Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 May 20

= May 20 =

Consonant clusters
What, if any, language families or individual languages of the Sinosphere, Mongolia, Indochina, the Malay Archipelago and Australasia permit consonant clusters within a native syllable? --Theurgist (talk) 00:44, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Mongolian permits consonant clusters, though they don't seem to be particularly frequent (to quote the page, "the maximal syllable is CVVCCC", although "clusters that do not conform to [certain] restrictions will be broken up by an epenthetic nonphonemic vowel")&mdash;they only occur in final position. There is an example on the article, namajg (I. ACCUSATIVE ). It is asserted in a few places that Ainu conserves some consonant clusters, but these would have to be final since all initial consonant clusters have dropped out in modern Ainu, and I generally can't find further evidence of their existence. Otherwise I don't believe there are any Northeast Asian languages that conserve consonant clusters. Interestingly though, Old Chinese did have initial and final consonant clusters, and also lacked tones&mdash;this seems to have shifted relatively early on. I'll defer to others' knowledge about the other regions you've listed. --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 01:21, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Perusing List of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin, I see Canberra, Gilgandra. Grong Grong, Cootamundra, Yerrinbool, Oodnadatta and others. Many current place names are somewhat corrupted when compared with what their originals would have been, but this seems to suggest consonant clusters were widespread in Aboriginal languages. --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  01:26, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The question was about consonant clusters within syllables. HenryFlower 02:05, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * OK, but Grong Grong works. And it's line-ball whether -andra is an + dra or and + ra or a + ndra or andr + a, but any way you cut it, there's a cluster.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  02:10, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * "Gilgandra" is still possibly relevant, though you're right the others aren't ("Grong" is /ɡroŋ/). For Gilgandra we find "Derived from Wiradhuri and Kamilaroi 'gilgai' for waterhole, with suffix 'dra' for 'with'" here (the assertion below about "Kalagandra" isn't supported anywhere else). Examples on the article for Wiradjuri suggest that the cluster -nd is found syllable-finally, but absent any technical info it's difficult to make any judgement. In general consonant clusters don't seem to be common in the Pama–Nyungan languages, but as for whether they're entirely absent, I don't know enough to say.--Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 02:19, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Is not the Gr of Grong a cluster? --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  02:22, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It potentially is, you're right: I was focusing on the "ng" and erroneously ignored the initial part. It seems to come from Wiradjuri again, but since that page lacks technical info I can't make any judgement. Given the many different "r" sounds that there are which aren't necessarily consonants (see R-colored vowel)&mdash;and bearing in mind it's a borrowing which might well have left out vowels&mdash;it would be too adventurous to claim it as a native consonant cluster without further info. --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 02:31, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * FWIW, (this depends on your definition of "Australasia") Polynesian languages in general do not allow such clusters, though there are several "letters" in languages such as Maori which are written as two letters in English (in Maori, wh, pronounced similarly to the English "f", and ng, pronounced similarly to the central letters of the word "singing" in English). The Melanesian language of Fijianoften places an unwritten m or n sound before some other consonants - notably the letter "b" - so that, for example, 1990s coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka's surname was pronounced "Rambuka" (other than the first letter, a very similar pronunciation to the drink Sambuca). Grutness...wha?  05:29, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * looks like it might be of interest, though it doesn't give details. SE Indochina and the northern tip of Australia have pockets of languages that allow clusters beyond consonant-glide. Lsfreak (talk) 06:09, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * To just put some of the ones I'm aware of out there: Thai allows consontant clusters (stop + liquid or /w/, although stop + liquid seems to be falling out of use), Lao allows them (certain stops + /w/), Khmer has right in its name that it allows clusters (some quite complex compared to other languages of the region). Burmese, the language of the largest ethnic group in Myanmar allows the combination consonant + /j/ as in the name of the country. The languages of ethnic minorities might contain even more clusters, some even more complex than those of these majority languages. V85 (talk) 17:07, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Additional question: Adoption of foreign names
Thanks everyone for the responses so far. Further input will also be appreciated. I was aware that, among the major national languages of those regions, consonant clusters are often discouraged or nonexistent, or limited to a consonant plus a liquid or a glide. Globally speaking, there are languages that are made up of open syllables entirely (Polynesian languages, Japanese, pretty much Swahili). Other languages might be OK with having a consonant and even a consonant cluster in the syllable coda, but disallow or discourage multiple consonants in the syllable onset (Mongolian as demonstrated above, also some Turkic, Semitic and Uralic languages). But what happens when one has to read out a foreign name like Jack Straw or Berti Vogts? In terms of writing those names down, Vietnamese's and Malay's Latin-based alphabets have no problems at all - no changes are necessary. Mongolian's Cyrillic also poses little trouble - simple straightforward transliteration is all that is needed. With Arabic, writing two or three consecutive consonants word-initially is still not impossible, though this will be generally counterintuitive unless vocalised. I'm not completely sure and can't competently comment about the abugidas of Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese, but I do know that with Chinese characters, with the kana syllabary and with hangeul, representing any consonant clusters within a syllable on either side of the vowel is just impossible (except when there is an initial consonant plus a glide), and this necessitates the insertion - in writing and in pronunciation - of epenthetic vowels between original consecutive consonants, which effectively breaks down an original syllable into multiple syllables. For example, monosyllabic "Straw" becomes trisyllabic seu-teu-ro in Korean, and monosyllabic "Vogts" becomes tetrasyllabic po-keu-teu-seu (the Korean Wikipedia has it po-keu-cheu, but that doesn't seem correct to me). At the same time, generally, clusters in loanwords don't necessarily follow the borrowing language's limits. My questions are: can one say that the way foreign names are cited in a language may depend on the writing system that the language uses? How does one normally pronounce those and similar names in, say, Vietnamese speech? Is it possible that the customs of Chinese, Japanese and Korean in that respect could have been different if they were using a true alphabet inherently? We know that writing is secondary; civilisations invented writing to put down what they were speaking, not the other way around. --Theurgist (talk) 22:10, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * When writing foreign names (and words) in Thai, the Thai spelling attempts to mimic the orthography of the original language as much as possible (in many cases, regardless of what the source language is, the Thai spelling seems to assume non-rhotic English pronounciation). Word initial consonant clusters will be kept in writing, but a short /a/ might be introduced in reading if the consonant cluster doesn't adhere to the phonetic rules of Thai. Word final consonant clusters will ususally be reduced to a single stop consonant in pronounciation, as Thai does not allow syllable final consonant clusters. This is true not only in pronounciation, but also in writing - rather large word syllable consonant clusters (three-four consonants) that will be pronounced as a single stop consonant, might be reduced to one or two written consonants, with those that are meant to be silent, having the 'silent letter' diacritic added to them.
 * For the specific examples: Straw would in Thai be written something like สตรอ. The last name is written as s-t-r-o (so, quite close to how it is pronounced in English). However, it would be read as /sa-trɔː/, or more colloquially as /sa-tɔː/.
 * As for Vogts, that is more of a challenge. I don't know how it's pronounced in Thai, but it would be read with either a syllable final -k or -t, and the spelling would reflect that. The most accurate spelling would be วอก์ทส์ or วอกท์ส์. Both consist of the letters w-o-g-t-s, but with the silent diacritic placed on different letters (the first one has the pronounciation /wɔːt/, the second /wɔːk/.) However, having more than one silent letter is very rare. My guess is that the ส์ would be dropped completely, leaving only วอกท์ w-o-k-(silent t) or วอก์ท w-o-(silent k)-t. My money's on the first one. It would of course be possible to keep the ส, and instead drop either the ก or ท, giving a plethora of possible spellings, however, I've never come across spellings that add syllables to maintain syllable final clusters.
 * Lao is a bit different. As the article Lao script says: it isn't really an abugida, since it doesn't use inherent vowels and its spelling is highly, highly phonetic. Given this, and that Lao phonology is almost the same as Thai, we would end up with, simply ສະຕໍ /sa-tɔː/ and ວອກ /wɔːk/. However, as these are foreign names, we could have implied/silent consonants here as well: Straw could be ສະຕຼໍ s-a-t-(implied silent liquid)-o and Vogts could be written in a way similar to Thai: ວອກທ໌ w-o-k-(silent t) (or another alternative).
 * As an interesting aside, I attempted to write 'Straw' in Khmer and wrote ស្ត្រូ (s-t-r-o). A google search lead to an interesting result: It didn't seem to give any hits for Jack Straw, but it came back as a partial hit for ស្ត្រូ​ស​ខាន់ viz. Strauss-Kahn (with au being pronounced o as in French). While this seems straight-forward, I don't know if Khmer has the consonant cluster ស្ត្រ str-, so I don't know how it would be read by a native speaker, although the spelling indicates str- without any inherent vowels. Khmer doesn't really seem to have the possibility of syllable final clusters, so I don't know how it would deal with a name like Vogts, neither when it comes to pronounciation nor spelling. V85 (talk) 07:26, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * ស្ត្រ (str- )is a cluster used in native Khmer words as well, such as ស្ត្រី /striː/, woman. V85 (talk) 18:56, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * "Striː" is almost certainly originally taken from Sanskrit... AnonMoos (talk) 18:38, 24 May 2012 (UTC)


 * In Vietnamese there are two main approaches. Foreign names, and loan words, that have been in use for a long time were first transcribed into Chinese, and then the Chinese characters were written out in Roman script. The newer approach is simply to write the word as it appears in the original language. See link [here http://www.thanhnien.com.vn/pages/20120516/ong-strauss-kahn-kien-nguoc-co-hau-phong-16-5-2012.aspx] where we have "Strauss-Kahn", "Diallo", "Reuters" etc., but where the country names "Mỹ" (America) and "Pháp" (France) result from the earlier method. Itsmejudith (talk) 11:42, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * In this context, what would be interesting to know is also how the Vietnamese reader of that article would pronounce the name 'Strauss-Kahn' - just the same as the French? or would the pronounciation be changed to fit Vietnamese pronounciation= V85 (talk) 18:56, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I was just about to ask the very same thing. Given that Vietnamese is completely free of syllable-internal clusters (ignoring consonant + the /w/ semivowel), how does one read out such foreign names in Vietnamese? Does one break the clusters into multiple syllables, or reduce them to a single consonant, or try to preserve them as much as possible? --Theurgist (talk) 19:12, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it depends on how well the speaker knows the original language. They do their best with th unfamiliar sounds, like English speakers do with a Vietnamese name. Nguyen being a prime example. Itsmejudith (talk) 23:53, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

So the difference is that Vietnamese speakers try to imitate the original soundings of names and reproduce non-native clusters as much as they can, while (to the best of my knowledge - please correct me if I'm wrong) speakers of Japanese, Chinese and Korean break or simplify the cluster in order to circumvent it. Note: I don't mean doing so when learning how to speak and converse in a foreign language, but rather, doing so when pronouncing foreign names in casual native speech, e.g. while reading the news on TV. How much of that difference is due to the fact that the Vietnamese have a Latin-based orthography and can write "Strauss-Kahn" and "Vogts" and "gvbrdgvni" if they want, while for the other three languages, due to the natures of their writing systems, it is orthographically impossible to spell any rows of consecutive consonants within a syllable? --Theurgist (talk) 06:22, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't know about the comparison with other Asian languages, but I'd just point out that the spell-it-in-full convention is fairly new in Vietnamese, goes along with an international trend to use native names (Beijing, Mumbai, for example), and isn't necessarily pronounced very well in "casual" speech. Newsreaders aren't really speaking casually, and conventions for both spelling and pronunciation may vary across publications. I note that the main spelling for Burma adopted in vn.wiki is Myanmar although the name Miến Điện for the country goes back a long way. Itsmejudith (talk) 13:07, 22 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Theurgist, it seems to me that you are trying to arrive at a single, technical reason for why certain East Asian languages pronounce foreign names, especially those containing a consonant cluster in a way that is very different from that used in the original language. I think it would be very difficult to find any evidence that the reason for such pronounciations are solely due to the way these languages are written.
 * I think that there are other things, as well, that determine how foreign words end up sounding when adopted by another language. This includes the phonology of the borrowing language, certain norms and traditions for foreign borrowings, and, I suppose, also the way in which the borrowed word is written in the native script.
 * Even borrowings from one European language to another rarely keep their original pronounciation when passing from one language to another. German 'Führer' becomes English 'Fyoora(r)', even though it's spelt the same. English 'cool' becomes French 'koul', even though the French also spell it 'cool'. And these are borrowings between languages that are relatively closely related and with phonologies that are relatively similar, of course words will change even more when passing to languages that are completely unrelated and have completely different phonoligies (and writing systems).
 * Another example could be taken from this very forum last week, when there was a question about a man with an Albanian name ending in -aj and how that should be pronounced: According to Albanian spelling, it should be pronounced [aj], but this particular man, who lived in France, chose to pronounce it [aʒ] as the aj would imply in French. The OP stated that the man knew what the correct Albanian pronounciation should be, yet he himself 'mispronounced' it. One of the replies was that it was probably to make it easier for 'the French ear' to understand his name, and to match it to its actual spelling.
 * To some extent, having an alphabetic system of writing for your language will make it easier to more accurately portray the sounds of the foreign words, but only to some extent. The written language is an attempt to write the spoken word of a language. Look for instance at the question we have here about the letter r: Why is it pronounced so differently in many languages? Why doesn't j represent the same sound in English as it does in French as it does in Spanish as it does in German? It's because all of these languages have taken the same set of Latin letters and modified them to easily (debatable!) write their own language. French spelling is pretty good at conveying accurately the sounds of the French language, however, it might be less appropriate for conveying the sounds of different languages. (I am constantly flabbergasted by attempts to find 'English equivalents' of sounds found in foreign languages, especially when sounds go across word barriers.)
 * Japanese people have a hard time pronouncing my name, I don't think it is because they first convert it into hiragana and then attempt to read the hiragana, it's because my name contains sounds and sound contrasts that they are not used to. (My name starts with a V and has both an l and an r.) In Tagalog, one of the Philippines' official languages, they can't even pronounce the (English) name of their own country, but insist on calling it the 'Pilipinas'. This is not due to the writing systems of these languages, but because of the phonology of these languages.
 * As for how foreign words end up sounding when borrowed by another language, I think that it will depend on what you might call 'custom' or 'tradition', in order that the word better 'fit' within native speach. To use my name as an example again: When speaking Norwegian or English, I put the emphasis on the first syllable, when speaking French, I put it on the last syllable. A minor change, granted, but still audible. Since we have been talking about Asian languages, I will use three examples from Thai. The English words jam, jelly and German have all been borrowed into Thai, and are written as แยม, เยลลี่, and เยอรมัน; transcribed, they become 'yaem' /jɛːm/, 'yelli' /je(n)-li/ and 'yoeraman' /jɤː-ra-man/. There is no good phonetic reason why the English /d͡ʒ/ has become /j/ in Thai in these words. The Thai letter จ is often transcribed to English as j and represents a sound that is very close to /d͡ʒ/ (an allophone). My personal guess is that y (j) is a more common sound in Thai than j /d͡ʒ/, so someone thought it'd be better to use y /j/ than j /d͡ʒ/, because it'd 'flow' better.
 * I guess the same could be the case for borrowings into East Asian languages. Let's take the name of France in Vietnamese - Pháp. Even if we assume that it is a borrowing from Chinese, the final -p seems rather odd. Given the pronounciation of 'France' in French, 'Fang/Phang' would seem a more accurate. (Adding a final '-se/-sa/-sə' would make it fit the original French pronounciation even more.) Maybe 'Phap' fit Vietnamese pronounciation better, or maybe it sounded like a more appropriate name for a country than 'fang'.
 * This has little to do with the actual sounds of the language, and which combinations are possible, but rather what combination of sounds actually sounds like words and possibly even words that sound like what they are meant to represent. V85 (talk) 19:28, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

In English or French or Vietnamese, one does not have to respell foreign names. One just has to approach their pronunciations, and one can usually do this in the way they find best. But if your language uses another writing system, you have to write the names down as well, and the situation is more strict of one. Spelling conventions for foreign-language names (and words) do exist, and are usually more or less rigid. Note: I don't mean loanwords that may sometimes have been corrupted in one way or another, nor do I mean proper names that have been incorporated into the language (Paris, Detroit, Napoleon, Roosevelt), but rather I mean random names (and words) that we hear in the news and read in the Internet every day. Sometimes transcription systems based on those conventions have been officially codified by authoritative bodies. (Examples: Russian conventions, Thai conventions.) Each language has its own general patterns and traditional norms of adopting non-native sounds and sound combinations. Written transcriptions and their readings seek a balance between the original pronunciation, the original spelling and the phonology of the adopting language - but, as a rule, the original pronunciation dominates over the other two. The principle is generally the same as the example you gave with the word cool. English cool [kʰuːɫ] is adapted in French as cool [kul]. French doesn't have any of [kʰ], [uː] and [ɫ], but [k], [u] and [l] are reasonably good approximations, and if you say [kul], you won't be accused of not knowing the English pronunciation of the word. Sometimes different languages deal with the same sounds in different manners - for example Müller and Güngören become respectively Myuller and Gyungyoren in Russian, but Miler and Gingeren in Greek; and also the consonants /θ ð/ are represented as /t d/ in some languages, and as /s z/ in others. It's not all that clear, of course. Conventions could vary, and there could exist uncertanties, for example, about whether or not to record a certain type of vowel reduction, and for even fairly popular foreign names, two, three or more interchangeable variants may coexist in literature and periodicals. However, that's not the case in most instances. In most instances when multiple variants coexist, just one of them is the "correct" one, and the others (which might unfortunately be much more widespread than the "correct" one) are "incorrect", and the reason for their being there is that whoever wrote them down first wasn't aware of the pronunciation rules of the particular foreign language. There's no question that, here in Bulgaria, German Dürer [dyːʁɐ] must become Дюрер [dʲurɛr] and French printemps [pʁɛ̃tɑ̃] must become прентан [prɛntan], and all other renderings can be viewed as results of ignorance and unawareness. You'll often see and hear the intervocalic "s" of a Norwegian or Swedish name wirtten and pronounced as z /z/, which, as you know, is a huge mistake. This kind of thing academic literature doesn't usually do.

Thanks for a nice conversation. --Theurgist (talk) 03:23, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Tone deaf, intonational languages
Probably a silly question, but do tone-deaf people have added difficulty in learning intonational languages like Mandarin? TIA, Grutness...wha?  05:21, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * The article for tone deafness states that "tone deaf people seem to be disabled only when it comes to music, as they can fully interpret the prosody or intonation of human speech", which is uncited there, but I can find a citation for it here ("... tone-deaf individuals can fully interpret the pitch of human speech"). This study suggests that amusia's effect on being able to learn tonal languages is actually quite small (but there is an effect). --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 12:59, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * When it comes to tonality in a language, it has little to do with musical tones. How the tones are articulated is arbitrary and varies from speaker to speaker, but with certain commonalities. Such as, a high tone will always have higher pitch then a middle tone and a middle tone will have a higher pitch than a low tone, yet not so high a pitch as to be the high tone. So, if you are writing a song, you could set high tone to G, middle tone to E and low tone to C. Individuals would not necessarily relate to the tones in the same way, i.e. a high tone will not always be spoken as a G. Being able to speak a tonal language has little to do with hearing a G and being able to identifying it as a G, it is about contrasting the tones, the ability to hear a C and a G and being able to say which is high and which is low. V85 (talk) 16:42, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * ...But that's exactly what tone-deafness is (in theory): the lack of ability to distinguish relative (not absolute) pitch. --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 17:00, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * It seems my knowledge of musical theory is very weak... :-S V85 (talk) 17:09, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Relative pitch means being able to distinguish, say, a fourth from a fifth. I think the tone deaf can tell which of two tones is higher. -- BenRG (talk) 20:33, 22 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I sometimes wonder about that. Scenario: Someone with no musical training, or some musical training but no piano training, sits at a piano and tries to pick out a simple melody (their latest favourite song, say).  They know enough to know that when the pitch goes up they move their hand to the right, and when it goes down they move their hand to the left.  The only mistake they ought to make is judging just exactly how far to the right or left each new note is relative to its predecessor.   But how often have I seen them going left when the pitch goes up, or right when it goes down? I've lost count.  Almost everyone in this situation does that at some stage of the tune.  Maybe because these things are often done in a fun, party atmosphere, where "serious music making" is not what's going on.  Maybe if they were alone in a quiet room, they'd do it a little more carefully - but then, there'd be nobody to hear them.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  21:29, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * If someone with no musical training is sitting at a piano and there's noone around to hear them, do they make a sound? -- Ferkelparade &pi; 22:53, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Why not ask him? --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  23:36, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Origin of "You set 'em up, I'll knock 'em down"?
I'm working on a translation of an english text, containing the phrase "You set 'em up, I'll knock 'em down". The context remains unclear. My best guess is that it has something to do with sports, or physical violence, or ordering alcoholic beverages. What's the origin of this expression? What are its possible meanings? Gadret (talk) 10:38, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * With a little more context you might get a better answer, but I'll have a go anyway. In the UK I'm more familiar with the phrase "you set 'em up, I'll knock 'em in". This refers to football, and the imagery of someone making an assist - that is, making a pass to another player that allows them to easily score a goal. In the wider sense the phrase can be used to show one's gratitude to another person for doing the work that allows one to achieve highly - a little like Isaac Newton's famous phrase "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants [sic]."
 * The specific formation "you set 'em up, I'll knock 'em down" makes me personally think of domino toppling or Tin Can Alley. The figurative meaning, however, remains the same. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 11:12, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Sounds like skittles to me. Can you give the reference - what English text are you working on? This will help us to narrow the reference down. --TammyMoet (talk) 11:44, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * It makes me think of ten-pin bowling. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:06, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The context (which in our case we have not got – apologies to Henry Reed ) should make the meaning clearer, but the phrase alone suggest to me that the the conversationalists are about to fist-fight with a larger number of opponents, and the speaker is suggesting that his companion assault each opponent in a manner ("You set 'em up . . .") which will allow the speaker to deliver decisive blows (". . . I'll knock 'em down."), eliminating them from the conflict. Since this is usually not a realistic strategy, the line would likely be intended as gallows humour, although in a comedy setting (such as a Hope and Crosby film) the plan might actually succeed. The expression might be used in other sorts of conflict, such as a military skirmish. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.66.211 (talk) 12:46, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for not providing context any earlier. The text I'm working on is the lyrics to the song Rags To Riches by Gavin Friday. It's basically the words of someone rambling in a bar so the text is open to wide interpretation. In my initial translation the "You set em up..." line was about someone looking for a fight. Yesterday I watched the film The Shining, which has Jack Nicholson saying: "You set 'em up, and I'll knock 'em back, Lloyd, one by one." He's talking about drinks here (Lloyd is the bartender). When I googled for the phrase I found several blog posts and newspaper articles with similar titles, as if it´s some kind of well known expression or famous quote. That's why I asked for the origin of what I now take to be an (American?) idiomatic expression. Gadret (talk) 13:44, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * "Knock 'em back" is to drink a lot, and he's making a play on "knock 'em down". As others have said, bowling seems the most obvious origin, as pins used to be set up by hand (by minimum-wage workers called "pin boys") until they developed the machines used now in bowling alleys. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:33, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * There it is again: "Let's put a new coat of paint on this lonesome old town / Set 'em up, we'll be knockin' em down. / You wear a dress, baby, and I'll wear a tie. / We'll laugh at that old bloodshot moon in that burgundy sky." (New Coat Of Paint by Tom Waits) Gadret (talk) 13:49, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * In the most general sense, it means "You do the preparation, and I will finish the job". StuRat (talk) 14:41, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Definitely. I suspect the nuance or humor of it would be lost in translation, unless there happened to be a similar idiom in the other language. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:33, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * "Knock'em down" can also mean drink likker. Clarityfiend (talk) 21:31, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Sichuan Mandarin
I have learned a small amount of Standard Chinese, and now I am curious about Sichuan Mandarin. What are some recommended books and websites for learning Sichuan Mandarin, especially printed dictionaries and online dictionaries? Ideally, a dictionary would be trilingual, converting among English, Standard Chinese, and Sichuan Mandarin; however, if either English or Standard Chinese is missing, I am still interested. Also, is there anything anywhere equivalent to the article "Comparison of American and British English"? —Wavelength (talk) 14:53, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * zh:四川话 is well referenced. Does it help? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:40, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I am not sure, because of my limited understanding of Standard Chinese, but I thank you for your reply, and I intend to ask my Mandarin-speaking friend to help me in understanding the article.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 16:51, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Posh but polite department store
Translating McDermid's The Wire in the Blood, I found the sentences as follow:

"They think civil liberties is that posh but polite department store in London." He laughed at his own bad joke.

'They' means a CCTV development company, which probably ignores civil liberties, of course. But I don't understand what the sentence above means, and why it is a joke. Please help.--Analphil (talk) 15:30, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * See Liberty (department store). --TammyMoet (talk) 16:57, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Apparently they've been taking liberties with their puns. StuRat (talk) 17:26, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you! --Analphil (talk) 18:18, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Also worth remembering that English people tend to call shops by a possessive form of their name - so "Liberty's". DuncanHill (talk) 19:40, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

R
Why does the pronunciation of 'r' in different languages vary so much more than the pronunciations of other consonants? --108.206.4.199 (talk) 15:57, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * You may find the article Rhotic consonant interesting. There's some discussion there as to why the R is such a varied consonant.  -- Jayron  32  17:14, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * There are some British dialects (as well as some pockets in the eastern US) where both the "r" and the "l" are so rounded off that Elmer Fudd would fit right in. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:29, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Platypodes
Is the 'e' in 'platypodes' silent? --108.206.4.199 (talk) 18:08, 20 May 2012 (UTC)


 * No. It's pronounced 'platee-pohdees'. Note, however, that unless you want to sound like a raving grammar-pedant, the plural of Platypus is 'Platypuses'. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 21:47, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

"Buckwheat" as pejorative/racial term before 1934
George Pullen Jackson, in his 1933 article "Buckwheat Notes", mentions this apparently pejorative term for shape notes. "Many an article in the musical magazines of the early post-Civil War period reviled the proponents of 'measle-toed' and 'square-toed' music, or assured them that their 'buckwheat notes' were about 'good enough for niggers'" (p. 400). The question is whether, prior to the appearance of the Little Rascals character Buckwheat in 1934, this pejorative usage could have a specifically racial significance (as we might suspect from its occurrence here in combination with an obvious racial slur, despite the fact that the music being disparaged was usually thought of as "white"). Evidence is appreciated. Information or speculation about the origin and evolution of the word's pejorative use is also welcome (the OED doesn't mention any pej. use; is it that buckwheat is a more rustic grain favored in the cuisine of the poor?). Wareh (talk) 23:42, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't have the answer, but it may be of interest that this newspaper letter from 1942 refers specifically to "buckwheat notes" as a term in use in schools and music teaching, presumably (from the context) in the later years of the 19th century. The term may have had different connotations at that time.  Ghmyrtle (talk) 20:09, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * PS: From the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: "The rural and 'primitive' nature of the shape-notes led to their being termed 'buckwheat notes' by the somewhat more musically sophisticated..."  Other (not necessarily reliable) sources suggest that they were called "buckwheat notes" because of their shape - "a handful of buckwheat grains with their varying shapes really does remind you of what shape notes look like."   More reliable source here: "The shapes, designed as an aid to sight-reading, were also called patent notes and "buckwheat notes," the latter because the angular noteheads bore a fancied resemblance to kernels of buckwheat."  Ghmyrtle (talk) 20:19, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The 1942 newspaper is interesting, since it suggests a pre-1933 memory of "buckwheat notes" as a term that's not evidently pejorative at all & certainly seems to lack any possibility of racial overtones. I have to admit that I was initially dismissive of the idea that the resemblance in shape could be an important part of it, but I've had a look at a photograph of buckwheat groats, and I have to say they are quite suggestive of the shapes of shape notes! I'm going to conclude, at any rate, that the shape-resemblance theory of the name's origin can't be dismissed. Wareh (talk) 14:51, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The shape explanation seems plausible. I just wanted to add, in case Wareh wasn't aware of it yet, that there is a black boy named "Buckwheat" aboard the Elsinore in Jack London's The Mutiny of the Elsinore, twenty years prior to the Little Rascals character. At one point he is characterized as "hopelessly of the stupid lowly". See, for example, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography, University of Georgia Press, 2009, p 263, ISBN 9780820327891. Or the original text at The Gutenberg Project. ---Sluzzelin talk  09:50, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The sources commenting specifically on shape notes look to me just to be repeating an impression; I think the case has to be decided on uses of "buckwheat" outside this musical context. So the Jack London character name is an interesting additional piece of information. The author says the character is named "Buckwheat (of all things)," which doesn't really indicate whether she thinks it's a striking coincidence with the famous TV character, or a proof of London's resorting to outrageously ham-handed racial stereotypes. Wareh (talk) 01:48, 23 May 2012 (UTC)