Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 April 7

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April 7

Welsh

Why are there so many mutations in welsh. It makes it too difficult.--79.76.239.84 (talk) 03:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, natural languages don't evolve in such a way as to be easy for nonnative speakers to learn. And native speakers don't have any difficulty getting the mutations right. The mutations serve a useful purpose for native speakers, providing a way to distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns, between subjects and objects, etc. +Angr 07:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Also see (?) lenition. I could have sworn I've seen this and things like it crop up quite a few times now. -- the Great Gavini 07:30, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

If you want something which can be seem even more exotic or difficult for learners whose native languages are typologically different, just look at Semitic roots... AnonMoos (talk) 09:09, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

If the question "why" is taken not as a complaint but as an actual inquiry about the cause, our article consonant mutation offers an explanation of sorts:

Historically, the Celtic initial mutations originated from progressive assimilation and sandhi phenomena between adjacent words. For example, the mutating effect of the conjunction a 'and' is due to the fact that it used to have the form *ak, and the final consonant influenced the following sounds (Ternes, Elmar. 1986. A Grammatical hierarchy of joining. In: Andersen, Henning. Sandhi phenomena in the languages of Europe. P.17-18).

This is, admittedly, pretty general and elliptic, but I couldn't found a more detailed account. By the way, I think Semitic roots are less weird to an English speaker than Celtic mutations: after all, English has (unproductive) internal vowel changes like foot-feet, goose-geese, write-wrote etc, but nowhere or almost nowhere in English grammar does the first consonant of the root simply change to a different one without any visible phonetic motivation. In English and many other languages, you normally expect the first consonant of a root to be the most stable thing in a word, or if it does change as in Norwegian ku /kʉ:/ 'cow' - kyr /çy:r/ 'cows', Nynorsk Norwegian koma /ˈko:mɑ/ 'to come' - kjem /çɛm:/ 'came', at least it is sort-of conditioned by another sound. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 14:37, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Since this is the language desk... The spelling is ku. Another consonant which behaves similarly in Norwegian is "g", as in gå (go), gikk (went); pronounced Gaw, yick. In contrast, in Spanish consonants occationally change to preserve the pronunciation, as in criticar, critiqué. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 15:35, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very much, I must have confused it with Danish and Swedish. I've fixed it now (no strikethrough, because the sentence is tricky enough to read as it is).--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

No im talking about the change in the first few letters of the welsh words, depending on what precedes them. I think its just a matter of laziness on the part of the welsh speakers. Am I correct?--79.76.239.84 (talk) 23:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, it's not laziness, or they probably wouldn't bother changing it at all (surely that's the easier way to do it, right?). The historical reason is that The 'y' that causes nasal mutation used to be pronounced 'yng'. When a word followed yng, it took on the nasal characteristic of the 'ng' at the end of 'yng'. So it was 'yng' + 'Bangor' = 'yng Mangor'. Then the 'ng' disappeared. Why say the 'ng' when the nasal change on the next word tells you that it's there? It's strange, sure enough, but not primarily to do with laziness. Steewi (talk) 00:45, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

This happens in English too, but in the opposite direction. You just don't notice it because the spelling doesn't change. "In Bangor", for example, is actually pronounced "im Bangor". Adam Bishop (talk) 02:39, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Hence the common pronunciation of my national capital as "KAM-bərə". -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ...

That's just straightforward nasal assimilation (changing /n/ to /m/ before /b/). In Welsh ym Mangor (not *yng Mangor) the /b/ itself changes into /m/ – and (speaking synchronically rather than historically) not for phonetic reasons, but for morphological reasons. It's really not laziness, as there are strict rules governing mutation that have to be followed in order for the phrase to be grammatically correct. Another use of the mutations is to distinguish between the words for "his" (ei), "her" (ei), and "their" (eu), which are all pronounced the same in Welsh: "his cat" is ei gath, "her cat" is ei chath, and "their cat" is eu cath, and the only difference between them is the mutation on the noun meaning "cat". That's not laziness. +Angr 12:45, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

strict rules governing mutation that have to be followed in order for the phrase to be grammatically correct:

This sounds fairly prescriptivist. Would descriptivists see it that way? -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 13:04, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes. I'm referring to the subconscious rules of grammar that all native speakers of a language follow, not prescriptive rules of what's "good" and "bad" grammar. (However, the descriptivist would point out that native speakers of Welsh don't always do the mutations in the way the grammar books say they should!) +Angr 13:28, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Say the following two phrases: 'Yn Cymru' (no mutations) and Yng Nghymru (nasal mutation). You will agree that the latter is very slightly easier to say, but the former is quite easy to say. Therefore the Welsh are being very lazy in pronunciation, but fastidious in their spelling of their simplified pronunciations. Weird?!

To a person trying to learn Welsh, words (such as 'Cymru') once learnt, then have to be relearnt (as Nghymru) with all the different possible mutations etc. Is this really sane? --79.76.236.198 (talk) 20:14, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I find yn Cymru easier to pronounce than yng Nghymru with its voiceless nasal, but either way, laziness has nothing to do with it. As for learning both Cymru and Nghymru, it's certainly no more insane than learning the vowel alternations that English has in pairs like finite/infinite, serene/serenity or the consonant alternations in pairs like electric/electricity, analogous/analogy, part/partial, shelf/shelves, etc. +Angr 20:24, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Ah, but you ignore the fact that, in your examples, the first parts of the word are the same and therefore quite recognizable and so I do not accept your argument. This is the difficulty with welsh mutations: unless you know the mutation being used, you cant look up the word in a dictionary!! This is why its difficult for learners (BTW I was a learner many years ago) -- which is what I said about 3 miles higher up this page.--79.76.236.198 (talk) 22:17, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Getting on famously

One of the meanings of 'famously' is 'to an unusual degree'. The only example I can think of where this meaning actually applies is where we’re talking about two people who’ve just met, they click instantly, and thereafter they 'get on famously'.

Are there other things one could do 'to an unusual degree', that might be described as being done 'famously'? I don’t believe there are any common ones, but maybe there’s an arcane example or two. If I’m right, why would the word 'famously' have this meaning in only one very specific context? Or is it a case of a meaning that was once used more widely, but has dwindled down to one last bastion? -- (JackofOz=) 202.142.129.66 (talk) 03:33, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

According to the OED, it was once used generally to mean "splendidly". It is attested in Shakespeare: "I say vnto you what he hath done Famouslie, he did it to that end"; and in Bulwer-Lytton: "I've contrived it famously". LANTZY^TALK 03:37, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, this simply comes from an older colloquial use of the adjective "famous" to mean "splendid" or "magnificent", as in the 1890 attestation "It is a famous place for a fair." The latest attestation is from 1960: "Both parties..were ready to claim a famous victory in the early hours of tomorrow." It seems to have been quite a common sense of the word. LANTZY^TALK 03:42, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

It probably derives from a something along the lines of 'in a way worthy of fame or praise' --Ludwigs2 05:37, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

"A famous victory" is back in vogue, at least among certain Australian sports commentators. When I heard them referring to something that had only just happened, literally 5 seconds ago, as "a famous victory", I wondered where they learned their English. But I now see they were more learnèd than I gave them credit for. -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 05:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

It may be that, like others of my generation, they were exposed to the poem by Robert Southey that uses the phrase repeatedly. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 11:26, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Maybe. And there's no denying these guys (they're mostly guys) know their English - after all, they've created so much of it from scratch.  :) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:38, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Hebrew and Arabic

A lot of Arabic words seem to have very similar Hebrew equivalents. I have also heard native Arabic speakers say they can understand Hebrew without having studied it. Notwithstanding the issue of the many mutually unintelligible varieties of Arabic, are Hebrew and Arabic mutually intelligible? Rimush (talk) 10:53, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

As you say, and as is mentioned in our article Semitic languages, Arabic itself is divided into several dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, so it is unlikely that an Arabic monoglot with no prior exposure to the rather more different Hebrew would be able to understand much of it. That said, the two languages are related and share the 3-consonant Semitic root system which probably aids mutual intelligibility more that would be the case with similarly related languages that do not have this feature. Also, Hebrew has (since its 20th-century revival from a liturgical to a living language) probably been influenced to some degree by the Arabic spoken alongside it. The most important factor, I would suggest, is that most speakers of Hebrew and some speakers of Arabic will have been exposed to the other language for most of their lives in the flesh and in the media even without having formally studied it, and will therefore both consciously and unconsciously have learned it to some extent through the usual natural - as opposed to academic - language acquisition processes. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 11:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

The phenomenon of diglossia in Arabic could also aid an Arabic speaker with a good command of Classical Arabic in understanding Hebrew. Classical Arabic, based on a version of the language spoken nearly 1500 years ago, is much closer to Hebrew (likewise based on an ancient language) than are any of the modern Arabic vernaculars. A speaker used to making the mental leap from his native vernacular to Classical or Standard Arabic would only need to leap a bit further (metaphorically) to grasp Hebrew. Marco polo (talk) 14:56, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to call you on that, Marco. On what evidence do you say that Classical Arabic is much closer to Hebrew than any of the modern Arabic vernaculars? I can't think of any obvious ways in what that will be true. Structurally, Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew are probably a bit closer to each other than either is to the other's modern versions, but even there I'm not sure that much similarity would be noticeable to the untrained speaker. --ColinFine (talk) 23:13, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

---

Arabic and Hebrew have a number of structural similarities which would make it much easier for an Arabic speaker to learn Hebrew than to learn a completely unrelated language, but they're not particularly mutually comprehensible when presented "raw' (i.e. an Arabic-speaker who knows no Hebrew and a Hebrew speaker who knows no Arabic would have an extremely limited ability to convey information purely verbally). On the other hand, some words are quite similar between the two languages, and if an Arabic speaker can learn to kind of mentally compensate for certain historical changes (such as the Canaanite shift, etc.), then it would be fairly easy to pick up a number of Hebrew words.

As for Classical Arabic vs. colloquial Arabic, there are a few details where Classical Arabic is more similar to Hebrew than most colloquial dialects are (such as the use of the consonantal root r + glottal stop + y to mean "to see"), but overall, many colloquial Arabic dialects have greater structural similarity to Hebrew than Classical Arabic does (e.g. absence of the dual, absence of distinctively feminine plural verb forms, suppression of case distinctions, etc.), due to quasi-parallel evolution or "drift". -- AnonMoos (talk) 05:49, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

reminds me of English/German; i.e. if you know both, you can see the great similarities in retrospect, but knowing one language doesn't help understand the other very much, without a lot of slow repetition, and even then only to a limited degree.Gzuckier (talk) 06:03, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Fluffy McFluffersons

Hi, where does the miniature snowclone formula of "Fluffy McFluffersons" come from? --Kjoonlee 12:36, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

(!) Google doesn't bring up a lot of results for "McFluffersons", but does a little better for something called "McFluffenstein" which could be related (?). Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea what either of these things are... Some sort of reduplication thing, maybe? -- the Great Gavini 14:22, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

The question, I think, is not about the specific example but about a pattern — which I've more often seen in a form like "Grumpy McFrownypants", where the content-words are distinct but related. —Tamfang (talk) 04:58, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

"The --- that dared to be"?

Hi, I heard a long time ago, of something in mythology, or books, or something, to which I have forgotten exactly where and in which context I had heard it. BUT I heard of a "something" that dared to be. I thought it was "the one" that dared, but no matter.

I have searched fruitlessly through google. and just hoped if anybody out there knew the exact quote and where it came from, although my description isn't all too helpful.

My initial idea was I had heard it from somewhere in mythology, or perhaps an old religious tale of "The one that dared to be"??

Thank you in advance for all your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.47.123.128 (talk) 14:32, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Almost anything is possible. What immediately came to my mind, though, is a famous "dare not": Lord Alfred Douglas's 1892 poem Two Loves ends with the line that refers to pederasty as "the love that dare not speak its name". Bielle (talk) 15:07, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Did it just dare to be, or did it dare to be [adjective]? Aaadddaaammm (talk) 15:12, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

The BNC, the COCA, and the Time corpus all yield no results for the [*nn1*] that dared to [vbi]. But I'm not so used to using these Web sites, so that might not be the correct syntax.—msh210℠ 18:17, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

You might have more luck with the [*nn1*] that who dared to [vbi]. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:54, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

No, none. It might also help if the OP answered Adam's question.—msh210℠ 06:11, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Who Dares ,Wins perhapshotclaws 16:07, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Conjugating verbs

Why do many languages conjugate verbs to agree with the subject? It seems like redundant information since you already know the number from the subject being pluralized or not. Some English dialects (Black English, Hillbilly English) don't do it ("they is going ..."), so it's clearly not necessary. Thanks for any insight. --Sean 15:11, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

There's some discussion of the usefulness of redundancy in language at Redundancy (linguistics). +Angr 15:15, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

In languages without fixed word order, the agreement is vital in helping to determine which part of the sentence is the subject.—Emil J. 15:30, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with that. Even without fixed word order, the verb agreement would still often be redundant (or useless); for example if both subject and object are singular. Surely marking the subject or object would be the only way to be certain. Matt Deres (talk) 16:14, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Many times the agreement is redundant, yes. So what? Many times it isn't. I doubt you can find a grammatical feature which is never redundant.—Emil J. 16:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I was going to say. It would be strange to only use the agreement suffix when the subject and the object have different numbers, wouldn't it? Once we accept that subject marking is helpful in some cases, it should come as no surprise that it is extended to others.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:53, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

You said that "the agreement is vital in helping to determine which part of the sentence is the subject". I am merely saying that subject-verb agreement only helps in the cases where the subject is singular and object is plural (or vice versa). So how "vital" could it possibly be? Matt Deres (talk) 18:18, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, so it's not always vital, just sometimes helpful. But one shouldn't underestimate the significance of "sometimes-helpfulness". Also note that many languages mark more features of the subject than just its number - for example, gender / noun class. This can enhance the disambiguating effect even more.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:15, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, many (perhaps most) languages with verbal subject agreement are "pro-drop"; in other words, they don't express the subject with a separate word, so the ending is not redundant but necessary: e.g. Latin amo instead of ego amo. Once both become obligatory, as they have in the Germanic languages (seen already in Old Norse and Old English, but not yet in Gothic), agreement is arguably likely to wither away (albeit at glacier speed), finally leading to the near loss of agreement in English (and complete loss in mainland Scandinavian). Or vice versa, it may be that the very transition to non-pro-drop in Germanic was the result of the decay of agreement morphology, which in turn resulted from phonetic and phonological processes.

Finally, I think that redundancy in general is useful, because while it does pose requirements on the speaker, it makes things easier to comprehend for the listener: the more "clues" signal the same thing, the more likely you are to understand even under adverse conditions or with minimal concentration.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:53, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

As Mr. 91.148 has pointed out, in some languages, such as Basque, Spanish and Catalan, the subject is optional and, if used, adds emphasis. For example, if someone tells you: "¿Has hecho los deberes?" (Have you done your homework?) you'd answer "Sí, los he hecho." (Yes, I have.). But if that person thinks that you might have copied your homework they could ask: "¿Has hecho tú los deberes?" and you would reply: "Pues claro que los he hecho yo." (something like "Of course it was me who did it."). --Belchman (talk) 17:12, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Subject-verb agreement is far from being the only "redundant" type of marking in natural language. Some languages have object agreement (this is true of Kurdish and some Bantu languages, see e.g. [1]), some have possessive agreement (most notably the Turkic languages), some have a small amount of case marking even though they have fixed word order (English and all the Romance languages, anyone?), some have double negatives (French), and I'm sure there are more things I'm not thinking of right now. This is just what languages do. rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:39, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

And noun-adjective agreement, of course. And double/triple definiteness marking in adjective-noun phrases in most of Scandinavian (to a smaller extent double definiteness marking in German, Dutch and Danish).--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:22, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

And subject, object and indirect object indexing in verbs in Georgian. And double definiteness in Hebrew (as well as optional object marking. And ... --ColinFine (talk) 23:17, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

...And Sumerian optional verbal agreement with the comitative, ablative and terminative participants (besides the equally optional agreement with the dative one and the obligatory agreement with the ergative and absolutive ones).--91.148.159.4 (talk) 14:13, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

I have taken the liberty of adding a wikilink to the Sumerian language in your reply, Mr. 91.148. --Belchman (talk) 17:50, 8 April 2010 (UTC)