Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 July 21

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July 21

Ur-pun

What is the world's earliest known pun? Any language, not just English. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:39, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

The Hebrew Bible has "explanations" as to why various people were given their names which are not always etymologically accurate; if such an explanation involves a similar-sounding word, I guess it could be a pun. The episode of Susanna and the Elders added to the Greek version of the book of Daniel has two specific puns on Greek tree names... AnonMoos (talk) 06:32, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Earlier: Genesis 4 gives us Cain and Abel § Etymology - "their names may be a direct pun on the roles they take"; perhaps Genesis 2 counts for Adam § Connection to the earth. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 19:24, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Have you seen Pun#History_and_global_usage? Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:37, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I have seen a book titled something like Puns: the foundation of writing. Much of early writing uses homophones for concepts that cannot easily be pictured. —Tamfang (talk) 22:37, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Arguably, Chinese characters still do, at least partially. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:54, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Writing hard-to-draw words by substituting a drawing of easy-to-draw words is known as the "Rebus principle" (scan down in article Rebus)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:11, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Is backwards English a language?

If all English sentences had their word order perfectly reversed, could this still be a conceivably natural language? Or, would this new Hsilgne language have any unnatural features that would make it unique among other languages? 2600:8800:718D:8D00:D4AB:BD6F:4954:2F7 (talk) 04:35, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

For almost any order between several connected syntactical parts, such as a verb (V) with a subject (S) and an object (O), or a noun (N) with an adjective (A), there are languages whose grammar prescribes that order, so we have VSO languages, SOV languages, OSV languages, and so on. English is an SVO language, so English reverse would be an OVS language - a rare, but not non-existent type. Likewise, English is an AN language ("blank card"), but there are many NA languages, such as French ("carte blanche"). For more, see Linguistic typology, Word order and Head-directionality parameter. Some languages (e.g. Turkish) do many things in the reverse order of English; for exampe, "I don't know the man who stole your book" becomes "Book-your stealing man-the know-not-I". There is nothing unnatural about the word orders that reverse the word order of English. Therefore it is IMO a reasonable guess that kids growing up immersed in an environment where English reverse is spoken will pick it up just like they would pick up any natural language.  --Lambiam 07:07, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

OVS OSV isn't unnatural or forbidden, but it's typologically disfavored as the main default word order in a language -- it's the rarest of the six basic word order types by a significant margin... AnonMoos (talk) 07:28, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

OSV is even rarer, yet Warao kids have no problem learning it naturally, which is the issue.  --Lambiam 07:38, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant "OSV" (I had problems reversing just three letters!). I'm sure that OSV is viable as a language system, but it's very strongly typologically disfavored, as I meant to say. If you round to the nearest percentage, then the occurrence of both SVO and SOV among the world's languages is in the solid double digits, VSO is almost in the double digits, while the closest integer percentage to express the occurrence of OSV languages is 0%. AnonMoos (talk) 13:24, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

The deuce you say!  Card Zero  (talk) 22:12, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

A minor aspect that would not be natural: the variation between an and a for the indefinite article, governed in English by whether the onset of the following syllable is zero. "An untied band is not a united band", reversed, should become "Band united a not is band untied an"; however, such a variation, originally a phonological process, being governed by distant phonemes, is not seen in natural languages.  --Lambiam 07:29, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Kilometre

Do average English speakers in countries that have metricated almost everything (such as Australia and New Zealand) use word "kilometre" in expressions to indicate an unspecified distance, such as "kilometres away", "a few kilometres", "several kilometres", "thousands of kilometres", in daily lives? --40bus (talk) 19:13, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't know if Canada qualifies, but the answer here is "mostly no". I mean, you could say it and be perfectly understood, but I'd bet more than half the people you'd meet would use "miles". Kilometers sounds formal and scientific, almost stuffy. Light travels 300,000 kilometers a second, but that town is twenty miles from here. I think younger folks tend to favour the metric more, so perhaps this is changing. Matt Deres (talk) 01:59, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Even though there isn't much scientific base for the metre's exact length, anyway. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:08, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Agree. In Canada you'd say about a family relocating to some far-away suburb: "they moved miles away from here", not "kilometres away" unless you want to specify a precise distance, which you would then include in the sentence. Xuxl (talk) 07:32, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, "miles away" carries a connotation of "a long way away", that "kilometres away" simply doesn't. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:57, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

How about "give him an inch and he'll take an ell"? DuncanHill (talk) 13:04, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

My international traveler yoga instructor sometimes fashions himself a bit of a linguistic wit, and insists on saying rather than "inch your fingers forward", "millimeter your fingers forward", which is at the very least kinda silly. I stopped saying anything about his dumb jokes a while ago - he's a good teacher and leader, but oy. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇} 17:42, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Is "several kilometres" ever used? Is it common to say "a several-kilometre-long traffic jam". In Finnish is common to say "useita kilometrejä". --40bus (talk) 15:10, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, traffic reporters on the radio would say "several kilometres". HiLo48 (talk) 00:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

What syllable do they stress? When I was growing up I learned /kɪlˈɑːmɪtər/ but now I mostly say /ˈkɪloʊˌmiːtər/ (with some of the weak vowels probably devolving into indistinct schwa-ishness in practice). I hear both in the wild but tend to think of the first-syllable stress as "more precise" or "more sciency". I'm willing to allow the possibility that this might be a slight affectation. --Trovatore (talk) 18:56, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Our Metric Conversion Board recommended emphasising the first syllable. However, our rather opinionated Prime Minister at the time, Gough Whitlam firmly favoured emphasising the second, based on the classical derivations of the word. HiLo48 (talk) 04:59, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Sample of one, but I've always favoured stressing the second syllable (not the first and/or third), to avoid the word sounding like a device to meter kilos. I prefer to stress the antipenultimate syllable in names or words that derive (or might derive) from Greek. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 (talk) 94.2.67.235 (talk) 20:20, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Interesting — we have the same goal but the opposite execution. To me the second-syllable stress sounds like "speedometer", which measures speed, and "odometer", which measures, well, od I guess. --Trovatore (talk) 23:33, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

On a lighter note, see <https://discus.4specs.com/discus/messages/4254/Thanksgiving_day-art_buchwald-8902.pdf>. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 20:11, 29 July 2024 (UTC)