How do English speakers say fractions of units? For example, is 50 cm "half a metre", and 150 cm "one and half metres"? Does English refer to a period of two days as "48 hours"? Is 12 hours "half a day", 36 hours "one and half days" and 18 months "one and half years"? --40bus (talk) 10:49, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes to all, except that it would be "one and a half" rather than "one and half". Shantavira|^{feed me} 12:26, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) One does not say "one and half metres" but "one and a half metres". One can also say "one and a half metre" or "one metre and a half". Likewise for "one and half days/years". In "two and a half metres", one only uses the plural form. Note that "48 hours" can also be used for any 48-hour period, like from Saturday 6am to Monday 6am.  --Lambiam 12:31, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is then 75 minutes "one and a quarter hours"? Is 250,000 "a quarter million"? --40bus (talk) 15:20, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In British English at least, 75 minutes = one and a quarter hours, or an hour and a quarter; 250,000 is a quarter of a million, or two-hundred-and-fifty thousand. Bazza 7 (talk) 15:36, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also in British English, "eighteen months" would be more usual than "one and a half years". It's common to give the age of babies as a number of months until they reach the age of two. Alansplodge (talk) 16:49, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All those usages are also found in America English. Also "a quarter million" is not uncommon in casual speech whereas "a quarter of a million" sounds formal. However, "three quarters of a million" is the only correct way to refer to 750,000 with this idiom though the 's' in quaters is often not audible. Eluchil404 (talk) 23:36, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In Finnish it is common to give age of one-year-old babies as mixed years and months, such as "yksi vuosi ja kuusi kuukautta" ("one year and six month")? Puolitoista vuotta is very commonly used to mean 18 months. Also, puoli vuorokautta is 12 hours and puolitoista vuorokautta 36 hours. Does English use day to refer to thing that Finnish refers as vuorokausi, i.e., a period of exactly 24 hours (1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds), starting at any moment and ending exactly 24 hours later? --40bus (talk) 18:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In English ages between one and two years are more often given in months than mixed months and years. I.e. "18 months" is more common than "a/one year and six months" but both are heard. A one day period is more often called 24 hours because "day" would be ambiguous. "One day later" could mean any time during the next day. But using "one day" or "exactly one day" in that meaning would not be obviously incorrect either. Eluchil404 (talk) 23:36, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To my annoyance, "24 hours" and multiples thereof are often used as synonyms of "day(s)", not for precision but because more syllables make more importance. —Tamfang (talk) 23:00, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has an article Nychthemeron (an unambiguous expression in technical English)... AnonMoos (talk) 21:17, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Hebrew letters Het (ח) and ayin (ע) had two different pronunciations each in Ancient Hebrew: the Het could be pronounced like Arabic Ha (ح) or like Arabic kha (خ) while ayin could be pronounced like Arabic ayin (ع) or like Arabic ghayin (غ).

For ayin the clue that this was the case is the transcription into Greek (e.g. in the Septuagint) of Hebrew words like the names Gaza, Gomora, etc. compared to modern Hebrew Aza, Amora, etc. The Greek gamma is in fact a reflex of the ghayin pronunciation. When the letter was pronounced ayin it was not transcribed, e.g. in Eden.

But how do we know for Het? What are in the Septuagint transcribed Hebrew words that indicate that the letter Het had two pronunciations? In other words what are the two different transcriptions of letter Het in the Septuagint that are a clue to that fact? If I had to adventure a guess I would guess that the pronunciation Het was not transcribed (except possibly for a rough breathing), while the pronunciation khet was transcribed as a khi, but I don't know, and I can't think of any examples, and that's exactly why I am asking here.

178.51.7.23 (talk) 12:28, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't Biblical Hebrew survive as a liturgical language? Maybe that proviced pointers. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:44, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, not phonologically. From the point of view of the phonology you're mixing two meanings of "Biblical Hebrew" here. The pronunciation used when the text were composed and the ritual pronunciation of the text nowadays. That has nothing to do with the ancient pronunciation and in fact has developed differently in different traditions (ashkenazi, sefaradi, yemeni, iraqi, persian, etc. none of which preserves the double pronunciation of Het and/or ayin) which obviously cannot all be different and yet be identical to the ancient pronunciation. In any case I now changed "Biblical" to "Ancient". 178.51.7.23 (talk) 12:54, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The het inהָגָר‎ (Hagar) is not transcribed in the Septuagint: ῎Αγαρ (Agar), whileחֶבְרוֹן‎ (Hebron) is transcribed as Χεβρών (Khebrōn).  --Lambiam 13:04, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In Hagar you don't have a Het (8th letter) but a heh (5th letter). However I think the idea is good. 178.51.7.23 (talk) 13:14, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, yes, mistake.  --Lambiam 13:27, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Did you check the breathing in Greek Agar is soft? I would say that's a surprise. 178.51.7.23 (talk) 13:36, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I did. The Vulgate has Agar. See also Ἄγαρ on Wiktionary. I suspect, though, that when the Septuagint was originally produced, breathings were not yet written.  --Lambiam 13:41, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

חַגַּי‎ (Haggai) is transcribed as ᾿Αγγαῖος (Angaios), Aggaeus in the Vulgate.  --Lambiam 14:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Biblical Hebrew#Phonology mentions the pair יצחק = Ἰσαάκ = Isaac vs. רחל = Ῥαχήλ = Rachel with non-intial ח. Another example of initial ח as zero is Ἐνώχ (Enoch) from חנוך. –Austronesier (talk) 16:25, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This conversation brings up the question "Does the LXX contain transcriptions?"

Temerarius (talk) 18:07, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean? 178.51.7.23 (talk) 19:15, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Transcription" is perhaps not the right term. We have an article on Latinization of names, but AFAIK nothing similar for Greek. (Hellenization of place names is about a 19th- and 20th-century policy of replacing non-Greek geonyms by Greek ones, such as Βάρφανη → Παραπόταμος.) The Hellenization of Hebrew and Aramaic names in the LXX combines a largely phonetically based transcription of stems with coercing proper nouns into the straightjacket of one of the three Ancient Greek declensions.  --Lambiam 00:46, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See "On Polyphony in Biblical Hebrew" (PDF here) for a discussion by a distinguished scholar (Joshua Blau), arguing in great detail for the polyphony of ח (and also ע), representing both a pharyngeal consonant and a velar fricative in "literary" or formal Biblical recitation Hebrew down to the late centuries B.C. AnonMoos (talk) 01:10, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. But except for the front and back covers (first two and last two pages) the PDF file is absolutely illegible. Were you able to get legible PDFs of this article?

Was this 1982 article the first time someone realized that these two letters were "polyphonic" in Ancient Hebrew?

I was once browsing through a Hebrew dictionary (the well-known Even-Shoshan) in its ca. 1960 edition and (looking in a grammatical-historical appendix in the last volume) it didn't seem like the author of the dictionary was at all aware of the "polyphony" of those two letters in Ancient Hebrew.

But when I looked in a ca. 1995 edition of that same dictionary (in a one volume so called "merukaz" edition, incidentally) that "polyphony" was clearly alluded to.

Avraham Even-Shoshan, the author of the dictionary, died in 1984 so I don't know if it was he who changed things there (not impossible, as he had two years to do it), or if it was someone after his death (there were new editions of the dictionary as late as the 2000s).

In any case I imagined that between ca. 1960 and ca. 1995 something had changed in our knowledge of the pronunciation of Ancient Hebrew but I didn't know whose contribution it was.

178.51.94.220 (talk) 19:54, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The built-in PDF-viewers of some browers (Opera, Chrome) indeed display this document atrociously, but after having saved it locally, I could easily open it with all kinds of PDF viewers and get a legible view of it. Blau devotes four and a half pages to the history of research velar transcriptions of ayin. –Austronesier (talk) 20:26, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It worked. Thanks. 178.51.94.220 (talk) 21:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The PDF worked fine for me. I strongly doubt that 1982 was the first time, because scholars would have been able to compare Septuagint transcriptions to proto-Semitic reconstructions decades before that... AnonMoos (talk) 20:37, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There remains the question why the first editions of Even-Shoshan didn't seem to know about this. 178.51.94.220 (talk) 21:17, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In his play "Rhinoceros" the Romanian-born French playwright Eugène Ionesco uses the word "fauve" to refer to the rhinoceros as if it just meant "wild animal". I would say no native French speaker would do that: am I right or wrong? To me "fauve" would be used mostly for big cats (tigers, lions, leopards). Maybe for bears and wolves? (Not totally sure though). But "fauve" would never refer to just any large dangerous animal like Ionesco (who was not a native speaker of French) does. What do you say? 178.51.7.23 (talk) 12:42, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looking up French Wiktionnaire and some French dictionaries, it does indeed seem that "fauve" is an acceptable - albeit perhaps dated - way to refer to ochre or wild animals in general, not a non-native misunderstanding. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:50, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The first rulers of Rus' were Swedes (the Varangians), for example Rurik and his descendants. Is there a record of when they stopped to speak Old Norse? What are some Old Norse words in Russian that came with the Swedes (as opposed to later borrowings from Swedish possibly)? (I know of Rus' and the name of Russia itself it seems. Any other?) How about Russian personal names that go back to Swedish ones? (I know of Vladimir which goes back to Valdemar. Any other?) 178.51.7.23 (talk) 13:32, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To start you off, Wiktionary have a Category:Russian terms derived from Old Norse. --Antiquary (talk) 13:45, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

According to wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/Voldiměrъ, that derivation from Valdemar is something that "some sources speculate", and elsewhere (wikt:Valdemar) the borrowing is claimed to be the other way. ColinFine (talk) 15:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How about Oleg (from Helgi?), Igor (from Ingvar?), and of course Rurik (from ????) Incidentally, is Rurik a name that is still used in Russia these days? 178.51.7.23 (talk) 19:17, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This whole question is contentious, partly because of the sparsity of sources and partly because of political considerations. Some Soviet historians in Stalin's day appeared to believe that Viking assimilation with Slavic culture had been almost instantaneous because, I suppose, they wanted the foundations of the Russian state and nation to have as little foreign influence as possible. Russian historians still tend to argue for a more rapid assimilation than their Western counterparts do. However, there's a discussion of the language question by Elena A. Melnikova here which concludes that "By the mid-tenth century the Varangians became bilingual; by the end of the eleventh century they used Old Russian as their mother tongue", and my old student copy of E. V. Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse agrees that "the Rus themselves gradually lost their Scandinavian traditions and language; they must have been almost completely merged in the Slavonic people by the beginning of the twelfth century." [1] --Antiquary (talk) 10:02, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Does English ever use perfect instead of imperfect (past) to describe events that happened entirely in the past but still have connections to present time, such as "this house has been built in 1955", "Arsenal has last won Premier League in 2004", "When has Arsenal last won...", "this option has last been used three months ago", "humans have last visited Moon in 1972", "last ice age has ended 10,000 years ago"? And is simple present of verb be born ever used, since birth happen only once? And would sentences like "I am being born", "She is born" and "You are being born" sound odd? --40bus (talk) 18:30, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No to the first (except among the "unedumacated"). As for the second, I'm not sure this counts, but there is the religious "She is born again." The rest sound bizarre. Clarityfiend (talk) 20:34, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, that's not right as the question is stated. It's often fine to use use the present perfect (that's the better term than just "perfect") to describe events that happened entirely in the past. Say I have been promoted to colonel; you can use that if you're still a colonel, even though the promotion itself happened in the past.

What makes those sentences sound wrong is the explicit date on the sentence. That makes it very difficult to use the present perfect in idiomatic English. --Trovatore (talk) 22:40, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If I study really hard, someday I will become underedumacated. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:04, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Another question: why in English Wikipedia, events listed in year articles are in present tense, but in Finnish Wikipedia they are in past tense? --40bus (talk) 21:06, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Present or past tense is acceptable in English (why, I have no idea). Getting back to the original topic, the title of the first chapter of David Copperfield is "I am born." Clarityfiend (talk) 22:30, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the so-called historical present or narrative present. --Trovatore (talk) 22:37, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The worst of it, often seen on the internet, is using past and present tenses in describing the same event, such as in a movie plot. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:01, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am pretty sure that there are differences between British and American English in the use of the present perfect vs the simple past in such sentences. In American English all your examples sound wrong and should be simple past "this house was built", "Asenal last won", "When did Arsenal last win", "this option was last used", "humans last vistited", "the last ice age ended". When I see imperfect I thin of the past progressive tense: "was being built", "was winning", "was being used", "were visiting", "was ending" which wouldn't work in your example sentences. But I may be incorrect since my knowledge of grammatical categories is based on Classical Latin rather than modern descriptive linguistics. As for "be born", all your examples are perfectly good English. Eluchil404 (talk) 23:59, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

While I do think BrE uses the present perfect a bit more than AmE, I don't think that's really the issue here. I'm pretty sure (one of our British friends can correct me) that the first, second, fourth, fifth, and sixth example sentences in the original post would also sound odd (if not outright wrong) in BrE. Again, the problem is not the fact that the action is entirely in the past, but that the sentence contains an explicit marker of time in the past (1955, three months ago, etc). The third sentence, when has Arsenal last won, I'm less sure about; I find it marginally acceptable, though it would be much more idiomatic to say how long has it been since Arsenal last won.

As to "imperfect", this is a little complicated. The imperfect tense in Italian, and presumably in the rest of the Romance languages, indicates a continuous or habitual action, or a background description. In Latin it was much the same, whereas the Latin perfect indicates a completed action in the past. The present perfect (or analogous construction) entered Romance languages later, maybe with medieval Latin or some such, and differs from the perfect by the emphasis on the importance of the event to the present time.

In German and English, there was never an imperfect tense per se; it was conflated with the simple past (preterite), which is the closest to the Latin perfect tense. It's true that you can use the past continuous or "would" or "used to" to emphasize certain aspects of the imperfect, but at the simplest level, the Latin perfect and imperfect are merged in English, with the present perfect being distinct from both.

Modern Romance languages keep all three tenses in theory, but usually pick one of present perfect or preterite to use overwhelmingly in practice (alongside the imperfect, so they simplify to two conversational tenses). Both French and the northern varieties of Italian rarely use the preterite in conversation, and I think Spanish (especially Latin American Spanish) rarely use the present perfect. However as far as I know they all use the imperfect and keep it separate, which was one of the hardest things for me to get right learning Italian. --Trovatore (talk) 05:43, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think one can say, What have the Romans ever done for us, and when have they done it? Similarly, Sure, Arsenal has won the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, but when has Arsenal ever won the UEFA Cup?.  --Lambiam 12:00, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To my ear there's a difference in acceptability between when has Arsenal ever won?, which is unassailable except by Arsenal fans I suppose, and when has Arsenal last won?, which strikes me as borderline, the kind of thing that sounds weird and you're not sure why. I guess it must have something to do with the word "last" but I don't have a well-developed theory of exactly what it has to do with it. --Trovatore (talk) 22:24, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Does English ever use term 2000s to refer to period from 2000 to 2099? Why is 21st century more common? And is 2000s pronounced as "twenty hundreds"? --40bus (talk) 21:03, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is some ambiguity with 2000s; it could also refer to 2000 to 2009 (vs. 2010s), so that may be why 21st century is more used. It's pronounced "two thousands". Clarityfiend (talk) 22:35, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If 1900s is pronounced as "nineteen hundreds", then why 2000s is pronounced as "two-thousands"? And 2000s is sometimes used to represent the century, and the decade could be disambiguated by saying "2000s decade", "first decade of 2000s", with basic meaning being century. --40bus (talk) 07:24, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It could be, sure. And it is, sometimes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:04, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

“One thousand nine hundreds” has six syllables, “nineteen hundreds” has four, saving two. “Two thousands” has three syllables, “twenty hundreds” has four, adding one. People just pick the shorter option.

BTW, 2000s refers to the period 2000–2099, but 21st century to 2001–2100. It rarely matters. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:29, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

xkcd:1849. Nardog (talk) 10:30, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For me, the '00s (decade) are the "noughties". Probably I would call the '10s the "twenty tens" or "new tens". (Dunno why I feel the need to disambiguate from the 1910s.) Double sharp (talk) 11:59, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like "noughties" or "aughties" never really caught on. But it's almost time for the '00s nostalgia craze, so I suppose they'll come up with something. --Trovatore (talk) 00:42, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As a side note, I once read (possibly in an SF fanzine) that when Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick co-wrote the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke expected people to pronounce the title "Twenty-oh-one . . ." (as they do for 1901, for example), not "Two thousand and one . . .". {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.84.253 (talk) 12:03, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That story sounds familiar. Clark maybe didn't count on the public to keep it simple amid the grandeur, so to speak, of reaching a millennium. There's a late-1940s cartoon called "The Old Gray Hare", in which Elmer is taken into the future. The "voice of God" tells him, "At the sound of the gong, it will be TWO-THOUSAND A.D." That was the predominant media usage by the time it actually arrived. The "Y2K problem" or "Year two thousand problem", for example. By about 2010, the form "twenty-ten" had become more prevalent. As suggested above, one less syllable. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:28, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Back when it was 2008 (say), I would've said "two thousand and eight", but now that that year is in the past I'd say "twenty oh eight". Double sharp (talk) 03:34, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I still say "two thousand and [number from one to nine]", but it might be just me, or a wider 'elderly Brit' thing. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.84.253 (talk) 03:19, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. One thing I recall is that Charles Osgood was kind of an "early adapter" to that style, saying "twenty-oh-one" and so on. Now, pretty much everyone follows that norm. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:00, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Are 20th century years ever said like "nineteen hundred and twenty-five" for 1925? Does English put "hundred and" between first two and last two number in speech? --40bus (talk) 10:05, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I seem to recall that Alex Trebek used to say years that way. Maybe it was a Canadian thing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Only in the most formal contexts; but see the 1973 song, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five which I suspect used that style to aid with scansion. Alansplodge (talk) 18:48, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

An example of this very formal date usage is in this US Presidential Proclamation:

"In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twelfth day of February, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-two..."

Alansplodge (talk) 18:58, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I often say, we need a wildcard digit other than '0'. I often write "197x" and "200x" but would not do so in an article. —Tamfang (talk) 22:49, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So does "the 19xx's" mean all the years from 1900 to 1999, or only the ones that are congruent to 8 mod 11? --Trovatore (talk) 21:01, 4 January 2025 (UTC) [reply]

Perhaps "the 19xy's" solves that problem. :) Double sharp (talk) 05:11, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

During the 20th century, I only ever heard the period referred to as "the 20th century". If someone had talked about "the 1900s" I would have assumed they meant the decade 1900-1909. Using "the xx00s" to refer to the whole century is something I've only encountered recently, although I don't know if it actually is a recent usage or just something that has recently been revealed via internet usage. Iapetus (talk) 11:10, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]