Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 March 3

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 3

work on your presentation

I'm quite confused about the phrase "work on your presentation" in the following context: "It's easy for the "tone of voice" to be misinterpreted when it's written down on Skype, typed into a Google doc, or you have team members whose first language isn't English.So, instead of assuming your workers are slacking off and watching television rather than working on your presentation, make sure you clear the air. Hold brief but regular meetings to hash out any doubts." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.221.162.238 (talk) 12:38, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• A presentation is a lecture with visual aids, such as is often given by one business executive to other business executives. The executive may have junior colleagues who prepare the presentation for him or her, for example by writing the text or making a slide show. If you are the executive, these people are "working on your presentation". jnestorius^(talk) 13:17, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

If you want people to listen, there'll be audio aids, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 16:14, March 3, 2017 (UTC)

• Watch a TED talk on YouTube some time. That's a "presentation". To work on a presentation, you prepare the script and the visual aids. --Jayron32 16:23, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• What it says at presentation is the word means "the process of presenting a topic to an audience". "Work on your presentation" can also mean to improve your skills in performing this process. But that is not the meaning in the original question. --76.71.6.254 (talk) 23:00, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• I think the OP is properly questioning the sense of the quoted text. Syntactically, the sentence has the audience working on the presentation, but "work on your presentation" is usually an admonition to the presenter, not a description of the audience behaviour. The sentence is just wrong. It should be "attending to your presentation." -Arch dude (talk) 03:41, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't know the context, but many financial newspapers have an advice column addressed to managers. What seems to be happening here is that the team leader is being advised what to do when his team has been tasked with working up a presentation for the company and he wants to keep tabs on the progress of the work. The pronoun "your" here refers to the company. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 06:39, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Google shows that the context is "As Telecommuting Rises, Here’s How To Keep Tabs On Your Team". I agree with your analysis of the phrase; it does sound rather odd, and it's not talking about the workers ignoring a presentation that you're giving, so I can't really imagine any meaning other than the workers slacking off on their contribution to a presentation that you're preparing to give. Nyttend (talk) 12:07, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Gender in early Indo-European

I've read that in Early PIE there was no feminine or masculine gender, and that they both came from a split in an original animate gender. But couldn't the opposite be at least possible? What if the neuter gender came from either the masculine or feminine genders? Maybe the only reason why Hittite doesn't have them is because it split off from PIE earlier than the other daughter languages. Also, Proto Anatolian might've been influenced by Summerian (which distinguishes between human/non-human), resulting in a loss of the original two gender system. I'd think that this theory would be consistent with the reconstructed PIE religion, which included the reverence of natural objects/phenomenon like oak trees, rivers, and lightning. They would've seen these objects as either having male or female characteristics, based on Celtic animism and the Vedic Sarasvati hymns. Idielive (talk) 23:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

I added a USEFUL title. StuRat (talk) 17:46, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Not an entirely appropriate one, given that "neuter" is a gender. --Trovatore (talk) 21:24, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Note, the OP has restored the absolutely useless title he had originally. That title doesn't say anything about what the Q is. StuRat (talk) 03:30, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

And now Medeis added another useful title. StuRat (talk) 04:26, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

But at least the original title is polite and uncontroversial. Imagine what strife could be avoided if all queries were titled Question Please ! —Tamfang (talk) 09:47, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but we would have trouble referring to Q's, as wiki logic just jumps to the first item with that name on the page, when you click on a link. StuRat (talk) 15:24, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

• Winfred Lehmann's Pre-Proto-Indo-European addresses this. There's plenty of evidence that there was an archaic animate/inanimate distinction, consider the fact that there is a who/what distinction, with no masc/fem distinction in who as well as adjectives like fortis/forte in Latin where there is no masc/fem opposition. There is simply no evidence of the opposite development. μηδείς (talk) 22:42, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

You forget that the PIE word kwis (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/k%CA%B7is) meant not just what, but also who in the interrogative sense. In the relative sense it meant who, which, and that. The term kwos meant which and what.

It is fairly plausible to say that kwis meant what in the sense of what are you doing, same for kwos.

With this in mind, an early feminine/masculine gender distinction is still possible. Idielive (talk) 23:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

If you want to insist, feel free. It's handled under WP:OR. But there is simply no evidence. The kwis/kwid opposition is quite obviously an animate/inanimate opposition with no three-way gender differentiation. There are also pairs such as ignis/fire and aqua/water that point to a conception of these materials as active or passive agents. As for Sumerian, there is no evidence of contact with PIE, and the Hittites came from Anatolia, not Mesopotamia. Finally, the way the feminine evolved in different branches show that it is an innovation, for example the feminines in long i in the east, not found in, say, Germanic or the west. (I am not sure about Celtic.)

Please do not remove an informative header, the top of the page explicitly guides against this. μηδείς (talk) 03:46, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I never said the Hittites came from Mesopotamia. The Hittites had serval words borrowed from Summerian, like Dingir-lim, Kililu = Gilim, and Lu-Sang-a. And if PIE had no contact with Summerian how do you explain correspondences like Summerian agar/PIE agro, tur and dhwer, gu and gwou? Idielive (talk) 10:48, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

The earliest we know of the Sumerian language, it's in southern Mespotamia, while the earliest we know of Indo-European is that it's in all probability north of the Caucasus mountains, which creates a basic geographical gap of close to 1,000 miles. Is DINGIR a borrowing in Hittite, or a mere visual cuneiform "Sumerogram"? AnonMoos (talk) 03:55, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

According to the article "Hittite" by Calvert Watkins in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (ISBN 0-521-56256-2), DINGIR is a conventionalized transcription of a written cuneiform Sumerogram, and not a Sumerian word phonetically borrowed from Sumerian into the Hittite language. AnonMoos (talk) 21:24, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

This is not an unknown idea. I've certainly come across an account that says roughly "Hittite has lost a distinct feminine, and is well on the way to becoming a genderless language" - I think it might have been in Burrow's The Sanskrit Language, but my copy is in a box somewhere and I can't lay my hand to it to check. But it's not a mainstream view. Another piece of evidence for the primacy of animate vs neuter is the occurrence of old neuters in -mṇ in (I think) every branch. --ColinFine (talk) 19:03, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Calvert Watkins in the article "Hittite" and H. Craig Melchert in the article "Lycian" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (ISBN 0-521-56256-2) suggest that evidence from Lycian shows that proto-Anatolian IE would have had the conventional three genders, inherited from PIE... AnonMoos (talk) 21:24, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

@AnonMoos:, I am in the same "box" as @ColinFine: here in that I put my Cambridge Encyclopedia in storage in Massachusetts before my recent surgery. I do remember reading that the Anatolian languages did show some traces of what would later become gender when the -a endings of certain roots like *gwena and certain abstracts in -(i)a would become reanalysed as a separate gender. (One must admit that otherwise having abstracts in feminine rather than neuter is marked.)

That Anatolian had the precursors of this system, rather than an actual three-gender system seems plausible. Note again all the signs (for example, the non-productive heteroclitic nouns, and the marked PIE nominative in -s) that pre-PIE was an active-stative and ergative-absolute language, which tend to have at most an animate-inanimate opposition. A quotation of or a link to the Cambridge articles would be helpful. μηδείς (talk) 16:46, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

All I have is my paper copy. The articles discuss Lycian declension details, which I don't understand, and so don't feel comfortable trying to summarize. The key paper is apparently "The feminine gender in Anatolian" by Melchert (1994)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:22, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

It's on website as http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/feminine.pdf (though a little hard to track down). AnonMoos (talk) 04:42, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm, I guess he changed his mind by the time he wrote http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/The%20Position%20of%20AnatolianRevised3.pdf ... -- AnonMoos (talk) 10:37, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks to AnonMoos, here is the relevant quote (pp20-21) from the latter paper:

However, Hajnal (1994) has decisively refuted the claims that the presence of common gender nouns in Anatolian with a suffix *-eh2 demonstrates its prehistoric use there as a feminine motion-suffix. Many such nouns have masculine referents, and more importantly there is no evidence for feminine agreement in adjectives. Rieken (2005) has also now presented a convincing account of Anatolian “i-mutation” as originating in secondary derivatives in *-i-.11 This feature thus provides no compelling basis for the existence of either ablauting *-ih2/-yeh2 or *-ihx in Anatolian as a feminine motion-suffix.12 . . . One cannot in principle prove a negative. However, the suffix *-eh2 is undeniably present in Anatolian in its function of deriving abstracts and collectives, universally agreed to be older than its use as a feminine motion-suffix. Likewise, as per Widmer (2005), Hittite nakkī- ‘heavy’ probably reflects the “vṛkī-suffix” in its older use as an appurtenance suffix: *h1nóko- ‘burden’ → *h1nok-íhx *‘burdensome’.13 This distribution must in the absence of compelling counterevidence be taken as prima facie evidence for an archaism, and contrary to my own earlier claims I now regard the development of the feminine gender to be a common innovation of the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages.14

[bold added] μηδείς (talk) 23:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

[Closed] Would Brits, when with their family or friends say something like "Can you pass me the salt?"

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Would Brits, when with their family or friends say something like "Can you pass me the salt?"--Llaanngg (talk) 18:03, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

We would. DuncanHill (talk) 18:07, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Just for comparison, we Americans would as well. --Jayron32 18:10, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

We would usually say "please" at the end or "Can you please pass me the salt?" (Good manners are more important than split infinitives). Alansplodge (talk) 18:53, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

All true, but there's no split infinitive there. Henry^Flower 19:50, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

"Can you please pass me the salt?" sounds a little impatient to me. DuncanHill (talk) 19:55, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

"So when you call for ale, I pass water. Right."

No! It's "May you. . . " or "Would you":) Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:06, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

When would one ever say "May you pass the salt?". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:03, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

By the way, the dictionary definition of "asshole" is "Any person who insists there is a distinction between "may" and "can" when another person asks permission to do something." It's in the OED.. --Jayron32 00:44, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

When they mean/meant "might". Same difference? InedibleHulk (talk) 21:09, March 3, 2017 (UTC)

I've heard this "may" as a request, and I always think it sounds really weird. "Are you free to pass me the salt, without violating some moral, social, or legal stricture?" Come to think of it, "might" doesn't make much sense either, but it doesn't evoke that same must-not-be-a-native-speaker reaction in me — it just sounds British and posh.

I would prefer "would" to any of the modal auxiliaries so far mentioned. --Trovatore (talk) 21:21, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

In my family it's usually "could you pass the salt please?" No "me" as it's implicit. DBaK (talk) 22:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

"Could" and "can" both work for me, but seem a little less polite than "would" or "will". I still think "may" is just weird. Is it a recent novelty? --Trovatore (talk) 23:03, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

I think I was not in such a polite environment as other RD contributors. If I remember it correctly they would just say: "Pass the salt." Maybe "the salt" or even a plain "salt" are also possibilities. Hofhof (talk) 23:19, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Salt has social significance. It used to be a form of money (hence "salary") and in mediaeval England was placed in the middle of the dining table. The higher classes sat "above the salt" and the lower classes "below the salt". 80.5.88.48 (talk) 06:52, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Proto Indo European excerpt

This is a translation a two columns from the Wikipedia article entitled Proto Indo European Language. Please tell me what you think of it.

Méħtēr Dn̥gʰwéħs hes bʰrenk-ħed-n̥serodī komoini-anés Aryés nu Wekusperosés Dn̥gʰwéħs, huru uper ħel spregénti dn̥gʷʰā́m wéikn̥s eréh. Wérgóm bʰrenkénti Méħtēr dn̥ǵʰuħés ħed nosero dī heti ħel ánteros méħ-dn̥gʷʰéħs, nu tod hes gneʕyéti heti ħel ánteros méħ-dn̥gʷʰéħs tosyo dyes. Mē wérgóm yom dékmt-hnéun kmtóm yeh bhrenk PIE ħed nosero dī wē tosyo dʰugħtḗr dn̥gʰuħés (Méħ-Génhménséh), nu mē teksneħés nosero dyés bʰrenk PIE ħed nosero dī, līg Kʷód-preih Teks-neħ mag so kawd-teħéy. Toi teksneħes gʰebʰ ħel weidstos PIEés, rō n̥wrei dn̥gʰuħés hes. PIE spresprógés (óynos dn̥gʰwéħs) 3500 ħenti Komoini Dī yom Néwos Dī, to ħel mon spreg ki. Kur-Kóymos-Seku spreg agréh Kóymos Aryés hehóstés Kr̥snós Selos lendʰés ħeus Wekusperosés. Wérgóm bʰrenk-ħed-n̥serodī Aryés deiwóns. Aryós gʰreh ħeu ħepo swe kawd-teħéy mwoénd, ki kawd-teħéy Méħtēr Dn̥gʰwéħs ħmigu ʕebhi gneʕénti Wekusperos Dn̥gʰwéħs (ħeltós ‎nu néwos). PIEés megħlos merbʰḗ nu mē dʰeigu ardyéi wr̥dʰomés, nu wer-wṓkus. PIE wṓkus, nu wr̥dʰom ardes hes bʰrenk-ħed-n̥serodī. Ki-dei, huru uper ħel spregénti dʰugħtḗr dn̥ǵʰwéħes PIEés hes Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French, nu Marathi.

Mag Tengés

n̥hen ħenti kaput tenkó ħed spreg PIE deru. Ke hes bʰrenk-ħed-n̥serodī dʰugħtḗr dn̥gʰuħmós so dés, Kʷód-preih Teks-neħéh. [1] Kʷód-preih Teks-neħéh hes dʰeh ħen Neogrammarian yewos so spreg Arya-Wekusperos wṓkus yewos hes dʰéht. Teksneħ seku Kʷód-preih médʰyos dwóh Dn̥gʰwéħsés kwe dʰeh wṓkus yewos gʰed komoini anm. Sekudhí, seku Kʷód-preih toibʰi wr̥dʰom Italianéh kwe English: piede kwe foot, padre kwe father, pesce kwe fish. Toi hes mē līg. Megʰm̥ós spreg bei dn̥gʰwéħn̥s gʰreh óynos méħtrey. Idielive (talk) 23:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

See Talk:Proto-Indo-European language for some background on this.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 01:11, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

When I see such "PIE", for me only one thing is to be recalled: Lovecraft. No J in place of Y and no DZ in place of J contributes to this Lovecraftism in more than half. Ad these English words inside. Terrific. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.249.159.66 (talk) 13:25, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Idielive -- you do know that even if all the individual features of such a passage were to be reconstructed correctly (something which is by no means assured), it's possible and quite likely that many such features actually come from various different time periods and dialects, and were not found coexisting together in actual historical speech in the way that they're found together in the reconstruction? I'm afraid that it's somewhat fruitless to try to write an extended text that a Proto-Indo-European speaker could have understood. A proposal for a Proto-Indo-European Wikipedia would be rejected (since even proposals for Wikipedias in several very-well-attested written dead languages have been rejected). It would probably be best to stick to Schleicher's fable... -- AnonMoos (talk) 06:11, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Also, I'm not sure I've seen "ħ" in PIE transcriptions before. In IPA, [ħ] is a voiceless pharyngeal... AnonMoos (talk) 07:35, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't have enough IE vocabulary memorized to be able to immediately understand the intended structure of this "text", but from what I can figure out, I see very little effort at taking anything like syntax into account at all – it seems mostly to be a word-by-word gloss of the English article preserving most of the English word order. Not worthwhile investing further work in, as far as I'm concerned, and certainly nothing with any potential use for our article. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:18, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Future Perfect at Sunrise, I dont think you understand. I would have taken syntax into account, however I chose not to so it would be easier for people to read. Plus, even if I had written in the correct word order, the translation would still be criticized. Idielive (talk) 10:32, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

As an example of a word-by-word translation, I suppose it is an interesting exercise, but I doubt whether it has any actual use since the translation does not represent any actual single language, and would not have been understood at any time in the past even if we could take it back there. Dbfirs 17:11, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I'll be polite and I'll say this is a (fringe) original research and obviously out of place. PIE is a long dead language and is only known by disputable reconstructions, one can not translate modern texts with eleborate technical vocabulary into PIE. This is anti-scientific.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:03, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Many dead languages were attempted to be revived by means of, among other things, translating modern texts with eleborate technical vocabulary into them; see List of revived languages. I wouldn't call all these attempts "anti-scientific". --81.96.84.137 (talk) 19:54, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

... but, to quote an example from your linked article, " ... substantial fragments, including grammars, from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries survived, ... allowed Cornish to be revived". This is not possible with PIE. Dbfirs 20:11, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I do not see any reconstructed languages there. All of them have had a corpus of texts and were actually known, not reconstructed, and they became extinct quite recently. So we know how those language looked like for 99% certain. In any case they have been revived for a purpose with a good methodology, not for a pure fun of a single person. I'm not against fun, but. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:18, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

There is one practical way to revive 100 percent authentic Proto Indo European. Petroglyphs were found in the Maykop Culture (please correct me if I'm wrong), and if tests were actually done on the writing, one might just find the writing to be PIE. The downside is that there is little chance of ever translating the petroglyphs. Idielive (talk) 3:8, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but the invention of writing (as opposed to its adoption from elsewhere) seems to have required the administrative needs of large-scale organized trade and/or centralized government (which didn't exist in Indo-European societies until long after the language had started to diverge into separate branches). There was no true writing anywhere in the world before roughly 3,000 B.C., and it didn't start spreading to societies without such administrative structures until after 2,000 B.C. If the Indus valley script can't be shown to be linguistic in nature, I would strongly doubt that there's much hope for your petroglyphs. AnonMoos (talk) 04:14, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Again the problem we're forced to do it backward. We have already reconstructed PIE, then we find some undeciphered writing, then we postulate it's PIE, then using our PIE reconstruction we decipher the writing. Often our deciphering adds something new and revises our previous reconstruction (this has actually happened with Hittite). But for the known revived languages it is quite straightforward: we know exactly how the language was written and usually pronounced (though certain details may be missed and we can only speculate), then we try to return the language to its previous living state often inadvertently changing it while adopting it to the modernity (this has happened with Hebrew - probably the only most successful revived language - I doubt we can routinely bring in such a unique case as an example of alleged ordinariness of language reviving).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:29, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

As noted, however, the earliest writing systems date to several hundred years after PIE was supposed to be a single, spoken language. Even more problematic for our dating, however, is that the earliest writing systems to be unambigiously sound based (like alphabets and syllabaries) are even later, so it is highly unlikely we would have a sound-based system to work from. --Jayron32 15:51, 7 March 2017 (UTC)