Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 June 6

= June 6 =

Please help with a Middle (?) English expression
Hi,

while looking into the history of the Lambton Worm, an English dragon legend, I came across a "curious entry [...] in an old MS. Pedigree" which reads Johan Lambeton that slewe ye Worme was Knight of Rhoodes and Lord of Lambton and Wod Apilton efter the dethe of fower brothers sans esshewe masle. The MS. itself isn't old, the entry might be copied from an older source. First, can anybody tell me when this spelling might actually have been used? Second, is my "translation" correct? "J.L. who slew the Worm was Knight of Rhodes and Lord of Lambton and Wood Appleton after the death of four brothers, without any (other) male left/ without eschewing any male." (meaning all of his brothers had died and John was the only male left...) The original sources are and/or Surtees' letter (draft) to Sir W. Scott (Nov. 1809). --Jonas kork (talk) 08:42, 6 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It would be "without male issue" (meaning without male children), not "without eschewing any male". DuncanHill (talk) 08:50, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Would you say its Middle English oder rather Early Modern E.? --Jonas kork (talk) 09:50, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Not an expert on the division between the two, but Early Modern to my eyes. DuncanHill (talk) 09:56, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks again, you've been a great help! Jonas kork (talk) 10:38, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * To me, the spellings seem to predate the establishment of the Chancery Standard in the late 15th century, and the passage suggests the survival of Anglo-Norman (note the position of the adjective masle after the noun esschewe) and yet the passage uses brothers rather than brethren or brether, which did not become the dominant form until the 17th century (though it existed earlier), so it is no longer clearly Middle English. So I would guess that the passage comes from the eve of the establishment of the Chancery Standard, probably from the mid- to late 15th century.  Marco polo (talk) 13:26, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Not an expert but I've always believed that "ye" meaning "the" was a sign of someone trying to write in "ye olde Englisshe" in later years. Wasn't it a mistaken rendering of the OE Thorn (letter) "þ"? Alansplodge (talk) 14:09, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Y instead of Thorn was "used by early printers when the obsolescent letter "þ" was not available", as the disambiguation page tells us. Rimush (talk) 16:35, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh yes; quite right. Alansplodge (talk) 16:59, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your answers! John Lambton is mentioned in the will of his mother (1439) and brother (1442), but the information given in the quoted entry isn't correct (it seems he never was Lord of Lambton), so I would have expected the quotation to have a certain "temporal distance" to him (allowing for the inaccuracy). I also think it is entirely possible (but not necessary) that someone tried to write in archaic spelling... Jonas kork (talk) 07:16, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Latin language
why did latin die? I thought it simply evolved into other romance languages and ceased to be used in the former provinces of the Roman Empire, but then wouldn't Italian be almost purely descended from latin? Why do we call latin a dead language if "Modern Latin" still exists in the form of Italian? thank —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.229.209.138 (talk) 14:48, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Latin didn't die; as you say, it simply evolved into the modern Romance languages and thus stopped being peoples' everyday "please pass the salt" language. Italian is certainly descended from Latin, but not to a significantly greater degree than other Romance languages, so it doesn't have more right to the title "Modern Latin" than French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. And anyway, Modern Latin refers to something else - to the modern use of Classical(-style) Latin, primarily for writing (for example, the Latin Wikipedia is written in Modern Latin). +Angr 15:11, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Then why did people stop using latin 15:20, 6 June 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.229.209.138 (talk)
 * Because it is no longer a cast status or inherent quality of the intellectual elites as it was? -Mr.Bitpart (talk) 15:35, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * They didn't feel they did. The language just changed over time, and it changed differently in different areas to such an extent that the results had to be considered separate languages, because they were so different from each other. Each generation's spoken language was only slightly different from its parents' generation's language, but over time the differences added up. Meanwhile, the written language was staying largely the same (not exactly the same, but close enough), so that while people were speaking a very progressive form of Vulgar Latin that could be considered the earliest form of Spanish, French, Italian, etc., they were still writing (at least, the few of them were literate were still writing) a relatively conservative variety of Latin that Cicero would have recognized as a form of his native language. Later still, people began writing some things their everyday language while still writing other things in Latin, so that the modern Romance languages developed literary standards of their own that were separate from Latin. +Angr 15:36, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Languages change very quickly; I can even notice that it has changed from the language that my grandparents and parents speak. Which of these changes will stick?  That's the million dollar question.  Over a thousand years, it is very unlikely that any language, even the one you are so comfortable with, will be easily (or at all) understood.  It seems odd, but nobody makes the choice (okay, some people do, but as a rule) to make a change from the language that their parents spoke, but it just happens naturally.  That is why I do not speak to thee with the specially-designated second person singular pronoun in typical conversation.  I use "you" instead, which I hate, because my ancestors for some reason stopped using "thou" (and it was not a conscious decision on their part). Falconus p  t   c 17:13, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It's been said "A language is a dialect with an army and navy". One way to view what you're asking is "Why are Italian/French/Spanish viewed as separate languages, rather than being dialects of Latin?" All languages have internal variation. Even when Rome was at its zenith, vulgar Latin and classical Latin coexisted, much in the way that there is American English, Indian English, Australian English and even regional variants of English within England. The romance languages started out as vulgar Latin - literally, the Latin of the common people. As time progressed various regions developed progressively greater differences from "official" Latin. After Rome fell, these regions became separate, and their speech became wrapped up in cultural and ethnic identities of the groups speaking them. At some point (and the changeover was probably gradual), they were claimed as full and separate languages in their own right, rather than being "mere" variants of Latin. I don't know the details, but would guess that the distinction was done primarily for ethno-political reasons. -- 174.24.203.234 (talk) 17:08, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Part of what makes the difference of whether a language is called the same thing as its ancestor is political. Old English is still called English, even though we cannot understand it at all (without studying it).  Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are both called "Greek" despite the massive differences, I am told.  This being said, however, when Latin split into all its different forms, it became known by many different names, and it is not politically correct to call "Italian" "Modern Latin".  From a practical standpoint, this makes no sense to me because while with just a little bit of Latin I can already read Italian better than I can read Old English as a native English speaker.
 * Take for example (and I don't speak Italian, I am just going with the little that I remember, so somebody correct me if I'm inadvertantly making stuff up):
 * Latin: "Te amo", Italian: "Ti amo", English: "I love you." Latin: "[Ego] parlo."  Italian: "Io parlo." English: "I speak."
 * Old English: "Hwæt! Wē Gār‐Dena in geār‐dagum þēod‐cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon." Modern English: "Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!"
 * So I draw the conclusion that the reason that Italian is not considered modern Latin is entirely political. Feel free to disagree with me. Falconus p  t   c 17:13, 6 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Modern Italian parlare comes from an ancient Latin form like parabolare (though this was not any kind of ordinary way of saying "to speak" in Classical Latin).  The basic way of saying "I speak" in classical Latin was dico... -- AnonMoos (talk) 17:37, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * You are right; I can't believe I made that mistake... Thanks for pointing that out.  I must have gotten it crossed with French "parler."  I should have said "dico," I believe, from "dico, dicere"  Not speaking Italian, I won't embarrass myself further, but I know for a fact that there are numerous similarities between Latin and Italian, despite the fact that they are way too different to be able to be mutually intelligible. Falconus p  t   c 17:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

By the way, until very roughly ca. 1000 A.D., when many scribes in Romance-speaking areas read Latin texts, they pronounced aloud words of their local Romance vernacular; and when they had occasion to write down spoken words of their local Romance vernacular, they translated into Latin on the fly as they wrote, so that written Latin was kind of in a diglossic relationship with the local Romance vernacular. And many of them assumed that things had more or less always been done that way -- Dante was one of the first to have a clear idea that ancient Latin had been a spoken language very different from the medieval Romance languages... AnonMoos (talk) 17:48, 6 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Latin belongs to that select group of languages (along with ancient Hebrew and Arabic, Pali, Aramaic, and Sanskrit) which became intimately connected with religious teachings. The real question here is not why Latin died, but rather why Latin was preserved while the languages which people spoke in their daily lives moved on.  Latin was preserved because the Christian church had placed most of their teachings in a Latin canon at the height of the Roman empire, and the canon was carefully preserved (along with the ability to speak the language) across he intervening centuries to maintain the authenticity of the documents.  -- Ludwigs 2  19:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)


 * English Wikipedia has Spoken articles, and Latin Wikipedia (Vicipaedia) has la:Categoria:Paginae audibiles.
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 06:41, 7 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Note also that the "classical" Latin as used by Cicero, Caesar, Agricola, and the like, is something of an artificial language, in that it was created by retrofitting Greek mannerisms and Grammar onto a common language that was not really a very good fit for it. Vulgar Latin (as mentioned above) was probably a lot closer to modern Italian and Spanish. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:53, 8 June 2010 (UTC)


 * By the way, Parabolare referred to above is a derivation of a Greek loanword which occurred in Vulgar Latin, but not Classical Latin! Formal written Classical Latin was certainly a somewhat "rhetorified" and slightly artificial form of spoken ancient Latin -- but on the other hand, the evidence is clear that in morphology, for example, all forms of ancient Latin under the republic and early empire were more similar in some respects to ancient Greek than to modern Romance languages, in having a full-fledged set of noun case distinctions, a "synthetic" (single-word) passive verb inflection, lacking an indefinite article etc. AnonMoos (talk) 16:21, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Japanese sentence help -- 何もかもしよう
Hi there. I appreciate the help I'm getting here with my beginners' Japanese. This time it's:

１人で、何もかもしようと思わないほうがいいですよ. ("You don't have to do everything by yourself.")

I do not know how to parse 何もかもしよう. Is this some kind of fixed expression, or can we break it down into its component parts? I understand the rest of the sentence (with the exception of exactly how the negative verb works with the problem phrase). 86.186.34.190 (talk) 20:01, 6 June 2010 (UTC).
 * It's 何もかも and しよう(do). You can replace 何もかも with なんでも or すべてを. Oda Mari (talk) 20:16, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * What Mari said. 何もかも basically means "everything possible". So your sentence means what you put in the brackets - but to put it into a more literal and clumsy translation: "It is better for people to not think they want to do everything possible." - again, the translation you gave is better, mine is just sorta more by-the-word. TomorrowTime (talk) 21:31, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. My dictionary says 何も means "nothing", and I originally thought that かも was intensifying this. Is there a logical reason why adding かも should turn "nothing" into "everything" or is it just a case of "that's the way it is"? 86.173.34.182 (talk) 12:02, 7 June 2010 (UTC).
 * 何もかも is a single word. かも is 彼も in kanji. See these examples of 何もかも. There is a similar word. 誰もかも/誰もかれも/誰も彼も and the meaning is everybody. 何も can be "nothing", but with a negative form. 何も聞こえない/I can hear nothing. Other usage is emphasizing. See and  Oda Mari (talk) 16:21, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Why don't you use online dictionaries? This one is good. Oda Mari (talk) 16:46, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks -- and thanks for the dictionary recommendation. I have in the past tried a couple that I found at random via Internet search, but those ones seemed pretty crappy. 86.185.75.250 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:54, 7 June 2010 (UTC).

"It was about some stuff" or similar...
This is a rather horrible question to answer, I fear, but I'm trying to remember something. Someone (perhaps an actor, or a writer) made a comment along the lines of "It was about some stuff" about a very long work. Does anyone have any idea who said this, and about whose work? Many thanks, and if anyone gets this, they are the king/queen of finding answers to vague questions. 129.67.144.19 (talk) 21:56, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * You might have better luck at the Humanities reference desk. rʨ anaɢ (talk) 22:33, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * If it helps, I immediately thought of War and Peace when I read the question - I'm sure I've heard it summarised thus. DuncanHill (talk) 10:46, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I thought I had clicked humanities, but I'd clicked the wrong one. DuncanHill, thanks, that's right! It was Woody Allen, after he took a spead-reading course and read War and Peace in an evening: "It was about some Russians." Thanks muchly! :) 129.67.144.19 (talk) 13:33, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Chinese character
Hey guys! Does anyone speak Chinese? A long time ago, I saw a really cool Chinese character. I forgot what it meant, but the rmoanization was "ji", I think. I want to use it for a design, but I don't know how to write Chinese. I have an idea of what it looks like in my mind so I can recognize it but I can't reproduce it without looking at it. Can someone help me find what character I'm thinking of? Thanks so much. 68.76.156.93 (talk) 22:38, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * 及 - 季 - 寄 - 急 - 挤 or 济? wiooiw (talk) 22:44, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * There are over a hundred characters with the romanization ji, and I daresay more than one of them look "really cool":


 * These are mostly simplified characters; some also have traditional counterparts, as in 记/記. You can find even more at Wiktionary (see, , , and ), although all the common ones (and therefore the ones you are likely to have seen) and more are already included in the table above, I think. rʨ anaɢ (talk) 23:11, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * sēn = 森 = forrest. Just a random one i know. wiooiw (talk) 23:22, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * There are certainly more than those provided by Rjanag in the table above, though they include the most common. I would estimate there are at least 300 characters that could be transliterated as "ji". Chinese is a tonal language, and you have not provided a tone diacritic, which is approximately equivalent to giving an English speaker a word without any vowels. It is akin to me giving you "bt"; I could mean "boot", "but", or even "beauty". There is also the issue of how long ago "a long time ago" was; pinyin superseded Wade-Giles and other romanization methods (in the Mainland, at least) about 20 years before I was born but if the romanization is from before 1958 that is another issue which requires consideration.  Intelligent  sium  23:41, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * @wiooiw: 森 alone usually cannot be used as "forest" in English would be used (which correspond to 森林 or a similar construction). 森 certainly implies forest, but if I were to join it to form "森严", it would mean something close to "forbidding".  Intelligent  sium  23:41, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
 * If I have to guess, would it be 雞 (chicken/cock/hen) ? Probably having seen it on something related to the zodiac? Also don't forget, what you've saw might have been written in cursive calligraphy, which may not resemble computer fonts you see here. --Kvasir (talk) 22:21, 7 June 2010 (UTC)