Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 March 15

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March 15

Deloculated

What does the term "deloculated" mean? For instance the term is used in a sentence like "an abscess was deloculated". What does the term "deloculated" stand for? aniketnik 12:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aniketnik (talk • contribs)

It seem to mean, remove or fill a locule (or loculi). meltBanana 13:41, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

A positive rant

I'm looking for a word that has the meaning of 'rant,' or 'diatribe' but without the negative connotations. 'Soliloquy' and 'monologue' both sound a little too theateresque to me. Any ideas?209.6.54.248 (talk) 17:24, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I disagree that monologue is necessarily theatrical. I think that it is the best, most neutral term for a person going on and on without interruption. If you want a word for a "positive rant", or a speech of praise, panegyric is a good word. Marco polo (talk) 18:30, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

And what's wrong with just "speech" ? In particular, a "keynote speech" sounds positive, to me. A "testimonial" is a speech endorsing a particular person or product, and also has a religious connotation. StuRat (talk) 20:48, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

"Jeremiad" is, if not necessarily positive, at least semi-obscure and somewhat Biblical-sounding and dignified... AnonMoos (talk) 01:25, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

"Encomium" is nice, "eulogy" would do, but does tend to be associated with funerals. DuncanHill (talk) 01:29, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

And despite our article (which seems to me a clear violation of WP:DICDEF), screed can be used neutrally to refer to a written mass of verbiage of rantlike character. Deor (talk) 01:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

How about "rave", as in rant and rave. Shadowjams (talk) 04:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Filibuster? Adam Bishop (talk) 07:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Pontificate? Expound? Hold forth? --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, wait. You're looking for nouns. --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 17:01, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Spiel? --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 18:39, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Try "harangue." --some other jerk on the Internet 21 March 2011

Bizarre Sentence Stress on UK News Reports

I have been noticing for a while now strange stress patterns on UK TV news reports. An example would be:

"There was an explosion at the No.1 reactor this morning, after the No.2 reactor suffered a similar explosion yesterday, while this afternoon No.3 reactor exploded......"

I am talking about placing stress on words which have already been used a number of times, as if they were new, rather than the more usual stress pattern of (in the example above) stressing the numbers. What is the reason for this, and is there a name for this particular pattern? Personally I think it might be done to drum certain words into us, but it actually sounds to me like the newsreader isn't paying attention to what he/she is saying (and coupled with mumbling the most important words in an attempt to sound sympathetic/ominous/vaguely interested, it makes for a very annoying news broadcast, to be honest). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:42, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I think you might find, if you experiment with reading those sentences without the stress, that there is a tendency to slur those words. News readers very often are trained to use unusual stress patterns in order to make difficult words come through distinctly. Looie496 (talk) 19:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

One of the most extraordinary examples is the correspondent Robert Peston, whose mannerisms are much imitated. By impressionists. Though he, himself, blames it on over-coaching by the BBC. Ghmyrtle (talk) 19:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Right, so that's what it is. They are actually instructed to do this. I have also noticed it a lot with gameshow hosts reading out the possible answers that a contestant could give ("ten-thousand, twenty-thousand, thirty-thousand, or seventy-five [pause] THOUSAND"). I took that particular one as being boredom at the sheer repetitiveness of the job, but could not quite understand why it has extended to newsreaders. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 19:59, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, if only some correspondents/newsreaders were amenable to instruction. I'd have a long list of dos and don'ts for them. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:36, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Could the teleprompter also be to blame ? That is, if the word doesn't come up quite fast enough, wouldn't there naturally be a pause followed by emphasizing the word ? StuRat (talk) 20:46, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Possibly, but not all the time and in such a recognizable pattern, I'm sure. I'm guessing from Jack's comment it's not just us Brits who are plagued by this, either. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:00, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Not at all. "I have been noticing for a while now strange stress patterns on [Australian] TV news reports". And not just speech patterns. There's a whole gamut of contrived, cliched, unnatural things they do. And all terribly predictable, which is the worst sin of all. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 21:24, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think this is a new thing with British commentators. Eric Idle was one who made fun of this perhaps "over-dramatic" style, clear back in the early 70s. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

This problem has spread to other countries, too. Here in Bulgaria, newsreaders used to speak more or less normally, but now they are trained to slavishly imitate the style of English-language newsreaders, including the illogical sentence stresses, as well as the overall intonation tunes. I'm glad to learn that at least you too are feeling the discomfort of the disease you've infected us with.:) --91.148.159.4 (talk) 11:21, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Scrabble word list / dictionary disparity

I've downloaded the Official North American Tournament Scrabble Word List from a couple of sources. It has 8691 words. In the article Scrabble it says the word list is compiled from 4 dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster. In the article Wiktionary I read that Miriam-Webster has 475,000 entries. Why are there apparently hundreds of thousands of words, something like 98%, missing from the Scrabble word list? 213.122.48.199 (talk) 22:10, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure that you've counted correctly? Our article says that the list contains 178,691 words. Deor (talk) 22:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, good deduction, you're right. Turns out SciTE's line numbering wraps round to 0 when it gets to 9999. Ta. (I guess the remaining disparity is accounted for by obsolete words, or peculiar conjugations?) 213.122.14.131 (talk) 23:13, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, I suppose it excludes words that are impossible in a Scrabble game, such as words that can't be spelled with the limited number of letters and blanks available, as well as words of more than fifteen letters. I'd imagine, however, that most of the difference between Merriam-Webster and the Scrabble word list is accounted for by the many open and hyphenated compounds (e.g., iron oxide) that constitute lemmas in the dictionary but, to the best of my recollection, are inadmissible in Scrabble. Deor (talk) 01:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

(G/K/Kh/Q)addafi

Which is correct? --70.244.234.128 (talk) 23:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

They are all attempts at transliterating Arabic. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:17, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Google Translate prefers "Gadaffi", and the Arabic comes out like this, for what it's worth

القذافي

←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:21, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

القذافي(EC)

So, from this, we see that 'Q' is correct, but in the Libyan dialect of Arabic (like Egyptian), this is pronounced as 'G'. See Phonology Of Libyan Arabic for this. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:29, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

What is "correct" depends on what you mean by "correct". Do you mean "what is the best representation of how the name is pronounced by those who bear it", or do you mean "what would be consistent with that used for [n] dialect of Arabic"? DuncanHill (talk) 23:54, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

(EC) Perhaps I should clarify (though I am not sure if your post, Duncan, was a reply to me or the OP). 'Q' is generally the transliteration for the letter 'qaf', which is the first letter of the name, when transliterating literary Arabic, but it is pronounced as 'G' in the Libyan dialect. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:00, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Well I was replying to both you and the OP. "Correct" is one of those words which needs nailing down when it is used. DuncanHill (talk) 00:17, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I should have thought of that, yes, you are quite correct :) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:29, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Our article Muammar_Gaddafi#Name has some discussion of this, which may help the original questioner. DuncanHill (talk) 23:58, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

This user seems to be a troll; his previous questions here have been hidden. ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{spik ʌp!} 00:29, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Whatever the nature of his previous questions, this one is reasonable. So long as people will insist on using a huge variety of languages, dialects, and alphabets worldwide difficulties will inevitably arise. DuncanHill (talk) 01:07, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I would say that the most "correct" transliteration, in the sense of most accurately reflecting classical Arabic norms, would be either Qadhdhāfī or Qaððāfī (depending on whether you favor digraphs or IPA characters to represent the Arabic ذ letter). Of course, these transliterations would not reflect the most common vernacular pronunciations in Libya itself... AnonMoos (talk) 00:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

This and this may be of interest. These articles also note that when the Libyan leader wrote to second-graders in Minnesota in 1986, he signed the letter "Moammar El-Gadhafi". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 08:41, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

It's strange that both of those articles get it slightly wrong regarding the (standard Arabic) q sound; they just say it's the same as "k" and forget to mention it's a "deep"/uvular/"emphatic" one. If it were simply the same as "k", there would be no reason for a separate letter.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 10:50, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Is it more like the Spanish "J" or the Scottish "ch", or for that matter the "ch" in "Chanukah"? Seems to me that natives of Iraq say it like "Irach", with the "ch" being like in the Scottish "loch". Is that correct? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:34, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I have always heard Iraqis pronounce the 'q' of 'Iraq' as a glottal stop (when not pronouncing it as 'q' (or indeed 'g')), but never as /x/. It is mainly an area that uses Gulf State Arabic variants (though Egyptian influence is as ubiquitous here as anywhere else). The article I linked to above, however, does mention that in Libyan Arabic, 'q' can sometimes be pronounced as /x/ (translit. 'kh'), so I guess this could happen in Iraq too. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:11, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Back to Baseball Bugs' question - in "proper" Modern Standard Arabic, the sound in Iraq is like a "k", but pronounced deeper in the throat: technically, a voiceless uvular plosive, which is what is usually transcribed with the letter "q" in IPA. There's a passable sound file in our article, too. There is no similar sound in English. It's not particularly similar to how most people, even Scots, would pronounce "loch". However, one could say that there is some similarity to the sound in German Bach (χ): it is articulated in the same place in the mouth - though not in the same manner (q is a stop and χ is a fricative). Here is what the useful Forvo site has to offer us in that connection (also in Persian).--91.148.159.4 (talk) 18:24, 16 March 2011 (UTC)