Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 November 10

= November 10 =

Burmese/Karen braille
According to one of the sources for Burmese Braille (the image in the info box), there's a diacritic that looks like a virama but which is called a visarga (or s.t. very much like it – I don't read Burmese). Can anyone explain what it is? (There's a footnote for it in the article.) That source also seems to order conjunct consonants differently than how we describe them at Burmese alphabet, so I also wanted to make sure there was no problem with that. — kwami (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * This page toward the bottom under "combining marks" attempts to explain how virama (which looks like a "plus" sign under a consonant) is used differently than the "asat" (which is written above and looks like the symbol our article calls a "virama"). "Visarga" is also shown there. I can't get Burmese fonts to work in my browser right now for some reason so I'm afraid I can't make any sense of it at the moment. --William Thweatt TalkContribs 03:16, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify, the virama only looks like a plus sign when the Unicode character is used by itself. In written Burmese, there's no diacritic that looks like a plus sign. The virama is used in Unicode to stack consonants; e.g. to write ဗုဒ္ဓ, you type ဗ then ု then ဒ then ္ then ဓ. That doesn't help us figure out what character is being talked about here, though. But the article says the character being question is used in Karen Braille, which may be different from Burmese Braille. Ordinary written Karen uses some diacritics not found in Burmese, so it wouldn't be surprising if the same were true of Karen Braille. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:23, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Kopfblatt?
What's the proper English translation of the German 'kopfblatt', as in p. 111, ? --Soman (talk) 00:50, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I can't read the context of page 111 in snippet view. Kopfblatt would be header page, but if the context is newspapers you are maybe looking for local edition or branch paper. Short explanation here. Did it help? Best, Sam Sailor Sing 01:12, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Combining the two snippets for 1191 and 1192 the text is "(5) später Kopfblatt von 'Die rote Fahne', Berlin". Issues of 'Die rote Fahne' are online at Berlin State Library. It presumably means: [The newspaper] later [was a] branch paper of 'Die rote Fahne'. Perhaps somebody can translate de:Kopfblatt or link it to its English equivalent in order to get the best English rendering. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 02:03, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! --Soman (talk) 02:26, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The newspapers share content with the larger paper - with the local paper adding a few pages of local news. Probably as a wrapper. Rmhermen (talk) 05:50, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Confusion of tongues: The German articles de:Kopfblatt, de:Vollredaktion, de:Mantel (Zeitung) and de:Publizistische Einheit have no English equivalent. What are the English words? --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 12:48, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This practice seems to be uncommon in the English-speaking world, certainly in the UK. Our newspaper article suggests the term for producing local editions with some local content (or possibly only local advertising) is zoning but this part of the article is poorly referenced. More typically, newspapers in the UK might produce different editions for different areas with some different content (i.e local news) and some shared content. For example my own local paper produces a Birmingham and a Black Country edition, but both are published as the Birmingham Mail, and many national UK newspapers also produce an Irish version and sometimes a Scottish version. This is a somewhat different practice to having a general-purpose Mantel with a Kopfblatt with an entirely different name on the masthead for each locality. I suspect a lot of the non-local content of some of the smaller local papers in the UK is shared (most are published by one of a handful of companies such as Trinity Mirror plc and Local World) but my impression is that it's the written (etc.) content that's shared rather than the actual formatted pages, so you might read the same article in multiple papers, but it would not necessarily be in the same place in each as there is no shared Mantel which the local pages wrap around. (Compare print syndication which I understand is responsible for significant parts of the content of many US papers and is again about shared content rather than shared pages). Francophone publishing seems to follow the UK and US. fr:Quotidien régional describes regional papers as consisting of regional news, local news which varies between different editions of the same paper, and national news, which is bought in (i.e. syndicated) from press agencies. it:Quotidiano mentions that some national newspapers include local inserts, again the reverse of the German practice. It seems to follow that there are no commonly used terms in English to translate these German words which relate to publishing practices which are apparently specifically German. Valiantis (talk) 02:39, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 11:28, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

AUS English question
Our article on the Inland taipan contains the sentence "The police was involved to find out how the Inland Taipan got to this part of Australia." Is that grammatical? I was going to change it to were, but it occurred to me that this might be one of those instances where the local dialect uses different rules for plurals than what I'm expecting. And, indeed, there's a warning to that effect when I went to edit the section. So... "The police was...? Matt Deres (talk) 02:47, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Mentioning User:JackofOz and User:HiLo48 should get their attention. μηδείς (talk) 05:11, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah gidday. Yes, you found me! To me, that's just bad grammar. Should be "were". "Kilometres" was incorrectly spelt too. I've done some editing. HiLo48 (talk) 05:28, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Helo
Hi. What is the origin of "helo" as an abbreviation of "helicopter"? I mean, why -o? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.171.42.209 (talk) 20:38, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Google references indicate late 1960s for first use, a "shortening and altering" of "helicopter". Who knows? Maybe because "heli" sounds like "helly", which is not really the best connotation. Although I've heard "chopper" or even "copter" a lot more often. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:56, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I think "helo" is used a lot in the armed forces. 86.171.42.209 (talk) 21:55, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Is that with a long or short "e" - like HEEL or HELL? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:24, 10 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I've always heard HEEL-0. There is also a piece of mechanical equipment called a "high-low", as that's a common term for a scissor lift.  StuRat (talk) 22:32, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * In the UK armed forces, it's shortened to 'heli' (with a short 'e').  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  09:04, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Are you certain about that? I believe I have heard "helo" from British people (though it may have originally been imported from the US), but I don't recall ever hearing "heli". 86.177.105.62 (talk) 12:08, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * UK resident here - never heard of heel-o but heli is very common. --TammyMoet (talk) 14:47, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I can remember Australians coming back from Vietnam duties using that term, and pronouncing it HEEL-0. So 1960s sounds good to me. HiLo48 (talk) 09:27, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * You'll find 'heli' used in this film, multiple times.  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  19:27, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Which film? --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:45, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, spaz of a wank fuck tiny computer.  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  22:29, 11 November 2013 (UTC)