Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 15

= March 15 =

Goat sound
When I was little I was taught that the sound of a goat was maa and that the sound of a sheep was baa. But Internet sites are saying that baa belongs to both animal species. Does Wikipedia have any articles on the true sound of a goat?? Georgia guy (talk) 14:13, 15 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Nothing that can be written with letters of the alphabet is the "true sound" of any non-human animal. Rather, it is human Onomatopoeia of the animal's sound (and such onomatopoeic imitations can vary startlingly between languages).  The conventional English onomatopoeia of the bleating of a sheep is [bæːːː], but I'm not sure that there's an established goat cry imitation (maybe among goat herders). AnonMoos (talk)


 * Our list of animal sounds says (with a reference – The Bumper Book for the Loo, no less) that goats either bleat or go "baa", but it isn't hard to find people using the word maa for the sound a goat makes. --Antiquary (talk) 15:03, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Why doesn't the Chinese Wikipedia have a word for Songkran?
The Chinese Wikipedia just has 泼水节, which is linked to Songkran. Both seem to talk about the holiday as a general phenomenon for Southeast Asians and the ethnic minority group in China. Curiously, the English Wikipedia also has a water-sprinkling festival article, and it's linked to Songkran. But it's not linked to any other Wikipedia. So apparently, the English Wikipedia has two articles, one for the Chinese minority ethnic group and the other is for the actual holiday, while the Chinese Wikipedia mentions both in the same article and calls it 泼水节. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 20:00, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
 * All articles on the English and the 'Chinese' (presumably MSM) Wikipedias are written entirely independently by volunteers as they choose (or not). (The same applies to all the different-language Wikipedias, of course.)
 * Similarly, links between articles on different-language Wikipedias are added (or not) when individual volunteer editors choose to do so (as far as I know – I'm open to correction).
 * Given this independence, it's inevitable that there will not necessarily be one-to-one matches between articles on related topics on the two different projects, although sometimes a volunteer editor will deliberately translate an existing article on one for addition to the other where there is no such article already. Nor will there necessarily be a link between two articles on the same subject. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.211.131.202 (talk) 15:44, 16 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The interwiki "Language" links in the left sidebar have gotten more complicated. Long ago, These were one-way links implemented within each language separately at the discretion of individual editors. Now, those links are populated from a wikidata item, so all wikipedias with a "dog" article are listed in the "dog" wikidata item, and each of these wikipedias will populate its respective "languages" list from that wikidata item. The decision to associate an article with a particular wikidata item is usually made automatically by a robot but can be overridden by an editor . That's wonderful, until we get a situation where the mapping from article to wikidata item differs among wikipedias, typically because one of the wikipedias splits a concept that another wikipedia thinks is unitary. And so here we are. -Arch dude (talk) 21:07, 18 March 2018 (UTC)