Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2006 December 10

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 10

ENGLISH TO COPTIC..PLEASE

Can anyone translate english to coptic? 

"TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE" or something that would mean something similar? not sure if its from the bible... thankyou. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 211.29.114.186 (talk) 07:42, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

(It's from Hamlet, Act I. Scene III:

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Skarioffszky 10:03, 10 December 2006 (UTC))

Coptic is a dead language, and there are only a relatively small number of professional ancient-language scholars and priests of the Egyptian Coptic church who would have a good chance of giving a correct answer, and the odds are against any of them happening to hang out here. If you're the same one who was asking about Egyptian several months ago, then I still think getting tattoos in other languages is a bad idea unless you can have a high degree of confidence that what you're getting etched into your flesh is actually correct (ideally, you should know why it's correct...). AnonMoos 14:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Of course, unlike Asian exoticists in the West who get Chinese character tattoos whose meanings are perhaps not what they intended, if someone gets a Coptic tattoo, the changes of an embarassing situation ensuing when someone who knows the language sees the tattoo is vanishingly small, so who cares, right? Nohat 08:05, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

"Crossing the bar"

Meanings and origins, please

Ships leaving a river-mouth or bay usually have to cross a sandbar or bank of silt, so 'crossing the bar' means leaving shelter/harbour for the open sea. Tennyson's poem uses it as a metaphor for dying.--HJMG 23:16, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

The OED says 'bar' can mean "A bank of sand, silt, etc., across the mouth of a river or harbour, which obstructs navigation.". Their earliest example is from 1586 when Dublin is described as a "barred" harbour.--HJMG 23:34, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

See also: Crossing the Bar. -THB 00:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

It could also be a variation on "crossing the line", which means "going too far". StuRat 12:27, 11 December 2006 (UTC)