Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 February 1

= February 1 =

Pronunciation for "Ehrie"
I'm researching Harry Houdini for a piece of fiction and I found friends called him Ehrie. Am I right in assuming it was pronounced like Ehrich (see Ehrich Weiss) more than eerie? I haven't got any soundbites to check it against. - 131.211.210.182 (talk) 10:59, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, at least in the U.S., I think native speakers are taught to recognize the letter combination "eh" as being /ei/ (long "a" as in "faith") or at least /ε/ (short "eh" as in dead) rather than /i/ ("ee" as in feet)...Plus in German eh is usually /e/ (like English "a" as in faith), not /i/ -- so I really doubt it would be prononuced like "eerie" unless some local dialectal glides (or what have you) took over, but I don't think these are prevalent in the large East Coast cities (I'm excluding upstate New York).--71.111.229.19 (talk) 11:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I erroneously thought he was from the East Coast but actually was from the Midwest--so there's a greater chance of there being some kind of a glide or other vowel shift toward /i/. However, I still think my hypothesis is likely to be correct, that /i/ as in Eerie was not used, since it was after all an affectionate form of Eric, which of course uses a short "e" (/ε/)...--71.111.229.19 (talk) 11:13, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * People who distinguish "Mary" and "merry" might be tempted by the spelling to make it rhyme with "Mary", although "Eric" has (TTBOMK) the "merry" vowel. But for those Americans (including most Midwesterners) for whom "Mary" and "merry" are homophones, "Ehrie" probably rhymes with both, i.e. it's a homophone of "airy" rather than of "Erie" and "eerie"). +Angr 13:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, if literally short for Ehric, and assuming Ehric is pronounced the same as Eric or Erik, then Ehrie would likely rhyme with "airy", "Mary", "marry", "merry", etc., as pronounced in the midwest. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Does the fact that he lived in Budapest until age 4, and in Wisconsin only until age 13, make any difference to the answer? --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   18:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * What would be the conventional Hungarian pronunciation of "Ehrich"? Also, you said something about "query" in your edit summary. Whether you were being intentionally funny or not, some Americans pronounce "query" to rhyme with "airy", others to rhyme with "eerie". I think the "eerie" rhyme is more common in British English. I hear it less and less in America, as it's a homophone for "queery", which has obvious connotations in this over-sensitive American society. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "'Who could ask for anything more?' I hear you query. / Who could ask for anything more? Well, let me tell you, dearie." +Angr 18:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * (ec) No, not intentionally funny; nor am I weary of being a queery; but others should be wary of my quaries, not to mention my wiry enquiries. (I worry sometimes :)  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   18:29, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Hey, it's English, where all things are linguistically possible. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hindi/Urdu in Roman Script in Media and Music
This YouTube video, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glit-kwFozY&feature=fvhl Hey Ya ! Song from Karthik Calling Karthik] apparently shows a woman faxing a message to a man stating (so far as my limited Hindi tells me), "How are you -- just [come] for a coffee." Is showing Hindi/Urdu onscreen in Roman (Latin) script common in Indian or Pakistani media, music, film, etc.? If so, who is the audience? Presumably non-Hindi/Urdu speakers wouldn't understand the text even when Roman script was used...so prob. it's to prevent Pakistanis from not understanding Hindi written in Devanagari (or vice versa for Indians vs. Urdu Arabic script)? --71.111.229.19 (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * In Hindi/Urdu-language media of India, Roman-script Hindi/Urdu is very common, primarily for popular media such as game shows, ads, etc. Film titles are actually (almost) always released in Roman script, although text shown within films is often in Nagari.  The reason for using Roman script, apart from reaching the Urdu-speaking and non-resident Indian populations may also be because Roman-script is perceived as more informal-- it's the script that Hindi/Urdu-speaking internet users often use, mixed with English words. In Pakistani media, Roman script seems to be less common.  Bʌsʌwʌʟʌ   Speak up!  01:01, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Density of verbal communication
A rule of thumb for translators is that when a passage of English is translated into German, it'll end up taking about 20% more space on the page in German. Is there a similar rule of thumb for the duration of verbal communication? Do spoken German conversations take 20% longer than their English counterparts? What spoken languages are the most "compressed", where a given conversation takes the shortest amount of time?

I'll speculate pre-emptively that most conversations will take longer in Spanish than in English based on the fact that English has a great many monosyllabic words, whereas Spanish has very few by comparison; on the other hand, of course, the English two-syllable "I go" becomes the Spanish one-syllable "voy". I realize that any language is littered with decorative formalisms that depend on the speakers and the situation and don't directly express any content, which complicates the analysis. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Spanish is actually what has been called a "Syllable-timed" language, while English is a "Stress-timed" language, so a syllable in English and a syllable in Spanish are not really the same thing with respect to the dynamics of duration... AnonMoos (talk) 19:43, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * This is affected by a lot of factors. the two most important, probably, are the number of phonemes in the language and the compatibility of semantic and syntactic structures.  phonemes matter because languages with fewer phonemes tend to distinguish between words by adding extra syllables, which can add up over time.  semantic and syntactic compatibility matters because any place where there is an incompatibility requires (sometimes extensive) explanation.  for examples: Chinese lacks a tense structure, so translating from Chinese usually requires  an expansion (otherwise you get those odd-sounding literal translations); the word 'experience' in English can be translated in two distinct ways in German, so extra words are required to explain which German word is being used in the English translations (ran across that one studying German philosophy...).  Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' is roughly 100 pages in the original French, and close to 300 in the English translation, because there are philosophical 'givens' in the French tradition which have no English-language correlates.  -- Ludwigs 2  20:37, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Another fact about Spanish is that its syllables are simpler than English syllables, typically consisting of just a single consonant and a single vowel, whereas English syllables often involve cluster of consonants, diphthongs, and coda consonants, so English syllables take longer to speak. Therefore, it would be easy for a Spanish speaker to utter more syllables per minute than an English speaker.  This would tend to make up for the greater length of Spanish words.  Another compensating factor, as you have hinted, is that Spanish words often include inflectional endings that express meanings and relationships that would require additional words in English.  For example decía in Spanish requires three or four words in English:  "He was saying" or "He used to say".  As for German, written German certainly requires longer words and more syllables than written English.  In the case of German, the syllables are certainly not simpler than English syllables.  However, spoken German involves lots of shortcuts and telegraphic expressions that wouldn't be used in written German, with the result that I don't think a German conversation takes much longer than an English one, either.  Marco polo (talk) 20:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I think translations are always longer than the original text. So if you take a German text and translate into English and try to be faithfull to the meaning, you will end up with more stuff on your page. So no language is denser than the other, it is an artifact of the translation process, which requires explanantion of the concepts that are concise in the source language, but not in the target language. And since the author didn't think in terms of the target language, there is little possible gain in conciseness when you are performing the tranlation. 192.147.55.3 (talk) 02:46, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * ... translations are always longer than the original text - that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. By this theory, we could retranslate a text backwards and forwards between English and German, say, each time increasing the size of the text and ultimately ending up with something 1000+ times its original size. --  202.142.129.66 (talk) 04:39, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * no, that's not true. the 'largerness' comes from efforts to clear up misunderstandings that are caused by the translation process.  since translation is not supposed to add new meaning to the text, translating back to the original language shouldn't suffer from the same problems.  -- Ludwigs 2  05:02, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Does that depend on the 2nd translator knowing that they're translating something that's already been translated from the target language?  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   07:25, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think 192's assertion is true anyway. I translate texts from German to English for a living, and my English translations are almost always shorter (in terms of character count) than the German original. +Angr 11:03, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly my point. --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   11:07, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * How about comparing the running time of unabridged audiobooks that have been translated into various languages. For example, the first Harry Potter book is 8 hours, 23 minutes.  I know that it's also available as an audiobook in other languages (Harry Potter Und der Stein der Weisen, etc.) but couldn't spot the running time on Amazon or the foreign language versions on UK iTunes. --Frumpo (talk) 10:50, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * There are two versions of the English language HP audiobooks - the American ones read by Jim Dale and the British ones read by Stephen Fry. I'd hazard that the running times for these two will be (by dint of pacing, performance, and production) sufficiently dissimilar as to show that differences between their equivalents in different languages aren't evidence of very much. 87.115.47.188 (talk) 20:39, 2 February 2010 (UTC)