Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 August 18

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August 18

Proper-hyphen-ation

Is it "early-eighteenth century statue" or "early-eighteenth-century" or possibly "early eighteenth-century"? Clarityfiend (talk) 05:19, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

A cursory check indicates that of the three, early eighteenth-century is the only one in common use, but it is also commonly used without any hyphens (i.e.: early eighteenth century). —71.20.250.51 (talk) 06:16, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Personally I take every opportunity to resist the with-enough-hyphens-any-phrase-can-be-an-adjective trend. —Tamfang (talk) 07:24, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

See "compound modifier" and "English compound#Hyphenated compound modifiers". Gabbe (talk) 07:47, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I am simultaneously an arch-anti-over-hyphenationist and an arch anti under hyphenationist. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 12:15, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Your third suggestion is the most correct. The first suggestion has one alternative interpretation from the intended - that there exists objects called century-statues, of which this particular one is the early-eighteenth. The usage rules of commas, means that there is only one interpretation of the third suggestion - since there is no comma following 'early', as an adjective, 'early' is automatically associated with 'eighteenth-century'. Meaning that while correct, the hyphen following 'early' in the second suggestion is superfluous. Plasmic Physics (talk) 07:57, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

zero/O

BE speakers giving telephone numbers and similar number strings in speech often pronounce 0 (zero) as the letter O. Does this occur in other varieties of English and is there an equivalent in other languages Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:32, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

AmEng most definitely. Not sure about other languages. Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 16:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

And so we very properly had the letter O on the digit 0 on our telephone dials. It was only because foreigners put it in the wrong place that we had to give up using letters when international dialling happened. --ColinFine (talk) 17:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Nobody in the history of the world has ever been heard to say, e.g. History 101 as "History one zero one". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:34, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

A challenge! —Tamfang (talk) 21:01, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

In Illinois I had a neighbor whose house number was displayed as Six O One. I often thought, "And half a dozen O the other." —Tamfang (talk) 21:01, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Bloody hell, you're me. Welcome to the madness. :) Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 14:19, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I've never come across a variety of English that didn't pronounce zero as "Oh" within numbers. This is common with years such as "nineteen-oh-one", and I recall some speculation about whether we would read 2005 as "twenty-oh-five". In the event it was actually pronounced as "two thousand five".

You asked about other languages. In Korean, the digit five happens to be called 오, pronounced "oh". This leads to great confusion for expats from English-speaking countries switching between languages, since "oh" has to get mapped to 0 in one context and 5 in the other, and it invariably goes wrong some of the time. Although Korean does have a round-circle letter, it is not identified with zero either in typing or in pronunciation. Instead, the numeral zero is often called 공, gong, meaning a ball. Other languages I've come across seem to just call zero by the standard word for zero. --Amble (talk) 00:34, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

"Two-thousand..." was common for the first decade, but more and more the usage is becoming "Twenty-oh..." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Really?? In what geographical region do you hear "twenty-oh-something"? We do use "twenty-ten" and so on for the second decade, but I literally cannot recall ever hearing that pattern extrapolated back to the previous decade to give "twenty-oh-something". I only heard this back in 1999 when people were talking about what the coming years were going to be called. I'd be interested to hear if that pattern really did catch on somewhere. --Amble (talk) 00:46, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Charles Osgood was saying "twenty-oh..." from the get-go. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:49, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Very interesting, thanks. It also occurs to me that we do say "oh-five", "oh-eight", etc. when giving years in two-digit form. --Amble (talk) 01:00, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

And some people do refer to the police as "five-oh", even when they're not in Hawaii. - Marchjuly (talk) 04:33, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Just to confuse everybody, the original series was Hawaii Five-O (oh), but the new one is Hawaii Five-0 (zero). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:42, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Is the name of the reboot still pronounced the same? I wonder if they changed McGarret's "Book 'em Danno (Dann-oh)!" to "Book 'em Dann-zero!" as well. It's interesting that in Japanese they are also written differently: the original is and the reboot is Hawaii Five-0. - Marchjuly (talk) 05:07, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

In Japanese, there are two words which mean "zero":ゼロ (zero) (spelling is the same but pronunciation is slightly different) and 零 (rei). The word 丸 (maru, circle) is also sometimes used when reading numbers out loud because "○" looks a little like "0" and it's really easy to understand. So, a Japanese person might read "102" as "ichi zero ni", "ichi rei ni", or "ichi maru ni". Kind of depends on context and on the person. Since "maru" is more conversational and "zero" is a loanword taken from English, the Japanese "rei" is what is usually used on NHK. - Marchjuly (talk) 04:33, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

While reading about Don Pardo's recent death, I got to wondering what he looked like (Note: Pardo is most known for his voice work). So I looked for a clip on YouTube and found an interview that he gave. In it, he uses the shorthand of "Two-Oh-Five" to refer to 2005. He does this repeatedly throughout the interview when discussing years in the first decade of this century. This is the first time I've heard someone drop one of the zeros from those years. Dismas|^(talk) 06:31, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Sportscaster Brent Musburger is known to use "oh" even ehen referring to a single zero [as opposed to the more common "nothing" (U.S.) or "nil" / "naught" (U.K.)], as in "The Giants take the lead 3-0 (three-oh)."    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 04:21, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

I've often heard baseball broadcasters describe a 3-0 pitch as "three-and-oh" or just "three-oh". For an 0-2 pitch, they might say "oh-two" or "oh-and-two". Possibly "nothing and". But not "zero" in any case. Sometimes the term "zip" is used, as in, "the score is 3-zip". Certainly not "nil", as that's pretty much just a soccer term. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:07, 20 August 2014 (UTC)