Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 March 18

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[edit] March 18

[edit] The Bridge on the River Kwai

Does anyone know why the film is called The Bridge on the River Kwai and the book on which it was based The Bridge over the River Kwai? Why would the preposition be so significant as to warrant a change? Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:30, 18 March 2008 (UTC))

It's worse than that, Joseph. The original French title was Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï, which translates literally to "The Bridge of the River Kwai". But that sounds unidiomatic in English, so the English-language title of the book had the word over. When it came to the movie (one of the all-time greats, imho), I guess they wanted a title that sounded a little less clunky and a little more marketable than "over the River..", so it became "The Bridge on the River Kwai", which flows more easily from the tongue. That's just my guess, though. -- JackofOz (talk) 05:44, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Le Pont etc means River Kwai Bridge which is not in the least poetic, more like a mapmaker's documetnary. I didn't realise movie titles were tested for their rolling off the tongue qualties but since you've raised it, maybe they are... Julia Rossi (talk) 07:21, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
You mean like The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger or Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (gasp)? Clarityfiend (talk) 07:57, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
They're also checked for ease of pronunciation a la Betelgeuse/Beetlejuice - X201 (talk) 15:28, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

In case anyone's interested, Boulle's book was based on real events but shamelessly distorted part of the truth about the building of the Burma Railway bridge over the Khwae Yai River... in particular, transferring the spirit of collaboration from French officers to an invented Englishman: l'ennemi héréditaire strikes again! To counter some of the misinformation in the film, see Philip Toosey. Xn4 18:30, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I am interested - since I heard the Poles cracked the enigma code, not the Brish or Americans. Julia Rossi (talk) 22:00, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
That's only somewhat true: Marian Rejewski and his team were the first to break a form of enigma, but lacking the resources to keep up with improvements to the system, they handed over their work to the British and French in 1939. It was the British who broke the (massively stronger) forms of enigma used later. The americans were not involved at all, but did break the Japanese purple code. Algebraist 22:30, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
"The americans were not involved at all" which seems a good enough line for me to point everyone towards the Historical Inaccuracies section of U-571 (film). It didn't do very well at the box office on this side of the Atlantic, can't think why.... - X201 (talk) 22:46, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Matthew Mcconaughey is enough reason for any film not to do well. SaundersW (talk) 16:27, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the input ... I guess it makes sense. But .... in terms of marketing, are there significantly different marketing concerns for a book versus a film? If so, what? In other words, if the preposition "over" is too klunky / non-poetic of a title for a film, it is equally so for the book ... and should have concerned the book publishers, just as it did the film producers ... no? Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC))

When I was writing my post above, I just knew you were going to come back with a question like this, Joseph, because the same query occurred to me. It may - and this is purely another guess - have something to do with fact that the French book was translated into English in 1954 by a Briton named Xan Fielding, whereas the producers of the movie were American, and the slight difference in title reflects a slight preference for one word over another in those 2 countries. Since they were making a film depicting the story as originally told by Boulle, not of any one translation of the story (I assume there are more than just Fielding's), I guess they didn't feel obliged to comply exactly with the title of any one translation. There are always more than one way to translate a title. -- JackofOz (talk) 07:39, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Generic country names

Am I correct in thinking that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is actually a common noun, not a proper noun? Unlike, say, the United States of America or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which contain specific geographical referents. Although the term Soviet came to be treated as a proper noun, is it not originally a common noun? Is there any other example of a state with a common noun as its name, or whose name was originally a common noun? Lantzy talk 17:00, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

For me, it's a proper noun. To say "a union of soviet socialist republics", would infer something quite different from "the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", a term which described and was and is the name of a particular political union, hence the capital letters. Xn4 17:58, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
But it is correct to say that "the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" is a country name made up entirely of words none of which is a proper noun. Other examples that come to mind are Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën (Republic of the Seven United Provinces) and Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów (Commonwealth of the Two Nations). The official name of the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary was die im Reichsrat vertretenen Königreiche und Länder (Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council). Of course, if you look at our List of country name etymologies, you will find that almost all country names ultimately derive from common nouns. — Kpalion(talk) 19:45, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Of course, both 'union' and 'republic' are common nouns. Thanks, Kpalion, I'd never heard that name for the bits of Austria-Hungary that weren't Hungary. The name may have helped the British Foreign Office in 1914 to resolve the vexed question of whether or not the British Empire was at war with Liechtenstein! (After a lot of head-scratching, our boys recognized Liechtenstein's neutrality.) Xn4 19:57, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Holy See would be another example as both terms are far from being proper nouns. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 00:00, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
It may not be quite true to say that the "Soviet" in "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" would otherwise have been an improper noun. In the Russian, it's Sovyétskikh, which is the genitive plural form of Sovyétskiy, the adjective formed from the noun Sovyét (Which has only 2 syllables, not 3: sə-VYET. Note: I put the stress marks in to show the stress is on the 2nd syllable in all these words, not on the first as we tend to say it, SO-vi-ət. The stress marks are not part of the written language, as they are in French, for example). "Sovyét" simply means what "Council" means to us, although in English we also use the word "Soviet" in reference to these Russian councils. One could argue that when used generically, "council" or "soviet" would not be capitalised; but each individual one would be "the Moscow Council/Soviet", "the Novgorod Council/Soviet" or whatever. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:49, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
But then, the same goes for words like "republic" or "union". Not capitalized when used generically, but capitalized in names like "the Republic of France". So "soviet" is not any different, although I don't know why "council" is not used instead (as in "the Union of Council Socialist Republics"). As for the Holy See, I was thinking about it too, but it's not really a country (the State of the Vatican City is, but "Vatican" is a proper noun). — Kpalion(talk) 17:41, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Using "Council" would not have worked. We all became so used to hearing "Union of Soviet ..." that we thought nothing of it; yet if we stopped to think about it, we'd realise that "Soviet" functions as a noun adjunct here, and hence is adjectival in nature. We don't have an adjective from "council"; the Russians do. We do use "council" as a noun adjunct ("This is not something that this company deals with; it's a Council matter"; meaning, it's a matter the local Council has responsibility for). But the meaning in USSR is more like "Council-based". Union of Council-based Socialist Republics? Hmm, maybe not. I presume that prior to 1917, the word "soviet" would have meant nothing to most English-speakers, so it would be interesting to find out who decided to include it in the official English translation of the name of the country, and how quickly and easily it became recognised and accepted in the anglophone world. -- JackofOz (talk) 04:44, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks very much, Xn4, Kpalion, Cookatoo, and Jack. I knew there had to be other, better examples. Lantzy talk 18:11, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of Soviets, the Libyan Jamahiriya springs to mind. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 07:20, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Numbers written out?

Can I copy (English) written numbers from 1 to 1000 from somewhere? --212.149.216.233 (talk) 17:20, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean in the sense of a PDF with them on a document with them handwritten on? You can 'create' a list of the numbers very rapidly in Excel, but to write them by hand would take more work. Your best bet might be to hand-write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0 and then do some sort of photo-copying/clever system to copy them rather than having to hand write every number. ny156uk (talk) 17:41, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
I did, but apparently something went wrong. See the thing below if you feel like searching for errors. It's weirdly formatted because it's for Project Euler Problem 17.


Details about I hate this template are hidden below.


--212.149.216.233 (talk) 18:38, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

The obvious errors are the lack of hyphens in numbers like twenty-one or ninety-five, and the lack of spaces before and/or after "hundred" or "and". --LarryMac | Talk 19:27, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Also see our excellent article Names of numbers in English. Thomprod (talk) 20:00, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
About those errors, I probably should have said, the task was to count all letters but no spaces or hyphens. --212.149.216.233 (talk) 20:06, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
As far as I see, you didn't make any mistakes in typing out the numbers (you are my hero if you did it by hand!) What I did was I copied your numbers to an MS Word file, run a replace tool to replace every of "twenty", "thirty", ..., "ninety", "hundred", "and" with "twenty ", "thirty ", ..., "ninety ", "hundred ", "and " (added spaces after the words) and then run a spell check. Word didn't find any problems, word count shows that there are exactly 1000 lines, so I concluded you typed the numbers right and didn't skip any. There are 21,124 characters used in there. Why do you think that something went wrong?  ARTYOM  20:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Meanwhile — I've heard that in Hindi the numbers up to 99 have been so strongly affected by sandhi (and not regularized by analogy) that one has to learn them separately; where might one look for a list, either in Devanāgarī or transliterated? —Tamfang (talk) 04:30, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I've heard the same about Nepali, but thought Hindi was fairly regular. Actually, even in Nepali most of the numbers are reasonably close to being regular, though few are entirely predictable. — kwami (talk) 05:00, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

You are my hero ARTYOM, as you gave the correct answer. I got 23,124 in my own calculations and was clever enough to try subtracting 1000 from it to take out the newlines, but I forgot my good old Windows version of *nixy word counter wc expects one byte new lines (lf) instead of the Windows style two byte (cr-lf) new lines, so all the new lines get doubled. Thanks! --212.149.216.233 (talk) 05:22, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Haha! And now I got involved in Project Euler too :o)  ARTYOM  08:33, 19 March 2008 (UTC)