Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 October 7

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

October 7

Some one writes a phrase not before

I see the word not before after i read gta lcs mission the portland chainsaw masquarade on gta wiki on fandom.

Why someone writes phrase not before?

So there exist a phrase but accompanied by word time see here https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/not-before-time

So what happen if you remove word time after word before. So i think the meaning is different. Correct me if i am wrong. Ps. The phrase ussualy accompanied with time. But many writers write phrase not before but without word time.114.124.182.159 (talk) 01:38, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

"Not before" is not an idiomatic phrase; it's just the combination of "not" and "before". So it means "after, or at the same time". For example, "not before April 4" would include any of April 4, April 5, April 6, etc.

People might use it because in a particular sentence they think it's clearer than using "after". --174.95.81.219 (talk) 02:06, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

In pretty common usage, a literal translation of "not before" to "on or after" would sort of miss the point. In this usage, it is not a time but some other event. So as we describe a sequence of events, we tell you that something happened and then mention that something else happened first, i.e. not before that something else happened. This suggests something anti-climactic (i.e. more significant than the event we were expecting to happen).

For example: "I hit the brakes and the car stopped, but not before crashing through the garage door." Fabrickator (talk) 04:36, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

"Not before" can also imply something not permitted to happen or be done until (or after) the specified time or date. For example, a mother might tell her child "You can eat a chocolate bar tonight, but not before eight o'clock."

The idiomatic phrase "not before time", as the OP has presumably learned from Collins, is an observation about something that has happened or been done that, preferably, should have happened or been done earlier: for example: Child, late in the evening, "Mother, I've done the washing up!" Mother, "Not before time." {The poster formerly known as 87.81.203.195} 90.193.128.129 (talk) 15:54, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Declension of "I" in unrelated languages

Is it merely an unusual coincidence that the declensions of the I pronoun in unrelated languages all start with the letter "m"? E.g. English me, French moi, Russian меня, Finnish minä, Mongolian миний, Azerbaijani məni, Swahili mimi et.? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 16:41, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, and no. The first three are all related languages in the Indo-European phylum; Mongolian and Turkic (including Azeri) are generally regareded as Altaic, and some scholars (but not all) count this with a larger phylum Uralic which includes Finnish. Some linguists go further and posit a macrofamily Nostratic - and, revealingly, one name proposed for this has been Mitian (currently a redirect to Nostratic) based on the prevalence of "mi" and "ti" for the first and second person pronouns. I'm not aware of any theories linking Niger Congo (which Swahili is ultimately part of) to Nostratic, except at the level of Ruhlen's Proto world. ColinFine (talk) 17:10, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

My thought was also about Nostratic languages, especially since the declension spelling is very similar in some unrelated languages (e.g. Russian, Finnish, Mongolian and Azeri). 212.180.235.46 (talk) 21:22, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I believe the general consensus on Nostratic is that the hypothesis is unlikely, but that it cannot be disproven. There's also the concept of Wanderwörter, although it seems a bit strange that a pronoun would become a wanderwort. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:41, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

If the monogenesis hypothesis is largely correct – I am not aware of an argument that would show it to be implausible – and one assumes languages to be evolved from ancestor languages in a neat, treelike fashion, ignoring the occasional genesis of mixed languages, any collection of languages, such as the set {Azeri, Zaza}, has an LCA. However, the mutation rate appears to be such that attempts to reconstruct the tree beyond the Neolithic will remain fruitless. Also, creole languages do not conform to this tree pattern, and it is conceivable that some language families descend from later creoles.  --Lambiam 11:48, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

So to summarize, we can answer the question with a clear and unfaltering "Maybe..." 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:16, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

I might go so far out on a limb as to add, '"or maybe not".  --Lambiam  --Lambiam 01:05, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

212.180.235.46 -- Something which happens to be diagnostic of linguistic relatedness is 1st. person singular pronouns beginning with "m-" in the non-subject cases, but NOT beginning with "m-" in the subject case (nominative). The Indo-European languages on your list do this (English I/me, French je/moi, Russian ya/m-), and many other IE langs as well, but I doubt whether many non-Indo-European languages do (if any do, it's very probably coincidence)... AnonMoos (talk) 00:15, 8 October 2022 (UTC)