Talk:Nominative determinism

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Semi-protected edit request on 27 June 2025

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changing the way things are written to encompass more cultures. from " In pre-urban times, people were only known by a single name – for example, the Anglo-Saxon name Beornheard" to "For many cultures, in pre-urban times people were only known by a single name – for example, the Anglo-Saxon name Beornheard" Arbie.wizarD (talk) 00:21, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Not done: The page's protection level has changed since this request was placed. You should now be able to edit the page yourself. If you still seem to be unable to, please reopen the request with further details. SI09 (talk) 04:28, 28 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tiger WOODS

World famous golfer Tiger Woods has an appropriate name. 2601:680:CD81:9260:8C14:7DE8:1B92:15AD (talk) 15:39, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Motivated perception in research?

"Second was urology, with 1 in 59 related names such as Burns, Waterfall, Ball, and Koch."

I know the point of a discussion page is to discuss the article but is this source honestly academic research? I don't know about other people, but pissing is one of the last things I would associate with the word "burns", and not even the main medical specialism. As for "Ball", I don't think I'd have to tell this to academics, but urine doesn't come from the testes, and especially not for half of the human population. Is this not motivated perception, taking names with nothing to do with a profession, and then making a link to it? Unknown Temptation (talk) 17:26, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how serious this post is, but if you read the opening sentence of urology you'll learn the scope of the specialism, which includes the whole reproductive system (regardless of its role in facilitating removal of the yellow stuff). EditorInTheRye (talk) 17:49, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how serious this research is. "Downs, Lowe, Bhatti, Moodie, Nutt" are listed for psychiatry. Down syndrome is a genetic condition that has a variety of effects including intellectual disability. It is not primarily a matter for a psychiatrist. The rest seems like bad puns from a Viz comic, and highly pejorative and antiquated for the era the paper was published. Do medical journals also have "and finally" articles like the news, because this looks like one. Unknown Temptation (talk) 17:35, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or possibly "Downs" relates to "feeling down", which would be applicable. - SchroCat (talk) 18:21, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Given that Down syndrome is named after a person (John Langdon Down), your suggestion is almost certainly the case, or you'd have some sort of circular nominative determinism. EditorInTheRye (talk) 18:56, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not just circular reasoning. This whole idea sounds like it was written by men about men. What about the vast number of women who advance in a career but take on their husband's name? Did her husband's last name magically guide her into the career she chose? Or did the researchers even bother to investigate birth names of women? 2601:600:C400:7310:7816:89E8:FC23:558 (talk) 20:32, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Iconicity in ideophones, expressive words, etc.

A very different, yet possibly relatable area might be the diagrammatic or other types of iconicity in onomatopoeia and ideophones (also known in the literature as expressives (along with a host of other terms)). These forms are not found in large numbers in languages like English (which may have just a couple of hundred), but in many other areas of the world languages are rife with them. Korean, for example, has in excess of 29 THOUSAND, counting all derivatives, compounds, and larger constructions containing these roots. The iconicity is at the level of the individual segments. According to standard linguistic dogma of the last century, words are inherently meaningless except through speaker agreement (conventionality). Phonemes merely (and conveniently) differentiate one meaningless form from another, with memory and association doing the rest.

Ideophones, on the other hand, tend to show, in most of the languages that have very many of them, strong ties between individual segments and primitive meaning ranges, often lost or obscured in conventional vocabulary. For example, in Japanese (which has tens of thousands of expressives), voiced stops connote larger referents than voiceless stops in otherwise identical forms. This split between voiced and voiceless stops is present in a good number of different language families connected areally (as in Central Asia) or found in farther flung regions of the earth.

In the end, what this sort of iconic relation implies is that for ideophones/expressives words that, by formula, 'fit' their referents/connotations better have a greater chance of surviving and prospering in the speaker population. 24.187.223.42 (talk) 20:30, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]