Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 September 24

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.

September 24

Is a music band singular or plural?

In the entry for M83, it starts off with "M83 are a French electronic music band…" To me, that sounds off. Isn't a band a singular entity? Wouldn't it be "M83 is a French electronic music band"? Sure, a music band, by definition, contains more than one musician. But collectively, they are a singular entity, no? --208.185.21.102 (talk) 00:36, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

It depends on where your English is from. See for example our article on Comparison of American and British English, subsection "Formal and notional agreement". See also synesis. ---Sluzzelin talk 00:41, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

The use of the plural with singular nouns is an affectation of recent British English. You won't find it in authors like Dickens or Swift, and especially not good ones, like Shakespeare. μηδείς (talk) 02:48, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

You don't regard Dickens and Swift as good writers, Medeis? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:44, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, now that you ask, no, I do not regard Dickens as a good writer. He's a formulaic paid-per-the-word hack, "the Stephen King of his times" would be a good way of putting it, if that didn't unnecessarily insult King. Swift is harder to judge since he writes in early modern English. Gulliver's Travels was trite and obvious to a modern reader. It may have been an innovation and more topical when he wrote it. His essay on eating Catholic babies is entertaining enough for one reading in a class on the era. μηδείς (talk) 21:58, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm curious why you'd have chosen a writer for whom you have no respect as an exemplar of, well, anything, really. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:10, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

The simple answer is he was just the first to come to mind from the era, especially one whom most Americans would know was British. As for my opinion of him, I am jealous as hell of his writing skills. I cannot for the life of me write fiction, and he can. The fact that I do not enjoy him while millions of others do doesn't reflect well on me. It just means I am too picky and incapable of enjoying a good filling mediocre stew when it is put before me. I don't think not being able to enjoy something is ever a virtue. μηδείς (talk) 22:23, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Well said. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:33, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

British English uses both plural and singular verbs with collective nouns, depending on whether the speaker is emphasising the collective as a unit, or as its members. Medeis' description of this normal part of British English grammar as an "affectation" is tendentious. You won't find present continuous constructions in Shakespeare either. --ColinFine (talk) 08:45, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

American English also uses both singular and plural verbs with collective nouns, depending on whether the emphasis is on the group as a unit or on the individual members. However, in situations like the one mentioned by the OP, or similarly in referring to sports teams, American English uses the singular only.

Regarding the OP's quote, "M83 are a French electronic music band…", I would think it would be incorrect in both British and American English, since the last part of the quote makes it clear that M83 is being viewed as "a ... band" -- i.e., as a single unit. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:00, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

As a UK speaker I find "are" completely natural here, though perhaps partly by analogy with "The Beatles are.." (would anyone say "The Beatles was a band..."?). On the other hand, our article Metallica begins: 'Metallica is an American heavy metal band'. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:14, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

"The Beatles" is not a good example because the "s" makes it unambiguously plural. So even Americans use a plural verb here. The interesting cases are those where one has a collective noun with a singular form. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:20, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, both forms of English use a plural verb when the band name is plural in form (although I've seen Dire Straits treated as singular). It works for things like band names and sports teams (the Washington Redskins take a plural verb, in the same way Blackburn Rovers do), but not for titles of creative works. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic would say "The Brothers Karamazov were a novel..." or "The Wild Ones were a film..." Dire Straits were a band, and Dire Straits was their first album. --Nicknack009 (talk) 17:10, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

On a semi-related note, I think I recall that the band The Carpenters at one point dropped "the" from their name for some reason. (Our article implies that the name was always that way, but I vaguely recall seeing them say on a talk show that they were changing it.) In any event, it just didn't sound right to me having a plural without "the", even though the alternative name "Carpenter", singular, would have sounded natural to me. Any other examples of this occurring? Duoduoduo (talk) 22:08, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Village people, Men at Work, Eagles, ... (of course the indefinite might be intentional, "The Men at Work" would sound less "right" to me). ---Sluzzelin talk 22:14, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Carpenters was chosen intentionally without "the" from the beginning, I have been looking into Karen Carpenter recently, which you can see at the humanities desk, and have come across the abstract name repeatedly. Another group who insisted on not having a "the" was Eurythmics. μηδείς (talk) 22:27, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, they probably all intentionally omitted the "The" on albums covers etc. As often, I typed the wrong word. I possibly meant something more like "more fitting" rather than "intentional". In any event, I think the reason some of these band names don't sound as natural as the "The ..."-version does to Duoduoduo (as well as to myself) has to do with conventions: The convention of using the definite article when actually talking about the band ("The first time I heard the Eagles ...") and the convention of having thousands of bands using "The". If you think about it, you can picture the Eagles being just Eagles, as a species, a flock, an apparition, a metaphor, without needing to be "the" Eagles (but the real band-name etymology is probably completely different, and I haven't bothered to research. I just noticed that the indefinite version is imaginable and can make sense, we're just not used to it in connection with bands). ---Sluzzelin talk 22:56, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Also, at least in America, we're not used to it in the context of sports teams -- we don't say "He plays for Yankees" (baseball team) and so forth. Duoduoduo (talk) 23:45, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Unlike the UK, where "he plays for Rovers" is quite normal. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:15, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

This all reminded me of The The, so I had to check. Our page starts The The are an English musical and multimedia group... No real point here, just a curiosity, although if the band's name is "The The" one could say "I went to see the The The." Pfly (talk) 18:03, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

/aw/

I recently saw the following statement, and I'm {{user ipa-0}}, but I can't ask the author very easily about its meaning. In English, a syllable nucleus /aw/ MUST be followed by a coronal consonant. Coronal consonant I can understand, but what exactly does /aw/ sound like? I don't have time to scroll through a dictionary looking for words with this string (and anyway, I can easily misunderstand IPA), so I thought it better to come here. Nyttend (talk) 04:32, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

By /aw/ he presumably means the diphthong found in house and now. Coronal consonants are those formed in the middle of the mouth, without the lips or velum. So words in English that have the /aw/ sound can end in t, d, n, s, z, sh, ch, dg, or zh: out, loud, clown, louse, rouse, ouch, gouge. (I cannot think of examples ending in -sh or -zh, but they would be permitted by the rule.) There are, however, no native English words ending in the aw sound like -oup, -oub, oung, or ouk. μηδείς (talk) 04:47, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Now I'm even more confused, because "now" doesn't have any consonant whatsoever after the vowel, at least in my pronunciation. Nyttend (talk) 04:56, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

That's called the zero consonant. Ignore it. As long as house and now have rhyming vowel sounds in your dialect you are set. Also ignore the fact that -oup is the ending of soup. That's a matter of spelling, soup has the /u:/ sound, not the /aw/ sound. μηδείς (talk) 04:59, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Depending on how you pronounce it, yawp may be an exception, with a labial final. I also had a fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Straub. But that is a German proper name, not a native English common noun. μηδείς (talk) 05:08, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I am ignoring it (and ignoring soup); that's why I'm confused. Bough, plough/plow, now, haymow, 3/4 of "how now brown cow", etc. all end in this vowel when we pronounce them. Is the original quote perhaps an error for "In English, a consonant following a syllable nucleus /aw/ MUST be a coronal consonant"? Nyttend (talk) 05:10, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. Another way to put it would be /aw/ (or better, /aʊ/, which means the same thing but is what we at WP usually use) may not be followed by a noncoronal consonant. Which is an interesting rule from the point of view of the Great Vowel Shift, because there are a fair number of words that "ought" to have /aʊ/ before a noncoronal consonant, etymologically speaking, but that managed to avoid it. In native English words /aʊ/ usually comes from Old English ū, but ū before noncoronal consonants always managed to become something else. In dūfe > dove (the bird) and in þūma > thumb it became /ʌ/, in brūcan > brook (as in 'I will brook no contradiction') it became /ʊ/, and in rūm > room it remained unchanged as /uː/. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Other exceptions to this so-called "rule" are the Scottish and northern English "loup" (or "lowp", a varaint of "leap"); "gowk" (a cuckoo) and "howk" (to dig). I suspect that the "rule" is just an observation, and doesn't apply to dialect. Dbfirs 20:27, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Notice also that in German, dove and thumb are Daumen and Taube, with the parallel shift from /u:/ to /aw/ being broader than in English. μηδείς (talk) 22:32, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

And brook (in this sense) and room are brauchen and Raum. Thinking of German words with /aʊ/ followed by a noncoronal consonant is how I came up with this list in the first place! Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:33, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Would you, please, give us the full source of the statement? Context is needed here. I think the statement is either wrong or badly formulated. Angr above has said much better ("may not ... non-coronal").--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:22, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

The original statement is incorrect, which I had assumed was clear from context, or I'd've been more clear yesterday. Angr has correctly and fully explained what the statement should be. μηδείς (talk) 00:03, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

The original statement was a quote posted on Facebook; my friend didn't quote anything else, and she said absolutely nothing about where she got it. Nyttend (talk) 04:57, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Incidentally, with the notable exception of oink, the same restriction applies to /ɔɪ/, as well as to the NEAR, SQUARE, and CURE lexical sets, and (with the exception of pork) to the FORCE lexical set in dialects that haven't merged it with the NORTH set. I find the semantic relationship between these two exceptions highly suspicious. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:31, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

In addition to "oink", there's also "boink" (= "to have sexual intercourse"). Duoduoduo (talk) 20:56, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Grammaticality of the sentence

Is the following sentence gramatically correct? What does it really mean?

         Sing a song they must.

14.139.82.6 (talk) 12:44, 24 September 2013 (UTC) Sukhada

This is just an example of inversion or anastrophe applied to the sentence 'They must sing a song'. It's often used for poetic effect but your example would be completely unidiomatic in normal speech or writing (unless your name is Yoda). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:07, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

See also Inversion (linguistics)#Inversion in English. Duoduoduo (talk) 14:18, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Similar example: "A frog he would a-wooing go."[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:55, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

The Simon & Garfunkel tune "April Come She Will" has that usage in the title, as well as in the lyric "August, die she must."[2] It's pretty evident that their transposition in those two cases was to make it rhyme. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:10, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Here's a non-poetic example of this main_verb-subject-auxiliary_verb usage: "Come what may, I'll be there". There must be other non-poetic examples. Duoduoduo (talk) 02:36, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

I think there are contexts in which it would not be "completely unidiomatic". Something along the lines of "They said they would sing a song, so sing a song they must." Compared to "They said they would sing a song, so they must sing a song." there is a different feeling. I'm not sure if there is a term for this kind of thing, and the sense may depend on the larger context. If "they" said they would sing a song but when the time came didn't really want to, the first sentence ("sing a song they must") might have a sense of resignation, "sigh, ok, we'll sing a song", while the second sentence might have a sense of requirement. No? The difference might be more evident if "they" was "we"—"We said we would sing a song, so sing a song we must". Pfly (talk) 18:19, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

/aʊ/ is /au/ in some dialects?

The earlier thread refers to the sound in "house" and "now" as /aw/ or /aʊ/, and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects refers to it as basically /aʊ/ in all dialects given, including General American. But it seems to me that I normally pronounce it /au/. Are there American dialects that do this? Duoduoduo (talk) 13:30, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't take the /ʊ/ symbol too seriously (it is in slashes after all, indicating a broad phonemic transcription). The actual phonetic realization varies from [o] through [ʊ] and all the way up to [u] (and [w] is just another way of writing nonsyllabic [u]), probably even within the speech of a single speaker. Also, it's very difficult to tell where exactly your diphthong ends just by introspection; you'd need to make a spectrogram of yourself saying "pout", "boot", "put", and "boat" and then compare the formants. You might be surprised to learn that how you actually pronounce things is not exactly how you think you pronounce things. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:30, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. The /aw/ transcription is just a very broad phonemic transcription of the sound. It is not necessarily so accurate in an objective sense as a phonetic transcription, but simply stands for one set of vowels that rhyme with each other, but which contrast with other sets of vowels. I.e., house, cow, lounge, vs. pie, try, high or joy, boy, toy. I don't actually say [aw], I say [æw]. But it is still the phoneme /aw/. μηδείς (talk) 21:41, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

move up the appointment

If someone says they have to "move up the appointment" or "move the appointment up", do they mean make it later or make it earlier? I thought it meant make it earlier, but my doctor's receptionist meant make it later. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:40, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

It means they are talking unclearly. Don't take it personally; the phrase doesn't mean anything. There is also "bringing it forward" and "putting it back". The former means making it earlier and the latter means making it later, but because they are so unclear, neither phrase should be used. --Viennese Waltz 13:47, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

It means they need to make it earlier (at least in America it means that). If the receptionist is in the US, she might not be too bright. --Nelson Ricardo (talk) 14:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I hear this all the time and I always ask directly, "Do you mean earlier or later?" because it's so unclear. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:31, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I've always understood it to mean that moving an appointment "up" means "up closer to the present moment", while moving an appointment "back" means "father back from the present moment". That doesn't mean the receptionist understands it, though. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:08, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, in American it means move it closer to the top of the agenda--make come sooner. μηδείς (talk) 21:34, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

"Half as many again"

In reading the latest issue of The Economist, I came across the expression "half as many again". I'm American, and this wording confuses me. The full sentence is, "Acapulco, a city of 850,000, saw more than 1,000 murders last year, half as many again as Mexico City, which has ten times more people." Does this mean that Mexico City experienced 2,000 murders? If so, is the word "again" necessary in British English, or does it sound as old-fashioned to a 21st-century Brit as it does to me? Or does the "again" make the Mexico City figure other than 2,000? --Nelson Ricardo (talk) 14:50, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

The again is necessary. Half as many again means "one and a half times as many" meaning Mexico City had roughly between 600 and 700, it's just a phrase the figures wouldn't be exact. Biggs Pliff (talk) 14:57, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

(ec) No, it means Mexico city saw 667 murders. Acapulco saw 'Half as many again', which is another 333 on top of 667 = 1,000. Astronaut (talk) 14:59, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks guys. I think that an American would have used "one and a half times" instead. --Nelson Ricardo (talk) 15:03, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm American, and I use expressions like "half as many again" or "half again as much" all the time. There's nothing distinctly British about it. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:34, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm American, I don't really use that expression, but it's well-known to me. It sounds slightly fancy, like something a journalist might say as part of spicing up his prose a bit. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:05, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm American, and I'm always amused when the Economist in its British English says that someone is being "too clever by half" (150% as clever as would be best, = self-defeating) -- I never hear that in America. Duoduoduo (talk) 20:42, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

"Half as many again" is not unknown in American English, but it is a little unusual. I think it is one of those expressions from the parent language that remains common in Britain but is falling out of usage in the United States. Marco polo (talk) 01:02, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Bit off the main topic here (and possibly unnecessary), but "too clever by half" doesn't imply that someone is "150% as clever" it implies that they THINK they are cleverer than they are, a person would use that phrase derogatively to express their annoyance at the arrogance of someone's perception of their own intelligence. Biggs Pliff (talk) 10:19, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that clarification, Biggs Pliff. So can I translate it to American as "not as smart as he thinks he is"? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:26, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

I think it means pretty much the same thing as "too smart for his own good". Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:57, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, they're all essentially the same thing. Biggs Pliff (talk) 22:00, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

• Turning a 540 instead of a 360 is a quintessentially American goof. No harm no foul though. μηδείς (talk) 22:32, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

My first thought was "half as many again" looked weird and a more common form, in my experience, is "half again as many". Not that either makes more sense. Out of curiosity I did a Google Ngram of the two, [3], which shows "half again as many" as a more recent form that has become more common than "half as many again"...at least according to the Google Ngram data. Pfly (talk) 18:29, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

(replying to myself) Ah, but then compare the Ngrams for American English, [4] vs. British English, [5], and it appears the preference may be somewhat US-UK split. Pfly (talk) 18:33, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

She/He/It comes

It's just me with another dumb question. Is there any explanation about why in the third person there has to be an s at the end of the verb (don't know if I expressed myself correctly), so here's an example: She loves him; He eats carrots; It comes first. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 15:27, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

It's just a remnant of the verb conjugations from Middle English (see Middle English#Verb), and ultimately Old English. English verbs used to be conjugated just like German verbs (ich komme, du kommst, er kommt) - it's basically the same idea as in Spanish (vengo, vienes, viene). We just lost all the other conjugations over the past few hundred years. Adam Bishop (talk) 15:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

You might find this history of English morphology interesting. Marnanel (talk) 15:38, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

(ec) It's called subject-verb agreement (or concord). Most other languages that have S-V agreement have richer systems than that, where each grammatical person typically has its own inflected form (as in Spanish: yo hablo, tú hablas, él habla, nosotros hablamos, etc.). The situation in English, where there is an inflected form only in one of these cases (the third person singular) versus uninflected forms in all others, is rather uncommon. It is basically a fossilized remnant of an erstwhile much richer agreement system that has been reduced over time, through the combined effects of several factors (phonological erosion, dialect mixture etc.) The fact that it is just the 3rd person singular that has remained inflected, and not any of the other forms, is basically just a piece of historical coincidence. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:43, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

You'll notice that the verb to be also inflects in the first person singular (I am and I was), and there's an archaic second person singular familiar you might hear in a religious setting or in Shakespeare (thou comest) - other remnants of an inflectional system that used to be more complex. --Nicknack009 (talk) 17:15, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

And Miss Bono, you're probably aware of the fact that one distinctive feature of English modal verbs is that they do not take s at the end in the third person singular. Duoduoduo (talk) 21:57, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware. :D You say She can not She cans. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 14:13, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

A good teacher of mine taught that -s here is the "floating" marker either of subject or predicate. That is "A bus comes" vs "Busses come", -s "jumps over" here depending on number of the subject (sing. or pl.). Though this does not explain things like "Men come" and is probably unscientific, but it's good enough to remember.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

That's entirely false as an historical explanation, but if the "floating ess" helps as a mnemonic, fell free. Of course you have the difficult cases of the oxen eat grain, the species exists, and the president can veto it. There really shouldn't be a problem with this for people whose first language retains a verb conjugation. μηδείς (talk) 00:01, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, unhistorical, but if English was firstly recorded in the 20th century and its history totally unknown this analysis would have some grounds.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 01:04, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Okay. If.  :) But how would you fit the possessive in there? (THe same analysis occurred to me when I was ~15 y/o and studying French for the first year.) μηδείς (talk) 01:18, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

I think the reason why this remained is the need to distinguish subject and predicate more clearly. In the first and the second persons pronouns are always used, so endings are redundant, but in the third one there is probability of confusion of subject and predicate, as many verbs look like nouns and vice versa. Despite the strict word order this marker helps to parse a sentence. I'm not sure whether it's only my speculations or this is also said somewhere in books. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 09:31, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

It's conceivable; but the fact that the Scandinavian langages (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish) have lost personal inflection in verbs completely, but in most ways have very similar syntax to English, rather weakens the argument. What is it about English that required this distinction to be retained which didn't apply in the Scandinavian languages? --ColinFine (talk) 14:57, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Nevertheless here can be seen that it is marked with -r (gå>går), it's if in English there were "I comes, you comes, he comes, we comes, they comes". But I do not insist on my speculations, I've never researched why -s remained, I should read some books, it has to be explained there, I believe. The good of the RD: there are asked the interesting questions I've never asked myself before.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:07, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

There are some English dialects that do use only the -s form, like Newfoundland English. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, it's interesting.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 03:15, 26 September 2013 (UTC)