Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 January 3

= January 3 =

Name for insect vegetarian
Eating insects appears to be a coming trend in the Western world. I could imagine that some vegetarians would eat insects, just like some eat dairy, fish or poultry. These varieties of vegetarianism all have specific names, listed in Vegetarianism. If the term followed the same linguistic rules as those, what would a vegetarian that also eats insects be called? Sjö (talk) 08:44, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Insects are not vegetables. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:58, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Mmmm...Colorado potato beetle. InedibleHulk (talk) 14:40, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Vegetarians by definition do not eat fish, poultry, or insects. Someone who ate insects could call themselves an insectivore.--Shantavira|feed me 10:00, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I think Sjö meant varieties of "semi-vegetarianism" which would include Pescetarianism. The term Vegetarianism is seldom used to mean a strict diet of vegetables only.  Insectivores eat just insects.  "Entomotarianism" has been suggested elsewhere, but I don't expect it to become a dictionary word.    D b f i r s   10:14, 3 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Among people who actually are vegetarian, the habit of certain people who are not vegetarian of calling themselves vegetarian is annoying, as it tends to confuse caterers. And its use to mean, you know, actually vegetarian, is not "seldom". --ColinFine (talk) 22:24, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * There's another term for "semi-vegetarian": It's "omnivore". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:14, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Kind of, but not really. Omnivore means (literally) "all-eater", though since no organism literally meets that criterion, it's used to mean organisms that are indiscriminate about what they eat. Lacto-vegetarians (for example) don't match that label since they refuse to eat fairly significant classes of goods most other people consider food (i.e. animal flesh). Or, to put it the other way round, if lacto-vegetarians are omnivores, what would you call people who eat an unrestricted diet? Matt Deres (talk) 17:43, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Japanese translation request
Howdy, I'm dealing with some users who keep adding unsourced or improperly sourced television episodes to articles. In most cases they are doing so in contravention of WP:CRYSTAL. In this edit a user adds back an episode and cites this as the reference. I'm curious if anyone can tell me whether or not both the episode title and air date appears in that image:


 * 地獄の皇帝
 * Jigoku no Kōtei
 * January 24, 2016

Thanks, and sorry for the weird question. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:46, 3 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, looking quickly for every の in the image, I don't see one in the middle of 地獄の皇帝. —Tamfang (talk) 06:02, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note that this same image is given as the reference for the previous episode (number 89) in the same article. The heading line on the top of the image has both the title of the franchise "遊☆戯☆王ARC-V" and the date range "1月／10・17".  The line two below that appears to give the title of both episode 88 and 89.  &#x2013; b_jonas 15:55, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

In what order are digits written within a right-to-left text?
I've noticed Hebrew and Arabic text editors, etc. switch to left-to-right when you start writing numbers. Do speakers of those languages also do that when writing by hand? I would assume yes and that that's why text editors do that but I'd like to check. How about old mechanical Hebrew typewriters? (I have never even seen an mechanical Arabic typewriter). Normally the carriage moves left-to-right to allow you to write right-to-left. Did the carriage of those typewriters switch to moving right-to-left when you started writing a number? I don't suppose they did, but again I'd like to check. Contact Basemetal   here  19:06, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * In Arabic, you always have to interpret what you read or what you hear, because many things can be understood in a way or in an opposite way. Your example, the numbers: If you say 1989 (one thousand nine hundred eighty nine) in English, there is only one way to say 1989 and to write it. In Arabic, you can say "one thousand nine hundred nine eighty" or you can say "nine eighty nine hundred one thousand" they both mean 1989, but you have to be smart enough (constantly interpreting what you read or what you hear) to guess whether the text direction suddenly changes or if it sticks to the right-to-left. Akseli9 (talk) 19:25, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Are you a Taylor Swift fan? Saying a number "upward" (what's the right phrase? there is one but I forget what it is) as in "nine and eighty and nine hundred and a thousand" used to be the standard order in both Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. However, as far as I know, absolutely no one does that any longer in the modern languages. The order is now invariably "a thousand eight hundred ninety-nine" and left-to-right is the only order I've seen used in Arabic text editors when writing numbers. But it is a good question whether when Arabic speakers used to still use the "upward" order they also wrote the numerals right-to-left. Contact  Basemetal   here  20:14, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

How do Japanese people view those who pronounce the particle を as 'wo'?
I've run into Japanese people who insist on pronouncing 'wo' the object particle を which everyone else pronounces 'o'. Sometimes you hear it in songs too. This is clearly a case of hypercorrection influenced by the writing system. These are not people who have kept the syllable 'wo' in their phonological inventory somehow, since in all other cases they, like all other Japanese, pronounce 'o' the syllables that used to be pronounced 'wo'. It is only in this one case that they retain the syllable 'wo'. But how do Japanese people view people who do that? Eccentric? Pedants? Sophisticated? Cool? Old-fashioned? Or do they not even notice? Contact Basemetal   here  19:35, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * It may be a dialectical thing too. I would also imagine that this pronunciation might be useful when some sort of ambiguity in speech needed to be cleared up (though I can't imagine that happening often). Otherwise I would imagine it to be treated as a spelling pronunciation. But I am not Japanese and do not even speak the language, so these are just guesses (albeit based on what people who I believe to be actual Japanese speakers have said). Double sharp (talk) 06:05, 7 January 2016 (UTC)


 * It's worth noting that pronunciation in songs often differs from pronunciation in conversation, and not just for Japanese. Singing a consonant (or semi-consonant) in front of a vowel sound helps separate it from surrounding syllables, which makes the rhythm of the song clearer. So Japanese singers usually pronounce ん as a hard n syllabic consonant regardless of context, because that makes it easier to stick to the meter. Similarly, people who might say o still sing wo, just because that's the standard singing pronunciation, and it's clearer. This Stack Exchange discussion lists a few other common singing pronunciations. Smurrayinchester 14:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

In what order are digits spoken within a left-to-right text?
As an addendum to the query above:

In English:123 = 100 + 20 + 3 = hundred twenty three

In German: 123 = 100 + 3 + 20 = hundert drei und zwanzig (hundred three and twenty)

Reading from left to right is, at least in Indo-European languages, the standard. Applying the same principle to numeric “words” would seem natural.

The question is: Why / when did German develop this oddity of switching the last two digits?  And yes, I am aware that 13 / three-ten to 19 / nine-ten in English does the same.

Sorry, Googling gets me to totally useless pages unrelated to the question. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 21:00, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The spoken order of the lower numerals in Germanic developed long before Germanic people learned to write, in whatever direction, and even longer before they learned to write numbers with the present (Indo-Arabic) numeral system, so there's no oddity involved at all. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:12, 3 January 2016 (UTC)


 * It is still odd that those languages mix two orders. Is it a feature of all Germanic languages? (Except those like English where it became obsolete, although you can still find in Early Modern English things like "three and twenty", etc.) Any other Indo-European language family that does that? Any explanation how such a feature would arise? Contact Basemetal   here  21:36, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Latin has the same: un-decim, duo-decim, tre-decim etc. for 11–17, and optionally either viginti-duo or duo et viginti for the larger combinations. It seems that numeral systems are simply not invented in a single go, as a coherent system. People learn the smaller numerals first, and use them much more often, so languages may end up having older, more conservative or simply idiosyncratic forms for them. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:09, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it belongs to the same logics as leaving the verb at the end of the sentence? (In German, the verb is at the end of the sentence, like this: "In German, the verb at the end of the sentence is") Akseli9 (talk) 22:00, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * That is an idea that many people have, although it wrong is. In German put we verbs in the end only in subclauses, while we in mainclauses the main part of the verb in second position place. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:09, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * And no, seriously, I don't think there is a common logic there. While it's true that word order differences between languages are often interrelated, via the principle of common left- or right-Headedness (e.g. languages that have objects before the verbs will also most often have adjectives before their nouns, and so on), I'm not aware that the order of the spoken numeric digits is typologically correlated with any of these (numerals are more like coordinating compounds than like headed phrases anyway). Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:17, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Related previous discussion. Deor (talk) 00:02, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The order is occasionally still seen in English: four and twenty blackbirds.   D b f i r s   10:16, 4 January 2016 (UTC)