Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 August 24

= August 24 =

Languages easiest to learn for English-Chinese bilingual native speakers?
Which languages are easiest to learn for English-Chinese bilingual native speakers? I've seen an infographic on this topic, for native English speakers. It covers the Germanic and Romance languages as being easiest and Far Eastern (Japanese, Korean, Chinese) and Near Eastern languages (Arabic) as hardest. But I'm not sure if the reverse would be true for English-Chinese bilingual native speakers - people who speak and write in both English and Chinese at the native level. Japanese, despite having Chinese characters called kanji, looks very complicated. Though, the kanji word for Japanese in Japanese looks like Chinese and coincidentally has the same meaning! If there are more words like that, then Japanese may not be terribly difficult for native Chinese learners after all. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 01:47, 24 August 2017 (UTC)


 * You are asking for opinion that overlaps with previous questions, but if you don't want to cheat and pick Scots English or Shanghainese, I'd go with Vietnamese. It shares many structural characteristics and borrowed vocabulary with Chinese, and is written in the Latin alphabet, so it requires little learning regarding orthography.  Vietnamese is not demonstrably related to either of the two given native tongues.
 * Japanese isn't close to either either, and while it may superficially look like Chinese, there are still many characters to learn or relearn including ones that have two readings, and although its grammar isn't horribly complex, its verbal system and sentence structure differ greatly from the native languages.
 * Typologically, Arabic is fairly close to European languages, just the script is scary. Otherwise I'd say it's no worse to learn than Russian. μηδείς (talk) 03:45, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Having dabbled in both Arabic and Russian, the former is much harder. Its grammar has nothing to do with Indo-European languages, there is little overlapping vocabulary, and its phonetics are a lot more challenging than Russian. Typically, programs to reach fluency in Arabic require twice as many teaching hours as those for Russian. --Xuxl (talk) 12:34, 24 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I was speaking typologically, not addressing vocabulary. Arabic has a non-Latin script and a non-PIE wordstock, but even most Russian vocabulary is obscure to non-Slavs.  That is, ogon and jazyk are cognates to ignite and tongue, but in no way obviously so.  Arabic has verb conjugations, gender, and the rudiments of case.  These are alien to the isolating languages of the East, not not to most Europeans. μηδείς (talk) 20:23, 24 August 2017 (UTC)


 * 50.4.236.254 -- Those literate in Chinese can sometimes get the gist of a Japanese text from the kanji characters (at least the subject matter may be relatively clear, even if you have little idea of what is being said about it). However, the Japanese language is typologically very different from Chinese, and has the most complex writing system in the world (two syllabaries, and kanji characters which systematically have multiple pronunciations in a way not found in Chinese), so I don't know if I would recommend it for you... AnonMoos (talk) 13:54, 24 August 2017 (UTC)


 * For English-Chinese bilinguals I recommend either French or Vietnamese. —Stephen (talk) 01:33, 25 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I'll stick with the Vietnamese. French is not that difficult, although the conjugations and silent letters are huge cucumbers.  Back to Arabic, yes, it does have a few post-velar consonants, but at least it never has more than two consonants in a row.  Try saying Где встретил еë (gdje vstrjetjil jijo)? or Здравствуйте (zdravstvujtje) three times fast ('j'=English 'y').  And that's just "where'd he meet her?" and "hello"! μηδείς (talk) 01:54, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually Russian is a very euphonic language. Neither romanization nor original Cyrillic spelling must confuse people how Russian is actually pronounced. The main rule in Russian phonetics is the way of the least effort. This is why there are a lot of assimilations of one sound to another, the most famous being the soft-hard dichotomy. The other one is the ascending sonority rule. Thus, /zdr/ is quite easy to pronounce as it is a sequence where two voiced obstruents (a fricative then a stop) are followed by a sonorant (compare "he's driving). The same is for /stv/: the first -в- in -вств- is not pronounced (compare "chest-voice"), as well as /fstr/ -встр- (compare "off-street"). /gd/ seems to be tricky but actually it is not, it is no more difficult than in "big deal". Plus again, soft consonants are followed by front(ed) vowels (or vice versa, depends how one looks), and hard consonants by non-front vowels, unstressed vowels are reduced, the overall result being a very smooth relaxed speech. Considering all that, English becomes beyond comparison with its famous "sixths": I believe there are no other well-known language where /ksθs/ is possible. English has a very tricky cacophonous phonetics for the self-proclaimed global language. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:53, 29 August 2017 (UTC)


 * You so funneh! Russian spelling is highly phonemic, although one needs to know the accented vowel, which is usually not marked.  English is the self-proclaimed language of... "England".  Others adopt it voluntarily, pay highly to study it, and call it a lingua franca.  The Russians were too busy lobbing bombs at Caesar to invent the airplane, or the world standard for aviation communication might not be Anglo-Saxon.
 * That being said, I do think Russian is perfect for drama (Mikhail Bulgakov)and poetry (Pushkin).
 * As for consonant strings, check out the Georgian language and clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' from the Nuxalk language.
 * Yes, medeis, I know your knowledge of Russian is very limited. I'm glad you are a very proud American who like to boast of the global dominance of your country and language, so that others are begging to learn it. I just do not like when others say factually incorrect statements about my pitiful language. Yours was one, I tried to correct it, but feel free to disagree.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:50, 29 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I really have no idea what you are talking about. I am a Russophile.  Do you think my praise of Bulgakov and Pushkin was insulting?  Nowhere have I spoken of the global "dominance" of my country or "bragged" about it.  The "you so funneh" comment in response to your calling English "cacaphonous" was kidding, but I suppose you would have had to be watching Martin Lawrence (comedian) in the 1990's to get the joke.  (In any case, you will be aware that I refer to you often and with respect as our foremost expert here on Russian questions.) I am not sure what exact mistake of mine you have corrected.  You seem to have this idea that I am anti-Russian; I am not.  Please stop asserting this falsehood.  You will notice that my focus has been on the structure of the languages, and I have mentioned several.  This is hardly nationalism on my part. μηδείς (talk) 18:21, 29 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Given the topic, Anatole V. Lyovin's Introduction to the Languages of the World has detailed sketches of Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin, as well as Finnish, Swahili, Tibetan, Hawaiian, Dyirbal, Yup'ik, Quechua, and Tok Pisin. μηδείς (talk) 02:11, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

I suppose I am really an English-Chinese bilingual native speaker, although I have some difficulty admitting it because the latter is very rusty, so I can tell you that I found the consonant clusters of Russian a lot easier to pick up than the new places of articulation of Arabic: I still can't for the life of me pronounce the pharyngeals reliably alone after over six years of trying, let alone within a word. (By the time I tried Russian I had already encountered Polish, but since I found the clusters there also not very problematic I don't think it makes that much of a difference. Perhaps it helps that many of the sounds of Polish that do not have close English analogues have close Chinese analogues.) French was indeed not so hard to learn; the conjugations were the hardest, since neither English nor Chinese has a conjugation system of comparable complexity. I don't think German is that much harder, though I haven't achieved fluency in that yet. Possibly a problem would be that neither English nor Chinese possess an alveolar trill: I still for the life of me can't figure out how to make one. The uvular rhotics for French and German came much easier: I usually use a uvular trill, because it seems to come more easily than the fricative, although I understand that this is dialectical, for French. Alas, I have not tried to learn Japanese, so I can say very little about that: I keep a Babel box for it on my userpage, though, because I sometimes contribute on Japan-related topics, and I find that I have some partial passive comprehension of the substance of Japanese texts thanks to knowing Chinese, though certainly not the details. Of course, I do not know how much this personal experience would generalise. Double sharp (talk) 02:17, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Latin. Does anybody here understand Latin well?
I have a question, regarding this Latin text (p. DCCLV, sec. X). It gives some information about an ancient coin (drawn ibid.), but unfortunately I don't understand Latin. Mainly, I would like to know the following:


 * 1) Where was this coin found?
 * 2) Who found it?
 * 3) When was it found?
 * 4) When was it coined / minted?
 * 5) How many items of this coin have already been found?
 * 6) Can anybody watch it physically (e.g. in museums and likewise), nowadays?

Or any other relevant information about this coin. 185.46.78.132 (talk) 07:22, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The book he refers to is Caspari Waseri, Tig. De antiquis numis Hebraeorum ..., Tiguri 1605, fol. 72, where Casparus Waserus describes this coin. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 07:55, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, the other text (Waserus' book) is in Latin as well, which I don't understand either... 185.46.78.132 (talk) 08:05, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Waserus' book starts the section on the coin with: "To be added that it is commonly believed that in the times of David and his son Solomon, the shekels in use were made from silver and had the appearance and inscription as shown in the following figure." Knowing that coins did not exist at that time, one may conclude easily that this is a fantasy drawing. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 12:06, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Does Waserus give any source for what is "commonly believed" about "the appearance and inscription as shown in the following figure"? 185.46.78.132 (talk) 13:02, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * No, he refers to general belief, that means, there must be a well-known source, and indeed, other publications like Oluf Gerhard Tychsen's Die Unächtheit der jüdischen Münzen mit hebräischen und samaritanischen Buchstaben, 1779, p. 13 refer to that medal quoting some lines from the Babylonian talmud (500 AD) "tr. Baba Kama, fol. 97, col. 2, line 23 sq.": "Our teachers taught us to recognize a coin of Jerusalem: It is inscribed on one side "David and Salomo" (Hebrew characters) and on the other side "Jerusalem the holy city" (Hebrew characters). In addition they taught us how our progenitor's Abraham's coin looks like: It is inscribed on one side: "The old man and the old wife", and on the other side: "The young man and the young maid". --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 17:55, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I still wonder about the drawing in this coin. Both Latin sources, i.e. the Latin link I have supplied and the other Latin link you have supplied, also show a drawing that splits the word "Jerusalem" into two parts. I wonder about how these sources could know anything about this drawing and/or about the "split" of the word, since the Hebrew text you have supplied doesn't mention anything about the drawing and about the split. Additionally, the Hebrew text says "David and Salomon", while the Latin texts say "King David and his son King Salomon", so I wonder about this difference as well. 185.46.78.132 (talk) 08:14, 25 August 2017
 * Where exactly does it say "David and Solomon" without mentioning that they're kings? --82.69.159.206 (talk) 12:19, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Pp.paul.4, gave us the exact reference, and it says "David and Salomon" only, without mentioning their being kings. 185.46.78.17 (talk) 12:41, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, so that's in the German text, not in a Hebrew text. --82.69.159.206 (talk) 13:17, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * First, the German text quotes exactly the Hebrew text, and gives also the reference (which was given also by user:Pp.paul.4). Second, the Hebrew text writes exactly what the German text says on behalf of the Hebrew text. Third, both texts say the same. Fourth, did you see the Hebrew text? Fifth, I did. Sixth, this is the Hebrew text. Seventh, I couldn't understand why you said "not the Hebrew text". 185.46.78.17 (talk) 13:58, 25 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Knowing that coins did not exist at that time, one may conclude easily that this is a fantasy drawing. -- not to mention that the square script used in these drawings didn't come into use until half a millennium after "the times of David and his son Solomon". --82.69.159.206 (talk) 20:48, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Alternatively, it may be a drawing of a forgery, accepted in good faith; see Not Kosher: Forgeries of Ancient Jewish and Biblical Coins Alansplodge (talk) 11:17, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Is it rude to say "bon appetit" to an actual French person?
In today's Daily Express, there's an article claiming that "bon appetite" (sic) is considered rude in France, on the basis that it suggests the other person looks half-starved. (Here's the link) Anyone know if this is actually the case? I've been to France a few times and definitely heard the phrase used, as far as I could tell without irony. The Express is known for publishing nonsense, of course, often of a xenophobic flavour...

There's also an unlikely-sounding claim in the same article that using the informal pronoun "du" to a German policeman will lead to a large fine - presumably this is taken from a law against insulting public officials, which is quite unlikely to be used to victimize clueless tourists? 129.67.116.109 (talk) 17:29, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Bon appétit is often used in Northern France, whereas in southern France it is banned as impolite. Using the informal pronoun "du" towards a German policeman can result and has indeed been fined with 600 Euros, however, only in certain cases, presumably not involving clueless tourists. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 18:19, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * A number of French guides to good manners indeed claim that "Bon appétit" is impolite, especially in a formal context. See here for example . That said, it is commonly used informally, with no particular geographic preference. --Xuxl (talk) 18:45, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't give too much credence to this anonymous blogger who writes in an over-elaborate style, for effect, and gives openly sexist advice on how to treat women. Looks to me as if he is describing 19th century high society France, or the behaviour expected at the count of Paris's home. But to the OP, I'd say I lived 27 years in France and no one ever mentioned to me once that "Bon appétit" could be impolite in any setting, formal or informal. --Lgriot (talk) 14:17, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm French, living in France, and I often eat in restaurants or in collectivities with many people eating together, and I can tell you we French use "bon appétit" as a friendly and nice thing to say when people are eating, especially when starting to eat. Akseli9 (talk) 18:39, 27 August 2017 (UTC)