Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 May 1

= May 1 =

Arabic, Chinese, and Greek help: What are the characters in these documents?
What are the characters in the second line of the header in this Arabic document:
 * http://wayback.archive.org/web/20041213013832/http://nycenet.edu/Forms/ethnic_idforms/arabic.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6GHJQl8gb

What are the characters in the second line of the header in this Chinese document? http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040309163944/http://nycenet.edu/Forms/ethnic_idforms/chinese.pdf

What are the Greek characters in:
 * The first line of this document: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20041213011708/http://nycenet.edu/Forms/ethnic_idforms/greek.pdf
 * The first line of this document: http://opt-osfns.org/languages/greek.pdf

Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 00:44, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The second line of the Arabic says "بطاقة الطالب العرقية لولي الامر", or I would say something like "Student ethnicity form for guardians" (or basically what it says in English). The first line of the first Greek document says "ΣΥΜΒΟΥΛΙΟ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑΣ ΤΟΥ ΔΕΜΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΝΕΑΣ ΥΟΡΚΗΣ", or like the English, "Board of Education of the (City?) of New York". The first line of the second Greek document says "ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑΣ ΠΟΛΕΩΣ ΤΗΣ ΝΕΑΣ ΥΟΡΚΗΣ" or "Ministry of Education of the (City?) of New York". I don't really know Greek so I don't know why it's "demos" in the first one and "polis" in the second (or at least, the difference between the two in ancient Greek is probably not relevant here...) Adam Bishop (talk) 01:47, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you! What is the Arabic of the first line? WhisperToMe (talk) 03:12, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * It says "The Board of Education for the City of New York." Wrad (talk) 05:08, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, but I would like the actual Arabic text so I can post it in the Arabic Wikipedia article and on the Commons Category page. WhisperToMe (talk) 05:30, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * It's "الهيئة التعليمية المدينة نيو يورك". Adam Bishop (talk) 10:48, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 15:29, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

The Chinese characters in the second line are 供家長、監護人填寫的學生種族身份資料. Oda Mari (talk) 06:34, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 07:34, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

"to Temp" food
What does it mean to temp steak, or food? This reference occurred in Hells Kitchen (US version) of season 11 of episode 8.Curb Chain (talk) 05:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Maybe the word was temper, not temp? What was the sentence in which the word was used? — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 07:45, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It maybe has something to do with temperature, e.g. Heating or cooling the lobster. ☯ Bonkers The Clown  \(^_^)/  Nonsensical Babble  ☯ 07:59, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Sounds more like testing the food to see if it's reached the right temperature inside. --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  08:06, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It may also be the process of taking a steak out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature before frying/grilling/cooking/whatever it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:52, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * A quick Google shows lots of websites that recommend bringing a steak to room temperature before cooking it. Alansplodge (talk) 17:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Another possibility is an abbreviation for tempura. StuRat (talk) 19:06, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * That's a batter answer than any of the others. :)  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  20:07, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Ouch. — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 03:51, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * You liked that one? Here's another: What does one say when one is served a plate of Eels à la japonaise? O tempura, o morays!.  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  08:28, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Relationship between Pashto and Persian
How closely related are the two official languages of Afghanistan, namely Pashto and (Dari) Persian? I'll freely admit to a certain amount of neglect in my studies of this side of the Indo-European tree. I understand they're both Iranian languages but that article isn't much help. How long ago did they diverge from a common ancestor and how divergent are they? If one were to make a crude comparison, would the relationship be more similar to that of Spanish and Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, or Spanish and Icelandic? Are educated speakers of one able to distinguish familiar elements in or maybe even understand bits of the other without instruction?--William Thweatt TalkContribs 08:38, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Pashto is a southeastern Iranian language, while modern Persian is a southwestern Iranian language, so that they're not too close (definitely much more divergent than Spanish and Portuguese). AnonMoos (talk) 09:23, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

They diverged from Proto-Iranian around 2000-1500 BC. (See this tree File:Iranian_Family_Tree_v2.0.png However, as they're in such proximity they probably borrow words back and forth. The relationship could be seen as that between Spanish and Greek. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Iranian_languages_word_table there are enormous differences between basic words. EamonnPKeane (talk) 10:30, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I bet they both have lots of loanwords from (standard) Persian and from Arabic too. That will help intelligibility to some extent. (I don't know Hungarian, but I have a pretty good idea what Artikulációs fonetika means.) Angr (talk) 19:25, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * At the date of separation Eamonn mentions the difference would be closer to that between Breton and French. μηδείς (talk) 19:27, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Does that not assume that all languages evolve (and hence any two sister languages deviate) at the same rate? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.66.241.41 (talk) 22:17, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * No, it can't. But Greco-Aryan separated from Italo-Celtic long before internal divisions within Italo-Celtic and Aryan. μηδείς (talk) 23:47, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * 87.81.230.195/5.66.241.41 -- Proponents of Glottochronology claimed that the rate of replacement of "basic vocabulary" should be much the same between related languages, but were never really able to make the numbers add up in a way that would allow reliable deductions of absolute dating of language splits to be made from glottochronological data. Pashtun and Persian have diverged within a single Indo-European branch, so I'm not sure how valid it would be to compare their degree of divergence to those of languages from different Indo-European branches (Spanish and Greek, or Breton and French). AnonMoos (talk) 01:06, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I denied a constant rate of evolution and mentioned Breton and French only since, like Dari and Pashto, they are in the same modern geopolitical unit. The Gallic languages are both quite divergent from their roots.  I have no knowledge of Pashto and the most limited knowledge of Farsi.  But it is obvious they are at lest as divergent as any of the two most divergent Germanic dialects, even if the latter were a unity as recent as 1,000 BC or after. μηδείς (talk) 02:17, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * AnonMoos's objection to Medeis's argument, that Pashto and Farsi belong to the same branch of Indo-European whereas French and Breton do not, doesn't seem to me to hold up. Our conception of the branches has more to do with our ability to prove common descent for the constituent languages than with their linguistic closeness to one another.  For the Iranian languages, our ability to prove common descent has to do with the antiquity of Avestan and its obvious closeness to Old Persian.  For the Celtic and Italic languages we don't have any exemplars nearly as old as Avestan. If we did have examples of Celtic or Italic languages that were three thousand or so years old, we would very likely be able to label Italic and Celtic as a single "branch".  In which case French and Breton would be a good analogy to Pashto and Farsi.  159.182.1.4 (talk) 14:41, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * As a side note, I think it is fairly clear from a comparison of Oscan and Umbrian with the Gaulish language that had Latin gone extinct, they and Old Latin would be considered part of a larger Celtic family than as a separate Italic branch. μηδείς (talk) 16:15, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The Italo-Celtic hypothesis has waxed and waned in academic acceptance over the decades (one of the main original pieces of evidence for it seems to have been a comparison of r-endings in verbs which didn't hold up), and I'm not sure that it's as solidly established as a branching subdivision (as opposed to a former dialect continuum / sprachbund) as is Indo-Iranian, or even Balto-Slavic... AnonMoos (talk) 16:58, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * No, it's very much a minority view nowadays. The loss of p in Celtic but not Italic as well as the divergent treatment of the voiced aspirates (becoming plain voiced stops in Celtic but voiceless fricatives presumably by way of voiceless aspirates in Italic) makes it very difficult to believe that Celtic and Italic descend from a common ancestor later than PIE. The innovative similarities they have (such as p...kʷ > kʷ...kʷ as well as lexical items) are the sort of thing that can be easily attributed to language contact rather than genetic relationship. Angr (talk) 20:06, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The p/kw developments seem to be parallels, not common innovations, just the loss of final s in French an spoken Mexican is a mere parallel. And the -r endings are a common retention.  (Neither of which is at all evidence against a connection)  But there are about 20 apparent common innovations including vocabulary proving a common period of development.  You can find much of the relevant discussion in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov.  And no, the commonalities are not as detailed and as many as in the more obvious Indo-Iranian and Balto-Celtic groups.  Reconstruction of Italo-Celtic would get you a post-Anatolian form of PIE with a few dozen peculiarities.  Still enough to define the group and give it a date of about 2,000- 2,500 BC.  Also, other evidence will have been lost, just as much Latin vocabulary did not make it into Romance and would have been lost save for written records.  The pendulum has swung and overly ambitious 19th century constructs like Uralo-Altaic have been demolished to the point that the obviously valid Altaic is denied and even Marcantontio now scoffs at the uncontroversial Uralic as a "myth".  This is a skeptical ideological epistemological fashion that has little to do with the examined evidence.  Had Latin not survived there would have been no reason to separate Oscan and Umbrbian from Gaulish in a wider continental macro-Celtic. μηδείς (talk) 06:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Which would have been virtually identical to postlaryngeal PIE. Shared vocabulary is no evidence of a common period of development since vocabulary is so easily borrowed in language contact, and the phonological and morphological similarities are either not universal in Italic and Celtic or not unique to Italic and Celtic. Of course it's impossible to prove a negative, but I think most Indo-Europeanists just find the evidence for a distinct Proto-Italo-Celtic stage unconvincing. Angr (talk) 19:25, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers and the (as always) interesting conversations.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 19:59, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Beating
When was the English term "beating" first used, as having the meaning to work to windward or sailing upwind?LordGorval (talk) 18:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The first source in the OED is :   Of all the modes of progression invented by man, beating to windward in a sailing vessel is morally the most beautiful. -- 1883 Contemp. Rev. Aug. 231. So that's a start. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:30, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * A Google Books search finds several instances of "beating to windward" from the early 1700s (as early as 1703), but nothing from the 1600s. As I understand it, though, "beating" originally meant moving back and forth (i.e., tacking) rather than specifically moving to windward.  (Of course the main reason to tack is that it is the only way to go upwind.) Looie496 (talk) 03:33, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the information from the both of you. Appreciate it. LordGorval (talk) 11:30, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The OED quotation was specifically for the gerund, but in other inflections the verb beat in its nautical sense has been in use since at least 1677 (at "beat, v.1", sense 19.a):
 * "Naut. (intr.) To strive against contrary winds or currents at sea; to make way in any direction against the wind. to beat about : to tack against the wind. [Compare nautical use of Icelandic beita to bait: some conjecture that beat here represents a lost *bait.] 1677   A. Yarranton England's Improvem. I. 1   We must lye beating at Sea while the Dutch are at Anchor."
 * Lesgles (talk) 19:36, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Scrutator
Ian Irvine's books, The Well of Echoes, refer to scrutators. What is a scrutator? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.102.251.193 (talk) 20:59, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * One who scrutinizes. See scrutator. Tevildo (talk) 21:27, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't know what you do where you're from, but I eat my tators. -- Jayron  32  02:55, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Do you eat special taters or just commentators ? StuRat (talk) 04:45, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

As opposed to a tater screw?165.212.189.187 (talk) 12:45, 2 May 2013 (UTC)