(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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Adarain
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Adarain »

Iyionaku wrote:
Lao Kou wrote:Apologies for the misspelling. [:$]
Well, you may be apologized as there are only a handful of German stems with initial <dsch>, the other ones being Dschihad (jihad), Dschinn (genie), Dschunke (junk) and a few proper nouns.
All of which I of course pronounce with tʃ. And I've always spelled Jihad with a j.

Isn't there also Dschibouti? Or however it was spelled
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Iyionaku »

Adarain wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:
Lao Kou wrote:Apologies for the misspelling. [:$]
Well, you may be apologized as there are only a handful of German stems with initial <dsch>, the other ones being Dschihad (jihad), Dschinn (genie), Dschunke (junk) and a few proper nouns.
All of which I of course pronounce with tʃ. And I've always spelled Jihad with a j.

Isn't there also Dschibouti? Or however it was spelled
Well I personally say indeed [dʒ] (albeit not as an affricate, as far as I can tell the difference), but I feature a somewhat hypercorrect language, resulted in being forced to give up my (Saxonian) dialect but never even attempted to obtain that horrible Swabian one. I also pronounce fünf as [fʏnf] instead of [fʏɱf].

Yes, the country is Dschibuti, and a proper none which I included. :) there are also Dschebbel, Dschidda, Dschizya, Dschuba, Dschiggetai, ...
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All4Ɇn
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Given that Chinese has a very complex system of kinship terms, have there been any known simplifications of it as a result of the one-child/two-child policies?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by gestaltist »

Iyionaku wrote:
Adarain wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:
Lao Kou wrote:Apologies for the misspelling. [:$]
Well, you may be apologized as there are only a handful of German stems with initial <dsch>, the other ones being Dschihad (jihad), Dschinn (genie), Dschunke (junk) and a few proper nouns.
All of which I of course pronounce with tʃ. And I've always spelled Jihad with a j.

Isn't there also Dschibouti? Or however it was spelled
Well I personally say indeed [dʒ] (albeit not as an affricate, as far as I can tell the difference), but I feature a somewhat hypercorrect language, resulted in being forced to give up my (Saxonian) dialect but never even attempted to obtain that horrible Swabian one. I also pronounce fünf as [fʏnf] instead of [fʏɱf].

Yes, the country is Dschibuti, and a proper none which I included. :) there are also Dschebbel, Dschidda, Dschizya, Dschuba, Dschiggetai, ...
... and Dschungel
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by GrandPiano »

All4Ɇn wrote:Given that Chinese has a very complex system of kinship terms, have there been any known simplifications of it as a result of the one-child/two-child policies?
Doesn't seem like it, no. As far as I can tell, the only effect the one-/two-child policies may have had on the system of kinship terms is that people have more difficulty remembering some of the terms.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

So what do you guys think? Is the English word none singular or plural? Etymologically it comes from "not one" and when you replace it with "not one" in a given sentence, only the singular of the verb is acceptable:

None of us were/was? surprised.

Not one of us was/*were surprised.

I guess I have a tendency to use it with plural verbs when it seems to refer to a group of people or things. Sometimes also singular pronouns are attracted into the plural when a plural noun is closer to the verb of the sentence.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:So what do you guys think? Is the English word none singular or plural? Etymologically it comes from "not one" and when you replace it with "not one" in a given sentence, only the singular of the verb is acceptable:

None of us were/was? surprised.

Not one of us was/*were surprised.

I guess I have a tendency to use it with plural verbs when it seems to refer to a group of people or things. Sometimes also singular pronouns are attracted into the plural when a plural noun is closer to the verb of the sentence.
I don't think it's a simple as saying "it's singular" or "it's plural". (Well, obviously anyone can decide whatever they want to call "acceptable" on a personal level, for whatever arbitrary reason, but if we're trying to describe educated current usage I think the situation is more complicated.) Probably it depends on various factors. There is some useful information on the following page: http://english.stackexchange.com/questi ... te-pronoun
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Right, grammatical issues are rarely that simple. Thanks for that link though; definitely some great information there.

"*Almost none of the apples is edible." is an example I never would've thought of, but it does seem to forbid the singular there. Even "translating" none into "not one" in this sentence doesn't work: *Almost not one
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

I don't have it on me right now, but if I remember correctly, the Associated Press Stylebook says to always treat "none" as singular. So if you want to write like a journalist, there's your answer. In daily life. I think I use both singular and plural agreement, but I lean more toward singular (That "apples" sentence is acceptable to me with either singular or plural.) possibly because of influence from AP style.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

I'd avoid prescriptivist standards, and instead, I would go with the most freely flowing speech. Most style books dictate saying "It is I" instead of "It's me". And if it comes from Strunk and White (only), then you can gladly ignore it: it's based in 1920s philosophy instead of linguistics.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

I'm selectively prescriptivist. I see nothing wrong with a prescriptivist standard as long as it's applied in the context it's intended for (and of course, you can change or not change your personal usage as you see fit). That's why you'll always see me specify what standard I'm referring to and what it's meant to be used for. You'll also never see me saying these sources have the right answer, just an answer.

Note: I have the book now, and the guidance is more nuanced than what I said above: singular agreement unless more than one object is implied. For example, you'd write, "None of the consultants agree on a strategy" because there must be at least two people who think the same way for there to be an agreement. The apple sentence would use the singular because only one apple needs to be edible for the sentence to be true.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Imralu »

qwed117 wrote:I'd avoid prescriptivist standards, and instead, I would go with the most freely flowing speech. Most style books dictate saying "It is I" instead of "It's me". And if it comes from Strunk and White (only), then you can gladly ignore it: it's based in 1920s philosophy instead of linguistics.
This.

Also, how can "none" be said to be logically singular if it refers to a quantity of zero things rather than one thing? We use plural nouns after the word "zero" and after quantities like "one and a half". We frequently use either singular or plural to talk about zero of something "no person", "no people". And as I see it, "none" is the pronoun form of the determiner "no", just like how "mine" is the pronoun form of the determiner "my" - both can stand for a singular or plural noun.

- My dog is bigger. > Your dog is big, but mine is bigger.
- My dogs are bigger. > Your dogs are big, but mine are bigger.

- There is no water on Mars. > There is plenty of water on Earth, but there is none on Mars.
- There are no people on Mars. > There are plenty of people on Earth, but there is are none on Mars.

Honestly, as a native speaker of English, my internal grammar says using "is" in the last sentence is just dead wrong* and if a style guide says "none" must ALWAYS be used with singular verbs, it's simply out of touch.

* unless doing the very informal switch from "there are" to "there's" which I'm sure the writers of those style guides would be frothing at the mouth over anyway.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

Imralu wrote:Honestly, as a native speaker of English, my internal grammar says using "is" in the last sentence is just dead wrong* and if a style guide says "none" must ALWAYS be used with singular verbs, it's simply out of touch.
I updated with what the guide I talked about actually says in my previous post. It calls for "are" in the case you gave.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

Here's a thought: since "none" means "not one", I will argue that if I have two daughters, and someone asks me how many daughters I have, I can truthfully reply "none", because I have two, not one. Isn't that logically valid?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by GrandPiano »

Sumelic wrote:Here's a thought: since "none" means "not one", I will argue that if I have two daughters, and someone asks me how many daughters I have, I can truthfully reply "none", because I have two, not one. Isn't that logically valid?
I would say no, because etymology does not necessarily define meaning, especially when the word in question was probably coined about a thousand years ago.
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Post by Creyeditor »

Nevertheless, negation of cardinals is a really interesting topic. Compare this German sentence:

:de-hh: Der Bauer da hat keine zwanzig Schafe.
DEF peasant there have.3SG.PRS NEG.NM twenty sheep.PL
That peasant has less than twenty sheep.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Imralu wrote:
qwed117 wrote:I'd avoid prescriptivist standards, and instead, I would go with the most freely flowing speech. Most style books dictate saying "It is I" instead of "It's me". And if it comes from Strunk and White (only), then you can gladly ignore it: it's based in 1920s philosophy instead of linguistics.
This.

Also, how can "none" be said to be logically singular if it refers to a quantity of zero things rather than one thing? We use plural nouns after the word "zero" and after quantities like "one and a half". We frequently use either singular or plural to talk about zero of something "no person", "no people". And as I see it, "none" is the pronoun form of the determiner "no", just like how "mine" is the pronoun form of the determiner "my" - both can stand for a singular or plural noun.
That brings up the interesting distinction between semantic and syntactic number. Even though both "not one" and "none" semantically refer to zero in phrases like "none are available" vs. "not one is available", they can take different verb agreement ("not one" seems fixed on the singular because of the strong "singularity" of the word "one" whereas "none" is more ambiguous and can take either singular or plural agreement depending on the sentence). The fact that in English the plural usually agrees with zero shows that the meaning of plural isn't really "more than one" as much as it is "not-one", i.e. including more than one and zero.

As for I vs. me, I know that "It is I" is what I've been taught in school to say and it sounds more formally "correct" but in everyday language I'm much more likely to say "it's me". Thus for my everyday speech the function of "I" is "subject" and the function is "me" is "not-subject", so it covers predicate nominative expressions like "it's me" and "that would be me" (and even exclamations like "Dear me!"). Anything but a syntactic subject.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

The situation I know of where it sounds most ghastly to use a prescriptively correct nominative pronoun is in sentences like "It's not easy being I." In fact, I haven't found evidence that anyone has ever said this sentence, while Google clearly attests to the existence of "it's not easy being me." Perhaps "It is not easy to be I" sounds a bit less bad since the unnatural formality softens the effect of the unnatural grammar.

Regarding "one", it's even less logical that "more than one" takes singular agreement, but that's how it works.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

gestaltist wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:
Adarain wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:... German stems with initial <dsch>, the other ones being Dschihad (jihad), Dschinn (genie), Dschunke (junk) and a few proper nouns.
... Dschibouti? ...
.... Dschibuti, ... Dschebbel, Dschidda, Dschizya, Dschuba, Dschiggetai, ...
... and Dschungel
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by GrandPiano »

Sumelic wrote:The situation I know of where it sounds most ghastly to use a prescriptively correct nominative pronoun is in sentences like "It's not easy being I." In fact, I haven't found evidence that anyone has ever said this sentence, while Google clearly attests to the existence of "it's not easy being me." Perhaps "It is not easy to be I" sounds a bit less bad since the unnatural formality softens the effect of the unnatural grammar.
If you really want to be prescriptivist about it, some would argue that it should be "Being I is not easy" or "To be I is not easy".
Sumelic wrote:Regarding "one", it's even less logical that "more than one" takes singular agreement, but that's how it works.
I interpret it as "more than [one thing]" rather than "[more than one] thing".
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