pronounced on American war films, where it is 'Dee-Em-Zee'. Do Brits pronounce it 'Dee-Em-Zed'? KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 13:18, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to think they would say Z differently there than they normally do (that is, as "zed"). Note that Canadians also say "zed". StuRat (talk) 13:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't see that there will be a single universal answer. As a phrase, de militarized zone is most heavily associated with the Korean war, and as such most British English speakers will view it as an American English phrase. Therefore some BE speakers will pronounce it in an AE manner, and say "dee em zee". Others will pronounce it as it is written without translation: "dee em zed". I've heard both.--Phil Holmes (talk) 14:01, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Just to note that there was a considerable British and Commonwealth participation in the Korean War, [1] and a British officer is a member of the Military Armistice Commission. I take your point though about the DMZ in the Vietnam War. On the whole though, Britons are generally less keen than Americans on TLAs and therefore I would pronounce "DMZ" as "Demilitarised Zone". Alansplodge (talk) 15:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

And if pressed, I would choose "Dee-Em-Zed". Few people I know here in England would, when saying the letter's name, say "zee" in preference to "zed" regardless of the circumstances. The only ones I have come across were IT specialists working for American companies, and even then only in those companies' acronyms. Bazza (talk) 16:03, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

As a Canadian, I've always heard it pronounced "dee em zee". Clarityfiend (talk) 16:32, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'm Canadian and it would not occur to me to pronounce it "dee em zee". However, I can't remember when's the last time I heard someone else say it. --65.95.178.150 (talk) 00:06, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

This Canuck, too. And I rarely hear anyone ever say "zed". Or "aboot". InedibleHulk (talk) 18:30, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I've heard "aboot" many times in talking with Canadian colleagues. But maybe it's a regional thing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:13, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

It's not really "aboot". It's more like "ah-boh-ute", more or less exactly as it's spelled (IPA [abɔʊt] as opposed to American [abaʊt] or even [abæʊt]). At least that's how I hear it. I spent a year in Toronto and may be basing it on their local accent, if that's different. --Trovatore (talk) 06:01, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Do they happen to be Maritimers? InedibleHulk (talk) 20:36, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Or maybe prairie folk, hey? InedibleHulk (talk) 20:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Z pronounced zed in New Zealand. Hardly ever hear zee. New Zealand itself is sometimes colloquially referred to as En Zed. Akld guy (talk) 21:48, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

"New Zealand is the en-zee of the world." Brilliant! I don't know why that isn't the national tourist slogan:) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

How's come they don't call their country "New Zedland"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:07, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Jack, that goes into the realm of boasting. We don't do boasting. Akld guy (talk) 00:29, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

"100% natural" is quite a boast in this artificial age. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:18, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

At least they don't get their tourism adverts banned in several countries by saying "Where the bloody hell are you?". :) KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 15:43, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I was glad that ad was banned. I hated it. It made us all sound like bogans; it's well known that only about 65% of us are actually like that. Anyway, I was being nice to NZ, and didn't want to foment a trans-Tasman war of words. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:03, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Better than "Feck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke". Or worse. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:46, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

See also: The Big Bogan--Shirt58 (talk) 11:04, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

• I've been wondering about this for a couple of months. I call the letter "zed", but pronounce "DMZ" as "dee em zee".--Shirt58 (talk) 05:47, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

"DMZ" is also widely used in IT, and is probably more familiar to many in that sense than in the original sense. I've only every hear "dee em zed" in the UK. --ColinFine (talk) 22:42, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

These are the first examples I found in searching for TV news from the UK on the DMZ in Korea: Lucy Williamson (BBC) calls it Dee Em Zee ([2] [3]), as does John Irvine (ITV) [4]. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:40, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Wow, Sluzzelin, in that BBC report pronouncing it "dee-em-zee" sounds like perfectly natural English to me, even though it shouldn't as I'm a native speaker of a "calls <z> /zɛd/" variety of English.

Out of interest, when you yourself say "DMZ" - meaning the DMZ - in German, do you pronounce it as /deː ɛm tsɛt/, /diː ɛm ziː/, or some other way? Shirt58 (talk) 11:04, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

In this case I probably would use the German letters /deː ɛm tsɛt/, not least because the initialism does work in German too ("demilitarisierte Zone"). I checked some German news sites where it gets pronounced that way. Likewise, the one German tutorial on installing a DMZ network I accessed uses the German pronunciation too. I don't know when we do what. We say "USA" with German letters, /uː ɛs aː/ not /juː ɛs eɪ/, (even though the German initialism would be "VSA"), but no one says /t͡seː ɛn ɛn/ for CNN or /ɛf beː iː/ for the FBI; German speakers use English letters here: /siː ɛn ɛn/ and /ɛf biː aɪ/. ---Sluzzelin talk 11:53, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

I (Canadian) would call it dee-em-zed, but I call the muckracking website tee-em-zee, because that's their name. 64.235.97.146 (talk) 13:44, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Can anyone explain the origin of the names of the letters? They appear to fall into groups which are remarkably consistent across the languages I have knowledge of (allowing for differences in the pronunciation of the vowels).

Thus:

bee, cee, dee, gee, pe, tee, vee

jay, kay

ef, el, em, en, ess, ex

ar

irregular: aitch, cue, zed. 78.145.27.94 (talk) 11:02, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

In Portuguese, "j" is jota, from the Greek. "r" is regular: erre. "x" is xis, pronounced "sheesh". Again this is completely regular, cf taxa de juros meaning "rate of interest", pronounced tasha de juroosh. "y" is ipsilon, again from the Greek. In fact it's the only Portuguese word I know of which ends in the letter "n". 89.240.30.121 (talk) 14:14, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

See Alphabet#Names of letters and English alphabet#Etymology. Kahastok talk 14:51, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

More specifically, letters representing plosives in Latin were named Ce (C representing the consonant in question) for instance be, de, ge; letters for other consonants were eC, for instance el, em, es; c, k and q, all representing (roughly) the same sound were distinguished as ce, ka and qu; y and z were treated differently as imported later from Greek. Not sure our articles have all this detail. --rossb (talk) 20:10, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Language and Vision

• In a recent brainstorm, the subseqent question arose in my mind:
• For a person with sight impairment (“blind”, in simple terms), numerous standard words in everyday conversation must be difficult to “understand”:
• “dumpy, attractive, cubism, windmill, sphere, elephant, tree, fly, rotate, below, green”, … and a lot more. All of these require some visual model to “make sense”. Needless to state, a few can be understood by tactile means, others, e.g. “the curvature of space-time”, can´t.
• So the question is: What percentage of the “standard” vocabulary is based on visual experiences, be it literal or metaphorical? Is there a linguistic term for words which are derived primarily from visual (and other) sensory input?
• As a corollary: Is a blind person, as a result, then not only disabled by their visual impairment but even more severely disabled on the level of language - and consequently on the conceptual / cognitive level?
• I am, of course, aware that people with sight impairment develop highly complex skills to perceive their environment based on audial / thermal / etc sensations which most of us are equally “blind” to, so the reverse cognitive impairment applies. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 19:19, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Can you provide some sources to substantiate your points. Admittedly I have only worked with two blind brothers but they both understood some of the words in your third point. While I couldn't say if they understood green the always wanted to know what colour something was. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 23:56, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. Color is one of the few concepts that can only be understood visually (although I suppose it can still be explained as certain frequencies of electromagnetic energy). For "the curvature of space-time", for example, you could have a physical model of a hyperbolic funnel, and they could send balls "in orbit" around it and hear them as they orbit. Yes, this is just a 2D illustration of the concept, but it's the same one that sighted people use.

Also note that many blind people were sighted at one time, so do have memories of things like color. StuRat (talk) 16:57, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The only thing that they don't see in your list, is the color green. They "see" everything else, of course not the eyes way, but they see it through a combination of other concurring means and they have an exact and accurate and correct idea of what it is to fly, what is a windmill and how it is built, etc. Ask a blind person to point you the tallest trees in a park. He will. Ask him to point you the ones that have the largest leaves. He will be able to name the species without too many errors. Ask a blind person how many buses are parked in the bus station. He knows the exact number when we only know an approximate nmuber of buses. About the color of things, to them it is yet another reference that they use to communicate with sighted people who use only the color reference when the blind constantly use more than one reference. Akseli9 (talk) 17:28, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I doubt that a blind person would know all those things. Yes, they could figure them out eventually, but they probably wouldn't have the time to figure out the more trivial items, like where the tallest tree is. StuRat (talk) 02:02, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

They feel the masses of big things. They also measure the action of the wind and the action of the airmass on trees. There will be a few errors of course, but what I meant is that they "see" everything through a combination of several senses allied with a constant deduction process and with a trained memory that provides a constant flow of stored detailed information about everything. As much as the space surrounding them is ruled, less chaotic as possible, as much they cope as well as us, many times better than us (the more ordonated the surrounding space is). As the question was about language, my point was the blind can rely and base upon as much as the sighted, sometimes even more than the sighted, in order to build up a thinking and a capability of imagination. Akseli9 (talk) 10:19, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Feel the mass how ? I hope you don't mean by gravitational attraction, as the gravitational attraction from a tree is way too small for a person to detect. StuRat (talk) 15:32, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Of course not gravitational attraction. I used to work by a school where blind people were learning. I used to talk a lot with them, I never went to discuss physical details with them, but I think it more has to do with the air. Please picture that we, the sighted. "thanks" to our capabilty of seeing through our eyes, never train and never use our earing and our other senses (especially the sense of touching and feeling the air masses and air movements), to "see" things through other means. The blind use that and so many more things we don't even know we would be good at too if only we trained it. And I forgot to mention the obvious: they hear the leaves, just as we see the leaves, naturally without thinking of it, while we talk or while we play chess or whatever we do, at the same time we see the leaves, and they hear the leaves, we see the trees, they feel the trees. On the topic of language, my point is that when you constantly use only one way to see things, your eyes, and neglect to develop your other capabilities (ears, air feeling), you won't necessarily be more apt at language, than the blind who naturally and constantly develops and uses not only one capability, but a combination of several capabilities working together. Akseli9 (talk) 16:58, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Due to the concept of qualia, one can argue that even sighted people have difficulty understanding the concept of "green". I know what "green" means to me, but is that the same experience as "green" is to you? Depending on what languages you know, you might not even be able to easily make a distinction between green or blue, or might be able to easily make finer distinctions than an English speaker can. (Though those points are highly debated.) - Typically the best you can do is practical descriptions: "Grass is green.", "The sky is blue.", "That sweater is green." Blind people certainly can make similar statements, although they would need to be told what color something is, rather than being able to determine it for themselves. (Much like sighted people would need to be told, e.g. how much voltage a wire has.) This doesn't necessarily handicap them in understanding the practicalities - for example, knowing that green grass is healthy and that brown grass probably needs to be watered. Or knowing that when someone says "the meat was green", it was unfit for consumption. (Just like a sighted person would know that a wire containing 400V is dangerous, even though they can't "see" the voltage.) -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 18:17, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

@Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM: The scholarly work on this and related topics could fill a small library. Here's a whole special journal issue on language-vision interaction [5]. A lot of other work is focused on language acquisition in sighted and non-seeing children, e.g. these two books [6] [7]. Here's an introduction to another book [8]. Interestingly enough, when searching combinations of /language vision blind [etc]/ on google scholar, I found a decent number of articles talking about vision, cognition, and language in the context of computers/robots/AI research, e.g. here [9]. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:08, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

• @ Cambridge Bay
• It may be difficult to come up with examples, which make sense to those of us who have no visual disability, but let me try:
• Being interested in architecture, I may use in some discussion the terms “architrave”, “pendentive”, “flying buttress” and so on. No doubt these are meaningless words to a person who could not care less about Greek temples, the Hagia Sophia or French cathedrals. However, in “our” case, we don´t need to know the terminology because we can “see” the respective objects.
• If, on the other hand, I attempted to explain to a person of impaired vision the static principles of a basilica or a Gothic church I would find that quite difficult as the above terms (== objects) are essential elements which distribute the load of a dome or a vault. Not knowing what a pendentive is, precludes an understanding of the mathematics of Isidore & Anthemius.
• Of course, the same applies to numerous other areas of knowledge: DNA looks a bit like a “double helix”? , the “green spotted” kangaroo is an endangered species?, I detest “paisley” ties. So, what is a helix, what are green spots, what is paisley?
• For those who still don´t get it: “The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”. As this sentence does NOT contain the term “green” it is (by Akseli and others above) entirely comprehensible to sighted and blind people alike.
• @SemanticMantis: Thank you for the references. I will check the relevant university libraries. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 20:00, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Don't forget the convenience of WP:REX, or I can probably help you out if you contact me via email through my talk page link. As to your other points, recall that the crystal structure of DNA is a mathematical geometrical thing, not primarily a visual one. And blind people do just fine at geometry, sometimes better than sighted people! SemanticMantis (talk) 21:30, 16 September 2015 (UTC)