Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Richard W]

Englishman writing here.

I write the 12th, 12 August 2020, 12 August, 12/8/20 or 12/8, and mostly say it as the twelfth, the twelfth of August, twenty twenty or the twelfth of August. When using a word processor, I use a non-breaking space between the number and the month. I occasionally drop the article from the last two spoken forms. I occasionally say August the twelfth or August the twelfth, 2020, and do not drop the article from these forms.

Of course, for this particular date, I might just say the glorious twelfth.

Nowadays I say the year 2003 as twenty oh three. Back then, I usually said it two thousand and three. 2000 is two thousand, not twenty hundred, but 2200 is spoken as twenty two hundred.

However, I will write 1^st September, not 1 September.

[Kuchigakatai]

By the way, the variation I mentioned above also has an annoying consequence in forms: in form fields to enter purely numerical dates, in Canada you often see MM-DD in regular forms (like the one you'd fill the first time visiting a dentist), because that's what we normally use, but in the more serious and official types of forms like those of the government, you often see DD-MM, again to match the French. I've learned to watch out for this, but occasionally mistakes make it through... When the year is placed first, I know it's always YYYY-MM-DD, but when it is separate, gotta pay attention.

[Jonlang]

As a Brit, I favour written formats like 12/08/2020 (or 12/08/20) and 12th August 2020. In speech, I would pretty much always say "(the) twelfth of August twenty-twenty".

I've always found the American "August twelve" which I've only ever heard in movie trailers to be very grating, possibly because it seems lazy. I also find American "two-thousand nine" for 2009 grating because it misses the "and" which I've never heard being omitted in British English.

[Yalensky]

Nowadays I say the year 2003 as twenty oh three.

This way of saying the years 2001-2009 strikes my American ear as very British. I've only heard it aloud from watching UK TV and from a non-native speaker of English (a Russian, possibly taught British English). Am I mistaken? Is it common in the UK relative to the other ways of saying the year?

I'm also curious at what years people slip from saying "two thousand (and) X" to "twenty X". I start saying "twenty X" with 2010 --it's the earliest possible "twenty X" form in my dialect. I prefer the "twenty X" forms when "two thousand X" is also possible, though I wouldn't bat an eyelash at hearing for example "two thousand thirteen" instead of "twenty thirteen". 2009 and earlier are always "two thousand X" (without the "and") for me.

For dates, by the way, I use the usual American formats.

[Raphael]

In German, I'd say that today is der 13.[dreizehnte] August or der 13. 8. [dreizehnte achte] in the year Zweitausendzwanzig. However, in file names on my computer, I prefer the YYYY-MM-DD format, because that way, when I sort the files alphanumerically, they automatically get sorted by date as well.

This discussion, and specifically Yalensky's contribution, reminds me of one of the small things in life that make me a bit sad: that I won't be around in the year 2525 to see whether people in that year will remember the song of that name, and if so, what they will think of it.

[KathTheDragon]

I'm also curious at what years people slip from saying "two thousand (and) X" to "twenty X". I start saying "twenty X" with 2010 --it's the earliest possible "twenty X" form in my dialect. I prefer the "twenty X" forms when "two thousand X" is also possible, though I wouldn't bat an eyelash at hearing for example "two thousand thirteen" instead of "twenty thirteen". 2009 and earlier are always "two thousand X" (without the "and") for me.

I have exactly the same preferences as you here. I suspect the "twenty-oh-X" years are analogous to e.g. "nineteen-oh-X" for 190X.

[anteallach]

I have "two thousand and X" up to about 2012, "twenty X" from this year onwards, and vary for the years from 2013 to 2019.

I think "twenty-oh-X" for 2001 to 2009 is a minority usage, but it's out there. Jeremy Paxman always says it that way on University Challenge.

[Richard W]

I have exactly the same preferences as you here. I suspect the "twenty-oh-X" years are analogous to e.g. "nineteen-oh-X" for 190X.

Also to 1605 and 1805.

What happened is that the old pattern no longer had support from general cardinals - "twenty-oh-five" only also meant five past eight. As looming dates were becoming unwieldy, the old pattern for years reasserted itself. The way I say the early years of this century has changed - i noticed myself switching to the pattern used for the previous millenium.

No grouse lovers?

[Space60]

As a Brit, I favour written formats like 12/08/2020 (or 12/08/20) and 12th August 2020. In speech, I would pretty much always say "(the) twelfth of August twenty-twenty".

I've always found the American "August twelve" which I've only ever heard in movie trailers to be very grating, possibly because it seems lazy. I also find American "two-thousand nine" for 2009 grating because it misses the "and" which I've never heard being omitted in British English.

I'm American and I say "August twelfth" not "August twelve" though I write the date as "August 12" not "August 12th".

[Richard W]

To me, "August 12" was eight years ago!

[Travis B.]

In addition to saying "August twelfth" or "August twelfth two thousand and twenty" I write "August 12th" or "8/12" or "8/12/2020".

[Space60]

To me, "August 12" was eight years ago!

For me that would be "August '12".

[Kuchigakatai]

found this just now:
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

For host-only networking, as with internal networking, you may find the DHCP server useful that is built into Oracle VM VirtualBox.

lol. How natural does that sound to you though? Personally I'm not unused to seeing calques from other languages in software documentation.

I suppose there might be some substance to Richard's claim that some native speakers at least (who are not from South Asia) do use that construction, but it feels so non-standard to me, and it's not something I normally come across at all.

Just came across this quote from Peter Thiel that included a sentence-final relative clause:

"In a definite world, money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world, you have no idea what to do with money and money simply becomes an end in itself, which seems always a little bit perverse. You just accumulate money and you have no idea what to do with it. [...] And then what do the companies do that get the money? They've been told that all they should do is generate free cash flows, because if they were to actually invest the money in specific things that would suggest the companies had ideas about the future, and that would be very dangerous."

I.e. "What do the companies that get the money [from investors] do?".

[Yalensky]

I think "twenty-oh-X" for 2001 to 2009 is a minority usage, but it's out there. Jeremy Paxman always says it that way on University Challenge.

Yep, he's definitely someone I was thinking of when I said it sounded like a British usage.

[anteallach]

The mess around A level results reminded me that I actually can have the LOT vowel before word-final /l/: Ofqual /ˈɒfkwɒl/. (It's Newspeakshort for "Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation", and qualifications has an unremarkable /ɒ/.) Normally LOT has merged with GOAT in this environment for me (e.g. doll).

[Qwynegold]

Searching in a Spanish dictionary I found words such as coche-cama, coche-comedor, coche-patrulla, cortocircuito, cuentakilómetros, estadounidense, gomaespuma, guardabarros, guardabosques though.

I think Pabappa gave a good answer to your question (English happens to be an example of what you wanted). What I did was mentioning that Romance doesn't typically do "compounds of the Germanic type with multiple stressed words", as you seemed to be suggesting. None of those is an example in Spanish:
- four don't have a relationship of modifier-modified as in the question you're interested in but rather "X that is also Y" (cochecama, coche-comedor, coche-patrulla, gomaespuma —a cochecama is not a car of the bed type, or a bed of the car type, but "a car that is also a bed")
- three involve the 3SG verb + plural noun = noun pattern that is largely absent in Germanic (cuentakilómetros "it-counts-kilometres", guardabarros 'it-protects-[from]-mudsplats", guardabosques "it-protects-forests")
- one is a Greek-like compound with linker -o- (estad-o-unidense, from Estados Unidos 'the US', cf. English therm-o-metre)
- and the remaining one is an example of the rare adjective-noun = noun compound pattern (cortocircuito, historically a calque of English "short-circuit").

I think only the second one is highly productive and common in regular Spanish. The third one might be too, but in fancy scientific writing rather than everyday language. Neither is relevant to your question anyway.

Note how these Germanic-type doubly stressed modifier-modified compounds get rendered: "linguistics textbook" (libro de texto de lingüística, or libro/manual de lingüística, or even texto de lingüística), "cotton shirt" (camisa de algodón, lit. "shirt of cotton"), "metal table" (mesa de metal "table of metal", mesa metálica "metallic table").

But anyway, I was wondering if compounds of the proyecto en línea type would be better?

That's not a compound in Spanish as you can modify the nouns as you please: "el proyecto nuevo de mi hermano en línea" 'my brother's new online project'. I'd say you can do as in Romance and forbid modifier-modified (or modified-modifier) compound nouns. Or you can do like English and do what you originally wanted to do (i.e. having both "cards of silver" and "silver cards"). Basically you can do whatever you want.

Hmm, I was thinking a little more wider about this than what I wrote in my first post. But anyways, thanks! I'll do mostly head-final compounds, and the occasional possessee GEN possessor-"compound".

[Qwynegold]

Are geminate clicks possible? Is it attested?

[bradrn]

Are geminate clicks possible? Is it attested?

Possible? Yes, I can say them easily. Attested? I don’t believe so, though I’m not completely sure. (Wikipedia says of Dahalo that ‘It is likely that the glottals and clicks do not occur as geminates’ — but given that geminate glottal stops are attested, and Dahalo geminates are only possible intervocalically while Dahalo clicks are rare intervocalically, I’m hesitant to take this evidence as being too significant.)

[bradrn]

Quick terminological question: what aspect would you call something like ‘he bled all over the place’? (If it even has an established name, that is.) I’m guessing it’s an instance of the distributive, but I’m not too sure about that given that I’m pretty uncertain as to what the distributive aspect even is.

And a follow-up question: would such an aspect be more readily grouped as being perfective or imperfective, semantically? I’d guess imperfective (or at least non-perfective), given the absence of a clear end-state, the fact that the internal structure of the event is being considered, and the fact that such an event is decidedly non-punctual — but again, I’m not entirely sure.

[bradrn]

Quick terminological question: what aspect would you call something like ‘he bled all over the place’? (If it even has an established name, that is.) I’m guessing it’s an instance of the distributive, but I’m not too sure about that given that I’m pretty uncertain as to what the distributive aspect even is.

And a follow-up question: would such an aspect be more readily grouped as being perfective or imperfective, semantically? I’d guess imperfective (or at least non-perfective), given the absence of a clear end-state, the fact that the internal structure of the event is being considered, and the fact that such an event is decidedly non-punctual — but again, I’m not entirely sure.

It’s been two days so far, and no-one has answered this yet. Is there really no-one here who can answer this?

Oh, and while I’m writing, another (unrelated) question: Are there any languages with transitive light verb constructions? e.g. In English we can only say ‘I’m doing research on linguistics’, with an intransitive light verb; I’m interested to know if there are any languages which allow transitive expressions like ‘I’m doing research linguistics’. (Note: I’m not particularly interested in languages like Jingulu, where the light verb contructions seem to be more like a verb+converb; I’m more interested in languages like English which allow verb+noun light verbs.)