Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 February 23

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[edit] February 23

[edit] Translate three short phrases into Irish/Gaelic for me?

Would anybody do the favor of translating the following three phrases into Irish/Gaelic for me, if you have a moment?

  1. "Office of Services"
  2. "Office of Safety"
  3. "Office of Order"

IPA pronounciation would also be helpful. Thank you! --Brasswatchman 00:54, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Can you provide more context? What kinds of "offices" are these? Also, there's no one standard pronunciation of Irish; if you want an IPA transcription you need to specify which dialect you want (Donegal, Mayo, Connemara, Aran Islands, West Kerry, West Cork, or Ring). —Angr 05:12, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I assume that he's looking for the names of the equivelant public offices (aka departments, ministries). So for example what do the Irish call the government body that others would call the "Office of Safety", "Ministry of Safety" or "Department of Safety".
Then the best way to find the answer is to find out what specific government departments/ministries of the Republic of Ireland you want, go to their websites, and see what they call themselves in Irish. —Angr 21:31, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
You know, never mind. I found something else that will work. Sorry for the trouble. --Brasswatchman 04:58, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] works of johan bojer

I need the spoiler of the novel "The Great Hunger" by Johan Bojer

You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg. --NorwegianBlue talk 16:29, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Two unrelated questions

First of all, is there an antonym of the word "precocious"? I thought it might be "antecocious", but I can't find such a word in any dictionary.

Secondly, would the Latin for "Whithersoever you throw me, it hurts!" be, based on the Manx motto "Quocunque Jeceris Stabit" (Whithersoever you throw it, it will stand)? Laïka 10:08, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

In answer to the first, I can only think of "late developer". --Richardrj talk email 10:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Pre- and ante- are more or less synonyms. If you wanted to coin an antonym for "precocious" it should be "postcocious"! —Angr 11:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Too late. Google has 62 hits, and I've just come across a use of the word in an old newspaper cutting from 2004 ("Most of my friends did the grand tour of Europe ... in their late teens. I was postcocious and didn't start till I was 20" - Garry Marchant in the Weekend Australian, Travel, 21-22 August 2004). -- JackofOz 08:07, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I think you could probably create a parody of QJS with the intended meaning... I don't know Latin well, but perhaps some de-dogged variant of "Quocunque Me Jeceris, Id Dolet" (???) will suffice... 惑乱 分からん 12:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I don't think that there is an exact antonym for "precocious", but words such as "backward", "delayed", or "retarded" come close.
As for the second question, I think that Wakuran's suggestion doesn't really capture the sense of the English phrase. When you say "Wherever you throw me, it hurts", idiomatically, "it hurts" really means "I suffer pain". The Latin translation "id dolet" suggests that wherever you throw me, that thing suffers pain. I think you would get closer to your meaning with "Quocunque me jeceris, doleo" or, if you want to mimic the pithiness of the Manx motto at the expense of a little ambiguity, "Quocunque jeceris doleo". Marco polo 12:58, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
The Latin was never intended to be a perfect translation, just a rough draft... =S I guess MP's translation literally would be something like "Whithersoever you throw, it hurts me" and I'm not certain whether the sense of "you throw me" could be considered as understood from context. 惑乱 分からん 13:53, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
A problem seems to be that while the English parody is transparently meaningful enough, its sense breaks down on the literal level. It literally means, "Wherever you throw me, in that place I hurt." But the destination to which a person is thrown is not the part of them where pain is felt. You could say "ibi doleo," meaning, basically, e.g. "If'n you throw me to the bottom of a pit, I'm-a-still-a-gonna-be hurtin' at the bottom of that pit. An' if'n you throw me under the wheels of a bus..." But that's not precisely what I took Laïka to mean. Wareh 14:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
That is pretty much what I was looking, although Quocunque jeceris doleo is probably both close enough to the original, and near enough to the intended meaning. Thanks! Laïka 16:07, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] English grammar

Hi,

I'm 54, a retired English/Music teacher and I have never thoroughly uderstood the "lie, lay, lie" and "lay" etc. Would you please define and use in a sentence?

Thanks 68.99.48.158 17:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

(reposted by frothT 18:31, 23 February 2007 (UTC))

"Lay" is the preterite or simple past form of the word "lie", in the sense of "to lie on the grass" or "to lie two miles south of here" (not "to lie to one's friends"). For example, if you like to sit in a field watching the sunset, you might say "every day I lie on the grass" or "I am going to lie on the grass", while if you only did it in the past, you would say "I lay on the grass last night". For lie as "be situated", if someone asks where the farm is, you might "it lies three miles to the north of here", while if the farm has just burned to the ground, and therefore is no longer there, you would say "it lay three miles to the north of here". Note that "They lie to you" does NOT become "they lay to you"; it becomes "they lied to you". For more information, see the Wiktionary page on lie: wikt:lie. Laïka 18:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
The lie/lay connection is roughly the same as in sit/set, fall/fell etc. (intransitive/transitive or perhaps causative)... 惑乱 分からん 18:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
While "lay" is the preterite of "to lie" (meaning "to be positioned", not "to tell a lie") there is also a separate verb, "to lay", meaning "to set down". Wakuran is correct that the lie/lay pair is analogous to the sit/set, fall/fell, and rise/raise pairs. In each of these pairs, the second member is a transitive verb that is also the old causative form of the first, intransitive member. Here are examples of the different forms of "to lie" and "to lay":
I want to lie down at sunset.
Every day, I lie down at sunset.
Yesterday, I lay down at sunset.
Every day of my life, I have lain down at sunset.
  • I want to lay my baby in her crib at sunset.
  • Every day, I lay my baby in her crib at sunset.
  • Yesterday, I laid my baby in her crib at sunset.
  • Every day of her life, I have laid my baby in her crib at sunset.
Do you see the difference between these verbs? A very common error is to use "lay" intransitively to mean "lie", as in "I want to lay down at sunset". This is an error, though it is so common that a non-normative approach would have to recognize "lay" as a variant of the intransitive "lie", as well as a separate transitive verb. Marco polo 19:58, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


Thank you so much. Now it's back to Lit Critting H.D. Nice imagistic work. Great field, geography. Wish they still taught it in school. How do you teach Shakespeare w/o knowing all of Gaul? Thanks again. May I copy>

Marianne68.99.48.158 21:12, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I guess you basically could copy everything you'd wish from Wikipedia, since it's GDFL. Please return if you have any other question. 惑乱 分からん 22:36, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I'd just like to add that my favorite example of the correct use of "lay" as the past of "lie" is the opening lines of The Fifth Dimension's hit song "(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep at All."
Last night I didn't get to sleep at all (no, no)
I lay awake and watched until the morning light
Washed away the darkness of the lonely night.
Chuck 23:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Letter "tone"

While scrolling around Character Map, I discovered a strange symbol "ƨ". Character map gives the symbols name as "Latin Small Letter Tone Two", and it has a capital version too: "Ƨ". However, I've never come across the letter Tone or Tone Two, and there don't appear to be any articles about it: Tone (letter) and Tone two both come back red. What sort of letter is it? Laïka 18:34, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

See Ƨ, you could actually often search on weird characters in the search field, I believe most of the glyphs in the Cyrillic, Greek and International Phonetic Alphabet have their own articles or redirects, for instance. 惑乱 分からん 19:02, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
OK, thanks! Laïka 19:14, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Maybe this is too basic for many readers, but you could copy and paste basically every character you see with the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V hotkeys (except for Mac usage). Good to know. 惑乱 分からん 22:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology of the verb 'to be'

Hi,

I was wondering how the plural forms of the verb 'to be' in English came to be how they are. 'Are' doesn't seem very similar to the other main Germanic equivalents sind/seid/sind in German and zijn/zijn/zijn in Dutch, and it doesn't have much similarity to the corresponding parts of either of the verbs in Old English which cover its meanings, wesan and bēon, which use sint and bēoþ. Any offers?

--131.111.238.69 19:36, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The English present plural form of the verb "to be" is actually taken from Old Norse rather than from Old English. According to our article on the Indo-European copula, Old Norse used a different root, "*er-", for the verb "to be" than did the West Germanic languages, which used reflexes of "*wes-", "*be-", and "*es-". The Old Norse plural forms for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons were "erum", "eruð", and "eru". The modern Danish common plural form is "er". The heavy Norse/Danish settlement of the Danelaw in eastern and northwestern England influenced English in the two centuries or so before the Norman conquest. The pronouns "she" and "they" are also thought to have come from Old Norse or a Danish dialect of it. (edited) Marco polo 20:08, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I'd have guessed "are", one way or another, was some kind of rhotacized variant of the *s-root, but apparently American Heritage Dictionary disagrees...
Note that in modern Danish, the singular and plural form has merged. "They" from Old Norse seems good, but "she" is more problematic since the word for "she" always have been a derivation from the h*-root (as in he, him, her) in North Germanic, but possibly the explanation that the nominative feminine demonstrative pronoun sjá (that) [1] somehow affected Old English equivalent séo before the word shifted meaning is valid. (Sources to link to?)
Also, aren't the *s-roots for "sein" and "ist" the same? 惑乱 分からん 23:06, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I don't have any references at my fingertips, but I certainly learned in my History of the English Language class that "she" came from the Norse influence in the Danelaw. Tesseran 09:51, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
I stand somewhat corrected on "she", according to our article She. According to this article, the word is derived from the Old English demonstrative pronoun seo/sio (meaning "that (feminine) one"). However, the use of this word as a personal pronoun (replacing the Old English third-person feminine singular pronoun heo) seems to have begun within the Danelaw. Some scholars believe that it did so due to the influence of Old Norse sjá. Marco polo 13:50, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
Sounds plausible, I heard one reason the words "she" and "they" became popular was that in Old English, all of the 3rd person pronouns were based on the h-root, and easily got mixed up (see Old_English_morphology#Pronouns).
As a digression, isn't there some succinct grammatical terminology of differing between demonstrative pronouns, "this" and "that"? The Wikipedia article mentions "proximal" and "distal", which sounds nice to me. (Because "nominative feminine distal demonstrative pronoun" is very succinct. =S) But it would be nice with terminology for the Japanese distinction of demonstratives (I.e. close to speaker, close to speakee, far from both. 惑乱 分からん 14:20, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Two brief questions

Hello, there:

I have two short questions to ask. Firstly, do any of you know of anything out there that can analyse a text and report which words and letters are most used?

Secondly, is there anything similar to an IPA text-to-speech engine around?

Peace, It's-is-not-a-genitive 21:12, 23 February 2007 (UTC)