Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 September 7

= September 7 =

What language is this in?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-783292470513012671&hl=en# Looks like Uzbek or Uyghur. --03:47, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * My first guess would be Uzbek. It's not Uyghur, there are some differences in vocabulary and orthography and the vowel harmony is consistent. But it's clearly a Turkic language from Central Asia. Another possibility is Kazakh or Kyrgyz, but those are generally written as Cyrillic; Uzbek is more likely because that's usually written in Latin script . That being said, all those Central Asian Turkic languages are virtually indistinguishable anyway :P r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 03:51, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, I bet it's more likely to be Azerbaijani or something closely related to that. I can barely understand a word of it, which means it's probably not Uzbek (I speak some Uyghur, and Uzbek and Uyghur are almost mutually intelligible). The Latin script used in the description is consistent with the script used for Azerbaijani. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 03:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * As a complete blundering ignoramus, and going purely by the most superficial context, I would ignorantly guess Turkmen, Turkish or Uyghur. But paste the text into Google and you'll get 26 hits plus alternate pages, so maybe that's worth a shot to someone who's actually equipped to discern the languages. And if the languages are mutually intelligible, at least in part, then some of the featured videos might be in cognate languages (like the video on Tibet, which might be in Uyghur even if the other videos aren't.) —— Shakescene (talk) 04:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC) ¶ And by a complete blundering ignoramus, I mean someone who doesn't know a single word of any Turkic or Central Asian language and is going purely by the appearance of the YouTube and Google pages. —— Shakescene (talk) 04:53, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Looking at the video itself, the subject is very clearly the Uyghur struggle for autonomy or independence in East Turkestan (cf. the crescent and star on a sky blue flag), currently the Xinjiang-Uyghur [Sinkiang-Uighur] Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. I don't know the significance of the moon and wolves, but someone here must. I think the mosque in in Urumqi (Urumchi). But that doesn't tell us what language the video is narrated in. —— Shakescene (talk) 05:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * In response to your first message, all I can say for certain is it's not Uyghur. But Turkish and Turkmen are all possibilities, as is Azerbaijani which I suggested above. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 05:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I can only judge the written text, not the language that's being sung, but the written text is almost certainly (I'd say 95% certainty) Turkish, not Uyghur, Turkmen, Uzbek, or Azeri. It's not Uyghur because Uyghur is usually written in the Arabic or Cyrillic alphabet, almost never the Latin. It's not Turkmen or Uzbek, because they don't use Ğ, nor do they distinguish İ and I, which the text does. (And to judge by Uyghur alphabet, no Latin version of Uyghur uses Ğ or distinguishes İ and I either.) It's thus either Azeri or Turkish, but Turkish is far more likely because the text never uses the letter Ə, which is one of the most common letters in Azeri (though I suppose it would be possible to compose an Azeri text without it, just as it's possible to compose an English text without the letter E). It also doesn't use Q or X, but I don't know how common those letters are in Azeri. Thus it's either Turkish, or an Azeri text that by accident or design manages to avoid the most common Azeri vowel. Of the two possibilities, Turkish is way more likely. +Angr 07:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * (minor aside): Actually, today Uyghur Latin script is becoming pretty common, especially on the internet in forums, comment threads, etc., where a lot of people have difficulty finding the fonts or rendering support for the Arabic-derived script. Of course, it depends a lot where you are&mdash;I think Uyghurs in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan use Cyrillic much more, for example. That being said, you're still right that this isn't Uyghur: no Uyghur Latin script I know of uses Ğ or distinguishes front and back I (although some people, myself not included, believe it should do the latter). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 16:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Turkish. "íhtílal türküsü" = "songs of revolution". Perhaps worth mentioning that Turks sympathize strongly with the Uyghurs, who they view (not without reason) as distant kin. --Pykk (talk) 11:02, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The map at 02:00 is a clear representation of Turanist discourse. Btw, is the Turkish word ihtilal related to the Arabic احتلال? --Soman (talk) 13:01, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The Turkish "ihtilal" is indeed derived from the Arabic, as are a large number of abstract words in the Turkish language. --Xuxl (talk) 18:47, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The orthography, is Turkish, for sure. Many of the slides are also in Turkish; I believe doğu is a Turkey-specific neologism.  However, the first slide does not appear to distinguish i from ı, just look at the word yillik which would be yıllık in Turkish.  My best guess (emphasis on guess) is that this is Turkish spoken (and written) by a Uyghur.  I've also just noticing üch bin (three thousand); bin is exclusively Oghuz (western Turkic) I believe; Uyghur would use mang.  And in response to Shakescene, the mosque pictured is the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, which I would assume is still standing after the demolition of most of Kashgar's Old City.  It's not in Urumchi.  The wolves, AFAIK, is a symbol for the Uyghur people.  216.195.18.44 (talk) 01:48, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Difference between agglutinative and isolating languages
In spoken language, what's the difference between agglutination (a bunch of morphemes in a row considered one word) and isolation (a bunch of morphemes in a row considered multiple words)? Couldn't you write the language with spaces and call it an isolating/analytic language, or write it without spaces and call it an agglutinative language? Obviously I'm misunderstanding one or both of these concepts, but I keep looking at the articles and I still don't get it. Thanks, 74.105.132.151 (talk) 04:31, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * To add to the confusion, I've definitely heard people refer to English as "isolating" and German as "agglutinating", but one I heard from one linguist that English compounds are actually similar to those in German, but the fact that we use dashes or spaces rather than writing them as one word is an orthographic convention. Can anyone explain this? Mo-Al (talk) 04:40, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Mo-Al: Kind of depends on the compound. It's true that noun-noun compounds like "toilet bowl" or "car seat" (where an English speaker wouldn't necessarily see anything wrong with adding a hyphen) are invariably written as one word in other Germanic languages. English tends to avoid preposition+verb compounds; E.g. In the other Germanic languages you can say either "off-finish" or "finish off" (abschließen/schloss ab), but in English only the latter is used. Yet there are some exceptions, like "tomorrow", "downfall". Note that 'downfall' has a different meaning than 'fall down' - which isn't unique to English either. Since English is a Germanic language, the fundamental 'rules' of forming compounds are still there, they're just infrequently and inconsistently used. (Whereas they're frequently and consistently used elsewhere). It doesn't actually make much sense that you say "workbench" but "operating table", "hen house" but "greenhouse". --Pykk (talk) 10:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Agglutination refers more (or at least 50%, let's say), to function morphemes, rather than just content morphemes. So saying a language is "agglutinative" doesn't just mean a word is made of a lot of morphemes (although it certainly can mean that as well); it means that a single content word will have a big bundle of function affixes attached. Mesoamerican languages such as K'iche', Q'anjobal, etc. are good examples of this: a single verb will have person markers, ergativity markers, aspect markers, transitivity markers, tense markers, reflexive pronouns, and more attached to it.
 * "Isolating language", on the other hand, refers not just to words being separate, but to words having very little functional morphology (no verb conjucations, noun declensions, etc.). Chinese is the classic example of this. While the vast majority of nouns are formed by compounding, the language is often considered "isolating" because nouns don't have morphological case marking, verbs don't have person/number/whatever agreement, etc. I once read a long rant about Vietnamese and how it was "not an isolating language" because it has "so many" different function morphemes (it was a writer wanting to "prove" that Vietnamese was modern and not primitive, and thus trying to think up excuses to disassociate it as much as possible to Chinese and to compare it as much as possible to German and French).
 * For a concrete example...take the phrase "i heard that", etc. In one language I study, Uyghur, this is said ئاڭلىشىمچە anglishimche, which can be broken down into angli-shi-m-che (hear - GERUND - 1st.person.POSS - 'according.to' : literally, "according to my hearing", but all in one word). On the other hand, in Chinese, this is 听说 ting shuo (hear say). Clearly, Uyghur is more on the "agglutinative" end of the scale, and Chinese more "isolating".
 * That being said, there is no bright line that cuts a clear divide between isolating and agglutinating languages. They're on a fuzzy continuum, and a lot of linguists don't even really use these monikers (for that very reason). r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 04:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Not sure how that Vietnamese thing would have made too much sense, since standard sources generally say that Vietnamese is the most isolating of all prominent widely-spoken languages in the world today (even more isolating than modern Mandarin Chinese). By the way, German is definitely not "agglutinating" in its case and number inflections! AnonMoos (talk) 09:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Well as an example of a confusing case, look at Tashelhiyt. According to my understanding, the Arabic orthography conventionally groups lots of functional morphemes together into words, while the Latinate orthography seperates them with spaces. I'd give an example, but I don't have the book with me. Mo-Al (talk)
 * That's a good point, although we can't blame it all on the Arabic morphology. Central Asian Turkic languages like Uyghur, Uzbek, Khazakh, Kyrgyz, and Azerbaijani are all equally agglutinative (in fact, some of them&mdash;particularly Uyghur and Uzbek&mdash;are almost mutually intelligible) even though they use a variety of scripts. Uyghur is the only one that mostly uses Arabic script (although Khazakh and Kyrgyz speakers in Xinjiang sometimes use Arabic script as well); Uzbek and Azerbaijani mostly use Latin script, and Khazakh and Kyrgyz mostly Cyrillic, but they're all still agglutinative. One way to tell that functional morphemes are attached to words, regardless of orthography, is the behavior of vowel harmony and other phonological alternations&mdash;both alternations that happen in root words but are triggered by suffixes, and alternations that happen in suffixes in order to have [vowel harmony, voicing agreement, etc., take your pick] with the root. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 05:13, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

74.105.132.151 -- Frequently in agglutinating languages, morphemes are composed of sound sequences which can't really stand alone as separate words by themselves; while in isolating languages, the words which indicate grammatical relations are not really arranged in strict paradigms (the way affixes in agglutinating languages often are), and have more freedom of positioning than do affixes in agglutinating languages, etc. So it's not the case that agglutinating languages and isolating languages are just the same thing, with fewer word boundaries recognized vs. more word boundaries recognized.

For a basic introduction to some of the parameters of language typology in the area of morphology, Edward Sapir's 1921 book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech is still fairly good for beginners (though some of the particular terminology he uses is not generally used by modern linguists), and it's out-of-copyright and available on-line: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12629. -- AnonMoos (talk) 09:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

It's a sliding scale really, so it's probably impossible to get everyone to agree on a particular definition. That said, I don't think German is considered is considered agglutinative by any common standard. It's more agglutinative than English, in the sense that it has (or rather, retains) more cases, and forms compounds more easily. OTOH, the Scandinavian languages lack cases but use suffixes for the definite article, unlike English, German and Hungarian (which usually is considered agglutinative). --Pykk (talk) 10:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, if German has endings in which case, number, and inflectional paradigm are inextricably intertwined, and it's generally impossible to point to any given phonological sub-sequence and say that such phonological material solely and exclusively means "accusative" or whatever, then that's not what's called "agglutinative" in morphological typology... AnonMoos (talk)


 * I didn't say German was agglutinative, I said it wasn't. I said it was a sliding scale. English, German and Finnish are all 'synthetic', but German is more so than English, and Finnish more so than German. Hungarian is ostensibly agglutinative, but obviously closer to Finnish grammar than Finnish is to German. --Pykk (talk) 18:14, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * An assertion that "German is more agglutinating than English" is quite dubious, since very little of the additional inflectional morphology that German has with respect to English could be accurately called "agglutinating", while much of the difference between English and German in compounding actually has a lot more to do with orthographic conventions (adding more word spaces in writing vs. running words together in writing) than with deep-seated linguistic structure differences. The relatively subtle remaining differences in English vs. German compounding do very little to make German truly "agglutinative"... AnonMoos (talk)

Languages of Austria-Hungary
I'm trying to find the Rusyn and Ladin names of the rulers of Austria-Hungary (Emperors of Austria, Kings of Hungary, ...). Both Rusyn and Ladin where languages spoken in Austria-Hungary, but Rusyn was, with Ukrainian, counted as "Ruthenian" while Ladin was counted as a dialect of "Italian". Now, for example, for Franz Joseph I of Austria you get: German: Franz Joseph; Hungarian: Ferenc József; Ukrainian: Франц Йосиф; Polish: Franciszek Józef; Czech: František Josef; Slovak: František Jozef; Slovene: Franc Jožef; Croatian: Franjo Josip; Bosnian: Faruk Jusuf; Serbian: Фрања Јосиф / Franja Josif; Latin: Franciscus Iosephus; Italian: Francesco Giuseppe; Friulian: Francesc Josef; Romanian: Francisc Iosif. But I'm unable to find his Rusyn and Ladin name. --151.51.50.29 (talk) 11:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Just for fun, let's make a table. I'm a bit surprised that Friulian is distinguished if Ladin isn't. —Tamfang (talk) 19:27, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Need English translation of Latin (?) paragraph
For context, the paragraph was written by a Jesuit missionary studying the Kaifeng Jewish Community of China:

"On n'a pu encore rien savoir des biens positif sur les Juifs de Hamkeou, de Nimpo, Peking, Ning-hia, etc. Les Juifs de Caifonfou me dirent qu'ils n'en avoient aucunne connoissance. Avez vous, leurs dis je, communication avec les autres Juifs des pays etrangers, ou des Provinces de Chine. Rep. Depuis plus de 100 ans, nous n'avons vus aucun Juif etranger, et il enest tres peu parmi nous, qui sache lire. A peine deux ou trois expliquent passablement quelques passages. Pour les autres Prinvinces de Chine, nous ne savons pas qu'il y ait des Juifs. Ils disent qu'en Chine il n'y a pas d'autres Juifs, et ils n'ont aucune connoissance d ceux des Indes, du Thibet, et de la Tartarie occidentale, etc."

I, of course, recognize many of the place names mentioned. I'm assuming "juifs" means Jews. Thank you in advance for translating this. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 11:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

We could not even know anything about the positive properties of the Jews Hamkeou of Nimpo, Peking, Ning-hsia, etc.. Jews Caifonfou told me they never had any uninsured items acquaintance. Have you, I say their, communication with other Jews from foreign countries, or provinces of China. Rep. For over 100 years we have seen no Jews abroad, and he enest very few among us who can read. Just two or three fairly explain some passages. For other Prinvinces of China, we do not know that there are Jews. They say that in China there are no other Jews, and they have no knowledge of those of India, Tibet, and Western Tartary, etc.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.51.50.29 (talk) 12:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that's French. --151.51.50.29 (talk) 12:01, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * A rough Google translation:

It's French, but the spelling is often not modern and there a few typos that will throw off machine translation. I'm not sure about the first sentence; an expert would be able to give a better translation for "savoir des biens positif". Roughly: "We haven't yet been able to learn anything of the Jews of H, of N, P, N etc. The Jews of K told me that they have no knowledge of them. "Have you", I said to them, "any communication with Jews from other countries, or other provinces of China?". "We haven't seen a foreign Jew for 100 years, and there are very few among us who can read, hardly two or three can read a few passages. We don't know if there are any Jews in other Chinese provinces" they replied. They say that in China there are no other Jews, and they know nothing of the Jews of India, Tibet or Tartary." Tinfoilcat (talk) 12:18, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, the French are notorious for making up funny spellings and pronunciations of foreign names, and making up totally new and unrelated titles for foreign movies :). (In their defense, though, we English speakers are not much better.) r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 16:17, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * English likes to keep the foreign spelling and change the pronunciation - yet still use one that's not consistent with most English. Witness: "queue", "lingerie". Contrast that to the opposite in Norwegian, which borrowed the former word to "kø" (which is also the IPA way of writing the original pronunciation). Guess the nationality that misspells it more.. :) --Pykk (talk) 17:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh man, queue... when I was a kid my brother made soooo much fun of me because I thought it was pronounced [kwewe]. English is fun... r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 17:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Oooh, and I always thought yacht was pronounced with the German hard "k" coming out something like the first syllable of "nachtmusik". And I thought quay was pronounced "kway" but then everyone told me it was "kee".  And in my dictionary, it says "kar-mul" is a discouraged pronunciation of "caramel" and says "ker-uh-mul" is better.  But I've always said it that way!  ... :) 20:17, 9 September 2009 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Logomaniac (talk • contribs)

Golf Course Humor
Golf Course Humor consists of jokes, sarcasm, witticisms, gestures, and pranks that originate on the golf course, are often off-color, and occasionally are repeated elsewhere. Otherwise known as "Coarse course" humor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Whalenk (talk • contribs) 14:48, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * So what's your question? Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 14:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Trolling, trolling, trolling, keep them doggies trolling, rawhide!DOR (HK) (talk) 06:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Great. Now I've got Frankie Laine and Dan Aykroyd singing a duet in my head. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 11:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Possessive form
Let's say that a business is named Pepsi. If I want the possessive form, I would add an apostrophe and an "s" ... to get Pepsi's. Thus, for example, a sentence might read:


 * Pepsi's new marketing campaign was so successful that the company earned record high profits this year.

Now, what if the name of the company is, say, McDonald's? How would we punctuate the sentence above, if the company were named McDonald's instead of Pepsi?


 * __________ new marketing campaign was so successful that the company earned record high profits this year.

Technically, it would seem that McDonald's's would be correct (by following the "letter of the law"). Or, possibly, McDonald's'. But I have never seen a possessive of a possessive before. Nor have I seen an apostrophe and "s" followed by another apostrophe and "s". Nor have I seen an apostrophe and "s" followed by another final apostrophe.

So, both look odd and don't quite seem correct. At the same time, simply using McDonald's would also appear to be incorrect ... as this would mean "The new marketing campaign of McDonald  was so successful that the company earned record high profits this year." And there is no such entity as "McDonald". So, what gives in this situation?

For purposes of this question: (A) Let us assume that the company name is indeed McDonald's ... and not McDonald or McDonalds. And (B) I am not seeking to reword the sentence in a form such as "The new marketing campaign of McDonald's  was so successful that the company earned record high profits this year." ... or ... " McDonald's Corporation's new marketing campaign was so successful that the company earned record high profits this year."

My question really boils down to: can you form the possessive of something that is already a possessive? I have never run across this until recently. I was editing the Wikipedia article named McDonald's coffee case ... when this possessive form question hit me. Thank you. (Joseph A. Spadaro, 7 September 2009)


 * In informal speech, some people do say stuff like "McDonald's's" (pronounced roughly "McDonaldz-iz"). In writing, however, I don't think this is ever marked; just "McDonald's CEO) is what would be written. It's along the same lines as not writing an extra s for the possessive of a plural ("all the states'", not *"all the states's"). <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 16:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It's called a "double possessive". But you don't write 's's ever. Either it gets trunkated to 's or you use an 'avoidance strategy' such as using of. The McDonald's phrase could be rephrased as "The new marketing campaign from McDonalds...". Something like "St. John's's skyline" could become "[the] skyline of St. John's". --Pykk (talk) 17:46, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Or, just as we can say "The Pepsi ad campaign was ...", we could say "The McDonald's ad campaign was ...". --  JackofOz (talk) 20:01, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Not to quibble, but I think "The ____" is fulfilling a different linguistic function there than it did in the OP's original sentence. At least, I don't think we can say "The Pepsi new marketing campaign was so successful..." which sounds very off to my ears. Jwrosenzweig (talk) 22:35, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Your inflexibility shall condemn you to linguistic purgatory. Simply adjust the word order and you get "The new Pepsi marketing campaign was so successful..." which sounds delightful to ALL ears. ;-) 218.25.32.210 (talk) 01:03, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. You make an excellent point--that does resolve things! :-) Jwrosenzweig (talk) 04:39, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

McDonald's Corporation itself treats its name like a possessive in an appropriate context: Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 10:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Some stores will drop the apostrophe and avoid this kind of issue - Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, for example. Others retain it - Bennigan's, for example. An interesting consideration about McDonald's is that it was started by the McDonald brothers, so it could have been McDonalds' or McDonalds's. That would lead to the amusing prospect of calling the corporation's possessive form "McDonalds's's". However, the corporation chose a name that treats the founding family as a singular, and one way to look at it is that they consider "Ronald McDonald" to be the "owner" or at least the corporate icon. It's like it's "his" corporation, and hence any possessive connected with the corporation is also "his". That all sounds kind of goofy, but it works for understanding their usage of the name. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 11:09, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * We really shouldn't be assuming that food merchants are experts on the use of the apostrophe. Uncle G (talk) 00:29, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, but the way they use it themselves appears to be consistent with the way I described it. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 02:38, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Rules on emphasizing punctuation
Are there rules or guidelines on what to do with punctuation that touches a bold or italic word? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 19:38, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The bold/italic should end before the punctuation, unless you're bolding an entire sentence. So:
 * No, I said I ate an apple. (punctuation not bold)
 * I can't believe what just happened. I ate an apple! Can you believe that? (punctuation bold)
 * <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 20:42, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * That's indeed the style on Wikipedia. In the world of publishing, however, the predominant style, before the advent of computerized typesetting, used to be that a mark of punctuation (unless it was a closing parenthesis or quotation mark or an em dash) was set in the style of the preceding word. Deor (talk) 21:05, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * If it comes to that, before the advent of computerized typesetting, boldface was virtually never used for emphasis in running text, so it was just a question of when punctuation marks were italicized and when they weren't. +Angr 21:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but bf was used for other purposes. For instance, in my copy of Webster's New Biographical Dictionary, in which bf is used for the surnames in lemmas, bf commas and periods are used when they immediately follow such surnames. I've seen a variety of other similar uses, as in textbooks in which words that are included in an appended glossary are bolded in the running text. Deor (talk) 00:36, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Was there a difference between regular periods and italic periods, or would that rule really only be relevant for commas, question marks, and exclamation marks? -- 128.104.112.179 (talk) 14:48, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The difference is usually noticeable; boldface periods are "fatter" (like other boldface characters). Compare "." and "." Deor (talk) 15:17, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Here is a regular period and an italicized period, in that order: compare "." and "." - no discernible difference that I can see.  Thanks.   (Joseph A. Spadaro, 9 September 2009)


 * I remember noticing a case where the old rule gave a very wrong flavor. A question in dialogue ended with an italicized word – not for emphasis; the word was foreign, or a ship name, or the like.  The following '?' was italicized to match, making the question seem emphatic, even shrill.  (It didn't help that that particular italic face's '?' was extravagantly curly.) —Tamfang (talk) 19:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

origin of word
The word Benny is used at the shore in New Jersey to describe people who visit the beaches from Northern cities. It is said the word only describes New Yorkers but I think it has a more sinister meaning. Can you find any info on the origin of this word? 69.141.244.77 (talk) 20:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * See Benny (slang). Nanonic (talk) 20:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Latin words please
Need the Latin words for November and December. Thanks.--Doug Coldwell talk 20:52, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * November and December. They're direct imports into English. Algebraist 20:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Also rendered as Novembris and Decembris, the ninth and tenth months of the Roman calendar. I'm guessing the alternative spelling has to do with Latin "case" or some such. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 10:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The "-is" ending is the third declension genitive singular suffix: Latin declension... AnonMoos (talk) 11:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * You may also find –brem, –bri, –bre in unusual contexts. —Tamfang (talk) 19:38, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Translation help please
Could someone please read this and tell me if Crystal Harris is Italian-American? Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 21:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Apparently. It says "Il magnate è arrivato con la crème de la crème del suo serraglio da Roma, dove ha soggiornato alcuni giorni prima di accompagnare la Harris in Abruzzo, nel paese d' origine della madre della ragazza", which means "The mogul [Hugh Hefner] has arrived with the crème de la crème of his seraglio from Rome, where he stayed a few days before accompanying Harris to Abruzzo, the home country of the girl's mother." +Angr 21:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Dismas |(talk) 21:35, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Though both meanings exist, I'd translate paese with "village" here, not "country". ("...before accompanying Harris to Abruzzo, to the home village of the girl's mother"). Hugh & Harris already are in the country Italy, before traveling to Abruzzo. In this sense of "country", paese is usually applied to nations or sovereign states, not to Regions of Italy. (or so I think, and it doesn't change the answer to Dismas's question). ---Sluzzelin  talk  23:12, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Why not land? —Tamfang (talk) 19:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)