Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 March 20

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March 20

"The best student of his generation" in Serbian

I've come across two different articles about Serbs/Montenegrins that specifically describe them as the "best student of their generation" at their respective universities - an old version of Zdravko Krivokapic, where I removed it for being uncited and sounding ridiculous, but also at Vladimir Cvijan, where it's cited to here, which does say something about him in relation to a "generacija" at a university that I can't figure out from Google Translate.

So can "generacija" also mean "graduating class" in Serbian and these are translation errors? Or is calling someone "the best student of his generation" a common hyperbolic in Serbian? Or is this just a coincidence and both articles were indeed trying to say the person in question was literally the best student of their entire generation? -Elmer Clark (talk) 16:53, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Each year brings a new "generation". I think that in "generacija (or generacij%a) 2011/2011", the year is that of the first year of matriculation, not graduation. In English "class of 2010", the year is that of graduation. I can't think of a good English equivalent for "generacija".  --Lambiam 23:17, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

If that's what it means, why not just say "of their year"? --142.112.149.107 (talk) 04:44, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

It is ambiguous. Will "their year" be understood by the reader to mean the year of their matriculation or of their graduation?  --Lambiam 10:03, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't see that as a big problem, since the majority of students presumably stay the same number of years to get their degree, but if you want to be more exact, just say something like "the best student of his entry year at the University of XYZ"... AnonMoos (talk) 17:04, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

In the pre-bologna central European university system, there was no set number of years to study for a degree. I was always confused about "freshman", "sophomore", "senior" in the US context. When I studied computer science, the curriculum was nominally designed for 9 semesters/4.5 years (for German "Diplom", roughly equivalent to a master's degree). Few graduated in less than 12 semesters, the average was a bit over 14, and some took longer. So there was a lot of variation. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:47, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Native speaker here. Yes, generacija does mean '(graduating) class', and đak generacije or student generacije are set expressions for the best student in class. As Stephan Shulz pointed out, there were no fixed classes in pre-Bologna system, but universities nonetheless had their methods of defining student generacije – usually, the best one that graduated in the given year, with the proviso that they completed the studies in an allotted time (say, less than 5.5 years for 9-semester curriculum). No such user (talk) 11:34, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

grammar for a language

I've been told that when linguists study a language they record the lexicon (vocabulary) and they write a grammar for it. What would such a grammar look like? I don't think my town library would have a linguistics specific grammar for me to examine and when I try to imagine documenting the grammar for English I imagine a horribly long and complicated result. By the way, my background is in software so when we studied computer grammars we studied context-free grammars and context-sensitive grammars but I don't know if a grammar for a natural language would be documented like that. Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 19:00, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

For example: Modern Swahili Grammar. Alansplodge (talk) 19:28, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

As I recall, an unabridged dictionary will often have a grammar section in front, in addition to a pronunciation guide. One thing about computer languages is that they are primarily instructions to do specific tasks, so they have a much smaller vocabulary and grammar. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 19:57, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Most modern computer languages have indeed an infinite vocabulary, since they allow for identifiers and strings of any length. In principle the same is true of languages (like German) which support composite words. But in that case you can still break it down to a finite elementary vocabulary. What makes (most) computer languages simpler ist the grammar, not the vocabulary. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:39, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Computer languages aren't too much like natural languages, since there is generally an exact definition of what is part of the language and what isn't, and if there is an error, then the running of the program usually stops at that point with an error-message which may or may not be helpful. Mathematical grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy have been used in attempts to parse human languages with computer software, but linguists don't generally use them when writing grammar-books covering human languages... AnonMoos (talk) 18:15, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

It's been a long loooong time back, but I remember seeing what I now know are context-free grammars for parts of English and German back in high school. Things like a sentence being composed of a noun phrase, a verb phrase, and an optional noun phrase, with a noun phrase being (e.g.) a noun, or an adjective followed by a noun phrase. It was by no means complete, but it covered the basic cases... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:39, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Those are what linguists call "toy grammars" (or "a grammar for a toy subset of English language" on the Chomsky hierarchy article), which only handle a very small fraction of the sentences in a language. Theoretical linguists devising a new syntactic theory are sometimes enamored with mathematical grammar frameworks, but this is much less common in the case of practical linguists writing a book-length description of the grammar of one specific language. Incorporating a simplified version of the Aspects of the Theory of Syntax transformational theory into language textbooks for high-schoolers or even junior-high-schoolers was a slightly strange educational fad of the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s which did not last. I doubt it did any harm, but I doubt that it did much good in accomplishing educational goals, either... AnonMoos (talk) 01:19, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Does any computer language have an infinite number of reserved words? <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 21:53, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

In computer languages variables are sort of like nouns and functions like verbs and you can create those at will (subject to implementation, memory, and programmer's comprehension.) RJFJR (talk) 13:43, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

In Cobol, as an example, "move A to B" and "move C to D" are grammatically equivalent. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:11, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

The method a linguist will use to describe the grammar of a language depends very much both on the background of the linguist and the intended audience. If that audience is formed by aspiring language learners, the vast majority of whom are not linguists, they had better use an informal description with paradigm tables and example sentences. AFAIK, no one has ever attempted to give a formal description of the full complexity of any natural language. A scholarly work like The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language runs up to 1178 pages, while the earlier A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language ends on page 1779. Neither can lay claim to being complete. Whether a sentence is grammatically acceptable is not always a simple yes-no issue; a native speaker's grammar sense may tell them a sentence is a bit off, but not really wrong.  --Lambiam 22:27, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you to everyone for the information. RJFJR (talk) 13:43, 23 March 2021 (UTC)