Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 November 10

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November 10

radar

what word discribes a word that can be speled backward and forward with the same result? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.27.165.15 (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Palindrome. Algebraist 00:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

A palidrome may also be a whole phrase - 'rats live on no evil star' - and complete sentences like the one attributed to Napoleon, "Able was I ere I saw Elba". Gurumaister (talk) 13:34, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

The Napoleon bit is a joke, right? Rimush (talk) 20:40, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, especially since in French, it isn't a palindrome. --Jayron32 20:54, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Bilingualism in the world

What percentage of the world's population have proficiency in at least one language the equal of or better than someone who has studied that language at one year in a rigorous university class? Two years? Able to converse? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.92.78.167 (talk) 01:05, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

It would be tough to say. I would say that most of the world is able to converse in multiple languages, pursuant to how you would define "language" and "proficiency". In countries with a highly educated population, formal second language study is a common requirement for most education programs. In places that have lots of little areas where different languages are spoken, most people know their home language and a lingua franca to converse with others in nearby villages that speak something different. I would actually speculate that the latter group is more likely to be proficient in multiple languages than the former, if only because in places like America and Japan, one doesn't get as much cause to use one's second language as in places like Indonesia, where there are literally hundreds of different native languages, and people need to know the lingua franca on top of their own language. --Jayron32 16:38, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Our article Multilingualism is peppered with "citation needed" and other tags, but may have useful information for the OP anyway. —Angr (talk) 17:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Jayron. It's going to be hard to find a specific number (or you might find lots of specific numbers, depending on people measure this, and it will be hard to find any two that agree), but there is a wide consensus that most of the world is multilingual. Books or websites about sociolinguistics, language contact, bilingualism, etc., can probably attest to this if you want more information. rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Monolingual countries are actually a small minority of the total. Roger (talk) 18:19, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

What is a monolingual country? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:43, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

A country where only one language is spoken. There aren't many. Roger (talk) 19:32, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

That not much of an enlightenment. Strictly interpreted, I suspect you can strike the "m" in "many". Certainly every country I'm in is not monolingual in that sense. More relevant is if more than one language has some kind of official status, or if significant parts of the population have different native languages. Italy has at least Italian and German. Germany has German, but has 4 recognized minority languages. Spain has Spanish/Castilian, but also a number of recognized minority languages. I'd suspect that Iceland is monolingual in a legal sense (although a large part of the population will be at least bilingual with English). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:14, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

That depends on your definition of "bilingual", as does this entire thread, I guess. Laypeople often use "bilingual" to mean "able to speak two languages with a fair degree of fluency", while linguists use it to mean "having native speaker competence in two languages". There are bound to be some people in Iceland who are bilingual_linguists in Icelandic and English, but certainly not a large part of the population. —Angr (talk) 15:42, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I disagree that most people can speak a second language at the level that would be attained after a year of rigorous university study. Very few of the 900 million native speakers of Mandarin Chinese speak anything else. Relatively few of the 400 million or so native speakers of English have much proficiency in a second language. Likewise native speakers of Khariboli Hindi, Bengali, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Farsi, and the majority languages of mainland Southeast Asian countries. Probably a majority of native speakers of many other European and South Asian languages, such as French, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Telugu, Sinhala, and Tamil, have no second-language abilities or only the most rudimentary second-language abilities, allowing them to get by minimally as tourists or with visiting outsiders. Adding these people up, you get a total of more than half of the world's population. Marco polo (talk) 20:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Comparing to time in a "rigorous university class" is a rather bad measurement. In most of the parts of the world where the majority is bilingual, the second language is learned with less intensity over a longer time, and in a far less formal setting. Second languages are most obtained through e.g. society outside a family with a different language than the majority, from a lingua franca of the community absorbed e.g. through media, or through classes in primary or secondary school. Learning a language at university level is the unusual thing, and it is usually those who have learned languages that way that are compared to those who have absorbed it more naturally, rather than the other way around. I'm not saying that it isn't possible to compare to university students, just that it isn't a very good measure. /Coffeeshivers (talk) 22:06, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Regardless, my point stands based on the argument above that a majority of the world's population is almost certainly unable to communicate, beyond a few token words and phrases, in any language other than their native language. It doesn't matter that these people live in countries where other languages are spoken, since they speak the majority language in their country or (in the case of India) in a large region beyond which few but the elite ever travel. Marco polo (talk) 23:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

@Marco Polo: where do you get those factoids? Actually very many Mandarin speakers in the PRC are multilingual (or at least multidialectal) in Standard Mandarin and the local language wherever they are. Likewise, many people in Spain are also at least somewhat proficient in Catalan or Galician (if they live in those areas). Most French people study one or two other languages in secondary school.rʨanaɢ (talk) 11 November 2010

When the majority language/lingua franca is actually your native language, there is little incentive to learn the language(s) of local minorities. And the majority language is, tautologically, the native language of most people in given country.
Now, I know little about the situation in China: I thought that Mandarin or a related dialect thereof is the native language of most population; judging on your post, that is not the case? No such user (talk) 07:42, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if it's an absolute majority in China as a whole, but certainly the majority of people southeast of a line running approximately from Suzhou to the northern tip of the border with Vietnam are native speakers of a non-Mandarin Chinese language; not to mention the native speakers of non-Chinese languages like Zhuang, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and dozens if not hundreds of smaller ones. If nonnative speakers of Mandarin aren't the absolute majority in China, they're at least a very sizable minority. —Angr (talk) 07:58, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

(Add to that that, in the PRC, anyone who's been through their 9 years of compulsory education, which is the majority of the country, has taken several years of English classes. The effectiveness of these classes varies, of course, but the point is that the majority of educated Chinese people nowadays also speak English to some extent or another. rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:31, 11 November 2010 (UTC))

What was actually the question??? If you take the OP's question literally, the answer is the percentage to the world's population of the group comprising 1. all native speakers + 2. all non-native speakers that achieved or surpassed first-year university standard. So clearly for Chinese it would be larger than for Finnish. So what? The question is so sloppily formulated we'd better ask the OP to re-formulate it before any attempts to answer. 93.172.59.179 (talk) 07:59, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

And, by the way, if we understand the question literally, that is considering all the languages together, the answer is 100% LOL 93.172.59.179 (talk) 08:03, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation for Norman surname

Could somebody please tell me how the 12th-century Normans in England would have pronounced the surname de Neufmarché? As I wish to add it to an article, I shall need reliable sources to back up the pronunciation. Thank you.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 18:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure that in those days the name was spelt "Neufmarché" ? In 1291, the French village of Neuf-Marché in Normandy was spelt "Noef Marchié". See here [1] — AldoSyrt (talk) 21:42, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I know that the spelling ch was pronounced [tʃ] (that is, like modern English ch) rather than [ʃ] as in modern French. If you want a reliable source, you might try tracking this source down in your local research library. Marco polo (talk) 23:59, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

According to this source and others I've seen, at some point in the Middle Ages, the sound represented by the digraph eu mutated from the diphthong [eʊ] to the monophthongs [œ] or [ø]. This source suggests that the late medieval spelling oe was an attempt to render the new monophthong. I would suspect that Anglo Norman was conservative and preserved the diphthong. (This certainly happened for the sequence eau, pronounced [ju] in beauty.) This would suggest a pronunciation something like [dəneʊfmartʃe] or even [dɘnjʊfmartʃe]. I would guess that the second and fourth syllables were stressed, but that is just a guess. Good luck with those sources. Marco polo (talk) 02:54, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

We have a bunch of articles on Old Norman, Norman language, Anglo-Norman language, and probably others...it's hard to tell how they pronounced things, since it is usually extrapolated from modern English and French pronunciations. But it's possible that they still could have pronounced "ch" as "k", as in modern Picardy. Vowels tended to be pronounced as written, so "neuf" could be "neh-oof", but maybe it was already a new vowel like the modern pronuncation. When in the twelfth-century is this from? That might also make a difference. The book Marco polo suggested is good, and there are dozens of others (I don't think anyone knows how to pronounce Anglo-Norman, but it's a popular topic anyway). There is also a multi-volume Anglo-Norman dictionary, edited by William Rothwell, which probably has some info on pronunciation. There is also a long series of publications from the yearly "Battle Conference", so if you can find those, I'm sure they discuss language. Adam Bishop (talk) 03:04, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I do have to say, though, that I'm not sure in what context it would really improve the article to include the 12th-century pronunciation, unless it's an article about the phonology of 12th-century Norman French. --Trovatore (talk) 03:09, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

This is all very interesting as the name de Neufmarché was Novo Mercato in Latin and became Newmarket in English. There was also a medieval unit of currency known as a mark. It appears that marché was indeed prounouned as mark rather than as the modern French mar-SHAY. I wish to thank you all for your help and advice.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 08:13, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

English to Spanish translation request

Hi! Commons:Template:PD-CAGov needs a translation in Spanish. Lemme see if I can find an official state translation for the law quoted in this template. If I do not find one, assume that it needs to be translated by a Wikipedian. Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 22:28, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

COINTELPRO

I've always heard it pronounced as Coin-tel-pro. But today watched a clip of a figure within the intelligence community during that time (can't recall who) pronounce it as Co-intel-pro. Any insight? Grsz¹¹ 23:30, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I've never heard it pronounced Coin-tel-pro. I have always heard the diaresis in the first part, co-intel-pro, since the root is Counterintelligence program. I think your perceptions on how the word is commonly pronounced are mistaken. --Jayron32 02:47, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Develop a virus

Is it proper to state that "the victim’s computer developed a virus"?Smallman12q (talk) 23:38, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Not unless it has attained sentience and is out to get us. In which case, it needs to get in line behind Colossus, AM, HAL, Skynet ... It's better to say it contracted a virus. Clarityfiend (talk) 01:45, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Or ...was infected with (or by) a virus. HiLo48 (talk) 02:02, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Usually it's the virus writer who develops the virus. If the computer is doing software development all by itself, please direct me to someone who can teach me woodworking or some other useful skill. --Trovatore (talk) 03:11, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Just informal English-language idiom that's probably centuries old (before even biological viruses had been identified), as in "Having caught a nasty cold that was then neglected, Jane began to develop pneumonia" (Jane wasn't culturing Petri dishes in the kitchen in order to do so) or "Under the severe stress of solitary confinement, the prisoner had developed unmistakable symptoms of paranoia." ¶ On the other hand, since "development" in this context can also refer to software development, it's best to avoid this sort of ambiguous idiom when writing the Wikipedia article. Other actor/action confusions to avoid are the new (and I think awful) meaning of "reporting" to mean gathering the news rather than telling others about it; and the intransitive "presents" in the medical jargon "Patient presented with abrasions, contusions and elevated blood pressure." —— Shakescene (talk) 08:29, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

When we say a person "develops" a disease, this refers to the gradual transition from being well to being sick. That doesn't apply to a computer virus, so the usage is inappropriate for that reason as well. --Anonymous, 23:32 UTC, November 11, 2010.