Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 October 10

= October 10 =

Expression, Phrase or Term?
There are concepts like Big Bang or Golden goal whose names comprise several words. How would you call such a group of words which is the name of one concept? Expression? Phrase? Term? Something else? What’s the best name for such a group of words? -- Irene1949 (talk) 00:38, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Neologism? schyler (talk) 01:49, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * "Neologism" means a newly-created word, and the concept of a multi-word construction comprising a single name is nothing new: e.g. "Papal States", "Holy Roman Empire", "Luminiferous aether", "Euclidean geometry", etc. At any rate, the phrase "Big Bang" in regards to universe origins has been around since 1949, and is the most commonly used and preferred term for a widely discussed concept - it would hardly classify as a neologism. -- 174.24.199.14 (talk) 05:53, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * The OP's examples are just alliterative two-word terms comprising an adjective and a noun.   D b f i r s   06:38, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * So "term" is the best word? -- Irene1949 (talk) 09:40, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * 'Term' or 'expression', take your pick. Not 'phrase', though, because they are inherently part of a larger construct, a sentence, whereas your examples exist in isolation. --  Jack of Oz   ... speak! ...   10:48, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * "Term" is the right word. An "expression" is an idiom. --98.114.98.2 (talk) 14:56, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * "Expression" can also apply to these sorts of things. --  Jack of Oz   ... speak! ...   18:45, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Another word to consider is collocation. --Anonymous, 21:55 UTC, 2010-10-10.


 * I have read the beginning of the article collocation. Thank you, but I don't think that that is the word I was looking for. -- Irene1949 (talk) 00:13, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank you to all of you for your answers. -- Irene1949 (talk) 17:42, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Need German translation
La guimauve est-elle un être vivant, et a-t-elle les propriétés que lui accordent Dioscoride et Galien?

Google translate gives: "Marshmallow, is it a living being and does it give him the properties that Dioscorides and Galen?"

The "Marshmallow" part doesn't make sense. Explain further the comparison to that of Dioscorides and Galen. It can be found on page 5, here. Just type in " 5 " and hit return. It is item number 3. Thanks for help.--Doug Coldwell talk 14:34, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * First off, it's French, and the translation is "The [guimauve], is it a living being, and does it have the properties which Dioscorides and Galen ascribe to it?" The word Guimauve seems to refer to the original plant, not the puffy white sugary thing... AnonMoos (talk) 14:42, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * See Althaea officinalis. The plant has been used for medicinal purposes since ancient times. The modern confection no longer has anything to do with the plant.--Cam (talk) 15:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that makes much more sense.--Doug Coldwell talk 15:54, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * How did you manage to Google-translate it without knowing what language it's in? Rimush (talk) 18:17, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Google Translate has a nifty feature called "recognise this language". J I P &#124; Talk 13:25, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Chinese
What is the most complex chinese character in (relative) common use? I asked a native speaker and he guessed 藏 (so the character shouldn't be much more obscure than that) but told me to look it up somewhere. Thanks. 24.92.78.167 (talk) 15:20, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That all depends how you define "common use".
 * It also depends on how you define "complex". Do you mean number of strokes, or number of radicals? And, of course, the counts for either will be different depending on whether you are talking about simplified characters or traditional character. In any case, 藏, at 20 strokes, is not all that complex, I'm sure there are more complex ones that can still be considered "common" (i.e., not rare ones like the one for biang). rʨ anaɢ (talk) 15:27, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Come to think of it, I happen to have a copy of this Chinese character corpus with stroke counts added. Here is a list of all the characters with as many or more strokes than 藏 and a log frequency of greater than 0 (indicating that they are probably not super-weird; anything with a log frequency of above 1 might be considered "common" depending on your definition. For instance, the characters 警、露、避、霸、籍 are all very common, although most of them are tied with 藏 on stroke count (霸 has one more); 蘑 (common in the word 蘑菇, mushroom), has 22 strokes and is far more common than what its log frequency of 0.712 would suggest, probably due to sampling error (the materials for this corpus are mostly news stories and fiction); another common food one is 藕 with 21 strokes. Some of the results below are traditional characters.


 * rʨ anaɢ (talk) 15:33, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I went through an older copy of the "Unihan" database I happen to have downloaded, and found the character with "kFrequency      1" and the highest remaining value of the "kTotalstrokes" field, and it turned out to be U9084 or   &#36996;   (which may or may not mean anything)... AnonMoos (talk) 15:50, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * That is the traditional equivalent of 还; it only has 17 strokes, though. rʨ anaɢ (talk) 15:55, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * But it's presumably quite common (or that's what the database entry is indicating). AnonMoos (talk) 16:11, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * The characters with "kFrequency     2" and the highest remaining value of the "kTotalstrokes" field are U7063   &#28771;   and U89C0   &#35264;   ... AnonMoos (talk) 15:55, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * And those are 湾 and 观, respectively, in simplified. <b class="IPA">r<font color="#8B0000">ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 15:58, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * See Chinese character. -- Wavelength (talk) 19:41, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * See also "The Chinese character biáng". --Theurgist (talk) 19:52, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * The OP asked for non-rare characters, though. <b class="IPA">r<font color="#8B0000">ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 21:32, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh, I must have overlooked that, sorry. --Theurgist (talk) 22:15, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Klingon alphabet
Is the Klingon alphabet uniquely decodable? --84.61.131.141 (talk) 18:00, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, there seem to be two Klingon alphabets, neither one of which has really been used in the actual TV shows or movies to write Klingon words... AnonMoos (talk) 19:55, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * That's an interesting contrast of "actual" and "actually", especially in the context of fictional language. --Anonymous, 21:58 UTC, 2010-10-10. ''


 * See Klingon writing systems. 124.214.131.55 (talk) 23:13, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Five points to the first person who can write "My hovercraft is full of eels" in any of the Klingon alphabets. And for bonus absurdity, I just noticed that my computer's spell-checker actually recognizes 'Klingon' as a valid word in English.  I'm still trying to put my finger on the horribly wrongness of that.  -- Ludwigs 2  02:09, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Don't struggle too much, just accept it. If Hobbit can be a word, why not Klingon?  Btw, the expression "horribly wrongness" is, well, horribly wrong.  :)  --  202.142.129.66 (talk) 02:34, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Don't worry about the spellchecker - they are notoriously [insert your adjective of choice here], especially with proper nouns - my Firefox spellchecker doesn't even recognize the word 'Firefox' (or 'spellchecker' - and NeoOffice on my Mac doesn't recognize 'spellchecker' either, urging me to replace it with 'spellchecker' - the same word). -- <font face="Freestyle Script" color="blue">KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:54, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * To Ludwigs2: Omniglot claims it's "lupDujHomwIj luteb gharghmey". &#x2013; b_jonas 12:18, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is uniquely decodable: it's a prefix code if you read it in reverse. &#x2013; b_jonas 12:18, 17 October 2010 (UTC)