Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 December 6

= December 6 =

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Which is the original title of this classic novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Does original title include "the"? Wikipedia title omits "the" from article title, it includes "the" in the first sentence. --Boonlup (talk) 07:42, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The original title page is shown in the article and it does not begin with "The". I just checked the British Library's online catalog and they show the original edition without a "The".  So the Wikipedia article title is correct.  The catalog also shows that the book has been published with the "The", so the article's first sentence is correct.  But it should mention the original form of the title; I'll change it.  --Anonymous, 09:02 UTC, December 6, 2009.


 * Incidentally, the talk page for the article goes into some detail about the exact title that should be used for the article. When you have questions about the accuracy of something you see in an article, checking the talk page is often the best first step. Matt Deres (talk) 15:53, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Holy Roman Empire
I'm looking for a linguistic map of the Holy Roman Empire, showing speaking areas of germanic, romance and slavic languages. Something similar to this: .--151.51.22.147 (talk) 15:31, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * What year? The HRE was around for a long time. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 15:48, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The Germanic-Romance language boundary hasn't really changed all that much since ca. 962 A.D. (some relatively minor adjustments, no real large-scale fluctuations). Germanic vs. Slavic is an entirely separate matter... AnonMoos (talk) 00:04, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Language games to amuse kids
Christmas is rolling up and I will be spending some of it in the company of little ones, say toddler-ish to ten years old or so. I would like to have ideas of what to do with them, to test their language development in (as the kids say) the funnest way possible. I am thinking of things like the wug test (and I've followed the links from there to Professor Gleason's page). Comparatives and superlatives? Vocab range? Irregular past tenses? Any ideas for how I can approach this? Needless to say, my young relatives and friends' kids are very brainy babes. BrainyBabe (talk) 19:20, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't know about testing, but for fun why not have a tongue-twister competition? Another one we used to do at summer camp was chant (there is no real tune) "I like to eat, I like to eat, I like to eat green apples and bananas" and then repeat it five times subbing in one letter of the alphabet for all of the vowels. So "Ey lake tay ate, Ey lake tay ate, Ey lake tay ate greyn eypples eynd bayneyneys, Ee leek tee eat, I like tai ait, etc. U for some reason kids find particularly funny :) Best, WikiJedits (talk) 20:06, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * We used to play a version of Balderdash, where we are given an unfamiliar word, and you have to come up with a definition on your own. Then you read out the definitions, slipping the real one in there, and vote on which one's the real meaning. For a list of tongue twisters, the best page I've ever seen was http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/. Steewi (talk) 23:09, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * How about teapot (game)? Unfortunately, we currently only have the German article, de:Teekesselchen, and I currently don't have the time to translate it. Maybe next week. Another language game, which primarily trains memory, is Kofferpacken (literally "suitcase packing"; not sure if there is an English name for it). It goes as follows:
 * Andy: I'm packing my suitcase, and I'm packing a T-shirt.
 * Beth: I'm packing my suitcase, and I'm packing a T-shirt and my bathing suit.
 * Charly: I'm packing my suitcase, and I'm packing a shirt, my bathing suit, and my rubber boots.
 * ... and so on. Who messes up gets eliminated. &mdash; Sebastian 04:04, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Being an EFL/ESL teacher for many years myself, I could give you a few hundred links (well, maybe a few dozen) to websites with language games on, but they are pretty much essentially going to be websites with a bunch of the same games on with slight variations. However, one link I could give would be GenkiEnglish. I guess the kids in question are native speakers, but it wouldn't be hard to adapt the games on this site to native speakers. Have fun! --  KageTora - SPQW - (影虎)  ( talk )  08:28, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
 * A couple of games here. They may like something as simple as going round the table and everyone saying a word starting with H or whatever. Miss a turn if you can't think of one, or for rude words. Itsmejudith (talk) 17:06, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

One of the games I liked in linguistics class was this: word pairs can be compared based on whether they sound alike, mean alike, or are spelled alike. There are eight possible combinations (same, same, different; different, same, different, etc.); can the kids come up with word pairs for each of the possible combinations? For example polish and Polish could be the word pair for different, different, same, because they don't sound alike or mean alike, but have the same letters. There will be some judgment required to officiate what qualifies as "alike", but it can be fun regardless. Obviously, this would be more for the older kids. Matt Deres (talk) 21:10, 7 December 2009 (UTC)


 * These all sound great. But I think most of what has been suggested will be suitable for the older schoolchildren, those who can already read and write (and spell). What about the younger kids, those who haven't entirely got their tongues round their first langauge yet? What can one do with two to five year olds, not just to amuse me and them, but for me to see how they are developing? I appreciate the ideas so far, thanks -- keep 'em coming! BrainyBabe (talk) 22:49, 7 December 2009 (UTC)


 * If there are very small toddlers, and if you're good enough at reproducing foreign phonemes, you could repeat the famous "magnet effect" experiment, which is briefly described here. Wouldn't it be cool if the little toddlers outdid the older kids in such a game? &mdash; Sebastian 06:28, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

French phonotactics
Why aren't there many French words with a nasal consonant in a word-medial coda? --84.62.213.156 (talk) 21:14, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Can you be more specific? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  21:19, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * This is the same person as "why can't X be a word of Y"? Blocked on sight. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 21:25, 6 December 2009 (UTC)