Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 March 11

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March 11

Speech question

What's the name of the problem that causes people to mess up their past and present tenses? Like if someone says "I was so tired I can sleep all day" instead of "I was so tired I could have slept all day"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.65.135.44 (talk) 11:23, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't think there is a specific problem. There are various neurological conditions (some of them congenital) which impair people's ability to manipulate grammatical patterns, but I doubt if there is one identified which interferes with expression of tenses as opposed to other grammatical concepts. You might find some leads in aphasia. --ColinFine (talk) 12:04, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't have anything more useful than "poor grammar". I have noticed this is quite common in people that are not speaking their native language and are often applying their Mother_tongue grammar rules to the language they're speaking. 196.214.78.114 (talk) 12:13, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Are we talking about native speakers here? Often non-fluent speakers of learned languages slip into the present tense simply because it is usually the first one they learned and the one practiced most. (Disclaimer: this is personal observation/OR) -- Q Chris (talk) 13:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

This only works for colloquial and academic speech, in fiction the past tenses comprise more than 50% of all verb forms in a text[1].--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

People often use the present to indicate the future: As a result of a chance meeting I had with an old friend yesterday, we are going to Chequers for the weekend. And there's the historical present as well, which is sometimes mixed up with the simple past. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

.. in UK it's called Premier-League-speak. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:56, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

No, that's quite different. That is substituting one past (the "present perfect") for another. --ColinFine (talk) 22:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, I'm glad someone else has noticed that. It's also taken root in Australia. I can remember a time before which I had never heard anyone talking this way. That was around 1993, and I remember the occasion and the speaker clearly because it confused me until I worked out what was going on. But now, it's extremely common. Police officers seem particularly enamoured of it. When describing a series of events, it'll be "He has done this, and she has done that, then they have done something else ...", rather than "He did this, then she did that, then they did something else ...". You can depend on it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:41, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

That's the Police Perfect, Jack. See. for example, [[2]] passim. What it signifies, in police-speak, may be some kind of avoidance usage (like °deceased male person″ for dead man). Djbcjk (talk) 05:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

The best cure would be to learn Malay, which only has one tense and no plurals. Hence, 'I went to the shops yesterday' literally and approximately translates as 'I go to the shop yesterday happened'. Source: anecdotal from a native speaker. --89.242.206.103 (talk) 15:25, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Singular or plural?

"The Somerset Levels and Moors is a unique flat landscape..." sounds right, but so does "The Somerset Levels and Moors are unique, timeless and tranquil...". So, for the article, which should it be? Ghmyrtle (talk) 17:42, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

They collectively constitute a landscape, so singular. Discussing them as various constituent entities, they are plural, so plural. "are unique, timeless and tranquil" of course is right out, as violative of WP:NPOV. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:48, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

It was a quote from another site. Not our article. Obviously. Ghmyrtle (talk) 18:45, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

How about:

The Somerset Levels, or the Somerset Levels and Moors as they are less commonly but more correctly known, constitute [or make up, etc] a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland district of central Somerset, in South West England, running south from the Mendip Hills to the Blackdown Hills.

The district occupies an area of about 160,000 acres (650 km²),... ----Ehrenkater (talk) 18:21, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Except that "district" in England commonly denotes a local government area. "It covers an area of about...." could do it. But there are other examples later in the article. Accepting Orangemike's main point, is this an example of where it is possible, even desirable, to use both singular and plural in the same article, depending on whether a sentence is talking about the area as a whole, or about the constituent sub-areas within it collectively? Ghmyrtle (talk) 18:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

If you are talking about two different entities, or parts of entities, then you will have to call them by different names, to distinguish between them: in which case there can be no objection to one being singular and the other plural. If you are talking about the same entity in different places, then it is not ideal to mix singular and plural, and I would avoid doing so, although I suspect that most readers wouldn't notice.----Ehrenkater (talk) 19:32, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Our dear Lord Smith had this to say back in January: "The Somerset Levels are a completely unique landscape.. " [3] But then he's not a very popular figure in that area at the moment, so I guess we shouldn't listen to him. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:39, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

What would an incompletely unique landscape look like? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:41, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Off-topic, but so interesting I had to share:

Dictionary usage note on "unique," for the interested
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
“ usage: There is a set of adjectives—including unique, complete, equal, and perfect —whose core meaning embraces a mathematically absolute concept and which therefore, according to a traditional argument, cannot be modified by adverbs such as really, quite, or very. For example, since the core meaning of unique (from Latin ‘one’) is ‘being only one of its kind,’ it is logically impossible, the argument goes, to submodify it: it either is ‘unique’ or it is not, and there are no stages in between. In practice, the situation in the language is more complex than this. Words like unique have a core sense, but they often also have a secondary, less precise (nonabsolute) sense of ‘very remarkable or unusual,’ as in a really unique opportunity. It is advisable, however, to use unique in this sense sparingly and not to modify it with very, quite, really, etc. ”

--from the version of NOAD on my Mac (although this bit would seemingly apply across the anglosphere). See also [4]. But I guess, like me, you still insist that certain words should mean certain things, despite all the usage to the contrary ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 21:55, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

You guess correctly. I do so insist.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:23, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

SemanticMantis, your post here is perfectly unique. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Would you say "Alice and Bob is a good team"? —Tamfang (talk) 16:32, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

I might well say, "'Alice and Bob' is a good team, compared to 'The Team Formerly Known As Squiffy' or 'Seventeen Dead Horses and a Pickle'." (I have seen some really odd bowling league rosters.) --Orange Mike | Talk 17:44, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

I can think of some wiki editors who are a good team of one... Martinevans123 (talk) 18:01, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Noun–adjective order

Linguists have a name for everything. What's it called when a simple phrase is noun–adjective, vs adjective–noun? To give an example, what's the name for saying "car red" or "sandwich cheese" (to refer to a car that is red, or a sandwich that features cheese), rather than "red car" or "cheese sandwich"?

Thanks. (Please {{Ping}} me.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I'm not sure about a general linguistic term that covers all languages, but in English we have Postpositive_adjectives. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:12, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Languages in which most adjectives are post-positive are considered strongly right-branching. Marco polo (talk) 01:25, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

• It's very technical, and quite controversial, but you might also look at head-marking versus modifier-marking languages, and Johanna Nichols' Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. μηδείς (talk) 04:35, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Have you been to/gone to & Fuiste (ir) /Fuiste (ser) coincidence, or language universal?

In both English and Spanish the past tense of to go and to be fall together, in that "Have you ever gone to Germany" can be expressed by "Have you ever been to Germany", but only in the perfect, while in Spanish, the past tense of the verbs ser "to be" and ir "to go" are also identical in form (fui, fuiste, fue...) while they differ in all other tenses. (In Spanish this past form is called the preterite, but it descends from the Latin perfect.) Is this a coincidence, or does it indicate some sort of trend or linguistic universal? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 22:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I think the Spanish thing has to be an innovation. It doesn't even exist in Italian, probably the second closest "major" European language after Portuguese. Spanish se va becomes se fue (I think; my Spanish isn't that great), whereas in Italian se ne va becomes se ne andò. --Trovatore (talk) 23:07, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I guess I should clarify I am looking for something outside the Romance languages and the West Germanic languages that would show that this parallel development (convergent evolution in the linguistic sense) is due to some underlying logic or linguistic universal. I am familiar with the Spanish, French, and Latin. The form ando comes from the Latin ambitare and the va- forms come from vadere, the first an expanded form of ire (ambi-ta-ire) and the second a cognate with the English to wade. So those are actually both innovations as they have been made part of the ire verb paradigm by suppletion. "Been" as in have you ever been to Germany (i.e., "gone to and come back") seems to be somehow related in motivation. μηδείς (talk) 01:18, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Medeis -- I don't see that "be" and "go" have any particular tendency to coalesce in English, but in ancient Greek a few forms coincided except for accents or iota subscripts (e.g. accentless ειμι can be "I am" or "I go", in writing and in the segmental pronunciation of those dialects in which ει of diphthongal origin and ει originating in compensatory lengthening had merged). In Latin, some parallel forms of "to be" and "to eat" have the same spellings; the forms from "to eat" are shown with long root vowel in grammars, but I'm not sure if this distinction was consistently observed in spoken Latin... AnonMoos (talk) 03:21, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, User:AnonMoos, I should of remembered that. Various forms of eat, be and go fall together very closely in Slavic. This is an obvious phonological development from similar sounding roots, though, which doesn't apply to gone/been in English, and is an irregular development in Latin, where ii, iisti become identical to fui, fuisti in Spanish. μηδείς (talk) 18:27, 14 March 2014 (UTC)