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In To Have and Have Not, the drunks at the bar have a short philological discussion about the phrase "the old rale", which is some sort of venereal disease. Which one is it? And, to continue their analysis, what's the derivation? Googling claimed it was derived from "ral", a ruffian. Tempshill ( talk) 02:47, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Hypothetically, could the English language merge two of its written letters without creating any homographs? I mean, if you replaced both the letter m and the letter t with a single new letter, the words map and tap would have the same spelling. Likewise, merging the letter v and the letter z would leave crave and craze spelled identically, and merging c and k would eliminate any written distinction between lace and lake. But is this the case for every pair of letters? I can't immediately think of any words which would become indistinguishable if there was only one grapheme shared between the current letter j and letter z, for example... but maybe there are some. And for that matter, is there a linguistic term for such a lack of overlap in where letters appear? -- 203.97.105.173 ( talk) 06:30, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
I did a brute-force search on a dictionary file containing approximately 210,000 words, many of them obscure. Ignoring capitalized words and single-letter "words", there were only 7 letter-pairs where conflating the two letters did not produce any ambiguous words. In each case one letter of the pair was Q; the other one was A, F, I, J, O, X, or Z.
There were 4 more letter-pairs, also each involving Q, where only one pair of ambiguous words was produced. These were shoe/shoq, snudge/squdge, shoq/shou, and qeri/veri. Did I mention that this dictionary file included a lot of obscure words? Two more letter-pairs involving Q produced only two ambiguous word-pairs each: bere/qere and built/quilt, and qere/yere and quen/yuan.
For letter-pairs not involving Q, the fewest ambiguous word-pairs produced was 3, for U with either J or Z. At least one word in each of these pairs was obscure. In the other direction, the letter-pairs producing the greatest number of ambiguous word-pairs were A and O with 2,031 and D and R with 2,031. Of course, adding inflected forms might very well greatly change this result.
--Anonymous, 12:33 UTC, September 21, 2009.
tr $i $j <words | sort - words | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 2' >out$i$j
Are you sure there are 7 pairs only? How about the pair K-Q? I can't think currently of any "normal" word (i.e. one used in normal life) which contains a Q and which would have had another "normal" meaning - had the Q been replaced by a K... Anyways, your investigation is interesting. Good luck. HOOTmag ( talk) 12:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
¶ Postulating some plausible possibilities and checking them in the
OED, I came up with FUITE and QUICE, which would double with QUITE and JUICE. The first is marked obsolete, and is essentially the same as "fuite" in modern French, meaning "flight"; the OED's citation of it first use is
William Caxton in 1499, referring to "their fuite or flyinge". "Quice" is a variant of "queest", which the OED calls still current in some western English dialects for a ring-dove or wood pigeon. The OED also gives another rare, obsolete meaning of QUICE found only in "quice tree", meaning gorse or whin, with a citation (spelt differently) from 1490.
As for proper names, I'd allow them if they weren't contrived neologisms like HOOTmag's "Aueen"; and "Auran" would thus be on the edge (it wasn't concocted to break the rule, but it was designed partly to be a non-word or a new word). I have a greater problem when the two words mean the same thing as in QOPH and KOPH, because nothing is lost if K and Q were merged: the merged word would be spelt the same and mean the same thing.
—— Shakescene (
talk)
¶ Having found something for Q with A (Qural/aural), F (fuite/quite) and J (juice/quice), I scanned (visually, not electronically) the OED for possible OUI combinations to match with QUI, and, while OUI and QUI themselves did not appear as hoped, I came up with a couple of obsolete word-forms that might work: OUIN (oven) and OUIR (over). QUIN to us is a colloquial term for Quintuplet, to rhyme with Twin; it's also another name for Pecten (a mollusc or shellfish). QUIR is an obsolete use or spelling of QUIRE = Choir.
¶ I, X and Z look much harder to postulate possible letter-combinations for, to match corresponding ones with Q. But there might be promise in the modern Chinese spelling system, where Q and X (as well as J) stand for different Chinese sounds that Anglophones hear (and
Wade–Giles transcribes) as "Ch" or "Sh", as in
Jiang Qing (
Chiang Ching),
Mao 's widow, and
Deng Xiaoping (
Teng Hsiao-ping), Mao's successor. Perhaps there are Chinese words whose current spelling differs only in Q/X that have migrated and naturalized sufficiently to be considered English words.
—— Shakescene (
talk)
07:11, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
¶ However, I found another town name,
Fiq, referring both to a current town and zone in the Somali region of Ethiopia and to a town in the
Golan Heights disputed between Syria and Israel. This of course, would duplicate with FIX were Q and X to be the same letter. As with Qural in Somalia, this is a proper name, so it wouldn't meet some people's criteria. If they (and the obsolete words OUIN, OUIR and/or QUIR) were admissible, that leaves I and Z as letters that could still be in theory be merged with Q with no loss of information. Anyone want to postulate a possible coincidence of Q with I or Z (which is how I came up with the previous examples to check)?
—— Shakescene (
talk)
18:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
(This is one of the most fun reference desk topics I've ever read.) -- jpgordon ::==( o ) 04:28, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
Could someone who understands Latin take a look at the Calends article, and translate the verse there that purportedly determines when the Calends occurred? Thanks. Rojomoke ( talk) 18:08, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Language desk | ||
---|---|---|
< September 20 | << Aug | September | Oct >> | September 22 > |
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. |
In To Have and Have Not, the drunks at the bar have a short philological discussion about the phrase "the old rale", which is some sort of venereal disease. Which one is it? And, to continue their analysis, what's the derivation? Googling claimed it was derived from "ral", a ruffian. Tempshill ( talk) 02:47, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Hypothetically, could the English language merge two of its written letters without creating any homographs? I mean, if you replaced both the letter m and the letter t with a single new letter, the words map and tap would have the same spelling. Likewise, merging the letter v and the letter z would leave crave and craze spelled identically, and merging c and k would eliminate any written distinction between lace and lake. But is this the case for every pair of letters? I can't immediately think of any words which would become indistinguishable if there was only one grapheme shared between the current letter j and letter z, for example... but maybe there are some. And for that matter, is there a linguistic term for such a lack of overlap in where letters appear? -- 203.97.105.173 ( talk) 06:30, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
I did a brute-force search on a dictionary file containing approximately 210,000 words, many of them obscure. Ignoring capitalized words and single-letter "words", there were only 7 letter-pairs where conflating the two letters did not produce any ambiguous words. In each case one letter of the pair was Q; the other one was A, F, I, J, O, X, or Z.
There were 4 more letter-pairs, also each involving Q, where only one pair of ambiguous words was produced. These were shoe/shoq, snudge/squdge, shoq/shou, and qeri/veri. Did I mention that this dictionary file included a lot of obscure words? Two more letter-pairs involving Q produced only two ambiguous word-pairs each: bere/qere and built/quilt, and qere/yere and quen/yuan.
For letter-pairs not involving Q, the fewest ambiguous word-pairs produced was 3, for U with either J or Z. At least one word in each of these pairs was obscure. In the other direction, the letter-pairs producing the greatest number of ambiguous word-pairs were A and O with 2,031 and D and R with 2,031. Of course, adding inflected forms might very well greatly change this result.
--Anonymous, 12:33 UTC, September 21, 2009.
tr $i $j <words | sort - words | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 2' >out$i$j
Are you sure there are 7 pairs only? How about the pair K-Q? I can't think currently of any "normal" word (i.e. one used in normal life) which contains a Q and which would have had another "normal" meaning - had the Q been replaced by a K... Anyways, your investigation is interesting. Good luck. HOOTmag ( talk) 12:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
¶ Postulating some plausible possibilities and checking them in the
OED, I came up with FUITE and QUICE, which would double with QUITE and JUICE. The first is marked obsolete, and is essentially the same as "fuite" in modern French, meaning "flight"; the OED's citation of it first use is
William Caxton in 1499, referring to "their fuite or flyinge". "Quice" is a variant of "queest", which the OED calls still current in some western English dialects for a ring-dove or wood pigeon. The OED also gives another rare, obsolete meaning of QUICE found only in "quice tree", meaning gorse or whin, with a citation (spelt differently) from 1490.
As for proper names, I'd allow them if they weren't contrived neologisms like HOOTmag's "Aueen"; and "Auran" would thus be on the edge (it wasn't concocted to break the rule, but it was designed partly to be a non-word or a new word). I have a greater problem when the two words mean the same thing as in QOPH and KOPH, because nothing is lost if K and Q were merged: the merged word would be spelt the same and mean the same thing.
—— Shakescene (
talk)
¶ Having found something for Q with A (Qural/aural), F (fuite/quite) and J (juice/quice), I scanned (visually, not electronically) the OED for possible OUI combinations to match with QUI, and, while OUI and QUI themselves did not appear as hoped, I came up with a couple of obsolete word-forms that might work: OUIN (oven) and OUIR (over). QUIN to us is a colloquial term for Quintuplet, to rhyme with Twin; it's also another name for Pecten (a mollusc or shellfish). QUIR is an obsolete use or spelling of QUIRE = Choir.
¶ I, X and Z look much harder to postulate possible letter-combinations for, to match corresponding ones with Q. But there might be promise in the modern Chinese spelling system, where Q and X (as well as J) stand for different Chinese sounds that Anglophones hear (and
Wade–Giles transcribes) as "Ch" or "Sh", as in
Jiang Qing (
Chiang Ching),
Mao 's widow, and
Deng Xiaoping (
Teng Hsiao-ping), Mao's successor. Perhaps there are Chinese words whose current spelling differs only in Q/X that have migrated and naturalized sufficiently to be considered English words.
—— Shakescene (
talk)
07:11, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
¶ However, I found another town name,
Fiq, referring both to a current town and zone in the Somali region of Ethiopia and to a town in the
Golan Heights disputed between Syria and Israel. This of course, would duplicate with FIX were Q and X to be the same letter. As with Qural in Somalia, this is a proper name, so it wouldn't meet some people's criteria. If they (and the obsolete words OUIN, OUIR and/or QUIR) were admissible, that leaves I and Z as letters that could still be in theory be merged with Q with no loss of information. Anyone want to postulate a possible coincidence of Q with I or Z (which is how I came up with the previous examples to check)?
—— Shakescene (
talk)
18:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
(This is one of the most fun reference desk topics I've ever read.) -- jpgordon ::==( o ) 04:28, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
Could someone who understands Latin take a look at the Calends article, and translate the verse there that purportedly determines when the Calends occurred? Thanks. Rojomoke ( talk) 18:08, 21 September 2009 (UTC)