Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 March 14

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March 14

Missing the verb for performing a lay

Hi, what does a bard do when he is performing a lay? Amond the Scandi bards or skalds, a lay would be a kvad (cognate with "quoth", I presume), and the word for making as well as performing a kvad is to "kvede". Is there any corresponding verb in English, Old English, Anglo-Saxon ... or de we go to "perform", "speak", "chant" or something similar? TiA! T 85.166.161.28 (talk) 00:59, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

"Recited" is one good word there... AnonMoos (talk) 01:40, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi, thank you. AFAICS this is norman/latin in origin, right? Nothing in "Ænglisc" English (etc.), or nothing in use today? T 85.166.161.28 (talk) 01:51, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Sing? It depends on exactly how it is performed. I could imagine both sung and spoken word style performances. --Khajidha (talk) 17:13, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

85.166.161.28 -- In lines 90 and 92 of the Beowulf poem, the verb forms sægde and cwæð are used, but I really couldn't tell you what the connotations of those words were for Old English speakers... AnonMoos (talk) 20:31, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Could someone please explain to this American what this thread is talking about? Jmar67 (talk) 06:47, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Per Lay#Poetry, a ballad or lyrical poem. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:44, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

The English word lay with the meaning of "ballad; lyrical poem" has only been around since Middle English, having been borrowed from French. The Old English cognate would have been lācan, meaning "to fight; to contend; to sing", which in turn is cognate with Old Norse leika (not kvad). The Old English cognate of kvede was cweþan, meaning "to say; to tell", which is indeed whence we get quethe, the past tense of which was quoth.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 18:30, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi everyone, mille grazie for the information from all of you; I'm researching for a fellow translator. I hope I understood you correctly: My take-away from all this is that the old AS words have fallen out of use today (or would be really, really anachronistic, esp. with the historical letters like æ and ð etc.), that there are no pre-Norman-root terms current today, and that we are left with the latin root terms (recite, chant, lay), or paraphrases (e.g. sing, say, speak, tell). ... A bit sad, somehow ... Anyway, thank you all. T 85.166.161.28 (talk) 02:54, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Fixing period locations

No doubt Americans will see and immediately guess what that title means, but this Australian has been seeing that as an Edit summary on lots of articles on my Watchlist, including many purely Australian topics. Here, a period is a chunk of time, or something ladies experience, and that's it. I was truly puzzled for a while. How can you change the location of a chunk of time? It took me a while to figure out that it was about moving full stops. I wonder if the (no doubt American) editor who came up with that presumably automated Edit summary is even aware of it's lack of or confusing meaning in versions of English that aren't American? Do Americans reading this know what I'm talking about? I also wonder, how did American English and other versions of English come up with such totally different words for a simple dot? Full stop doesn't seem to explain it terribly well to me. HiLo48 (talk) 01:55, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

As an American it took me a while to figure out that "full stop" meant the punctuation mark that we call a period. As in, "that punctuation mark is called a period, period." Or as Gracie Allen used to say, "Never place a period where God has placed a comma". It never would have occurred to me that "period" could confuse anyone, but if that edit summary is left by a bot or script, maybe you could ask the maintainer to change it. 2601:648:8202:96B0:54D9:2ABB:1EDB:CEE3 (talk) 02:05, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Acually, I'm aware of the problem but (without devoting much thought to it) haven't come up with an elegant solution. Therefore, when I type an edit summary such as "adding missing ——", I alternate the uses of period and full stop in the blank. Or I just use "punct" as the edit summary. Deor (talk) 04:33, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Canadian here. We sometimes say "full stop," but only if we want to emphasise periods. It's kind of like how people get so confused when you ask about their pants across the pond. Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝) 05:21, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

I feel pain when I use "full stop" to designate the mark itself. It has always described to me the action that the mark has ("the sentence is now complete"). What I have just learned, however, is that there is also the term "full point", which defies logic. Jmar67 (talk) 07:02, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

The etymology of "period" may help explain these various usages.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:45, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

"America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a ." (the final words of 1066 and All That, 1930). Alansplodge (talk) 13:49, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

@HiLo48: as presumably the editor in question, what would you prefer the summary be, that works for all articles? DannyS712 (talk) 23:06, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

How about something along the lines of "Fixing locations of periods/full stops"? Explicitly including the Wikilink might even help educate more readers. HiLo48 (talk) 23:12, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

If "punctuation" won't do, why not just say 'Fixing locations of "."' instead of all that verbosity? --69.159.8.46 (talk) 06:17, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Let the edit summary be simply "copy edit". The diff shows what was changed. Jmar67 (talk) 19:48, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Why is this editor even DOING all this? He or she has made a mess of a couple of articles I am watching, and I've had to change them back. Is there some odd WP guideline that he or she is attempting to implement? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 06:40, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

He is right to be doing it. The full stop should indeed come before the reference. --Viennese Waltz 06:48, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

@BeenAroundAWhile: Please see Wikipedia:Citing sources#How to place an inline citation using ref tags and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation and footnotes DannyS712 (talk) 07:14, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

I usually link to the specific MOS section related to the fix, or if there are too many, just MOS:PUNCT. I think AWB utters nothing at all when it moves clause-ending punctuation before refs (where it belongs). —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 08:22, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

This issue has been discussed before Talk:Year 2000 problem/Archive 3#Full stops in references. 2A00:23C5:318A:3100:38D1:3264:444D:A59A (talk) 11:02, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

I had to move the full stop inside the bracket to make that link work! 2A00:23C5:318A:3100:38D1:3264:444D:A59A (talk) 11:09, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

That's because the person who created the section named it with a trailing '.' (improperly). Section links need to match exactly. —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 18:38, 15 March 2020 (UTC)