Languages! Are! Weird!

And the most commonly used systems are...?

That depends on the language used. And if the programmer was lazy or thorough.

edited 25th Sep '16 8:34:17 AM by war877

Well, we're talking English here, and I doubt that laziness is a virtue.

Okay, I think this is the most common:

Transformation 1: All letters are converted to lowercase.
Transformation 2: A, An and The, if they start the phrase, are moved to the end of the phrase.
Transformation 3: White space is moved to the end of the phrase.
Pass one: Find the first non-identical character ignoring diacritical marks, and punctuation in the two phrases and use that to decide. If one phrase is the perfect prefix for another, the prefix comes first.
Pass two: If the phrases are identical, repeat while recognising diacritical marks, and punctuation.

edited 25th Sep '16 8:15:36 PM by war877

Wouldn't it be more effective to recognize diacritical marks and etc. in the first run?

Would it be faster? Yes. Reading up on it, it looks like brackets are treated as punctuation. Other not-alphanumeric characters come before numbers in the sort. Numbers come before letters. Some punctuation, notably hyphens, is treated as a space character.

Oh, it looks like there is an exception for roman numerals. They get sorted by their arithmetic value.

edited 25th Sep '16 8:16:54 PM by war877

So... "Bell's" comes before "Bells" under such a ruleset?

New question: The word "philoxenia" (or "philoxeny", for a more Anglicized form) seems like an obvious synonym for "xenophilia" (AKA "xenophily"), doesn't it? It's modelled after "philanthropy", I think.

As the apostrophe is a punctuation mark, bells comes before bell's in the system I outlined. But it is just one of many systems.

The first non-identical character is the apostrophe. The other word has no character in its place. Apostrophe comes after nothing in the sort.

edited 30th Sep '16 10:23:57 PM by war877

Odd. From my experience, "Bell's" would be placed before "Bells"; Windows Explorer does it, as an example.

New question: I'm trying to figure out how the close-mid fornt unrounded vowel gets pronounced in Old English cwen, where it's a long vowel (IPA: /kweːn/). Any help?

In testing, It appears you are mistaken about explorer. Maybe they updated their software.

Well, my Windows Explorer is up to date and I use Windows 7, also up to date. What do you use?

windows ten.

In the vein of "duumvirate", "triumvirate", "quadrumvirate", "quintumvirate", and similar words, what would be the logical equivalent for denoting "a group of an indefinitely large number of people"? "Multivirate", since all the extant words derive from the genitives of the corresponding numerals (e.g. duum, contraction of duorum, from duo "2") and "multi" is the genitive form of "multus" (Latin for "many")?

polyumvirate. I think.

No, poly is a greek prefix.

I think there should be an um or em in that word, though.

edited 17th Dec '16 2:30:02 AM by war877

Well, multi is the singular genitive for multus. The plural genitive, on the other hand, is multorum (or multarum if feminine), which could be contracted to multum by comparison to duum.

Use "oligarchy" and call it a day.

Also, talking about time: in English, when you say thirty minutes past a full hour, you say "half past last hour". In Polish, we say "half to next hour". This is interesting when you start translating titles like "Half Past Dead".

I need help with constructing a sentence that I intend to use in describing a fictional species. It currently stands as follows:

"They are adept climbers, runners and swimmers, displaying excellent swiftness and agility ..."

I want something to put in place of the ellipsis at the end to fit the preceding part and emphasize how the traits mentioned apply whether the species is moving on land, up and/or across trees, or throughout bodies of water, but I'm drawing blanks.

"...whether on the ground, leaping through the canopy or in water."

Thank you very much!

When I was tweeting to one of my favourite singer in Google translated Japanese, I swapped out the particle wa into mo because I read some random answer to a question in Quora that mentioned that the particle wa implies an one-off thing and mo implies that it has been always that way. Considering that the tweet is about her singing voice, this is for the better.

Am I right about this?

edited 31st Mar '17 11:19:34 PM by murazrai

Perhaps it would be better to ask this question in the Japanese Culture Thread... or better yet, go to the Japanese Stack Exchange site.

I need help with phrasing the description of a fictional race's somewhat bizarre name. Here is what I have right now; ignore any special characters that your computer may be unable to represent, they're not really important for the purposes of my request (I could have replaced them all with question marks and it wouldn't make a difference).

I'm not sure if I've phrased things correctly, since English in general isn't my native language and I'm not used to writing in formal English in the first place. The above should be written as if a linguist is trying to explain things to laymen, with only a bare minimum of technical terminology (i.e. the symbols for the phonetic pronunciation).

Sounds comprehensible to me. I might make a few minor tweaks though for clarity. "Significantly imprecise" sounds a it odd to me. I've worked in statistics where precision is very important, and if we wanted to not that sometimes wasn't precise, we'd write that it "lacks significant precision" instead of "is significantly imprecise"

One slight grammar issue would be adding commas to "the enclosed sounds are effectively, if not genuinely, merged" to make it read better

I'd personally break "Some kind of non-vocal component that is somehow "carried" by the vocal one; its exact nature continues to elude human scientific understanding, and its existence is only known through the vrakmyrrhs noting its conspicuous absence in any human attempt at reproducing the endonym's native pronunciation" into a few sentences since it's kind of bordering on a run-on sentence, but that's just me.

But otherwise, sounds great

I just found a cool infographic about the languages spoken in my humble hometown (The most linguistically diverse area in the world) Queens, NY I'm over in the Northwest with the Greek and Arabic speakers.

Also, an interesting piece about dying languages found in NYC

edited 22nd Apr '17 2:41:42 PM by Cailleach

Thank you. I've made the suggested changes, with the exception of the last one.

I have to learn German now. I was meeting with the adviser at my school in charge of prestigious scholarships, and he said learning German would be the best bet for my particular interests. I've got a few months to become somewhat passable. Two years to be fluent. Challenge accepted