Language desk
< November 10	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 11

"Over against"

Is "over against" specifically a religious usage? I see it a lot in religious writing (even contemporary) but seemingly nowhere else. 71.126.56.219 (talk) 23:01, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I thought it was the 17th-century way of saying "across from" (that's how I've encountered it). AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes or "opposite":

And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury... Mark 12:41 from the King James Version of the Bible. Although more modern translations came into widespread use in the 20th century, some conservative Christians continue to promote the exclusive use of the 17th-century text; see for example, the King James Only movement. Alansplodge (talk) 21:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a way to read this blurry text?

Just curious if anyone has super-human vision or a way to read this. Viriditas (talk) 23:21, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Second paragraph begins with "After college, Olga was hired by the", something something, "on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles".

Third paragraph begins with "By the time she retired in 19<xx>" and ends with "still used all over the world today". DS (talk) 01:38, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. In other news, the yearbook spells her name (and her sister I believe) as Hartmann, but later she went by Hartman. Was this common for people to drop letters? Viriditas (talk)|

Misspellings happen all the time. As to this picture, it seems like all of those plaques at Waterloo [Illinois] High are blurry. Your best bet might be to contact them and see if they have a larger version or can provide you with the text. This might be her obit if you're looking for more info.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:20, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Viriditas -- German-language names generally end in "-mann", English in "-man", so it would have been Anglicizing her name, not dropping a random letter... AnonMoos (talk) 04:13, 12 November 2023 (UT

Correct. My greater point is why, after 18 years, would this happen? In the US, anglicisation at this time often occurred upon entry to the country. Her family had already been in the US for some time. So it looks like it was for another reason. She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1926, and it shows her name as Hartman, so I'm assuming she changed it before she enrolled. What was the reason? Our article on Hartmann says it was a Jewish name. Would she have been discriminated against during college admission, and would simply dropping a letter help her get in to UI? Another thing that occurs to me is that she had other colleagues in her field who had the same name (we see evidence of this in the literature around the 1940s and 1950s). By dropping the last letter, her publications couldn't be confused with other "Hartmann". Viriditas (talk) 21:00, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think the Eastern European first names Olga and Frieda would sound fairly Jewish, in themselves. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:24, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some more guess work:

"After college, Olga was hired by the Alan Hancock Foundation to work on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles."
"By the time she retired in 19xx, xx, Olga Hartman was the world's most recognized authority on polychaetous annelids. She published, co-authored or even ..."

All tentative, of course. --Lambiam 12:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, she retired in 1969.^[2] --Lambiam 12:43, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Very first line ends in (as should have been obvious) "graduated from Waterloo High". DS (talk) 15:36, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I know I'm probably imagining this, but is there any chance the first sentence says: "When Olga and her sister Freida Hartmann graduated from Waterloo High School in 1918...? Viriditas (talk) 20:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That seems possible, except that I'd expect "Frieda Hartman". The last word on the second line may be "oceanography". On the third line I imagine I'm seeing "shouldn't go to college, especially as women". --Lambiam 04:30, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How badly do you want this, Viriditas? I'm about 30–40 miles from Waterloo HS, and I could drive down there and ask if they would let me see and transcribe the text. It would probably be easier, though, to phone or e-mail the WHS Legacy Society and ask them for the text. Deor (talk) 00:18, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ha, no worries. What I really want is the source text it is based upon (pages 1-27 in Essays on Polychaetous Annelids: In Memory of Dr. Olga Hartman) which is impossible to find. Viriditas (talk)

Here's WorldCat's list of 147 libraries that have the book. Deor (talk) 01:00, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I know, but I would have to fly to Oahu. Viriditas (talk) 01:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, your user page doesn't divulge your location (though neither does mine). Deor (talk) 01:19, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's ok. I've been in Hawaii for 23 years, and I've been pretty open about it. Viriditas (talk) 01:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the spelling "Hartmann" found? Note that "Hartman" with one "n" is a not uncommon Dutch name and that "Olga" and "Frieda" are both not unusual Dutch female given names (e.g. Olga Commandeur, Olga Zuiderhoek, Olga Zoutendijk, Frieda Belinfante). --Lambiam 04:30, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I found both "Olga Hartmann" and "Frieda Hartmann" here. Amazingly, almost everyone on that page has a German surname. The rhyme at the bottom of this page shows that as a high-school student she was an all-rounder. --Lambiam 04:45, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Around here (north London) there are few if any German residents, but what you see is typical of publications put out by the Jewish community. 2A00:23C4:79CD:B301:C5B0:A9F0:AAD0:3253 (talk) 11:43, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that. I also noticed this: "Hartman destroyed most of her field notes, correspondence, and other personal records before her death so not much is known about her activities outside of the AHF." Viriditas (talk) 20:57, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Second paragraph, one but last line: "These expeditions took her all over the Pacific ??? and". (I expect it should be within the capibilities of a multimodal generative neural network trained on English texts to produce further plausible reconstructions.) --Lambiam 14:28, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article includes a little bit of the text from the plaque: [3]. --Amble (talk) 17:45, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Great find, but I'm curious how the author got it so wrong. It says she "earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in marine biology from Columbia University", but I've seen no evidence of that. She got both her degrees from Berkeley (which I'm still trying to verify). Viriditas (talk) 20:42, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Pure guess, based on scanty knowledge of medical degrees granted to women in the UK whan that was still widely frowned upon – is it possible that she studied at one university that did not then give degrees to women, but was granted them by another University that did? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.5.208 (talk) 20:48, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I just confirmed her MA[4] and PhD[5] at UC Berkeley. It just seems like a weird error for them to make. Viriditas (talk) 21:28, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think it says something to that effect in her bio on the WHS Legacy Wall in the last sentence of the first paragraph; the author in the Republic-Times just copied it:

"She graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor's degree and went on to Columbia University in New York that had Master's and PhD in Marine Biology."

--Lambiam 22:17, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like it wasn't as much of an error as I thought. Just found this: A.B. 1926, University of Illinois; M.A. 1933. Ph.D. 1936, University of California; special study at Harris Teachers College, St. Louis, Missouri, and Columbia University.[6] Not sure what it means. Viriditas (talk) 23:15, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"A.B." is presumably "Bachelor of Arts", written "B.A." here in the U K. Is this the normal American way of writing it? Oxford writes some degrees like this, for example "Doctor of Medicine" is "D.M.", rather than "M.D.", but Bachelor of Arts is not one of them. She definitely got an Arts degree from Berkeley, but since she was a scientist why would she get that? 2.101.9.143 (talk) 11:23, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See: https://admissionsight.com/what-is-an-ab-degree/ . Whether a particular institution issues an AB or a BA is entirely up to that institution. I can think of several reasons why a scientist might start with a BA instead of a BS: 1) the school they attended only offered BAs, 2) they had not originally intended on going into science, 3) they failed a particular class necessary for the BS but still fulfilled all qualifications for a BA. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:36, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at the undergraduate links in Olga Hartman, it looks like she was on track for a career in a health or medical field before studying marine biology at Berkeley under S. F. Light. See the category Category:Students of Sol Felty Light to get an idea of the students he trained. Viriditas (talk) 17:26, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I thought I was clear. I don’t know what this means regarding her work at Columbia or what she did there. I know what the other stuff means. Viriditas (talk) 17:05, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's perfectly normal for a scientist to pursue an Arts degree; e.g. Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist, got AB and MA degrees from UPenn. Crash48 (talk) 08:39, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistics is or was often considered a social science, so those degrees would not necessarily be considered incongruous. I personally have a B.A. in a "hard science" discipline. I didn't have a choice in the matter, but it was apparently because I took too many humanities electives and not as many science electives as would have been preferred... AnonMoos (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Even today, biology majors can choose from a BA or a BS. I should note, that her high school was heavy on natural science (you can look at their course offerings in the yearbook link in her bio), so she had a good background in science before she ever attended uni. Viriditas (talk) 20:45, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]