Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 November 13

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November 13

苏荷

I am not very good at searching chinese phrase/words. Can you help?

苏荷靓仔威威

Translate.google.com says the above means "Soho handsome Weiwei". We are talking about a guy, so handsome Weiwei I get it but what does 苏荷 could mean? --Lgriot (talk) 14:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

苏荷 does mean Soho; without any further context, it's hard to tell what else this might mean. Can you provide the context for this phrase?

Also, good resources for looking up Chinese words include http://nciku.com, http://dict.cn, and http://zhongwen.com . rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:16, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The context is inside a gay publication, the photo of a young man with this caption. Could it be slang meaning "gay"? Did London Soho become so obvious that the word Soho has suddenly shifted to mean gay in Chinese?--Lgriot (talk) 15:38, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Can't it just be 'handsome Soho guy' (i.e., 'handsome guy from Soho')? Peking University's language corpus only turns up a few hits, most of which are about the district itself (苏荷地区 = 'Soho district'), google turns up mostly pages about bars or places, and Baidupedia's article specifically defines it as referring to NYC's Soho. According to this forum post, it also refers to Shanghai's soho ("最近，上海“苏荷”这一新名词颇引人注目，它指的是上海近年在旧城改造和产业结构调整中自然诞生的文化创意产业基地" -> roughly 'recently, in Shanghai the word "苏荷" has been attracting people's attention, it refers to the area in Shanghai's old town that has in recent years been developing a lot of culture/art stuff'). So as far as I can tell, the word is most commonly used to refer to a place itself... maybe in some of these contexts it has extended to mean something like "artsy, hipster, bohemian", which could also be relevant for your caption. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:46, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry forgot to say, the guy is from Schenzen if I understand well, nowhere in the west. Plus I have seen this qualifier on gay websites for other guys. I thought it was obvious, nothing as subtle as "bohemian", but I don't have that much understanding of the chinese gay world.--Lgriot (talk) 15:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

It might be; I'm not a native speaker so I'm less aware of subculture-y uses like that. A native speaker might be able to clarify more. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Is the Shanghai Soho around Suhujia, then? Steewi (talk) 01:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

A term for this class of words?

Is there a term for the specific type of adverb that can be formed by combining an adjective with a preposition? Example: whereupon, hereto, therefor, herein, etc. --BennyD (talk) 15:00, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Usually, that is the adverbial (or part of its function). The examples are adverbs. There may be a specifc term.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 16:28, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

On SyuRat’s comment (which is disappeared), lawyers do mistakes as we do like treating the adverbs (like of the examples) as adjectives. Those are difficult to detect in a context whether such closed class of words are consciously meant to be the modifiers of verbs or not.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 16:47, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll add my comment back in, which I had redacted earlier as not answering the Q, if only to show the correct spelling of my name: Sounds like lawyer-speak to me. Along with the needless use of Latin, and calling people by strange terms like "the party of the first part" instead of by their actual names. If they didn't do all this to confuse people, then people wouldn't need lawyers to decipher it all. StuRat (talk) 15:47, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I would have said 'prepositional compound', but I can't find anybody else using the phrase in this way, or a name for words of this type in either English or German. (There isn't an adjective in them, by the way: it's a preposition and a pronoun). There's some similarity with the Irish morphology#inflected prepositions in Irish and Welsh, but those really involve personal pronouns, whereas the Germanic examples all involve demonstrative pronouns. So no, there doesn't seem to be (a term) --ColinFine (talk) 17:41, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary sticks them in wikt:Category:English pronominal adverbs if that means anything to anyone. Nanonic (talk) 20:10, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

There are such words which are not archaic legalese, one of the most common being "nearby". "Forthright" might also qualify. —— Shakescene (talk) 22:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

And "forthcoming" which is (sadly) losing ground in the UK to the American "upcoming".Alansplodge (talk) 00:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

... a word that many people are now rendering as "up and coming", which has a completely different meaning. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

But "forthcoming" and "upcoming" do not mean the same thing—as far as I know, the latter is something about to happen (an upcoming event, etc.), the former is something about to be published or presented (a forthcoming article, his argument is forthcoming, etc.). More importantly for this topic, it's not made of prepositions ('coming' is a verb), and it's not an adverb (it's an adjective). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, you win on the adverb/adjective point, but in the UK, "forthcoming events" is a common phrase[1][2]. However, now even BBC reporters refer to "the upcoming meeting". I had never heard the word "upcoming" or seen it in print until about 10 years ago and it still grates on my ear.Alansplodge (talk) 16:51, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

The reason for many of these words was that historically basic prepositions didn't really directly take neuter pronouns as objects, so that compounds of "there"+preposition etc. were used instead. Modern German and Dutch still have a similar system (e.g. German daran, darauf, daraus, darin, darueber, darum, darunter etc.). AnonMoos (talk) 02:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

would

I'm not a native speaker of English, so this might be a stupid question, anyway: I stumbled over a passage in John O'Haras Appointment in Samarra: This guy "Al Grecco" is driving his car down a highway and passes another car whose driver he recognizes as Mr. Julian English. And then: Al also noticed that there was a woman in the car, slumped low in the front seat, low and as far away from English as she could get. That would be Mrs. English. I guess it means something like "This must be Mrs. English", but what is this "would" here in terms of grammar? Conditional or past tense? --77.185.228.115 (talk) 17:36, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

No, it's not a stupid question; but I'm not sure I can answer it in the framework of English grammar you may have been taught. I would describe that as the modal auxiliary 'would', used in its epistemic sense. Formally it is in the past tense (as opposed to "That will be mother now") but I don't believe in tenses in modern English, other than the present/simple-past distinction (for example, since I know of no morphological or syntactic test that distinguishes 'I will go' from 'I can go', I find it unhelpful to refer to one as a 'tense' and the other not). Incidentally, 'would' as opposed to 'must' implies to me that Al Grecco has just deduced who she is. --ColinFine (talk) 17:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

There's not really any formal grammatical distinction, "would be" is just something some people use in place of "is" in some situations. For example, if people at a party are waiting for John, who's known for being late, and then the phone rings, someone may say "That would be John". I don't think there is any tense issue here. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I always thought the phrase "That would be X" is just an idiom for "That person is X", while indicating that you are identifying X for the benefit of someone who doesn't know the person; and the phrase would not be used in the range of hearing of X. The phrase "That would be X" sounds formal, and I think it's usually used with a little ironic formality. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:07, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that there is a subtle difference in meaning among "That would be Mrs. English", "That must be Mrs. English", and "That is Mrs. English". "That is", in this case, would imply certain recognition. It would suggest that Al has met Mrs. English in the past and recognizes the woman in the car as her. "That must", in this case, would imply that Al is not completely certain that the woman in the car is Mrs. English, but he is fairly certain that it couldn't be anyone else. "That would", in this case, means that Al deduces that this is Mrs. English. He isn't completely certain that it is Mrs. English, it just makes sense that she is. Marco polo (talk) 19:37, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't see any real difference between "that must be" and "that would be", in this case. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

"Would be" can often just mean "is" with a little twist of attitude (and perhaps does in the O'Hara passage). If someone asks me "Who's that woman over there?" I might answer "That would be my mother." I might be conveying a bit of chagrin at her behavior or some other nuance that a simple "is" would lack, but I'm certainly in no doubt as to her identity. Deor (talk) 00:39, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Helping and Modal Auxiliary Verbs says that would can "express a sense of probability". -- Wavelength (talk) 19:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

My idea here follows with 'that must be' = 'that will be', both used in the sense of probability, but here 'would' is used because the whole situation is set in the past, and 'would' is technically the past tense of 'will', c.f. 'At the party I met the lady who would later become my wife' - we are not talking about a probability here, it's an actual fact that 'she became my wife' at some point after our meeting at the party. In the excerpt cited by the OP, Al Grecco has guessed that the lady is Mrs. English, but will later find out for sure. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 08:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't must in this context imply that you don't actually know Mrs. English and that you've determined this through deductive reasoning of some sort? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:23, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I thought that was what I and everyone else were saying here. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 13:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)