Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 March 19

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March 19

grauben, gräuben

Are they pronounced differently in German? The latter is a girl's name in Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Thanks for any help. --Omidinist (talk) 11:36, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

They are indeed pronounced differently in German, with the first one being like 'GROW-ben' and the second being more like 'GROY-ben'. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:56, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify KageTora's response, the first syllable of grauben rhymes with cow, not hoe. Deor (talk) 13:12, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Aha - thanks. It never even occurred to me. I was thinking 'growl' without the 'l', and not 'grow'.... --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:54, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Note though, that Verne actually spelled her name "Graüben". The vowels "aü" (unlike "äu") do not form a diphthong commonly used in Standard German. If I had to pronounce it, and knew it wasn't a typo for "äu", I might actually pronounce the diphthong "aü" as ɑ + y, the way it would be pronounced in rarely occurring compounds made from one word ending in "-a" and another beginning with "ü-", as in "Salsaübung" (for want of a better example). ---Sluzzelin talk 15:48, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Off-topic, but to give you an example of two verbs which only differ in their usage of "au" or "äu", and follow KageTora and Deor's pronunciation instructions (and also have an interesting relationship to one another): "saugen means "to suck", while säugen means "to suckle" (to nurse at the breast, wiktionary translates it as "to lactate"). "saügen", on the other hand, does not exist at all, and hurts my eyes. ---Sluzzelin talk 17:40, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Slaüzzelin has a certain slimy-oozy quality to it.  :) -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:00, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I've been called slushbrain here, and pronouncing my moniker has been likened to being sozzled, but slime and ooze?! Shall we say pistols at dawn? ---Sluzzelin talk 19:17, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Your place or mine? -- Jack of Oooozze [your turn] 19:20, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Anyway, your eyes will be hurting too much to focus properly. You'd probably hit a passing bushwalker. Better find a more peaceful way. Shall we say Scrabble boards at dawn?  :) -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:39, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Note that she is described in the book as a "Virlandaise", which as I understand it means somebody from the northern part of Estonia. Looie496 (talk) 17:43, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, see Vironians. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 18:56, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you all, though your discussion makes me a little puzzled. The girl's name in the book is spelled gräuben as I said earlier; see here, p 16.--Omidinist (talk) 19:52, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

That's the English translation; they seem to have cleaned it up. See the original here. --Trovatore (talk) 20:35, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Does French ever use umlaut to indicate diaeresis as sometimes occurs in English? For example, coöperate. See also Trema (diacritic). Perhaps Verne was just giving pronunciation instructions and the English translation is the mistkae. 75.41.110.200 (talk) 20:45, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think French does that, but I suppose your suggestion is borderline possible. It seems much more likely to me that Verne intended it to be a German spelling (yes, I understand that the girl was not German) but that he just wasn't very good at German, or his editors weren't. --Trovatore (talk) 22:41, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

To the best of my knowledge, Graüben is not a German name. I did, however, stumble upon a textual alnalysis where the author muses that Graüben may be a "pun" on the German verb graben (to dig / to excavate). If so, it strikes me as rather awkward and I (a German native speaker) would never have guessed the connection. Maybe we have an Estonian speaker who could comment on the name? --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 23:03, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I believe you that it's not a German name. Google results give me the idea that it's a name Verne made up himself. Virtually all the hits seem to be for the novel. Still, my speculation is that he made it up on the pattern of what he thought were German-ish names. --Trovatore (talk) 23:07, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

"Tell"?

I was randomly browsing some blogs a while ago, and came across this kind of comment: He will be here tell the 15th. What does "tell" mean here? Is it some feature of the English language I am unaware of, because of my having learned English as an entirely foreign language? JIP | Talk 18:49, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I would say it's a typo for "till". Or someone who genuinely believes that "tell" is the right word. Maybe the same class of people who write "then" or "that" when they mean "than". ("Obama is a better president then that than Bush".) -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 18:55, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

The confusion of "then" and "than" is common enough, but I've been fortunate enough to not have seen "that" confused with either, so far. (I do then agree that a 3-way confusion is worse than a 2-way confusion.) StuRat (talk) 20:23, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry to ruin your day, but here's an example of "that" used instead of "than". -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:54, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

How do you know it's not just a typo ? StuRat (talk) 21:40, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Fair question, but how do we know "then" is not a typo for "than" in many cases either? I've seen "that" used instead of "than" often enough to make me believe there's a significant group of language users who think it's the right word. With what we see online (and elsewhere) these days, there seems no end of creative (= wrong) ways of writing and spelling. Where they get these ideas from in the first place - search me. I'm forever getting emails with the word "definitely" spelt as "defiantly". A colleague of mine spells "hotel" as "hottle". And I think I've mentioned before about the forms we hand out to clients, embarrassingly headed "Statuary Declaration". I could go on. It's not as if they actually pronounce these words the way they write them (except maybe "statuary"). -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 00:31, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

"That" could be a literal translation from Italian. (Perhaps French or Spanish as well.) --Trovatore (talk) 10:30, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

My favorite is the "statue of limitations". Sounds as if it could refer to Lady Justice, in a negative way, as being incapable of telling the innocent from the guilty because, after all, she's blindfolded and can't see the evidence. :-) StuRat (talk) 10:25, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

(ec) It's probably a misspelling of till, shortening of until. Some accents make /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ very similar, if not almost indistinguishable. Lexicografía (talk) 18:57, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Can't let this go: The word till is not in fact a shortening of until. Till is a perfectly good word on its own. The misunderstanding that it's short for until seems to be behind the spelling 'til, which is arguably a sort of hypercorrection, although well enough established by now to be considered an acceptable variant (though I wouldn't use it myself). --Trovatore (talk) 19:40, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, right. Lexicografía (talk) 19:52, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Looks like a lowland Scottish pronunciation to me.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

'How came you'

In the following usage:

"How comes it that the Church has attained such greatness in temporal power"(The Prince, 1513)

I understand that 'How comes it' is olde timey speak for 'How did it come to pass' or 'How did it come to be' but what I'm wondering if I can use that type of phrasing in the following ways:

How came you by this knowledge? (by what means, non-material)

How came you to my house? (by what means, material)

Is there a word governing this kind of usage, (besides: archaic, obsolete, old-fashioned etc.) I mean, is there some kind of linguistic concept for "how comes it" i.e. transitive, periphrastic, gerundive (not that those are options, i mean, those kind of words)

Sorry for my vaugeries, I'm not good at articulation199.94.68.201 (talk) 20:14, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

It's an impersonal verb, isn't it? Adam Bishop (talk) 21:53, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

The real question is not so much, why we say 'How did you come to my house?', but why we don't say 'How came you to my house?'. From Brittonicisms in English#Change from syntheticism towards analyticism:

DO-periphrasis in a variety of uses. Modern English is dependent on a semantically neutral 'do' in some negative statements and questions, e.g. 'I don't know' rather than 'I know not". This feature is linguistically very rare. Celtic languages use a similar structure, but without dependence. The usage is frequent in Cornish and Middle Cornish. e.g."Omma ny wreugh why tryge"="You do not stay here" and it is used in Middle Breton. "Do" is more common in Celtic Englishes than Standard English.

Middle Welsh too: "Ef a or6c a ... " = "He did and" often in the White Book of Rhydderch ("6" is not a mistake: it's one of the common ways of transliterating an obsolete letter which corresponds to "w" or "u" in later Welsh).

(OR warning): I conjecture that one of the factors behind the spread of do-periphrasis for negatives in English was that Jespersen's Cycle had left English with an uncharacteristic Head-Modifier order, e.g. "I go not". This doesn't account for interrogatives though. --ColinFine (talk) 01:00, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

While this feature exists to some extent in other Germanic languages such as in German dialects, I believe English is unique among them in using it so consistently. So you could say that you are opting out of the do-periphrasis. It is implicit in such a statement that you then use the same grammar for questions that the other Germanic languages do. Hans Adler 22:36, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I know not if you have had much exposure to Early Modern English. Hast thou ever read Shakespeare or the King James Bible? Then thou shouldst know what I mean. It was very similar to today's English, but it was still common to form sentences that nowadays sound like a word-by-word translation from German, Dutch or Danish. This paper describes how the do-periphrasis became obligatory in English questions during that period. Hans Adler 22:46, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Right, the use of "do" this way is an English trick that has taken off relatively recently. Would not be shocked to learn to came from a Celtic influence. Note to the original poster though: The Prince was written in Italian, so the grammar you are quoting is someone's translation, not Machiavelli's. This comes from CHAPTER XI — CONCERNING ECCLESIASTICAL PRINCIPALITIES. Here it is in Italian. "Nevertheless, if any one should ask of me how comes it that the Church has attained such greatness in temporal power" was really "on di manco, se alcuno mi ricercassi donde viene che la Chiesa, nel temporale, sia venuta a tanta grandezza". My Italian is not good enough to say if this sounds old fashioned, but at least concerning the verb we are discussing I think not.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:15, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, on di manco is certainly not ordinary contemporary Italian, nor is alcuno, and ricercare today means "research". Also donde might be a little more used than whence is in English, but not by a huge factor. And a temporale is a brief rainstorm. So by and large, yes, the sentence sounds pretty old-fashioned, but considering when it was written, certainly not excessively so. --Trovatore (talk) 16:51, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

(I should say, alcuno is not contemporary Italian in the sense used here; that would be qualcuno. You could maybe find it in a sentence like non ho visto alcuno scoiattolo, "I did not see any squirrel", where I had to choose the noun carefully because for most nouns it would be alcun or alcuna rather than alcuno. That's maybe still kind of old-fashioned, but not 16th-century old-fashioned.) --Trovatore (talk) 22:17, 25 March 2011 (UTC)