Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 May 10

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May 10

How do you label an amount of nothing, such as 0 bee(s). Would I be correct in treating nothing like a plural?(English language)

Lets say having nothing of something but you want to state this is so. If you have 0 somethings, would you say 0 something or 0 somethings (or something else, like "no somethings")? Editor0000001 ^talk 11:29, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

In general, yes. English "plural" is really non-singular: anything other than one should take it: Zero people came, no people came, zero degrees centigrade, zero point one degrees centigrade. However, prescriptive grammar sometimes says that "plural" means two or more, and that affects people's speech. Also, negative numbers can be a bit weird, since the grammar didn't really evolve with them. (They tend to be the mirror image, so −1 is singular like +1.) — kwami (talk) 11:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I believe fractions between 0 and 1 are also treated as singular: half a banana, a half gallon, etc. StuRat (talk) 02:39, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

That's only because it's a unit fraction: one half is. If it were two thirds, it would be plural again. — kwami (talk) 08:19, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

In what context are you envisaging using a plural verb with "two thirds"? I would say "Two thirds of a banana is enough", "Two thirds of a gallon is about 3 litres". "Two thirds of the people are married", sure, but that's because of "people", not "two thirds". 86.148.152.229 (talk) 11:44, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

(e/c) It would depend on what kind of "something" you're talking about. If the item was a mass noun, you wouldn't usually use a plural; if it's a count noun (like "bees"), then you would. There's a bit of overlap in cases where things that are normally mass nouns get counted. For example, honey is usually not counted, so you'd say "I have no honey", but if you were in a food warehouse counting out cases of product you could say that there were "no honeys" or "zero honeys" in a given location. Using a zero in the sentence usually indicates that you're using a count noun. Matt Deres (talk) 11:38, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

"Yes, We Have No Bananas"... -- AnonMoos (talk) 13:06, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

In the high school where I work the kids from one end of the town are more likely to say "We ain't got no bananas". I doubt if this helps. 20:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

They didn't need no education. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:08, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Korean translation

There's a rumour that female runner Shin Geum-Dan was actually a man. I suspect one of the following debunks this, but don't trust Google translate, and have no idea how reliable either source is:

• ehistory.korea.kr, in particular this embedded MP4 (6.4MB)
• h21.hani.co.kr

I would be grateful if a Korean-speaker could reply at Talk:Shin Geum-Dan#Gender question. Thanks jnestorius^(talk) 17:49, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

ş alt code

What's the alt code for ş? I googled it, but the alt codes I got, Alt+0351 and Alt+0352, give me _ and `. What is the correct alt code (in Windows 7, English)? --108.206.4.199 (talk) 23:49, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

The Cedilla article might lead somewhere useful. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:00, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Turns out this was discussed here in February.[1] This link came up, oddly enough, in a google search. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:07, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Unicode is your friend. Put "ş" in - exactly those characters, "&", "0", "3", "5" "1" ";" and it should show up as ş irrespective of what keyboard or OS you're using to type it in. (I'm using a Mac and the Alt key does different things to what it does under Windows). A capital Ş is Ş. Alternatively there's a handy set of characters just down there ↓ when you're editing a page, just below "If you do not want…". Select "Latin" from the "Insert" dropdown and there's a whole bunch of characters with diacritical marks. Tonywalton ^Talk 00:52, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Tonywalton, you're possibly missing the fact that the IP managed to insert the letter into their question! Code page 852 seems to suggest that the answer might be 0173: I can't vouch for it though. --ColinFine (talk) 21:48, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Not hard to do, considering it can be copied from the cedilla article: ş ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:58, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I didn't miss it – in fact I wondered how they'd done it without an "alt code" (horrible Windows-centric term though that is). I assumed, as evidently has BB Bugs, that they'd copied it from somewhere like here or elsewhere. Using Wikimedia's "Insert" dropdown appears to be the handiest, obviating the need to trawl the Web (or Unicode, at least) for single characters like Ș, Ŵ, ə, č, ↓ or even ∐, whatever OS/hardware/keyboard you happen to be using. Of course if you're doing a lot of work in a character set outside plain vanilla ASCII you'd be as well to select a keyboard appropriate to the symbols you intend to use. Tonywalton ^Talk 23:25, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The OP asked for an alt code and you told him how to insert the character in an HTML page. What if he's writing some other kind of document, like in a text editor or word processor or something? Angr (talk) 23:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Like you, I get _ and ` (Win 7). There is some stuff about this at Alt code. As I understand it, it's saying that for reasons of backwards compatibility, Windows may not always convert Alt codes according to Unicode standard, but may revert to some earlier character map. It explains how to circumvent this (prefix the code with "+" on the numeric keypad, type the code in hex), but you have to add the registry key too, like it says (edit the registry at your own risk). Remember you have to type it in hex, so 351 is 15F. I have just tried this and it works fine in Notepad and Word, but not in this edit window (IE 9), or, apparently, in IE generally, where apparently something is intercepting the keypress sequence and doing something different when it detects Alt+F. Great design, if true! 86.181.201.75 (talk) 03:25, 12 May 2012 (UTC)