Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 November 21

= November 21 =

Svetlana Penkina - help please :-)
Hi all, I can read her name by sounding out the letters, one by one, but that's not going to help me find relable sources for this article. Your assistance would be appreciated. Petr aka --Shirt58 (talk) 04:25, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Пенкина, Светлана Александровна in Russian
 * Пєнкіна, Світлана Олександрівна in Ukrainian
 * Your request is not clear. Do you need an IPA transcription? I was about to add it but then I thought you have asked something else. Though if you ask to find, translate and add sources to the article, I am not much help as I am absolutely uninterested in such articles. I think you'll hardly find anything else that is not already in the Russian version--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:38, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * You're right, I should have been more specific.
 * (I'm fascinated with Linguistics - especially Phonology - though I've never studied it. WP:RD/L is my MOOC. An IPA transcription would be of great interest to me, but wouldn't really assist saving the article from WP:BLPPROD deletion.)
 * What I am looking for is reliable sources for her date of birth, her movies and so on. I can't find any in English, and was hoping someone could find them in Russian.
 * --Shirt58 (talk) 09:02, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Al-Kawakibi
This Arabic word appears in the name of the Al-Kawakibi Democracy Transition Center (active 2006 to mid-2011 in the Levant and North Africa) and the recently-founded French Fondation Al-Kawakibi, described as a "world forum for [discussing] the reform of Islam." What's the literal meaning of the word? Does it have any figurative associations from Islam or Arab culture? -- Deborahjay (talk) 18:49, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi? -- Jayron 32 20:08, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Quite likely, as he seems an influential figure in the anti-Ottoman pan-Arabism of his day, with mentions of "reform" views of Islam (which is the source of my interest, see fr:Félix Marquardt). I'd still like to know the etymology of the name - is it perhaps toponymic? Per that page, he studied in his youth at a madrasa al-Kawakibi in his home town of Aleppo, where his well-off parents might have been patrons of the school. But which is the namesake? Further, in The Emergence of the Arab Movements (Routledge Press, 1993), Eliezer Tauber writes that al-Kawakibi's family was "of Kurdish origin." (I'll add this content to the page when I get it sorted out.) -- Deborahjay (talk) 21:09, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Having only a passing familiarity with Semitic languages in general, this is not much more than an OR guess, but is the name possibly derived from the same root as kawkab (كوكب, "planet", "star"; cognate with Hebrew kochavim)?--William Thweatt TalkContribs 02:27, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, kawakib is the plural of kawkab, and Kawakibi is a common surname in Islamic countries. Omidinist (talk) 04:52, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

emoji
I had always thought that the "emo" in "emoji" was from English "emotion", similar to "emoticon", but apparently it is from unrelated Japanese words. Even so, was the Japanese word influenced in any way by the English, or is the "emo" similarity entirely a linguistic coincidence? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.183.128.129 (talk) 20:28, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * According to Emoji, it means "picture character" in Japanese. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:04, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Uh, yes, I know. Those are the "unrelated Japanese words". 86.183.128.129 (talk) 01:12, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The word emoji is much older than cell phones and I think it's more or less the same as English "pictogram". The Japanese Wikipedia article mentions rongorongo glyphs as an example. That doesn't rule out the English word influencing the choice to call DoCoMo's pictures "emoji", but this blog post (in Japanese) claims that no one associated the "emo" with English "emotion" until after emoji were added to the iPhone and went international, and the first blog comment begins "oh yeah, now that you mention it..." which is further anecdotal evidence that the similarity isn't obvious to Japanese speakers. -- BenRG (talk) 01:16, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I imagine on seeing a text containing rongorongo, one would have to sing "Rongorongorongorongo banana phone" All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:12, 22 November 2015 (UTC).


 * Or "Rongorongorongo, I don't want to leave the Congo." 99.235.223.170 (talk) 16:36, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Based on the history section, it appears emoji did not include emoticons until later. So just a coincidence. Reach Out to the Truth 01:19, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * So, the -ji part comes from the root that means "character" (as in Kanji) but then what is the root for the "emo-" part? --Lgriot (talk) 14:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * "Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"). The apparent resemblance to English "emotion" and "emoticon" is just a coincidence." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Interesting, so -moji is for character, but sometimes Japanese uses only -ji as in kanji and romaji. --Lgriot (talk) 14:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Since no one has linked it, see the article titled False cognate. Emoji and emoticon are classic examples of false cognates.  -- Jayron 32 02:11, 24 November 2015 (UTC)