Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 July 30

= July 30 =

Need help with Arabic
How would you say the following in Arabic:

1) "India and China"? Would it be al-Hind wa al-Sin?

2) "Travels through India and China"?

Thanks. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 04:24, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * How about "rihla fi'l-Hind wa'l-Sin", رحلة في الهند والصين. (Or do you have to repeat "fi" the second time?) Adam Bishop (talk) 07:52, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * No, you don't have to repeat the fii. If you're pronouncing it, remember that al-Siin is pronounced aS-Siin. Steewi (talk) 01:56, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the help guys. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 00:40, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Non-toxic
How should we hyphenate the word "non-toxic", in the context of;


 * Dry ice has the advantage of being relatively cheap and completely non-toxic.

Should it be "non toxic", "non-toxic" or "nontoxic"?

 Chzz  ►  08:07, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah I would go with "non-toxic" as per your thread header. "Nontoxic" might work as an alternative, but writing it as two words won't do. --Richardrj talkemail 08:28, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Not everyone agrees with this, but IMHO there is no such English word as "non". It's a word element (like "un", "in", "ab", "ig", "pro", etc), and therefore always needs a hyphen (non-toxic), or at the very least needs to be attached to the word it's negating (nontoxic).   --  JackofOz (talk) 08:45, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * It's a bound morpheme, in other words. Indeterminate (talk) 11:24, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * This is another of those pesky British-versus-American things. Folks on the eastern side of the Atlantic tend to use hyphens in non- words much more freely than folks on the western side, who tend to spell them solid. In Merriam-Webster dictionaries (U.S.), for instance, all non- words, including nontoxic, are entered in solid form; and U.S. style guides also recommend the solid spellings, almost without exception. Deor (talk) 12:19, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Also remember the (obsolescent?, British-English?) rule ("not so much a code, more of a guideline, really, Ah-harr") where, with non-bound morphemes, one writes for example "The blood-red sky . . ." but "The sky was blood red." 87.81.230.195 (talk) 00:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Words in English seem to start out separately, then hyphenate, then become a single word. The most obvious example that comes to mind is "base ball", "base-ball" and "baseball". In the context of this discussion, "nonsense" is an obvious example. Unless the Brits spell it "non-sense". Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 17:12, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * There's another phenomenon that's risen in the past 10-15 years. Various common word pairs that were always spelled separately are now routinely being combined: a lot > alot; at all > atall; in case > incase, up to > upto ... I've seen hundreds of similar examples.  A lot of it has its roots in text-speak, which has its own internal validity, but the problem is, it then takes over in places where it's not appropriate, because many people are so used to seeing words spelled that way, they assume it's the correct spelling.  When the "monkey see, monkey do" effect applies, any consideration of whether a word might perhaps be spelled differently (e.g. either as 2 words, or as a hyphenated word, or using different letters) doesn't get a look in.   --  JackofOz (talk) 07:08, 1 August 2009 (UTC)


 * "Homerun" would be another one. Usage drives the evolution of the language, for better or worse. When we start seeing reputable dictionaries giving "U" and "R" as synonyms for "you" and "are", we'll know the apocalypse is nigh. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 07:21, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Efficiency of written languages
The question above about Polish villages got me thinking about the relative efficiency of written languages. By that, I mean, the ratio of the number of letters required to write a text vs. the number of syllables required to speak it. Or some similar measure. Polish looks horrendously difficult for many people because of all the -sz- and -cz- combinations, often appearing side by side, as in "-szcz-", which the languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet handle with just one letter, -щ-. For this sound, written Russian, say, is 4 times more "efficient" than written Polish, because it requires 4 times fewer letters. Then there are converse examples: English and many languages use one letter, x, for the -ks- sound, whereas some other languages have to spell out the component k and s sounds with 2 letters (Russian uses к and с). Then there's the question of diacritics: Vietnamese looks like there are hardly any words at all that don't use at least one; and often up to half a dozen. Then there languages like Chinese and Japanese that use pictograms, sometimes needing up to about 20 brush strokes each, often for not much of a result in terms of spoken syllables. Have any studies been done on this sort of thing to determine the most and least "efficient" written languages? -- JackofOz (talk) 09:06, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You may want to look at this old Reference Desk thread.--Goodmorningworld (talk) 09:29, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Although that thread's about information efficiency and Jack seems to be asking about phonological efficiency. There's articles here on the subject, although I doubt they'll be much help. Orthography talks about efficiency meaning grapheme-to-phoneme ratio, Phonemic orthography talks about the same thing. The orthography article also talks briefly about "deep" vs. "shallow" orthographies, but it conflates the idea with "defectiveness"... I'm working on a correction, but in the meantime keep in mind that it's inaccurate. Anyway, I'm not aware of any studies on comparative orthography efficiency, but if you come across any good ones, could you post them on Talk:Orthography? :) Indeterminate (talk) 11:19, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Polish szcz may look like a mouthful, but in English you need exactly just as many letters to represent the same sounds: shch. Compare it with German, which needs seven: schtsch. But the least efficient language I know is French, where it seems that about only half the letters in any sentence are pronounced, and eaux is just a single vowel! I suppose the most efficient languages should be those for which the alphabets they use were originally designed. Latin alphabet worked well for Classical Latin, but why should it work for languages with completely different phonologies, like English, German, Polish or Vietnamese? Those other languages have to make do with digraphs, trigraphs, diacritics and other ortographic quirks. Cyrillic alphabet was originally designed for Old Bulgarian, so it works well for Slavic languages. If Mieszko I had chosen Slavic-rite Christianity as his religion in 966, then maybe Polish would be easier to spell today (if you know Cyrillic, of course). But he picked Latin-rite Christianity instead, so we use Latin alphabet now. I think the folks who created modern Polish ortography in the 16th century did a pretty good job anyway – it's quite consistent and almost phonemic. — Kpalion(talk) 17:40, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I just had a look at the interwiki links at Nikita Khrushchev. Here's a little breakdown you may find interesting (I included only selected languages, but feel free to add more):
 * {| class="wikitable"

! # Letters ! Languages ! Transliterations of Хрущёв
 * 1
 * Russian
 * Хрущёв
 * 2
 * Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Turkish
 * Хрушчов, Khrusxov, Chruščov, Kruşçev,
 * 3
 * Finnish, Basque, Hungarian, Hebrew
 * Hruštšov, Khrustxev, Hruscsov, חרושצ'וב
 * 4
 * Danish, English, Icelandic, Polish
 * Khrusjtjov, Khrushchev, Krústsjov, Chruszczow
 * 5
 * Dutch, French
 * Chroesjtsjov, Khrouchtchev
 * 6
 * 7
 * German
 * Chruschtschow
 * }
 * Naturally, that tells us only about the šč cluster and little about each language's efficiency in general, but it may be still some starting point. — Kpalion(talk) 18:15, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Irish is pretty inefficient; a word like bhfuil uses six letters to spell three sounds (the word is basically homophonous with English will), and some words use the two letters "fh" to spell no sound at all. +Angr 21:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * 7
 * German
 * Chruschtschow
 * }
 * Naturally, that tells us only about the šč cluster and little about each language's efficiency in general, but it may be still some starting point. — Kpalion(talk) 18:15, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Irish is pretty inefficient; a word like bhfuil uses six letters to spell three sounds (the word is basically homophonous with English will), and some words use the two letters "fh" to spell no sound at all. +Angr 21:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * }
 * Naturally, that tells us only about the šč cluster and little about each language's efficiency in general, but it may be still some starting point. — Kpalion(talk) 18:15, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Irish is pretty inefficient; a word like bhfuil uses six letters to spell three sounds (the word is basically homophonous with English will), and some words use the two letters "fh" to spell no sound at all. +Angr 21:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Irish is pretty inefficient; a word like bhfuil uses six letters to spell three sounds (the word is basically homophonous with English will), and some words use the two letters "fh" to spell no sound at all. +Angr 21:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Is that not because the 'silent' letters are actually conveying information about how the adjacent non-silent letters are to be pronounced? (Interested in linguistics, but entirely Erse-less.) 87.81.230.195 (talk) 00:24, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, sometimes. But often it reflects the language's history of phonological change. In other words, maybe it used to be pronounced the way it's spelled. A phoneme in a particular environment might get dropped from the standard pronunciation, but written language changes much more slowly than spoken language, so it takes a long time for the spelling to catch up. These days, if you try to spell things phonetically, people tell you "you're doing it wrong". Ironic, eh? Indeterminate (talk) 01:56, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Vietnamese doesn't use "up to half a dozen" diacritics in each word. It might look confusing to the uninitiated eyes, but there are at most 3 diacritical marks in each word - the tone mark and some vowels requiring diacritics. DHN (talk) 23:09, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Don't forget the barred d. —Tamfang (talk) 06:00, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, since the vowels with diacritics and the barred d are considered separate letters (just like the dot in i and j are "diacritical marks"), there is actually at most one diacritical mark in each Vietnamese word - the tone mark. DHN (talk) 06:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the correction. As often happens with random questions that float into my mind, the issue is far more complex than I originally thought.  We could compare the spellings of individual words all day long, but that wouldn't really tell us about the languages overall.  Just comparing the number of letters in a given text is not necessarily a good comparison, because some languages can express concepts more concisely than others, using fewer words, but their average word length might be greater.  Some languages, notoriously German and Finnish, concatenate words into sesquipedelian monstrosities, so a word count could be very misleading.  Pen strokes might be something to consider, but that doesn't have much relevance to typed text, where every (lower case) character requires the same number of keystrokes as any other, one.  Then, how do we compare alphabetic writing with pictorial writing?  I'm beginning to see why there's no easy answer to this, maybe no answer at all that takes all the relevant factors into account, and why nobody's aware of any such studies.  Thanks for the input so far. --  JackofOz (talk) 06:48, 1 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I am always amused when I see "Vladimir Poutine" in French. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:51, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Heh. Well, that's at least defensible given the French romanization conventions.  But I'm still amused at how the anglosphere has settled on Tchaikovsky, Tcherepnin, and a few others.  We have no difficulty in writing Chekhov, Cherkassov, Chernobyl and similar names.  This hybrid "Tch" is a bastard of a thing that never otherwise appears at the start of a word in English, but it seems we're stuck with it for certain "special" people.  The New Grove Dictionary (1980) tried valiantly and listed Tchaikovsky as "Chaykovsky", but I suspect later editions have surrendered to the inevitable.  I guess that's the price he has to pay for being so popular; if he had been a relative non-entity, we'd have corrected the romanization years ago without a second's thought. --  JackofOz (talk) 07:06, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I have to share another case that's always astounded me. Prokofiev wrote a ballet with the title "Шут" (pronounced like "shoot" but with a short vowel).  The word means "buffoon" or "clown".  We know it via French as "Chout".  But even the French would pronounce that as "shoo".  To get closer to the correct pronunciation, they'd have to spell it "Choute".  But for some reason, that's not how it's ever written, and as a result most people pronounce it any way but how it's supposed to be pronounced.  It really is a bit of a шутка (joke)! --  JackofOz (talk) 07:18, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Your original question was about the ratio of the number of letters required to write a text vs. the number of syllables required to speak it. Some languages, like Japanese, use phonetic syllabaries in which each sound is represented by a single written syllable. For Japanese words, this is quite efficient: sushi is written すし, karate is　からて, and karaoke is からおけ. There are two ways of representing each syllable, so the same words could also be written スシ,　カラテ, and　カラオケ. On the other hand, Japanese also uses Chinese characters, which complicates matters considerably. For instance, besides すし, sushi can be written be 鮨, 鮓, or 寿司, requiring 16, 16, and 11 strokes respectively. So, in terms of your question, each sound can be represented by a single written character, although as a writing system Japanese is anything but efficient. Exploding Boy (talk) 06:50, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Ger. Eng. Alleinerziehender = single parent?
Are both words completely equal? I get the impression that in German you have to raise your children alone to be "Alleinerziehender", but in English it possible that you are single and have children (even if uncommon).--Quest09 (talk) 10:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I think you are considered both alleinerziehend in German-speaking countries and a single parent in English-speaking ones even if the child's other parent has partial custody, if you have primary custody. If both the child's parents live together and share in childrearing, I don't think they're considered "single parents" even if they're not married. It doesn't mean single in the sense of unmarried, it means single in the sense of doing it all yourself. +Angr 11:23, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think you'd be a "single parent" even if you were living with someone who isn't the child's other parent, e.g. in the case of remarriage, or even if the parent was cohabitating with someone who was helping to raise the child. -- 128.104.112.100 (talk) 20:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Sentence Grammar Check (Another one)
Hello once again. This is, yet again, another sentence that is being disputed as grammatically incorrect. So, I'd like to know the opinion of the experts:

"Chile was not mentioned in the text of the treaty, but was not informed about its existence, which led the Chilean government to believe that the treaty was in reality aimed against Chile."

Anything wrong? Is the "but" correctly added into the sentence? Do you think their is any editor POV on the sentence?

This whole thing is dealing with the defensive treaty. The sentences around it go into more detail about each thing.--$%MarshalN20%$ (talk) 15:24, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Something like "Although Chile was not mentioned in the text of the treaty, the signatories' failure to reveal it to the Chilean government led the government to conclude that the alliance was directed against Chile" might be clearer.
 * (Personal note: I don't think the reference desk is the proper venue for questions like this. Questions about the wording of individual WP articles should be dealt with on the articles' talk pages; and War of the Pacific has a number of grammtical and syntactic problems that need to be addressed. Perhaps you should ask the Guild of Copy Editors to have a look at it.) Deor (talk) 15:55, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Nice! Thank you. I will check with the Guild; they seem to have a horrible backlog, though.--$%MarshalN20%$ (talk) 16:35, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I like Deor's suggestion, but if you were going to go with the original sentence, the "but" really should be an "and" (or "and neither was it informed"). It's giving two independent reasons why the Chilean government believed what it did, either or both of which could have occurred.  One of the reasons is not mitigating the other, so a "but" is not appropriate there.  --  JackofOz (talk) 21:20, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * How could the absence of any mention of Chile in the treaty lead the Chilean government to suspect that the intent was sinister? Surely it was just the secrecy of the proceedings that made them suspicious. Deor (talk) 22:58, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Believe me. The War of the Pacific is a complicated topic. Diego Portales, a Chilean politician, proposed an idea in the 19th century that any kind of union or alliance between Bolivia and Peru would always be a menace/danger to Chile. For some reason, Chileans have lived with that philosophy ever since it was proposed until modern times. When Chile discovered that Peru and Bolivia had formed a defensive alliance, they immediately saw it as a menace to Chile. Of course, the "secrecy" was part of the reason, but even though Chile was not mention in the treaty, they still see themselves as the nation that the treaty was aimed at (Despite Peruvians and Bolivians telling them otherwise prior to the War of the Pacific, during the War of the Pacific, and ever since the end of the War of the Pacific).--$%MarshalN20%$ (talk) 06:11, 31 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The first point mitigates the second. —Tamfang (talk) 06:03, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

The meaning of "Adonio"
Hi, Does anyone know the meaning of this word please? I think it could be latin although it looks italian to me.

Many thanks in advance. Gwen —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.10.206.40 (talk) 18:25, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * According to the Italian WP is a metrical foot in poetry, consisting of a dactyl and a spondee. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 18:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Context would help. According to the DRAE, adonio has the same meaning in Spanish as it does in Italian. A more common Spanish word with almost the same pronunciation is "idóneo", which means suitable. Googling also shows that it is a name, probably a variant of Adonis. --NorwegianBluetalk 20:06, 30 July 2009 (UTC)