Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 May 28

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May 28

Amy Poehler

Does her surname really mean "football player" in German? Similarly Frederik Pohl, Robert von Pöhlmann, etc. TBased on wiktionary translation of pöhlen as "kick" etc, but maybe there is something else. Thanks. 2601:648:8200:970:0:0:0:752 (talk) 08:15, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

This [1] and this [2] website (the latter citing "Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press" as its source) describe it as being derived from a Low German word cognate with English "pool" (High German "Pfühl"), i.e. "somebody who lived by a pond/pool". The dialect word for playing football seems to be from an unrelated root, cognate with English "pole" (High German "Pfahl"), according to Wiktionary. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:46, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I may try to add the other translation to Wiktionary. 2601:648:8200:970:0:0:0:752 (talk) 01:20, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

tell me about it

I'm not a native speaker, so I'm probably wrong, but I do have two or maybe three questions about the expression wikt:tell me about it:

1. according to the wiktionary it is "Used to express agreement and sympathy with the previous speaker's statement" - is that so? I always thought it was intrinsically sarcastic and is nothing to do with "sympathy" at all?
2. the earliest quotation/reference is from 1996. Is the expression that young? (It "feels" much older than, say, "I know, right?" which is def. 2000ff).
3. bonus question: is that American English only or would a Brit say that too? It feels vaguely AE to my Sprachgefühl. "Was du nicht sagst" would be the German equivalent, strictly ironic/sarcastic btw. But then again I'm not a native speaker. "you don't say!" (used either to express surprise or lack of surprise in a humorous and slightly unkind way says the Cambridge Dictionary) seems more BE to me.

--2A01:C22:3408:2100:956D:E115:C639:DDE8 (talk) 13:02, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

BrEng speaker here. Yes, it's sympathetic. Yes, it's been used for many years. Yes, a Brit would say it. --Viennese Waltz 13:25, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Could you specify "for many years"? Has it been around for centuries or since 1950 or 1970 or whatever?

(It may seem odd to non-native speakers, but many expressions in English come with a coined-at- and sell-by-date that you have to learn: I only learned from the 3rd edition of Fowler's "Modern English Usage" that the Nike slogan "Go for it", which would have seemed quite transparent and unproblematic to me, didn't make much/any sense to BrEngl speakers at the time (1985 or so). --77.183.168.226 (talk) 13:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC))

Well, I don't know how long people have been saying it for. I'm not in the first flush of youth, I would say it has been around since at least the 1970s, possibly earlier. --Viennese Waltz 13:47, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I would put it a decade or two later, but without any evidence. I left school and started work in the 1970s and don't recall its use then, but who knows? I strongly suspect it came to us from US film and TV. Alansplodge (talk) 10:53, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

(sliding off topic and into the land of anecdotes, as I often do) Since you mentioned German, 2A01:C22: In Swiss German there is the phrase "Säg nüt!", literally "Say nothing!" with a similar affirmative/confirming meaning as the English "say no more" perhaps, in any event without any touch of sarcasm or irony. Years ago, I lived in an eight-person "WG", and one of our house-mates was German. As we tend to do when speaking Hochdeutsch, one of us always translated this phrase literally ("Sag nichts!"), and she was quite perplexed as to why she shouldn't say anything (until someone finally explained). ---Sluzzelin talk 13:47, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I happen to be half Swabian myself, so I'm confident you could decode the phrase "A Wa" when intoned in a certain way as it was intended to ...--2A01:C22:3408:2100:956D:E115:C639:DDE8 (talk) 14:07, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I alluded to a rather risky joke (told on a website) to a friend and she responded "Tell me about it!" It's an expression of interest equivalent to the (metaphorical) "Give me the dope!". There's no sarcasm involved. 84.9.101.54 (talk) 14:32, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

That's not the idiomatic usage being discussed here. --JBL (talk) 14:48, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

AmEng speaker. The phrase has been used at least as long as I can remember (born in the mid 1970s). While it is sympathetic, the most common usage I am familiar with carries a bit of the same meaning as "you're preaching to the choir". The one saying it is not only agreeing and sympathizing with the other person, but also saying that they have experienced it. Possibly even with the connotation that this personal experience should be well known to the other. For example, a young man who has just had an argument with his girlfriend might say to another man "Women, I just can't understand them". At which point the second man, who is older and three times divorced, would reply "Tell me about it." --Khajidha (talk) 15:56, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Since BE and AmE speakers agree it's sympathetic and non-sarcastic, the closest German equivalent probably is Wem sagst du das! which also implies agreement, sympathy and own experience. –Austronesier (talk) 17:39, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it: (as an ironic rejoinder, esp. expressing rueful agreement or understanding) ‘I'm well aware of that’, ‘I agree’; ‘you don't have to tell me’, tags it as "originally U.S.", and has its first citation from the 1976 novel Ordinary People by American writer Judith Guest. Of course it could have been used in speech before the first published citation. CodeTalker (talk) 19:21, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Almost any positive expression can also be used ironically.  --Lambiam 07:13, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

See also Why does “tell me about it” not mean “tell me about it”?. Alansplodge (talk) 10:56, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Languages that differ by gender

(Please excuse the clumsy heading, my topic is hard to encapsulate in a few words.)

Are there languages where the ways men and women speak (or write) is markedly different?

One example I have noticed is the style of Japanese in historical movies. Women speak in soft almost musical tones while men's gruff growling speech sounds as if every utterance is a command to boil some unfortunate peasant family to death.

I remember this from The Last Samurai and the Shogun series, and even to some extent in Tora, Tora, Tora though it did not feature any Japanese women. Modern Japanese has lost this gender difference or it has at least become far less noticable. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:05, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Genderlect redirects to our article on Language and gender which mentions a couple of examples, including those listed in the subsection gender-specific vocabulary, e.g. ---Sluzzelin talk 15:10, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Sluzzelin, Thanks for the link. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:14, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Dodger67 -- What you mentioned (differences in intonation and speech emphasis) is not what linguists usually have in mind when they think of formalized men's speech and women's speech. Rather, they refer to differences in pronunciation, morphology, or vocabulary between differently-gendered speakers. Japanese has some differences in pronouns and sentence-final particles between men's and women's speech (about 20 years ago, it was scandalous to many when young women started using the formerly masculine 1st person pronoun "boku"), and women traditionally used a higher-level of polite forms and honorifics (such as the noun prefix o- etc).

The most famous example of differences between men's and women's speech is the Garifuna language (a past form of the language, or what past scholars thought the language was, rather than the language as it's commonly spoken today).. AnonMoos (talk) 19:48, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Our article Language and gender might contain some information relevant to Doger67's interests. There are/were also writing systems used in China and Japan exclusively by women (and generally unintelligible if not unknown to literate men of those cultures): they are linked from Women's script. (The Korean Hangul alphabet is also linked from that page because, when first introduced to replace an older system, male traditionalists scorned it and women were more enthusiastic about taking it up.) I dimly recall reading about at least one other women-only script/language, probably on the blog Language Log, but I can't remember any useful details, and may be mistaken. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.121.163.176 (talk) 20:05, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

In certain past historical eras, women commonly wrote Japanese using all hiragana (a small set of syllable signs), while men wrote Japanese using Chinese characters, or for their more serious or literary efforts they actually wrote in the Chinese language. At that time it was mostly considered inappropriate for Japanese women to learn Chinese writing or langague (just as in Europe through the 19th century, it was usually considered inappropriate for women to learn Latin or Greek). But I don't think that hiragana was any great secret, or known to women only... AnonMoos (talk) 20:23, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Russian does this to a small degree. I refer to the past tense singular of verbs, which differ by the gender of the referent. If the I, you or she is female, there's a different ending compared to when the referent is male. Он поехал (he went) but Она поехала (she went).

A better example for this question is a male and a female in conversation. He: Я поехал (I went). She: Я тоже поехала (I also went). I have no idea what the advent of the transgender culture has done to this convention. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:12, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

But there's no variation in past plural tense, present tense, or future tense (to the extent that it exists). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:25, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

The Russian example is historically a participle, which agrees by gender with the subject, that's not that uncommon, at least in Slavic and Romance languages, though it may be perceived differently in modern Russian due to the lack of the auxiliary verb. Agreement (linguistics) suggests this is less common with verbs even in languages were grammatical gender plays a significant role. I'm mostly familiar only with a subset of indoeuropean languages (aka biased as hell) and Japanese seems to have some particularities in this reguard (there is an article Gender differences in Japanese). As for intonation I'm familiar with a dialect with remarkable pitch accents, which seems to be also the case for Japanese, and women generally sound a lot more "musical", not sure how much this has to do with common differences in voice between genders and sound perception, genderlects and social roles or simple prejudice, or if this particular aspect was subject to much study. Personuser (talk) 19:14, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

English in the Marvel Movie Universe

In the Marvel Movie Universe, Earth doesn't have the ability to travel to, or communicate with other planets.

However, English is also spoken fluently by races that do not live on Earth. This happens most often in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 1. Ignoring the fictional origins for Peter Quill / Starlord, is there a linguistic theory or process that accounts for the exact same language to develop independently (and at the exact same rate) on two planets that never contacted each other before or is this just a case of "movie magic"?

DarklitShadow (talk) 22:03, 28 May 2021 (UTC) ]

Movies with English-speaking unreachably-distant alien cultures have been around since at least the early 1950s. Either nobody had the brains to question such an impossibility, or it was all part of the suspension of disbelief that is a huge element of "movie magic". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:14, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

The Star Wars films take place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." and yet most of the main characters speak English except the Wookie and one of the robots. Casablanca has only one American character yet all the other characters speak accented English. This is commonplace in Hollywood. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 22:34, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

The Clan of the Cave Bear (film) is set about 50,000 years ago and the characters speak English. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 23:06, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps the earliest example was the 1936 Flash Gordon Film serial, which featured the English-speaking Ming the Merciless, ruler of the planet Mongo. Alansplodge (talk) 10:44, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

@Cullen328: Do they? It has been a few decades since I saw it, but I don't remember any English in that film at all. Characters mostly spoke through grunts and hand gestures, IIRC. I don't remember English being used at all, except as subtitles for the audience. --Jayron32 13:49, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Correct Jayron; "Dialogue is conducted mostly through a form of sign language which is translated for the audience with subtitles" according to our article. Alansplodge (talk) 18:30, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

To spell it out explicitly for DarklitShadow, of course we're not expected to believe that cultures with no (previous) connection to Earth actually speak 20/21st-century English or any other terrestrial language. It would be more realistic (to a limited value of realistic, see below), for them to speak (or otherwise utilise) some (invented) language (not necessarily sound-based) unintelligible to us, and either "translate" it with subtitles, or establish that some magic or futuristic automatic translation device (which is scientifically implausible) is being used (as is supposedly the case in Star Trek and Doctor Who, for example). However, this is somewhat cumbersome and may detract from the flow of the narrative. It is therefore a globally understood convention that, for dramatic convenience, aliens are presented as speaking English (or other language of the film's audience). Amusingly, aliens in my youth and before were often given an air of 'otherness' by having them speak in unnaturally perfect grammatical English.

This is really a subset of the fact that, in films/TV, most aliens are depicted as much more humanoid that is likely to be the case in reality, assuming (as I personally do) that intelligent extraterrestrials actually do exist somewhere else in the real universe. This is because, for financial and practical reasons, most alien characters in films/TV are played by human actors using makeup and limited prosthetics, and also because if 'alien' characters were depicted as truly alien and non-humanoid, we would either feel no emotional bond to them (as is necessary for sympathetic characters) or would be actively repulsed. This would not make for good box office.

For one honorable exception to this trope, see the film Arrival. No doubt other respondents may have further suggestions. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.121.163.176 (talk) 21:12, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

The OP may find this page useful. Matt Deres (talk) 02:24, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Bah, technology. I swear by my Babel fish.  --Lambiam 17:22, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

English word-ending [tət], [tɘt], [tɨt], or similar

English lects classify sounds in different ways: depending on the lect, "defeated" might be better thought of as /dəˈfitəd/, /dɨˈfitɨd/, or something else. For simplicity's sake, let's say the vowel is a realization of /ə/.

Do any English words end in (unstressed) /tət/?

I can't think why they shouldn't, yet it does somehow seem slightly odd to me. I can't think of any examples, and wonder if such a word-ending is ruled out by some phonotactic rule of which I have no conscious awareness. -- Hoary (talk) 23:08, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I know this doesn't quite fit, but all I could think of. In some of the clips I just listened to, the last syllable of wrentit, bushtit, and (to a lesser degree) tomtit sounded unstressed, close to /tət/. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:22, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. This would I think be /tɪt/, which for me is very close to the syllable in question (which for me happens to contain, I think, [ɨ]; and certainly not a schwa). -- Hoary (talk) 23:35, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

No, I think you're right. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:45, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Well actually I think that you are. The sources seem to agree that [ɪ] is one thing and the vowel that appears twice in "defeated" is another, and that these are different phonemes; but in my own English (as I hazily understand it), they're the same; so if I were describing the Hoary idiolect, I'd write /dɪˈfitɪd/. But I can hardly believe that I know better than do an array of writers with PhDs in related matters: it's more likely that I have a certain "blindness" not shared by others, or that my idiolect is an outlier. -- Hoary (talk) 00:26, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

No idea how to put it in IPA, but I don't hear any vowel repeated in "defeated". The word sounds like "duh-fee-ted", "duh" as in "well, duh", "fee" as in "cost for services", and "ted" as in "Ted Koppel". --Khajidha (talk) 01:22, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

That resembles [dəfitɛd]. The last vowel rather surprises me. -- Hoary (talk) 01:39, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Octet (computing) maybe? 2601:648:8200:970:0:0:0:752 (talk) 01:25, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Depending on where one comes from, that would be /ɑkˈtɛt/, /ɒkˈtet/, or similar, I think. The second syllable is stressed, I believe. -- Hoary (talk) 01:39, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

I found apostate, variably pronounced with unstressed /teɪt/ or /tət/, so perhaps other ones ending in -tate. Orcaguy | Write me | Mon œuvre 03:48, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Interesting! I hadn't known of the pronunciation with schwa, but Merriam-Webster agrees with you, so I sit corrected. ¶ At this point (now that I have evidence that my suspicions are unjustified), I might as well say why I raised the question. It's a commonplace in introductory morphology texts that when confronted with allomorphy the (novice?) morphologist should start by guessing that one of the allomorphs is the default and the others are only used when the default is ruled out by phonotactics. A common illustrative example is "past tense 'ed'" of English: the reader is invited to pause and work out which among /əd/, /t/, and /d/ is the default. (i) Imagine that it's /əd/. Of course we don't pronounce "fenced" or "loaned" in this way, but we could. Therefore there'd be no reason for the allomorphs; therefore the default is not /əd/. (ii) Imagine that it's /t/. Of course we don't say "loaned" in this way, but we easily could (cf "don't"). And we can't say "doubted" in this way (with a word-final doubled /t/); but to fix this, all we need is an epenthetic vowel (for /ˈdawtət/): no need to voice the final consonant as well. (iii) Imagine that it's /d/. [I'll leave this to you.] All very plausible -- until today, when I suddenly thought: No, /ˈdawtət/ (even as, say, an unrelated noun) doesn't just sound unfamiliar; it actually sounds rather wrong. But if there are example of word-final /tət/, it must be right. And so I racked my tired brain for other, unrelated examples, but failed. Orcaguy brings a real example. -- Hoary (talk) 04:34, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

I would use the different pronunciations for "apostate" differently. If I'm understanding the IPA right, /teɪt/ (this rhymes with "ate", correct?) would be the noun form and /tət/ would be the adjective form.--Khajidha (talk) 20:32, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure I've heard "intestate" spoken like "apostate" above. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:30, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes! I have too. I hadn't thought of that one. Thank you, JackofOz. -- Hoary (talk) 12:54, 30 May 2021 (UTC)