Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2006 November 11

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 11

They shall not grow old...

Ode of Remembrance. Anyone know when this was first used in remembrance services? Carcharoth 00:42, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Since November 1921. Clio the Muse 00:52, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

searhing for a word

I am searching for a word that was spoken on a radio program that I think means " stupid talk " it is possible that it sounds somewhat like "gallintisis " for the life of me I can't remember the word... sorry to bug you but hope you can help.

Gibberish? --Wooty  Woot? | contribs 02:12, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Gallimauphry? User:Zoe|(talk) 04:34, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Galimatia? I think it's from Gargantua and Pantagruel. Look for "gallimatia" or "galimatias" spelling, too. --Dementios.

Which programming language for a linguist?

I would like to start a website on the Teochew language, providing some language lessons, grammar, phonetics and maybe cultural stuff as well. I would also like to make a simple electronic dictionary of the language, which might or might not appear on the site. These are the ideas about the website I would like to make but the problem is I do not know much about computer technologies but I am very willing to start from scratch and learn the skills or softwares I'll need for making such a site.

I know I'll probably have to learn Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash if I want to make a fairly nice website. However, will I also need to learn any programming language(s) for such purpose? I googled "programming for linguists" and I found these two books: Hammond, Michael. (2003) Programming for Linguists: Perl for Language Researchers. Blackwell Publishing. and Hammond, Michael. (2002) Programming for Linguists: Java TM Technology for Language Researchers. Blackwell Publishing. I'm afraid I do not know any differences between these two languages and their respective wikipedia pages do not tell much about what I can do with them as applied to linguistic studies or research.

Could anyone tell me which of them (or any others) should be easier for a linguist who does not have much background in programming (I only did Pascal at school years ago). My purpose is to write a programme which would allow the users to search for any words using (a combination of) the Chinese character, consonants, vowels, tones, or meaning and return the rest of the information about the word. And it can automatically do the tone sandhi and return the sandhi tones (and other pronunciation information) by entering a string of Chinese characters. I hope what I've said makes sense and is clear enough. Any advice should be useful! Thank you very much! Shingrila 09:44, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Perl and Java are both fairly common on the web. Perl is often used to write (when the internet is concerned) CGI scripts and Java is used to write applets. However, I don't think you will need Java on your site. You might, however, need CGI. I wouldn't recommend Perl though, but you should take a look at PHP, which is much more common. You shouldn't need more programming than PHP either, I don't think. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 17:23, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a recommendation really, because I'm not knowledgeable about programming. Nevertheless, my phonetics professor said he had a hard time getting used to programming, but he could get started by learning Perl, since its syntax can be close to natural languages. --Kjoonlee 03:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't recommend Java at all, though like most programmers I'm biased. Programming your site requires viewers to have the Java libraries installed (which most people do), and these run significantly slower on low-end systems and frankly I find everything about Java annoying and clumsy. Perl is probably the best (possibly best documented for the web and easy to start out on) for what you're desribing, and you won't have to worry about speed issues or inconveniencing your users client-side.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  12:45, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

If the Java runs as CGI code, you don't have to make clients run the code themselves. If it's possible to make Java do that, that is. --Kjoonlee 17:05, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a big, big question with many ramifications. There are (or may be) several different parts to a web site, which you create in different ways using different languages.

• The fixed content (text, images etc) pretty well have to be written in HTML. I generally write HTML directly, but many people use tools like Dreamweaver, or document editors like MS Word to produce it.
• Content which will vary, depending on what the user asks for, but which will be generated by a program running on the server, and sent to the user's browser. A typical example is information which comes out of a database. The languages most used for CGI programmes, as these are called, are PERL, Visual Basic and PHP. My recommendation would be PHP.
• If the page is to be able to do things actively as the user works on it (for example, revealing hidden data when the user picks a particular button) without reloading the page from the server, it will have to have some scripting embedded in it: by far the most common language from this is Javascript (which is an entirely different langauge from Java).
• It is also possible to cause a page to download a self-contained program in Java to do some more complex interactive task, but this is quite specialised.

It sounds to me as if you will need some HTML generated somehow, and a CGI script to look up things in a database. If you want the user to have some interactivity you may want to add some Javascript. I would advise against getting into either Flash or Java unless you are very clear that you need something that can only be done that way.

As for the actual language - to tell the truth it doesn't make very much difference. None of them have any particular relevance for linguistics, and the books you mention sound as if they are not geared towards CGI. I use Perl myself, but I would advise a beginner against starting with it: it has a lot of features which let you be clever or concise but little that you can't achieve with other languages. Since you will need t obe using a database well, I suggest Googling (or looking on Amazon) for 'PHP MySQL' and choosing one of the beginners' books.

--ColinFine 00:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Language

How to pronounce "gangue"? (as in metallurgy)- Sadd

According to OED, it's /gæŋ/ -Obli (Talk)^? 13:43, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Comma edits

Are these commas correct?

However, he is mentioned positively in 2 Chronicles 33:10-17, and was buried in the palace garden.

Pharaoh Neco responded the following year by retaking Kumukh after a four-month siege, and also after executing the Babylonian garrison.

The temple was also partially pillaged during this attack, and Jehoiakim was taken captive.

The only one that is definitely wrong is the second sentence, where the comma must be removed. The others are fine. Tesseran 19:21, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, only the second sentence is incorrect Englishnerd 22:37, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I have amended the previously incorrect second quote.

I would not agree with either of the above; sorry. The positioning of commas in English, unlike German, does not follow an exact rule. In general, where in speaking you feel the need to take a breath, therein goes the comma. The first part of the sentence beginning 'The temple..' could easily stand alone, so the second statement naturally follows from , and is linked by, a comma. Clio the Muse 06:34, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

The only garrison I know of that you can execute is Garrison Keillor, after a particularly bad pun, perhaps. StuRat 00:30, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Not so, sir. Eg. "The enemy captured and later executed the platoon". The meaning is entirely clear. JackofOz 05:04, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

To me, a garrison is a fortified building ("a military post; especially: a permanent military installation"), not the troops in the building, but I now see that is a secondary meaning of the word, although that meaning is not much used in the US. So, it sounded like it would sound to you if I said "he executed the castle". StuRat 06:55, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. But please don't execute Garrison Keillor, he's far too precious to ever lose. He is obviously your personal mentor.  :) JackofOz 00:29, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

My favorite quote of his, explaining why he isn't on TV: "I have a face that was just made for radio." :-) StuRat 05:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

IPA for bane and bone

According to the articles Help:IPA for English and General American, the vowels in "bayed" and "bode" are transcribed as e and o, but may sometimes be rendered as /ei/ and /oʊ/, because they are pronounced as diphthongs by "many" speakers of general American. Now, I am absolutely unable to imagine any speaker of General American who doesn't pronounce them as these diphthongs. Thoughts? --194.145.161.227 18:14, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Have you met them all? There are quite a few. When describing accent, it's usually best to "never say never" since, no one has ever studied the language of every speaker unless there are only a handful of speakers. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:48, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

We're talking about general American, which would be what CNN newscasters usually speak - not some obscure dialects. If you can imagine a pronunciation of "bayed" and "bode" which is both non-diphthongal and can be described as "general American", then ... well, then you can imagine more than I can. My guess is that this is just some US transcription convention which doesn't even pretend to express phonetic reality - the phonetic reality being that these vowels are always diphthongal. --194.145.161.227 02:07, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you on this one. The article may be a bit weak on the words because it doesn't have references to back up such statements. Then again, native speakers of diphthong heavy languages often argue that they don't exist as diphthongs in fast speech, so there might be references supporting the opposite.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  12:36, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that I suspect that the wording in the article is very misleading for the reader (implying that these vowels are frequently, even normally monophthongal) without clear support in literature. Th' prunseaysh'n in fa:s speech isn' normly regardd 's th' "real" un. Anyway, I think this should be researched and fixed (I don't have an English book about phonetics at home right now, so I prefer somebody else to do it :)).

Yeah, I know you mean GA and I still stand by my above statement. There are many speakers of General American and there just happens to be idiolectal variation among speakers. Although I sometimes question the analysis of always-diphthongal [eɪ]. It's just as easy to imagine that there is one /e/ and is more open when a monophthong and more close when part of a rising diphthong. Phonemic and underlying representations can get pretty scary. I once read an analysis of French that stated that there were no underlying front vowels. I also hear that Chomsky and Halle (in Sound Pattern of English) analyze English /ɔɪ/ as an underlying |ø| .Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 14:06, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Sure, innovative phonological analyses of what is "underlying" can be very weird; I prefer to discuss the phonetic side of it. But I'm not sure I understood your questioning of the "always-diphthongal [eɪ]" Aren't you talking about a diphthong, too? --194.145.161.227 15:46, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm saying that in speakers/dialects in which it is always a diphthong, I see three plausible underlying representations:

1. two vowels: |e| → [eɪ] and |ɛ| → [ɛ]
2. two vowels: |ej| → [eɪ] and |ɛ| → [ɛ]
3. one vowel, raised before /j/: |ɛj| → [eɪ]

To a certain extent, what you choose for the underlying representation is sort of arbitrary, but I think it ought to make sense. Otherwise, you could do something like this |☺| → [eɪ]. |♥| → [ɛ]. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. In other words, it's a matter of taste; you simply like e, it kind of appeals to your aesthetic sense. That's fine with me. --194.145.161.227 17:55, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It's not that I like e, that is what is apparantly used in the scholarship. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 22:32, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it's obviously used in American scholarship (note that the British transcription of IP is quite different, even though RP itself is hardly very different phonetically in these respects, but this can be interpreted in different ways:

1.It can be just a traditional notation in American scholarship (as I suspect).

2.It could supposed to reflect an underlying form rather than the actual phonetic realization (as you suggest)

3.It could actually be supposed to mean that either the dominant pronunciation is non-diphthongal (as some wordings in the article currently imply).

Your interpretation is based on your opinion that an underlying analysis of that sort is plausible, although it's not rationally clear what is so plausible about it - hence my comment about aesthetic taste. In any case, that ought to be checked. --194.145.161.227 21:08, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what needs to be checked. Roca & Johnson state that the vowel in late is "diphthongized usually in GA, and generally in RP... where it is also a little lower..." (p179).Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 00:39, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, even that is a sufficient basis for changing the wording in the article. Yet - I would be interested to know how they describe the vowel phonetically, before stating that it is "usually diphthongized"? --194.145.161.227 01:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Speaking entirely for myself, I'm a speaker of GenAm and have very monophthongal values for those vowels in closed syllables. I didn't expect this; in all my linguistics classes throughout my undergraduate education we were taught--you could say we had it drummed into us--that the vowels of bane and bone were diphthongs in American English. Then I started graduate school and was taking a phonetics class, and we had an assignment to make spectrograms of our own speech, putting all the different vowels in the context "h__d". You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my own recordings of "hayed" and "hoed" and saw absolutely no movement of the formants at all. They were pure monophthongs. And I'm not from Minnesota, whose stereotypical accent has monophthongs there; I'm from Texas, renowned for its diphthongs, triphthongs, and tetraphthongs. —Angr 06:03, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. /i/ and /u/ are also often (typically?) pronounced as slightly rising and de-centering (is that the opposite of centering? [anti-centering? radiating?]) diphthongs, especially in careful speech, but they aren't usually represented as a diphthong in phonemic transcription. It's always struck me as strange that the phonemic representation for /e/ and /o/ includes what seems a minor phonetic detail—the presence of an offglide. From a phonological perspective, I think there is a valuable generalization to be drawn by separating the "true" (nonrhotic/noncentering) diphthongs, which have two distinct articulatory targets (/ɔɪ/, /ɑʊ/, /ɑɪ/) from the "marginal" diphthongs /e/ and /o/, which have more in common with /i/ and /u/, in that they have a single articulatory target with an offglide. Transcribing /i/ and /u/ as monophthongs and /e/ and /o/ as diphthongs might seem under close analysis to be an unnecessarily arbitrary dichotomy. On the other hand, Canepari in [1] chooses to transcribe all 7 vowels in phonemic form as diphthongs, which, though taking the opposite tack, seems more defensible than the "normal" transcription for these vowels. Nohat 08:25, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Honestly, I am not in the position to comment on this. I am pretty certain that I hear diphthongs there (and not a contrast between more open and more close monophtongs of the sort that occurs in French - without vowel quantity differences - and in most Germanic languages - with vowel quantity differences), and I am stupefied by what both of you are saying, especially by the results of Angr's experiment (surely there must be an offglide at least; I do hear it); as for Nohat's suggestion, I don't trust my own ears to distinguish between a true diphthong and a diphthongoid, but I believe it should be possible to check whether it's correct by phonetic analysis, and I would even be surprised if some scholar hasn't already done it) . Unfortunately, I am getting real busy in real life right now, so I just don't have time to try and replicate Angrs' experiment - let alone check Nohat's concept - with PRAAT. I have very little training/experience in that sort of thing, too. However, I notice that both of you are talking about the monophthongal interpretation as non-standard and as a product of your own research/considerations as opposed to the "normal"/usual diphthongal interpretation. This makes me think that the state of the art needs to be researched further, and that it should be reflected in more detail in the article - but as I said, I'm not the one who is going to do it in the immediate future. Gone are the times when I used to go to the library for the special purpose of obtaining a source for editing Wikipedia. :) --194.145.161.227 14:25, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Best Language

What is the best language in the world from a utilitarian perspective.

Good question. Every language has its quirks, weird verb forms, odd grammar, etc. Some say Esperanto is the most natural language. --Wooty  Woot? | contribs 20:53, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

No way, Esperanto sucks. Interlingua is the most useful, in that the most people have a good chance of understanding it without training. —Keenan Pepper 21:15, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

See also Ido and Interlingua compared. For billions of people, both languages need to be learned, and Ido is the easier to learn.  --Lambiam^Talk 22:18, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, they all suck. Indo-European, nay Romance toys. A good conlang should take into account the languages of humanity as a whole, in all their diversity; I don't think anybody has made a satisfactory attempt at that, although loglan etc. at least try to do something universal. --194.145.161.227 02:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Esperanto is certainly not Romance, by grammar or vocabulary. Plundaring the world is likely just to produce a mish-mash.--Prosfilaes 11:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Many languages have complications in their grammar, morphology, phonology, vocabulary and idiom, such as genders, cases, declension, agreement, paradigms, sandhi, ablaut, dozens of vowels, irregularities, etcetera. Taking account of the diversity is a good way to see that all these complications are unneeded: for every complication there are thousands of languages that manage quite well without. A good model for consequent simplicity is formed by the creole languages. To design a new "world language" my proposal would be to use that as a syntactic model and English words as the basis for the lexicon, with simplified spelling and pronunciation (for example instead of "finite" and "infinite" just "finit", pronounced ['finit], and "infinit", pronounced [in'finit]).  --Lambiam^Talk 23:04, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Some bookcases are built without wood, some without metal, etc.; but that doesn't mean that you don't need a building material. Removing one may force you to add another. Simplified pronounciation? ['finite] and [in'finite] (how are you choosing the stresses?) would be significantly simpler for large part of the world that does not end their syllables with plosives. What are you going to do with "th"? That's one of the harder sounds for the average human to learn.--Prosfilaes 11:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

For understanding, there's no way you're going to come near actually speaking the language. My experience with Interlingua reminds me of when I downloaded a English-language video with Swedish subtitles. I could make out bits and pieces here and there, but most of it was opaque to me, and I didn't get close to understanding it.--Prosfilaes 10:38, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

And think the basic theory behind the site you link to is absurd. Esperanto is not "bad enough to strike the general public as risible", as the general public doesn't know anything about Esperanto, and if they did, would dismiss it because it's not just like English or French or their native tongue. Everything has faults, but no one can agree what Esperanto's major faults are, and the proposals for faults are frequently contrary; one says Esperanto has too many roots, and the other says too few. (It also irks me that he accuses Esperanto of being ugly, but displays it only in an artificial transliteration.) Frankly, Interlingua strikes me as an atrocity; assuming everyone speaks a descendant of Latin, and retaining all the quirks the speakers of those languages are used to doesn't amuse this speaker of Germanic languages.--Prosfilaes 11:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

If you're concerned about the actual utility of using the language for communication (what can you get done with it) rather than the pure utility of using the language (how easy is it to use), I'd think that English is the best one, as it's commonly spoken in much of the world, and is also a lingua franca in many spheres, including most of the business and academic worlds. As such, it's commonly learned as a second language. If you're interested in one area of the world more than others, languages like Arabic (North Africa, Middle East) or Spanish (Latin America) are also useful. The List of languages by number of native speakers may be of some interest. --ByeByeBaby 21:59, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I asked this question, and what I meant was, what is the best language when viewed in its ease of use, its efficiency, its clarity(it shouldn't be difficult to differentiate different words, and one phrase shouldn't have multiple meanings unless it's intended), and other such characteristics, disregarding ease of learning, previously existing known vocabulary, or cultural bias. And I don't care about the orthography, however simple or complex it may be.

Apart from english, which is obviously the best! I'd say German. It is logical, straight forward, and is satisfying to speak.Englishnerd 22:35, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

...and speaking German has the advantage of clearing any phlegm out of your throat. :-) StuRat 00:24, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

...and there's the hours of enjoyment spent trying to figure out if your pepper mill is male or female ("well, it does have that handle..."). StuRat 00:25, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah, the pleasure of pondering whether the shower curtain is masculine or feminine...then to realize it's actually neuter...and then, long after one's listener has departed, to wonder how to pluralize the word. Really, how can anyone compliment the logic of weak noun declensions? By the time you ask for a policeman the thief has already gotten away. Durova^Charge! 02:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Let me reincarnate as a native speaker of each and every language on the planet and use it extensively in various spheres of life under the same conditions - and then I might give the satisfying answer to this question, if my head doesn't explode first. --194.145.161.227 02:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Well if this is just about voicing an opinion, I'd say Russian. It's got uniform spelling, straightforward grammar, very little irregularity and a rather utilitarian approach to usage (I think -- no articles, no present tense of the verb "to be", no frills.) Though you could some of the same things about German, my totally subjective opinion is that I studied German and never learned it and found Russian much easier. As for english, I agree its one of the most useful worldwide, because so many people speak it, but I'm eternally grateful that its my native language, as it's a rather difficult language -- so many irregularities, so many synonyms and homonyms, etc. Dina 02:48, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

And although Russian nouns do have gender, it is always (well almost always) clear from the ending of the noun what the gender is. Dina 02:52, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Although I love Russian, one "disadvantage" from a learning perspective is its great use of idiomatic expressions and impersonal forms. Translation is a bugger because often it's not remotely transparent what the text is really about, and you can stumble around for ages finding the "right" English words, in the process completely missing the real meaning. That was my experience anyway. JackofOz 04:59, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

All the classification I've seen has put Russian as one of the harder languages to learn, at least for an English speaker. The US military intensive language training school spent eight months on Russian as compared to four with German, IIRC.--Prosfilaes 11:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

There's no "best" language. All languages are about the same in complexity: extremely complex; it's just a difference of where the complexity lies. --Kjoonlee 03:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

If we're going for simplicity then any of a number of creole languages might do. They have little to no allomorphy, fairly straightforward phonology, and little to no suffixation. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 13:37, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Toki Pona might be the simplest "working" language you could find... 惑乱 分からん 14:48, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I've always felt that Ro could be a good language from a utilitarian perspective, but any language could probably be argued to be the "best" language for efficiency. That said, Chinese or any tonal language would be good candidates, given the number of monosyllabic words in their vocabularies. -- the GREAT Gavini 16:39, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Monosyllabicity shouldn't be a major criterion for a language's simplicity, even if you're just going on a phonetic basis. As an English speaker, I have difficulty distinguishing tone. I'd suggest Hawaiian because they have no consonant clusters, but then again neither does Hmong language and that monosyllabic (and tonal) language has some pretty difficult sounds to produce. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 16:56, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Name translation from English to Bulgarian

Hi, I am trying to find out the correct Bulgarian spelling of the name IVANCA. I have a girlfriend who was born in Bulgaria and lives here in the United States. I am trying to have a necklace made with her name spelled in Bulgarian. I realize the Bulgarian and English alphabets do not have exactly the same number of letters. Thank you.Alaskapsm0 21:20, 11 November 2006 (UTC)÷

You might have more luck contacting one of these editors on their talk page: [2], because it could be a while before someone happens along here who speaks Bulgarian. Dina 02:03, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Being Bulgarian, I'd say her name must be Иванка. If it's pronounced Ivanka, that is (I can't think of any other option). --194.145.161.227 02:22, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

If the beads for the necklace are only available in Latin letters, it's not a problem. Just use NBAHKA and get them to string the N upside-down so it looks like an И. —Angr 07:52, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

German-speaking kings

I asked this before, but didn't get what I wanted. I am looking for a list of kings specifically or other royalty who speak German, first or second language. Thanks! Reywas92^Talk 21:58, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Prince Albert. Englishnerd 22:34, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Still living ones? Or deceased ones? There must be thousands - as the Germanic countries had a large number of princes. Rmhermen 23:43, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure I really understand what you are after here, Reywas. Are you really looking for a list of all of the kings, and other royals, in the whole of history who speak, or have spoken, German? If so, do you have any idea how immense such a list would be? At the risk of overstating the position, this is a task not that far removed from counting the pebbles on a beach. Clio the Muse 23:43, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Not that it matters, but Victoria and Albert spoke German at home. He was a German prince and her mother was a German princess. Durova^Charge! 02:11, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

One example of thousands, and not all German. Clio the Muse 02:30, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I remember this being asked before, and you're not going to get a better answer until you supply a better question. Define "royalty" - at what point should someone be considered royalty? Tell us if you mean now, or historically, or what time period you're talking about. Also define "speaking German", do you mean natively or fluently, as a second language, or what? --BluePlatypus 00:27, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Irregular plurals

Also asked before with no good answer. read that there are only 13 irregular plurals in English. Is this true? I found

• foot/feet
• goose/geese
• louse/lice
• man/men
• mouse/mice
• tooth/teeth
• woman/women
• die/dice

I want only words which are truly different with a vowel change in the word stem. This excludes cactus/cacti, moose/moose, and other words in which only the end changes. Thanks! Reywas92^Talk 22:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

What does this question have to do with Verbs? I can't think of many, but one must remember that in english there are many different pluralisations, as we take them on from other languages e.g.

datum - data

Ox - oxen

radius - radii

and others, so there arn't many chances to be irregular, as there are so many ways in which to be regular! Englishnerd 22:33, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

"oxen" was not taken from another language. It's native English. --Ptcamn 18:32, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I meant plurals, not verbs. all three of your examples change the end of the word, I want something completely different, like my examples.

Technically, die/dice doesn't have a vowel change. Phonetically, the only difference between the expected [daɪz] and actual [daɪs]plural in that one is that the coda is voiceless. Otherwise, you're looking for words that undergo ablaut. There are verbs that undergo this same process as well as adjectival words (long/length). Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:24, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, foot/feet, goose/geese, louse/lice, man/men, mouse/mice, tooth/teeth, woman/women are examples of Umlaut as a historical sound change process... Ablaut as a technical term refers to early Indo-European vowel variations (mainly e/o in terms of vowel quality), while Umlaut refers to later Germanic vowel variations conditioned by an original following "i" or "y" sound. The English irregular vowel plurals (except for Child/Children) are historically umlaut, not ablaut... AnonMoos 00:01, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

What about "person/people"? There are some more in English_plural#Nouns_with_multiple_plurals, although many of them are archaic. Cadaeib (talk) 02:25, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

• brother, brethren --Kjoonlee 03:05, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
  • child, children (This isn't due to umlaut, but the vowel's different.) --Kjoonlee 03:08, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

• So "cow/kine" is umlaut? --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 15:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

People/person is a bad example. both can be a singular or plural noun.

• I am a person
• my friends and I are people
• all the persons in this room ...
• we are a people

Oh the joy of the english language! Englishnerd 16:31, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

It's worth noting that most "irregular" formations could be thought of as declensions/conjugations with a very small number of members — and, like the Sorites paradox, there's no clear line at which irregularity ends and minority declension begins. If we had more words like oxen, brethren and children, we'd say English had two declensions, an -en declension and an -es declension.

The only truly irregular words are suppletive ones. --Ptcamn 18:32, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Spanish. What does 'guero canelo' means?

I have seen it as the name of a restaurant and as the name of a song.

The translation I found makes little sense, but possibly "drimysy white-boy". =S 惑乱 分からん 00:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Excuse me? Clio the Muse 00:29, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Altavista Babelfish offers up the supremely unhelpful "cinnamon-coloured guero". Dina 02:21, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds vaguely offensive! Alas, I suspect that there are certain terms that just cannot be translated. Clio the Muse 02:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

• Maybe! But: The name “El Guero Canelo” also came from Contreras’ personal life. The moniker has been his lifelong nickname, and it means “cinnamon blond,” with “guero” referring to his light skin, and “canelo” to his cinnamon-reddish hair.[3] --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 05:03, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Sounds like what we would say as "strawberry blonde". User:Zoe|(talk) 05:21, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
    • Hmm, I thought about "cinnamony", it probably makes more sense than "drimysy"... 惑乱 分からん 12:47, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

• • • It might just mean "the redhead", and not specifically "strawberry blond". Cinnamon is much closer in colour to medium red hair than it is to very light red hair, and true redheads may actually have lighter skin than strawberry blonds. --Charlene 15:18, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Güero (pron. IPA ['wero]) is a Mexican Spanish slang term for a pale-skinned or blonde-haired person, often used as a slur. Canelo is an ajective, "cinnamony". 惑乱 分からん 16:59, 12 November 2006 (UTC)