Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 December 5

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 5

East African words

In an introduction by Mike Resnick, I read (punctuation changed):

In 1890, not a single East African language had a word for "wheel," because no one had ever seen one.

[...]

There is no word for ``woman´´ in Swahili [...] The closest one can come to it is "manamouki," a word that means "female property," and equally describes women, mares, sows, and ewes.

Is Resnick right?

Wiktionary has wikt:mwanamke ("woman") with etymology:

mwana (“daughter”) +‎ mke (“wife”)

and wikt:mwanamume ("man") with etymology:

mwana (“son”) +‎ mume (“husband”)

Where did East African languages take their words for "wheel" from? Swahili wikt:gurudumu is said to be from Persian. -- Error (talk) 01:24, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

His second assertion is implausible for any human language, and doesn't make too much sense for Swahili, where words referring to humans have different class marker prefixes than words referring to non-humans. AnonMoos (talk) 03:56, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

The Wiktionary etymologies are circular, anyway, where "mwana" rather means "child" and mke and mume otherwise are considered contractions... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 04:07, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Anyway, I turned up my copy of "Teach Yourself Swahili", and from what I can deduce from perusing it, the basic stems meaning female and male are -ke and -ume, but of course these cannot occur as actual words unless a class-marker prefix is added. If a non-human class prefix is added, then you get the words which appear in the phrases utu uke, meaning "womanhood" and utu ume meaning "manhood" (where the class prefix has apparently merged with the stem-initial vowel in this last form). If you add the human class prefix, then you get mke meaning "wife" (plural wake) and mume meaning "husband" (plural waume). The words meaning "man" and "woman" are actually compounds, as has been seen above, but I don't see how things are circular -- mke and mume don't seem to be "contractions" in any meaningful sense... AnonMoos (talk) 19:35, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Our article Wheel#History strongly suggests wheels have been used at least in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia for many centuries, so I doubt Resnick's premise. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:48, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

One of the references says: "One of the great technological puzzles of Sub-Saharan African economic history is that wheeled transportation was barely used prior to the colonial period. Instead, head porterage was the main method of transportation." Not as radical as Resnick but it points where he might had taken the idea from. --Error (talk) 15:55, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

wikt:Wheel says that the Igbo translation is wiilcode: ibo promoted to code: ig . It does not appear in wikt:wiil and Igbo is West African, so I don't know the etymology. Maybe Resnick is quite confused. He did publish several stories with a Kikuyu theme, though. --Error (talk) 15:47, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Given the extensive trade links coastal East Africa had with the outside world (e.g. the Arabian peninsula and further across the Indian ocean), I'd have thought it unlikely that no East African would have seem one, even if wheels weren't in use in East Africa itself prior to the date given. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

It does look like a borrowing from English wheel or Afrikaans wiel, if the information given is correct. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:15, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I am not an expert by any means but I have done a bit of reading and I think that we need to consider the fact that most East African cultural groups did not raise what we would consider to be draft animals. They may have raised pigs, goats, dogs, poultry and so on, but not cattle, horses or donkeys. In large part, this was due to tsetse fly infestations, which spread diseases that are particularly dangerous to large draft animals. Tsetse flies are common thoughout Central and East Africa but they are much more abundant in some ecological niches and much less common in other areas. Cattle are by far the most susceptible domesticated species. The Maasai people are a counterexample who are well known as cattle herders, and to them, cattle equals wealth and prestige. They carefully maintain their herds in areas with relatively few tsetse flies. If they used castrated male cattle to pull ox carts for long distance trade, then they would inevitably pass through river valley woodlands where tsetse flies are most abundant and the oxen would be infected with the several diseases spread by tsetse flies that could then place their main herds at greatly increased risk of infection. Instead, they confined their herds to grazing lands with the lowest infection rates. No draft animals means no carts and no wagons and no wheels, and no need to discuss wheeled vehicles until the modern era. Cullen328 (talk) 08:19, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Just because a culture doesn't usually encounter an object doesn't mean they can't have a word for it. Ireland famously has no snakes, yet there is an Irish word for 'snake' (nathair, which is not a loanword but inherited all the way from Proto-Indo-European). It also has a word for 'sun' (grian) despite that object being purely the stuff of legend and rumor in Ireland. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:53, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but the Irish traveled and interacted widely and were colonized by a country that had snakes and studied a holy book that discusses vipers and other serpents. See Serpents in the Bible. The Saltair na Rann told the Adam and Eve story over 1000 years ago. As for the sun, I once spent a week in Ireland, and actually saw that celestial object several times while there. Cullen328 (talk) 17:02, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Exactly. No one, in any culture, has ever encountered a unicorn, or a dragon, and yet those words exist... --Jayron32 19:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I even got sun-burnt in Belfast. --Error (talk) 10:01, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I got that from Guns, Germs and Steel. The Wheel article mentions that American cultures did have toys with wheels but did not apply them for transportation. Pre-Columbian American did not have draft animals, but they could have used wheelbarrows in their massive construction projects. I understand that the Andes or Lake Tenochtitlan are not conductive to having flat paved roads, but elsewhere? Perhaps, carts are a prerequisite for wheelbarrows.

About Africa, it is puzzling that "wheeled transportation was barely used".

--Error (talk) 10:01, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I noticed that several of the African translations of "wheel" in Wiktionary are defined in their articles as "tire". I wonder if their definitions are too narrow or the translation section too broad. Wiktionary does not seem very trustworthy for African languages. --Error (talk) 10:01, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Greek transliteration question

Has anyone ever used a caron for macron-plus-acute when transliterating ancient Greek, yielding something like this?

ε = e

έ = é

η = ē

ή = ě

ῆ = ê Lazar Taxon (talk) 18:37, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

How would one transliterate ἢ ... ἤ ("either ... or")^[1] ?  --Lambiam 02:29, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, I'm kinda envisioning that this approach would dispense with the acute/grave distinction like 20th-century Katharevousa did. More broadly, I'm just curious if anyone's managed to adapt polytonic Greek into Latin without the visual clunkiness of things like ḗ. Lazar Taxon (talk) 08:37, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Few questions

1. Why does Dutch not have aspiration?
2. Why do Germanic languages have aspiration?
3. Why does Estonian use short scale in large numerals but Finnish uses long scale, despite being related?
4. Why does British English no longer use long scale?
5. Why does English not use comma as decimal separator?
6. Are there any verbs in English which get both vowel change and ending -ed in spelling?
7. Is there any language where numbers 10-19 are formed exactly same way as numbers 20-99, i.e. 11 literally "onety-one", rather than "eleven", "oneteen" or "ten and one"?
8. Why does Dutch lack [g] sound while English and German have it? Has a sound shift not occurred in Dutch but occurred in English and German? --40bus (talk) 19:09, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

7. Japanese and Chinese should have the constructions ten-one for 11 and two-ten-one for 21. I'm not sure if that counts. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:13, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Re #6: If you consider -t equivalent to -ed (both are forms of the weak verb past-tense ending), then keep, kept is one example. Deor (talk) 19:18, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

7. Esperanto dek unu 11, dudek tri 23. Probably most auxlangs (at least most Esperantidos) follow a similar pattern. --Error (talk) 19:55, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

7. Likewise in Turkish. 11 is on bir, 21 is yirmi bir, 91 is doksan bir.  --Lambiam 02:16, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Turkish doesn't really seem to have any inherent order for the nomenclature of its tens, though... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 04:51, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean that there is no correspondence between the names for the numbers from 1 through 9, and the names for the corresponding multiples of ten? That is indeed the case for 1 through 5, but then 6 = altı, 60 = altmış; 7 = yedi, 70 = yetmiş; 8 = sekiz, 80 = seksen; and 9 = dokuz, 90 = doksan.  --Lambiam 03:14, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

What I meant was that in Japanese (which might have borrowed its system from the Chinese, anyway), 10 is jū, 20 is ni-jū, 30 is san-jū etc., and in English there's a fairly regular pattern with a -ty-ending, but in Turkish, the system seems pretty random and it's hard to spot a pattern. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:50, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

3. Short scale and long scale vis-a-vis genetic relation have really nothing to do with each other. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:24, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

5. I thought British English does use it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:50, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

5. In the UK, the interpunct was traditionally used as a decimal separator, and often still is in handwriting. Commas are used in some European countries, Italy for example. Alansplodge (talk) 11:47, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

(5) A bit out of date old chap. It was all getting a bit confusing, so we went with the flow, London being an international finance centre and all that. The British Government officially changed to the French and American system in 1974, but I believe that the City had been using it for a while before that. Alansplodge (talk) 22:29, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

@Alansplodge I'm a bit confused by your reply above, which seems to be addressing the OP's question no 4. Bazza (talk) 10:03, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Quite right, the perils of late night editing. Thanks for spotting that. Alansplodge (talk) 11:47, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

"Why" questions about natural languages are generally unanswerable. Why does the Basque word for "dog" start with the same four letters as txakoli ? Why is the word order in French une vaste étendue ("a vast expanse", adjective precedes the noun as in English) but une étendue immense ("an immense expanse", adjective follows the noun)? Why does Finnish have fifteen noun cases; why not fourteen or sixteen?  --Lambiam 02:08, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

5. The article to read is Decimal separator. Bazza (talk) 10:03, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

6. bleed/bled, breed/bred, feed/fed, flee/fled, lead/led --212.235.125.124 (talk) 16:46, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

40Bus -- The basic output of Grimm's Law was that Indo-European /bʰ/, /dʰ/, /gʰ/ became Germanic /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/. However, in proto-Germanic or early common Germanic, these became stops after a nasal, and also when geminated: /mb/, /bb/, /nd/, /dd/, [ŋg], /gg/. At some point, /β/ and /ð/ became stops /b/ and /d/ when word-initial, but /ɣ/ did not. In West Germanic, all /ð/ became /d/. (A new [ð] later developed as a voiced allophone of /θ/.) In Old English, surviving /ɣ/ was split into palatalized and non-palatalized allophones [ɣʲ] and [ɣ]. Fairly early on in OE, [ɣʲ] merged with /j/, while [ɣ] eventually became /g/ word-initially and /w/ between vowels medially (and was sometimes devoiced to [x] word-finally), while /gg/ and [ŋg] remained (though they became affricates when palatalized). I don't know the details leading to Dutch, but it seems that there was no palatalization split, word-initial /ɣ/ simply remained, and [ŋg] always became /ŋ/. (Not sure what happened to /gg/...) AnonMoos (talk) 19:32, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Apparently /gg/ degeminated, e.g. brug from OD brugga, wig from OD *weggi --82.166.199.42 (talk) 09:48, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but it's not entirely clear why the result of the degemination of a stop should become a fricative... AnonMoos (talk) 23:20, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

"he should have drank more milk"

Which one is grammatically correct in English?

1. He should have drank more milk.

2. He should have drunk more milk.

(This is not a homework question. It came up in an online forum[2].) Helian James (talk) 20:53, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

'Drunk' is correct. --Viennese Waltz 21:18, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Helian James (talk) 22:08, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Resolved

Helian James (talk) 22:08, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Honey, I Have Shrunk the Kids. Alansplodge (talk) 22:33, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Who'd a thunk it? --Wrongfilter (talk) 22:59, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

"DRANK is widely used as a past participle in speech by educated persons and must be considered an alternate standard form" (Random House Unabridged). Nardog (talk) 00:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Don't let Jack hear that!  --Lambiam 01:47, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Too late. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:06, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I thought I was crazy when I found "drank" to be grammatical and "drunk" to be ungrammatical. Good to know that I'm not the only one out there using this alternate form. Helian James (talk) 04:50, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

You're certainly not the only one, but you ought to be aware that it's widely considered inferior. The form less likely to draw attention in formal-register discourse is drunk. --Trovatore (talk) 18:14, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

The word "drunk" might be universally accepted as the correct usage in this context if it did not also mean "intoxicated by excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages". Now, I will pour myself a shot of whiskey. Cullen328 (talk) 05:04, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Neither is ungrammatical; though there may be dialectical differences when each is used. Cullen's note is important as well. "I am drunk" means "I am intoxicated on alcohol". "I am drank" only makes sense if you're on some really wild hallucinogens. --Jayron32 12:07, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

An ad for an expensive whiskey might show a bottle as claiming. "I am drunk by connoisseurs".  --Lambiam 12:53, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.” --Viennese Waltz 14:23, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I'm not as think as you drunk I am! -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 17:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

It's okay ociffer, I've only had this many beers ✌️ --Jayron32 18:18, 6 December 2022 (UTC)