Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 August 6

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August 6

Bloody 'ell

What adjective do the British use for someone who is covered in circulatory fluid? Clarityfiend (talk) 06:45, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

What adjective to other English speaking nations use? MarnetteD|Talk 07:51, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Icky. What else? Clarityfiend (talk) 18:59, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Answering the original question: Bloody(1) Bazza (talk) 07:59, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

People wanting to avoid the possible ambiguity of referring to someone as "bloody" might use gory (or ensanguined if they wanted to be snooty about it). Deor (talk) 08:52, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Context and emphasis are useful in avoiding confusion. Wikt:bloody#Adjective says "Used as an intensifier"; so you might have "that bloody man [is annoying me]", as opposed to "that bloody man [with a chest wound]". Alansplodge (talk) 09:30, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Interestingly, Americans don't seem to have a problem distinguishing between "covered in shit" and "of low quality", similarly I don't think the British have any problem distinguishing between the two meanings of "Bloody". --Jayron32 12:41, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

There is the old joke:

'A man had just been told that his best friend had an affair with his wife. He got drunk that night and in the pub said, "I'll fucking kill the fucker. How dare that fucking bastard have sexual intercourse with my fucking wife?"'

(quoted from Ruth Wajnryb, Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language) ---Sluzzelin talk 13:44, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks all. Clarityfiend (talk) 18:59, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

There is also the word "bloodied" as in "bloodied but unbowed", which I think is more likely to be used on this occasion than "bloody". --TammyMoet (talk) 14:18, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I've always known that expression as "bloody but unbowed". It see it comes from the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The version with "bloodied" seems to be a later variant. As Jayron says above, we generally have no trouble distinguishing the two senses of "bloody", though I have known audiences at Macbeth to snigger at Duncan's line "What bloody man is that?" AndrewWTaylor (talk) 15:08, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I once went on a first aid at work course in which the treatment for severe bleeding was described as: "sit or lay the bleeding casualty down, elevate the bleeding limb, apply direct pressure to the bleeding wound, remove the bleeding casualty to hospital, don't forget to do the bleeding paperwork". Alansplodge (talk) 13:51, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Why did Dutch and Afrikaans become different languages so quick?

Jamestown, Virginia, USA was settled 45 years earlier than South Africa and is not a different language yet. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:37, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

The Afrikaans article suggests they are not all that different. And American English and British English are not 100 percent with each other either. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:42, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Baseball_Bugs -- Afrikaans has very minimal verb inflection. Except for a few auxiliaries, modals, and semi-archaic forms, most verbs seem to have exactly two forms: A past participle with "ge-" prefix and an undifferentiated uninflected form which serves all other purposes. Typical Dutch verbs have more like eight inflectionally distinct forms (infinitive, present 1st sg., present 2nd. and 3rd. sg., present plural, past singular, past plural, past participle, and present participle). That's a far more radical difference than between American and British English, where the differences in verb inflection are somewhat subtle or minimal ("gotten", "snuck", "dreamed" etc.) AnonMoos (talk) 14:22, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

P.S. I probably should have said seven (not eight), because the present plural is generally the same as the infinitive (though the "to be" verb has two infinitives, zijn and wezen)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:26, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I gather that local languages influenced the development of Afrikaans. I don't know that that kind of thing happened very much with the English settlers in America. American Indian words seemingly survive largely as place names and some object names, not as parts of English grammar or vocabulary otherwise. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:34, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Language change does not happen in a predictable, rigidly reliable, rate. It happens in fits and starts, sometimes with large-scale changes occurring in a matter of a few generations, sometimes remaining relatively static for centuries. There is literally no way to predict, ahead of time, which languages will changes rapidly, and which slowly, neither is there any meaningful way to explain why one language changed faster or slower than another did. It is possible to describe (rather than explain) the changes that have already occurred in a systematic way, for example with English there was the great vowel shift that occurred during the period known as Middle English. But that is a descriptive thing and not an explanatory thing. We can say what happened, but not why it happened in a way that is predictive or transferrable to analyzing other languages. It just doesn't work that way. There are some large-scale, very broad statistics on this, but those statistics are nearly useless in applying to a single language over a relatively short period of time (say, a few centuries). This paper here tries to draw some conclusions regarding the connection between size of a population of speakers and the rates of linguistic change, but even it admits that "the rate of linguistic change is likely to vary across time and place for many different reasons" and that coming up with any sort of law that is universally applicable at the individual language level probably isn't possible. --Jayron32 15:59, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

The degree of linguistic isolation is important. Back then, before recorded voices, physical isolation meant you never heard anyone speak the mother tongue. The British colonies in America continued to have lots of travel back and forth to England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales and to other British colonies in the new world (for example, Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis). I'm not familiar with the degree of interchange between South Africa and The Netherlands. SinisterLefty (talk) 18:11, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

It definitely decreased after the British took over the Dutch Cape Colony in the Napoleonic wars, and also with the movements of white settlers inland away from the coasts... AnonMoos (talk) 19:33, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Settlers are normally drawn from a narrow set of the mother land and bring regional and class dialects that may not be standard. Australia for example began as a penal colony, and its language is influenced by the original settlers who tended to be from underprivileged backgrounds. The main reason the Boer language is different is that it is a cross between Dutch and a pidgin Dutch spoken by mixed race South Africans. Something similar happened in the British Caribbean Islands and even ebonics in the U.S. Some of these languages are incomprehensible to other English speakers. Another factor is that the Boers became separated from the Netherlands when they were ceded to Great Britain, while the U.S. and Great Britain retained close contact following American independence. The Bostonian accent in the 19th century for example was influenced by changes in British English, such as dropping the final "r" in words such as car and bar. Quebec French on the other hand did not follow changes in European French following its cession to Great Britain and hence its difference from European French has grown. Finally, as Jayron32 pointed out, the speed of change is unpredictable. TFD (talk) 20:00, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I would take "unpredictable" just to mean that we haven't come up with an accurate model yet for making that prediction. We've already mentioned a number of factors which would go into any such formula, but there may well be others. For example, the desire of the people to speak the mother tongue or to avoid doing so, with subcultures and those seeking independence often choosing to intentionally distance themselves from the main language. On the other hand, those forced into an enclave or exclave may wish to maintain the linguistic link. SinisterLefty (talk) 16:30, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

It could be that we don't yet have a working model or theory to explain such things as "language change rate" in a universal manner; OR it may literally be unpredictable in the sense that the behavior is chaotic or non-mechantistic. There are many, many situations in science where behavior is literally "unpredictable" in the sense that it could never be known and not just in the sense that "our models aren't good enough yet or we don't have enough data". Everything from the n-body problem to quantum mechanics and lots of other areas have stuff that is literally unknowable. Those are but two examples. The Newtonian view of the clockwork universe, where one could know everything if only we were smart enough or had enough data or had good enough models has been abandoned by many fields of science as quite likely an inaccurate world view. However, that's irrelevant to answering the OPs question. Whether we don't have a model and never could, or don't have a model and maybe someday will, the answer for the OP would still be "We don't have a model to answer that question." What may happen or may not happen in the future isn't relevant (I will of course, leave open the possibility that it could be answered with existing research. I just couldn't find it, and most linguistic papers I could find on the subject (the link I gave above is representative and not exhaustive) say that no one can currently explain the rate of linguistic change.) --Jayron32 18:05, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

I wonder what model could have predicted rhyming slang, for example. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:15, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

The model wouldn't predict the actual language changes, just the rate at which changes occur. SinisterLefty (talk) 20:23, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

How could it predict the rate of something it didn't know was going to happen? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:01, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

The same way we can predict the rate of genetic drift without knowing exactly where it will drift. Mathematically, a random walk is relevant, where random movements should result in a fairly predictable drift rate from the origin, even though the exact location at any time is unpredictable. The law of large numbers plays a part, too, similar to how we can predict that a large number of coin flips will generate about half heads, even though we have no idea which will be heads and tails. SinisterLefty (talk) 21:22, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

I think you're mixing apples and pears. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:55, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

It's not the same because the rate of genetic mutations is known, while language change depends on many factors. It may be that the English began dropping "r"s because George I spoke that way. The French of the nobility was replaced by the French of the middle class following the French Revolution, while Quebec was shielded from this because of it was no longer a French colony. Radio and television have lead to greater standardization of many languages, with the lessening for example of Newfoundland and Bavarian accents. The "our" spelling became standard in English Canada due to increased loyalty to Britain following the War of 1812. Elite accents in the British Empire and the U.K. were seen as snobbish following WW2 and declined. TFD (talk) 23:58, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

The rate of genetic mutations is also based on many factors, such as exposure to ionizing radiation. So, any model needs to take all these factors into account. Same with the rate of language drift. SinisterLefty (talk) 15:12, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

You're hitting upon the important point, which some others have made here too, that language change is at least to some extent a conscious effort by its speakers. Genetic drift is a natural, random and non-conscious process. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:18, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I touched on that when mentioning how subcultures choose to differentiate themselves linguistically. However, individual choices still lead to predictable averages, in the long run, such as stock market prices, based on many individual buy/sell/hold decisions, approximating the value of the company. I wouldn't expect to get 100% accurate results out of such a model, but better than nothing, such as models predicting the outcome of elections. SinisterLefty (talk) 15:12, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

I think you missed my point, so let me restate only the important part. "that's irrelevant to answering the OPs question. Whether we don't have a model and never could, or don't have a model and maybe someday will, the answer for the OP would still be "We don't have a model to answer that question."" is the part where the important bit we said. I fully clearly conceded that the rate of language change may be a knowable concept for which we just don't have the right data or models yet. That's irrelevant. No one can provide those models to the OP if they don't exist, for whatever reason they don't exist. Not existing (and no one has yet provided evidence they do) means everyone is just making shit up at this point. That's not really what we do here. If you've been sitting on a reliable source that demonstrates how to calculate or predict the rate of linguistic change in a manner that helps resolve the OP's question, please post that source. I tried to find one, and the best I could find were sources that says it's mostly not possible. Of which I posted the best one I could find. --Jayron32 16:25, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Language_change#Quantification does offer a way to measure language change over time, which is at least the first step in modelling it. In the context of this Q, that source could provide a way to verify or refute the OP's assumption that Africaans is more different from Dutch than US English is from British English. SinisterLefty (talk) 17:13, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

It gives a way to measure the rate of the change in a language. It does not give a means by which to explain or predict such a rate. As I noted above, already quite clearly, "It is possible to describe (rather than explain) the changes that have already occurred in a systematic way... But that is a descriptive thing and not an explanatory thing. We can say what happened, but not why it happened in a way that is predictive or transferrable to analyzing other languages." See my post above, dated 15:59, 6 August 2019. The Quantification section you note above gives a way to quantify the rate of change of a specific language, but it does not create a model or theory allowing us to predict or explain the rate of change. --Jayron32 17:33, 8 August 2019 (UTC)