Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 April 1

= April 1 =

Yiddish article
I'm struggling to map the electoral districts for the 1916 Warsaw City Council election (earlier post here - Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2024_March_13). We have sources talking about 52 electoral districts (such as Goniec Poranny. 1916, no 317 p. 1) but then there is this ordinance seemingly dividing voters into seven voting stations with no reference to the 52 districts. Now I found a snippet in Der Moment July 13, 1916 issue (see the image) which might resolve the query or at least provide greater detail. It makes a reference in the middle to 52 electoral districts and later seems to have a similar listing of 7 voting places as the electoral ordinance. But I can't get exactly what the article is trying to say, is there any possibility to translate from Yiddish to English? -- Soman (talk) 08:57, 1 April 2024 (UTC)


 * My Yiddish is limited, and it isn't helped by distortions and irregularities in the letter shapes caused by the original printing process and/or the document's handling down the decades. The first sentence seems to say that there are 6 Curias, but the word "Curia" doesn't occur anywhere else in the image.  The word which has ditto marks beneath it in columns is Wahl-Rayon, which appears to combine a German word with a Russian word.  Voters in the 7 areas with one type of characteristic vote in polling places for each area -- those in the first area at an address in the 6th Wahl-Rayon, those in the second area at an address in the 8th Wahl-Rayon, etc.  Voters in the 7 areas with another characteristic vote at another list of locations -- in the same Wahl-Rayons, but sometimes at different addresses.  Not sure what's used to classify the two types of voters, but the header to the second list seems to say something about "From letter [Buchstab] D to M", so maybe it's alphabetic... AnonMoos (talk) 10:45, 2 April 2024 (UTC)


 * If you want to contact a Wikipedia user who is more proficient in Yiddish than I am, you could try an expedient common in the early days of the Language Ref. Desk, and look through the "User_yi" categories (though technically those Babelbox categories mean that a user can reply to comments in the language or is interested in editing Wikipedia in the language, which is not necessarily the same thing as an interest in answering questions about the language)... AnonMoos (talk) 02:52, 3 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks. So the Wahl-Rayon seem to match the Stimmbezirk mentioned here or Okreg in Polish, whereas the 52 Wahl-Biuro seem to match listing in Polish refs (okrag, see https://crispa.uw.edu.pl/object/files/175137/display/JPEG) but it doesn't seem the article can help us connect which Wahl-Biuro belonged to which Wahl-Rayon (which would have helped us to make a map of the city with the voting results). --Soman (talk) 11:59, 3 April 2024 (UTC)


 * The word Wahl-Byuro (with additional final consonant) occurs in the image twice (not in the lists), but I didn't mention it because I wasn't sure whether it was a loanword or a native Yiddish word unrelated to "bureau", and I was having a hard time telling whether the occurrences in the image ended with the letter Samekh or the final form of the letter Mem. The word Wahl-Byuro(s/m) occurs next to the number 52, while the highest number that the word Wahl-Rayon occurs next to is 26.  The word Tsugab-Lokalen also occurs twice in the image, once next to the number 2, if that means anything.  I'm getting the impression that the voting procedures in this election may have been complicated... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 13:34, 3 April 2024 (UTC)


 * What would "Tsugab" mean? Comparing wth German "zugeben", I guess it could mean something like "additional" or "extended". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:11, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
 * German Zugab is a common apocopation of Zugabe. --Lambiam 21:51, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
 * So... I think I got it now, looking at File:Poster_Wahlen_Bekanntmachung_fur_die_Wahler_der_Kurie_VI_Warsaw_6_July_1916.png. There were 52 electoral circuits (some split in 2), but in 7 circuits (6, 8, 13, 17, 20, 25, 26) voters were instructed to vote by the letter of their last name. Presumably in all other 45 circuits voters could vote at any time in a single bureau. --Soman (talk) 15:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Arabic stress: is there a Western convention having nothing to do with real Arabic?
Wheeler M. Thackston's "An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic" gives the following three rules for the stress of Classical Arabic (I'm re-writing his statement to make my question easier to state):

(1) the final syllable never receives stress (this rule of his is false incidentally)

(2) if either the penultimate or antepenultimate is heavy (CVC) then the closest of these to the end of the word receives the stress

(3) if neither penultimate or antepenultimate is heavy then he gives an alternative (which he calls "two schools of practice"):

(a) either the antepenultimate receives the stress (even if it is light, i.e. CV)

(b) or the accent can recede towards the beginning of the world without limit until a heavy syllable is found or, if no such syllable is found, the first syllable of the word is stressed, even if it is light.

These last two possibilities that he gives would permit a form like "madiynatuhum" ("their city") to be accented either "madiynátuhum" or "madíynatuhum" (Writing "iy" for the long "i" as I can't find my macrons). Now I've never heard of any Arabic accent anywhere that can recede further back than the antepenultimate. So where does the second possibility he gives ("madíynatuhum") come from? His use of the phrase "school of practice" leaves me a bit puzzled. "School of practice" is not what one usually calls a stress pattern that is borrowed from a language form in actual use. He seems to be talking about "conventions". Could that second possibility simply be a convention used in Western departments of Arabic that has nothing to do with any actual Arabic stress pattern practiced in the Arab world? Or is there in fact a way of accenting MSA or Classical Arabic in the Arab world that does correspond to that second possibility and that I simply happen never to have heard of? 178.51.93.5 (talk) 20:19, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

PS: Not relevant to my question, but the first rule he gives is strictly speaking false: a final syllable of the form CVCC (super-heavy) is always accented. In Classical Arabic such syllables can occur only at the end of a word (with minute exceptions) and only in pausa. I find it odd that a scholar of Thackston's caliber could make such a gross error. Maybe he excluded pausal forms for some reason, but as stated his rule is false. 178.51.93.5 (talk) 20:19, 1 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I couldn't discuss any details without making an effort to look things up, but I can tell you that modern Western academic linguists in the last few decades of the 20th century spent more effort analyzing the observed stress patterns of "Cairo Radio Arabic" (MSA) than what's theoretically correct when reciting the Qur'an. But "schools of practice" are presumably much the same thing as what is called "pronunciation traditions" when discussing the Hebrew Bible... AnonMoos (talk) 20:46, 1 April 2024 (UTC)