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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 September 16

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September 16

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Need some help from a wordsmith

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crossing, testcrossing, backcrossing, mating, breeding, and possibly marrying?

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Why are crossing, testcrossing, backcrossing, mating, and breeding used for other animals while those terms are not used for humans? Meanwhile, why do humans get the terms like marrying, consummating, copulating, engaging in sexual intercourse, engaging in coitus, and having sex? Is the difference due to an intrinsic etymological distinction between the two types of terms, or is the distinction due to habitual/conventional usage? 164.107.102.199 (talk) 16:14, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Because we are social animals who create reality and assign words in a way that seems fine to us? Anyway, what's the purpose of saying animals marry? They cannot go into a real social contract. And since this is the lang desk: you are not completely right that those terms are just applied to humans or animal exclusively, there is some crossing of terminology, even if it's just meant ironically. OsmanRF34 (talk) 16:46, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
164.107.102.199 -- the word "copulation" and some others are used of both humans and animals. However, marriage is a stable socially-recognized relationship. It might sort of make sense to speak of "marriage" in the case of some species (mainly birds) where parents partner together to raise children, while frequently interacting with other members of their own species. However, for the great majority of species it would not make any sense to use the word "marriage". By the way, in many languages it would be considered inappropriate or even offensive to apply the words "male" and and "female" (as used to refer to non-human species) to humans... AnonMoos (talk) 18:12, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Really? Which languages are those? I mean, in English, there are certainly some uses of "male" and "female" that sound "off" when applied to humans, but there are others that don't.
(I'll leave it to the individual reader's sensibility to decide which case the above is an example of.) --Trovatore (talk) 00:38, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Danish is one case that I've heard of. You can see some of the complaints from speakers of such languages at http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P21 (the allowed values of Property:P21 had to be expanded to distinguish human vs. animal sex/gender)... AnonMoos (talk) 00:59, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The terms crossing, test-crossing, back-crossing, mating, and breeding relate to human-controlled reproduction in non-humans. There is rarely human-controlled reproduction in humans. Some, though not all, of the terms marrying, consummating, copulating, engaging in sexual intercourse, engaging in coitus, and having sex are used in reference to non-humans. Bus stop (talk) 19:50, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Animals reproduce in the usual way, and some species mate for life as a rule, while other species have what we might call "harems", while still others only mate at certain times and are otherwise loners. They do what they do, not really by choice, but by the instinctive behavior encoded in their DNA. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots21:16, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Then, what determines "choice" then in humans? 164.107.103.68 (talk) 21:48, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Talking about things, making decisions. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots22:31, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Or, we are as bound by our primitive instincts to reproduce as any other animal, and only our ability to think about it makes us assume we are not. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:20, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Or, the animals do choose. Their choices are predictable at a statistical level, but I see no reason to rule out the possibility that an individual choice is free. --Trovatore (talk) 00:31, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Animals probably do choose to some degree. But I take issue with the notions that humans are slaves to their "primitive instincts". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots21:19, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oddly, we don't say that two people mate (verb), but we do call a spouse a mate (noun) sometimes. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:18, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Planed or planned

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Is this the correct usage: " We are going to Mexico and had planned on getting some pesos."--Christie the puppy lover (talk) 18:30, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it could be, but it would require the right context. To say "had planned" suggests we're no longer planning on doing so. Readers don't know what has happened to change our plans, our what our alternative plans, if any, are. But that may be coming in the next sentence. If that was not what you were wanting to get across, then you probably meant to say "We are going to Mexico and plan on getting some pesos".
Either way, "planed" is never the past tense of the verb "plan". It's the past tense of the verb "plane". -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 19:38, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Great. You answered my question. ("planed" is never the past tense of the verb "plan"). Muchas gracias! --Christie the puppy lover (talk) 19:58, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen non-native-English speakers say "planing" instead of "planning" in memos. When they talk about "planing" a project, I get a mental picture of the project slowly shrinking. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots21:12, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Then again, a particularly warped project idea may require a good deal of planing to straighten it out. StuRat (talk) 15:25, 17 September 2013 (UTC) [reply]
Should be: "We are going to Mexico and have planned on getting some pesos." Itsmejudith (talk) 21:41, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually I agree with Jack — present-tense plan is better. Have planned isn't wrong, but it invites the listener to try to figure out why you're using a more-complicated-than-necessary verb tense. --Trovatore (talk) 01:33, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved
The original sentence is fine with the appropriate context. Imagine people stranded on a road somewhere. "We are going to Mexico and had planned on getting some pesos. But then we got stuck here before we could get to a bank." rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:17, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Christie the puppy lover: Here's how you know that the past of plan has to be planned and not planed: The word plan has what we call a "short a" sound (IPA sound /æ/), and the past tense and past participle have the same sound. For this sound /æ/ you need more than one written consonant after the a. If you only use a single consonant after the a, as in the word planed, you would have pronounce the vowel as /ei/.

There are five sounds in English that cannot be written (maybe with exceptions: there are always exceptions in English!) before a single consonant: /æ/ as in plan, /ɛ/ as in pet, /ɪ/ as in pit, /ɒ/ as in slot, and /ʌ/ as in gut. So in order to preserve the sound of these, you have to write their past tenses as planned, petted, pitted, slotted, gutted. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:36, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You probably mean before a single consonant followed by a vowel. But as you say, there are exceptions (lots of them I think). As far as past tenses themselves go, an exception is when the consonant is "x", like in "faxed" and "boxed". W. P. Uzer (talk) 14:11, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about that -- I forgot to say when the consonant(s) after the short vowel are followed by another vowel. Thanks for catching that!
It would be interesting to know what tendencies there are in the exceptions. As you say, "faxed" and others with "x" are one of them. We have "panel" but "channel". Wiktionary says the plural of "fez" is "fezzes" or "fezes". The standard plural of "bus" is "buses", which always struck me as odd because it looks like it rhymes with "fuses", even though it does not. But maybe it is "buses" only to distinguish it from the 3rd person singular of "buss", which is "busses". Duoduoduo (talk) 14:50, 18 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bead

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The word bead derives from the Old English for prayer. What was the Old English word for bead?  Card Zero  (talk) 23:42, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the etymology section, Wiktionary says bead is derived from the Old English word gebed, which is defined as "prayer". misread question -- 205.175.124.72 (talk) 23:46, 16 September 2013 (UTC) [reply]
After a quick glance through two of my Anglo-Saxon ---> Modern English glossaries, I was unable to find an entry for "bead". One source did suggest "munuces", the genitive singular for the noun meaning "monk" (of a/the monk) but did not cite a text in which it was used. Perhaps somebody with a more comprehensive dictionary will find something different.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 00:22, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In German they seem to be called artificial pearls. Künstliche Perle. μηδείς (talk) 00:59, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
... which could mean that Old High German also lacked a generic word for bead, meaning that the same was true of Old Saxon, leading to Anglo-Saxon *glæsperle (like de:Glasperle) for glass beads, and *stanperle for stone ones. Good thinking, Batman. Or just perle for both things, like Danish: da:perle. Google translates: "A pearl is the name for a piece of material with a hole. The meaning of the word is a gem, a rare and precious natural product created by an oyster, but today the word pearl is also used for man-made objects. English distinguishes between pearls and beads, where pearl is the name of genuine pearls, while bead represents beads made of other materials. Danish uses the word pearl in both senses."  Card Zero  (talk) 01:48, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The beads on a rosary are called Perlen in German. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:02, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There's a bunch of resources here. I couldn't find a translation for "bead", nor anything like perle or variant spellings that meant anything close. The Modern English "pearl" seems generally translated as meregrot (spelled variously, eg, mere-grēot, mere-grota, etc). The mere part seems to mean "sea" (though how that got into Old English I'm not sure), and the grot part something like "grain" or "grit". Sandgrot is "grain of sand", says one dictionary. There are plenty of words that could mean something like "bead"—variations on gem, jewel, ornament, stone, precious stone, agate, jet, amber, etc. Pfly (talk) 09:55, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't come across meregrot before, but I immediately assumed that it was a borrowing from margarit-, the word for a pearl in several languages, and any etymologies in OE would be folk etymologies. --ColinFine (talk) 11:07, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, meregrot is bound to be a folk-etymology. As for how mere "got into Old English", it's a perfectly cromulent Germanic word cognate with German Meer, coming from Proto-Germanic *mari and Proto-Indo-European *móri. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:00, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, right. I get confused when old German and Romance words/roots are so similar. Pfly (talk) 22:50, 19 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, margarita (various spellings) seems to be a word with a varied history. It started out meaning "pearl"? I never heard that.
I think I first knew about the girl's name and the cocktail, not sure in what order. Then I find out it's a kind of pizza, but that that's based on the Italian word for "daisy". And now you tell me it originally means "pearl". I gather that these are all etymologically related, though the logical connections are obscure (though I can kind of see the path from "daisy" to "girl's name" to "cocktail"). --Trovatore (talk) 05:17, 19 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You may have missed at least these 2 earlier ref desk questions: here and here. In your defence, you were not involved in either of them. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 22:09, 19 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I don't see anything about daisies, pizzas, or cocktails in either of those, and not much about pearls. Is "margarine" also supposed to be connected to these words? --Trovatore (talk) 23:33, 19 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I should have posted my thing after your first sentence, since it was in response to "I never heard that". -- Jack of Oz [+pleasantries] 00:28, 20 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
OK, well, all of this is kind of meta. Any information at the object-language level? E.g. are these five senses really etymologically connected, and how did the meanings evolve? --Trovatore (talk) 01:00, 20 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]