Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 April 10

= April 10 =

$1,000 to spend on home audio system.
I have about a grand to spend on a home audio system. I am looking for links to have it shipped to my house (I live in Missouri). Amazon.com would be great for me, but beggars can't be choosers. I am certainly no "audiophile" and don't really know a lot about the specifications on speakers, AV receiver, etc. Specifically, I'm looking for a subwoofer + 2 floorstanding speakers (plus possibly a AV receiver, whatever you suggest? my current receiver is a Sony STR-DG500). Kind of a random question on here, but hoping you can lead me in the right direction based on the "researchable" specifications of the audio equipment based upon the price. Thanks in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.178.160.89 (talk) 00:09, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Probably any reputable company in that business would be happy to give you information on what all those technical terms mean in the real world. Sometimes we just have to do our own research.190.56.14.159 (talk) 14:54, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * One thing I would suggest is that you try to listen to your proposed setup before buying. A $1000 is a lot to spend on something that sounds terrible.  Many high-end hi-fi stores, certainly here in the UK, have a listening room where, with some prior notice, you can listen to your proposed setup and consider some alternatives - for example, I changed the speakers I had picked out based on their specifications, after a listening test revealed my original choice were way too bass-heavy for my musical tastes; instead the salesman suggested a more balanced alternative which I am still very happy with.  Of course, there is the assumption on the part of the store that you are actually going to buy from them, but I doubt you are under any obligation.  Astronaut (talk) 11:35, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Cuál es el mejor Museo de México para visitar?
Cuál es el mejor Museo de México para visitar? Neptunekh2 (talk) 00:55, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Depends on what you mean by "best". I googled [mexican national museum] and a number of entries came up, the first wikipedia item being Museo Nacional de Antropología. That sounds like a good one to visit. But it depends on what you're looking for. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:14, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, if you want to ask questions at English wikipedia, its best to ask in English, you will get more responses since the plurality of people who respond here speak English natively. If you wish to ask, and have a question answered, in Spanish, you should perhaps try http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consultas which is the Spanish language reference desk.  -- Jayron  32  04:29, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Note that although I understood your question because I know some Spanish, I answered it in English. HINT! :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:30, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Why do British people write "Teheran" instead of "Tehran"?
The Persian name doesn't have an extra "e" sound there. --70.244.234.128 (talk) 02:51, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * There's often more than one acceptable output when you're transliterating between alphabets, and English is a particularly bad destination language to have complaints about spelling inconsistencies and variable vowel sounds. &mdash; Lomn 03:04, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Why do Americans write "meter" for the length, when the rest of the world, especially the part that actually uses the metric system, writes "metre"? Why was the OP's question written from a perspective where the British are somehow outsiders? Was it an unthinking US-centric question? But anyway, as Lomn said, don't look for logic in English. HiLo48 (talk) 03:15, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Because the "e" sound comes before the "r" sound in the word? Same for center, theater, etc. etc. -- Jayron  32  03:57, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * When I see "metre", I'm inclined to pronounce it "met-ray". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:31, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think any offense towards British people was intended. The OP gave a sound (excuse the pun) reason for their reasoning.  Dismas |(talk) 08:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * No, I appreciate that no offence was intended. I put it down to a non-thinking, US-centric view of everything, including this GLOBAL encyclopaedia. HiLo48 (talk) 21:27, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * What "r" sound? --Tango (talk) 11:47, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, as in the Beatles song, "Lovely Rita, Meetuh Maid". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:54, 10 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, I think that the first guy who wrote "Teheran" thought that if he would write "Tehran", reader might read it like "Teran" which is not correct. The letter H is pronounced strongly in the name of this city. --Omidinist (talk) 03:54, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, this is most likely an attempt to get something closer to the correct pronunciation of the word, native english speakers are very bad in my experience at pronouncıng the 'h' in such words. Mikenorton (talk) 09:11, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Did you really write "pronouncing" with a "ı" there? &#x2013; b_jonas 09:39, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm in Turkey at the moment, I keep gettıng the 'ı' and the 'i' mıxed up on the keyboard. Mikenorton (talk) 20:10, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm don't think your claim is even true. I'm British and "Tehran" is the spelling I'm more familiar with. It's also the spelling used by the BBC. --Tango (talk) 11:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Agreed; Tehran is almost universally used in the UK now. From a quick Google, it seems that "Teheran" is an obsolete variant. The 1943 Teheran Conference gets several hits. Alansplodge (talk) 13:31, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Spellings of place names are a matter of taste. The French speak of "Londres" which has no rrelation to how the place name is pronounced in England at all. So saying that a spelling must reflect how locals prounce a name is irrelevant. US place names are fun ... Calais, ME is "Callous", Cairo, IL is "K-ro". and so on. "Teheran" was a historical spelling of "Tehran" and is neither more right nor wrong than any other variant. As a matter of fact, the postmark for Teheran for many years spelt the name "Teheran." Collect (talk) 14:04, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Your example of "Londres" doesn't really work. The French don't just spell it differently to the English, they pronounce it differently. Tehran is an attempt to write in the Latin alphabet a word pronouced the same as the native pronounciation of the name of the city. Londres is a completely different name for the same city. ("Paris" is in yet another category, since it is spelt the same in French and English, but prounounced differently.) --Tango (talk) 14:37, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * In recent times, we Brits have made an effort to say foreign names properly, out of respect I suppose. The days when we called Livorno "Leghorn" or Vlissingen "Flushing" are past. Alansplodge (talk) 16:37, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * But is it still Rome, Naples, Florence, Belgrade, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Copenhagen, Nuremberg, Munich, Prague, Lisbon ... or are we using the local names now? I rather think we all still have a long way to go in the "artificial-PC" stakes.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:48, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, point taken! Alansplodge (talk) 22:25, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed, being English myself, Tehran is the spelling I have seen most places. In fact, all places until now, I'm sure. Whereas, Ispahan, Kostantiniyye, and so on, lots of different spellings all over the place. And for the record, down here, we pronounce metre as just me'a. 148.197.121.205 (talk) 18:17, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I suspect you at least have a glottal stop in the middle. --Tango (talk) 18:57, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Like 148.197, I find an apostrophe very useful if I need to indicate a glottal stop. I'm not sure if there's a better method. Alansplodge (talk) 22:24, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The specific symbol is the ʻokina, which looks a bit like a backwards apostrophe. Well, at least in the context of Polynesian languages. --Trovatore (talk) 22:26, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * And the Greek apostrophe and reverse apostrophe ... whatever they are called. The point is that the Persians spelt it "Teheran" on their own postmarks.  Collect (talk) 22:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Not just the British who call it Tehran, the local Imam Khomeini International Airport http://ikia.airport.ir/HomePage.aspx?TabID=5021&Site=ikia.airport&Lang=en-US uses the spelling Tehran on the website. MilborneOne (talk) 19:13, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

pronunciation of 'Los Angeles'
I've noticed recently that in movies and radio programs from back in the 1940's and early 50's 'Los Angeles' was normally pronounced with a hard 'G' and long 'E' (i.e. Loss An-guh-lees) - most recently I heard it in Hitchcock's "Saboteur" - whereas now it's conventionally a soft 'G' and short 'E' (i.e. Loss An-jeh-less). does anyone happen to know how and when that shift happened? it's particularly interesting because you hear the first pronunciation in early episodes of the 'Dragnet' radio series and the second pronunciation in later episodes of that series, even though (as far as I can tell) there was no shift in the cast or announcers. There's nothing about it in the Los Angeles article. ideas? -- Ludwigs 2 15:18, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I have a vague recollection that this has come up before on one of the ref desk, a year or two back. It had something to do with a conscious effort at one time to Americanize the Spanish names. One example is San Pedro, which was and may still be pronounced PEED-roh. Then there's Figueroa Street, which is or was pronounced FIGURE-oh-uh. Likewise with the city name. Not much help, but maybe something to go on. There was also the variant pronuncation "los an-jell-eez". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:38, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The Angeleno pronunciation is figger-OH-ah. I have never heard of a time when the second-to-last syllable was not stressed, and no one puts a y sound after the g. --Trovatore (talk) 20:51, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Click. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 16:29, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * And the boy gets a cigar! And it was more recent that I recalled, just last June. Bravo! ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:41, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

I hold it to be self evident that since the spelling is Spanish then the pronunciation should also be Spanish.190.56.16.100 (talk) 17:40, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * There are innumerably many counter-examples to that proposed rule. Keeping the spelling of a loan word but pronoucing it how that sequence of letters would be pronouced in the borrowing language is very common. (As are the opposite of keeping the pronunciation and changing the spelling or keeping both, of course.) --Tango (talk) 19:03, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Self-evident it ain't. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:05, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I hold it to be self-evident that "forecastle" should be pronounced "forecastle" instead of "folks'll", but I don't anticipate that happening anytime soon. Actually, the way a Spanish-speaker says "los angeles" and the way it's normally said in English are not all that different. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:08, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * If you can guys can accept that 'forecastle' is pronounced 'folks'll', and zillions of other weird and non-obvious English pronunciations, I find it hard to believe you're so tempted to say "metray" when you see 'metre' that you've changed the spelling to 'meter', even though you steadfastly remain out of step with the world by not using the metric system. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:36, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * We like to think that the world is out of step with us. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:22, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * In an effort to adjust to this foreign spelling, I'm going to start spelling other words in a similar way. Today, for example: I made breakfast using an egg beatre. I combed my hair to make it neatre, then I attended mass at St. Petre's. Then I watched a ball game featuring Derek Jetre. I took my kids to the playground, where they enjoyed the teetre-tottre. I did some lawn work using a weed-eatre. A cold front came through and I had to turn on the heatre. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:30, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I shoughed you're poast to my friend Ritre, and sheigh said it was silly. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:39, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Surely you meant forrin spelling? And that you cohmed your hair before the cold front came throo? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:32, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * None of the above posts qualifies as notable here. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:15, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * That is somehow reassuring. Mean while, the one place I see my name on you're list, I have now repaired in the ark-hive. Thanks for bringin it to my attenshun. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:46, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * "Some forecastle never eat a bug, and then some other forecastle" —Tamfang (talk) 03:16, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank's guys. That was self evidently fun. formaly 190 56 16 100190.56.14.126 (talk) 20:25, 10 April 2011 (UTC)


 * A prominent Angeleno who used the hard G pronunciation (or rather a soft version of the hard G, as opposed to J) was long-time Mayor Sam Yorty (1909-98, Mayor 1961-73). And if you move to California, as I did when I was a freshman at Berkeley, you have to learn a whole set of localized or Southwesternized pronunciations of places, people and things, sometimes close to the Spanish or Mexican pronunciation and sometimes rather different, e.g. San PEA-dro, San Ruf-FELL (San Rafael), Ala-MEE-da (Alameda, pron. Ala-MAY-da in Spanish) and Puh-KNOLL (Pinole). Using the correct Spanish pronunciation wasn't actually wrong, but it would be like pronouncing Paris "Paree", and slow down comprehension, especially if most of the town's current population uses the non-Spanish pronunciation, leading to the question of what is "correct"? The inhabitants of Berlin, New Hampshire put the stress on the first syllable, and for that city as opposed to the German capital, that is the correct pronunciation. Ditto for Milan (MY-lan), N.H., and the Thames River in New London, Connecticut (pronounced not "Tems" but "Thaymes", which according to urban legend is how Old Londoners pronounced their river's name before those German-speaking Hanoverian Kings brought over their German-speaking courtiers). (Don't follow leadres, watch the parquing metres.) —— Shakescene (talk) 11:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)


 * It is not just movies from the 50's; I'm pretty sure the hard-G pronunciation is used by Anjelica Huston in The Grifters. Astronaut (talk) 11:19, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * And it's not just Californians and New Englanders who mispronounce geographic names of foreign origin. Midwesterners are particularly apt at this, as you can tell by visiting KAY-ro, Illinois, Bell-FOUN-tin, Ohio, LIE-ma, Ohio or Vye-EN-na, Ohio. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:40, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Don't forget "Dez Plainez, Illinois" and "Verr-saylz, Kentucky". -- Jayron  32  04:34, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * As with Berlin, NH, there is New BER-lin, Illinois. And there's a Vienna, Illinois, that's pronounced the same as it is in Ohio. Then there's the Hoosiers who pronounce their neighboring state "Ill-i-NOISE". There's also Mont-e-VID-e-o, Minnesota. And any number of places called "Monticello" which should be pronounced "Montichello" but are usually pronounced "Montisello", except for Jefferson's home. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:57, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * For a counterexample, Pend Orielle ("Pondoray") is not pronounced anything like it's spelled in English, but as a decent approximation to what it should be in French. I have no idea why they kept the pronunciation in that case.--Noren (talk) 20:59, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

maya astronomical observations.
I had an unresolved disagreement with a friend. Do the Maya astronomical observations include Pluto? Couldn't find it.190.56.16.100 (talk) 18:03, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * No. The Maya worked with just the naked eye, and you can't see Pluto without a telescope. --Tango (talk) 19:05, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Tango. For a little while there I'd almost almost fallen prey to very positive B.S. Strange how often that worke.190.56.16.100 (talk) 19:17, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Ilokano Wikipedia
Does anyone know what has happened with the Ilokano Wikipedia? I took a look at it, because according to Milestone statistics, it is the Wikipedia that hasn't reached a new milestone for the longest time (almost five years now). I don't speak Ilokano, but I took a look at the history of the main page and saw that it hadn't been updated in over two years. The talk page for the main page only showed a few comments, all in English, none in Ilokano. The article 2011 only seems to contain some mentions of "Michael Verzosa", whoever or whatever that is, but an actual look at the article showed that is has been completely vandalised, and no one had bothered to fix it, for several years. As my knowledge of the Ilokano language is absolutely zero I can't fix it because I have no idea what it is supposed to say, but I do know that, for example, links to general articles about different foods (European/American, not Filipino), links to sites such as Facebook, and pictures about penises don't belong to an article about some individual person. J I P &#124; Talk 18:53, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The project has been locked so no-one can edit it. That's done when there is no-one actively maintaining the project and it's just getting vandalised. It will be unlocked if anyone requests it and shows willing to work on the project and maintain it. --Tango (talk) 21:36, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think that's correct. The project is not locked, since I can still edit it, and indeed, even a glance at the Recent changes shows edits as of today by IP editors. More than likely, the few really active maintainers have gone on to other projects. Avic ennasis  @ 01:11, 7 Nisan 5771 / 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I stand corrected. The page I looked at just happened to be protected! Sorry! --Tango (talk) 22:51, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Ilocano refers to the language and culture associated with the Ilocano people, the third largest ethnic group in the Philippines. I had to look this up. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:02, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I glanced at the wiki on Asia and looked at the history of it. Turns out many edits were bots adding language links. General Rommel (talk) 11:03, 15 April 2011 (UTC)