Language desk
< May 2	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 4 >

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.

May 3

King consort

Is the plural "kings consort" or "king consorts"? Thanks. Joefromrandb (talk) 02:26, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on whether he's a type of consort or a type of king; that is which word is playing the role of the noun. I'd be inclined to pluralize it "kings consort", because consort describes the kind of king he is. --Jayron32 04:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But bear in mind that this term is not commonly used, as the husband of a queen regnant is not normally given the title king, unless he is a co-ruler. Prince Consort (pl. Princes Consort) would be more usual. Rojomoke (talk) 15:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But would there even be a plural, in that a queen regnant would have just one prince consort? — Michael J 21:26, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Even if there was only one king consort in a given country at a given time, you could still talk about the kings consort of different countries, or all the kings consort that a country had had over its history. —Angr (talk) 21:41, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Prince Philip is about to turn 90. If he dies, the Queen could marry again (just for "companionship", mind you, none of that other revolting hanky-panky), in which case her new guy would be the second of her two princes consort. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:26, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The title "king consort" is used often enough in fantasy fiction that the plural of "kings consort" is well-known. I've never seen "king consorts". --NellieBly (talk) 01:27, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would think "king consorts" would only make sense if the queen had multiple husbands. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:16, 7 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Turning that around, I'm sure there have been kings in faraway places who've had multiple wives - hence multiple queen consorts. Or it is still multiple queens consort? I can't see why the pluralisation would differ. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 21:35, 9 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Norwegian languages

Can't anyone who understands Old Norse and modern Norwegian language help me translate the names of the Kings of Norway?--Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 06:02, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not quite sure what you want translated, the epithets? If you follow the links on the individual kings, these are translated in the lede. One exception: Harald Gråfell is translated as Harald Graycloak. "Fell" means fleece (fur), and according to the Norwegian wikipedia, he earned this epithet after a raid in the White Sea area in 965, where he stole a large quantity of valuable furs. --NorwegianBlue^talk 19:41, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

looking forward to "join" vs "joining"

Dear Wikipedians, I am writing a letter to my new employer. I wonder which of the following is correct?

I am eagerly looking forward to joining your firm.
I am eagerly looking forward to join your firm.

Thanks in advance. Sincerely, 59.182.87.222 (talk) 08:45, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The first one is the better one, but I'd use "looking forwards" (British English speaker). --TammyMoet (talk) 09:21, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the first one is better, and I'd use "looking forward" (American English speaker). Pais (talk) 10:23, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I also agree the first one is better, and I prefer "forward". But what's of more interest to me is that we say "I am looking forward to joining your firm", but "I am looking to join your firm". That intrigues me, because I can't quite see why we make that distinction. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 11:00, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You would say "I am looking to join your firm" when writing an initial letter of approach, to see if there is a suitable vacancy. In this case, the OP has a new job and is writing to his/her new employer, and expressing anticipation. --TammyMoet (talk) 11:33, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say "look forward to" has to be followed by a noun, and a gerund like "joining" counts as a noun. But "look" in the sense of "seek" is followed by an infinitive. So you look forward to something, but you look to do something. In AmEng I wouldn't say "I am looking to join your firm" at all, but the IP is from India, so AmEng probably isn't relevant. Pais (talk) 11:44, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Looking to join" is a colloquialism almost of the same depth as "Fixin' to join". Regarding the OP's question, the first item sounds right and the second sounds like the writer does not speak English natively. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:07, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am a British English speaker and would NEVER say "looking forwardS to joining". "Looking forwards", in my view, can only refer to a direction of looking i.e.

"Which way were you looking at the time of the accident?"

"I was looking forwards".

If you are anticipating something, I feel the only choice is "to look forward to".

As for "joining" or "join", I concur with "joining" as under option one. 164.36.44.4 (talk) 13:30, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

[edit conflict] Can another British English speaker confirm that the British standard is to say "I am looking forwards to doing..."? While my version of the language is American English, I normally recognize British usages as regular British usages, but this one just looks wrong to me. I know that the British prefer forwards to forward when it stands alone. ("We are moving forwards" instead of "We are moving forward".) However, I thought that looking forward to [a future experience] was a set idiom on both sides of the Atlantic. Is the standard British expression really looking forwards to [a future experience]? Thanks. [As I was writing this, someone else was providing the requested confirmation, but I am wondering if a British RefDesker with a login name could also confirm.] Marco polo (talk) 13:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I (BrE) would never say "I am looking forwards to doing...", and I don't think I've ever heard anyone else say it. It's just not idiomatic. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:41, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I think we should say clearly that the second option presented by the questioner is not just less preferable. It is incorrect. Marco polo (talk) 13:38, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

←Thank you everyone for the responses. It's clear to me that option 2 is incorrect. But after going through the discussion I am confused between "I look forward to joining..." vs "I am looking forward to joining..."? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.182.8.71 (talk) 13:46, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistically, the difference is the "simple present" versus the "present continuous". Somewhat strangely, the actual use is a bit reversed from what one would expect from the names. I would interpret "I look ..." as the "express habitual actions" meaning of the simple present, whereas I would take the "I am looking ..." to be in the "describe something which is happening at the exact moment of speech" sense of the present continuous. They're effectively equivalent, but there are slight connotation differences regarding the extent and duration of the action, but not so much in this case that one would be definitely preferred over the other. -- 174.31.219.218 (talk) 15:47, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"I am eagerly looking forward to joining ..." has a somewhat conversational tone, and it implies "at the moment" or a weaker commitment, so it has a more transitory feel. By contrast, "I eagerly look forward to joining..." suggests more commitment, and it is a bit more formal in tone. In short, I think that "look forward" is more appropriate in a professional letter to a law firm. Marco polo (talk) 17:34, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gascon Occitan question

Does anyone reading this know Gascon? An inscription under the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes says Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou, which the article Bernadette Soubirous tells us is Gascon (a dialect of or language closely related to Occitan) for "I am the Immaculate Conception". I don't know Gascon or Occitan, but I know some other Romance languages, and I'm wondering about this. The only word of the first three that looks right is "soy" for "I am", which is the same in Spanish. "Que" looks like it ought to mean "that", as if it were introducing a wish ("Oh that I were..."), and "era" looks like it ought to mean "(I, he, she) was" (< Latin eram, erat). But if our translation is right, then "que" has to mean "I" and "era" has to mean "the". Could this be right? Could "que" come from Latin "ego" and be cognate with French "je" rather than French "que"? Could "era" come from Latin "illa" and be cognate with Spanish "la" and "ella" rather than Spanish "era"? Our articles on the two languages don't go into this kind of detail. Pais (talk) 13:20, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know anything about this particular language either, but I agree it's suspicious. On the other hand, it seems conceivable (to me) that the personal pronoun might have been omitted as redundant, and that que might mean only, as in French ne ... que. That's not very plausible of course. Hans Adler 13:51, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The occitan version of the article doesn't help, either. But you could ask for help at oc:Wikipèdia:La tavèrna. It doesn't seem to be completely dead. Hans Adler 14:01, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Or you could trust random information on the internet: [1] (found by googling for "que soy era"). Hans Adler 14:04, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good link, thank you! The Aragonese Wikipedia (of all things) has an article on the definite article in Occitan, which confirms that the masculine singular def.art. is eth and the feminine singular is era. And the origin of the "que" according to the link is interesting: "Jo que soy..." ("I who am" or "It's me who is") gets shortened to "Que soy" so you wind up saying literally "Who am..." to mean "I am...". That's kind of cool. Pais (talk) 14:39, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's interesting, because I did a little work with Google Translate, which has a "Catalan" option, and Catalan is fairly closely related to Occitan, and it says that "era" means "was" in Catalan. For example, "I was the Immaculate Conception" in Catalan is "Jo era la Immaculada Concepció", and "la" is clearly the definitive article, and "era" is clearly the verb. However, I also tripped over Occitan_conjugation#.C3.88sser_.28.22to_be.22.29, which states that the first person "Present indicative" of "To be" in Gascon is "soi", which seems close enough to "soy" to make it right for our purposes. --Jayron32 15:03, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The same link shows that in Gascon, "was" is èra, so the difference between "the (fem. sing.)" and "was" in Gascon is a grave matter indeed! ;-) Pais (talk) 15:43, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

RE: the que, Catalan has a que ([kə]) that can surface to introduce yes/no questions, and it's different from què ([kɛ]), which means "what" (cf. Spanish qué). This distinction in pronunciation is maintained in the Eastern Catalan dialects. Although que ([kə]) is also a complementizer/relativizer "that," it doesn't serve that function in this case since the interrogative sentence is a complete sentence (though I suppose the distinctiveness between its comp./rel. use and interrogative marker use could be called into question). Read about it in Haulde's Catalan: [2], pages 2-3, available in this Google Books preview. I wonder if the strangeness of this use of que in Catalan is related to the strangeness of the use of que in that Gascon sentence. That is, in both cases, it doesn't seem like the que adds anything meaningful to the sentence; it's just there.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 21:19, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently the que is an "enunciative particle" and it seems to be unique to Gascon, at least among the Romance languages. Googling enunciative particle gets many interesting hits, almost all of which refer to Gascon. According to this paper, it's sort of a "non-emphatic" particle, used in contrast to adverbs that do indicate a particular emphasis. Compare neutral que m' at pagaràs un dia 'I will pay you back one day' with emphatic ja m' at pagaràs un dia 'I certainly will pay you back one day', or neutral que m' at averé podut díser 'He could have told me about it' with emphatic be m' at averé podut díser 'He could have told me about it, couldn't he?'. So it seems the function of the que is to indicate that the sentence does NOT have any sort of "certainly!" or "you'd think so, wouldn't you?!" emphasis about it. Kind of an odd thing to have a specific marker for, but languages can be weird that way. —Angr (talk) 22:20, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Verboten

What is the pronunciation of the surname “Verboten”? --84.61.132.230 (talk) 16:48, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's pronounced [fɛɐ̯ˈboːtən] (English approximation "fair-BOAT-en"), but I never knew it was a surname. It's just the German word for "forbidden" or "prohibited". Pais (talk) 16:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've never heard of it as a surname either, except perhaps in a humorous context. HominidMachinae (talk) 20:09, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

sl:Natalija Verboten. --84.61.132.230 (talk) 20:10, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

... so we need to know how the name is pronounced in Slovenia. Do they use the German pronunciation? Dbfirs 20:25, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Is it even her real last name, or is it a stage name? Slovenia belonged to Austria for centuries, so they probably use an approximation of the German pronunciation, adapted to Slovenian phonology. —Angr (talk) 20:29, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I could be imagining it but I think that her full name is said at about 5 seconds in this interview [3]. 129.234.53.36 (talk) 21:29, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it is, good find. The announcer says "z nami je Natalija Verboten" ([znami je na'taːlija vɛr'boːtɛn]) (with us is Natalija Verboten). No such user (talk) 12:15, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to the biography on her web page, her parents were Jožica and Milan Verboten, so it appears to be an actual name. Looie496 (talk) 21:31, 3 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]