Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 December 29

= December 29 =

Klingon
What's a good website where I can learn Klingon for free? --75.50.52.102 (talk) 01:39, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It's possible wikipedia has an article on the subject, but I simply went to google and entered [klingon language] and this website was the first one on the list. It seems to have at least some basics. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:44, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Because Klingon (Tlh'ingan Hol) is a conlang, it's actually under copyright, unlike most languages, which are nobody's property. For this reason, one can't simply write one's own Klingon Language Course. It's a bit of an unusual situation. All natural languages, and most other conlangs are, for want of a better word, open-source. There aren't restrictions on teaching and learning, for the most part. Some natural languages (such as Australian aboriginal languages and other indigenous languages of the world) do have some restrictions due to understandings of cultural possession and connections to spirituality. Steewi (talk) 03:41, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd like to see a RS ref that it's actually under copyright. AFAIK, one can't copyright a language or a script. kwami (talk) 06:19, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Our own article (not a reliable source, presumably, but a start) says "Paramount Pictures owns a copyright to the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. No challenge has been brought to court." I assume this would mean you can't go around publishing your own dictionaries and textbooks. Adam Bishop (talk) 07:12, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Page 228:
 * "'There is one invented language that is essentially owned by a private company, though the terms of ownership have not been tested in court: Klingon is protected by a trademark held by Paramount Pictures.'"
 * --ColinFine (talk) 10:12, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, but trademark protection is completely different from copyright protection. +Angr 11:02, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The term "Klingon" would be the trademark. The language itself would be copyrighted. Obviously, a language is not a trademark. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:09, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, so the implication here is that we won't know whether a language can be copyrighted until someone tests it in court. Jonathan talk 22:06, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Are there any other copyrighted conlangs? --84.62.197.235 (talk) 17:05, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * IANAL, but any conlang which has been invented in the past hundred years or so and which hasn't been explicitly released to the public domain is necessarily copyrighted. The author might not complain about your use of the language (they'd probably be rather happy about it), but it's still copyrighted.  Marnanel (talk) 17:17, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I challenge that. Languages are not copyrightable.  Companies can purport to hold a copyright on them, which Paramount is currently purporting.  The copyright office in the US will just register the copyright on their dictionary without comment.  The dictionary itself is copyrightable but facts are not; in this case the words of the fake language are the facts.  As stated above, this fake copyright has not been tested in court.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:14, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * (after ec) Quoting further from Okrent (op. cit., p. 227): "Brown claimed he owned the rights to the vocabulary of Loglan. Did he? Brown did have copyrights on his books, incluiding the dictionary. But copyright does not extend to each individual word in a copyrighted work ... Would it have been possible for him to copyright each Loglan word separately? Perhaps, but he didn't ... Can the rules of a languae be owned? Probably not ... There is, however, some blur in this area within the murky world of software patents, so given the right lawyer and the right judge, who knows?" --ColinFine (talk) 18:19, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I take your point, but what does "Would it have been possible for him to copyright each Loglan word separately? Perhaps, but he didn't" mean? It's not as though copyrighting something involves a deliberate action.  You have copyright in your creation from the moment it exists in tangible form. Marnanel (talk) 18:30, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * To give a possible answer to the question about conlangs with lawyers and money behind them, I think the most obvious parallel is with Tolkien's conlangs. I'd like to see what would happen if someone published a new creative work which had sections written in the Arda languages but leaned on no other part of the Tolkien corpus. Marnanel (talk) 18:35, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I think Blissymbolics may be copyrighted. If I remember the story correctly, Mr. Bliss spent a lot of time and money trying to popularize his symbols, to no avail.  A teacher at the Ontario school mentioned in the wiki article was digging through some old materials and found his symbols, and realized they could be used at their school for students as a introductory step before teaching them to read.  When Bliss found this out he was overjoyed, bought tickets to Canada to visit them and went around talking everyone up at the school and trying to charm them.  As time went on, he got violently upset that they weren't using his symbols 'correctly'.  They were 'corrupting' them, etc.   He tried taking legal action and caused a mess for a long time.  Finally, the school decided it was best to just 'buy' the rights to his symbols so that he couldn't harass them anymore.  Bliss promptly spent the money on publishing a large number of reference manuals to Blissymbolics.   There were more details in the "In the Land of Invented Languages" book that Colin Fine quoted above.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.165.132.252 (talk) 23:19, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Back to the earlier question about Klingon copyright, I'm pretty sure it's possible to copyright the dictionaries and the grammar description but not the language itself (otherwise you would be violating copyright whenever you spoke the language). The only other way I could imagine it being an issue would be if, for example, I made a movie in which people spoke Klingon and I made a lot of money off of it. For what it's worth, the language copyright issue issue also came up (briefly) just a couple days ago at WP:Articles for deletion/Na'vi language. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 02:00, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure about that. Dictionaries of all kinds of languages are copyrighted, but the language itself is not; it's in the public domain. However, Klingon is not in the public domain unless its inventors have declared it to be - it's a work of fiction, hence as copyrightable as anything. They couldn't stop you from talking Klingon with someone, but if you tried to profit from it, I would think it's likely they could enjoin you from doing so. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:07, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * . Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:13, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Translation assistance, please
What does "le desordre c'est moi" mean? I thought Babelfish would tell me but I don't really understand the result. Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 13:05, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It's a play on the famous phrase "L'état c'est moi" (Louis XIV of France)... AnonMoos (talk) 13:14, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * And it means: "Chaos is me" or "I am chaos". Also, it's spelled "désordre". --Xuxl (talk) 15:37, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, both those translations might be considered inadequate to fully render the connotative force of the original French construction (and "chaos is me" is kind of distractingly similar to "woe is me"); that's why "L'état, c'est moi" is often left untranslated in English-language works... AnonMoos (talk) 20:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, all! Dismas |(talk) 11:24, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Translate "gods" into Chinese please.
The context:

"Thank you, sir. God bless you." "Gods have nothing to do with this. You're welcome."


 * God bless you would be: 上帝保佑你. In that, 上帝 is used as "god", pronounced "shangdi". --  k a i n a w &trade; 16:28, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, but what about the question? Thanks. 67.243.1.21 (talk) 18:47, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * What question? It asked to translate "gods" into Chinese within a specific context.  In that context, the translation is 上帝. --  k a i n a w &trade; 20:36, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The full translation might be something along the lines of 上帝不管这个 or 这和上帝没有关系, but without more context (specifically, what "this" is), it's hard to say. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 20:39, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't find that to be a good translation as the second speaker does not appear to subscribe to the monotheism of the first speaker. 67.243.1.21 (talk) 00:08, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The plural is not expressed like that in Chinese, so there's no straightforward way to give that impression anyway. And personally I don't see that to be an important part of the original English either. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 02:09, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * If you attempt to change it from a monotheistic god to some sort of random collection of sub-gods (in order to make the joke), it will be completely lost in Chinese. There are many words for "god".  So, the response will use a completely different word for "dieties" or "spirits" instead of "god".  It is similar to translating a bad Chinese pun into English and getting: "How old is your son?"  "He's four."  "Oh, I'm so sorry for asking." (I'm sure all the Chinese speakers are cringing at such a pathetic pun!) --  k a i n a w &trade; 02:50, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * That was horrific, in both senses of the word! :) --  KageTora - (影虎)  ( Talk? )  11:46, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Tetraphobia, for those who are wondering... AnonMoos (talk) 00:01, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It was not an attempt at a joke; believe me, I know better ones. I simply wanted to make a point. 67.243.1.21 (talk) 00:16, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It's been suggested to me "这和诸神无关系". It sounds good. What do you think? 67.243.1.21 (talk) 14:34, 1 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I can see that you want it to mean "All the gods in heaven", but I've never seen 诸神无 used. That doesn't mean it isn't used - I've just never seen it.  They way it is written, it literally looks like someone who doesn't know Chinese looked up the characters for "all", "God", and "heaven" and decided to cram them together. --  k a i n a w &trade; 01:52, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
 * No, "无关系" is the other word. In other words, "这和诸神没有关系". 67.243.1.21 (talk) 17:47, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

"Automatic Updates is turned off."
My Microsoft Winsows computer often tells me this. Shouldn't it be "Automatic updates are turned off"? You might say that "Automatic Updates" is a singluar piece of software, but automatic updates seems more like a verb or process that would happen more than once, and hence should have a plural. 84.13.181.49 (talk) 18:16, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, it's one of two possibilities. It's either that "Automatic updates" is, as you say, the name of a specific feature or piece of software, or it's another example of Microsoft software being illogical because the programmers didn't think it through.  Why, for example, must you press the "start" button to turn the computer off?  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  19:38, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I loathe Windows as much as any other Mac user, but I don't have a problem with that last one. You press 'start' to start the process of turning the thing off. --Richardrj talkemail 20:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I wish everyone didn't blame the programmers for the shortcomings of the UI designers. Marnanel (talk) 19:59, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Here's another example of a technical writer forgetting a cardinal rule: "Keep your audience in mind". I have to enter my email address and password to access my emails.  On that page, there's a separate box for each of these 2 bits of information.  Underneath is the legend: Please note that email address and password is case sensitive.
 * To normal humans, they're two things, so the verb can only be "are". But obviously to a programmer, they're part of the same overall piece of data, because case sensitivity will apply either to both (sub-)pieces of information or to neither.
 * Another one that used to have me tearing my hair out every time I saw the ad on TV: "Whether you're at home or out on the job, your local Telstra shop are here to help you". The rationale seemed to be that there were many physical shops, in many different locations, and they were all there to help their local communities, so it was a plural thing.  But to refer to them collectively as "your local Telstra shop" and still use the plural verb - I can only assume the ad was written by someone who was not a native speaker of English.  Or maybe it was a cunning ploy to get the audience's attention.  It worked. --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   20:07, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * "But obviously to a programmer, they're part of the same overall piece of data,"  -- LarryMac  | Talk  20:22, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, what else could explain someone writing "A and B is ..." rather than "A and B are ..."? --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   20:31, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Off the top of my head I can think of a) non-native English speaking programmers and b) incorrect design. But to state "obviously" how a programmer thinks is just wrong.  As a programmer-American who has written on or two log in routines, I can't imagine how anybody would write a functional system that could treat user name and password as a single data element.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  20:48, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * In that case, I withdraw my outrageous slur against programmers. --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   20:56, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I can easily imagine someone half-remembering a teacher telling them that "is" follows a singular noun, and saying to themselves, "well, 'password' is a singular noun..." Marnanel (talk) 20:38, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * To answer the OP's question, "Automatic Updates" is indeed the name of the service, and so it's technically correct to say "Automatic Updates is disabled" (cf "The Merry Wives of Windsor is not one of Shakespeare's greatest plays", although italics would probably be used in that case). I can also see another reason - in disabling Automatic Updates, you've disabled automatic updating for _Windows_, but not for any other application.  Someone might read "Automatic updates are disabled" as implying that _all_ automatic updates are disabled, which isn't the case.  Of course, Microsoft's choice of name for the service is open to criticism for the reasons mentioned above, but there's little anyone can do about that. Tevildo (talk) 20:58, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * @JackOfOz: it is common in British English to refer to a collective such as a government, a committee, or a shop with a singular or plural verb, depending on whether it is being regarded in context as an entity or a bunch of people. I know that this is not customary in the US, but I thought Australian agreed with British here - perhaps I'm wrong. Certainly to me, 'your local Telstra shop are there to help you' is unexceptionable. Pinker, discussing a text from a particular subject in The Language Instinct, notes that "My bank are awful" is grammatical in British English, and I concur. --ColinFine (talk) 21:11, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I concur. Hence, the cabinet is meeting today but the cabinet are divided. (Of course, the latter should be impossible.) Here, "Automatic Updates is" is the other side of a coin of common usage - the other being "Norwich City are". On a side note, "Red Hot Chili Peppers"- singular, or plural? - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 21:18, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I understand the above, but this is a different case. The name of each shop was "Telstra Shop".  They were all operated by Telstra.  There were many of them, in different locations.  Each one was, to its local community, the "local Telstra Shop".  Each local Telstra Shop serviced one and only one local community.  One could think of the Telstra Shop as a single nation-wide organisation (is) or as many different outlets (are), but when it comes to talking about local Telstra Shops, that's different.  So, the options were:
 * "The Telstra Shop is/are here to help you", or
 * "Your local Telstra Shop is here to help you", or
 * "Your local Telstra Shops are here to help you".
 * They were like local branches of a bank; one might say "The bank is .." or "The bank are ...", depending on the context, but one would never say "Your local branch of XYZ Bank are always at your service". Would one?  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   21:45, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I probably wouldn't, but I might say "Your local branch of XYZ Bank are always at your service" if I had a point to make about the staff (i.e. a plural by implication). I think, in reality, that it's all down to choice, context etc. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 21:51, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * "The local HSBC have contributed £1000 to the fund". That looks OK to me (BrE). Not "The local HSBC branch", though. Tevildo (talk) 22:25, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * "The branch has" and "The branch have" are both fine for me, as a Brit. As said before, it all depends on whether the speaker sees the branch as a single entity or a collection of staff members. I would think, for me, at least, that the plural verb in this case suggests familiarity and therefore friendliness, this could be why 'your local Telstra Shop are' was used in this case, to suggest this sort of closeness and friendliness. --  KageTora - (影虎)  ( Talk? )  11:43, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

The names Ivan vs. Ioanno in Russian
I saw the following on the back of a car the other day:
 * БОГ ЕСТь ЛЮБОВь -- ИОАННО 4:8

In Russian, are the names Ivan and Ioanno considered two different names? Woogee (talk) 22:09, 29 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps "Ioanno" is used specifically for the Evangelist, as it is here? Adam Bishop (talk) 00:35, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I found these Russian versions of 1 John 4:8 online.
 * 1-e Иоанна 4 Russian Synodal Text
 * 1-e Иоанна 4 Russian koi8r
 * Russian Version (KOI8-R Encoding)- Book of 1 John Chapter 4
 * Библия онлайн: 1 Иоанна 4:1-21 Священное Писание — Перевод нового мира - Официальный веб-сайт Свидетелей Иеговы
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 01:35, 30 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Иоанн (Ioann) is the original Slavonic version of what is generally now written Иван (Ivan = John). It was derived from the Old Greek name Ioannes.  Ioann is still used in relation to religious figures such as John the Evangelist.  For example, the Russian equivalent of Gospel of John is Евангелие от Иоанна (Иоанн appears here in the genitive case, Иоанна, being governed by the preposition от).
 * Tsar Ivan IV of Russia ("Ivan the Terrible") was a Ioann in his day, as were various others, and that form is still occasionally seen in reference to him - such as in A. K. Tolstoy's 1898 play Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, about Ivan's son Tsar Fyodor I, whose patronymic is now usually given as Ivanovich.
 * Ioanno might be some antique oblique case, or maybe just a mis-spelling. --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   07:39, 30 December 2009 (UTC)