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December 18

More than one sentence preceding reporting clause

"Do you smell that? It's like sulfur," he said.

Is it stylistically okay to put two sentences before the reporting clause ("he said") in English? In German, this is something that would make the copy editor turn down your book immediately. If you choose to put parts of your dialog at the beginning, you must insert the reporting clause after the first sentence at the latest. Otherwise, it can't be one unit structurally if you use a closing punctuation mark in the middle. I have to say I'm transcribing existing audio, so the words have to be uttered in this order. The first part is undoubtedly a question, and I see no other way than to put a question mark there.--2001:16B8:31F9:DA00:E0E4:2154:4A4A:BA30 (talk) 07:20, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have never heard of such a rule. The example seems perfectly standard to me.

Just out of interest, I just did a Google Books search on "he said", and was amused to find that a book exists with the title He Said, She Said: Writing Effective Dialogue (it's by a Laura E. Koons). Searching within the book for the phrase, I found this sentence in an example dialogue: "Excuse me. Do you think you could help me?" he asked. So this author agrees with me that it's an acceptable usage, and therefore everyone else does too. --174.95.161.129 (talk) 09:14, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) When a text hits the desk of a copy editor, it has usually already been accepted for publication. Different publishers have different style manuals; I doubt very much that there is a general rule against multi-sentence direct speech in reported speech with inversion. If there is, the memo did not reach the copy editor of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[1] A very complicated case, where the reported direct speech itself contains some seven sentences – most of which are themselves reports of direct speech – can be found in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.^[2] If you study this, you'll see that there is some funny business going on with the sentence structure. A common approach in literary styles is to put the reporting clause in the middle of the reported speech:^[3]

"Do you smell that?" he said, "It's like sulfur."

In older writings authors are less queasy about using question marks other than as sentence-closing punctuation marks; you might see something like,

"Do you smell that?--it's like sulfur," he said.

--Lambiam 09:37, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam, you may enjoy a compact book, used copies of which are easily available for a low price: Mark Lambert, Dickens and the suspended quotation, OCLC 473041917. (I had my own copy, but stupidly gave it away.) See also this later paper (by other authors). -- Hoary (talk) 07:44, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Looks perfectly fine to me. The quotation marks enclose both sentences, removing any ambiguity as to them being made by the same speaker. --Khajidha (talk) 14:50, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It all works. Clarity is the most important thing. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 16:15, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why yes, yes I am, but it's not really necessary to say so. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:04, 20 December 2020 (UTC) [reply]

NB: the more usual term is "dialogue tags" (no wiki article! an opportunity!). It's hard to reference no hard-and-fast rule existing, but if you google search something like "position dialogue tags" you will see most of the advice given for English is to place them where rhythm dictates. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 17:17, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hardly deserving of an article on its own, the term could find use in the article Direct speech. {{Sofixit}}. IMO it is a misnomer, since no dialogue need be involved. (“What the hell time is it?” muttered the old man.^[4]) --Lambiam 08:31, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We do have an article on Tom Swifties. -- AnonMoos (talk) 02:31, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is also the notion of a said-bookism, observed Lambiam sadly and bookishly. --Lambiam 08:31, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I see this frequently in English novels. As someone who has been learning German for a while now, rules like word order and comma use still baffle me to this day. English tends to be a little more freeform in comparison. --Tenryuu ² ( ¬ o Contributions/Tenryuu ) ( Wishlist! ) 23:19, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

One may well come to that conclusion if one reads stuff online. Since the teaching of restrictive/non-restrictive clauses (not to mention nouns, verbs, adjectives .......) was abandoned as trivial, (note comma) the placement of commas has become somewhat random. That sad fact provides never-ending fodder for editors such as I, (note comma) who were not the victims of deprived childhoods. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:33, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

JackofOz, congratulations on your lack of victimhood and commiserations on your sadness, but writers such as me will be grateful for non-daylight-correction of our "such as me". ("How / Hast thou such heart, to comfort such as me?" (Swinburne, Locrine) | "Which means, my friend Mahatma, that he spent most of the year in killing the lower animals such as me." (Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare) | "And is it True? It is not True. / And if it were it wouldn’t do, / For people such as me and you / Who pretty nearly all day long / Are doing something rather wrong." (Belloc, Cautionary Tales for Children | etc) -- Hoary (talk) 08:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a rather different opinion. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:25, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Solidarity

This should be an easy one: what's the Latin word for solidarity? My dictionary doesn't have it. There might not be an on-the-nose one, I'm looking for one that could mean both political or personal solidarity and oneness and the like. As in the song Solidarity Forever by Guthrie. "Semper solidaritas?" Temerarius (talk) 23:20, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It might not be so easy, due to differences between ancient and modern societies. I'm coming up blank for a single word in Classical Latin... AnonMoos (talk) 02:30, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. `Asabiyyah is a famous word in medieval Arabic (though that doesn't help in Latin). AnonMoos (talk) 02:34, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the OED, the word "Solidarity" was only introduced into English in the mid-19th century from the French (Solidarité). The OED's earliest quoted instances are:

In 1848 the People's Press (Vol II pp161/2) stated: "Solidarity is a word of French origin, the naturalisation of which, in this country, is desirable."

In 1851, Antonio Gallenga wrote (Italy in 1848 p429): "Actuated . . . by a feeling of national solidarity----to borrow a French word----which induced all of them to run the same risk."

This suggests to me that the concept itself, which is a metaphor, was only being formulated in English (and European) thought around that time. I suspect that if it had existed, and had a word, in Classical Latin, the many prior centuries of Latin's use by English and European theologians and scholars would surely have introduced it much earlier. Possibly if Classical writers did approach the concept, they used a different metaphor based on ideas like brotherhood or coherence (from Latin noun cohaerentia, "a clinging together, coherence, connection; verb co-haero to stick or hang together, cleave, [etc.]" according to William Smith's Smaller Latin-English Dictionary of 1870). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.56.237 (talk) 06:36, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the dictionary of the Académie française, the French term solidarité is a learned derivation formed from the adjective solidaire with the suffix -ité, first attested in 1693.^[5] Such new formations in analogy to existing forms inherited from Latin nouns formed with -itas are not rare; another example is sexualité, although this may have been borrowed from the earlier attested English sexuality, also not from Latin; the term has instead been borrowed from modern languages by authors writing in (New) Latin.^[6] The adjective solidaire is in turn again a learned formation from solide + -aire; there is no (Classical) Latin adjective *solidaris. But solide is inherited from Latin solidus. The absence of an English adjective corresponding to French solidaire is striking; French strikers may tell each other, soyons solidaires,^[7] which Google Translate translates as "let's be united" (IMO "let's stand together" conveys the idea better), but the stand-alone adjective is hard to translate. (There is an English adjective solidary borrowed from French, but it lacks currency.) --Lambiam 08:06, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How about societas? Dr Smith (1851) glosses it as "fellowship, association, union, community, society". It apparently is possible to equate the two words. --Antiquary (talk) 12:46, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's easy to find some Classical Latin words whose definitions contain at least part of the meanings of the English word "solidarity", but it's hard to find a word which doesn't also have different and strongly-distracting meanings... AnonMoos (talk) 20:03, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To me, societas doesn't have any of the shades of affection and fraternite that solidarity does. Temerarius (talk) 23:32, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, just as for sexualitas, the word has been borrowed into New Latin as solidaritas, as in the motto Opus solidaritatis pax ("The fruit of solidarity is peace") coined in the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.^[8] --Lambiam 10:47, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Rather strangely, though, that motto is rendered as Opus hominum coniunctionis pax in the Latin version of the encyclical,^[9] which also contains other occurrences of the term hominum coniunctio, literally "the connection/unity/friendship of people", which in the English version of the encyclical becomes solidarity. --Lambiam 11:03, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is Latin productive enough to create new words? Surely, when it was a language in wide usage it had the means by which to create new words. Why can those processes not be used today? --Jayron 32 14:50, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are certainly the whole areas of New Latin and Contemporary Latin with many added words. But, for example, "computatrum" for computer is a rather recent coinage, which some Latin enthusiasts strongly object to, and which was basically disseminated by Latin Wikipedia. If you're trying to convey profundity with your motto, you might not want to include a computatrum-type form in it... AnonMoos (talk) 15:27, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]