Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 August 29

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August 29

What sound would you say cicadas make?

Would it be "chirping"?

Also, do we have any onomatopoeia for it? (I told my friend that we don't, but maybe you guys can think of something I couldn't.) rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

To me it sounds like a buzz. Before I knew what cicadas were (when I was a small kid) I always thought that it was the sound of electricity going through the power lines. It made sense to me since the noise was coming from the general direction of the lines above my head. Little did I know that it was coming from bugs in the trees near the power lines... Dismas|^(talk) 03:03, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

As a kid I was told that that sound is made by "tree frogs", which I assumed were literally frogs who lived in trees. It was only in the past couple of years that I realized that didn't make any sense (and that other people looked at me funny when I mentioned it). I'm still really disappointed that there are no tree frogs...Adam Bishop (talk) 06:08, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_frog Rimush (talk) 06:35, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Right, sorry, that was poorly worded, I mean, what I thought was a tree frog is not a tree frog. Adam Bishop (talk) 15:27, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I just call it bloody loud! I know we have a very loud variety around these parts (SE Australia), but it's so loud it's almost impossible to discern a particular sound to be onomatopoeic about. It's a kind high pitched squeal. HiLo48 (talk) 04:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Rrrreee rree rree rree rree rreeeeeeeeeeee!!!

In Japanese it's ミーン　ミン　ミン　ミーーーン (miiin min min miiiin).

Shrill? Whir? Exploding Boy (talk) 06:19, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

There are many onomatopoeia of cicadas sounds in Japan. It depends on species. "Miiin min min miiiin" is one of them. Onomatopoeia of Tanna japonensis are "KIKIKIKIKI", "KEKEKEKEKE" and "CANNAT KANAKANA ...". Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata is "G...jijijiji/jirijiri". You can listen to the different calls at here. Put the cursor on the image. Oda Mari (talk) 08:15, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

From our article: "The name is a direct derivation of the Latin cicada, meaning "buzzer". In classical Greek, it was called a tettix, and in modern Greek tzitzikas—both names being onomatopoeic." Rimush (talk) 13:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I was really asking about current English onomatopoeia, not etymology. But thank you guys for your comments. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I call it a high-pitched whine. Matt Deres (talk) 14:41, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

stridulation Adambrowne666 (talk) 22:19, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

"Sire" vs. "Your Majesty"

Are there any rules regarding when one of them is preferable to the other in a dialogue with the king/Emperor? K61824 (talk) 04:58, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Our articles Style (manner of address), Royal and noble styles, Sire... don't deal with this. AFAIK, I think Your Majesty is used for the first address, Sire being used thereafter; I'm assuming it is the male equivalent of ma'am (see Wiktionary:ma'am). Of course, this would only hold in English; the only current monarch styled "Emperor" in English is that of Japan. If you're writing fiction or similar, you have poetic licence, naturally. -- the Great Gavini 07:35, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I believe "sir" would be used nowadays (from memory of reading reported conversations with George VI). But we haven't had a king for 70 years, so who knows. "Sire" certainly has an over-archaic ring to it. I'll try to find a reference later. Alansplodge (talk) 09:19, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

...fifty-eight. And of course that king was also an emperor. Marnanel (talk) 15:42, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh yes, sorry, s/b nearly 60 years. Doh! Alansplodge (talk) 20:48, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

girls

If a girl with blonde hair is a blonde, and a girl with brown hair is a brunette and a girl with red hair is a redhead, what do you call a girl with black hair? What about pink hair? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.144.125.153 (talk) 19:16, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I personally also call girls with black hair brunettes. Rimush (talk) 19:30, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

See also this archived question. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:37, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

And people who color their hair pink or blue or whatever you can just call idiots, no offence. Rimush (talk) 19:45, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

And people who judge others based on something as stupid as their hair color can equally be called idiots. 82.44.55.25 (talk) 22:35, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

This [1] lady might disagree with you there. ;-) Let's see, does she have her own Wikipedia entry yet? if not, someone should create it, as she is already mentined in another entry. -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 21:14, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Being mentioned in an existing entry is not in itself a qualification for a Wikipedia page. See WP:BIO for the full details. Marnanel (talk) 10:23, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Not in itself, no, but if you do look her up, you'll notice she might be relevant enough for her own Wikipedia entry. That said, there are more skilled editors than me, and it was only meant as a heads-up for those - I have no intention of writing the entry myself. Being a "fanboi" doesn't go well with WP:NPOV. ;-) -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 13:17, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Neat trick that, Rimush. Calling someone an idiot without intending to offend them. You must let me into your secret.  :) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 21:43, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh, that's quite simple. They should know they're idiots, however they shouldn't take this personally... Eliko (talk) 21:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Another neat trick: being an idiot, but still having enough self-awareness to know you are one, and also having the skill not to take it personally or be offended when people call you one. I wouldn't mind being an idiot under those conditions. Where do I apply? -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 03:40, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Raven-tressed. Bus stop (talk) 22:07, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh the humanity! 86.161.108.172 (talk) 01:48, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

When I lived in Tennessee, I heard the term "blackhead". When I first heard it, I asked for clarification and was given "redhead" as a related example. Dismas|^(talk) 01:56, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

French the odd one out?

The major romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. I know that Spanish and Portuguese are very close, due to goegraphy and stuff, and they are probably upward of 70-80% mutually intelligible. My Spanish teacher recently said of Portuguese that she could "speak Spanish and be understood by a Portuguese waiter [who spoke only pt]" and of Romanian that she could have a broken dinner conversation using Spanish with Romanian-speakers. THis reminded me of one of my Hispanic friends saying earlier that Italian is "very much like Spanish". But my teacher also said that though she could see similarities between written French and Spanish, when she went to France she was like (and I'm quoting) "W.T.F." because there was virtually no mutual intelligibility in spoken French and Spanish. Why is this? French doesn't have any major influences from other language groups, and Romanian is mixed with the Slavic languages. 68.248.229.115 (talk) 19:20, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't think Romanian is a problem for other Romance speakers because of the Slavic influence, but because of the weird pronunciation of words inherited from Latin that are otherwise quite similar. Same goes for Portuguese, which in its written form is much more similar to Spanish than in the spoken form (same with Danish and Norwegian, from what I've heard - you also get asymmetric intelligibility in the two cases: Portuguese and Danes understand Spanish and Norwegians respectively better than the other way around). To stay on topic, I can say that from my experience with French, as a guy who speaks no French at all, I can understand a lot of written French (although I'm not sure which of Romanian, Spanish, or English helps me more), but spoken French is a b*tch. Rimush (talk) 19:28, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I once heard a Portuguese friend hold an apparently productive conversation with an Italian ice cream salesman, each in their own language. A Romanian friend says that he can understand spoken Spanish but they can't understand him. Alansplodge (talk) 20:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

It's fairly notorious that Portuguese-speakers can understand Spanish more easily than Spanish-speakers can understand Portuguese, but there's not full comprehensibility either way. In any case, the great difference between French and the other well-known Romance languages is its strongly altered phonological system -- a great reduction in the number of syllables in words as compared to ancient Latin, the deletion of many word-final consonants in pronunciation (which correspond to medial consonants in ancient Latin), etc. So where Spanish has agua and Italian has acqua, French has monosyllabic eau (pronounced [o]), etc. etc. AnonMoos (talk)

"eau (pronounced [o])" - this is why I don't want to learn French Rimush (talk) 19:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

It gets worse, Rimush: the plural 'eaux' is also pronounced [o], but the word following it, if any, can sometimes change its pronunciation. But not always. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Anthony Burgess also complained about eau, saying that if the French could have contracted it further they would have done so. French words, he writes, are at their most French when they are monsters with heads but no tails. Living in Monaco, he could not entirely avoid speaking French, and shuddered every time he had to turn Jesus Christ into Jésu Cri. — Mu (talk) 21:10, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

My favorite is the response to a sneeze: souhaits /swɛ/. Eight letters for just three sounds. Pais (talk) 11:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

In "ils mangeaient", the second word is [mãžɛ]... AnonMoos (talk) 14:50, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Then there are the question particles: Qu'est-ce qu'on... [kɛskõ].—Emil J. 15:05, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Another French peculiarity that I love is when the addition of "s" results in the deletion of a sound, as in œuf [œf]/œufs [ø] or cerf [sɛʁf]/cerfs [sɛʁ]. Pais (talk) 16:04, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

To be fair, we have Ough (orthography), pronounced oo, aw, o, off, uff, ow and uh. 81.131.53.18 (talk) 11:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

My impression is that before the Renaissance French was pretty similar to the others. Maybe the cultural dominance of France during the period 1600-1800 caused it to undergo more rapid changes. Looie496 (talk) 23:06, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

In the late middle ages, French pronunciation was a little bit like Catalan with nasal vowels (to greatly oversimplify). It would be very difficult to correlate rather purely phonological changes (such as the last few rounds of final consonant dropping) with external cultural factors, and except in certain cases where sound-changes are driven by contact between different languages, most linguists don't even try... AnonMoos (talk) 05:19, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm Italian. Italian speakers have usually a good understanding of spoken Spanish, expecially if spoken slowly. The understanding is even greater if Spanish is written (you have problems almost only with different etymologies, like estate and verano). With Portuguese it's a bit more difficult, because of the apparently strange pronounciation of words that, if written, would be more recognizable. With spoken French, you usually understand only some word here and there. This is because of the aforementioned French custom to make almost every word monosillabic (It: es-ta-te, Fr: été). Luckily, written French is more conservative of its Latin origin, so it's a lot more understandable. To my ignorant eye, Catalan looks like a mixture of Spanish and French. I don't have much experience with Romanian, but it's not very intuitive for an Italian eye/ear, maybe some very Latin-like words. I had a look at the Corse Wikipedia and I can safely say that I can read every single word of it. --151.51.145.104 (talk) 23:10, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Back to the original question: the answer probably has a lot to do with the fact that after the Roman Empire subsided, modern French evolved from the Vulgar (spoken) Latin dialects in Northern France - which were heavily influenced over the centuries by Gaulish (Celtic), Frankish (Germanic), and Norman (Scandinavian) speakers. So you are mistaken in thinking that "French doesn't have any major influences from other language groups" - it does, quite a lot. See French Language, History of French, and Old French for more details on these historical developments. Textorus (talk) 01:31, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

And Occitan in southern France is a lot like Spanish and Italian. (Or more like Catalan, really.) Adam Bishop (talk) 02:21, 30 August 2010 (UTC)