Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 May 22

= May 22 =

Does the "free" in "The Free Encyclopedia" mean "liberation" or "cost no money"?
I am curious, because the Chinese version is 自由的百科全書. It's not 免费的 (free/cost-less), but 自由的 (free/liberating). Is this translation intentional? SSS (talk) 02:16, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * It's more about liberating. Read The Free Encyclopedia. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:39, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Oh, okay. So, that means the Chinese version is right on the translation, but the English language doesn't distinguish between this meaning of "free" and that meaning of "free". SSS (talk) 02:55, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * It's possible for multiple meanings to be intended. Wikipedia is free in the sense that Bugs mentions, it's free in that it doesn't cost money, and it's free the sense that it is not constrained by outside influence (or it at least avoids such constraints where legally and ethically reasonable). Ian.thomson (talk) 02:59, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Does "ethically reasonable" cover situations such as editors objecting to posting news of a penis transplant in WP:In the news because it's obscene? HiLo48 (talk) 03:28, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not censored for content. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:38, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Tell that to those who wanted to censor it, then alleged that criticising their position was personal abuse. HiLo48 (talk) 04:05, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Who would they be? You got examples? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:08, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * The initial claims of obscenity were on a now archived page for In the news/Candidates, from maybe a month ago. The allegations against me were in the discussion page for some completely different article. Quite off topic at the time of course, and I cannot recall what it was. HiLo48 (talk) 04:23, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I was referring more to things like WP:BLPNAME. There's plenty of sources out there on the names of celebrities' kids, but we generally don't include them because their privacy and safety matters more than cultish voyeurism and lurid sensationalism.  Ian.thomson (talk) 03:50, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * If the kids are notable in their own right, they will likely have articles. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:58, 22 May 2018 (UTC)


 * See Gratis versus libre. We have an article on everything.  -- Jayron 32 15:39, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * So, Latin and Chinese both make distinctions. It's English that uses the same term for different concepts. SSS (talk) 20:27, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * It's the antique pre-English roots of "free" that are ambiguous. In English we also have words like gratitude and liberty, which are distinctive. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:11, 22 May 2018 (UTC)


 * I think it just means the exchange rate with cn.wiki is currently in discussion. (Meanwhile, Feel free to make your WMF knowledge donations in Renminbi.) Martinevans123 (talk) 20:39, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Yiddish questions

 * 1) Why did Yiddish pronounced patakh (a Hebrew vowel sign corresponding to the Latin a) as pasakh?? (This sign was used on pasakh alef and pasakh tsvey yudn.)
 * 2) Why did Yiddish never use segol??
 * 3) Where did the name "melupn vov" originate??
 * 4) Why did thav change its sound from th to s in Yiddish?? Georgia guy (talk) 14:53, 22 May 2018 (UTC)
 * There's an article called Yiddish phonology which might be a starting point for this research. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:12, 22 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Georgia_guy -- [θ] to [s] is fairly natural as a sound change. It's observable in various "colloquial" Arabic pronunciations of classical Arabic words, among French-speakers trying to pronounce English, etc.  And I presume that the seghol diacritic was not used because the letter ע was used to indicate a basic [e] vowel... AnonMoos (talk) 18:45, 22 May 2018 (UTC)


 * ...which in turn was because... (And, what does the h in your spelling of seghol indicate??) Georgia guy (talk) 18:46, 22 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Georgia_guy -- in Biblical Hebrew as recited at the time of the Masoretes, all six non-emphatic stop consonants [p, b, t, d, k, g] had fricative allophones in certain contexts: [ɸ, β, θ, ð, x, γ]. סגול is a Masoretic word, and the ג would have been pronounced [γ] at that time.  In common modern Jewish pronunciation traditions, [ð] and [γ] have gone back to [d] and [g], while [ɸ] and [β] have become [f] and [v].  The [θ] allophone became [s] in Yiddish, but [t] in modern Israeli.  By the way, the last consonant in פתח was not originally [x], but rather pharyngeal [ħ].
 * I don't know the exact way in which the letter ע came to be associated with the sound [e], but I presume it had something to do with the fact that ע was useless in writing Yiddish words, while [e] didn't really have a mater lectionis associated with it.... AnonMoos (talk) 01:45, 23 May 2018 (UTC)


 * It's not just Yiddish that has sliding consonants. Consider the various routes taken by ship. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:14, 22 May 2018 (UTC)