Language desk
< September 13	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	September 15 >

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.

September 14

Years spelt out

Are there ever instances where people spell out years into words instead of numerals? It seems to me like even in the most formal documents, people would write ‘1994,’ not ‘nineteen ninety‐four.’ --66.190.69.246 (talk) 02:29, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've certainly come across spelt-out years in legal writing such as wills and legislation. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:36, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also in formal, printed invitations, at least in the old days. And it's kind of interesting that although Spanish, for example, will display a given year as 4 digits, the way it's read is as if it were spelled out - literally translated to English, such as 1975, read as one-thousand nine-hundred seventy-and-five. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:19, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Same in Russian. For ex, 1956 is spoken as тысяча девятьсот пятьдесят шесть (tysyacha devyatsot pyatdesyat shest), literally "thousand nine-hundred fifty six". They use 10 syllables to our 5 (nine-teen fif-ty six). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:37, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Welsh still hasn't recovered from the Millennium. Before, we used to give the number of thousands but the other digits were separate, so the year 1987 was "mil naw wyth saith" ("(one) thousand nine eight seven") (though the actual number 1987 is "mil naw chant wyth deg saith" - "thousand nine hundred eight-tens-seven"), since, we say "two thousand and..." so 2013 is "dwy fil a tair a ddeg" ("two thousand and three-and-ten"). No doubt we'll revert to the old system as the century gets older... -- Arwel Parry (talk) 08:07, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

why not dwy fil a thair ar ddeg? ----Ehrenkater (talk) 18:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That too. There's nothing like local/personal variation! Some people aren't as hot on mutations as others. -- Arwel Parry (talk) 00:52, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's nowhere as bad as French. 1998, for example, is "mille neuf cents quatre-vingt-dix-huit" (thousand nine hundred four-twenty-ten-eight), because the French haven't invented words for seventy, eighty, or ninety. --Bowlhover (talk) 18:41, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, they do exist — unsurprisingly, they are septante , huitante (or octante), nonante. The fr.wikt entries qualify these variously as Swiss, Belgian, or Cajun. In high school I was taught they were French-Canadian; that doesn't seem to be mentioned in Wiktionary. --Trovatore (talk) 20:37, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix are traces of the vigesimal numeral system used by Celts. Aside: that's the origin of the name of the Quinze-Vingts hospital in Paris (15 x 20 = 300 beds) — AldoSyrt (talk) 12:03, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It used to be common to spell out at least part of the year number in words in documents such as passports, to make it more difficult to alter the figure.----Ehrenkater (talk) 18:15, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the year of our lord. Also I thought spelt was a grain but apparently it's a valid past participle of to spell :o Effovex (talk) 03:31, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Along similar lines, what happened when a certain fish was left out in the sun too long: The smelt smelt. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:43, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A story is told about my uncle, when he was a little boy growing up in Washington. They were down at the docks and he saw one of the fishmongers' displays, and asked what sort of fish that was. "Smelt", says my gramma. He takes a whiff and replies, "I can't tell". --Trovatore (talk) 20:50, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is definitely so spelt, not 1984. But to my eyes the title stands out by being so. -ColinFine (talk) 07:41, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also diplomas (in the US sense of a document indicating completion of an educational program). Sometimes, though, they use the equally formal Roman numerals. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:14, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe not so much nowadays, but formerly years were often expressed in words in dialogue (passages of direct discourse in novels and such), since people speak in words rather than in numerals. Deor (talk) 13:52, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

When we went from 1999 to 2000 (nineteen ninety-nine to two thousand), for several years we were saying "two thousand-whatever". Now that the suffix is double digits, we seem to be increasingly reverting to the old habit: "twenty-whatever". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:30, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Punctuation required

I just found the following sentence in the Quraysh tribe article.

Quraysh is Nadhr ("son of") ibn Kinanah ibn Khuzaimah ibn Madrakah ibn Ilyas ( Elijah) ibn Madher ibn Nazar ibn Ma'ad ibn Adnan ibn Add ibn Send ibn Kedar (Arabic Qaydar)[2] ibn Ishmael[3][3][4] ibn Abraham[5] ibn Azar[6][7] (Terah) ibn Nahoor[8] ibn Srooj[9] ibn Ra'o[10] ibn Phaleg[11] ibn Aber ibn Shaleh[12][13][14] ibn Arpheckshad[15] ibn Sam ibn Noah ibn Lamek[16] ibn Motoshaleh ibn Edres (Enoch) ibn Yared ibn Mehlaiel ibn Qenan ibn Anosh ibn Sheeth ibn Adam

Now it needs some punctuation to break it up but should it be a comma or a semicolon and on which side of the word "ibn" should it go? CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 04:33, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Does it? Why? (Other than a full stop at the end, of course). --ColinFine (talk) 07:45, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If one were translating the patronymic, the convention is to put the comma after each name in the list ("... son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam."), but I agree that it's not necessary in the untranslated form. Tevildo (talk) 11:20, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was also going to change the "ibn" to "son of" as this is the English language Wikipedia.. The sentence is not a quote and "ibn" is not part of their proper names. So it is Ishmael (Isma'il) son of Abraham (Ibrahim) and not Ishmael ibn Abraham or Isma'il ibn Ibrahim. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 17:42, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

L and H

Would you please teach me the meaning of "L and H" in the following passage?122.19.123.34 (talk) 12:38, 14 September 2013 (UTC)dengen[reply]

    Kit had promised them all sausages and chips before they went
    into the town on the train to the L and H.  Tonight the notion
    was going to be about Sport, and Jack half threatened to speak.
    ---Maeve Binchy, Circle of Friends, p.439.

The Literary and Historical Society (University College Dublin). Tevildo (talk) 12:48, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Who Do You Trust?

Why is it right? It seems clear to me that it should be "Whom do you trust?" Are there other exceptions like this? OsmanRF34 (talk) 17:11, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but here is a discussion on the Twitter feature "who to follow". BbBrock (talk) 17:44, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, is that just then a different, informal, register, but perfectly normal? OsmanRF34 (talk) 17:56, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Few people now use "whom" in everyday speech, and many would never use it under any circumstances. It is a dying grammatical form, as -eth was in the seventeenth century. --ColinFine (talk) 19:29, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think "To whom it may concern" (never "To who ...") is still the choice of all who use such an expression - but that's probably vanishing as well. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:30, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think most educated speakers still prefer whom over who, even in speech, when it's the object of a preposition. It's only when it's the object of a verb that who has become somewhat normalized. (It may be, however, that who/whom as the object of a preposition is not that common in informal speech.) --Trovatore (talk) 22:18, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that educated speakers still tend to use "whom" after a preposition, as in To whom should I address it?; but when the prepositional phrase is split many (but not all) would use "whom": Who should I address it to? / Whom should I address it to? Duoduoduo (talk) 23:23, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, to whom/who to is my spoken usage. μηδείς (talk) 00:38, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that whom/who sometimes changes dependent on what precedes the word. If i were to say "In whom do you trust?" then 'whom' would seem to fit naturally. However "In who do you trust?" just sounds plain wrong and i don't feel that instinct of using 'whom' will die out any time soon in this case. To conclude, with no word preceding the who/whom in your stated question then there is nothing to confound upon it other than personal preference. (Cesdeva (talk) 22:05, 19 September 2013 (UTC))[reply]

"!" and "?" style choices???

Hello everyone! This time I'm wondering about the exclamation and question marks, and how they're placed. Recently I was looking at some packaging and noticed that on the English side, the "!" and "?" characters were connected to the words (ie. Example!) but, on the French side they are not (ie. Example !) I notice that there are many users on Wikipedia that write them like that, and also on other sites I visit. So... I am wondering: is it just a style choice, or is there more "history" etc behind writing them like that? Any insight is greatly appreciated. Thanks! --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 18:43, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Spaces before exclamation and question marks are a standard feature of French orthography - see Exclamation mark#French, or (for example) this style guide from TERMIUM Plus, the official Canadian translation bureau. I'm afraid I don't know the origin of this convention. Tevildo (talk) 20:07, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Standard for European French - as the Termium style guide notes, the only punctuation marks requiring a space in Canadian French are the colon and quotation marks. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:22, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There's a little information about the historical reasons for this at History of sentence spacing#French and English spacing and also at ::Plenken. -Ka renjc 08:56, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An explanation by a French typographer (both in French and English) here. AldoSyrt (talk) 17:25, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So I see ! Hmmm... it's contageous, is it not ? Thanks for the information, guys ! :) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 18:02, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I need a Chinese translation.

This is from my Chinese textbook, and I do not understand.

Mr Chan: 人户数, 家感到家?
Gareth (American Student): 新科迈罗敞篷版.
Mr Chan: 一行改... 一个作曲?
Gareth (American Student): 女友盘点佤邦. 佤因地域.

Thank you people. --Suksessingerplaatz (talk) 19:29, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Which Chinese book is this? I don't understand either. --Bowlhover (talk) 22:15, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]