Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 December 14

= December 14 =

Has anyone amalgamated German, French, Italian and Romansh into a constructed language?
Either as an academic curiosity or something more. Swiss language doesn't say. Has anyone done this with the Belgian languages? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:32, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't know of any pan-Swiss agglomerated conlang, but many of the best known of the "traditional" (late 19th-century / early 20th-century) conlangs were effectively mostly Germanic-Romance hybrids, with selected "international" Greco-Latin vocabulary items. This includes Esperanto, Ido, Novial etc.  See also Standard Average European.  By the way, "Swiss language" redirects to Languages of Switzerland... AnonMoos (talk) 08:04, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * But if it existed it might have a hatnote something like "Swiss language redirects here, for the constructed language see Deufratalish". Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:44, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Possible candidates are Occidental language, Idiom Neutral, Novial, and Interlingua. -- Q Chris (talk) 09:24, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Esperanto goes into some detail:

"The vocabulary, orthography, phonology, and semantics, are all thoroughly European. The vocabulary, for example, draws about two-thirds from Romance and one-third from Germanic languages; the syntax is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic."

While it is possible that someone, somewhere might have done something like this for fun at some point, the answer is no: there has never been any sort of serious attempt at this. In fact, I'm not even aware of any attempt to combine the various Swiss German dialects into a common language. The closest even to that is the Schwyzertütschi Dialäktschrift by Eugen Dieth, which only proposed a common way of spelling the various sounds of the Swiss German dialects. And Rumantsch Grischun, which combined the existing regional Romansh standards into a common pan-regional standard language, is still largely being rejected by most Romansh speakers. --Terfili (talk) 19:28, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * I didn't know such a geographically compact Western European language with the population of a neighborhood could keep different standards till 2017. It's interesting, in many European countries they're okay with regional languages and dialects taking a backseat to a national standard (some small regions' languages are even dead) but in Switzerland they don't even want to bother learning a compromise dialect to go from a few K to ~50K speakers. I can't blame them, if I grew up in a rare dialect part of the Romanchosphere and someone said learn this condialect I wouldn't want to either. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:39, 15 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Your thoughts are pretty much in line to how many non-Romansh Swiss react to the persistence of the regional Romansh standards. I think the main reason is that for most Romansh-speakers, Romansh is the language of daily local life and culture, whereas the language for communicating with the outside world is German. If your language is mainly important to you for your local and regional identity, local life, politics, and culture, and you already have another language that serves for everything else (German), then you will just not feel the use of adopting another language that serves neither function for you. A Romansh friend of mine once gave me one more reason: she said that her parents' generation often still feels like their German is inadequate, and so they feel like the one language they feel confident about, their regional Romansh, was being taken away from them and replaced by something they are not proficient in either. Finally, the way Rumantsch Grischun was introduced was perceived by many Romansh speakers as being hastily forced upon them by a disconnected Romansh elite and the non-Romansh majority. --Terfili (talk) 09:29, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

User:Sagittarian Milky Way -- I just now remembered that there was a semi-classic 1950s linguistics book which examined intensive language contact between a German dialect and a Romance dialect in one particular local area of Switzerland. The two do not merge into an indiscriminate Germanic-Romance hybrid mish-mosh, but there have come into existence a number of subtle one-to-one correspondences between the two languages, which cumulatively have the effect of making it simpler for bilinguals to switch between the two languages. I think it was Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems by Uriel Weinreich, but I couldn't be sure without seeing it... AnonMoos (talk) 17:36, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
 * You are likely correct that it was this book. This is a topic which is btw covered extensively under Romansh_language. --Terfili (talk) 20:14, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Roman Urdu
How is this Roman Urdu, and not Roman Hindi? I note that the intro mentions that it's used by multinational corporations to advertise their products in both India and Pakistan — in such a situation, the language lacks both the script and the cultural context that distinguish Urdu from Hindi, unless I'm missing something. Nyttend (talk) 03:39, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Urdu is used in India in the Arabic script, and a relatively small percentage of the population of Pakistan has Urdu as their first language. In some applications, you could tell Roman Urdu apart from Roman Hindi by the use of Perso-Arabic loanwords vs. Sanskrit loanwords, but I'm not sure that would apply to most Bollywood movies... AnonMoos (talk) 07:41, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The article is definitely an original research and likely be deleted. There are a few official romanization schemes (the Hunterian one being most used and approved by the Pakistani government), as well as ad hoc unregulated romanizations (which may use English spelling conventions like ee and oo for long i and u).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 09:54, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Tone letters in minority languages of SW China
How did they decide which letter to use for which tone for Zhuang, Hmong, Mien, among others?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:03, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * no sources have been offered yet and, unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any myself. However, I am familiar with both RPA and the Unified Script; maybe I can give you some clues to help in your search for references. I believe the primary concern was readability, so letters which do not duplicate possible final consonants were chosen. In RPA the letters ,, , ,  by themselves aren't used to represent initial consonants and Hmong doesn't allow final consonants so those letters seem to be logical choices.  and  are used as initials, but since they can't appear as finals, they too are used unambiguously as tone letters. Iu Mien syllables, on the other hand, can end in consonants namely, k, t, p, ʔ and nasals. This removes those letters (including  which is used in Hmong) as possible tone letters in the Unified Script, but , , ,  and  can unambiguously be used. Of those,  and  have the added advantage of not occurring as initials. --William Thweatt TalkContribs 22:32, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comment. However, my main interest was not the letter set as a whole but each letter. For example, I can figure out why the letter Z was chosen for tone 2 in Zhuang, because of the obvious similarity of 2 and Z (or, more correctly, of the tone letter Ƨ and Z - but the former obviously came from the number 2 anyway). But I see little reason why they chose J for tone 3, or X for tone 4, but not the other way around.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:58, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * It seems that the precedent was Hmong RPA in 1953, and that Zhuang and Mien then followed that. Just an observation: the official romanization system of the Sinitic languages from 1928 to 1958 was Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which also uses and  to mark tones. But as we all know, correlation does not indicate causation. I had a quick look at some obituaries, and there's nothing to indicate that any of the three main creators of RPA had any knowledge of Sinitic. Matt's talk 15:35, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Use of singular personal pronoun for a whole species/group/etc
I saw the following in a lecture recently: "I am a Neanderthal. I lived in Europe and Asia for nearly 400,000 years, but declined in numbers and went extinct around 30,000 years ago." The first sentence is phrased as though it's an individual Neanderthal speaking, but in the second sentence the "I" refers to the whole species (clearly, one individual cannot live for 400,00 years, or "decline in numbers"). Is there a term for this rhetorical/grammatical technique, where a singular pronoun is used for a collective such as a species? 169.228.151.156 (talk) 17:32, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Probably the simplest would be "personification" (as in National personification). "Lion" in a sentence such as "The lion is a four-footed animal" is often called a generic noun, but the word "generic" has different meanings when applied to pronouns... AnonMoos (talk) 04:21, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Can grammatically incorrect sentences translate across languages?

 * Tomatoes can at where buy?

This is grammatically incorrect. Can it still be translated across languages? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 18:33, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * You could translate the grammatically correct implied sentence ("where can I buy tomatoes?") into another language, and then introduce comparable grammatical errors. However, the errors would not necessarily be the same as those present in the English sentence: for example, the lack of a subject is an error in English, but there are languages in which that would not be a problem; same goes for word order. But, the fact that there is no determinate article in the English example (i.e. "the" tomatoes) is not an error, but it would be in many other languages. --Xuxl (talk) 19:17, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * The question in the original header is an emphatic "no". Languages are contructed using a bewildering array of grammatical rules which are distinct from other languages, some languages, either through common history or coincidence, have some similar grammatical rules (for example, Spanish and English use similar word order rules) but other times grammatical contructions in one language come of as nonsensical when translated directly word-for-word in another.  For example, in Basque, the common word order is subject-object-verb, and the articles come after (not before) the words, this thus the phrase in English "The teacher brought the pie" would (in Basque word order) be something like "teacher the pie the brought" which is nonsensical in English but in Basque makes perfect sense because that's how the language is built.  You just can't make straight word-for-word translations between languages and expect the same grammatical feeling to be preserved.  -- Jayron 32</b> 19:59, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Which neatly explains why it's almost always impossible to translate poetry successfully. Either the rhyme/metre has to sacrificed, or the literal meaning goes.  (That said, I'm slowly working my way through Clive James's translation of Dante's Inferno and enjoying it greatly.)  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:27, 14 December 2017 (UTC)


 * The answer to the header is "Yes" as long as you don't expect a correct translation. You can certainly take incorrect grammar in one language and translate it to incorrect grammar in another. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:30, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Douglas Hofstadter would probably say yes, and look for analogies in other languages (compare Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies). But translating sentences like this is an art, and almost never completely faithful (unless the languages involved are structurally very similar). —Kusma (t·c) 21:29, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * First you have to figure out what it's supposed to be in English. It could well be asking whether you can buy tomatoes at the same place they are canned (e.g. a Del Monte plant). ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:31, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The answer to the original header is an emphatic "indeterminate". The usual definition of "translate" is to convey the original sense of the source phrase in the target language. But a grammatically incorrect sentence may not have a determinate original sense. When the phrase is part of a larger work, the translator may be able to determine why the author used incorrect grammar and may then use the appropriate target incorrect grammar, but that is a higher level of translation. For example, grammatical errors may result from ignorance, or drunkenness, or stroke, or dyslexia, or regional or class variations. Each cause may affect the nature of grammatical errors in the source, so the translator needs to first extract the correct grammar, and then apply the correct error cause to create the target translation. -Arch dude (talk) 01:34, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Speak it well or poorly?
“If you went to American public schools, you probably speak a second language about as well as you do algebra. ”


 * So, does this mean you speak a foreign language well (because thinking algebraically is easy) or poorly (you get the basics, but haven’t mastered all of it)? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 18:42, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * From the way it is phrased I would take it as a pejorative. What is the context? uhhlive (talk) 18:52, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/english-speaking-countries-in-asia-europe-the-americas 140.254.70.33 (talk) 18:55, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * It clearly means you speak it poorly. It's a well-known meme that no one remembers their high school math (except for those who went into scientific fields afterwards). The rest of the article confirms that it is aimed at those whose second-language skills are nothing to brag about. --Xuxl (talk) 19:22, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The joke is akin to Father Guido Sarducci and his "Five Minute University". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:33, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * what I can only conclude (even though I know the author didn't mean that), is that the author was pretty bad at algebra while being a student at an American public school, and thinks they are not alone with that experience. HOTmag (talk) 21:44, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * What I conclude is that the author of that quote doesn't think much of American public schools. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:51, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Unless the original person is meaning "you speak a foreign language just as well as you speak algebra", the original's missing a word: it needs to be "well as you can do algebra", or something like that. I'd agree with Xuxl et al in their analysis of the phrase.  Nyttend (talk) 00:38, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I disagree, I think "do algebra" is a compound verb in this context, so it is the same construct as "you speak a foreign language just as well as you dance". -- Q Chris (talk) 09:15, 15 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Self-hating (i.e. alter-deprecating) bollocks! I went to US public school, and I have resorted to Algebra II on many occasions, as well as Geometry and Pre-Calc.  I haven't needed, but have used Calculus I & II (AP Calculus).  I also took four years of French, tested out of it to the 300-level in College, and three years (I, III & IV) of German, and tested into German 221 & 222 at university, where we read Der Richter und Sein Henker and Homo Faber.  I have read The Hobbit and Dune in German, the Silmarillion, Ringworld, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and 100pp of Don Quixote in Spanish, and Descartes, Rousseau, Sartre, Rostand, and Hugo, among many others, in French.  That some Americans don't avail themselves of the opportunities they are afforded is about as relevant as criticizing the English on the character of Basil Fawlty.  Vee haff meat hier in ze buildink! μηδείς (talk) 09:23, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, μηδείς, but you are clearly an exceptional individual. The original piece was presumably aimed at the average (i.e. modal) US reader of the publication in question, who indeed is likely (hence the writer's "probably") to be poor at algebra. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.220.212.173 (talk) 10:19, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * That's Brahms! Brahms's third racket! —Stephen (talk) 12:21, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Brahms played tennis? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:43, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Stephen, you made me snort out my coffee. The problem is the author's generalization on public schools.  I went to the same school as 500 other people in my graduating class, and they were all offered the same classes.  Had he said, "If you are as mentally lazy as the average American," I might still have objected, but on different grounds.  And he would have offended his audience, rather than giving them the excuse that it was not they who failed themselves, but their schools that misserved them.  Students where I grew up had the option of private and parochial schools, but none of these had a better reputation or program than my public school. μηδείς (talk) 17:38, 15 December 2017 (UTC)