Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 September 3

= September 3 =

Dutch Het
(Copied from the Wikipedia Help Desk Rojomoke (talk) 10:41, 3 September 2010 (UTC)) I need to know what het means in Dutch. I found it used everywhere and looks to be a definite article.

In this instance please: "Usils- genitivus van Usil, Sol, zon (in het Sabijns: Ausel)".Zanzan32 (talk) 08:31, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Het can be a definite article or the third person pronoun ("it"). "Usils – the genitive of Usil, Sol, sun (in the Sabines: Ausel)".—Emil J. 11:20, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * See Gender in Dutch grammar. Angus McLellan (Talk) 12:20, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * EmilJ's translation is good, except that in het Sabijns means "in Sabine" (that is, in the Sabine language). Marco polo (talk) 13:45, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you.Zanzan32 (talk) 07:08, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Leaving monkhood
With respect to Buddhist monk, is there a specific pali or English term for an act by which a Buddhist monk leaves his monkhood (and becomes a layperson again)? For example, an act by which he enters monkhood is called "upasampada" or "ordination".

182.52.102.58 (talk) 15:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The usual English expression for a priest to leave his profession is called either "Defrocking", "Unfrocking" or "Laicization" all meaning the opposite of "Ordination". These are primarily christian terms though. --93.241.232.86 (talk) 16:18, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I thought that defrocking means to be sacked as a priest, rather than leaving voluntarily. Alansplodge (talk) 17:31, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * "Return to laity"? "Return to secularity"? --98.114.146.39 (talk) 15:58, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Slander and libel in online social contexts
Now I know that slander refers to spoken defamation of character, and libel to published, written defamation. When I think about online forums however, where the posts seem to be of a more conversational manner than normal online publications like newspapers, do these terms still apply the same? I find it strange to call someone 'libelous' when it almost feels like a prolonged conversation. I'd be tempted to call online defamation of character, in this sense, slander. Am I wrong? Regards, --— Cyclonenim | Chat 20:26, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know where this falls legally, but in everyday usage I feel the distinction between "slander" and "libel" has worn pretty thin anyway. A lot of people use them interchangeably. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 23:04, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I do agree but I'd say, rather than the line wearing thin, it's more of a case of people using the two inappropriately and then others learning the bad habits. It's frustrating, to me at least, when people refer to newspaper lies as slander. Regards, --— Cyclonenim | Chat 23:32, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think that's usually how lines wear thin... r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 02:32, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Language learning
I'm italian and i'm learning english language. When i'm reading in english I translate in my mind every word in italian. I want to ask if this way it's right. I think not but I dont know how to do.--93.47.40.126 (talk) 21:48, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think that's inevitable when you're learning a language. I don't know how fluent you are, but when you become more fluent you'll rely less on your own language to understand. Regards, --— Cyclonenim | Chat 22:19, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * What he said. It's the natural course - at first, you translate everything, then you start subconsciously thinking in the foreign language when you speak it. Then, if you pursue your language studies long enough, you may wake up one morning and discover you just dreamed in a foreign language - that's quite a ground-shaking experience. TomorrowTime (talk) 22:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * While I haven't dreamt in English (except for dreams where I explained something in English to someone else), I've basically skipped step one of your list.
 * Growing up in the eighties, our local cable company had more channels available than there were German TV stations to fill them, so they added foreign stations. Which means I would watch British children's television each Saturday/Sunday morning, animated series like Inspector Gadget, Transformers, He-Man, and later even "regular" programming like The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and Land of the Giants on Sky Channel (I think it's called Sky One these days).
 * Watching the animated series had the advantage that the same episodes were usually shown in German shortly after, on one of the German channels. So if there was something I couldn't figure out from the given context, I could watch it again in German and see what it was all about.
 * I started doing this about the same time I started taking English classes, so it's hard to claim I had a head start over my classmates, still, I could never figure out why most of them were using word-by-word translations - even though I didn't have a formal understanding of English grammar back then, it would sound and feel plain wrong when they talked like that. It's like you subconsciously pick up the pattern of the language, even if you don't understand it at the beginning.
 * What I would suggest is to buy DVDs of movies you like - yes, buy them, don't download them illegally, so you have good quality and access to all the audio tracks and subtitles, plus it gives you that warm fuzzy feeling of not being a copyright violator - and watching them in your native language first, then again in English with subtitles in your native language, then in English with English subtitles, and then without subtitles. If you buy enough DVDs you can do this without boring yourself to death from watching the same movie over and over. ;-) Of course, once you start to get the hang of it, you can try to skip a few steps and start watching a new movie directly in English with English subtitles, for example.


 * One thing you really should keep in mind is that a foreign language isn't just a new set of words with a 1:1 mapping. If it were, you could always use machine translation like translate.google.com and wouldn't need humans for translation tasks. That was also something my classmates had trouble understanding - seeing that I had good grades, they would come to me for homework help and ask "How do you translate XXX into English?", getting mad at me when I asked about context before giving an answer. Seeing that for example the German word "Flügel" can mean, amongst other things, grand piano, the wing of a building, or the wing of an airplane, context does matter - think of the unexpected results of mounting a replacement engine on a grand piano. ;-) Given enough thrust, even pigs will fly, so a grand piano probably would, too. Still, that might not have been what you had in mind. -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 18:20, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Ecco due collegamenti utili. Here are two useful links.
 * English For Italians | Inglese per Italiani - Carmelo Mangano’s Blog
 * Corso di inglese on line - ABA English
 * —Wavelength (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The article on Language immersion isn't quite what I had in mind, but in general "immersion" means surrounding yourself with people speaking the language you want to learn. Kind of like the way kids learn a language, but accelerating the pace. That would probably be the best way to learn, if you have the opportunity. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:42, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * See Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 September 19.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 03:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Deewa / Pashto
Hello. This week I was listening to Voice of America in Pashto and was surprised to learn that there is a new and different version, VOA Deewa, apparently in "Pakistani Pashto," in supplement to the regular Pashto service. My question: is "Deewa" the name of the Pakistani Pashto dialect / regional variant; or is that the name of the radio station? Our relevant articles have no information on "Deewa" and I am curious what this word means. Any ideas? Thanks, Nimur (talk) 23:03, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

differentiate Slavic languages
hey guys. I like languages. I can speak French, Spanish, and English, and I can understand a lot of most Romance languages and tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean. However I can only tell if something is a Slavic language; I can't identify it. Can someone give me some tips on how to differentiate the Slavic languages in their spoken and written forms? I'm only interested in differentiating the ones that have major differences/are not mutually intellegible. 99.13.222.181 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:03, 3 September 2010 (UTC).


 * The written forms are easy. Almost every Slavic language has orthographic idiosyncrasies.  Also, of course, some Slavic languages use versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, while others use versions of the Latin alphabet.  See, for example, Polish orthography, Czech orthography, Croatian orthography, Russian orthography, etc. As for spoken forms, I agree that Slavic languages are generally closer phonetically than are the Romance languages, but there are substantial differences.  For example, Polish has nasal vowels that don't occur in other major Slavic languages.  If you study one or more Slavic languages, you will learn to hear what is distinctive about each of them.  Marco polo (talk) 00:04, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * If there are a lot of consonant+z combinations in running written text, then there's a good possibility it's Polish; if there are a lot of hachek diacritics, then there's a good possibility it's Czech... AnonMoos (talk) 01:22, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Minor nitpick - South Slavic languages have plenty of hacheks too. However, the hachek on the r (Ř) is a distinctively Czech feature, so that's a good indicator. Similarly, the l with stroke (Ł) is a distinctively Polish feature. D with stroke (Đ) is a South Slavic thing, used in all ex-Yugoslav Slavic languages except Slovene (where you may still find it used for the sake of convenience when writing personal or place names that are Croatian or Serbian in origin). As for differentiating the languages when hearing them... That might be a bit more difficult for someone who doesn't speak a single Slavic language, unfortunately. I could tell you that to my ears, Czech sounds like a melodic language with plenty of diminutives that make it sound like a cute, almost childlike language, whereas Russian sounds like it's using all the right words, but assigns weird, unthought of meanings to them (for instance, where "krasno" means "wonderful, beautiful" to me in Slovene, it means "red" in Russian, for some inexplicable reason), but that doesn't help you much :) TomorrowTime (talk) 07:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Caution: apart from Czech, ř is also used in Upper Sorbian, and likewise ł is used in both Sorbian languages. Frequent acute accents over vowels are an easy giveaway of Czech or Slovak; these do not appear at all in South Slavic languages, and Polish and Upper and Lower Sorbian have only ó. Apart from the already mentioned sz/cz/rz digraphs, another unique feature of Polish is the ogonek accent (ą, ę), and (this one is shared with U. and L. Sorbian) the usage of w instead of v.—Emil J. 12:23, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
 * See Language recognition chart. -- Wavelength (talk) 02:19, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
 * On a side note, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are unrelated languages, so it isn't surprising that it is not hard to tell them apart. The Slavic languages, however, are by definition closely related, as are the Romance languages. --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  02:40, 4 September 2010 (UTC)