Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 December 24

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December 24

Cod-Wagnerian, what does it mean?

I am doing some exploratory research on the author China Mieville and am currently parsing through his theories on literature and politics. Admittedly some of this is a bit above my head and a quote in a book chapter on his New Crobuzon novels has particularly left me scratching my head. The bit talks of Mieville's disdain for Tolkienesque fantasy and says that "Mieville describes Tolkien as a 'wen on the arse of fantasy literature' attacking his 'cod-Wagnerian pomposity'...." I get the gist, but what exactly does cod-Wagnerian mean? 66.181.120.130 (talk) 03:32, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Time Travel - How far back could I go before I had serious problems communicating?

It's 2010 in England and I have a time machine. Unfortunately unlike The Doctor, I don't have the benefit of the Tardis's translation circuits. How far back could I go before I started running into serious problems understanding and being understood in spoken english? Exxolon (talk) 01:04, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Probably fairly easily back to the early 18th-century or so. Beyond that it would start to get increasingly difficult -- and going back to before the great vowel shift would be an especially strong barrier to comprehensibility. AnonMoos (talk) 01:27, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Great Vowel Shift. History of the English language. Bus stop (talk) 01:33, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Maybe that wouldn't be as difficult for someone from Yorkshire, where many vowels still have the pre-shift sounds, as in "Dount Freeten the Dooks lass" -- Q Chris (talk)

See also a similar question from over three years ago. ---Sluzzelin talk 01:34, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

That's a hard one. Part of me wants to say that it would go back at least to the split of the colonies from England, and probably further, because the somewhat independent evolution of the dialects since then has not produced large differences, but there are several problems with that. Vocabulary is vastly different now out of necessity. We have no reason to know what a ferrier farrier or a cooper is. Very few people today get their horses shoed, or go to the local barrel-maker. Those would have been important back then. Likewise, if you were to go back to Shakespeare's day (just as an example), you could potentially run into a lot of problems trying to talk about something as simple as an "eyeball" or describing that "weird" thing sitting in the "bedroom". Grammar wise, I doubt that there would be as much difficulty for you, at least among the educated classes. You have probably read much from the last few hundred years in school. Thou knowest what I here with this mechanical quill enscribe upon this box of light. It sounds strange, and I am sure I did not even come close to how a native of those times would write it, but at least you would have an idea of what to expect, even if it's not the way you talk. I would imagine that the problem with that, and all of this is speculation, is going the other way. People from a couple hundred years ago did not have the same expectation or understanding of the strange grammar that we use and love today that we have of theirs. I can't think of examples, unfortunately, but I have no doubt that many things which we say would sound awkward if not incomprehensible to someone of eras in the not-to-distant past. In summary, I expect that you could communicate on some level with people back to Shakespeare's day at least, but I don't know how far back you could go and hold a conversation fluently without running into enough problems that comprehension is compromised. Falconus^{p t c} 06:11, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

By the magic of an online Shakespeare concordance, I give you: "be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible to every eyeball else" (The Tempest), "As the weird women promised" (Macbeth, though I suppose it has a specific meaning like sinister), and "They must be bound and laid in some dark room" (Comedy of Errors) and "withdrew to mine own room again" (Hamlet). Couldn't find bedroom, I admit, but I don't think it would have an unclear meaning to Shakespeare. Midsummer's Night's Dream has "by your side no bed-room me deny". I think you could probably draw attention to the weird eyeball sitting in your bedroom easily enough, provided you could keep calm enough to speak at all. Wait, are you talking about a webcam? 213.122.8.195 (talk) 11:14, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Of course they are in Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare invented the words "weird" "eyeball" and "bedroom". That was my point. They would not have been common usage until after Shakespeare's plays became popular. Falconus^{p t c} 16:07, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I know Shakespeare plays gave us lots of idioms, but are you saying that they contained words that would be incomprehensible to the audience? That's a bit avant-garde. I thought he was supposed to be a popularist. 81.131.26.124 (talk) 16:37, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Shakespeare's plays may be the earliest recorded uses of certain words but that doesn't mean he invented them. It just means they weren't written down any time earlier anywhere that has survived. --Tango (talk) 20:46, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Also consider that you would pick up their way of speaking in time, so the difficulty in communicating would only be temporary. StuRat (talk) 07:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I suspect that the time backwards would be surprisingly short before you would run into trouble. Even going back to 2000, let's say, you would have to somehow forget everything you've learned academically and culturally since 2000, otherwise you would immediately stand out as being weird in some indefinable way - and going back in time, the last thing you'd want to do is draw too much attention to yourself. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs -- That reminds me of the joke about "1999 House", but it has very little to do with the linguistic issues which the original questioner was mainly asking about... AnonMoos (talk) 12:22, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I know what he thought he was asking about, but the fact is that slang evolves very quickly and we adapt to it very quickly - and some slang and other terms we use even now would draw blank stares if used in 2000. The time traveler would do best to keep his ears open and his mouth shut. And even if you understood the "King's English" from half a millennium ago, there's no guarantee you could successfully communicate with the "man in the street". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:31, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

It would probably be best to pretend that you came from another country - preferably one that you would be unlikely to meed anyone else from. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:27, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

And at the very least, take nothing with you that was manufactured after the date you're headed for (aside from yourself, of course). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:15, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I can make reasonable sense of the written English of Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Mallory, so I think you could make yourself understood on a basic level in the 14th and 15th Centuries, although with some difficulty. Alansplodge (talk) 11:46, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

The time traveler's best bet would be to maintain as low a profile as possible, and observer everything that's going on, and learn from it - which is the whole point of time travel anyway, isn't it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Alansplodge -- When you read Chaucer, you interpret a lot of things according to your knowledge of the modern language (so interpreting Chaucer's long vowel writings with their modern pronunciations, throwing away silent e's, even though most of them were actually pronounced in Chaucer's day, ignoring the fact that modern silent gh spellings were also not "silent" then, etc.). If you actually heard the language of Chaucer's time being spoken, then a lot of stuff which you can kind of slide over in writing would make itself felt as a real barrier to comphrehension. AnonMoos (talk) 12:29, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

For a simple example, pronouncing "knight" as "ka-nich-t", yes? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:33, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking purely in communication terms, leaving aside the problems of not getting apprehended as a witch, heretic etc and I was at least subconciously thinking of the London/Home counties area avoiding the regional accent/dialect issues. I'm guessing the reverse would be much harder - a person from the past transported to 2010 would probably have problems far more quickly simply because the english lexicon has grown so much even in the last 100 years. I would easily understand "Have at thee! I shall smith thee mightily thou black knave!" but he would have problems understanding "I'm a so going to totally kick your arse you son of a bitch!" Exxolon (talk) 15:27, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I think a traveller from the middle ages would have a lot more on his/her plate trying to understand things like 'get off the Tube at Paddington and go up the escalators. Turn right at the kiosk and keep going until you get to the zebra crossing. Cross the road and you'll get to the bus station where you turn left and keep going until the Post Office....' It's not such a change in the language here, but more of a change in what we talk about even in the most day-to-day activities (like giving directions). 'You might want to hand that sword and suit of armour into the Police' might not be easily understood, either (leading to the above directions). :)KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:51, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Never mind the middle ages, Americans might have trouble with that lot. And there are plenty of words and idioms from 500 years ago that would baffle us. "Kick your arse you son of a bitch" sounds a fine contender for a mutually comprehensible phrase, though, the only difference being that "you" and "your" were formal (or plural). "A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver'd, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch" -- King Lear. Actually what's really baffling in all that isn't the literal meaning of the phrases, but their significance. Is it bad to have three suits because that's too many, or not enough? Is a broken meat a decadent luxury item or something you should throw away? What's wrong with taking action? 81.131.26.124 (talk) 16:27, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I read in a British paper a while ago that a British person from the mid-20th cntury would be baffled by all the Americanisms being used in 21st century British speech.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 19:02, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

OMG! Y dosnt ne1 from teh mid-20th cntury no what im ritin!? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.193.96.10 (talk) 19:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Si aedificaret apparatus ut facultatem habeat ire retro in temporibus, debes discere Latinam. Invenies aliquem, cui possis loqui. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.193.96.10 (talk) 19:03, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Amicus noster Google Translate est: "If you build a machine that has the ability to go back on the times, you ought to learn Latin. You will find somebody, to whom you can to speak." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:41, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

If you go back more than 222 years in Australia that won't help you in the slightest. HiLo48 (talk) 04:14, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Racism

What is the opposite of racism? Not colour blind but colour prejudiced in favour? Kittybrewster ☎ 18:14, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

It's still racism. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:21, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

It depends what you mean by "racism". Some define racism as "prejudice against people because of their race". In that case, prejudice in favour of a group because of their race necessarily involves prejudice against everyone else because of their race, and is therefore still racism. Some, on the other hand, would include an element of power or kyriarchy in the definition. Under such a definition, prejudice against a racial minority group would be racism and prejudice in favour of one would not be (since it would be at best a counterweight to the existing prejudice against them). ("Minority" in this sense is a term of art not necessarily congruent with the statistical sense, as in South Africa under apartheid.) For example, in the West, a quota system which discriminates against white people would be called racist under the first definition but not the second. Marnanel (talk) 18:34, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

There's a distinction to be made between racism and "racial pride". The former is negative, while the latter can be positive, although when engaged in by the ruling race, it's usually just a smokescreen for garden variety racism. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:41, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

A sort of positive discrimination, I suppose. In that line "positive racism" gets a fair few ghits. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 20:31, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

You realize you're opening a serious can of worms? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:37, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, since that term implies that racism and discrimination against certain groups is a positive thing, the term itself seems to be racist and discriminatory. StuRat (talk) 22:57, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that "positive" in "positive discrimination" is just a synonym of "good (in general, from a moral standpoint)". That would be an awkward pseudo-intellectual wording. I guess that "positive" here is supposed to mean that you select for, and not against. Instead of saying "we do not want any members of group A in our institution C" (negative discrimination), you say "we do want at least ten percent of the people in our institution C to be members of group B" (positive discrimination). An additional meaning is probably that the intended effect of positive discrimination is not to marginalize/exclude group A, but to integrate/include group B. The subtext is that at the outset, group A is in a much better condition than group B (it forms, say, 99% of institution C), so that the "positive discrimination", while harming individual members of group A, wouldn't lead to group A feeling excluded as a group (since it would still dominate the institution by holding 90% of it), whereas it would help to integrate group B. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:20, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I see what you're saying, but when you decide to preferentially hire X members of one group, that means that you are excluding the same number of members of other groups, who are presumably better qualified for the job. (If they weren't better qualified, then they wouldn't have been hired, in any case, unless the company wants to go bust by choosing to hire incompetents.) So, in a zero-sum game system, discrimination for anyone is also discrimination against somebody else. I say the best way is an objective hiring scheme, where you assign points for test results, years of experience, educational attainment, etc., and hire whoever gets the highest score. That stops discrimination in any direction. StuRat (talk) 04:06, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

The common term in the US is reverse racism, which is still racism, just in opposite the usual direction. This also leads to reverse discrimination. Unfortunately, both those links lead to the same article. StuRat (talk) 22:53, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Any system is which one "race" is regarded as superior or more deserving than another is racism. Surely the opposite of racism is treating everyone equally. HiLo48 (talk) 23:20, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, both positive and negative discrimination are racism. Whether it's benevolent or malevolent (which goes to the initial question) is a matter of circumstance. The only true opposite is "color-blind." PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 03:19, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

On a related note, my link to positive discrimination (leading the "affirmative action") and reverse discrimination are alternatively titled "positive discrimination". ["Discrimination" is always a controversial term; we do, for example, automatically discriminate on grounds of age, mental stability, criminal record, etc. etc. and think these things it is suitable to discriminate on - benevolent discrimination, as it were, or at least "justified". No-one can judge other forms of benevolent discrimination whilst thinking they themselves treat everyone equally. Thus, one can justify the use of the term "positive discrimination" as was commented on above.] - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 13:00, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

The OP specifically excluded color-blind: "Not colour blind but colour prejudiced in favour." That's racism or "reverse discrimination" or whatever. The attempt to label affirmative action that way is a backlash by those who want it the old way: Where hiring was based on "merit", and one of those "merits" was, "You have to be a white male." Affirmative action is an attempt to introduce some diversity into the workplace by demolishing that de facto "merit". Naturally, white folks who only want to hire white folks don't like that idea. But as an old colleague of mine once said, "There's no law that says you have to hire somebody that's stupid." And as we all know from experience, no race has a monopoly on stupidity - it's an equal-opportunity disability. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:36, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Not all people who oppose "affirmative action" are white supremists or racists. In fact, only a minority are. :-) StuRat (talk) 04:13, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

If that's a reply to me, Bugs (and not Vecrumba), none of my suggestions have been related to metaphorical "colour-blindness"; rather both those pages, which appear to cover the same thing, cover deliberate and supposedly benevolent discrimination, as you describe, I believe. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 18:16, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

More to Vecrumba than to you. At some point, the OP needs to step back in here and respond to the various comments, and maybe clarify or elaborate on the question. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:33, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Well I was thinking of the white person who sends her children to a private independant school in UK having predominantly black and yellow pupils - because she herself went to such a school, has numerous black friends and likes them. That isn't colour blindedness. Kittybrewster ☎ 15:00, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

In which case it's very likely nothing to do with "race" but with some associated aspect such as multi-culturalism, social diversity, and so on. I'd like to think we're beyond liking people simply for their skin color. :-) PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 17:41, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Or disliking them for that reason alone. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Maybe some personal form of allophilia? - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 19:56, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Sounds a bit clinical and a bit restrictive of a definition ignoring factors which may be at work, such as intellectual curiosity. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 02:48, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Meaning of verb "rescató"

Over on the Dutch wikipedia there is an article about the Colombian playwright and actress Patricia Ariza. The article uses as a source a website (http://www.colarte.arts.co/colarte/conspintores.asp?idartista=15747) where it says: "Su vida trashumante y frenética se acabó cuando un hermano la rescató de Isla Nada en el Pacífico, frente a Tumaco". Could someone please answer the following question: Does the verb "rescató" mean that Patricia Ariza was a hostage and that her brother paid a ransom to free her?

Thanks,Composmentis2 (talk) 19:22, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I put that expression into Google Translate, and this was what it came up with:

"Their nomadic life and frantic ended when a sibling rescued Nothing in the Pacific Island, opposite Tumaco."

Obviously Google Translate has some limitations. I would be inclined to say it this way. A native Spanish speaker can probably improve on this:

"Her nomadic and frantic life came to an end when a brother rescued her from the Pacific Island "Nada", opposite Tumaco."

"rescató" means "rescued" and "la rescató" means "rescued her". I don't know if this answers your question or not. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:42, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

"Isla Nada" seems to have been some kind of hippie commune for devotees of "nadaismo," or "nothing-ism," a Colombian version of the Beat movement whose names seems to be a play on dadaism. Also see this newspaper article. It's likely her "rescue" from Isla Nada to college is a figure of speech. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 20:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. I am also leaning to the assumption that rescató/rescued is a figure of speech. I thinks that her brother merely took her away from the hippie life.Composmentis2 (talk) 08:37, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

It's certainly used that way in English also, e.g. "Thanks for rescuing me from that meeting." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:15, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

This discussion is related to the OP's question at the misc desk,[1] for those who want to get a fuller picture. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:55, 26 December 2010 (UTC)