Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 March 23

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March 23

"coffee grounds" vs "coffee grinds"

Having always heard (and used) the phrase "coffee grounds," in the past week I've met two people who use "coffee grinds." Is this a matter of dialectal variation or idiosyncratic? Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 15:26, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I've only ever heard "coffee grounds", but Google ngrams shows that "coffee grinds" has bumbled along at a very low level since about 1960 (the occasional appearances before are probably accidental instances of this sequence of words with a different syntax). Since about 1986 it's taken off (though still far lower incidence than "coffee grounds"). --ColinFine (talk) 15:33, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I suspect ngrams wouldn't be too useful in this case, though, as there is the other meaning of "coffee grinds" that can refer to specific coarseness (e.g., a "coarse coffee grind" or a "fine coffee grind"), which is more of a descriptor of the grounds than a generic term for them. There's a technical term for that which is eluding me at the moment, probably because I have a head cold--a type of reverse gerund, perhaps? It's syntactically similar to something like "a rough chop" or "a close shave." The key is to somehow weed out instances like that from the cases where "coffee grinds" is used in place of the usual "coffee grounds." Hard to do with a computerized search. Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 16:43, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, our own article Coffee preparation refers to "spent coffee grinds", and that references a source that uses the term in its title and body. The Wikipedia article also uses "grounds". ―Mandruss ☎ 17:58, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I've heard both terms, with "grounds" used more commonly. Not sure what this illuminates or doesn't but I did an Ebsco database search for both terms, and this is what I found: "Coffee grinds" yielded 960 results, dating from 1991. The types of titles the term appeared in tended toward four main clusters: British, Canadian, & Australian publications, restaurant trade journals, environmental magazines like Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, and E: the Environmental Magazine, and literary journals like Southwest Review (where the term showed up in poetry). "Coffee grounds" yielded 12,607 results, dating from 1885 (though the database was behaving strangely and wouldn't let me see those oldest results). There was less noticeable clustering of types of titles, but academic and scientific journals in fields like radioanalytical & nuclear chemistry and advanced applied bioceramics did show up in the results set, along with titles like Men's Health and Businessweek. Now, this is just based on what I noticed looking through the results, and not good science, but there was the suggestion of a difference in where the two terms predominate, if someone were to want to pick up the thread and run with it. --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 13:16, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Lightnin' up the mood

What's the proper form for the possessive form of Lightnin': Lightnin's, Lightnin''s or "Lightnin'"'s? Clarityfiend (talk) 18:23, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I doubt there's a rule covering that situation, so I'd bypass the problem by using "Slim's", "Lightnin' Slim's", or "his". The majority of that article refers to him as "Slim", so why would "Slim's" be problematic? ―Mandruss ☎ 18:28, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

So circumlocution for Hiadeľ and its ilk too? Clarityfiend (talk) 18:34, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

If writing of Hiadel' is circumlocution, I'd say yes. But I'm not familiar with names of that form (is that a contraction of some kind?), so if the ending apostrophe isn't an essential part of the name perhaps it would be acceptable to write its possessive as Hiadel's.

The last letter of Hiadeľ is U+013E LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH CARON (LATIN SMALL LETTER L HAČEK). Why the diacritic looks like a little ‹9›, I cannot say. —Tamfang (talk) 06:23, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

I see, so there is no apostrophe there, and it's a different animal from Lightnin'. Still, considering zero Google hits for Hiadeľ's, the circumlocution of Hiadeľ seems preferable to non-linguist me. ―Mandruss ☎ 07:16, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

• The proper phrase is to lighten up the mood, "lightening" wouldn't normally take a possessive, but it would be "lightening's". μηδείς (talk) 18:45, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

• Taking the general prescription literally and without thought, we'd have e.g. /lightnin''s gun/. Obviously this isn't covered in our WP:MOS. I'd think /lightnin's gun/ would be acceptable in most cases. I suppose you could check a copy of Strunk & White or Fowler's A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_Usage - but I don't recall they address the issue. Agree that /Lightnin' Slim's gun/ would be more common. Usually people with names like that go by both, or by the second name. Sometimes this has humorous effect. When asked by 2 Chainz for rights to sample a song, Tom Lehrer responded

“ As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2? ”

Hope that helps. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:54, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

• I don't think two apostrophes in a row is standard English writing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:10, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Strange things among English irregular verbs

Hello, this question is posted from France. In the list below, I don't understand why only some verbs are in bold letters. It comes from a recent and good grammar : Bescherelle "L'anglais pour tous" Editor Hatier, 2014

I rejected some hypothesis.

H1) It has nothing to do with verbs that can be regular. This last verbs have a (R) in exponent.

H2) I don't think it has something to do with their frequency in English. They seem to be all very common.

H3) I don't think it has something to do with transitive verbs.

So what is there hidden below these verbs in bold letters? I thank you all to be courageous enough to read up to this end.--Jojodesbatignoles (talk) 21:40, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't know.

But I noticed "ate" has the suggested pronunciation /et/. To the best of my knowledge this is considered obsolete, but there may be pockets of resistance where it's still said that way. In my experience, children who say /et/ are corrected and told to pronounce it as written, viz. a homophone of "eight". I dimly remember hearing adults say /et/, but they were of my grandparents' generation and are long dead now. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:01, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I think that's a lower case e followed by a capital i, which would make sense. But you're right that saying "ate" as "et" sounds like something hillbillies would say. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:17, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, and check quickly (or download it), because they're about to delete it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:18, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Actually, /ɛt/ is the IPA for the archaic past tense that rhyme with "set" and the chart says /eɪ/ (not et) which is the proper IPA rendering of the RP and SAE pronunciation of vowel of "ate" that rhymes with "eight". The authors are not using standard IPA, however, since simple /e/ is not found in RP or SAE, and is the "clipped" vowel of "eight" in Scottish and some varieties of Welsh English. In other words, say and said are /seɪ/ and /sɛd/ in RP and SAE. But since /e/ nd /ɛ/ never contrast without the /eɪ/ dipthongization in the two standards, they may simply be simplifying by avoiding the extra /ɛ/ symbol. μηδείς (talk) 22:27, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Re the hillbilly thing: I seem to remember /et/ was once considered the 'proper' way to say "ate", and I'd give that some credence. I couldn't say when and why it changed, but it might have been chucked out in the same batch as "ain't", which I still maintain is the correct, legitimate and proper word to use for the tag question to "I am", viz. in expressions like "I'm wonderful, ain't I?". I'd much rather that than "aren't I" or "amn't I". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:34, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

"How many eggs did you have for breakfast, Juli?" "Et two, Brute." --Trovatore (talk) 17:35, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Lay's Potato Chips have or had a slogan that "no one can eat just one". In some print ads in the 1960s, featuring Bert Lahr as Caesar, they used that same idea. You're either very good or very old. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:32, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Lo and behold, here it is:[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:35, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

[The French "à voir avec" is equivalent to the English "to do with". In your three hypotheses, you evidently mean "nothing to do with" and "something to do with".

—Wavelength (talk) 22:52, 23 March 2015 (UTC)]

I can't see the image (I suspect it has been removed as a copyright violation). Is it available online, so that you could link to it? As for "ate" /ɛt/ is absolutely standard in my native (Southern England, somewhat close to RP) pronunciation. --ColinFine (talk) 11:07, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

In my dialect, we pronounce 'ate' as 'et', because prouncing it as 'eit' makes it sound like 'hate', as we do not pronounce the 'h'. A - "What do you think about the dinner I made for you?" B - "I /eit/ it." <- could cause some domestic misunderstandings, and we are not hillbillies - we don't live in the hills and we are not called Billy. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 11:13, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

If you are suggesting that you rhyme ate with set in your dialect, KT, you should either use the ett re-spelling or the phonemic transcription /ɛt/ with the symbol for what in English is called short e. The sounds [et] and [eit] are either nonexistent or only found in contexts I can't think of in RP and SAE. As mentioned before, say and said are [seɪ] and [sɛd] in RP and SAE.

Some people cannot read IPA. I was following Jack's example above of using 'normal' writing. Apologies. Also, I believe it is called 'phonetic transcription' and not 'phonemic transcription'. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 13:05, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Phonemic transcription is in /slashes/ and phonetic transcription is in [brackets]. By the way, in my dialect, if someone answered that question with "I ate it" it would sound like they didn't particularly like it and were making a thinly-veiled attempt to be diplomatic. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 14:40, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

It's perfectly alright not to use IPA, but you should avoid /*/ or [*] if not doing so. Anything between // is interpreted as a phoneme, which is usually a distinctive sound-symbol that exists across an entire language, or at least most of it. For example, English has only one /r/ sound. But anything in [] indicates how the sound is precisely said in a specific context in a specific dialect, or even by a specific person. One way to put it is that if you know the phonemes of a language you can speak it with a foreign accent, but if you master its phonetics you will speak a dialect like a native. Again, for example, the entirety of English has only one /r/ phoneme, but phonetically in SAE it is always [ɹ] (which British actors imitate to sound American). In British accents it may be [ɹ], [ɾ] (flap or [r] )trill) or even [w] word initially, and [ɹ], [ɾ] or [r] or even [0] (with vowel lengthening or colouring) in non-rhotic dialects. Spanish, however has two R (capitals imply generality) phonemes, spelt "r" and "rr" and realized as a flap [ɾ] and a trill [r]. Russian also has two R phonemes, one with a following "y" sound, and one without. When not speaking technically, it is best to use quotes and examples rather than slashes or brackets, as the latter will be taken to mean something different by the initiated from what the layman intends. μηδείς (talk) 00:08, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Hello, I asked the same question hear and on the French equivalent (called The Oracle) where I got an insight that I consider is correct. The verbs in bold letters are the most important to learn. That was nearly impossible for you, native English speakers, to measure what verbs are more important to know for a French learner. I thank you all for your long answers.--Jojodesbatignoles (talk) 13:30, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it is impossible for us, both native or not, to confirm whether your insight is correct or not. Is it possible to reload the scan to a third-party image hosting and give a link?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 04:42, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Someone was overzealous in removing that image. A chart of verbs is not copyrightable, and the image was obviously not orphaned. It should of stayed up for at least a week. μηδείς (talk) 19:12, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Korean punctuation

Does the hyphen exist in Korean? According to the article the tilde (~) is used for ranges in numbers, but what happens if you transliterate double-barrelled names into Korean? Is there a hyphen, a space or nothing? The linked article talks about something different and I have yet to find an article about a person with a double-barrelled name which has a link to a Korean article. --2.246.1.1 (talk) 23:38, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Tim Berners-Lee has an article in Korean. Unfortunately his surname is rendered as ಬರ್ನರ್ಸ್ ಲೀ in the article title but as ಬರ್ನರ್ಸ್-ಲೀ in the lead sentence, and both versions occur again in the article. I think a more reliable source is needed. --65.94.50.15 (talk) 04:48, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

That's Kannada, not Korean. FWIW, his Korean article is here, and I don't see any hyphen there.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 06:24, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

• Dang, sorry about the bum steer there. I was fooled by the abbreviation "kn" in combination with Wikipedia's practice of providing interlanguage links in that language (and with Korean therefore alphabetized under G, not K) rather than the language of the source article. It makes perfect sense if you can actually read the language, but I don't know either Korean or Kannada. --65.94.50.15 (talk) 05:28, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Korean writing looks very different in style from South Indian writing. —Tamfang (talk) 23:48, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. In Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, no hyphen or tilde is used for double-barrelled names. The tilde actually just means 'from'. In Japanese, a ・ would be used between the first part of the name, i.e. the first name, , but an = sign for the hyphen, but not so in Korean. In Chinese, the hyphen could be used, but I doubt it is obligatory. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 11:26, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Googling turns up some Korean pages that use hyphens or spaces to separate his last names. The = sign is a double hyphen. -- BenRG (talk) 18:41, 24 March 2015 (UTC)