Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 April 12

= April 12 =

Baingan bharta
The article baingan bharta tells us that "Baingan bharta (mashed eggplant) is a dish from the Indian subcontinent", and then proceeds to talk about "Baingan ka bharta" (my emphasis). Below, it adds "The dish has several regional names, such as: baingan ka bh u rtha" (my emphasis) in Hindi; none of the names listed is "baingan bharta". What language is "baingan bharta", how should the sadly non-polyglot anglophone refer to (ask for) this dish when talking to a speaker of Nepali (not one of the languages mentioned) or Hindi, and what would these be in IPA? -- Hoary (talk) 07:46, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Can't help you with the other variations, but "ka" is the genitive particle (the masculine singular inflection of the genitive particle in Hindi). AnonMoos (talk) 11:23, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you, . It's easy to imagine that a genitive particle is optional. (Also, that whatever vowel is found in Hindi "bhVrtha", it could reasonably be written as either ⟨a⟩ or ⟨u⟩.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:43, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * The corresponding article in the Hindi Wikipedia has the title बैंगन का भर्ता (baingan ka bharta), but starts: बैंगन भर्ता (baingan bharta), just like here using two terms, but then the other way around. The article states that the dish stems from the Punjab region, so the last word may be Punjabi ਭੱੜਥਾ (bhaṛathā). I did not find this word in any online Punjabi dictionaries, though. But Yandex translates Bengali ভর্তা (bhartā) as "mashed", which fits the manner of preparation, so this may be the origin. --Lambiam 22:25, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Good stuff. Thank you, ! Now all I need is the pronunciation. . . . Hoary (talk) 13:17, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * In which dialect of which language? --Lambiam 06:40, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * In a more or less standard dialect of Hindi and ditto of Nepali, I'd been thinking. And, come to think of it, ditto of Urdu. But, while I slept, has done much of the answering.... Hoary (talk) 23:02, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Phonological differences between Hindi and Urdu are minimal. Some even call them "all but indistinguishable" in phonology and grammar. --Lambiam 08:18, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

According to the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, भरता bhartā [ˈbʱərtaː] and भुरता bhurtā [ˈbʱʊrtaː] are two variants of the same word, meaning "a mash of boiled or fried vegetables". Note that the spelling in Devanagari should be भरता, not भर्ता, the latter being a Sanskrit loanword that means "lord" or "husband" (the pronunciation is identical, though). The usual spelling in Roman script would be bharta or bhurta (depending on which form of the word one prefers). The spelling bhurtha is unusual, but may be influenced by a South Indian language, since dental t is often transcribed as th in South India. --Jbuchholz (talk) 09:06, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Jbuchholz! I doubt that I can manage to distinguish [bʱ] from the way I render /b/ in the languages that I happen to speak, and I also doubt that I could manage a trilled [r] right in front of [t]; so it will probably come out as something fairly close to [ˈbʊɹtaː]. Can I trouble you about बैंगन? The reason is that I find myself looking at Japanese-language menus in what are more or less credibly South Asian restaurants, and this dish is about equally listed as [what, romanized, would be] "beigan" and "baigan" (though occasionally "beingan" or "baingan"), followed by "baruta" (or occasionally "buruta"; Japanese phonotactics demands a vowel between its /r/ and its /t/). I'm guessing something fairly close to [bɛɪŋgan]. (All this being in Hindi. I also guess that Nepalese restaurants provide [more or less] Hindi names, rather than Nepali names, for popular "Indian" items on their menus, perhaps using Nepali names for the "Nepalese" items.) -- Hoary (talk) 23:02, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not entirely sure if you are looking for the Hindi pronunciation or some kind of approximation thereof, but in Hindi, /bʱ/ and /b/ are clearly distinguished. How the Hindi word is pronounced by an English or Japanese speaker is of course a different question. Anyway, the Standard Hindi pronunciation of बैंगन baiṅgan is [bɛːŋɡən]. --Jbuchholz (talk) 06:51, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
 * P.S. Regarding the th, seems to be right: bhartha/bhurtha may actually be a transcription of the Punjabi word ਭੱੜਥਾ bhaṛthā / ਭੁੜਥਾ bhuṛthā (see  and ). So forget what I said about South Indian languages. --Jbuchholz (talk) 07:53, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
 * In this transcription, $\langleth\rangle$ stands for the aspirated consonant often written as [tʰ]. --Lambiam 08:36, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Simpson's clouds
What are "Simpson's Clouds" and are they connected with George "Sunny Jim" Simpson (1878–1965), past President of the Royal Meteorological Society? 86.175.173.84 (talk) 12:34, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * According to several Google search results, they are cumulus clouds that resemble those seen in the opening credits of The Simpsons, as shown here. I think I can faintly hear Mr. Fergusson, my old geography teacher, rotating in his grave somewhere. Alansplodge (talk) 13:53, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * One time my sky's clouds looked like a neatly arranged array of little muffins, and my friend and I simultaneously thought: they're Magritte clouds! —Tamfang (talk) 01:06, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Like this? Perhaps we've uncovered a secret homage to Magritte by David Silverman. Alansplodge (talk) 17:37, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * More regular than that. —Tamfang (talk) 00:30, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Ci in Italian
The word "ci" in Italian seems to have two uses: It occurs to me that there could be occasions on which it's ambiguous which meaning is intended. How can one tell, in a particular sentence, which it is? rossb (talk) 12:58, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * as a personal pronoun meaning "us"
 * as an adverb (is that the correct description?) meaning "there", "to it", etc. (I think of it, perhaps wrongly, as equivant to "y" in French.)


 * "One can tell" is also ambiguous. I have two sons. One can tell which it is, the other cannot. Basically any natural language has many ambiguities. "You wouldn't recognize little Freddy. He has grown another foot." In this case, common sense rules out the The Far Side interpretation of Freddy having become tripedalian, but in other cases, there is an interpretation that was not intended by the speaker but is a plausible interpretation, occasionally even leading to tragic results. A careful speaker would realize their sentence admits different interpretations and rephrase it to avoid the ambiguity. --Lambiam 17:30, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Where I first heard that joke was Gracie Allen on an old-time radio sketch, and it was probably a lot older than that. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:55, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Italian ci has lots of different meanings. Some of them are explained at ci. I'm not sure that list is really complete or completely correct; I'm not sure where it would put lui non sa cosa farci ("he doesn't know what to do about it"); it's similar to usage 8 under Pronome but doesn't seem exactly the same. Also it's used when you want to form the si-impersonale of a verb that's already reflexive &mdash; this is mentioned in usage 6 underPronome but as an "emphatic form", which I don't think is necessarily true. --Trovatore (talk) 18:25, 12 April 2021 (UTC)