Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Language/2006 October 3

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[edit] Danish translation

Could someone with a knowledge of Danish translate this page (up until the images, it's not very long)? zafiroblue05 | Talk 05:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

My attempt:
LUDVIG HOLBERG ON THE STAGE / CLASSICS DAYS 2004 / The Political Tinker (staged 1722) / Click on the individual images to see a larger picture / To the front page / Texts from The Political Tinker in the Archive for Danish Literature
Disclaimer: my knowledge of Danish is limited (but I think good enough for this simple text).  --LambiamTalk 06:37, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Assuming "tinker" is correct (having no idea), I must add that "teksten" means "the text", not "texts", you probably mixed up the Danish -en-ending with the -en-plural found in German and Dutch. 惑乱 分からん 13:59, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
You're right, and then it must of course be The text of. The title I gave is the usual English translation (see our article), another one found being The Pewterer turned Politician.  --LambiamTalk 16:04, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation of the French name "Villarceau"

I was wondering how exactly do you pronounce the name "Villarceau." I'm not all that with French, but I believe it's "vee lahr so". Can anyone provide IPA codes? Thanks! ☢ Ҡi∊ff⌇↯ 07:19, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

/vilɑr'so/ Lgriot 08:16, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
It should actually be /vilar'so/, with /a/ for /ɑ/. -- the GREAT Gavini 15:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I definitely pronounce /vilɑr'so/ and not /vilar'so/, but it may be a regional accent from my region (Savoy). Anyone from the town of Villarceau that knows the IPA and can tell us how it is pronounced there? Lgriot 17:20, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Agreed - the "standard" French would be /vilar'so/ since the parce in parce que is pronounced /paʁs/ on fr.wiktionary. I don't think dialectal forms are used for IPA transcriptions, though. -- the GREAT Gavini 17:42, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Don't let the slashes fool you. French stress is completely prosidic. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:26, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Don't you mean "prosodic"? -- the GREAT Gavini 15:12, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Can I offer /vilärso/ in compromise?  --LambiamTalk 21:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
No, but [viläʁˈso] is fine. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
[1] I'd say this bot get its right. You can type in a text in many languages, and the bot pronounces it:).Evilbu 21:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Don't rely on it: it pronounces patte and pâtes in exactly the same way ! Lgriot 19:17, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Prepatory ? Preparatory?

Is 'prepatory' a word or a mistake? We don't find prepatory in the Oxford or Cambridge, and suspect the preparatory is correct. But there are plenty of uses, including names of institutions and reports to be found be googling prepatory. Word or not, mistake or not, who can help (the request is time senstive this morning, if you can help, thanks.)

It's preparatory. By its very nature, Google contains just about every spelling mistake known to humanity, and a few others besides. JackofOz 09:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Tangent question: What's the shortest 'word' (as in string of letters) you can type in Google without getting any results?---Sluzzelin 10:19, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
znbrqx (6 letters) is the shortest I've managed to find. I haven't tested many combinations though. --Ptcamn 10:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
This reminds me that someone recently asked me to find a 'word' that generates precisely one hit - no more, no less - on Google. Any ideas? Maid Marion 11:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Sounds a bit like the game of Googlewacking. DMacks 18:44, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for responding quickly. I understand the problem with googling a word and getting misspellings. What gives us pause is finding pages for: "Montgomery Catholic Prepatory" and "Salzburg International Prepatory School". Checking and re-checking those websites, the use of the word is clearly not a typo. We thought maybe prepatory was an Americanization, but the Salzburg one is in Austria. Maybe prepatory is used specifically in the name of some institutions, and is otherwise incorrect? We're printing a doc that has been PDFed with 'prepatory' and we can't change it. We have to decide to go with it, or if the mistake (if it is one) prevents us from sending out our doc today, on deadline.

Despite its appearance all over these websites, 'prepatory' is just plain wrong. I would not be tempted to send my kids to a school where nobody apparently knows this. Maid Marion 11:42, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
In my experience, the people responsible for running an organisation's website are not necessarily the best spellers in that organisation. Even mis-spelling the very name of the organisation is far from impossible, as these examples seem to prove. Common sense would suggest website material be checked thoroughly before it hits the web, but maybe it's a case of seeing what they expect to be there rather than what's actually there. Maybe a bit of feedback to these "prepatory" organisations would not go astray. JackofOz 11:59, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Our Wikipedia article spells Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School and links to a website that has the same spelling.  --LambiamTalk 15:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Google search discloses 338,000 hits for "Luthern", many of which are "Luthern" churches. Same idiocy.Edison 07:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Can not" or "cannot"?

Next up: can not or cannot?

"Can not" and "cannot" have different meanings.
"I cannot do it." = It is impossible for me to do it.
"I can not do it." = Not doing is one possibility (and doing it is another.)
--Ptcamn 10:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Or, in the latter example, you could be stressing the "not". -- the GREAT Gavini 15:04, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
In an attempt to emphasise the impossibility of the thing in question, writers often separate cannot into 2 words, and bold or italicise the not. They don't seem to realise that by dividing the word up, they're actually watering down the supposed impossibility, by introducing the possibility of possibility. JackofOz 20:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Not all experts agree: AskOxford.COM.  --LambiamTalk 04:30, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I agree with that statement. JackofOz 08:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Moi aussi. That's probably the best way to put it. -- the GREAT Gavini 15:26, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
For a moment there, I thought you were claiming to be a countryman of mine. :) JackofOz 20:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] translation?

how do i translate an article in english into spanish?

Well first, you need to learn both English and Spanish... ;) Actually, if you just need a very rough translation, you can always put the text through the babel fish. If you are trying to get an English language wikipedia article into es.wikipedia.org, you could try to contact a user at Wikipedia:Translators available#Spanish-to-English, or check out the corresponding page over at the Spanish wiki es:Categoría:Wikipedia:Traducciones_solicitadas. Hope this helps.--Andrew c 17:29, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
What is the article in question? -- the GREAT Gavini 17:43, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Just in case, if you haven't noticed the interwiki links on the left side of the page, many wikipedia pages have links to similar articles in other languages there. (Look at the bottom of the column below the Wikipedia logo on the article page that you would like to find in Spanish. If you're lucky, there will already be a Spanish article about it.) - Rainwarrior 17:46, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question about an English idiom

I'm not a native English speaker and I'm quite puzzled by one Enligh phrase I often encounter and whose meaning I can't figure out or find in any dictionary: "if there ever was one". Like in, let's say, "This is a big thing if there ever was one". Doesn't make much sense to me so it must be some kind of an idiom. Please help! Kpalion 20:25, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

It means "this is a very big thing" or "this is the biggest thing I have ever seen." It is a strange idiom so it's hard to explain, but to take it extremely literally, I think it is "if there was ever such a thing that could be categorized as 'big', this would be the archetypical example". Adam Bishop 20:49, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks a lot. Kpalion 21:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Incidentally, it's more often heard as 'if ever there was one' rather than 'if there ever was one'. Maid Marion 08:17, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
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