Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 May 3

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May 3

Inuit = people

I'm wondering about cultures where the ethnic identification means "people" or something similar. For example, in Inuktitut, the ethnic descriptor "Inuk/Inuit" means "person/people". So if I were speaking Inuktitut, how would I distinguish between the Inuit ethnic group and the people of the world at large? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 06:18, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Qallunaaq is the general term. If you go back to the dictionary, I won't link because the links never work, yours just brought me to the start page rather than the term, and search for either "non-Inuit" or " qallunaaq". On the other hand different Inuit languages (dialects) may have different terms. For example in Inuinnaqtun the term for the people is Inuinnaq sometimes Inuinnait is used and inuk/inuit (no capital) just means person in general but Qablunaaq is also used. See the Inuinnaqtun/English Dictionary, Kitikmeot Region & Inuinnait Culture and Across Time and Tundra: The Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic. CBWeather, Talk, Seal meat for supper? 07:44, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

The OP may find the Wikipedia articles demonym, endonym, and exonym to be interesting. Demonym#Cultural problems specifically discusses some of the general problems the OP is getting at. --Jayron32 17:44, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Interestingly, Inuktitut is not (technically) the name of the language; it just means "in the manner of an Inuk" or "in the manner of the Inuit" so that you may "eat Inuktitut" (the name of series of linguistic seminars back in the 90s that discussed the concept) or "dress Inuktitut". Sort of a more concrete version of expressions like "eating Chinese" (where the final word, "food" is understood, but definitely missing). Matt Deres (talk) 22:57, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Inflected Bantu names like Luganda are the same. — kwami (talk) 23:18, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Often context determines. Usually the language will have a word for 'outsider'; the endonym means the ethnicity by default, because they are who you're normally talking about when you say "people" do something or another. Or another word for people may come to take over the original meaning of the endonym, so that it comes to mean specifically the ethnicity, and loses the meaning of 'people'. Rather like 'human' and 'person' taking over for 'man' in English. — kwami (talk) 23:18, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Which is, of course, a nice parallel to the original course of the word "mann" in English. "Mann" started as a term that meant "human person", while "were" meant "male person" and "wif" meant "female person". That English lost its main term for "male person" in favour of simply using the term for "person" makes claims that "man" was truly gender neutral in this period highly suspect, in my eyes. 85.255.233.193 (talk) 14:35, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

A nice pairing is Cwmry, "the people" in Welsh, and "Welsh", "foreigner" in English (even though they were here before the Saesons) Jimfbleak - talk to me?

Thai translations.

Arbitrarily dropping into Thailand for the first time in Google Maps, I almost instantly chanced upon a blue-shirted man urinating across the street from a water tower. Out of eyesight, but still rather close, is the Ban Kok O school. That made me chuckle, considering a recent help desk "outrage" about possibly publicly poisoning the well.

Then I continued southward and met a blue-shirted midget a "block" or so away. That made me chuckle, because I'm old-fashioned that way.

Considering how the peeing man who sued Google lived in Angers, I think there's a good chance I might have another cheap chuckle. What do the man's shirt and tree sign by the midget say, and can either or both be worked into fitting puns? Pertinent info is at 16.75515, 101.19386. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:30, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

When a local presents his weiner, should a visitor go to Phetchabun? InedibleHulk (talk) 07:46, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Strictly sticking to answering your first question: the man's shirt bears the words "คำซาวด์"; คำ is pronounced /kʰam/ (approximately "come" in English), and ซาวด์ is a rendering of the English word "sound". It's probably the name of a local shop or something. The sign on the tree looks like an advertisement for a moneylender. The words in the blue bubble in the middle are "กู้ได้" (/kûː dâi/), which means "can borrow [money]". --101.108.97.142 (talk) 08:10, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I can manage the pun part, and having the actual copyable text is much handier. InedibleHulk (talk) 16:32, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Efficent Language

Given that language changes are based on economy of effort, one deduction is that there must be a most efficent language. Although there are many variables, this seems highly quantitative to me. As a follow up, are there rule-based ways in which language will change? Given a starting word, will it change in any number of possible ways, or is it's changes necessary based on human physiology?— Preceding unsigned comment added by Schyler (talk • contribs)

I'm afraid your question cannot be answered, because of a logical error called plurium interrogationum. Your first statement says "Given that language changes are based on economy of effort..." however I am not aware that any broad linguistic princple says that. Since your presupposition is not established, we cannot answer the follow on question that depends on it meaningfully. There are laws that describe how languages have changed in the past, but these are observational laws based on past changes, and are not predictive of future changes centuries from now. Some commonly known linguistic laws include Grimm's law, which describes the deviation in consonant sounds during the split in the Indo-European family that produced the Germanic languages. You can see many of these at Category:Sound laws, but it bears repeating that these principles do not say what specifically will happen to any language in the future, merely they allow us to classify and organize past changes to languages. --Jayron32 19:07, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Queries about so-called "efficient languages" are recurrent on the reference desk. For some previous threads (albeit with not much in the way of actual references), see [1], [2], [3]. Deor (talk) 19:29, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

As Jayron says, we can't really answer this, but we can give some general reading suggestions (albeit, things you may have read). Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, argues against neuroplasticity models that could be used to support the claim that language can change in arbitrary ways. Also, his book The Language Instinct is generally interesting, and supports the general idea that language is innate. Furthermore, you might want to look up linguistic universals for at least something on aspects of language that are not arbitrary. Finally, if it's literally about economy of effort, the most efficient languages would most probably be those that have shown the least flux over recent centuries. If they haven't changed, one could argue that they have reached an optimal form, although this is far from proven. IBE (talk) 15:20, 4 May 2014 (UTC)