Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 July 11

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July 11

date and record of a cross

"Except for some Madonna lilies it is impossible to name them, since the wooden flats stood casually here and there in the flower bed, all thickly planted with dark green lily seedling. The occasional paper tag fluttering from a seed pod with the date and record of a cross showed that she was an amateur hybridizer with some special fondness for lilies of a warm muskmelon shade or a pale lemon yellow." Does "date" here mean the day when a cross germinates and "record" the detailed account of its growth process? Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.128.177.142 (talk) 14:37, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

I doubt it. The usual procedure for such a tag is to record just the name of each "parent" variety and the date on which the cross-pollination took place. (See the example under "Postpollination steps" a bit more than halfway down this page.) A "detailed account of its growth process" would be a matter for the gardener's notebook rather than the tag, as described in the section I referred to. Deor (talk) 22:51, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Odd gemination (dagesh hazaq) in a verse occurring numerous times in the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch?

Does anyone have an explanation for the bizarre gemination of the initial L(amed) at the beginning of the last word of the following verse of the Hebrew Bible?

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְהוָ֖ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

("The Lord spoke to Moses to say:")

This verse occurs repeated identically (identical "melody" included) in innumerable places in the Torah and always with this "anomaly". (If it is one).

This gemination doesn't seem to me to make any sense grammatically.

Besides, the form of this word seems to me to contravene a very basic rule of Biblical Hebrew phonology, namely that words cannot begin with a consonant cluster or a geminate, unless they are to be pronounced as one "accent word" with the preceding word, which the fact that in this instance the two words carry each its own trope (taam) and that there is no hyphen (maqaf) between them seems to me to go against.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks.

Contact Basemetal here 22:25, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

It seems to be considered a known anomaly; one source I found considers it a variation of דחיק, the maqaf rule your refered to above. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 04:21, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Hasirpad. For those who like me can't directly access Hasirpad's first reference, here is an alternative (note 3). Hasirpad's second reference is accessible (to me at least). Contact Basemetal here 16:09, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

• Another one: בְּתוּלֹתֶ֥יהָ נּוּגֹ֖ות ("Her [Zion's] virgins are grieving", Lamentations 1:4). This one's not even in Lerner. Contact Basemetal here 23:35, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

what is that nameless feeling of a scene

Hello, I've looked at saudade, but the thing I would like to find a name for is the sense you get when you remember a place, event or experience, and you get a further sense that places you right in the scene as you were washed with it then. If saudade is longing, that isn't it, nostalgia still isn't it. The sense is almost like taste, smell, but not so literally tactile. It's not a pang. There's no longing, no desire, no sense of being carried away. The thing I'm after is more like a note, a tone that completes the picture in a "time" way, something to do with the zeitgeist if you like, but more a feeling than that. I'm sure you clever reference-brarians have a word for it, so thanks in advance. Manytexts (talk) 22:30, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

The technical term in psychology is involuntary memory, first used by Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Tevildo (talk) 00:54, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like something I would call a "flashback". We have the article Flashback (psychology) which, at first glance, seems very similar (identical even?) to what is described in Tevildo's link. My background in this area is not sufficient to say for sure, so maybe there is a technical difference in use of the two terms. If not, maybe the two articles should be merged? And if so, then maybe the respective articles should be amended to indicate how one differs from the other.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 03:41, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

"Sodade"], performed by the late Cesaria Evora. Bus stop (talk) 03:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks to all for the links—the first two for the ambit and the third for atmospherics which is also relevant in a lateral way. IM was helpful: saturation with "essence..." makes sense as does "flashback", because there's no emotional judgment. It is also possibly like a spatial memory—effected by or in, the hippocampus but in the far past perhaps—taking in everything seen and hidden in that event. Manytexts (talk) 10:08, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Surely you are referring to déjà vu? — SMUconlaw (talk) 20:27, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Deja vu is not quite the same thing as X reminding you of Y. It's X reminding you of X - the feeling that something you're experiencing exactly replicates something you experienced once before, as if it's a "replay". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:54, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Good suggestion and good definition Bugs. An example of the "scene" is an old lady served tea in a cup and saucer with a particular rose, almost black-red. My mother had a set like that and she grew those roses. It wasn't that I just remembered, I was "there" with all the atmosphere of the event of my mother tending those roses, having that china when I was small. It's like a feeling in your skin at that time, but belongs to everything about it. Involuntary. Manytexts (talk) 09:32, 16 July 2015 (UTC)