Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 March 2

= March 2 =

St. George's, Grenada apostrophe
Why is there an apostrophe in the name of St. George's, the capital of Grenada? I had guessed that it might have originally been named St. Georges by the French, and that the English added the apostrophe in a process akin to back-formation, but I've not yet found any evidence to support that idea. -- ToE 00:46, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Could very well be a noun with possessive suffix, but without any explicit accompanying possessed (a phenomenon discussed not too long ago on this board). AnonMoos (talk) 01:00, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No, the French called the place Ville de Fort Royal, but when the island was ceded to Great Britain in 1763, it was renamed St George's Town, Saint George being the patron saint of England. See Grenada: Carriacou - Petite Martinique by Paul Crask (p. 92). Alansplodge (talk) 02:04, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I have added this detail to our article. Still needs some work though. Alansplodge (talk) 16:47, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you Alansplodge! -- ToE 23:41, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Russian help
Is this really Russian, and if so, is it grammatical? For the curious, this relates to the lost cosmonauts conspiracy theory. --Bowlhover (talk) 03:21, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, the intonation matches what is expected from the text, although the translation is not literal, and I cannot at all vouch for the provenance of the recording. Basically, I would say, "this sounds like a woman transmitting in Russian".  I expect User:JackofOz and User:Любослов Езыкин will agree, maybe they will comment.  But it's no more clear than "I buried Paul/Cranberry Sauce". μηδείς (talk) 04:43, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It's so unclear to my hearing-loss-affected ears that I could not say what language it's in. Only because I'm told it's Russian, do I think I perceive some brief glimpses of Russianish intonation.  But it could be Polish or Ukrainian or Bulgarian or Czech for all I know.  If I'd been given no information, the best I could say is that it was not English.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:32, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Are you a fluent Russian speaker? If you can easily understand spoken Russian, but you can't understand this video, I'll have to assume the woman is not a native Russian speaker.  --Bowlhover (talk) 22:28, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No, I have never claimed to be a fluent Russian speaker, because I never have been. I can usually understand the general gist of what a Russian speaker is saying, but as I say, this recording is so unclear, I can't say what language it is, let alone understand what she's saying. I tried to match the translation with the sounds I was hearing, but I couldn't even do that.  So, while I'm not prepared to confirm it's Russian, I'm not in a position to deny it either.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  03:19, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * That conclusion doesn't follow at all, Bowlhover. I can identify an orchid without being able to draw an orchid. I can tell the Beatles, Stones, or Hendrix are singing English without knowing what they are saying in English. Russian has very clear diagnostic features; a certain set of phonemes, free stress, with vowel reduction of unstressed vowels: akane and икaньe and a certain set of numbers which seem to occur in the recording.  The woman seems to say один in a way that is very diagnostic of Russian, not Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Rusyn, or any other Eastern Slavic or even Slavic language.  If you are going to ask for expert assistance, you might abstain from pretending to give your own. μηδείς (talk) 05:33, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * What are you talking about? I don't disagree with any of the statements you just made.  My point was that if someone is supposedly speaking English, and I can't even identify the language as English despite being a fluent English speaker, I would suspect that person is either not speaking English or not a native speaker.  Do you disagree with that?   --Bowlhover (talk) 05:56, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, I absolutely disagree with that. See Mondegreen.  See fetuses recognizing their own language at birth  It's perfectly possible to identify something as belonging to language X without being able to identify what exactly is being said in language X.  Even fetuses do this. μηδείς (talk) 06:27, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Also (or maybe the same), the fluency of the listener's command of the spoken language has no bearing on whether they can identify the language when spoken by others. I know no Dutch and very little German but I can distinguish them from each other.  I know maybe 2 words of Portuguese but I can distinguish it from Spanish.  I know no Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian or Rusyn, but I can distinguish them all from Russian and (apart from Rusyn) from each other.  I can distinguish Chinese from Japanese from Vietnamese from Cambodian ...  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:31, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Note that this is a recording by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, and almost certainly a hoax, probably with Russian-ish dialogue recorded by their (Italian) sister. Adam Bishop (talk) 02:21, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Adam, I saw your comment after having written mine. I'd also say that it looks like some woman was sitting in her dacha's veranda in a hot summer day and testing her newly bought tape recorder, that's why she was saying 1, 2, 3.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:15, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * If I wasn't aware it's in Russian I wouldn't comprehend anything. Only after having known it's Russian I could hear «1, 2, 3, 4, 5». And only after having read the translation and listening hard one more time I could recognize also «Слышите! Мне жарко!». My authoritative conclusion: it is incomprehensible gibberish. The description to the audio is an obvious anti-Soviet conspiracy rubbish about some good western guys (here they're Italians, hello Marconi!) revealing the Truth™ which had been hidden by the evil chthonic KGB. In fact this can be absolutely anything.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:08, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Follow-up on simulating and gibberish
Spun off from Adam Bishop's reply to the "Russian" question above: This kind of simulated (often improvised) rendering of a language has come up in questions before. I mean things like "Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?" or "Prisencolinensinainciusol" (or Simlish). Is there a term (or even a list of notable examples) for this spoken version, beyond gibberish? ---Sluzzelin talk  07:41, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's "double talk". See this brief video in four languages by perhaps the best practitioner of double talk ever. μηδείς (talk) 19:11, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There are a couple good double talk scenes in His Girl Friday which is on youtube and out of copyright. This is a contemporary artist in English. μηδείς (talk) 19:26, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! ---Sluzzelin talk  03:20, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * A famous British talker of total gibberish was comedian Stanley Unwin. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=323kQis2zbM 86.160.217.154 (talk) 15:04, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Books about Wikipedia or encyclopedias in languages other than English or French
There are a few books about Wikipedia and there are a few books about encyclopedias, but sources in languages other than English and French are difficult [for me] to find. Specifically I'm looking for books in languages other than English about encyclopedias outside of the best known Enlightenment and American examples (and on Wikipedia if about something other than the en.wikipedia). Is this better suited for Refdesk/Humanities? --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  |  16:25, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Category:Books about Wikipedia has a link to Arabic Wikipedia and a link to Portuguese Wikipedia.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 22:52, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Unfortunately the above only yielded one additional title. Hoping for more leads/ideas/answers before this thread expires... :/ --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  |  19:29, 9 March 2014 (UTC)