Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 October 22

= October 22 =

Kanji variants
Hi, I'm interested in the slight difference in the shape of the top right-hand element of these two versions of the same kanji character:

http://www.mahou.org/i/k/b/457A.png http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?15457a

Is there any significance in this difference, or are the two forms interchangeable and equally acceptable? 86.135.29.55 (talk) 12:58, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * They are the same character. I would say your second link is the more usual form. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:12, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * It's a matter of typeface or font. See this. I think the first one is the standard. Oda Mari (talk) 15:50, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, well, contradictory answers but thanks! I don't suppose one of you is thinking about Chinese use and the other Japanese? 86.135.171.63 (talk) 17:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC).
 * I think the difference is between handwritten and printed forms. Compare this and this for another example—the first stroke is almost universally slanted in handwritten characters and horizontal in printed characters, at least in Japanese (I don't know any Chinese). By the way, the images at mahou.org seem rather poorly drawn to me. The stroke order is correct but it's not a good model for attractive handwritten Japanese. The page that Oda Mari linked is much better looking, though you obviously need a brush to write that way... -- BenRG (talk) 21:00, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. In my original pair, then, which do you think is the handwritten form? Are you assuming that the mahou.org version is the handwritten form, and the monash.edu.au version is the printed form? However, I don't quite understand why anyone would produce a stroke order diagram for non-handwritten use... 86.135.171.63 (talk) 21:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, the images at Monash (from kanjicafe.com) are the printed forms. I don't know the reason, but it might have been the lack of a free handwriting font. -- BenRG (talk) 22:35, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you. 86.135.171.63 (talk) 23:28, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I am Japanese and I learned and write 答 as the mahou way. 答 is a kanji children learn in their second grade in Japan. Here is another Japanese page for children. (Click 答) The original 竹 is like this. Remember in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, brushes were the only tool for writing for hundreds years. The best way to learn correct kanji shapes is to see how they are written in the regular script. Oda Mari (talk) 06:20, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Irish Pronunciation
The epitaph on Spike Milligan's headstone reads "Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite". Could you give me a rough approximation of how this is pronounced? I don't read IPA (but I could look up the symbols if necessary). Ideally, I'd just like a transliteration that a UK English speaker could read out to approximate the correct sounds. --Frumpo (talk) 14:58, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't know Irish at all; you will want to have a look at WP:IPA-ga. However, Wiktionary's entries for dúirt, mé, leat, go, raibh, and breoite all have IPA pronunciations given, so the sentence would read (copy-pasted, in IPA) something like:
 * [d̪ˠuːɾʲtʲ mʲeː lʲat̪ˠ ɡo ɾˠɛvʲ mʲeː ˈbʲɾʲoːtʲɪ]
 * The entries for go and raibh both have alternate pronunciations listed, so I don't know which one would be used here. Lexicografía (talk) 15:26, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The actual pronunciation would vary among Irish dialects, and some of these sounds don't occur in any variety of English, but a very rough approximation for an RP English speaker might be "doohrrch may laht gor rruv may broacheh". Marco polo (talk) 15:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Brilliant. Many thanks for your rapid responses. It's for a pub quiz question --Frumpo (talk) 15:58, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Odd positioning of tilde to replace "fi"
I was skimming a legal encyclopedia that I was updating today (Cross on Local Government Law, in case you're wondering!), and in the prefacing biography of Cross there was an odd use of a tilde (~) that I haven't seen before, and was wondering if this is some archaic legal use, or perhaps just a typo. Instead of Town Clerk's Office, it read Town Clerk's O~ice, and later in the page, instead of Level 1 Certificate, it read Level 1 Certi~cate. Both seem to replace fi, or ffi, but I've never seen it before. Has anyone else? Snorgle (talk) 15:42, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, in the first example it replaces ff, in the second fi, so yes, odd. Rimush (talk) 16:26, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Is it a hardcopy or a computer file? If the latter, it might be an artifact of confused conversion software encountering a font with separate characters for the ff and fi ligatures, or alternatively, OCR of said ligatures.—Emil J. 16:35, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * (after edit conflict) Could it be that the text was scanned and OCRed from a typeface that made use of ligatures? "fi" sure is a ligature, "ff" probably is one as well (just skimmed over the article in question). That kind of stuff tends to confuse OCR software, so maybe it placed the ~ where it couldn't make out the letter(s). -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 16:40, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm sure it's a scanning error. My OCR software uses a tilde as the default placeholder for any unrecognized character. It's quite likely that the prelims were missing from the proofreader's copy so the biography was not properly checked.--Shantavira|feed me 08:14, 23 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I've also seen this in compiled LaTeX, though this was several years ago. Presumably the computer compiling the document was incorrectly set up / was missing some font ligatures. So it might be a "pure" software issue not involving OCR. Jørgen (talk) 10:10, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions - probably just a scanning error or similar. Snorgle (talk) 15:03, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

To
After hearing my first lecture about Aristotle's Categories, I was thinking about my limited knowledge of language. In Spanish I would say "Quiero andar..." and in English it would be "I want to walk..." The infinitive is clear in both translations, in English using the word "to." Finally, I wondered, what is the etymology of "to" and, more so, the idea of "to." As with many of my questions, it's not really a question, or a readily understandable one at that, but I hope it is decipherable. schyler (talk) 19:09, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * The Old English "long" infinitive form (there was also a "short" infinitive) was an old dative case form of a verbal noun preceded by preposition "to". The preposition word probably never had any real concrete spatial-temporal prepositional meaning in this function, and it's been a mere grammatical particle for many centuries... AnonMoos (talk) 19:28, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Adding a comma changes the meaning
I saw a picture on Facebook that showed the label of a Swedish brand of cat food, translated to Finnish. The wording made me realise that if you take this Finnish sentence:
 * ruotsalaiset, erittäin maukkaat raaka-aineet maistuvat kissoille

which means "cats like Swedish foodstuffs, which are very tasty", and insert one single comma, you get:
 * ruotsalaiset, erittäin maukkaat raaka-aineet, maistuvat kissoille

the meaning changes to "cats like Swedes, who are very tasty foodstuffs". Apologies to the Swedes, it's just that the brand of cat food happened to be Swedish, which inspired me to try out this sentence. Are similar phenomena, where adding or removing one single comma changes the meaning so drastically, found in any other language? J I P &#124; Talk 20:03, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * It certainly happens in English. See English relative clauses.  The presence or absence of commas makes a massive difference to the meaning, a fact often ignored by WP editors.  Example:
 * People who don't eat enough can expect to die young.
 * People, who don't eat enough, can expect to die young.
 * The first sentence says what it means. The second is saying that NO people eat enough, and that ALL people will die young - both patently absurd propositions.  --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   21:04, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * It happens in German too. The German sentence
 * Mein Gewissen sagt, das Gesetz ist Nebensache
 * means that my conscience says that the law is not so important,
 * while the German sentence
 * Mein Gewissen, sagt das Gesetz, ist Nebensache
 * means that the law says that my conscience is not so important.


 * Another example: In a famous drama there is a line saying
 * Der brave Mann denkt an sich selbst zuletzt
 * which means that for a brave man, there are more important things than having his own well-being in mind,
 * while it's a joke to say
 * Der brave Mann denkt an sich, selbst zuletzt
 * which means that the brave man has his own well-being in mind, even at the end. -- Irene1949 (talk) 21:27, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, one well-known example gives rise to the title of Lynn Truss's bestseller Eats, shoots & leaves:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

'Well, I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

Looie496 (talk) 21:31, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * In German, even different stressing of a word can make a difference for the meaning.
 * etwas umfahren means to drive around something if the second syllable is stressed,
 * but it means to drive against something so that it falls to the ground if the first syllable is stressed. -- Irene1949 (talk) 21:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * You can find additional examples at http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/grammar-tip-punctuation.asp
 * and http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/meaning.html.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 22:14, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * This is just a wider example of prosody (which the comma is indicating in writing) influencing how we chunk information in sentences, particularly in building relative clauses. That phenomenon is pretty well-studied in linguistics; here is a representative example. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 22:31, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Is this a misuse of the verb "deplore"?
According to the Pentagon's statement on the recent Wikileaks dump, "We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law".

I thought that the direct object of the verb "deplore" had to be an action or a state of affairs, such as "[we deplore] inducing individuals to break the law"; it sounds strange to hear the direct object be the agent of that act ("we deplore Wikileaks").

Am I correct that this is a misuse? AGradman / talk / how the subject page when I made this edit 21:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's really a misuse; or if it is, it's a common one. Lexicografía (talk) 21:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, you're right. One deplores actions, not things. But it's not a surprising misuse. Military bureaucracies the world over specialise in such mangling of language. HiLo48 (talk) 21:47, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Here this site includes the usage, but, not being a native speaker, I can't judge its correctness. I certainly miss my (Advanced?) Learner's Dictionary. Pallida  Mors  22:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Modern usage (the last hundred years) has tended towards using "deplore" to express disapproval of an action or state, but the original meaning was "to weep for" or "to grieve over", as in Tennyson's "Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?" (of Wellington). This has been the standard usage (with a person as direct object) since at least 1659 according to the OED.  I still feel uneasy about using deplore to mean disapproval of a person, but who can say which meaning was intended?    D b f i r s   01:29, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm finicky, but the Pentagon example strikes me as egregiously wrong. It's almost an Archie Bunkerism, because they were obviously looking for the word "denounce". Also it reminds me of the way some children today use the word "inappropriate": "Ryan is inappropriate! He drew privates!" L ANTZY T ALK 16:37, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

As a native AmE speaker I can't see anything unusual about the quoted sentence. I would not notice it when reading. On the other hand, I would notice something like "We deplore Wikileaks inducing individuals to break the law" which is a very BrE way of phrasing a sentence. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 16:52, 24 October 2010 (UTC)


 * It's not unusual, though it is a little odd-sounding. I think the problem is that when you talk about an organization, it's difficult to distinguish between the organization and its activities.  "We deplore the actions of WikiLeaks" would be better.  -- Ludwigs 2  17:46, 24 October 2010 (UTC)


 * It's just the grammar that isn't unusual. If they said they deplored the actions of wikileaks, that would be a different connotation to my ear. As I read it, the sentence they wrote basically says "we don't like Wikileaks very much" (with a possible subtext of "but there's nothing we can do about them except say that we don't like them"). &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:56, 25 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's how I interpreted it, but according to the traditional usage of the verb "to deplore" when applied to people, they would be weeping over or grieving about Wikileaks. The question was whether the modern meaning (commonly applied to actions) can be used of people and organisations in the modern rather than the traditional sense.    D b f i r s   06:46, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Chinese poems
Why do many Chinese poems (probably most famously the 静夜思) still rhyme even though their poets would have been writing in Old Chinese or Middle Chinese, which sounded much different from modern Chinese, I am told? 24.92.78.167 (talk) 21:56, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Most sound changes in a language affect whole groups of words in the same way; so if two words rhyme at one time, there is a good chance they will continue to do so centuries later. It's not inevitable, of course: only one of the words may change, possibly for no observable reason; or there may be something in their phonetic environment which causes them to develop in different ways. But on the whole, a particular sound will develop in a certain way in all the words that contain it. --ColinFine (talk) 23:06, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, some modern dialects (certainly Mandarin) have fewer allowed syllable types than old Chinese did, so the odds are somewhat favorable... AnonMoos (talk) 06:11, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Abbreviation of "million"
The article Pashto language (permanent link here) has an infobox which says "Approx. 20 Mio." beside "Total speakers". Is there a reference work supporting "Mio." or "mio." as an abbreviation of the word "million"? —Wavelength (talk) 23:34, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it's the German abbreviation for it. German regulars near? Pallida  Mors  00:26, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Your thought is correct, according to wikt:Mio. -- Wavelength (talk) 00:35, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Is there a reference work supporting "Mio." or "mio." as an abbreviation of the word "million" in English-language text? —Wavelength (talk) 00:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Not answering your question directly, Wikipedia suggests a business usage; this other site points to a European connection. Pallida  Mors  01:00, 23 October 2010 (UTC)


 * This is even better: a EU text written in English, denoting the abbreviation. . However, judging by a speedy web search, it doesn't seeem to be universally accepted, I'm afraid. Pallida  Mors  01:07, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * While people tend to write $1K $2M $3B (one thousand $, two million $, three billion $), accounting-wise it would technically be $1M for one thousand (Roman M = 1 + 3 zeros ), $2MM for two million &mdash; so "MM" would be the abbreviation. P ЄTЄRS J V ЄСRUМВА  ►TALK 01:11, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Do accountants still use Roman numerals?   D b f i r s   01:22, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Only the creative ones. Clarityfiend (talk) 04:47, 23 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Pallida Mors, thank you for your replies.—Wavelength (talk) 14:51, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * You're welcome! Pallida  Mors  19:07, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Since this is the first time I've seen "Mio." and understood its meaning, I changed itr to "million" in that article's information box. —— Shakescene (talk) 01:14, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

French pronunciation
How would the French name "Achille" be pronounced? Like the Italian, or would it be Ah-KEEL, or Ah-SHEEL? Note that I don't read IPA. 216.93.213.191 (talk) 23:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * A-SHEEL, I think, according to this file (you can listen to it yourself). :) Clementina   talk  00:05, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * More like the second, but you wouldn't pronounce "L" on the end. Try "ah-SHEE-yuh" (the small 'yuh' sound you hear on the end of, for instance, "Cirque du Soleil"). r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 00:07, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That's not what it says for Claude-Achille Debussy - klod aʃil dəbysi. --  Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   00:33, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm, I'll go with that then, I don't trust my French intuition a whole lot. Striking. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 04:10, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * And yet, 'famille', 'coquille' and similar words get the "EE-yuh" treatment that you described. I wonder why Achille would be different. --   Jack of Oz    ... speak! ...   12:52, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * In those types of words, "ll" comes from Latin "li"+vowel through an intermediate palatal or palatalized lateral stage; in "Achille" the ll was never before i+vowel... AnonMoos (talk) 22:57, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
 * »»» The ending ille is pronounced [il] in mille ("thousand"), tranquille ("tranquil"), and ville ("city").
 * French Phonetics: Pronunciation Overview: "Semi-Vowels"
 * French Pronunciation Charts
 * —Wavelength (talk) 23:31, 23 October 2010 (UTC)