Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 July 26

= July 26 =

Pronunciation of Los Angeles
On the old "I Love Lucy" television series, when Lucy went to Hollywood with Ricky, Fred, and Ethel, she would always pronounce it, "Los Angeleeze".

I was watching a very, very old film (black & white)... at 1:52-5 in the narrator says "Los Angeles" and pronounces the latter part something like [eiŋgʌləs]... like the word "angle" followed by the word "us"

Here's the video so you can see it for yourself: http://video.google.ca/googleplayer.swf?docid=-3660820995851036415&autoplay=1

Is this the way the city's name was pronounced? When did the hard "g" become soft and the initial "a" change from the sound it makes in "ate" to the sound in "at"? Do some people still say it this way?

Or do you think the narrator's just saying it wrong...? 108.3.173.100 (talk) 05:04, 26 July 2010 (UTC)TorreyOaks
 * You're not alone, because I've once heard in a modern movie (forgot which one), which pronounced it as 'Los Angs'. I've checked the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and it shows neither Angles or Angs.  Kayau  Voting   IS   evil 05:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The first pronunciation listed in Kenyon & Knott is, while (by the most common pronunciation I've ever heard – including that of my parents, who both grew up there in the 1930s and '40s) is listed second. The third pronunciation given is , which I associate with British speakers. Then there's a note saying, "Other pronunciations exist. A resident phonetician writes, 'The only one I've never heard is  [i.e. the Spanish pronunciation].'" (I wonder whether that resident phonetician was Peter Ladefoged.) I seem to remember that the narrator of Dragnet pronounced it . +Angr 05:45, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * [ændʒəliːz] has always grated on my nerves -- anything but that! AnonMoos (talk) 05:55, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Linguist Dwight L. Bolinger actually led an ad-hoc city-appointed commission about 50 years ago to decide on the pronunciation of the city's name, resulting in [las ændʒələs] being the generally-accepted American English pronunciation; before that time, there was more variation... AnonMoos (talk) 05:51, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Wow... thanks all! Especially Angr & AnonMoos. You are awesome. 108.3.173.100 (talk) 05:57, 26 July 2010 (UTC)TorreyOaks
 * They should do likewise in Missouri, where some say it "mih-zir-ee" and some say "mih-zir-uh". Jack Webb on Dragnet always said it the way I expect to hear it, which is "loss ANJ-uh-luss" (sorry, IPA doesn't work on my PC). If you listen to a proper Spanish pronounce, that latter English pronunciation is really not too far off. Contrast that with a 60s song, "flying into Los Angeleez, bringin' in a couple o' keys" or whatever it was. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:54, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not too far off? "Lodge" is not too far off from "Loch Ness", and "Jay" is not far from "Hay"? Hmm.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:05, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I say Missourah just because it's more fun. Rimush (talk) 07:45, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, AnonMoos' done a great job here – never dreamt that someone would do that just to decide on the pronunciation! Mind you, I will try not to pronounce 'Los Angeles' in front of you because I pronounce it as [ændʒəliːz]. HeeHee!  Kayau  Voting  IS   evil 07:48, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Or just do it the easy way: "L.A." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:43, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * That's not a pronunciation, that's a spelling. L.A. is pronounced 'El A l ' (i.e. like the airline, but with the final 'l' silent) in German ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:39, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe how non-Hebrew speakers pronounce the name of the airline El Al! That's correctly pronounced EHL AHL (equal stress on the two syllables and divided that way), whereas the abbreviation of Los Angeles (in the 60's through early 1980s when I lived there) is pronounced eh-LEY. The pronunciation of "Los Angeles" by locals varies widely, as it's one of the most cosmopolitan, mixed-ethnic and immigrant-populous cities on the planet.-- Deborahjay (talk) 18:44, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * (slightly off-topic) Someone proposed the change of Estonia's name in English to "Estland", and the Georgians officially demanded new names for their country in Hebrew and Lithuanian. --Theurgist (talk) 14:54, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, the pronunciation given by the OP [lɔs 'eiŋgʌləs] is a pronunciation I've heard often from German speakers. Marco polo (talk) 17:25, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Sam Yorty, the LA mayor elected on a platform of having garbage and recyclables picked up on the same day, pronounced the city's name "Los Angle-eez" -- Mwalcoff (talk) 19:37, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * There was a trend, starting in the 19th century among Anglo settlers of the Mexican Cession, to pronounce Spanish place names based on their spellings, using interpretations of those spellings as remote from Spanish pronunciation as possible.   For example, Pueblo, Colorado was pronounced something like .  I'm guessing that  or, even more so,  is probably an instance of this trend. Based on my acquaintance with old-timers from this region, this kind of pronunciation was motivated at least partly by contempt for the existing Spanish-speaking population and by a desire to assert that these were now English-speaking places. Marco polo (talk) 19:51, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I think pronouncing the ending -es of "Los Angeles" as if it were spelt "Los Angeleeze" actually seems somehow classicizing - as in "Hercules", "Pericles", "faeces" etc..--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:05, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The LA suburb of El Segundo is pronounced with a short "u," but it wasn't a name left over by the Spanish. The name dates to the 1910s and Standard Oil's second oil refinery on the West Coast. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 21:27, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Jack Webb in Dragnet used to pronounce some geographic feature called "San Pedro" as if it were spelled "san peedro". He also pronounced "Figueroa" as "figure-owe-uh". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:35, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * San Pedro, is, in general, pronounced Peedro. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 22:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

reference
I would like to use the followig article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesthetic_learning but I have no idea where to find citation information for it. Can you please help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.20.213.115 (talk) 15:56, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * At the bottom of the "Toolbox" list on the left side of the page is a "Cite this page" link that will lead you to the information you need. Deor (talk) 16:17, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Odd Phrasing in BBC News Article
This BBC article says something which strikes me as very odd.

"In 2005, as part of an event in the run-up to the 600th anniversary of Zheng's first voyage, the Chinese paid a visit to Lamu to undertake DNA tests on a Swahili family, who were found to have had traces of Chinese ancestry."

'The Chinese'? Like, all of them? Considering there is no mention anywhere in the text of any kind of team or anything, it strikes me as very odd phrasing that the name of the nationality should be used for 'a specific group of people of this nationality that we haven't mentioned before and will not mention again'. What if this had been 'the Australians', or 'the Cockneys', or 'the inhabitants of the Isle Of Man'? Any thoughts on this? --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  16:41, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It's a way of quickly implying some sort of official group sent to represent the interests of the wider group. So, a group standing in for, and representing, the whole of China paid a visit to Lamu to carry out DNA tests. It strongly implies the group were representing the Chinese government in some way. 86.164.66.83 (talk) 17:34, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the comment above - however, I have to agree that the phrasing is somewhat loose for an organisation like the BBC, whose English is normally more precise. Gurumaister (talk) 17:44, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, that is exactly what I am thinking - the BBC is our flagship news agency, supposedly, and I would never expect this kind of phrasing in an article by them, as acceptable as it may well be during a chat down the pub. Of course, the meaning itself is not lost on me - I would guess it was a group of scientists or a research team and not an Olympic skating team, given the context. The phrasing, however, is just not right to me. --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  17:52, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Well it sounds fine to me. The BBC news website is not an academic journal, it's a reliable news source written for an intelligent lay audience.   You get that sort of phrasing all the time in journalism, where space is often at a premium and the word count is important, so that things are often boiled down somewhat.  I don't think it's odd at all. --Viennese Waltz talk 17:59, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I read BBC all the time. You'd be surprised how many of their articles contain small mistakes, especially the newest ones before they get corrected, and those from faraway places (from my eurocentric perspective).  I don't mind at all. --84.46.39.217 (talk) 21:08, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree; I would expect better from the BBC. --Tango (talk) 18:15, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I think a bigger problem is "found to have Chinese ancestry". What does that mean? They just happened to stumble on a family that interbred with Chinese sailors 600 years ago? Sounds more like a publicity stunt, especially since Zheng He's other supposed voyages are so popular at the moment... Adam Bishop (talk) 18:47, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * That's true. I have just noticed the ambiguity in that phrase, too. The Swahili family was found to have Chinese ancestry? Was this before the DNA tests or after them? If after, then why was this family singled out for such tests? If they were found to have Chinese ancestry before the DNA tests, how did this happen? --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  16:53, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

The word "bread" meaning "money"
When was the first use of the word "bread" meaning "money"? Where did it originate from?--Christie the puppy lover (talk) 23:04, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * This page (and numerous others) suggests that it is cockney rhyming slang, money rhymes with "bread and honey", which of course also carries the connotation that money quite literally means bread on the table. Such origins would probably mean that it could be quite old, a least a couple of centuries, possibly more, with the first written recorded usage being from the mid 19th century. --Saddhiyama (talk) 23:13, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * This generally reliable source says that it's from the 1940s. The OED, which says that it's of U.S. origin, has a citation from 1939, but the citation is bracketed, indictating that the lexicographers aren't sure that the word is actually being used in the relevant sense. Both that citation and the next-earliest one deal with the world of jazz, so I think it's safe to assume that this use of bread originated in jazz musicians' slang. Deor (talk) 23:21, 26 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Oddly enough, "dough" used to also be slang for money, but you don't often hear it anymore. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:07, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not bread strictly speaking, but wheat was used as a symbol of wealth back to ancient cultures. Googlemeister (talk) 13:46, 27 July 2010 (UTC)


 * See http://www.fun-with-words.com/money_words.html. -- Wavelength (talk) 21:06, 27 July 2010 (UTC)


 * In Spain they use pasta, "¿Tienes pasta amigo?" - "Got any dosh mate?" Richard Avery (talk) 15:35, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Japanese translation?
Can anyone help to translate the text found in File:Japan Labour-Farmer Party poster 1928.jpg? --Soman (talk) 23:31, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

The words across the top are 黨農勞本日. Note that until the end of WWII, Japanese, when written horizontally, went right-to-left (nowadays it goes left-to-right like English). That just means (literally) "Japan Labor Farm Party" but spells "labor farm party" in an old fashioned way. The spelling has since been simplified from 勞農黨ーー>労農党　（Note that I wrote all that from left-to-right like in modern Japanese so you can see how the characters evolved). "Farm" (the middle character) stays the same, but the modern spelling for "labor party" is 労働党. That's a start anyway... I'll add more later when I have time if someone else hasn't translated the rest. Good luck! 108.3.173.100 (talk) 00:26, 27 July 2010 (UTC)TorreyOaks
 * It's a fill-in-the-blanks poster. 月/month, 日/day, 時/time,  and 於/at. 政見/political views, 議長/chairman, 大演説會/big speech meeting, and 辯士/speaker(s). I'm sorry but the three black characters on the red background are too small to read. Oda Mari (talk) 05:35, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
 * So basically, it is sort an empty template for announcing meetings of the party? --Soman (talk) 15:20, 27 July 2010 (UTC) I read Oda's comment to rash, not noticing the "fill-in-the-blanks" sentence, thanks. --Soman (talk) 15:30, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Latin Translation
What’s Latin for “We come in peace”? Venimus et quaerimus pacem ...? 108.3.173.100 (talk) 23:56, 26 July 2010 (UTC)Rorrim


 * That could work, but there is some extra info that's not in the English. "Venimus in pace" would suffice. (You can find "in pace" elsewhere, like "requiescat in pace", "ite in pace", etc.) Adam Bishop (talk) 02:27, 27 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The word "venimus" as such is ambiguous. I learned Latin with macrons.  The word "venīmus" (present tense) means "we come; we do come; we are coming".  The word "vēnimus" (perfect tense) means "we came; we have come".  Help:Macrons can help editors to type with macrons.  The conjugation of "veniō" (with macrons) can be seen at http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/venio.  My translation of the text is "Venīmus in pāce."
 * —Wavelength (talk) 14:23, 27 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I guess, but that's an artificial modern teaching tool. No one ever wrote Latin with macrons (well, actually, lines like that were used for abbreviations and numbers, but not to distinguish vowel length). It's no more ambiguous than "put" or "let" or any other English word where the present and past are the same. I still have to use the macrons when scanning poetry, so I don't mean to sound like a pompous ass (again), but they aren't part of normal Latin and people shouldn't depend on them. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:20, 27 July 2010 (UTC)


 * People in the Renaissance sometimes used a light sprinkling of circumflexes to mark selected long vowels in brief Latin texts (especially the ablative singular first declension ending, which is only distinguished from the nominative singular by length). AnonMoos (talk) 02:44, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Multas gratias vobis ago! :) 108.3.173.100 (talk) 21:51, 27 July 2010 (UTC)Rorrim