Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 April 29

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April 29

Parentheses after a colon

I have a question: (are parentheses directly after a colon linguistically acceptable?). Having a disagreement with a WMF dev. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 07:16, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: I very recently wrote something with a closing parenthesis immediately following a colon, so obviously I'd say, yes, under circumstances they are orthographically stylistically acceptable. I wonder how your interlocutor would, in this specific case, have addressed the punctuation of the parenthesis. I cannot think of an acceptable circumstance for an opening parenthesis immediately following a colon; I think I'd always insert a blank space.  --Lambiam 08:10, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

I can't think of any circumstances where that would be acceptable, but context is everything. Can you give an example of how you think that might be appropriate?. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:15, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Lambiam, Shantavira, I can't give an example because I couldn't think of an acceptable circumstance either. I tried to word my question in a neutral way in case I was wrong. The disagreement is on Phabricator: "/* Section title */ (gadget name)" should not show a colon after the section link. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 08:26, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

(An aside) would normally follow something else. Going first doesn't make sense. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:39, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

The Rolling Stones beg to differ. --Wrongfilter (talk) 10:20, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Plenty of other songs have used that construction. Where works of art are concerned, good grammar ain't necessarily so. :) --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:45, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Clarityfiend, the (gadget name) is added automatically by various gadgets and scripts like RedWarn, Shortdesc helper, XFDcloser, AFCH and also my scripts. But sometimes there just is no edit summary, but the gadget credit is still needed for the detection of possibly malfunctioning gadgets and scripts. It's possible to add a useless generic edit summary ("changing page", always true) but.. really? Lambiam, it looks weird to me, but maybe it's just me. Wrongfilter, and Britney. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:03, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

You could tell yourself that "editing something" is tacitly implied, and it's a form of ellipsis.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:26, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

I find nothing objectionable in (→Punctuation: (parenthesis)).  --Lambiam 11:32, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

It happens regularly in scripts. (The theatrical kind.) To take a random example from The Goon Show, a line begins Secretary: (Milligan, deranged) to indicate that the line is spoken by Milligan in the character of a deranged secretary. But this is a case where (as you said in the linked thread) "the text in parenthesis is followed by what the colon is supposed to emphasize". Suggestion: the gadgets could use square brackets instead of round ones. Square brackets are used for alterations and substitutions, so they would mean "this text not written by the original author", or even "edit made by gadget", and you could be happy for them to follow a colon.  Card Zero  (talk) 13:35, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

See [1] --Amble (talk) 17:03, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Tocharian C

Apparently someone in 1930 found some documents and identified them as containing words from a Tocharian substrate. Then someone in 2018 made similar claims. Then in 2019 a group of scholars discredited the 2018 claim.

What I'm confused by is whether the 1930 claim is still open or not. Were the documents referred to in 1930 and 2018/2019 the same, and therefore both discredited, or are the former still plausibly Tocharian in origin but the latter discredited? 70.172.194.25 (talk) 07:18, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

These are two different hypotheses referring to two different corpora. As mentioned in Dragoni et el. (2020) in footnote 3 on p. 336, Schmidt did not mention in his 2018 claims the earlier proposal by Burrows from the 1930s at all.

Mallory (2015) discusses the proposal by Burrows at some length on p. 6. and says: "This theory has been widely accepted", although he also cites several critical voices. But clearly, Burrows's proposal has gained more acceptance than Schmidt's. –Austronesier (talk) 11:25, 29 April 2022 (UTC)