Language desk
< February 3	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	Current desk >

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.

February 4[edit]

"Suspending" U.S. presidential campaigns[edit]

Why is the term used in ending presidential campaigns in the U.S. "suspend"? The dictionary definitions of "suspend" suggest that the suspension of anything is, in theory at least, only temporary in nature (i.e. "suspension of classes", "suspension of operations", "suspended for one game", etc.). However, in presidential elections, the term is used for the end of presidential campaigns. While I have also seen that term used in the same sense in airlines ceasing operations, news reports tend to suggest that these "suspensions" were in theory supposed to be temporary in nature while efforts to save the airline were being made, but for presidential elections, "suspensions" tend to be permanent. Why the use of the term "suspend" as opposed to another, more "final" term? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 01:59, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, if you officially end your campaign, federal elections laws kick in which would restrict your ability to manage and/or accept campaign contributions, for example to retire debt. Someone can probably give a more precise answer. But it's along those lines. --Trovatore (talk) 02:03, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And it might theoretically be possible to restart the campaign. For example, if Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both die or are unable to continue their campaigns, Martin O'Malley might rejoin them. (I wonder what happens if somebody wins the primary who is dead or withdraws before the general election.) StuRat (talk) 05:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If it's anything like in the early 2000s when Senator Paul Wellstone died just a couple of weeks before the election, the party bosses scramble to put in a replacement. The weirder problem is if the presumed president-elect dies between the election and inauguration day. It's uncharted territory, but presumably the party bosses could suggest the name of a new president to the electors and let them decide what to do. And if they don't come up with consensus, the US House will figure it out. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:21, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

With regard to a president-elect dying after the election - there are two scenarios. First is the president-elect dies before the electoral college meets and the second if the president-elect dies after the college meets and before the inauguration. Both are covered by the Twentieth Amendment.[1] Hack (talk) 06:08, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Quibble: The electoral college does not actually meet. The electors in each state meet, and transmit their votes to Congress, which counts them. --Trovatore (talk) 07:31, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If I remember correctly Gary Hart suspended his campaign for the 1988 primaries after the Monkey Business monkey business, but a few months later, he had a change of heart and decided to re-enter the race. He had been the front-runner before the 1988 race started in earnest, but was unable to rise from his ashes the second time and soon suspended his campaign again, this time for good. --Xuxl (talk) 09:50, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The public had a change of Hart. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:49, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Was looking at this in the news just now! Given the advanced age of the current crop of candidates, I think it's something that's likely to come up sooner rather than later. I think I'm right in thinking that any of Sanders, Clinton, Trump and Jeb could have a medical emergency tomorrow and leave a faction of a major party without a candidate. Can they assign their 'role' (campaign movement, organisation, possibly votes already won) to a successor? Blythwood (talk) 06:12, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe they can legally force their electoral college delegates to vote for a particular successor that they designate, but they can suggest one. StuRat (talk) 06:24, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Heng (letter)[edit]

This article says It has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a hypothetical phoneme in English, which includes both [h] and [ŋ] as its allophones. Normally /h/ and /ŋ/ are considered separate phonemes in English. Really? Could someone try to find a source for this? I haven't the slightest clue where I'd start, especially as the two sounds are so different in English that I can't imagine them being conflated as allophones of one phenome. Nyttend (talk) 02:30, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, /h/ is only found syllable-initially in English, while eng is only found finally. So, one could represent them with the same letter, although the motivation for doing so would be unclear. See minimal pair. μηδείς (talk) 03:14, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but it doesn't seem to me that you answered the question: obviously I don't understand your meaning. The intro to Phenome notes that minimal pairs need not share a related pair of different phenomes (e.g. "kill" and "kiss" are a minimal pair), so of course I can understand [h] and [ŋ] being a minimal pair, but I can't understand that being relevant. My question is about the sounds themselves, not the choice of glyphs used to represent them — how could [h] and [ŋ] possibly be allophones? Nyttend (talk) 04:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The intro to Phenome says that it's "the set of all phenotypes expressed by a cell, tissue, organ, organism, or species". You may have meant phoneme. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:17, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that [h] and [ŋ] are a single phoneme in English; but the case has been argued, really as a reductio ad absurdum to attack the relevance of complementary distribution in determining phonemes. I'll see if I can find a source. --ColinFine (talk) 10:38, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Not the most impressive source, but just as an example, [2]. Henry ^Flower 15:31, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You misunderstood me due to my brevity, Nyttend. My point was the ironic one that one could argue that because [h] and [ŋ] are technically in complimentary distribution, they could be defined as the same phoneme, because there is no minimal pair which distinguishes them. Given the fact of their separate derivations, their utter dissimilarity, and that they never appear in the same context, I would argue as do most that the heng hypothesis is a silly one. μηδείς (talk) 02:59, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know a source either, but the kind of analysis μηδείς was referring to is called "abstractness", which you can find more information in if you google e.g. "abstractness in phonology". [3] gives an example in English in the first few pages; such analyses have also been proposed for e.g. certain Spanish vowels, and Polish vowels in Hayes' Introductory Phonology section 12.2.3. These analyses, however, even when not really ridiculous like [h] and [ŋ], are still controversial, as noted in that same book; even though they "work" in terms of the theory, it is hard to see how e.g. children would learn these patterns (as opposed to just memorizing different phonemes). rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:21, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If we're worried about sources, it might be something as basic as Anthony Burgess, Mario Pei, or Fromkin and Rodman, (or even Raimo Anttila) all of which I read before I perused the university stacks. The best I can say is that I read a pre-1990 source that mentioned this "paradox" (if that is a good word) and dismissed it in so far as English.

In my ancestral Rusyn language, f and w are allophones of one phoneme, [f] being word final, and [w] word initial and intervocalically. But this is made obviously plausible by the use of [v] in other contexts, where the [w] and [v] of Rusyn fall together in the Phonology of Russian (e.g., /dveri/ "door(s)"). I suspect the h/ng matter is one I came acrost as an undergraduate in either a journal or a compilation, and that was a long time ago, and far, far away from my current interests. μηδείς (talk) 05:03, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The book linked to by Henry Flower says: "While [h] only occurs syllable-initially, [ŋ] is only to be found syllable-finally. These sounds seem to meet the criteria for conditioned allophones, and there are no minimal pairs like hope/*ngope or ring/*rih, so one might want to suggest that they are members of a single phoneme (which we can call ‘heng’ for convenience)."

Is it possible for words loaned from other languages to break this pattern? An initial [ŋ] can be heard in ngultrum or ngapi or Ngāi Tahu, and I've sometimes heard Bahrain being pronounced [bɑhˈɹeɪn] to better approximate the Arabic. This reminds me of a situation in Hebrew, where [p] and [f] have historically been complementarily distributed allophones of the same phoneme, but the introduction of many loanwords with [p] or [f] disobeying their distribution rules in Hebrew has resulted in /p/ and /f/ being now regarded as separate phonemes. So, when/if a minimal pair contrasting /h/ with /ŋ/ does become a thing, can we then say that the "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" principle rules out the existence of the hypothetical "heng" phoneme? --Theurgist (talk) 00:42, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" is meant to be taken diachronically. Old English certainly had phonemes that Modern English no longer has (e.g. diphthongs like /eːo̯/ and /æːɑ̯/). What that paper is referring to is the principle that if /X/ and /Y/ contrast anywhere in a language, then all surface [X]'s belong to /X/ and all surface [Y]'s belong to /Y/, even when the contrast between /X/ and /Y/ is neutralized in some environments. So even if anyone did believe that English has a "heng" phoneme, they wouldn't necessarily be claiming that a /h/~/ŋ/ contrast, with minimal pairs, couldn't arise at some point in the future. (And if anyone pronounces ngapi /ˈŋæpi/, we've got a minimal pair right there.) —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:17, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Back to the original question, the Phonetic Symbol Guide mentioned in the references of the article also describes the use of the symbol to represent the putative merged h+ŋ phoneme, but points out that the suggestion was not made seriously, but more as a straw man, as ColinFine mentioned above. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:21, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Study of time[edit]

What is the name for the scientific study of time -- the field of science that deals with the arrow of time, time travel, whether time is just an illusion, multiverse theory, and the question of how the universe could have a beginning if time is endless, etc.? The obvious chron- + ology = chronology is already taken. Chronics, maybe? Or temporology? Khemehekis (talk) 06:07, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The International Society for the Study of Time doesn't seem to use a single word. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:14, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Horology, [4]. Bazza (talk) 11:52, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. That was the first thing I thought of, but it's too narrow. It relates to the study of time-keeping, not to time itself and the matters mentioned by the OP. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:59, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In general, the concept of "time" is so wrapped up in other stuff that there's probably no-one (barring the odd amateur eccentric) who studies time in and of itself. Relativity (special relativity and general relativity) is the study of spacetime, while thermodynamics is where we get entropy, which is the closest we've got to understanding why there's an arrow of time. Those are probably the closest to a "study of time". The study of the perception of time is a branch of psychology. Smurrayinchester 13:37, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget this interesting piece of time-olgy, now sadly passed into history.--Shirt58 (talk) 02:51, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For longer periods of time, there's geochronology. Mikenorton (talk) 12:43, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Half-wave rectification" or "Half wave rectification"?[edit]

Rectifier circuits has both:

half-wave rectification

half wave rectification

What should it be? Or even halfwave rectification?

--Mortense (talk) 17:20, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Are you asking about the English language in general, or about Wikipedia style? I'm sure descriptivists would say about the former question that both forms can be found, but the right-thinking prescriptivist answer is that you should use the hyphen, and I expect this would be reflected in WP:HYPHEN, which should give the answer as regards Wikipedia style. --Trovatore (talk) 18:48, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Attributive compound modifiers are usually hyphenated.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 18:52, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is very simple. If "The rectification was half wave" seems best use "half wave"; but if for "The rectification was half-wave", seems better, use the latter. The options are either (it is(half(wave))) or (It is (half-wave)). If half-wave is a normal adjective, use it. If it is not, don't. I don't know the physics, so I cannot comment further.μηδείς (talk) 02:45, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There are two states for rectification, half wave and full wave. The OP's question is applicable to both. As a wider issue, in addition to half wave and full wave radio antennas, there are the popular quarter wave, three-quarter wave, and five-eighth wave antennas. It's possible to construct multiple wavelength antennas too, such as a one-and-a-half wave antenna. I mention the antennas to show that the question is but part of a wider issue. Akld guy (talk) 03:44, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I inserted the hyphen in the article just to achieve consistency for compound modifiers. I don't think the term wave rectifier is ever used in physics, and the article certainly doesn't discuss half of one of these imaginary objects. Dbfirs 22:00, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]