Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 February 17

= February 17 =

Need help with Chinese or Japanese reference
In the article Soybean the 7th reference is in Japanese or Chinese: /. I am trying to fix the references in this article and was wondering if someone could help set up this reference properly. Are foreign language okay? Do they need to be in the Roman alphabet? What parts of the website do we need to use? Since I can't read it, I don't know. 512bits (talk) 03:01, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Fixed. The linked page in ja is a dictionary search results page. I replaced it with an actual ja-to-en dic. page. As the ref #8 is a dead link, I replaced it with an en page. Oda Mari (talk) 06:44, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Very kind of you.512bits (talk) 11:03, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

French capitalisation
I'm looking at a book with a title in all caps: MASQUES DE L'OUEST IVOIRIEN. How would this book title generally be capitalised in French? I searched Google and got multiple results for this book — Masques de l'Ouest ivoirien and Masques De L'Ouest Ivoirien, plus Masques de L'ouest Ivoirien (a postcard) and masques de l'ouest ivoirien (a different book). Nyttend (talk) 16:34, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The usual French way of capitalizing titles is to capitalize just the first letter of the first word in the title and otherwise not to capitalize anything except proper nouns. So the title should be Masques de l'ouest ivoirien. Marco polo (talk) 16:37, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I think "Masques de l'ouest ivoirien" would be more usual, with "Masques de l'Ouest ivoirien" an alternative possibility... AnonMoos (talk) 16:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * So it's "iviorien" and not "Ivoirien", even though it's referring to Côte d'Ivoire? Nyttend (talk) 17:23, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, French demonyms are not normally capitalized as they are in English. Words like "anglais" and "français" and "ivorien" do not take special initial capitals.  In general, French uses capitals much less commonly than English does.  Proper nouns like personal names and country names (but not their adjectival forms) and the first words of sentences and titles are normally the only capitalized words.  This google search has some good sources on French capitalization rules; several of the better ones are on blacklisted sites like about dot com, but they are fairly useful nonetheless.  -- Jayron  32  17:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * My understanding (which may well be faulty) is that if the first word of a title is the definite article, then the word that follows it is also capitalized; otherwise, French titles follow sentence case. Thus Masques de l'ouest ivoirien is correct, but if the masques de were dropped, then the title would be L'Ouest ivoirien. Angr (talk) 18:01, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * But then we have titles like La bohème, not La Bohème. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:06, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * And then again we have Les Troyens, so I'm confused now. --    Jack of Oz   [your turn]  08:39, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * French Wikipedia, however, calls it La Bohème. And Troyens is a proper noun that is capitalized in French no matter what, anyway. Angr (talk) 13:14, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm still confused. Why would Troyens be capitalised, but americains, anglaises, australiens etc not be?  They're all identifying people from certain places.  Are cities treated differently from countries?  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:21, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Nouns are capitalized, adjectives aren't. So you write un groupe d'Américains but un touriste américain. It can be tricky sometimes, because in Il est Français, for example, the word Français is a noun even though it doesn't have an article, which is unintuitive to an English-speaker. As for La bohème, the b is lower case because the word doesn't refer literally to the region of Bohemia, but refers instead to the collection of all bohemians, that is, certain people leading an unconventional lifestyle. The word bohemian may or may not be capitalized in English in this sense. 96.46.204.126 (talk) 21:03, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * To answer the question about La bohème, it might be necessary to know something about late-19th century Italian conventions. 96.46.204.126 (talk) 21:25, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * In the French Wikipedia there is the link to the site with comprehensive rules.--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 18:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * See also this page for the rules on when to use a capital letter in the names of cardinal points. In the present case, l'Ouest would be preferred. 96.46.204.126 (talk) 22:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Nigdar ni bilo da nije nekak bilo - niti nigdar nebu da nekak nebu
Is the above quotation in Hungarian? Can someone translate it it into English for me? Thanks. Bielle (talk) 22:59, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it says "my hovercraft is full of eels". -- Jayron  32  23:06, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not Hungarian. It's Slavic. Probably Serbocroatian. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 23:11, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think I have an answer, but I don't speak any of the Slavic languages, so I may be wildly wrong. However, purely from my Google-ninja-skills, here is what I have. I'll lay out my sources so you can check up.
 * First I googled the phrase. Nothing leapt out. Then I tried Google Translate, which suggested it might be Slovenian, but I couldn't make head nor tail of the translation. Then I tried googling words one-by-one, and hit on Nigdar, which took me to our article Kajkavian dialect. It appears that Miroslav Krleža wrote a poem called Khevenhiller in this northern-Croatian dialect, although he used the spelling "Nigdar ni tak bilo da ni nekak bilo, pak ni vezda ne bu da nam nekak ne bu." It's clearly the same, though.
 * Googling on Khevenhiller got nothing, but eventually I found this page where someone is asking about a translation for the quote from Russian. My very limited knowledge of Cyrillic shows the pronunciation to be approximately the same, and someone gives a standard Croatian version (which still does not match your version). All this brings me on to the point, which is that the translation would appear to be:

"However it used to be, it used to be somehow" "It never happened yet that it was no-how"
 * I believe it is a cross between a proverb and a tongue-twister. As to which language it is, some dialect of Serbo-Croat seems to fit. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 23:56, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You are right, this is from a poem by Miroslav Krleža, part of the work called Balade Petrice Kerempuha. Full text is here, p. 34. The work was turned into a theatrical play and it is apparently so well known in Croatia that there is a square named after Petrica Kerempuh in Zagreb, there's a statue to him, and there is an article about him in Croatian Wikipedia.
 * The Russian quotation in your first link is very similar, but it is actually a completely different saying, from The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (book 2, chapter 3). Švejk predates Kerempuha by about 13 years. It is possible that Krleža borrowed it from Hašek.
 * I'm not an expert on Croatian either. The interpretation given by Theurgist looks like it could be correct.--Itinerant1 (talk) 11:37, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm a fellow Slavic speaker, but not really an expert on Serbo-Croatian dialects. I think "Nigdar ni bilo da nije nekak bilo - niti nigdar nebu da nekak nebu" (your quotation, which doesn't exactly coincide with the one cited at Kajkavian dialect) means: "Never has it been that it wasn't anyhow; nor will it ever be that it won't be anyhow". You may want another opinion though. I'm not even sure how to best express this in English. --Theurgist (talk) 00:20, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I found the quotation on the Facebook page of someone whose first name is Verrica. Does this help? Everything on the page was in Roman, not Cyrillic, letters. Bielle (talk) 02:15, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Ask the person whose page you found it on. RudolfRed (talk) 02:35, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Tried that; no response. Bielle (talk) 18:22, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You're all wrong. It's actually extraterrestrialese and, loosely translated, means "Gort, disintegrate those clowns running for the Republican presidential nomination so we can have a palatable choice." Clarityfiend (talk) 21:45, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

It is Kajkavian, a Croatian dialect. It is a paraphrase of Krleza's verse. It is misspelled (should be NE BU in stead of NEBU). It means: Never has it happened that it did not turn out somehow, and never will it happen that it does not turn out somehow. (native Serbo-Croatian speaker)