Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 June 15

= June 15 =

When did Proto-Indo-European split up into its different sub-branches?
As the title says - at what point (or points) in time did the Proto-Indo-European language split up into its various sub-branches like Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, etc.? Cilibinarii (talk) 16:29, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The answer depends on which of the various Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses you believe and on whether you believe the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, but sometime between 6000 and 4000 BC is a plausible range. —Angr (talk) 16:41, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * That's extremely complicated and controversial. Few will deny that the Anatolian branch split off first.  See Indo-Hittite.  Ivanov and Gamkrelidze hold that there were three major dialects after that, Italo-Celtic, Germano-Balto-Slavic, and Greco-Armenian-Indo-Iranian, defined by various innovations as the oblique plural case endings, the passive forms of the verb and the augment, as well as numerous lexical innovations unique to each of those groups.  Their arguments are sound.  The centum-satem split is now abandonned.  Marija Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis is the correct homeland theory - essential to any understanding of the issues.  Colin Renfrew's notions are popular with some, but wrong, contradicting the linguistic and cultural evidence.  Read J. P. Mallory for a good overview. μηδείς (talk) 16:48, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * "Few will deny that the Anatolian branch split off first." True; the controversy is more about how long before the rest split up, i.e. whether the split-off of Anatolian was a matter of centuries or a matter of millennia before the break-up of the remainder. —Angr (talk) 16:54, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Gimbutas dates the split of Anatolian from the rest of PIE between the domestication of the horse 4500BC and the zenith of the classical Pit-Grave culture at 3500BC. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis#Kurgan_culture which gives maps and timelines. μηδείς (talk) 17:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I suggest a reading, in the order given, of:


 * Mallory, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0500276161.
 * Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, translated by Johanna Nichols, 2 volumes. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995
 * Dexter, Miriam Robbins and Karlene Jones-Bley (eds) (1997). The Kurgan culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 by M. Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies monograph 18, Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man.

Note that Gamkrelidze and Ivanov are sympathetic to Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis for typological reasons, as supporting the glottalic theory. But the assumption is not necessary, given that glottalic consonants are reconstructed for the Northwest Caucasian languages and a laryngeal by some for Proto-Uralic.

μηδείς (talk) 17:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

For any two pairs of languages, how many commons speakers are there worldwide?
Obviously, there's subjectivity about the numbers, but at this point, I'd take any numbers. --Alecmconroy (talk) 17:19, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I see lots of statistics of how many people speak any given language.
 * I need to find how many people speak BOTH of two given languages-- for example, how many humans speak both german and english?


 * No google scholar or google books search gives any easy answer just for English and German. (You could try finding out how many Germans, Swiss and Austrians speak English and adding that to the number of Americans, British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders speak German to get a basic answer.) Given there are some 6,000 different languages, you are asking for the answers to some 35,944,000 different pairings. Good luck with that. μηδείς (talk) 19:56, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Irish-Urdu 2 (They are both busy as translators at meetings in Dublin.) One down and only 35,943,999 to go.  That's not so bad. ;o)...Wanderer57 (talk) 20:27, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * How about Anglo-Hispano-Zulu-Ruthenian? μηδείς (talk) 20:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * At last count, zero. Wanderer57 (talk) 22:34, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Kufanele ubale еще раз.


 * The person who asked the question may be looking for some more serious answers. Answering for all possible combinations of two languages is clearly very difficult if not impossible.  Is there a short list of languages in which you are most interested?  Wanderer57 (talk) 22:34, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I spent more than a few minutes looking just for German/English. Given the questioner has asked for that pair maybe you can come up with a better means of finding an answer for it?  Posting the number of languages was meant to inform the likelihood of there being any such database.  But I agree asking for the specific pairs necessary would help. μηδείς (talk) 00:15, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * My first sentence was not in reference to your reply so much as to my own. I'm very unlikely to come up with any better suggestion than yours. Wanderer57 (talk) 20:09, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * This EU page with this report has some information on bilingualism in Europe. Not a listing of country pairs as far as I can see, but at least a list of proficiency in German, French, English etc as second languages across Europe. I think I've seen something more detailed studies of this type before, probably EU-financed, but couldn't find it now. Jørgen (talk) 09:23, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Smokey Stover comic image
Have a look at this picture: http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Bill_Holman_Pekka_Pikanen.jpg (I can't embed it here because it has been uploaded to the Finnish Wikipedia and not here.) It's an image of a Smokey Stover comics strip translated into Finnish. I'm interested in the three images on the bottom row. From left to right, the captions say, directly translated: What do the captions say in the original English comic? I'm interested on how well the puns have been translated from English to Finnish. J I P &#124; Talk 19:30, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * "A contract is being filed" (as in a nail file)
 * "Boxer shorts"
 * "Oil on the waves/curves"


 * Is Smokey Stover still around? Awesome. The comic was known for puns, and I can pretty well guess at these, with a little help from Google Translate:
 * "Do not mourn" (maybe their way of saying "Notary Sojac" ")
 * "Your car(t) sounds really good"
 * "Is worthy" (maybe a play on "sound"?)
 * PK/FD would be palokunta/"fire department"
 * "Rubber eraser?"
 * "Buy jack!"
 * "Jykan [?] car service"
 * "Flat tire" (literally "housing ring")
 * "Filing a contract"
 * "Boxer shorts" (being worn by a boxer dog)
 * "Oil on waves" (literally "on trouble waters")
 * What do you show for translations of the other comments in the cartoon? That might help. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:51, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I wasn't asking to translate the text in the image to English. I speak Finnish natively so I could have done it myself. The point is that the texts have obviously been translated from English to Finnish, because Smokey Stover is an English-speaking comic. I want to know what the texts were in the original English version. J I P  &#124; Talk 04:27, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I know what you were asking. I'm asking you to provide the literal translations back into English, because I'm curious, and others might be too. Meanwhile, I was looking through Google for stuff about Smokey Stover, and this particular item did not turn up. Smokey was around for like 30 or 40 years, and unlike some modern cartoons (such as Dilbert), there doesn't seem to be any online archive of the Smokey Stover strips. The examples that I did find are very typical: Nearly all the gags are based on wordplay, outrageous puns and such. I expect translating the wordplay into any foreign language would prove to be challenging. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:27, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * As an example, "Notary Sojac", which seems to appear in nearly every strip, apparently derives from the Gaelic for "Merry Christmas". But translating "Merry Christmas" into Finnish wouldn't have the comic impact, and there can't be any literal translation for nonsense words like "Notary Sojac", so they would have had to come up with something else. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * An additional problem in trying to find the original English version of that panel is that there does not appear to be a date on it, so even if you had a complete collection of the Smokey Stover books that were once issued, you would pretty much have to look through every one of them, page by page. Although if we did have the date, it might be possible to find it somewhere on the internet. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:32, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, I misunderstood your reply. Here is a literal translation of the entire image:

J I P &#124; Talk 09:51, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Do not mourn
 * Pekka Pikanen (the Finnish name for Smokey Stover)
 * Apartment tire Co-op ("rengas" means both "tire" and "ring")
 * Your car sounds really nice!
 * It should, too!
 * Broken tire? Buy a jack! Jykä's car service
 * A contract is being filed
 * Boxer shorts
 * Oil on the waves/curves

"Ham"
I have read various blogs of native English-speaking people describing their children as "hams". I have not encountered this term anywhere outside these blogs. I don't think they mean their children are chunks of roast pork meat. What does it mean, then? J I P &#124; Talk 20:48, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I've (in the UK) have never heard this. A "ham" could, and is rarely, used to describe overweight people, but I can't see that being relevant (being very much derogatory). Do you know where these people locate to? Is it a written blog (i.e. it is definitely "ham"?)? Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 20:51, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * ''"Idiom 4. ham it up, to overact; ham. Bus stop (talk) 20:52, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * "ham it up": to show expressions or emotions more obviously than is realistic. "Here's a picture of Philip hamming it up for grandma when he was only three." Usage notes: usually said about expressions made to amuse others. Bus stop (talk) 21:01, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Here is an attempt at explaining the origin of the phrase "he's a ham". Bus stop (talk) 21:08, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * EO pretty much agrees with that. I always figured "ham" was a corruption of "amateur", but that's apparently a coincidence. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:32, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

See for example here: or here:  or here:. "Such hams" seems to be a very common expression, but I don't know what it means. From context I might guess it means that they like to be photographed, but I'm not sure. A Finnish term for such a person is linssilude ("lens-bug"). J I P &#124; Talk 18:10, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's it: it means they want to be in the limelight (another theatrical expression), or the centre of attention. --ColinFine (talk) 20:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * From Stan Freberg's History of America Part I:
 * King Ferdinand (Jesse White): "This is madness, I tell you! I don't like the way the crew are acting!"
 * Christopher Columbus (Stan Freberg): "Well, you're over-playing it a little bit yourself there."
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:07, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * (after edit conflict) So does "being a ham" mean "wanting to be in the limelight"? If so, what is the etymology? J I P  &#124; Talk 20:09, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * There's no iron-clad proof of the term's source. The citations listed in this section are the best educated-guesses at it. I'm not so sure it's so much wanting to be in the limelight as it is exploiting the limelight by overacting. The term "emoting" is also used. In contrast, good acting is said to not look like "acting", i.e. to not look like "ham acting". When Amber Tamblyn first got into the acting business, her father and fellow actor Russ Tamblyn's advice to her was, "Don't let me catch you 'acting'." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:22, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Merriam-Webster, 11th edition, claims ham as a word for a showy performer, or an actor with exaggerated style, comes for "hamfatter," after a minstrel song, The Ham-Fat Man. The song is not about acting, so the usage could refer to the nature of minstrel performance in the late 19th century.   --- OtherDave (talk) 21:26, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That's what EO says also. Oddly enough, this seems to connect with the item about word-usage "jumps" a few sections down from here: The song (presumably about a meat seller, not an actor) appears in a minstrel show; then anyone who acts in the style of the minstrel show is labeled a "ham-fat man"; it's shortened to "ham"; and it takes on a life of its own, having little or nothing to do with meat, as such. A good example of the evolution of language. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:43, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Spanish Translation of an article
Can someone translate es:Juan de Castilla "el de Tarifa" for me?--Queen Elizabeth II&#39;s Little Spy (talk) 23:29, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Translation might be helpful. Tonywalton Talk 00:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Not really. Creating a stub and waiting for someone else to translate the entire thing is going to take a long time. Look at Anna of Russia. It's been on the expansion translation line since January 2009.--Queen Elizabeth II&#39;s Little Spy (talk) 02:26, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * That's a huge article, you can get the gist by pasting the url into google translate μηδείς (talk) 02:26, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I understand but some of the sentences makes no sense and this would make a pretty important article.--Queen Elizabeth II&#39;s Little Spy (talk) 02:28, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Can I translate it with Google Translate and leave the sloppy mess for someone to clean up?--Queen Elizabeth II&#39;s Little Spy (talk) 02:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * If your intention is to create an article, no. And for a project that large a translator would charge you a few hundred dollars, or at least I would.  Is there already an English stub?  You could start one.  Otherwise, Tonywalton's suggestion is best.


 * Nope there isn't. I thought this was a free encyclopedia. No one is going to pay for anyone's work on this site.--Queen Elizabeth II&#39;s Little Spy (talk) 03:22, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I wasn't suggesting you pay me, lol. But also remember that you get what you pay for.  Do you know any Spanish?  Can you explain exactly what it is you are looking for?  Do you need specific information?  Do you simply think this would be a nice article to have in English?  You said can anyone translate the article "for me".  What exactly are you looking for?  μηδείς (talk) 03:32, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I would suggest creating a user sub-page rather than an actual article. Run the entire text (sentence by sentence) through Google Translate and see what it comes up with. Post the Spanish and then the supposed English translation of each paragraph. Then have a Spanish expert here (of which I am not one) look at the attempt and see how close it is. P.S. The article is indeed large. Try this idea first with just the introductory section, to see how it goes. It may work or it may not. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:53, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I am fluent in Spanish and English, and, time available, will watch the page you create if you follow Bugs' advice and tell me what to watch. But truly this is a huge amount of work if you intend to translate the entire article. 04:37, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Hebrew: counterintuitive deleting order of niqqud
I realised that deleting Hebrew text with the Backspace button first erases diacritics which belong to or modify the letter itself (dagesh, mapiq, shin/sin dot), and then diacritics which supply succeeding vowels (hiriq, patach, segol, shva).

Since my computer doesn't have a Hebrew keyboard layout, I use this site whenever I wish to type something in Hebrew. When I do so, I would type the dagesh first in order to disambiguate the consonant, and then the qamatz in order to supply the vowel after it. This arrangement seems most natural to me, with myself being a speaker of an Indo-European Cyrillic-written language. But once the text is published elsewhere, Backspace first deletes the dagesh and then the qamatz, as if they had been typed in the reverse order. Is there a particular reason for that? And should I better ask this at the Computing desk? --Theurgist (talk) 23:52, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * That is strange, because if I do the same thing, it deletes the qamatz first, as I would expect. I tried it with Arabic too and it also deletes the vowel markings first, as normal. I did this in Word, and in the Wikipedia edit box. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:47, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * But what about this for example: - copied from the article and pasted here? On the typing screen of the site a typed sequence of symbols erases in the reverse order of typing, and the same is with MS Word (where I rely on the "insert symbol" option, no way), and the same is with any typing box where the text is "under construction". But any text that has already been published behaves in the strange way. --Theurgist (talk) 12:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean...but I can't seem to repeat your problem either way. Hopefully someone else tries it out as well. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:52, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Oh, I wouldn't call it a "problem", it is just something that I spotted and that made me wonder. Luckily, I most often have to use a pen and a sheet of paper when writing Hebrew is called for :) --Theurgist (talk) 08:29, 17 June 2011 (UTC)