Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 April 24

= April 24 =

simple french
I just recently received a beautiful watch from my new uncle: the only problem is, I've never met him and he's french. And I don't speak french. So all I'm asking for, is for a simple translation. How do you say "Hello, nice to meet you", and "Thank you (so much) for the watch, I love it." in french? And some pronouciation tips?? Merci!! Johnnyboi7 (talk) 04:25, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Hello, nice to meet you: Bonjour, enchanté. (bone-zhoohr, ahn-shahn-tay)
 * Thank you (so much) for the watch, I love it. : Merci (beaucoup) pour la montre, je l'aime. (mayr-see (bow-coo) poohr la moan-truh, juh lemm)
 * Those pronunciations are very basic--just enough to be understood. If you're daring enough, you can ask for the IPA ones.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 04:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Bonjour, enchanté is [bɔ̃.ʒuʁ ɑ̃ʃɑ̃t.e]
 * Merci beaucoup pour la montre, je l'aime bien is [mɛʁ.si bo.ku puʁ la mɔ̃tʁ, ʒə lɛm bjɛ̃]
 * See Help:IPA for French for details. r ʨ anaɢ (talk)

"Facts Of Interest"
Is this a compound word? If so, what does it mean?174.3.123.220 (talk) 06:06, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * No, not a compound word. Without any context, I would say it means "facts that pertain to this conversation".  Can you provide the entire sentence that you found "facts of interest" in?  Comet Tuttle (talk) 06:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * "Interesting facts" would be more colloquial.--Shantavira|feed me 15:38, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Depends on the context. For example, in "The only facts of interest to him were..." that change wouldn't work.  --Anonymous, 17:20 UTC, April 24, 2010.

Domain specificity
Could anyone help me with a good definition of domain specificity? Yes of course, I did read the article Domain specificity, but I notice this concept is used in a slightly different way as it is explained in the wikipedia article. For instance, I read the following line in a scientific article: "The empirical evidence available so far does not allow a rejection of any of the above hypotheses, and the matter of the domain-specificity of face recognition is as yet unresolved." In this case, as far as I understand, it means that we don't know yet if the theories of face recognition are only valid for face recognition or if they are also valid for other types of recognition. But what would be a nice definition of domain specificity? Anyone? Lova Falk (talk) 13:52, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Applied to language, it roughly means that a given aspect of processing is specialized for language processing and nothing else. For instance, the group of neurons that gets excited when it sees vertical lines as opposed to horizontal lines is recruited for reading orthography but is not specific to language--it responds no matter what kind of lines it sees. Further forward in the visual cortex are groups of neurons that get excited when they see alphabetic letters rather than random shapes, and groups of neurons that get excited when they see arrangements of letters that could be words rather than random jumbles of consonants. Such areas might be called domain-specific, since they are especially geared towards processing language. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 14:35, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * The basic insight comes from the practical observation that many specific concrete real-world tasks are easy for humans (people often do them many times a day without thinking about them) but are extremely hard for computers -- while conversely, many basic general abstract problems (such as mathematical calculations, data tabulations, etc.) are very easy for computers, but not too easy for humans. So for example, it has been deduced that since visually recognizing various other individual members of one's own species has often been important to the survival of animals for probably almost the last 500 million years, therefore there are highly specialized systems for visually recognizing other members of one's own species (in humans, "face recognition"), which are separate from so-called "general cognition".  If that's the case, then face recognition in humans would be domain-specific... AnonMoos (talk) 14:56, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * So, a definition of "domain specificity" would be: a given aspect of processing that is specialized for a certain type of processing and not for other types of processing? Lova Falk (talk) 15:59, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * That can be compared with computer chess and dedicated consoles. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:28, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Your paraphrase sounds good to me. (Any other opinions?) Of course, the exact phrase "domain specificity" refers not to the processing itself, but to that characteristic of processing (i.e., you wouldn't say "X is a domain specificity", you'd say "X exhibits domain specificity") but that's just dotting the ɪ's :P r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 20:55, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Domain = a sphere of activity, concern, or function; a field. Domain specificity = a characteristic of processing that is unique for this domain. Face recognition exhibits domain specificity, that is: face recognition exhibits a characteristic of processing that is unique for face recognition. What about that? Lova Falk (talk) 09:08, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm all in favor of dotting the i's!

IPA software
Is there a software out there that would give pronunciation when input a single word or even a sentence in IPA transcription? Also the software would give IPA transcription when input a voice recording or a voice file. Thx. --Kvasir (talk) 16:18, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * My Google search led me to Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 February 11.
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 16:43, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Take a look at Praat for a start. 124.214.131.55 (talk) 17:29, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Hmm Praat looks really complicated and after an hour I still haven't figured out how to input IPA and get the program to pronounce it. I have a feeling that's not what the program does. --Kvasir (talk) 00:20, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, Praat can't create transcriptions or create sound from a transcription. Praat is a program used for analyzing sound files (creating spectograms and LPC spectra, measuring intensity and formant frequencies, etc.) and can also modify them and can create some synthetic sounds (such as sinusoidal tones, or speech sounds if you specifically tell it what to do), but I don't think it knows or cares about any particular transcription system. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 00:25, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I found http://www.archive.org/details/software-wanted, which might be helpful. -- Wavelength (talk) 17:54, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * No, Praat can't do that. I've looked for software like this before and haven't found it. If you just want to say a vowel and get an IPA symbol back, you may have some success finding a program like that, since vowels are easily programmatically identified from their first and second formants (well, [+/- round] is a bit harder, but horizontal and vertical tongue positions are easy). Consonant identification, however, probably doesn't exist as a free, stand-alone program, and from what I know about speech-to-text applications, a good number of them use decision trees for the whole utterance to determine what is the most likely ID of questionable sounds so that the utterance makes sense.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 19:43, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I get the idea that we don't have the technology to accurately transcribe IPA symbols from speech. However, there must be some application that would read out a string of IPA transcription. I don't think that is particularly difficult to put together? --Kvasir (talk) 22:55, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * To be honest, if technology for transcribing IPA from a speech stream existed, one of the primary research topics of phonetics and language perception would be solved--speech segmentation, mapping a variable acoustic signal onto invariant abstract categories, etc. These are all incredibly difficult issues to solve computationally (although, as someone astutely pointed out in another thread here, human beings can do it effortlessly). For some good background (and an idea just how long this problem has been around), a nice reading is this controversial but informative article by Al Liberman:
 * r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 23:03, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * And as for your second suggestion (that there is an application to pronounce IPA that you input), it's a good deal harder than you think. Because of coarticulation and prosody, a speech signal is much more than a simple concatenation of phonemes. Again, that Liberman article is a good starting point to get a feel for how complicated this all is :) r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 00:37, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
 * That's a good point. However sentences in IPA transcription do not usually take into account of coarticulation anyway, but rather present words as separate and not attempt to make it sound "natural". What's the point of having IPA transcription of sentences when we can't expect computer to be able to pronunce it, let alone a human to be able to read and articulate. For example, see this text sample here. The idea of IPA is such that anyone can articulate any language given the knowledge to read and pronounce the alphabet (it's phonetic, afterall!). I would never sound like the native speaker, but given the IPA even I should be, in theory, able to say that Danish paragraph. --Kvasir (talk) 19:26, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, but like I said, there's a lot of information that gets left out in any transcription. The earliest text-to-speech programs, which essentially just concatenated phonemes, sounded like incomprehensible gibberish. Only when a lot of prosodic information is added (specifically timing and intonation) does the output start to become intelligible. Humans don't have such a problem because timing and intonation come naturally to us without having to think about it (our timing and intonation might sound non-native, but it would be nearly impossible for us to produce that whole paragraph with, say, every single syllable spoken with a 100Hz fundamental frequency and every phoneme spoken with the same length in every context); computers, on the other hand, can't do any of that stuff unless they are explicitly told to, and figuring out what to tell the computer is quite difficult. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 21:21, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, but like I said, there's a lot of information that gets left out in any transcription. The earliest text-to-speech programs, which essentially just concatenated phonemes, sounded like incomprehensible gibberish. Only when a lot of prosodic information is added (specifically timing and intonation) does the output start to become intelligible. Humans don't have such a problem because timing and intonation come naturally to us without having to think about it (our timing and intonation might sound non-native, but it would be nearly impossible for us to produce that whole paragraph with, say, every single syllable spoken with a 100Hz fundamental frequency and every phoneme spoken with the same length in every context); computers, on the other hand, can't do any of that stuff unless they are explicitly told to, and figuring out what to tell the computer is quite difficult. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 21:21, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

"No problem"
Anyone know the history of "no problem" as a (particularly annoying) substitute for "you're welcome"? --jpgordon:==( o ) 16:56, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Just curious why you consider that annoying? It's merely a short-hand version for "it's not a problem, don't even mention it".  Seems rather cordial to me.  No?    (64.252.65.146 (talk) 20:18, 24 April 2010 (UTC))
 * Some people do get rather annoyed at it (see, for instance, prescriptivist Lynne Truss' Talk to the Hand), although I'm not one of them. Several other languages use something like this widely and no one seems to mind (for instance, French de rien! and Spanish de nada!, both of which mean "it's nothing!"). As for the history of "no problem", I don't know when it was first attested if that's what you're looking for....but based on the fact that it's common in similar languages I imagine it's probably been around a while. <b class="IPA">r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 20:46, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * In German, people say Nichts zu danken (lit. "nothing to thank" i.e. "nothing to say thank you for"), but I'm pretty sure I've heard kein Problem (lit. "no problem") as a response to danke too. Whether it's a translation of the English or an independent invention, I can't say. +Angr 21:05, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Uyghur uses چاتاق يوق (also "no problem"), and is quite distant from English and the Romance languages, so there's another example. But it does, like English, have a more common alternative ئەرزىمەيدۇ ("you're welcome", but literally "it's not worthy of mention" or something like that), whereas in French and Spanish the de riens are the most common. <b class="IPA">r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 21:19, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, its seems "you're welcome" is the odd ball among world's languages. Chinese has 沒問題 or 沒關係 in Mandarin; and 無問題 or 唔緊要 in Cantonese. Both literally mean "no problem" and "no concern" respectively. Translated back to Chinese, "you're welcome" is an odd response to a statement of gratitude. The closest expression is 不客氣 / 唔駛客氣 (No need to be gracious (like a guest)). --Kvasir (talk) 00:18, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * (I was gonna say the same...although in my experience, I hear 不（用）客气/不（用）谢 more often than 没问题 in this context, so I wasn't sure whether or not to use 没问题 as an example.) <b class="IPA">r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 00:54, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * It annoys the heck out of me, I have to report. That, or "Not a problem".  I hear it a lot in situations where a staff member is asked to do some task by their boss, or by a customer/client.  They want to appear ready, willing and able - which is a good thing in itself.  Typically, it's something routine, not particularly challenging, and certainly not a "problem"; so there's no need to refer to the hypothetical possibility of it being a problem, only to deny that that is the case in this particular case.  But even if the task really was a problem, the staff member would still be expected to sort it out and get it done.  That's what they're being paid for.  And so, whether it's a problem or not is not something the boss wants to know about.  Therefore, going to the point of denying there'll be any issue in getting the task done is as necessary and useful as telling the boss you'll be breathing air today.  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   21:43, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * That's not actually the use of "no problem" under discussion here, though. Algebraist 21:45, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * No worries :) --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  22:28, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * "No problem" in the sense Jack is describing is shorthand for "I can handle it", describing some future activity, and it's certainly something a boss likes to hear, assuming it's actually true, otherwise you can get yourself into hot water. That's the usage in the 1980 Blues Brothers film, where Carrie Fisher is firing a machine gun at Jake and Elwood, and Jake assures Elwood, "No problem." In the case of the waitress, when saying it in response to "Thank you," it's often used after the fact, a substitute for "You're welcome", and seems subtly arrogant to me sometimes: "You're welcome" sounds like "I am happy to serve you", while "No problem" sounds like "Your request did not incovenience me." However, I don't think they really mean it that way, it's just a habit that's been picked up over time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a phrase that was used frequently in TV shows, like maybe Seinfeld. Now, if the waitress is asked to do something and says "No problem", that's like what Jack is describing. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:40, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * "I can handle it", "Consider it done", "OK", "Easy", or some similar expression that's couched in positive terms is what's optimal if you want to inspire confidence in another. "No problem" is a very roundabout way of getting to that same point; the very mention of the word "problem", even if only to deny such a beast exists, suggests you're admitting the possibility of problems occurring, and that can only undermine the very confidence you're wanting to inspire.  This is analogous to being told "not" to do something undesirable that may never have even occurred to you before being told not to do it - rather than being told to "do" something desirable.  Like, "Don't forget your keys"; well, that kinda assumes the worst at the outset, and it actually increases the possibility of the person forgetting them, rather than reducing it; I'd much rather be asked "Please remember your keys".  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   02:01, 25 April 2010 (UTC)


 * "It is nothing" (de nada) is different from "no problem." "De nada" happens to be a gracious expression. It negates or minimizes an act done by one person for another. But when you say "no problem" you are not negating the act that you are doing for another person; you are merely eliminating the possibility of it being a "problem." There is a lesser degree of making oneself inconspicuous when one says "no problem." Bus stop (talk) 03:21, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * All of which discussion ignores the fact that idioms, almost all the time, are unanalysed and the literal meaning of the words is irrelevant (as are matters like the polarity of the phrase). --ColinFine (talk) 09:37, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Ironic "manage"
In English it's common to use the verb "manage" to ironically suggest that an inadvertent act was intentional, as in "I managed to get marinara sauce on my shirt" or "He managed to shoot himself in the foot with that last answer," both implying that the event was easily avoidable. My question is whether other languages have a similar construct. In particular, is it possible to use the Spanish "lograr" to convey this ironic sense, or would it be understood differently? 166.137.11.226 (talk) 21:11, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Well I would say it's the use of sarcasm and not just the use of a particular verb. This of course is not restricted to English. Here's an example in Cantonese: 佢叻到連一加一都加錯. (He's smart enough to get 1 plus 1 wrong.) --Kvasir (talk) 00:35, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * In Swedish we can say: "He succeeded with ...." when he has done something really stupid. Han lyckades med att radera hela artikeln i Wikipedia = He succeeded with erasing the whole Wikipedia article.Lova Falk (talk) 09:18, 25 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Japanese has an auxiliary modal verb "shimau" that can be added to any action to give that sense of chagrin, as well as the "adversarial passive", in which even an intransitive verb can be passive to indicate a negative event. Paul Davidson (talk) 12:55, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
 * French: Il s'est debrouille pour se tirer dans le pied which means just the same as he managed to shoot himself in the foot. --Lgriot (talk) 04:35, 26 April 2010 (UTC)


 * In German, possible translations of "she managed to ..." are:
 * "sie brachte es fertig, zu ..."
 * "sie schaffte es, zu ..."
 * They can also be used ironically, in the sense you are asking about. (I googled for the phrases in combination with "Fettnäpfchen"; "ins Fettnäpfchen treten" means something like "to put one's foot in one's mouth").
 * [Er] brachte es fertig, in beinahe jedes Fettnäpfchen hinab zu treten [...] ".
 * "schaffte es [...], sozusagen kein einziges der obligaten Fettnäpfchen auszulassen."
 * Though I didn't find any corresponding google hits for another possible translation, "brachte es zustande, zu ...", it too could be used in the same ironic sense: "Sie brachte es zustande, in jedes Fettnäpfchen zu treten ..." ---Sluzzelin talk  11:21, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * How about Es ist ihr gelungen, in fast jedes Fettnäpfchen zu treten (she succeeded in putting her foot in her mouth at every opportunity)? +Angr 11:42, 27 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Absolutely! Given all these answers, I suspect this ironic usage is a widespread phenomenon, not connected to specific lexical definitions of translations of "managed to". Are there languages where this kind of usage of "managed to" would not be understood? ---Sluzzelin talk  13:14, 27 April 2010 (UTC)


 * In Dutch: hij speelde het klaar om (he managed to) is ironic more often than not. 195.35.160.133 (talk) 11:23, 27 April 2010 (UTC) Martin.