Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 December 31

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December 31

Correct verb tense

I ran across the following sentence in the Wikipedia article on Sudden infant death syndrome. Diagnosis requires that the death remains unexplained even after a thorough autopsy and detailed death scene investigation. As I was reading it, I thought to myself that it should say: Diagnosis requires that the death remain unexplained even after a thorough autopsy and detailed death scene investigation. So, is the correct verb "remains" or "remain" and why? And what is this verb tense called? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:12, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Death remains unexplained vs. deaths remain unexplained. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:26, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Remain is correct; this is an example of the subjunctive mood (see English subjunctive). Double sharp (talk) 07:30, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Remain and remains are both found in this context. Remain is much more common in North American than in British English. Doing a search for require that (article) (singular noun) (verb 3sg) in the GloWbE corpus gives 15 US, 4 CA, 17 UK; while require that (article) (singular noun) (verb base) gives 51 US, 15 CA, 6 UK. --ColinFine (talk) 10:37, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

In each, the tense is present; there's no distinction of tense. In this context, both options are OK. "Remain" in Brit English was until fairly recently a bit of an archaism or an Americanism; but whether or not because of US influence, it has recently become commoner (again?). In the terminology of Huddleston and Pullum, CGEL: "remain" (here): subjunctive mandative; "remains" (here): covert mandative. -- Hoary (talk) 11:49, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. In my original question, I don't think that verb "tense" was the proper terminology. I think I was asking for "mood" ...? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:36, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:17, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Why is V a special letter??

A word with v in it is always spelled as if the preceding vowel were long, regardless of whether it is long or short. Final v is always followed by a silent e, and v is never spelled vv. Any reason?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:28, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Flivver. Deor (talk) 16:14, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Pre-1800 he says. Savvy?—eric 20:41, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, v was a classical Latin letter that in the middle ages gave birth to u and w (there is no u or w in classical Latin). W is double V. Don't know if that accounts for what you see but it is a rather special history. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:15, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

The letter v follows the normal rule that if it is followed by certain vowels (especially e) then the preceding vowel is long, as in five, shave, hove etc. Final "e"s are nearly always silent whatever the preceding consonant. I think the reason for no double v in English is historical as described by Alan above. Dbfirs 16:41, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Wrong. A final v sound is always spelled ve. The word five has a long i, but the word give has a short i. Georgia guy (talk) 16:48, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Wrong. It still follows the normal rule with exceptions like give (and live which can be long or short). We have a few words ending in just v: chiv, div, leitmotiv, Maariv, shiv, spiv, skiv and tiv. Dbfirs 17:16, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

For anyone who sees this list, can you tell me whether these words are post-1800 coinages?? Georgia guy (talk) 17:29, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Yes, they are all post-1800 except for "tiv" which is just a dialect representation. The spelling of chiv and div was chive and dive before 1800. I'm curious to know your reason for asking. Dbfirs 17:40, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I'm asking because this is the rule English words with v in them follow in general; a few recent coinages (such as your examples) are exceptions, but in general English words with v follow this unusual rule. Georgia guy (talk) 18:30, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

You mean the "rule" that there aren't any old words with a final v? I wonder if the letter f has had some influence on this? The old f or u in "give" seems to have turned into a v in the 1600s. The Scots still spell give as "gie" without the v. Dbfirs 19:07, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Voiced fricatives are a bit of a mess in English spelling, each one in different ways. /ð/ is spelt <th> just the same as /θ/: it's rare in final position, and tends to have a following <e> whether or not that affects the vowel (breath has a different vowel from breathe, but wreath has the same vowel as wreathe). Mouth is the only word I can think of which has both pronunciations (leaving aside with, which can be pronounce /wɪð/ or /wɪθ/, but the variation is between speakers not normally within one speaker's production).

Then there's /z/, which is mostly written <s>, except initially (eg zip) or finally after a stressed lax vowel (jazz); but as with <v> there are exceptions (eg because), and we have all sorts of devices to write /s/ in contexts where <s> is normally /z/.

Historically, the origin of all these problems is that Old English didn't distinguish the voiced from the unvoiced pair: they were phonologically conditioned allophones. That's why <v> is a late addition, <z> late except for borrowed words, and <th> does duty for both /θ/ and /ð/.

The voiced forms generally didn't occur in initial position; otherwise, the sounds were voiced between vowels and unvoiced finally. But a closed syllable (with a final consonant) is just the environment which has given rise to our modern lax vowels ("short vowels" in common parlance). For example, staff derives from OE stæf (monosyllabic, with a short vowel and unvoiced /f/) while stave is backformed from the plural staves, from OE stafas (plural of stæf, bisyllabic, with a different vowel, and voiced /v/, since it was between vowels).

This is the origin of silent e: it is what is left of a separate syllable, so the vowel was in an open syllable (and is usually tense today) and the consonant was voiced if it was a fricative.

Give and live are anomalous in their vowels: I don't know why they didn't become /aɪ/ like strive and hive. --ColinFine (talk) 20:21, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Now, what difference between stops and fricatives made it so that voiced and voiceless stops were distinguished easily in Old English but fricatives were not?? Georgia guy (talk) 21:06, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- the results of Grimm's law... AnonMoos (talk) 22:53, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

In turn, the reason that the voiced f got its own letter (but not the voiced th) is that English was influenced by French, which had a special letter for that sound. (Old English used f for both sounds, please correct me if I'm wrong.) The v sound in French did not come from voicing f in special positions. It came from PIE w; in fact nearly all non-English Indo-European languages have the v sound where it was formerly w; exceptions include English, which preserved the w sound; and Greek, where w disappeared and beta changed its sound from b to v. In contrast, both th sounds are sounds French lacked, so there was no way French's influence on English would allow the same thing to happen to the th sounds. Any corrections to the above?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:30, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps look to "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" [1]. It has been a while since I read it but the author to be very cursory suggests all/most that is 'weird' (or vveird, if you vvill?) English in comparison to the continent comes from Celtic (he also seems to say his ideas were minority views, perhaps they still are). I mention it because this suggests a Celtic connection in the development of v, u and w. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:11, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- Archaic Old French actually had a [θ] sound (not written with a "th" spelling, however), as seen in many post-vocalic 3rd-person singular verb endings which were then spelled with the letter "t" (now deleted in the modern language), and in a few other words (go to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faith for some discussion). And it seems probable that English is the only current-day living Indo-European language native to Europe in which early Indo-European [w] is still pronounced as [w] at the beginnings of words (a while back I searched for any other European IE languages that do this, and couldn't find any -- however, outside Europe there's at least Pashto, where wišt "twenty" is presumably cognate to Latin viginti etc). But I'm not sure that either of these facts has any great bearing on why "v" doesn't usually occur word-finally in English spelling... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:54, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Here are 26 words containing -vv-. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:22, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

A large group, demonstrating again that i can't spell.—eric 21:42, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I note that most of them seem to be sort of colloquial abbreviations (e.g. divvy for "divide"). The main exception is "savvy" and its derivatives, perfectly acceptable words in formal writing. --Trovatore (talk) 23:42, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

"Savvy" derives from Spanish "sabe" (SAH-bey or SAH-vey), and presumably is spelled with two V's to keep it from rhyming with "navy". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:58, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

These 26 words are, in fact, just 8 different lexemes: chivvy, civvy, divvy, flivver, navvy, revved, savvy, skivvy. The rest are inflected forms of those (chivvied, chivvying, etc). --Theurgist (talk) 19:40, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- First, forget the "long vowel" stuff: There's never been any completely consistent relationship in Modern English between pronounced long vowels and word-final "silent e", and it's the orthographic stuff (occurrence restrictions on letters and sequences of letters) that you're asking about.

That said, I'm not sure that there's any one simple clear "reason", but it's probably in some sense a continuation or carry-over of the fact that neither in Old English nor in Medieval French could [v] occur in absolute word-final position. In Old English (as ColinFine mentioned), [f] and [v] were allophones, with [v] only occurring when there were voiced sounds on both sides (both immediately following and immediately preceding it). In medieval French, there were alternations similar to that still seen in modern French juif "Jewish (masc.sg.)" vs. juive "Jewish (fem.sg.)". In both Middle English and older French, a word-final "e" letter was often pronounced as an unstressed schwa vowel (still optionally in modern French, when singing or enunciating clearly).

Somewhat the same applies to "th" -- outside of function words, "th" pronounced as [ð] is usually followed by "silent e" at the ends of words: breathe, clothe, wreathe, etc. (exception: smooth). AnonMoos (talk) 22:52, 31 December 2019 (UTC)