Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 September 8

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September 8

Delas/delas Alas?

Delas Alas or delas Alas? Which one is correct? AFAIK, the former is correct but yesterday while reading an article I saw it written as "delas Alas".Meerkatakreem (talk) 05:51, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

• Her Facebook page capitalizes the Delas, but I don't know how much control over its content she has, nor to what extent she cares whether people capitalize her D or not. Angr (talk) 06:04, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

hhhmmm...what about surnames like Delos Santos, Dela Cruz, Delos Reyes, De Dios? Is it acceptable if we use "delos or Delos" and "de or De"? Meerkatakreem (talk) 06:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

I think it should conform to the Spanish practice - 'de las', 'de los', 'dela', 'del', 'de', 'delas', etc. are not capitalized. But it varies a lot in Filipino usage and it's usually a matter of personal preference. People I know here who have those kinds of surnames do not capitalize it except in sentence case. e.g. If the name is written 'Dela Cruz, Juan' but not when it is written 'Juan dela Cruz'.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 06:30, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that Obsidian Soul :). I was reading an article about Ai-Ai delas Alas yesterday and read the line, "delas Alas has done several movies including Ang Tanging Ina produced by Star Cinema, ABS-CBN film productions." so I got confused when I saw "delas Alas" at the beginning of the sentence. (but now a minor edit has been done and changed it from "delas to Delas")Meerkatakreem (talk) 07:10, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Medieval manuscript terminology

Here are two pages of a medieval manuscript: [1]. Notice how the 'meta data' tab calls the image "ff.48v-49r". Can someone tell me what that means. I think manuscrupt pages are called folios. And the front and back of a page have Latin terms (I think one of them is something like verso for "back page"?). I'd like to know how to specifically name the page/folio on the right.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 09:10, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

The abbreviations r and v stand for recto and verso, meaning "front" and "back" respectively. In a double page spread, 48v (back side of folio 48) will be on the left and 49r (front side of folio 49) will be on the right. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:55, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Just for completeness, although it wasn't your main concern, the "ff." means folios, since there are two involved here. It was and to an extent still is a convention in some contexts to double a single-letter abbreviation to indicate plurality: similarly "MS" means "manuscript" and "MSS" means "manuscripts" (the English plural "-s" is a red herring here, since in Latin whence this convention derives plural endings are not formed by "-s").{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.193.78.41 (talk) 11:49, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that convention is still commonly encountered in the abbreviation pp. for "pages". It applies in other languages too, e.g. German SS. for "Seiten" (pages) and Spanish EE.UU. for "Estados Unidos" (United States). Angr (talk) 18:54, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

"List of Latin abbreviations" mentions ff. and also et seqq [sic] (for et seqq.), where the q is doubled.

—Wavelength (talk) 19:08, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

It should be removed from that list. None of the three meanings of ff is Latin (see Merriam-Webster:ff): 1. folios (is English), 2. and the following ones (is English) 3. fortissimo (is Italian). And it does not appear in Lexicon abbreviaturarum, click left on F (page 133) and scroll to FF (page 137). --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 11:44, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

It was added to the section "Common abbreviations and usages" by User:74.12.74.247 at 17:04, 16 August 2008. It was moved to the section "Less common abbreviations and usages" by User:173.54.6.206 at 01:23, 20 February 2010. Maybe User:74.12.74.247 can provide a reference. See also Special:Contributions/74.12.74.247.

—Wavelength (talk) 19:23, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

To respond specifically to your final sentence: In scholarly usage "folio 49r" would be the usual way to refer to the "page on the right". If you want to be a bit more explicit, you could say "the recto of folio 49". Deor (talk) 19:57, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks everyone. :) Searching the Latin terms in Wikipedia I found this article: Recto and verso. I'll use something like "the recto of folio 49" in an image caption I was thinking of.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 06:38, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

BTW, "folios" don't have to be in manuscripts, or too mediaeval. Early printed books I've seen (at least, in the 16th century Portugal and Spain - e.g., early editions of João de Barros, Bernardino de Escalante, or Gaspar da Cruz) were numbered in folios, not pages. So where a modern book would have "page 1" and "page 2" for the two sides of the same physical sheet of paper, an old book like that would have "folio 1 (recto)" and "folio 1 (verso)". I, too, have learned that when captioning some images I was uploading! -- Vmenkov (talk) 04:04, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

"Sentenced to jail time"

Is the expression right (in the US)? Shouldn't it be "sentenced to prison time?" Quest09 (talk) 19:26, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Not if they're gonna serve it in a jail rather than a prison. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:34, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Also, prisons are often called "jails" colloquially in the United States. Marco polo (talk) 19:40, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

In my native dialect (working-class U.S.), a "jail" is a local institution (city or county); a "prison" is a state or federal institution. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:45, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

The word "jail" is also common in the UK, but, as far as I'm aware, we don't have any local/national "jail"/"prison" distinction in meaning. It was traditionally spelled "gaol" in BrE, but that looks increasingly old-fashioned. 86.181.205.2 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:04, 8 September 2011 (UTC).

I am from the UK and I think that 'jail' and 'prison' can be used interchangeably in most cases, but to refer to the little room you get stuck in overnight at a police station we only use 'jail', and never 'prison', as 'prison' seems to refer to a longer term place, and generally with a load of other prisoners. Note also, that 'prisoners' and 'jailers' mean the opposite of each other. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:26, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I find this and this on the topic. This sentence leaps out at me from the second link: "...because of the long duration of most prison sentences, a complex social and political structure arises among the prisoners."

This looks like a good reference too. Bus stop (talk) 21:19, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Similar to OrangeMike, my understanding is that a jail is a place where people are kept after being arrested, but before being convicted; whereas a prison is where you keep convicted people. A little podunk sheriff's office in a little tiny county will still have a jail to keep people who are arrested (think of Andy Taylor's station), but convicted people aren't kept in such places. They go to prison. --Jayron32 21:55, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm a native American English speaker. I agree that there is a distinction between a jail—a local short-term lockup—and a prison, where convicted people serve time. However, colloquially, people say of someone in prison, "He's in jail". People also say, "He's going to jail," or "He just got out of jail" when they really mean "prison". At least, people use the word jail to refer colloquially to prison in the urban Northeast, where I've spent most of my life. This is not to say that people never use the word prison, just that jail and prison are somewhat interchangeable in everyday speech, except that you'd never use prison to refer to the local jail. Marco polo (talk) 22:40, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

This musical interlude may be capable of throwing all our theories into chaos. Bus stop (talk) 22:53, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

While "jail" cannot be freely substituted with "prison", there are a lot of circumstances (at least in American English) in which the term "jail" may refer to penitentiaries (and only to penitentiaries), especially in compound phrases: "jail time" hardly ever refers to a few hours spent waiting for bail to be posted, but rather to a prison sentence; "jailbird" invariably means a prison inmate, not to someone who just happens to be in the drunk tank; "jailbait" suggests a prison term, not a night in a cell, etc. In all these cases, "jail" is being used in an abstract way, like the "school" in "schoolwork". If used on its own with no article, it retains this abstract sense; but if used with an article or in the plural, it would always be understood to mean a local lockup, or perhaps an old-timey stand-alone hoosegow, never a big institution where people wear denim jumpsuits and make pruno. So you might say "Tim Allen is in jail", but not "Tim Allen is in a jail", unless you're notifying a bail bondsman. There are plenty of other location-nouns like this: "in school" versus "in a school", "in church" versus "in a church", etc. LANTZY^TALK 23:42, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Not that there aren't loads of exceptions, depending on context. "I spent the night in jail" would clearly refer to a lockup, not a prison, regardless of the lack of a definite article. And "jailhouse" is weird. Used on its own as a noun, it would probably refer to a small local lock-up, but in "jailhouse chili" it refers to large prisons. Basically, you just have to learn every damn idiomatic expression on its own. LANTZY^TALK 23:50, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Which is what makes them idiomatic expressions in the first place; their meaning is not ascertainable from the individual words but the whole gestalt and its meaning have to be memorised. No language I've ever heard of fails to contain idiomatic expressions. English is, at least on this score, not alone. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 02:25, 9 September 2011 (UTC)