Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 August 11

= August 11 =

classic literature for advanced learners (brazilian)
hi, i'm looking for texts of classic literature, not too difficult, short texts. for advanced learners in english, with integrated dictionary on every page for the unknown vocabulary. for example: i had the book ghost of canterville, transformed in little easier language. at the top of each page: the text. on the bottom of each page: vocabulary translated to german. like this. now i'm looking for a book like this, but for brazilian students, can be abbreviated. thanks for help --152.249.152.243 (talk) 00:28, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Major ELT publishers have series of what they call "easy readers" or "graded readers". Some of these are adaptations (simplifications) of classic works of literature, which are usefully out of copyright; some are adaptations of recent best-sellers, often within the same publishing house; others are original works of fiction, in some cases written by "names". I note that the example you linked to stated a lower intermediate level, not advanced; different providers may use different ways of grading. Here is one example. None of the ones I've found have integrated translations on the page. I would suggest contacting a specialist bookseller near you - if you are in Brazil, presumably there are bookshops, or sections of bookshops, that cater to Brazilian people learning English, and they may be able to find what you are looking for. I would have hesitated to offer such a suggestion a few days ago, but as no other volunteer on this reference desk has been able to help you, I thought it's best to cover the basics. Good luck - and if you do find something that meets your needs, please come back and add the information below, so that someone searching in future might benefit. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 09:46, 15 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The OP shouldn't go away thinking this is the only response.  The following was posted earlier:

I have a copy of Inocência by Visconde de Taunay. It's intended for English students learning Portuguese, so the annotations compare English and Portuguese versions of difficult words, which might be of some assistance. 81.151.100.208 (talk) 14:13, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you - that contribution was previously invisible to me. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 11:17, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

baaaad
When you refer to someone as a 'baaaad man' or a 'baaaad boy', what does it imply? --Omidinist (talk) 07:38, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * That he is baaaad. Perhaps you'd like to share some context? —Tamfang (talk) 10:45, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * They are numerous: here; here; here; here; here. Omidinist (talk) 11:47, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * In the first, third, fourth and fifth refs "baaaad" is a pun on "bad", in a more-or-less literal sense (see wikt:bad), and "baa", the traditional onomatopoeic representation of the sound made by a sheep. I did not watch the video in the second link, so cannot comment on that. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:19, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. But how about this:'baaaad nigger'? Omidinist (talk) 16:36, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * When I followed that link, I got no content. Then I tried removing some fields.  This shorter version works:  —Tamfang (talk) 09:14, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Tamfang, most of what you put in your shortened URL was redundant.  http://books.google.co.uk/books?id= followed by a 12 - character string is the unique identifier of an e - book.   Adding &pg=PA** takes you straight to the page.   The remaining 102 characters are superfluous. 81.151.100.208 (talk) 09:34, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not surprised. The original has 12 fields, so I tried 12 versions, each with one field removed.  Then I copied the address bar of each successful tab, and preserved those fields that appeared in all of them.  Google put some of them back, but I didn't try to compensate for that. • So the minimum is  but if you click that you'll be redirected, for lack of a better term, to the slightly longer . —Tamfang (talk) 00:04, 15 August 2016 (UTC)


 * This post from Oxford Dictionaries blog has a good synoposis of "inverted meanings", such as saying "bad" when you mean "good". It may very well be relevant.  Knowing if a speaker intends that use requires subtle clues and cultural contexts which may or may not be apparent in typed writing or in soundbites of only a few seconds.  You really need to know who is speaking, who they are speaking with, and what they are speaking about to get the context.  See also phat.  -- Jayron 32 17:50, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Good lead. Many thanks. Omidinist (talk) 18:43, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * "I'm a baaad boy" was a catchphrase used by Lou Costello of the team Abbott and Costello. But they didn't necessarily invent it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:38, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Surely we should have some discussion of this phenomenon on one of our many linguistics articles? I looked in vain at Opposites and its "see also"s. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 09:56, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

First names starting with "De"
I've noticed quite a few people in the media who have first names starting with "De" followed by (what I would call) a more conventional first name, often written as one word but with the "D" capitalised as well as the first letter of the "conventional" name - like "DeFirstname". I know where "de Surname" comes from, but what is the significance of "DeFirstname"? Does the "De" mean anything? Does it derive from a particular language's naming conventions, or does it result from someone being named after someone else's surname that has a "de" in it - like if your parents were a big fan of Thomas De Quincey you might be named DeQuincey Smith? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:20, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, I once met a DeVera who said (iirc) that Vera was her mother. —Tamfang (talk) 10:48, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * There's some information at African-American names. Within African-American culture it has become common naming practice for some time to use certain word beginnings and word endings.  I'm not sure that anything beyond prosody (that is, the sounds of the syllables themselves) holds any deeper meaning.  Here is an article at Salon.com that discusses African-American naming practices as well.  -- Jayron 32 11:18, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The person that came immediately to mind when I saw the question was DeForest Kelley, who apparently "was named after the pioneering electronics engineer Lee de Forest" (though the article doesn't explain why, or give a citation for this). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 11:20, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * There is also DaMarcus Beasley. --Theurgist (talk) 16:45, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

"De" is French for "of" or "from". Please see Nobiliary particle.--Shantavira|feed me 06:06, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * That's true in French, but not in all languages (as the link sort of states). It has no special meaning in Dutch, for instance. Fgf10 (talk) 08:23, 12 August 2016 (UTC)


 * DeWitt Clinton, named for his mother's maiden name, a practice that was not so unusual in olden days. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:03, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Brief linguistic overview of major world languages (Book)
I once took a book from a library that had a chapter on each of the major language families with the top languages highlighted, with maybe 20-30 pages per language, discussing phonology and grammar (and maybe writing systems) of each, in a very concise and yet thorough way. Lots of tables. Does this ring a bell for anyone? I'd like to find it again. --2620:0:1000:1610:59DC:D05A:66EF:1E20 (talk) 18:57, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Sounds like Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages. There are as well similar books like Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World or George L. Campbell's Concise Compendium of the World's Languages.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:14, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's it, exactly. --2620:0:1000:1610:59DC:D05A:66EF:1E20 (talk) 20:32, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * There's also An Introduction to the Languages of the World by Anatole Y. Lyovin. —Tamfang (talk) 09:23, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is a much better book if you want a taste of actual world diversity, rather than only of languages mostly important to Westerners. I do  refer to Comrie all the time, but the first half of the book is on European languages, then some languages from Persia and the subcontinent, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, and Yoruba.  Not a single language from the Americas.  Lyovin has sketches including Finnish, Russian, Arabic, Tibetan, Yup'ik Eskimo, Dyirbal (Australia), Hawaiian and Quechua from the Andes.
 * You can see table of contents at Amazon. Comrie's chapters are very thorough, although they lack a constant format (he's the editor) and it's basically a great reference book for Europeans who want to know what was important for the pre-Cold War professional.  Lyovin gives a broader, if not as deep sample. μηδείς (talk) 02:12, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Chernozemic vs chernozemic
In this book, both capitalizations are used, even in the same sentence. Searching in other books and journals turns up what seems like equal instances of both capitalizations. Can anyone tell me in what context this word should or should not be capitalized? At least for the linked book it must not be arbitrary. DTLHS (talk) 21:30, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * On a quick search (here's the WP article, BTW &mdash; chernozem) I can't imagine why it should be capitalized. It looks like a completely normal common noun/common adjective.  It's not even named after a place or person; just "dark dirt" in Russian.
 * If you're going to write about it in some other venue, you might consult the style guide for that, but I can predict pretty confidently that the attitude at Wikipedia will be that it should be lowercase. --Trovatore (talk) 21:59, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

If you go back to the front of the book, in the preface and the start of Chapter 3, you will see that in its taxonomy of soil types, Chernozemic is the name of an "order" and in that context is capitalized. Compare the practice in the taxonomy of living things, where levels from genus upwards are always capitalized (e.g. Homo in Homo sapiens) when referred to by their official names. Now go back to the page cited by the original poster and you'll see that it refers consistently to "Chernozemic" when it's talking about the order (as a name) or to soil of that order, but "chernozemic" when it's using the word in other ways. I have no idea of whether other scientists who do soil classification follow the same conventions, but that's what's going on in this book. --69.159.9.219 (talk) 06:29, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that.  I was guessing that the book just had sloppy proofreading. --Trovatore (talk) 06:53, 12 August 2016 (UTC)