Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 October 3

= October 3 =

List of 1000 most common French words
I'm getting to the point in my French studies where a lack of vocabulary is becoming my main problem. I have been surfing google, in French and English for a list of the top 1000 or so words in French and their English equivalents. I am not really turning up anything, other than some programs that won't run on Linux (and I'm hesitant about 3rd party software on Windows). If anybody knows of just a plain file that has such a list, I'd much appreciate it.

Merci, Falconus p t   c 00:07, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't know of a list off the top of my head, but if you know anyone in a linguistics department I bet they could find something&mdash;for major languages like this there are many corpora with this kind of information. From doing some quick googling, I came across this (but I can't tell if it's organized in any way or if it's just the conversations) (nvm, it's just transcriptions) and this (not a corpus, but a paper about a corpus--from there you might be able to find the actual corpus), as well as others that aren't free. If you search for things like "French corpus", "French corpora", "French text corpus", etc., you may find things. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 00:15, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * That being said, I don't think looking at a corpus is the best way to improve your language skills...1000 words is less than it sounds like (so you might already know most of the top 1000), and memorizing words by rote is often not very effective. A better way would be to find some French books, films, etc., and try to read them, looking up new words as you go--when you learn a word in context like that, it sticks better. If you have anyone living in France whom you can contact, they can often find French translations of popular American stuff, so for example if you've already read Harry Potter then you can try re-reading it in French, which is less intimidating, "stepping-stone" sort of thing you can do before diving into actual French novels. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 00:18, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks... I do actually have Harry Potter in French, so I guess I can try that.  Falconus p  t   c 00:31, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * If you have relatively-easily access to U.S. educational publishers, Vis-Ed has put out a set of 1,000 French-English vocabulary flash cards for the last half-century or so (US$14.95 new; ISBN 1-55637-005-9). They have other cards to learn verbs, grammar and conversation. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:16, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * If you like comics or comic books, Tintin was of course published in French long before translation into English, Flemish (Hergé was Belgian) and dozens of other languages. So you could get copies of the same adventure in both French and your native tongue, although when as a teenager I read "Prisoners of the Sun" in French, the English translation had not yet been widely published, making it a little harder to parse out. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:23, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * My all-time favorite comic to read in French will always be Asterix ;) r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 03:27, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that reading Tintin in the original is an excellent adjunct to learning French - we did so in my somewhat traditional English boarding school some 4 decades ago - but be aware that the English (and probably other-language) versions are far from straight translations: the originals are rich in untranslatable puns, jokes and other idioms, so the (excellent) translators had to make up or utilize entirely new/different ones of equal quality in English to preserve the levels of wit. (The same problem occurs with the works of Stanislav Lem, whose usual Polish-English translator Michael Kandel manages similar feats.) If you can get hold of some popular genre fiction paperbacks such as crime novels (e.g. Ed McBain translated into French, or Georges Simenon in the original), you might find they provide useful parallel texts, as they are often pitched at a less erudite level than, say, Marcel Proust. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 12:38, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I can hear people's teeth grinding in rage from what you wrote above: "...popular American stuff, so for example... Harry Potter". +Angr 09:10, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * True...but it's not because I like it. Last time I was in France, Harry Potter and Spiderman were everywhere... r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 14:13, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I think Angr's point was that J. K. Rowling is British... Ironfrost (talk) 16:57, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, she is? Oops. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 17:08, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * ungrinding teeth Actually the Harry Potter series may not be the ideal solution as the author quite naturally made so many words up. I'm not saying that it won't help, just that you may spend time trying to understand words that are simply not used in the French language outside the realms of magical fantasy, especially if you are looking for the 1,000 most common French words. The concept of reading a book that you have enjoyed in English is a good idea, but the more colloquial it is in English, the more you will come up with some odd phrases in French which when you try and translate (and Google Translator fails miserably on this example off the top of my head: "se faire rouler dans la farine" translates along the lines of "to be taken for a ride") you might end up dispairing. One cheap and cheerful solution is to pick a Wikipedia article that you like, and click on the French version (although the content most probably won't be identical). And if you get stuck, come to my userpage and email me. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 10:10, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * That's an excellent idea! fr-wiki could certainly use the help ;) r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 14:25, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Well this is a bit left field, but... bear with me... when I was doing my shorthand training there was a book containing the 1000 most common words and their shorthand outlines. You could see if there's a similar book containing the 1000 most common French words and their outlines. After all, there are many bilingual secretaries and they have to train in two languages, so there may well be a French/English/Shorthand book, which will probably meet your needs. --TammyMoet (talk) 09:27, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * ¶ My Googling "French thousand words" yielded this from Wiktionary: Wiktionary:Wiktionary:French_frequency_lists/1-2000, but pay heed to the cautions at Wikt:Wiktionary:Frequency_lists. And of course simple frequency lists won't tell you how useful each individual word might or might not be, or how well the words fit together. If, hypothetically, "aunt" (tante) and "uncle" (oncle) were on the list, you'd surely want to learn "niece" and "nephew" even if they weren't on the list. ¶ And, as implied above, the best way to learn words is to use each one a few times until you're comfortable with them and they have some tangible "feel" or reality to you, just as when you were learning new words in your native tongue. That's why you have to do those tedious writing and translation exercises for every lesson. —— Shakescene (talk) 10:04, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Alright, thanks... So I guess I should try reading French texts/watching French movies and then studying any expression that doesn't make sense, such as rolling in the flour, as referenced above.  Thanks to everyone who got back to me. Falconus p  t   c 16:52, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Je vous offre et  ("les mots les plus fréquents", au bas du page) 129.67.37.143 (talk) 19:58, 4 October 2009 (UTC)


 * But, real French comics are not necessarily written in School French, I personally like Frederic Boilet (also good for Learning Kanji- see Question for Kanji Pronounciation).--Radh (talk) 11:34, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Monthly anniversary called "Mensiversary"
I've been told a monthly Anniversary should be called a "Mensiversary". Are there similar words that can be used to describe 2 months (1/6th year), 3 months (1/4th year), 4 months (1/3rd year), and 6 months (1/2 year)? Thanks. Anythingapplied (talk) 08:25, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * This is a complete irrelevancy from the other end of the chronological spectrum, but my favorite story about U.S. President Gerald Ford (who Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson once said wasn't a smart enough House Minority Leader to "walk and chew gum at the same time") is from his address to the 150th-anniversary convocation dinner of Yale Law School—of which he, unlike LBJ, was a graduate. After thanking his hosts, he said, "Obviously, it's a very great privilege and pleasure to be here at the Yale Law School Sesquicentennial Convocation." Then he stopped abruptly to issue this challenge, "And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time." . —— Shakescene (talk) 09:05, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Gerry Ford served the Presidency with honor, which is more than I can say for some of those birds in my lifetime. "Mensiversary"? That's a new one on me, but it's all over google. And what kind of event would qualify as a "mensiversary" anyway? Something that happens every 3 months is typically called "quarterly", every 2 months is "bi-monthly" (which can be a confusing term, though) and 6 months is "semi-annually". Something monthly is a "monthly". This link indicates that you would say things like "6th mensiversary"... and that "mensiversary" itself is a coined word. Since both it and anniversary come from Latin roots for "month" and "year" respectively, that along with the prefix "6th" and so on would suggest you need a Latin prefix for the number, unless there are separate Latin words indicating "6 months" and so on. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 09:14, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Some might wish he had served the Presidency less. —Tamfang (talk) 06:28, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Assuming the prefix is ordinal (first, second, third, etc.) rather than cardinal (one, two, three, etc.) then an appropriate prefix could be something to do with primary, secondary, teriary, quaternary, etc. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 09:18, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * My partner and I always celebrate the 24th of the month, because we met on the 24th of a month. We sometimes call it our "monthiversary", but "mensiversary" might be even .... nah, it sounds too close to the outdated word menses, something I've always considered a fundamental design flaw on the part of Mother Nature.  Funny how "woman trouble" could refer to menses, or just to men.  :)  --  JackofOz (talk) 12:03, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * That makes sense - basically making a thing out of the specific day of the month, instead of just one day a year. "Monthiversary" as a word makes more sense, in a way, since it's a better-known prefix. It's an etymological mixed metaphor, but this is English, so it doesn't much matter. As you say, about the only time you hear the root "menses" in English, has to do with menstruation - which is simply a Latinized way of labeling a woman's "monthly". Indications are that "Mensiversary" is a fairly recently coined (some sources say "fake") word, so "monthiversary" or "six-monthiversary" could be equally valid. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 16:31, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The overiding purpose of a language is to communicate effectively. I think that if you came up to me and talked about a mensiversary I would get confused, especially if I had never had Latin.  If I wasn't thinking, I'd be trying to pin it to the words that sound similar (such as adversary and monthly cycles or mental [from mens]) and come up with something about opposing the mind or periods.  Maybe I just have my head screwed on strangely, but perhaps it would be more effective to just say "Monthly anniversary", which while not being technically correct, conveys the meaning perfectly, at least to me. Falconus p  t   c 17:02, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Indeed. "Monthly anniversary", I think, even though an etymological oxymoron, would be more quickly understood than a coined work like "mensiversary", which I suspect many (as hinted by Jack) would take to be a synonym for, or more likely a joke about, "menstruation". As a vague comparison of using language the way feel like using it, consider the various high-level scandals since 1974 that have the suffix "-gate" even though it makes no literal sense. It's a referback to "Watergate", and "something-gate" is understood to be shorthand for a scandal. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 18:38, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I've never even heard "monthly anniversary"; more common is "x-month anniversary". e.g., "My boyfriend and I are celebrating our 3-month anniversary". It may not be logical, but there are far more illogical things that people say (ever heard my favorite, "I just ran my first 5K marathon!" ?) r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 18:43, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I had never heard of the concept either until I saw this. But what you're talking about is kind of different from what Jack is talking about. He's talking about celebrating the 24th of every month. I think you're talking about milestones (or millstones) like 6 months, a year, maybe 1 1/2 years, 2 years, etc. In effect, Jack would be celebrating, for example, a 37th month. 5K marathon, eh? Well, if it's their first 5K, it probably felt like a marathon. "Nike!" [drops dead from exhaustion and improperly laced shoes] →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 19:52, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Sportspeak is a whole new world, linguistically speaking. We really ought to have an article on it, as it's commented on often enough.   Some things that come out of the mouths of sporting commentators and players are fine additions to the language.  But others ... don't get me started.  --  JackofOz (talk) 21:41, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * See Colemanballs. Malcolm XIV (talk) 11:11, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Malcolm. I must obtain some copies for my guffaw-bank.  --  JackofOz (talk) 20:20, 5 October 2009 (UTC)


 * To answer the OP for a change: you could invent sextantiversary, quadrantiversary, trientiversary, semianniversary (I've even used the last). — My ex and I met under a full moon, and for a while we counted luniversaries. —Tamfang (talk) 06:24, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Why is there a J in 'Juventus'?
Why is Juventus FC so called when the Italian alphabet doesn't contain the letter J? Barra21 (talk) 16:11, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Your answer is in the very first sentence of the Juventus F.C. article: its name comes from Latin, not Italian. And Latin 'i' was sometimes also written 'j'. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 16:21, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The Latin letter "I" at the beginning of a word was the "consonantal" version, which evolved into "J", just as "V" was both a vowel and a consonant depending on where it was used. Hence "IESVS" for "JESUS" and such as that (see INRI). →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 16:35, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * There are also a very few words in the Italian language that use the letter "j", as well as some proper names (I remember wondering about how to pronounce the name of a lighting manufacturer called DeMajo; a native informed me it is pronounced as if it were "DeMaio"). There's more on J in the Italian Wikipedia. --Rallette (talk) 09:44, 4 October 2009 (UTC)


 * See Italo Tajo, for example. --  JackofOz (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Expats using local words even if there is an English equivalent
I've noticed that among people who live in a foreign country, it's quite common to use some local words, even when speaking their native language with other native speakers. It seems like there are 3 categories of words this applies to: words that don't have an equivalent in their native language, words whose official translation is obscure or very long, and words which already have a direct, commonly known translation.

I'm interested in the third category, and I was wanting to read more about it but I don't know what to search for. So my questions are:

1. Is there a word for this, i.e. using a word in the local language in preference to the English equivalent?

2. Where can I find good articles discussing this phenomenon (does Wikipedia have one?)

P.S. the discussion that made me want to look this up was about the word "ayi", which is basically just Chinese for "maid", and my initial theory is "it's because people are embarrassed to admit to having a maid". But that's not the only word like this, and I guess there must be someone on the internet who has researched this sort of thing and written about it. 221.122.110.21 (talk) 16:51, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * This is a kind of code-switching. I don't know if there's a more specific term for this particular type of it. If you search google, google scholar, a local library, or most linguistics journals, you'll find lots of research on code-switching. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 16:53, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * As for why expats do it...I'm not very familiar with the code-switching literature, but judging by my personal experience there are two big reasons. One is that it's fun and mixing languages sounds funny (I mean, who doesn't love speaking franglais). Another (for at least some people) is that the speaker actually speaks little to none of the local language, but likes to throw in the few words he knows to feel like he's 'exotic' and living like the 'natives'. A third reason can be expressing solidarity with others who have the same language background as you...for example, I have an American friend with whom I studied both French and Chinese together, so often when talking we mix things together just because we can, and it creates a conversation that most other people around us can't totally make sense of but we can since we happen to have the same several languages in common. (For an example without French... she recently left me a voicemail that included "so 今天 like 现在 i'm supposed to move into like this new 公寓, 可是..." .) <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 16:59, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Is "ayi" exactly identical to "maid"? Or does it have some different connotation in Chinese, linguistically or culturally? I'm asking because in America, having a maid implies that you're relatively wealthy and can afford to have someone else do the drudgery around the house. Maybe that's considered a bad thing in Chinese culture, i.e. that having a maid implies "laziness"? →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 16:59, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * More literally, it means "auntie". But kinship terms have a lot more uses in Chinese than English (for example, I call friends' parents aunt and uncle if I'm not being formal, random kids call people like me big brother, etc.). As for maids...it's relatively common there, in expat communities and foreign students' dorms, etc., to have a fuwuyuan (service person) who cleans out your room. (Depending on who you are and where, they might also check out your e-mail and root through your stuff, to make sure you aren't stealing any of those good ol' state secrets :P .) If you're speaking mostly Chinese in your day-to-day life, you don't think of them as "the maid", you think of them as "the fuwuyuan", so it might not even cross your mind to call them anything else. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 17:04, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I wrote this before, but the conversation moved on and it didn't fit in my reply anymore so I'm posting it here instead: even though "ayi" has a pretty wide meaning in Chinese, when it's used as an English word it almost always means "maid". 221.122.110.21 (talk) 18:00, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * When you put it that way, it makes sense. It might fall more into the realm of a local word being more precise or commonly used locally, than the Chinese word. That seems to relate to a phenomenon which I've observed frequently with my foreign-born colleagues - mixing their native language and English when discussing project work. I asked about that, and they said that they tend to retain their own verbs and use the English nouns. →Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 17:13, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I often do the same when working in the US with a Chinese colleague who speaks English--even if we both know the Chinese word, sometimes it's easier to substitute, especially on the word that is the focus of the sentence. "我还需要一些native speakers", "试验后我们要做一格ANOVA", "如果这样的话 被试们会觉得这些句子很weird", etc. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 17:27, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I've come across the first two cases and I think in those cases it is a mixture of convenience and context. We used quite a few Swiss-German words, but almost exclusively in the context of babies/young children because we picked them up from my brother's local daycare. Since everything at the daycare happened in Swiss-German (or High German in conversations with us), it seems perfectly natural that we used Swiss-German words at home as well. --Tango (talk) 17:29, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * As an American living in Germany, I'm interested in this too. There are definitely certain words that English-speakers who live in Germany long-term say in German rather than in English. One example from the OP's third category is Handy, used as a noun to mean cell phone/mobile phone. We English speakers in Germany are far more likely to say "Give me a call on my handy" than "Give me a call on my cell (phone)" or "...on my mobile (phone)", and when I'm back in the States I have to constantly remind myself not to say it there. This may be because cell phones have only relatively recently become ubiquitous (and were therefore not part of the active vocabulary of those of us who have been in Germany for more than 10 years or so when we arrived in Germany), or it may be a compromise between the American term "cell (phone)" and the British term "mobile (phone)": by using the German word, we can avoid pushing an Americanism on our British friends and they can avoid pushing a Briticism on us. However, I believe it is relatively rare that there's a specific vocabulary item that is consistently more likely to be spoken in German than in English, the way "Handy" is; more often, cases from the OP's category 3 are just an isolated word that happened to come into the speaker's mind faster than its English equivalent (for example, I might say on one occasion "Let's take the Fahrstuhl" instead of "elevator/lift", but that doesn't mean I would regularly do so, much less that all the other English speakers would; rather, on that one occasion, Fahrstuhl simply came to my lips faster than elevator did, and on other occasions elevator would come first). I don't know if there have been any studies done on the phenomenon, though. It's the sort of thing that would be extremely difficult to analyze scientifically. +Angr 17:40, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks to everyone for replying so fast (and adding even more replies when I was writing this)! I'm not convinced that it's a result of thinking in Chinese - many of the people who have ayis aren't fluent in Chinese at all, people mostly pick up the word from other expats. I think perhaps the answer is something like Baseball Bugs first said - even though from a technical point of view a maid and an ayi are basically the same thing, the cultural meaning is different. A maid is someone only rich people can afford; an ayi is someone you or your friends employ. In Angr's case, a cellphone was something only rich people had when he/she left the US, but everyone in Germany has a handy. Perhaps it's not so strange to have a new loanword for a new situation you've only ever encountered abroad? 221.122.110.21 (talk) 17:58, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * It's an awful habit, but I code-switch all the time, depending upon 1. the country I'm in; 2. the company I'm keeping; and 3. whether I can be bothered or not to find the precise terms to keep a conversation entirely in one language. Often it is more convenient to use the local word, as it might have a more precise local meaning in a given context. If I'm with fellow multi-linguists, and I can express something better in another language, then I will switch to that language for that word or phrase. It drives people absolutely nuts, can seem incredibly pretentious and is frowned upon by some of my family and friends who are either purists or monolingual, but I'm sorry, sometimes it's just the best way to express my thought process and it can be tiresome to have to translate something into an unsatisfactory version. Though I have been known to thwack people with a wet kipper if they invent words in a language, such as "nous devons calendariser les dépenses". -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 20:43, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep, same here...I once had a girlfriend who was trilingual in the same three languages that I speak, so I would mix and match all three of them in the same sentence without caring, and she always got mad even though she could understand every word of it. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 20:46, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Huh, none of my English-speaking friends in Germany minds in the least about people doing this. I just have to remember not to toss in occasional German words when I'm, say, talking to my mother on the phone. The only time I've heard someone object to code-switching is when they witnessed an English-speaking mother codeswitching when speaking to her young child (e.g. "Help me look for a Parkplatz, honey" instead of "parking place"), because of the risk that the child (who was growing up bilingual) would get confused about which German words he could use when speaking English to monolinguals (e.g. kindergarten) and which ones he couldn't (e.g. Parkplatz). +Angr 21:04, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * For me it was also less of an issue (except with my parents, both multilingual but entrenched purists) when I lived in Germany, but more so when I lived in Geneva, Paris or Narbonne. Now that I'm in Rabat it's a very common phenomenon, with phrases constructed from Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French and smatterings of English just for the heck of it. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 21:42, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I think that must be why (at least before international television and recorded music became so prevalent) Britons are so often thrown, though only mildly so, by colloquial American. I know my family was when we stayed in New England in the mid-1950's when I was six. because so many words had non-British sources, such as "stoop" and "cookie" (both from the Dutch). And each wave of immigrants brought new words into American speech that didn't enter British speech. The opposite effect is that there are good English words or usages from the 17th century, like "fall" and "gotten", which are still part of normal American speech but have become archaic in Britain. ¶ That's entirely skipping over the fact (covered by the original enquirer's first point) that pioneers and settlers would use whatever local term (often Amerindian, Spanish or French-Canadian) was handiest to describe things that didn't already have an English name because they were uncommon or unknown in England. Just as Australians and New Zealanders use all those Aboriginal and Maori derived words like kangaroo. —— Shakescene (talk) 22:41, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

It has nothing to do with being fluent in the local language, as when I was in Japan for ten years it was not only I who did it, but also plenty other 'gaijin' who'd lived there for a while (short while - long while - didn't matter). We all had to call the 'kanojos' (girlfriends) on our 'keitais' (mobile phones) because some 'yopparai ojisan' (drunken old man) had kept us in the 'izakaya' (pub) way past the last 'densha' (train) and we only realized when we got to the 'eki' (station), and only had 'san-zen-en' (3,000 yen) left which wasn't enough for a taxi back to the 'apaato' (flat) so we'd be staying in a 'kapuseru' (capsule hotel) - and this was how we were explaining it to fellow native English speakers. It just became a normal way for us to talk - so much so that, when I meet old mates from Japan back here in England we tend to switch back into that way of speaking, which infuriates anyone we're with. One colleague once said something quite interesting to me, though. She said that these words have inserted themselves into our 'gaijin dialect' so comfortably, that we even start to abbreviate some words (e.g. 'shink' for 'shinkansen' (bullet train)) and verbify some nouns (e.g. "I'll be 'shinking' up to Tokyo at the weekend"). I'm quite interested in the topic, too, so I would be interested if there has been any research done on this. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 23:25, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I know that the US military in Germany frequently uses mox nix, an Americanization of macht's nichts, it doesn't matter. It's probably not something they would use in any other part of the world, unless they were speaking to other military members who have been in Germany.   Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 00:21, 4 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Despite living in Japan for over ten years I have not encountered the lect that Kagetora describes. Three exceptions: keitai (avoids a troublesome choice among English alternatives and also may be more specific, used in contradistinction to pitchi); kapuseru (as it's largely specific to Japan and "capsule" is merely an anglicization); apāto (as it's more informative than "flat"). I don't deny that some anglophones use "densha" etc within English, but wonder if they are numerous. -- Hoary (talk) 01:12, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a similar "ex-pat dialect" (as I've heard it called) amongst Anglos in China. Some examples I know are "I have 50 kuai" (newbies will still say 50yuan, i.e. money), sanlunche (bicycle taxi), waiguoren (foreigners = gaijin). They're usually local to an area, or a group of foreigners, but they spread around.
 * I suspect they're most common in countries where there aren't many ex-pats, and they stick together, and where it's common not to learn the local language. This is most common in China, Japan, Korea, etc. Indian English is influenced by the ex-pat dialect of the British colonisers. I don't know of any specific studies of it though. It would be interesting to read. 130.56.65.25 (talk) 02:53, 6 October 2009 (UTC)