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Sod this for a game of soldiers! Where does this phrase originate and what does it mean?-- Light current 00:34, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Is there a term for a series such as O!, or, oar, oral, polar, portal, caltrop, tropical, where each word contains the letters of the last plus one new one? Also, can this particular series be continued any further? Neon Merlin 04:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe the following is Latin (or maybe not):
Nihil Obstat. Temigus Lafort S.J.D. Censor
Can anybody offer a translation? Not sure of the context; perhaps from a book's title page. - R. S. Shaw 07:57, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Is there an article in Wikipedia which mentions the pros and cons of children being educated in their mother tongues? I googled and it led to huge essays and PhD thesis. -- Wikicheng 08:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, I meant the education in school. Let us say that the family of a child usually converses in Kannada, which is the mother tongue. Now the question is whether it is better for the child to study in the Kannada medium (because it is the mother tongue and the environment in which the child grows, mainly at home speak Kannada) or English, which is considered the Lingua_franca and as all the higher education (College, for example) is available mainly in English. I am not asking for an opinion or a debate here. i just wanted to know if there is an article available in Wikipedia on this :-) -- Wikicheng 13:11, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
In multilingual countries like India for example, by the time the child starts formal education, he/she is likely to be familiar/conversant with two or three languages, other than English. English is introduced only in schools. But unfortunately, the higher education is mainly in English. -- Wikicheng 13:31, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks to all of you. Multilingualism was fairly helpful -- Wikicheng 04:03, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
1. What is an appositive? Do appositives also modify adjectives?
2. Among the three subordinate clauses, namely adjectival, adverbial and nominal clause, only the first two mentioned are modifiers because accordingly the nominal clause does not modify anything in the sentence. Nominal clauses function like one-word noun (subject, direct and indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative and appositive). If it functions like an appositive, as in The belief that there will be nuclear war is widespread then it is also a modifier since it modifies the word before it.
Compare:
Adjectival Clause: He is wearing the hat that he bought in the Philippines. (The adjectival class that he bought in the Philippines modifiers the noun hat.
Nominal Clause: They did not believe the fact that
3. If appositives modify the noun before it.. Then, can we still consider the following nominal clause as an appositive? The word evident, I think, is an adjective. Do appositives also modify adjectives?
It is evident that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.
If not what function does that clause have?
Thank you so much..
How do you pronounce the word Dromiceiomimus? An IPA transliteration would be fine… I'll add it to the article if someone answers. Cheers! bdesham ★ 15:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I can't count how often people from abroad have confused the two countries Sweden and Switzerland in conversations held in English. Most recent example, paraphrased from memory:
I'm not making this up and I've discussed it with Swedes; some of them have had similar experiences the other way around. I'm curious as to whether people from other places have experienced this confusion too ( Slovakia/ Slovenia?). It needn't be limited to nations, for example, do people from U.S. states ( Mississippi/ Missouri, Idaho/ Iowa) or from certain cities often get mixed up with citizens from far away places as well? Thank you for sharing your experiences. --- Sluzzelin 17:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
(After e.c) Thanks for your very interesting reply, DHN. Actually, in my personal experience, it was mostly U.S. Americans, and mind you not uneducated ones, who confused the two so far. What always puzzled me is that, though it's true that both begin with Sw, one of them ends in -land and has three syllables while the other doesn't. (I've never heard anyone confuse Switzerland with Swaziland, e.g.) I'm still curious about other examples of placenames getting confused in English conversations. --- Sluzzelin 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Then there's Dominica and the Dominican Republic, both located in the Caribbean, and both of whose nationals are known as Dominicans. It must be particularly confusing for Dominican priests from these countries to explain where they're from. ("I'm a Dominican priest from the Dominican Republic". "Oh, if you're a Dominican, you must be from Dominica". "No. Let me explain it one more time .. Oh stuff it, God bless you, my son".) One of Australia's greatest corporate criminals, Christopher Skase, became a citizen of one of these countries, but I've never yet been able to establish with absolute certainty which country it was because the media sometimes say it was one place and sometimes the other place (probably without even being aware of the existence of the other). JackofOz 04:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
People from the east coast of the U.S. (those for whom "there is no life west of Chesapeake Bay") do mix up the names of Ohio, Iowa, and Idaho, and aren't always convinced there's really a difference. There are tee-shirts poking fun at this that say "University of Ohio, Iowa City, Idaho". And, while we're on the topic of how well Americans understand the geography of their own country, there are dozens of anecdotes of people from New Mexico being thought to be "foreigners". The most recent one I heard was of someone from New Mexico trying to get tickets to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, only to be told they had to contact their country's Olympic committee. — An gr 08:01, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
In the UK (and probably even more so outside) many people seem to have extraordinary difficulty distinguishing Oxford and Cambridge. Which just shows that cultural association plays as big a part as phonetic similarity, hence people confusing Switzerland with Sweden rather than with Swaziland. -- Blisco 11:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know when in history people started using the word "score" to refer to units of 20 (i.e. "Four score and seven years ago...")? If a probably origin for the term cannot be guessed, I would still appreciate evidence of the term's use as far back as possible. 208.200.8.168 17:35, 13 November 2006 --luvhistory
I go along with scoring (cutting) the tally stick as a mark of 20. StuRat 21:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Funny how trying to learn a foreign language leads one (or me, at least) into questioning one's own. English allows ambiguity like "I write about houses in Sweden in notebooks", which it seems to me can be parsed as "I write (in Sweden) in my notebooks about the subject of houses", "I write (in my notebooks) about Swedish houses", and "I write about Swedish houses that are described in notebooks" and probably more. Is there a name for this? Are there languages where this can't happen, either because ambiguity is automatically considered wrong grammatically, or because the language structures prevents it from happening? Notinasnaid 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Re: Weird Language/Spelling in Safari Browser-Only in the Wikipedia site
Hi -
I prefer to use Safari, but every time I load a Wikipedia page I get strange misspellings. If I copy and paste an example, it turns into regular English. In the page I'm viewing, "n" turns to "m", and so on. Example: "Far testimg bleose use the sandbox imstead" shows up instead of: "For testing, please use the sandbox instead."
When I use Firefox, Wikipedia looks fine. I am running Tiger on a G4 Mac so Internet Explorer is out of the question as an option.
What have I done?
What should I do?
Thanks, gabrielle
hi, set your browser to UTF-8/Unicode encoding. this is what wikipedia uses.
--- OKAY! And the answer is: Helvetica in my Font Book (Apple's font manager in OSX) was corrupt. Apparently, Wikipedia defaults to Helvetica and mine was funky. All good now.
What does a bridge,an orange, a yardstick, and friedship have in common? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.3.84.114 ( talk • contribs)
They usually ask the riddles on the Misc. Desk. Good to know we can move them over here from now on! - THB 04:50, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Language desk | ||
---|---|---|
< November 12 | << Oct | November | Dec >> | November 14 > |
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. |
Sod this for a game of soldiers! Where does this phrase originate and what does it mean?-- Light current 00:34, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Is there a term for a series such as O!, or, oar, oral, polar, portal, caltrop, tropical, where each word contains the letters of the last plus one new one? Also, can this particular series be continued any further? Neon Merlin 04:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe the following is Latin (or maybe not):
Nihil Obstat. Temigus Lafort S.J.D. Censor
Can anybody offer a translation? Not sure of the context; perhaps from a book's title page. - R. S. Shaw 07:57, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Is there an article in Wikipedia which mentions the pros and cons of children being educated in their mother tongues? I googled and it led to huge essays and PhD thesis. -- Wikicheng 08:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, I meant the education in school. Let us say that the family of a child usually converses in Kannada, which is the mother tongue. Now the question is whether it is better for the child to study in the Kannada medium (because it is the mother tongue and the environment in which the child grows, mainly at home speak Kannada) or English, which is considered the Lingua_franca and as all the higher education (College, for example) is available mainly in English. I am not asking for an opinion or a debate here. i just wanted to know if there is an article available in Wikipedia on this :-) -- Wikicheng 13:11, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
In multilingual countries like India for example, by the time the child starts formal education, he/she is likely to be familiar/conversant with two or three languages, other than English. English is introduced only in schools. But unfortunately, the higher education is mainly in English. -- Wikicheng 13:31, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks to all of you. Multilingualism was fairly helpful -- Wikicheng 04:03, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
1. What is an appositive? Do appositives also modify adjectives?
2. Among the three subordinate clauses, namely adjectival, adverbial and nominal clause, only the first two mentioned are modifiers because accordingly the nominal clause does not modify anything in the sentence. Nominal clauses function like one-word noun (subject, direct and indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative and appositive). If it functions like an appositive, as in The belief that there will be nuclear war is widespread then it is also a modifier since it modifies the word before it.
Compare:
Adjectival Clause: He is wearing the hat that he bought in the Philippines. (The adjectival class that he bought in the Philippines modifiers the noun hat.
Nominal Clause: They did not believe the fact that
3. If appositives modify the noun before it.. Then, can we still consider the following nominal clause as an appositive? The word evident, I think, is an adjective. Do appositives also modify adjectives?
It is evident that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.
If not what function does that clause have?
Thank you so much..
How do you pronounce the word Dromiceiomimus? An IPA transliteration would be fine… I'll add it to the article if someone answers. Cheers! bdesham ★ 15:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I can't count how often people from abroad have confused the two countries Sweden and Switzerland in conversations held in English. Most recent example, paraphrased from memory:
I'm not making this up and I've discussed it with Swedes; some of them have had similar experiences the other way around. I'm curious as to whether people from other places have experienced this confusion too ( Slovakia/ Slovenia?). It needn't be limited to nations, for example, do people from U.S. states ( Mississippi/ Missouri, Idaho/ Iowa) or from certain cities often get mixed up with citizens from far away places as well? Thank you for sharing your experiences. --- Sluzzelin 17:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
(After e.c) Thanks for your very interesting reply, DHN. Actually, in my personal experience, it was mostly U.S. Americans, and mind you not uneducated ones, who confused the two so far. What always puzzled me is that, though it's true that both begin with Sw, one of them ends in -land and has three syllables while the other doesn't. (I've never heard anyone confuse Switzerland with Swaziland, e.g.) I'm still curious about other examples of placenames getting confused in English conversations. --- Sluzzelin 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Then there's Dominica and the Dominican Republic, both located in the Caribbean, and both of whose nationals are known as Dominicans. It must be particularly confusing for Dominican priests from these countries to explain where they're from. ("I'm a Dominican priest from the Dominican Republic". "Oh, if you're a Dominican, you must be from Dominica". "No. Let me explain it one more time .. Oh stuff it, God bless you, my son".) One of Australia's greatest corporate criminals, Christopher Skase, became a citizen of one of these countries, but I've never yet been able to establish with absolute certainty which country it was because the media sometimes say it was one place and sometimes the other place (probably without even being aware of the existence of the other). JackofOz 04:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
People from the east coast of the U.S. (those for whom "there is no life west of Chesapeake Bay") do mix up the names of Ohio, Iowa, and Idaho, and aren't always convinced there's really a difference. There are tee-shirts poking fun at this that say "University of Ohio, Iowa City, Idaho". And, while we're on the topic of how well Americans understand the geography of their own country, there are dozens of anecdotes of people from New Mexico being thought to be "foreigners". The most recent one I heard was of someone from New Mexico trying to get tickets to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, only to be told they had to contact their country's Olympic committee. — An gr 08:01, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
In the UK (and probably even more so outside) many people seem to have extraordinary difficulty distinguishing Oxford and Cambridge. Which just shows that cultural association plays as big a part as phonetic similarity, hence people confusing Switzerland with Sweden rather than with Swaziland. -- Blisco 11:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know when in history people started using the word "score" to refer to units of 20 (i.e. "Four score and seven years ago...")? If a probably origin for the term cannot be guessed, I would still appreciate evidence of the term's use as far back as possible. 208.200.8.168 17:35, 13 November 2006 --luvhistory
I go along with scoring (cutting) the tally stick as a mark of 20. StuRat 21:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Funny how trying to learn a foreign language leads one (or me, at least) into questioning one's own. English allows ambiguity like "I write about houses in Sweden in notebooks", which it seems to me can be parsed as "I write (in Sweden) in my notebooks about the subject of houses", "I write (in my notebooks) about Swedish houses", and "I write about Swedish houses that are described in notebooks" and probably more. Is there a name for this? Are there languages where this can't happen, either because ambiguity is automatically considered wrong grammatically, or because the language structures prevents it from happening? Notinasnaid 17:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Re: Weird Language/Spelling in Safari Browser-Only in the Wikipedia site
Hi -
I prefer to use Safari, but every time I load a Wikipedia page I get strange misspellings. If I copy and paste an example, it turns into regular English. In the page I'm viewing, "n" turns to "m", and so on. Example: "Far testimg bleose use the sandbox imstead" shows up instead of: "For testing, please use the sandbox instead."
When I use Firefox, Wikipedia looks fine. I am running Tiger on a G4 Mac so Internet Explorer is out of the question as an option.
What have I done?
What should I do?
Thanks, gabrielle
hi, set your browser to UTF-8/Unicode encoding. this is what wikipedia uses.
--- OKAY! And the answer is: Helvetica in my Font Book (Apple's font manager in OSX) was corrupt. Apparently, Wikipedia defaults to Helvetica and mine was funky. All good now.
What does a bridge,an orange, a yardstick, and friedship have in common? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.3.84.114 ( talk • contribs)
They usually ask the riddles on the Misc. Desk. Good to know we can move them over here from now on! - THB 04:50, 16 November 2006 (UTC)