Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 March 14

= March 14 =

Chinese question
Hi! About http://www.cdc.gov/other/languages/images/chi/cdc_header_chi.gif - What are the Chinese characters for "U.S. Department of Health and Human Services" used in this image? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 06:07, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * 健康與人類服務部 See the bottom right of this page. There's a link. Oda Mari (talk) 08:25, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh! It looks like I missed the link. Thanks for pointing it out! WhisperToMe (talk) 17:10, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Olde Frenche
I have a couplet in Old French that's straightforward apart from one word:
 * On dit que cils fait la dorveille / Qui dort de l'ueil & dou cuer veille.

I assume cils is ceux and ueil is oeil, and cuer is listed in my dict. under coeur, but what is dou ? — kwami (talk) 07:12, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * doux? d'ou? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.99.254.208 (talk) 07:18, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Doux would probably have been dulz at the time. Maybe d'ou would work: who is asleep of eye and awake of heart ?? But I think that's forcing it. Is it just du, maybe? — kwami (talk) 07:26, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

(I think du is probably it: you'd expect a structure like that from the format anyway. Never mind, unless I got s.t. wrong. — kwami (talk) 08:05, 14 March 2012 (UTC))
 * Definitely just "du". When is this text from? That's how the combination of "de+le" is almost always spelled in the Old French I use (twelfth-fourteenth century stuff). In the context of the line it should also be a form of "de" to match with "de l'ueil". Adam Bishop (talk) 08:19, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that pattern is what convinced me.
 * ca. 1370.
 * Thanks — kwami (talk) 08:57, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Aha, that's the Prise d'Alexandrie! Definitely "du". Adam Bishop (talk) 09:03, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks again. It's for an entry on dorveille at Wikt. — kwami (talk) 04:06, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Eppering
That word unknown to me found its way into the article egg tapping on 23 May 2010. Very few sources refer to it,. What language is it? --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 16:14, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not in any English dictionaries up to and including the OED. --Colapeninsula (talk) 17:14, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * See also . --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  18:35, 14 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The article doesn't say it's English as such, but that
 * ". . . Central European Catholics of various nationalities call the tradition epper. This likely derives from or is related to the German word Opfer, also used to name the practice, which means 'sacrifice' or, literally, offering . . . . Ruthenians have the same tradition, which can include either rolling the eggs or cracking them in the hand. The word epper is used [there] . . . ."
 * Its use in both Germanic and Slavic areas suggests to me a borrowing (presumably from Germanic to Slavic) of significant antiquity, but I don't know enough about the history of folk movements in the area well enough to make any further deductions. Jack of Oz's link corroborates the word's importation into American English by Central European immigrants; it might be difficult to establish if in English it's (solely) a recent (and likely multiple) borrowing from Europe, or also a little known (and poorly documented) dialect survival in Br/Am English (itself a West Germanic language). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.66.234 (talk) 00:14, 15 March 2012 (UTC)