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

= June 24 =

"Taal" language?
Writing a footnote to the article on Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside tonight, trying to untangle the mystery of just how many languages the man spoke, I came across an article by Harold Nicolson which noted that during the Boer War, he "mastered Afrikaans and Taal". According to my Afrikaans-speaking source, "taal" is merely the Afrikaans word for "language"; it's not a language in its own right. I did find one indication that it might sometimes be used to refer to the creole Tsotsitaal, but this seems to be a twentieth-century urban development and not something he'd be likely to have encountered.

We did consider the possibility that it was garbled - "Afrikaans language" is "Afrikaanse taal", which might have been misheard or misread as "Afrikaans and Taal" - but the author was English, writing about a personal acquaintance of his; I can't imagine the story having been passed onto him in Afrikaans!

So... was there likely to have been a seperate dialect known by this name at the time of the war (1900) or the time of writing (1940)? Is our author just confused? Any suggestions appreciated. Shimgray | talk | 01:09, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * These results mention an acquaintance of Churchill from the same period speaking Taal and Afrikaans (or "the Kaffir language") I think Taal is the early form of Tsotsitaal or Fly-Taal. While Afrikaans was seen as a slow development from Dutch via Cape Dutch and was the prestige language, Taal was a creole with a large dose of Dutch and far more slangy. Your count of languages depends entirely on your assessment of their armed forces.  meltBanana  03:13, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that - it's good to see someone else used them distinctly! Some success in the OED today - "...in English, ‘the taal’, spec. applied to the Cape Dutch, or Dutch patois spoken in South Africa", all citations c. 1900 +- a few years. It seems "taal" was used for Cape Dutch to distinguish it from the other branch of what would become Afrikaans, or possibly just synonymous for both. The term appears in general use in English simultaneously with "Afrikaans" - which was previously just called Dutch, low Dutch, etc -
 * As to Fly-Taal or Tsotsitaal, I'm not sure they do link up - per this, it looks like a mostly urban dialect among black speakers, whilst the original source has him using Taal to pass himself off as a Boer farmer. Shimgray | talk | 12:49, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * This 1906 book chapter talks about two kinds of "Taal:" the common vernacular spoken by Afrikaners, and an artificial Dutchified Taal taught in schools and used in some written works. Not sure which would be called "Afrikaans" in your source, if this is the two-language situation it refers to. --Cam (talk) 13:13, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * There is a very brief Taal article. John Buchan refers to it several times in Greenmantle, e.g., "I shall talk Dutch and nothing else. And, my hat! I shall be pretty bitter about the British. There's a powerful lot of good swear-words in the taal."  Zoonoses (talk) 12:58, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Future languages of Wikipedia
As far as I know, new languages, before becoming official versions of Wikipedia, are stored in an "incubator" until they are big enough. Is there somewhere a list of languages that will be admitted in the Wiki family in the near future? --151.51.25.173 (talk) 16:35, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Requests for new languages is probably what you want. It doesn't seem super-organized for the outsider but there are links to various language committee topics in a box toward the top of the page.  Language proposal policy is the policy page, and has links to the incubator.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:15, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * meta:Requests_for_new_languages is the place to discuss things; however, more proposals get shiot down than accepted these days... AnonMoos (talk) 17:19, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * There are only a finite number of languages in this world, so I'd imagine that the number of languages not included in Wikipedia will become fewer and fewer, and the ones remaining will be less likely to have a willing and able population large enough to support their Wikipedia. Falconus p t   c 05:00, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I will propose the number of active Wikipedia's will actually begin to decrease in the next 50 years. --mboverload @ 23:22, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

term for hypocritical situation
What would be the term for a situation in which a restaurant called itself Healthy Eats but served only foods that came with lots of carcinogens produced by the manner in which the "healthy" ingredients were prepared? 71.100.2.16 (talk) 20:17, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I would call it an irony? "Hypocritical" implies intent, ie: Healthy Eats knows the way it prepares food causes carcinogens but does nothing about it. --Kvasir (talk) 20:21, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * A misnomer?&mdash;msh210 &#x2120; 20:26, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It could be a lot of things, probably depending on intent, degree, the law, and other factors. It could be false advertising or misrepresentation, for instance.  It could be exaggeration or impossible to quantify (as in "world's best pizza").  It might be simple ignorance.  It could be ironic.  It could be tongue-in-cheek.  Exploding Boy (talk) 20:30, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

In this case I think the situation is one in which the business name is being used indirectly to dispel the fact that fried foods have multiple health issues in order to continue serving fat and carcinogen ladened fried food. 71.100.2.16 (talk) 20:46, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Fraudulent labeling? (On the other hand, the sentence "He may be skinny, but he is a healthy eater" doesn't necessarily refer to modern notions of health). ---Sluzzelin talk  22:09, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * See Greenwash.—Wavelength (talk) 23:33, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * ...ah, perhaps healthwashing then. 71.100.2.16 (talk) 16:10, 25 June 2010 (UTC)