I was just reading Syndicate and trying to work out exactly what a syndicate is. The etymology section says The word syndicate comes from the French word syndicat which means "administrator" or "representative" (syndic meaning "administrator"). Is that really the meaning of syndicat? I'm inclined to change it to say just The word syndicate comes from the French word syndic meaning "administrator", because so far as I can tell syndicat means "syndicate". Wiktionary has syndicat d'initiative as a dated term for "tourist office", so it seems to have funny shades of meaning, but is "representative" really one meaning? Card Zero (talk) 22:02, 2 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

The original meaning of French syndicat is: the office or jurisdiction of a syndic; or a body or council of syndics, in which a "syndic" is a person who has a mandate to manage the interests of a community. In the current, non-historical common sense, Wiktionary defines the term as: "A group of individuals or companies formed to transact some specific business, or to promote a common interest; a self-coordinating group." ​‐‐Lambiam 11:29, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

OK, I made an edit on this one. Card Zero (talk) 18:18, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Concern (business) has this enigmatic line: Outside of professionals, the term Group, also mistakenly within the meaning of large companies – regardless of its corporate structure – is understood. This presumably originates from the German article, maybe from Der Begriff Konzern ist deutschen Ursprungs und auch in anderen deutschsprachigen Ländern gebräuchlich. Grundsätzlich aber ist er nicht immer begriffsidentisch übersetzbar. In der englischsprachigen Welt ist concern = „Firma, Unternehmen" zwar geläufig, gilt jedoch als deutscher Import und wird nur selektiv verwendet. Gebräuchlich ist dort eher die „corporate group" oder einfach „group". I'd like to rewrite the English version. But what is it even trying to say? Card Zero (talk) 22:09, 2 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Going off of machine translation, but I agree the English article text should be rewritten, as it makes no sense as is. The German text doesn't mention anything being "mistakenly". It only says that the English word for "konzern", "concern", with this specific meaning, is known in the English speaking world but is somewhat uncommon, and is seen as being an import from German, and that "group" or "corporate group" are more common in English. 76.20.114.184 (talk) 23:16, 2 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

The article is tagged with "multiple issues", including "poorly-translated text, needs attention from an expert in business." That tag is from 2009. Maybe in another 16 years such an expert will appear and fix it, but in the meantime I think it would be good for non-business-experts to make some guesses and knock some comprehensibility into it. Card Zero (talk) 23:36, 2 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

The oldest version of the English article is a translation of the German article as it was on 27 May 2008. The mysterious reference to "the Banking Act" concerns the German Kreditwesengesetz , so this does not offer a global view. The enigmatic line, in the oldest version, was:

Outside of professionals, the termGroupalso mistakenlywithin the meaning of large companies- regardless of its corporate structure - understood.

This was the attempted translation of:

Außerhalb der Fachkreise wird der Begriff Konzern fälschlicherweise auch im Sinne von Großunternehmen - unabhängig von seiner Gesellschaftsstruktur - verstanden.

Translated, somewhat freely:

Outside of professional circles, the term Konzern is often mistakenly understood to mean any large company, regardless of its corporate structure.

(Compare the definition on Wiktionary of the English term concern : "A business, firm or enterprise; a company.") ​‐‐Lambiam 00:01, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Yes. One should perhaps restructure the article so that it opens with the (nebulous) English concepts of "business concern" and "a going concern", and then has a section devoted to the (well-specified) Konzern concept. Card Zero (talk) 01:01, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Or merge Concern (business) into Corporate group. The German article Unternehmensverbindung , the counterpart of the suggested merge target, contains a section § Formen von Unternehmensverbindungen ("Forms of corporate groups" – not a good section heading for us, we should use just "§ Forms"), with subsections for various forms, one of which is § Konzern.

I am not certain how firmly established the narrow sense is of German Konzern that is given in the German article. The German Wiktionary only gives a more general definition, "Merger of several independent companies under unified economic management with the purpose of cost savings". In fact, this may even exclude the narrow, legal sense, in which the divisions are not independent legal persons. The definition of the notion of Konzern in German law is as follows:^[1]

Sind ein herrschendes und ein oder mehrere abhängige Unternehmen unter der einheitlichen Leitung des herrschenden Unternehmens zusammengefasst, so bilden sie einen Konzern; die einzelnen Unternehmen sind Konzernunternehmen.

(When a parent company and one or more dependent companies are grouped together under the unified management of the parent company, they form a Konzern; the individual companies are Konzern companies.)

Since – as far as I can tell – this specific narrow definition only plays a role in German law, and a rather limited role at that, a short paragraph should suffice. ​‐‐Lambiam 11:01, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Is there a word for someone who loves researching obscure cities and has an intense enthusiasm for local history? —TWOrantula ^TM (enter the web) 03:46, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Topophilia is said to mean "a special love for peculiar places". If we extend this meaning to include "a peculiar love for special places", it may cover your affliction, which means you are a topophiliac. ​‐‐Lambiam 10:22, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Not a topophile? Nardog (talk) 13:44, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Or a topoholic? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:16, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

In Italian, topo means "mouse", so those all sound a little odd. There's a concept in inner model theory called a mouse; it's sometimes occurred to me that those who study them could be considered topologists. --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 4 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Thanks to you, today I learned that Topo Gigio means "Louie Mouse". Grazie! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:57, 4 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Ah, Ed Sullivan, where are you now? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:51, 5 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Gone to that "really big shoo" in the sky. 😁 ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:27, 5 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Urban history buff, if you want a term that's readily understood. Card Zero (talk) 18:27, 3 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Why were Russian genitives in -го not changed to -во in the post-1918 spelling reforms? ~2025-31275-58 (talk) 18:00, 4 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

The question why the ending is written the way it is, is asked regularly by Russians; I can find no other reason stated than tradition ([2], [3], [4], [5]). The post-revolution spelling reform was mostly about doing away with redundant letters and about changing spelling rules that were confusing, particularly those that required writing "а" or "я" for a vowel pronounced like "е" or "о". So, perhaps, insufficient urgency was felt for another dramatic change. Many other discrepancies between orthography and pronunciation where also not addressed. ​‐‐Lambiam 10:30, 5 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

I've just read (on the German Wikipedia) that "the Paleo-Siberian languages comprise 5 or 6 language groups with no genetic relationship". Our own Paleo-Siberian languages is more cautious, and says they are "not known to have any genetic relationship to each other". But that set me to wonder: Is there currently a strong opinion if language acquisition was a unique event in human history/evolution? Are all language evolved from a common ancestor (with the usual intermixing, borrowing, and so on complicating the picture), or are there multiple language genesis events, and we have really genetically distinct language families? Or is the emergence of language a gradual process from pre-language communication forms, and there are multiple human groups that went through the boundary independently, meaning that all languages are connected, but on a pre-language level? Where would I look something like that up? Language genesis does not exist ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:19, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

No-one knows, most likely, but the second hypothesis seems more likely to me. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:49, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

[Edit conflict] Our articles Origin of language and (more narrowly) Proto-Human language (among others, see their 'See also' sections) discuss this topic, but no single hypothesis has any majority consensus, and it's difficult to see how one might ever be confirmed.

My own non-expert feeling is that languages demonstrably have evolved and diversified (often replacing others) so rapidly even within the last, say, six thousand years that it's likely impossibly to deduce what was going on even twenty thousand years ago, and human (including Neanderthal and Denisovan) languages probably have/had roots stretching back several hundred thousand years. Anatomical study of fossils may shed some light on the complexity of oral language (via the presence and extent of the Simian shelf, for example), but there are other ways of communicating.

The phenomenon of Cryptophasia suggests that, at least in 'modern humans', novel language generation might not have been unusual over the span of human (senso lato) prehistory. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2025-31359-08 (talk) 15:17, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

See Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis. Double sharp (talk) 15:29, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Thanks all! This is very helpful, if not exactly satisfying ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:51, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

There is no scientific consensus regarding the question whether Homo neanderthalensis had the capability to communicate using language (see Neanderthal § Language). The issue is not discussed at Origin of language or Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis, but the lead paragraph of Proto-Human language contains this sentence:

"As the predecessor of all extant languages spoken by modern humans (Homo sapiens ), Proto-Human as hypothesized would not necessarily be ancestral to any hypothetical Neanderthal language."

It appears to me that if Neanderthals had language capability, the most plausible hypothesis is that the common ancestor of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens also had language capability and communicated through speech. In that case it is reasonable (IMO) to conjecture that the first group of humans used this ancestral language. If it can be established that Neanderthals had language capability and the consensus arises that the first human language was this ancestral language, this would make it quite plausible that most of the major families have some genetic relationship to this ancestral language – a relationship that has become untraceable through the drift of language evolution over millions of years. But it would not follow that all known human languages are descended from it by evolution, and it would also not exclude language polygenesis for the genus Homo. ​‐‐Lambiam 20:29, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

I concur that Neanderthals and Denisovans probably had spoken languages and inherited their language ability from their common ancestor, probably Heidelbergensis, which probably also later gave rise to Sapiens, but all these species existed over spans of hundreds of thousands of years over most of Eurasia and/or Africa. Moreover, Neanderthals and Denisovans, from what we know so far, tended to live in smaller, more isolated groups than Sapiens commonly did (which would promote language diversification; given the usual speed of language evolution mentioned above, it is surely the case that all of these species each had many different languages that evolved, diversified and died out over those spans of time.

All this, of course will have existed alongside non-verbal communication such as gestures, facial expressions and body language, which recent studies have shown are, to a considerable extent, mutually intelligible between humans and chimpanzees (see for example [6]), whose common ancestors with us lie 5–7 million years in the past). [Edited to add: this might also be of interest.] {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2025-31359-08 (talk) 07:54, 10 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

While each of these species may have had many different languages, the tribe of hominims that split and thereby made its (unidentified) species the most recent common ancestor of both H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens was probably not multilingual. ​‐‐Lambiam 10:39, 10 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Quite possibly, but that "event" (which almost certainly occurred in Africa) was about 660,000 years ago (if not earlier) and thereafter populations of both sides of the 'split' ("Neandersovans" and "not-yet Sapiens") would have (I suggest) rapidly developed multiple languages as they spread around and across the globe (assuming they did have languages that early). I don't think there is much chance of saying anything meaningful about a hypothetical language that existed so long ago.

We should also remember that the split was not absolute: Interbreeding (to use a rather cold term) between various populations of all three of these, and other, early human groups seems to have been common, so they must often have been communicating, learning each others languages, forming creoles and so on.

Returning to Stephan Schulz's original question – we simply don't have any standout answer(s) and no obvious way of ever finding them. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2025-31359-08 (talk) 11:30, 10 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

While I agree that there is in fact no chance of saying anything meaningful about the hypothetical inherited ancestral language, the point remains that the possibility cannot be excluded that neither of the hypotheses presented as a dilemma in Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis is correct, but that the origin of human language precedes humanity; in other words, the hypothetical Proto-Human language may have been a non-human language. One can side with the Linguistic Society of Paris and the London Philological Society, which banned all discussion of the origin of language as being pointless speculation. But if one nevertheless engages in such discussion, one should not unduly exclude possibilities by assuming without a solid argument that the origin of human language lies within the timeline of our species. ​‐‐Lambiam 23:47, 10 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

That rather depends on the definitions of "human" and "humanity" that one adopts in this context. Some restrict it to Homo sapiens (but see para 5 of the Human article linked), others (including myself) extend it to at least H. neanderthalensis and Denisovans (for the moment formally H. longii but, in the light of recent discoveries I suspect destined to be subdivided), still others include H. heidelbergensis (if valid), H. erectus/ergaster (for me a definite "maybe"), and even H. habilis (which I am inclined to consider an Australopithecus). (And let's not get into H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis for the moment).

Within this array, when and how did "human language" first emerge, and did it do so abruptly or gradually, once or many times?

Or in other words, I largely agree with you, though we may be using different definitions. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2025-31359-08 (talk) 09:42, 11 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

In the articles Proto-Human language and Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis, the term human appears to refer to "anatomically modern humans". Some taxonomists prefer to lump Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis together as subspecies of one species that may also offer room to Denisovans and other lost cousins. The essence of my complaint about the implicit homocentricity remains for any definition of "human", unless one declares that, by definition, an ancestor of any human language is, by reverse inheritance, also a human language. ​‐‐Lambiam 14:46, 11 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Stephan Schulz, you may be interested in these early (but none too ethical) attempts to artificially reproduce language genesis at Language deprivation experiments. Alansplodge (talk) 20:54, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

In this version of "Take Away the Colour" why does the singer pronounces "take away" like "chicken" ("chicken by the color")? Per Alexia (singer), she's an Italian, but I doubt accent is to blame. ~2025-32409-74 (talk) 21:15, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

I hear "She can ... by the colour" (maybe "live"?). She's definitely not singing "Take away...". --Wrongfilter (talk) 21:55, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

And I hear "don't be ... don't be chickened down by the color ...". ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄ ---Sluzzelin talk 22:02, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

She might sing "Checkin' them by the colo(u)r", which sort of makes sense, considering that a lot of those euro-hits were written by people with a somewhat shaky command of English... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:32, 9 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

The lyrics say "Chickened down by the colour" and "Don't be chickened down by the colour". Perhaps the intended meaning is "chickened out by the colour" which makes sense. Brandmeister ^talk 15:51, 10 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

1. Are there any modern European languages that do not use all of the letters A, E, I, O and U in native words?
2. Can mass noune be pluralized in English, like "Snows melted yesterday", "Flours fell from the bag", "Honeys were mixed"? --40bus (talk) 22:13, 11 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

(2) If I understand you, no, but:

Never "snows melted", but Wiktionary has an entry for "Where are the snows of yesteryear?"

A compartmentalized bag might contain different types of flour.

An unscrupulous businessperson might mix grade A honey with substandard to maximize profit. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:03, 11 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

"Waters" exists, but it has specific uses. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:28, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

As in "I came to Casablanca for the waters." "The waters? What waters? We're in the desert." Deor (talk) 15:20, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Greek has extra vowels, H and Ω.
Sleigh (talk) 23:40, 11 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Greek has no Latin letters, and in particular no letter U, the closest being the Greek letter Υ. ​‐‐Lambiam 10:47, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Mass nouns can be pluralised when you're referring to separate groups or types of those things. For example "peoples", "salts". Iapetus (talk) 09:49, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

One can say "the snows had melted"^{[7] [8] [9]} without (IMO) a suggestion of separate groups or types of snow. Similarly, one can say, "the rains had come".^{[10] [11] [12]} Note the use of the definite article; these uses refer to considerable amounts of snowfall or rainfall, or such fall over an extended period of time. Yet another case: "the winds had been blowing".^{[13] [14] [15]} ​‐‐Lambiam 11:13, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Your examples for "the snows had melted" are all about the coming of spring. They are looking back over the preceding winter, when (presumably) snow had fallen more than once. Similarly, the examples for "the rains had come" are referring to a season. Again, there would have been multiple instances of rain in those periods. The same can be said for the examples you give for "the winds had been blowing". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:13, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

One can say that a winery offers excellent wines, and then the plural signifies that this refers to a variety of types of wine. For such uses, one cannot use the definite article. While it is hard to pinpoint this down precisely, the idiomatic definite article in "the snows", "the rains" and "the winds" seems to indicate a different role, comparable perhaps with the plural-only term "the zoomies". ​‐‐Lambiam 19:29, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

I'm not a native English speaker, but I remember this piece of dialogue from the British TV series, Rome : "Winter does not last forever. Spring comes, snows melt." "That's a threat!" "I assure you, it is no threat. Snows always melt." — Kpalion ^(talk) 08:35, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Why so many European languages do not use letter Y in native words? Why do Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Estonian, Latvian, Slovene and Serbo-Croatian not use this letter in native words? And why it is not par of Gaj's Latin alphabet? --40bus (talk) 22:56, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Possibly due to the close front rounded vowel being a relatively rare phoneme, and older orthographies that don't distinguish between that and similar sounds. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:20, 12 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

... and the Latin language (the alphabet of which we're talking about) didn't have "Y" either, among native words. ---Sluzzelin talk 01:59, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

But why most Romance languages do not use letter Y for words that had Y in Latin? And of these, Dutch, German and Estonian have /y/ sound, so why they do not use letter Y for it? --40bus (talk) 06:34, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

See Upsilon#Correspondence with Latin Y for some background. Most Latin words, particularly in the vocabulary of the largely illiterate speakers of vernacular Latin which evolved into the Romance languages before they came to be written down, were not spelled with 'Y'. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2025-31359-08 (talk) 08:58, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Those native words already had a spelling without an y. French and Dutch have /y/, typically spelled as u, and German and Estonian too, typically spelled as ü. All derive from /u/, which was fronted. This spelling-to-sound correspondence is regular in those languages, so there's no need to change spelling to y. The letter y in borrowed worlds comes in French and Dutch with the /i/ sound, so if those languages took the unnecessary decision to respell /y/ as y instead of u, they would also have to respell the loans with y to be written with an i.

The /u/ sound also occurs in those languages. In Estonian and German, it's spelled u, in Dutch oe and in French ou, all regular, so there's no need to free the letter currently associated with /y/. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:40, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

In texts in Middle Dutch and early modern Dutch we find ⟨y⟩ in free variation with ⟨ij⟩; see e.g. the uses of "vry" next to "vrij" in Elckerlijc. The digraph "ij" originally represented a long /iː/. It was a rendering of "ii", in which the "j" was a variant form of the letter "i". The pronunciation later turned into /ii̯/ and then into the diphthong /ɛi̯/, and the spelling ⟨ij⟩ became the norm. ​‐‐Lambiam 13:26, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

One thing I came to think of was that in Swedish, the chosen orthography seems to have been picked to approach the Germans and distance oneself from the Danes. (My father is a Norwegian Scandinavist who claims that Gustav Vasa more or less was an insurgent paid by the Germans who didn't want a united Scandinavia as a mighty rival, but it might be simplifying things.) But despite picking ä and ö instead of æ and ø, y was never replaced bu ü, although you might imagine a native Swedish spelling of words like bü, dü, fü, hü, lü, nü, sü, tü and and vü. (Vy is borrowed from French rather than being native, though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:31, 13 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Does English ever use hyphen to separate parts of a closed compound noun, such as PDF-file, Arsenal–Tottenham-match, 5-1-win, Canada–United States-relations, EU-report, KVLY-TV-tower, The Book of Chemicals -book, 3D-glasses or SIM-card? In many other languages, this is normal way to use hyphen. --40bus (talk) 00:52, 15 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

@40bus Those hyphens serve no purpose in English. I suppose one might be used if there would otherwise be some ambiguity. Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:18, 15 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

It could happen someday, as with base ball / base-ball / baseball, but it hasn't happened yet. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:20, 15 November 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

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