Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 September 7

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September 7

Does offsprings exist?

To my knowledge the plural of offspring does not exist. However, it is found in many Wikipedia articles (insource:/[Oo]ffsprings/). The non-false-positives need to be corrected. I would appreciate any help by native speakers. --Leyo 07:16, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the plural is a word with eleven cites in the latest (online) edition of the OED (though the most recent cite is from 1957). Like you, I prefer the singular. Should we remove the "s" for normal modern usage? I'm not sure. Wiktionary claims a modern computer sense for offsprings, so any change must be done with care. Dbfirs 07:32, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Like mens, womens and childrens? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:07, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

I would not say that "the plural of offspring does not exist". Rather, the (usual) plural of "offspring" is "offspring". I think the technical term is "invariant in the plural" or something like that. Compare "fish" and "sheep". I note in passing that all three plurals seem to have a sort of a mass-noun sense, but they can also be used as normal countable plurals.

The hyper-regular plural "offsprings" is something I would correct if I came across it (except perhaps in the computer sense that I was not aware of before now) but I'm not going to go hunting it down. I have no objection if you do, though. Sometimes mass correction efforts tend to provoke resistance, and this is often justified, though in this case I would be on your side. Just be ready for it. --Trovatore (talk) 16:19, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

So the answer to "Does offsprings exist?" is "Yes, they does." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:18, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

This is just silly. Never in my six decades have I heard this "word". Its like üeber. Given the lack of a source which treats it as a standard word; excerpt; as this is a professional-quality aimed encyclopedia. μηδείς (talk) 19:46, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Dbfirs cited the OED; doesn't that qualify as a source? Also the Corpus of Global Web-Based English [1] reports 357 uses of the word "offsprings". CodeTalker (talk) 22:08, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

What Dbfirs does not mention about the OED Online entry is that it identifies the use of "offspring" as a count noun (forming the plural "offsprings") as "now rare". In ordinary use it is a mass noun and therefore does not inflect for number. --69.159.61.86 (talk) 00:56, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't have access to the OED entry, but that sounds very unlikely. Are you sure? What I'd expect it to say is that a) count noun with plural offsprings is rare; b) count noun with plural offspring (as Trovatore said) is standard; c) mass noun is unusual. "How many offspring does a stork have?", rather than "How much ...?" Henry^Flower 09:07, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I overstated my point. The definitions given as current (rather than obsolete) usage are:

1. a. The progeny which springs or is descended from someone; a person's or couple's children or descendants collectively (or occas. individually); progeny, issue. Also: the product or products of sexual reproduction in animals or plants. Freq. with modifying adjective, as numerous, etc.

b. As a count noun (freq. in pl.): a child or descendant. Now rare.

c. fig. A person seen as the product or child of his or her motherland or place of origin.

5. fig. and in extended use from sense 1. That which springs from or originates in, or is produced or engendered by, something; the product, issue, outcome, or result of something. Freq. with of.

a. As a count noun. Now rare.

b. As a mass noun.

For sense 1a, there are no citations pluralized as "offsprings", but for this one sense the dictionary does not address whether it's a count noun (with plural "offspring") or is a mass noun (not inflected for number). Considering Henry's "how many" example, I think agree that it can be a count noun with plural "offspring". (All the citations with plural forms like "offsprings" or "off-springs" are under the "rare" senses 1b and 5a and the obsolete sense 4.) --69.159.61.86 (talk) 14:03, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry I wasn't around to clarify, but thank you to for 69.159.61.86 for doing so. The plural is also listed in Collins Online and in Merriam-Webster Online. You will find some modern usages here (Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization: 7th International Conference 2013) and here (Methods and Models in Artificial and Natural Computation, 2009), but I agree that it's rare and we could probably correct most of the Wikipedia usage. Dbfirs 12:49, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

@Dbfirs: Would you be willing to go through the remaining 255 occurrences? --Leyo 19:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

No, I don't have the time just now, and I don't know which hundred you have checked. Dbfirs 19:22, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Sanskrit visarga

Can anyone explain this parenthetical comment in the article on Rigvedic rivers about visarga:

″The term Sapta Sindhava, commonly used in Hindi and other Indian languages, is the nominative plural in Sanskrit (dropping the final visarga in conformity with the convention when expressing Sanskrit words in modern languages)."

Is this convention widespread? Amongst whom? Is it a convention in all modern languages? 92.29.147.91 (talk) 21:27, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Well, I can say that I've very rarely seen ‹ḥ› (even with the diacritic sloppily omitted) in English, other than in passages specifically about Sanskrit declension. Does the sentence mean that visarga is normally dropped in modern Indian languages? It would not surprise me. —Tamfang (talk) 05:41, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

To my knowledge no Sanskrit dictionary shows citation forms with the suffixed visarga. It has been established grammarian practice for 2500 years to drop the final visarga in lemma forms. The visarga is just a sandhi form of an underlying /s/ (the Indo-European nominative singular ending), and it surfaces as other sounds in other sandhi environments. Sanskrit nouns are usually lemmatized as bare stems, hence no final visarga in lemmata. However, it is included in declension tables. —Stephen (talk) 21:27, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Trouble here, though, is that sindhavaḥ is not a lemma form, it's nominative plural. —Tamfang (talk) 02:20, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Very good point. In my answer (below) I failed to distinguish, in the case of the Western scholarly convention, the case of words in isolation, titles of works, etc. and the case of whole passages, phrases, sentences, etc. Needless to say, in the latter case, no Western scholar will ever drop the visarga, certainly not in writing and at least they will make an attempt to pronounce it, even though I am rarely impressed by those attempts and by the Sanskrit pronunciation of Western scholars in general. As to the less careful, more sloppy, popular writers in English I can't think at the moment of any such case but Tamfang may be right that they would drop the visarga even in the case of phrases, etc. Finally I think the use of the term "convention" doesn't apply to the speech habits common in the vernaculars Indian languages. It's not like people got together and "decided" to do the one or the other. If anything can be called conventional here is that WP chose to follow the Indian vernacular form (and not entirely successfully since they don't give exactly neither the written form nor the actual pronunciation but something in between) rather than Western scholarly norms. For even more bizarre results of that "convention" see article Dadhichi. The proper Western scholarly form would be दध्यञ्च् [dadhyañc] if you follow the majority convention (see below) and use the bare stem (or possibly दध्यक् [dadhyak] if you're part of a subset of those that use the middle stem in the case of words with multiple stems) or दध्यङ [dadhyaṅ] if you're part of the minute minority that uses the nominative singular as the citation form. The Hindi form दधीचि [dadhīci] that is used as the basis of the name of the article in the English WP is related to the Sanskrit weak stem (दधीच् [dadhīc]) but obviously is not exactly it. (What accounts for the appended 'i' in Hindi I don't know). Basemetal 11:48, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Whew. It is a bit complicated. I'll use Harvard-Kyoto, ok? I don't know where to find the diacritics. Permission is hereby granted to any editor to change that to the standard transliteration with diacritics.

I have attempted it. —Tamfang (talk) 02:20, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much Tamfang. It looks a lot better this way. And you didn't take advantage of my sloppily mixing two conventions H-K's capital 'A' long a and some other convention's (which one?) 'aa' long a to refuse to do those . Thanks again. If you don't mind it might also be useful to add transliterations to the Nagari that I used in a hurry. I'll be very grateful. Paradoxically it's easier for me to write in Nagari (I just go into Google Translate) than to find diacritized letters of Orientalist transliteration. Where do you find those? Basemetal 11:48, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I've added the transliterations. In MacOS, letters like ‘ś’ and ‘ḥ’ are in the ABC Extended keyboard, to which I can switch with a keystroke. Underdot is option-x. —Tamfang (talk) 03:02, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Tamfang. I don't have a Mac. Sigh. Why is life always easier for you guys? Not fair. I've noticed Wikipedia articles about Sanskrit and Indian topics do not systematically use proper transliteration. Maybe they get edited by lots of paupers using Windows. Maybe that explains it. Does anyone know of a site with a keyboard carrying the Orientalist characters where I could type a text and then import it into WP? Basemetal 08:55, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Five cases have to be distinguished: (1) the everyday usage of modern (northern) Indo-Aryan languages when quoting a Sanskrit word or phrase, (2) the everyday usage modern Dravidian languages when quoting a Sanskrit word or phrase, (3) Sanskrit grammatical and lexical literature (that is Sanskrit works about Sanskrit), (4) modern Western scholarship and (finally) (5) the everyday usage of Western languages (in particular English): (1) when pronouncing Sanskrit words or phrases the visargaḥ is systematically dropped even if the result is an ungrammatical phrase like "sapta sindhava" (which is in actual fact pronounced "sapt sindhav"). In fact in actual pronunciation even the short a is dropped at the end of a word so a fortiori the visargaḥ will be dropped, so for for example the god शिव [śiva] (in Sanskrit शिवः [śivaḥ]) is pronounced शिव् [śiv], etc. This said Hindi does use the visargaḥ for Hindi words sometimes as a more fancy spelling variant of final ह [h] (note though the visargaḥ and ह [h] were not equivalent or prounounced the same in Sanskrit). For example for the word for the numeral six, छह [chaha], you will sometimes find the spelling छः [chaḥ]. In fact that word in actually pronounced छे [che] (yes, contrary to persistent rumors, Hindi spelling is not phonetic; Urdu spelling is a little more phonetic, at least when fully vocalized, and even there not quite); a caveat though: I'm not fully certain all of that is valid for Marathi. Check with a Marathi speaker or linguist. (2) For Dravidian languages you'll have to ask someone who knows. I used to know a little Malayalam but it's all gone now. What I remember is this: the final short a of Sanskrit words (or sometime in the middle of words) is never dropped as it is in the northern languages. As far as I can remember when the visargaḥ occurs it is changed into a Dravidian n or m according to the language. For example a common southern family name is Subrahmanyam or Subrahmanyan (according to the language, it is m in Tamil and Malayalam, n in Kannada and, I don't know, maybe m in Telugu) which comes from Sanskrit subrahmanyaḥ who is, as is well, known, the god of war, the son of Shiva; he is very popular in the south (though not only) for various reasons: for example in the Tamil country he is identified to the old Tamil god of war Murugan. But ask someone who really knows about all this. (3) For Sanskrit: Stephen is not correct when he states "it has been established grammarian practice for 2500 years to drop the final visarga in lemma forms." In Sanskrit grammatical texts the stems are always used in a declensional form, nominative, accusative, instrumental or whatever. Check pāṇini(ḥ)'s sutras, check the amarakōśaḥ, etc. Of course since the visargaḥ, under the operation of sandhiḥ (I'm overdoing this but see below), becomes something else everywhere else except in pausa you will only find a visargaḥ in pausa (for example in the ślōkāḥ of the amarakōśaḥ at the end of the half line, in the sūtrāḥ at the end of a sūtraḥ, etc.) But the visarga is not just simply "dropped". There is simply no way in Sanskrit grammar to use a bare stem. (Things are a bit different for verbal roots but getting into that would make this even more complicated). To make it simple and sum all of this up: in Sanskrit the phrase "the word "horse"" (as in say "I don't like to use the word horse" would be अश्व इति शब्दः [aśva iti śabdaḥ] which clearly shows it is the nominative singular with visarga (in this case अश्वः [aśvaḥ]) that is used as the citation form of a word. If the bare stem अश्व [aśva] had been used you would have gotten the sandhi form अश्वे 'ति शब्दः [aśve 'ti śabdaḥ] (or as is more commonly written: अश्वेति शब्दः [aśveti śabdaḥ]) (4) For Western scholarly literature it is true that, for a huge majority of Western scholars it is the bare stem that is used when quoting Sanskrit words in isolation. (That would be equivalent to a Latin scholar speaking of "servo" instead of "servus", "urb" instead of "urbs", "civi" instead of "civis", "ordin" instead of "ordo", "puero" instead of "puer", and so on: tell me if that doesn't sound silly?). However there is a (very small) minority of people who use the nominative singular as a quotation form (though none of the standard dictionaries). (You can tell I'm part of the minority, even though I'm not a scholar. That always got me in trouble.) I can't give you an actual name but I remember long time ago on the Indology list a German female Sanskrit scholar (working in Japan actually at the time) complaining that some other scholar, I forget his name, but I do remember he was also German, used to cite Sanskrit words in the nominative instead of as a bare stem and that it was confusing and annoying and blah, blah, blah. If you really want to know the name of the guy (there might be others) check the list for the past 30 years. There's a listserver that will email (or something...) a file with the messages to the list month by month for the past 30 years or so. Happy reading. So dropping the visargaḥ or not in that case is part of a wider problem which means that there are other discrepancies between the two usages that do not involve the visargaḥ: for example the majority would use aśvin as a basic form whereas the (very small) minority would use aśvī (or aśvinau since those guys, being twins, most often go by two). (5) Yes of course the visargaḥ is always dropped in popular usage. But popular usage is inconsistent. For examples when it seems convenient and less ambiguous some authors would use the nominative (when that does not involve using a visarga). For example if one wants to distinguish the impersonal brahman and the God Brahma it has become standard to use something derived from the nominative for the God. The bare stem is the same (brahman) but since the first is neuter its nominative is brahma, while the second, being masculine, is brahmā in the nominative. Popular writers take advantage of that and use brahma for the god, so they drop the macron and make it look like the nominative of the neuter in order to actually distinguish the two and thereby to clarify things! Confused already? Ok. I've got to go. I hope this is not too incoherent. Sorry, I don't have time to make it shorter (as Mme de Sévigné used to say: I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one). Cheers. Basemetal 00:39, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Basemetal for the excellent answer (although some references would have been nice for those unfamiliar with IA studies). I've been contemplating answering this for a few days but couldn't condense my answer nearly as much as you have, nor could I find any readily link-able references. I'll include some of my thoughts below while I keep searching for on-line references.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 01:59, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

I for one would be perfectly content with citing Latin stems rather than nominatives. —Tamfang (talk) 02:26, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Really? Note that if you use the bare stem in Sanskrit not only do you use a citation form that's not an actual word of the language but a grammatical abstraction (that would have to be the only language (mis)treated that way unless you can show me another example, I'm of course not talking of reconstructed languages such as PIE) but the bare stem often violates elementary rules of Sanskrit phonetics such as that a word cannot end in a palatal or in a sibilant or in 'r' or in a stop other than an unvoiced unaspirated stop, or in more than one consonant (except for one minute and unimportant exception), etc. So on the one hand hand you want learners to internalize the rules of Sanskrit phonetics and on the other hand you (not you personally Tamfang, I mean all those who prefer to use the bare stem as a citation form for Sanskrit) favor a convention that constantly presents to them and has them utter forms that violate those rules. I don't know. There are also practical advantages to using the nominative singular rather than the bare stem. For example for the huge class of Sanskrit nouns and adjectives whose stem ends in short a, using the nominative singular immediately distinguishes (and forces you to remember) the neuters from the masculines whereas using the bare stem doesn't. Basemetal 11:48, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Basemetal's answer is spot on. I will attempt a TLDR version. The quote in the OP's question seems to be about the modern vernaculars. As Basemetal touched upon, Sanskrit's ह was voiced, [ɦ]. By the time of Sanskrit's description, however, the word final /s/ (in pausa) and sometimes /r/ had become reduced to a voiceless [h]. The visarga was invented to represent that sound. In those words which have survived in the vernacular to the present, the evolution has continued and the word-final [h] has disappeared from pronunciation in most languages. In words where that leaves a short unstressed /a/ ([ə]), the /a/, as Basemetal also points out, will also not be pronounced in the spoken vernacular. So in every day speech, Sanskrit sapta sindhavaḥ is pronounced sapt sindhav.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 01:59, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Oddly enough, however, modern vernacular Hindi does have a word-final [h], but it is unrelated to the visarga. Word-final ह, once the /a/ is dropped, would leave word-final /ɦ/ but it is reduced/devoiced to [h]: कह /kəɦə/ > [kɛh]. Also, to make matters even more complicated, the modern reading of visarga by speakers when reading Sanskrit tends to include an echo of the preceding vowel. So, for example, a word ending in written -aḥ would be pronounced -aḥa in careful citation form. So the phrase in question would be pronounced sapta sindhavaḥa by an Indian using a careful citation form (although this totally throws off the meter in Sanskrit verse), but sapt sindhav in everyday speech.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 01:59, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Completely agree with your remarks about the modern Sanskrit pronunciation of the visarga in India. For example they pronounce सः ('he', 'that man') and सह ('with', postposition) exactly the same. Not only does this habit of adding a syllable ruin the line of verse when it's there as you say, but when Indians use "easy" Sanskrit with sentences where sandhi rules are applied only between very closely connected words such as in the videos for kids with tales from the हितोपदेशः that you find on YouTube that pronunciation of the visarga really ends up getting on your nerves. According to the ancient phoneticians the visarga is a voiceless 'h' breath made in the position of the previous vowel (or component of a diphthong), a breathed (or is the technical term "whispered"?) vowel so to speak, a bit like in the Cuban vernacular pronunciation of Spanish 'dos' and 'tres' (note again an 's' that has become an 'h' like in Sanskrit, although in Sanskrit the visarga may also come from an 'r'), and certainly not like a full voiced vowel with its own syllable as is done in India nowadays. However there is hope: I've seen one or two videos on YouTube made by Indians where that usage is criticized and it is suggested to go back to the ancient pronunciation. Apologies again for sloppy writing and lack of sources. I hope nevertheless all this will be useful to the OP. Basemetal 11:48, 10 September 2016 (UTC)