Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 December 19

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December 19

Kanji identification

Hi, what is the second kanji at http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/1610/kanji2.jpg?

所？時間４０分

86.177.105.200 (talk) 02:27, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

要? --Ghostexorcist (talk) 02:33, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes. The full thing says: 所要時間：４０分, which means 'Turnaround: 40 mins'. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 02:39, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, much obliged! 86.177.105.200 (talk) 03:48, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

english grammatical error

on the article about Elizabeth Empress of Austria known as Sissi, it refers to her 'excercise regime". that should be REGIMEN. Her husband's reign is a REGIME, a course of excericise, treatment or antibiotics is a REGIMEN. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Esawatsky (talk • contribs) 05:43, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Empress Elisabeth of Austria is where that issue is better raised. This page you have here is for seeking answers to questions from reference sources.

But for what it's worth, it's quite OK to talk about an exercise regime. Regimen means something a little different. A reign is only a regime if it's authoritarian. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:53, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, see the entry in Wiktionary, but I agree that it is unwise to use any of the nouns based on Latin rego in an article on an empress. Perhaps a different synonym would be more appropriate. Dbfirs 08:08, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

There's no problem with using "regimen",[1] except maybe that it would look like someone's attempt at a joke. Someone changed the incorrect "regime" to "routine", and that works. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:42, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I made the change for exactly that reason. "Exercise regime" is a commonly accepted idiom, whatever prescriptivists may say, but inappropriate here. Dbfirs 19:30, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I've never heard anyone call it that, and it sounds like a joke. Like "Welcome to our humble chapeau". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:12, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it's a transpacific thing, but it's a well-known expression over here down under. Here are 2.4 million hits for "exercise regime" that exclude the word "regimen". -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:06, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't know what dictionaries Esawatsky & BB use, but American Heritage Dictionary has: regime: "A regulated system, as of diet and exercise; a regimen", and even Websters gives regimen as a synonym. I agree with both critics that the term is best not used in the article, but this is a matter of style, because of the origin of the words, rather than some grammatical error. Dbfirs 08:51, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

"Even Websters"? What's that supposed to mean? And which Websters? Anybody can slap the name Websters on their dictionary, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with Noah (or even Daniel) Webster. Pais (talk) 09:18, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Fair comment. I meant Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 11th Edition which, besides the "regimen" synonym also has as an example "He was put on a strict exercise regime", and Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed. (2010) which has "regimen" as a synonym of "regime". I don't know whether Noah would have approved! Dbfirs 12:38, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

As noted in EO,[2] "regime" has to do with government. Using it as a synonym for "regimen" strikes me as one of those odd colloquialisms that doesn't stand up to close examination. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:05, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

... but exactly the same criticism would apply to "regimen" except that this word has been "misused" for longer! Dbfirs 22:50, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Apparently, it's one of those degenerations of the language that is probably too far advanced and too deeply embedded in modern-day usage to resist anymore, except by refusing to use it oneself. --Orange Mike | Talk 16:08, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, kids today refuse to distinguish accusative and dative case in pronouns, or either of them from the nominative in nouns. And they ignore grammatical gender and just lazily use "it" to refer back to any noun that signifies an inanimate object. And they don't inflect verbs for any person other than 3rd singular present anymore. The English language is going to hell in a handbasket! Angr (talk) 16:40, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I could care less [sic] about the close examination up to which certain commonly used expressions don't stand.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 18:38, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

seems that both come from Latin and French for "rule". Is that so ? Manytexts (talk) 06:02, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, regime, regimen and regiment are all ultimately from Latin rego (I rule) but the last two are via Latin regimen (rule, guidance, government) whereas the first comes via French in the late eighteenth century. Dbfirs 17:51, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah. I've heard British people refer to a diet regime when they mean regimen. French (1), Brits (nil). Manytexts (talk) 07:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

No, we don't mean regimen, that's the translation into American. British English has changed since you borrowed it! See the entry in the French Wiktionary. Dbfirs 10:27, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Manytexts, what you wrote is like saying "I've heard Americans say <erb> when they meant <herb>". What sounds wrong to your ears is not necessarily because the speaker made any sort of mistake, but it could be because they have a different idiolect and they use different words, different meanings, and different pronunciations. Ask a thousand random Australians what "exercise regime" means, and you'll get 1000 good answers, but ask 1000 random Aussies about "exercise regimen" and you'll get about 950 quizzical looks or blank stares. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:44, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Written languages

I have been trying to find a Wikipedia article that addresses the question of how many written languages there are in the world today. Several articles attempt an answer as to how many are spoken. If it's not somewhere already, it would be a good thing to add, I think. SeoMac (talk) 05:55, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I suppose you could start with List of languages by first written accounts and cross off the ones that aren't used anymore. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:26, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I imagine such a list would be as difficult to compile as the list of spoken languages. For one thing in cases of diglossia the basilectal variety won't be written down very much, yet most basilects do have written forms for the rare occasions when someone wants to write them. For example, Swiss German, Walloon and Jamaican Creole English are very rarely written in comparison to standard German, French and English respectively, but they are written occasionally. And the same questions about when two closely related languages count as separate languages and when they count as dialects of the same language will arise with written languages as with spoken languages. Are written American English and written British English two languages or one language in two dialects? What about Bokmal Norwegian and Nynorsk - or Bokmal Norwegian and Danish for that matter? What about simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese? And what about small "tribal" languages in remote forest areas of Africa, South America and New Guinea where 99% of the speakers are illiterate but missionaries and/or anthropological linguists have recently created a practical orthography? I really doubt your question is easily answerable. Angr (talk) 08:12, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Agree. On the other hand, it's possible that writing only originated once, or maybe twice, and the idea spread from there. So there might be a small number of languages that where "the original written languages". However, as far as I know, we don't have a very good understanding of the early development and spread of writing. Apparently, all alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to Phoenician. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:26, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

It may be slightly pedantic, but actually they can be traced back to a proximate ancestor of Phoenician (South Arabian alphabets do not come directly from Phoenician). AnonMoos (talk) 09:13, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

And that proximate ancestor was quite likely influenced by Sumerian writing. A descendant of cuneiform Sumerian writing was in use for centuries in the area where proto-Sinaitic later emerged. Overall, there were indeed only a few "original written languages", which were invented completely independently from each other - Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, either Mayan or Olmec, possibly Indus script, and possibly Rongorongo.--Itinerant1 (talk) 10:33, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Actually, the first alphabet was almost certainly developed out of Egyptian hieroglyphs (with the application of the acrophonic principle), not "Sumerian". In any case, the script used to write the Sumerian language is usually called cuneiform, and at the time the alphabet was likely invented, West Semitic speakers in the Levant were much more likely to come in contact with Akkadian-language speakers than Sumerian-language speakers. Of course, the Ugaritic alphabet is a famous recasting of the hieroglyphic-derived early alphabet to be used with cuneiform writing technology (pressing a stylus into mud tablets) rather than hieroglyphic writing technology (scratching symbols into stone, or writing them with ink onto papyrus). AnonMoos (talk) 15:54, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

As an interesting side-note, Jamaican Creole has just had its own version of the Bible published - apparently to the dismay of some congregations who don't think the language is sufficiently prestigious. [3] -- Arwel Parry (talk) 12:35, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

In any case, the SIL Ethnologue keeps some info on the written status of various languages (though maybe not stored in a way that would enable any quick tabulation). AnonMoos (talk) 09:17, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Here 2696 languages have bible translations and 2000 more have none. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 13:30, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks for the interesting comments. What Angr says about dialects and rarely written languages had broadly occurred to me but not so clearly. Pp.paul.4 gets some sort of prize: It always comes back to SIL because of their catalogue of languages and translation program--no stone left unturned, so to speak. I could have gone there myself but wanted to see if the question was addressed at Wikipedia with updated info and maybe a wider net. Back around 2000, I was on the Endangered Languages List (ELL) when a Norwegian linguist took on this same question. He used the SIL lists, which at the time listed somewhat over 2,000 languages as having Bible translations--about 700 (if I remember correctly) had complete Bibles, the rest just the New Testament, or (if their resources were limited) just one book of the NT (one of which is considered indispensable.) So I did already have a ballpark figure in my head. Thanks again. SeoMac (talk) 17:28, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Non-standard use of IPA symbols

Hello, Is it legally or morally permissible to use an IPA symbol to represent a sound other than the one assigned to it. For example. I want to use ọ (o with a dot below it) to represent the oi diphthong in a conlang? Prsaucer1958 (talk) 13:26, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Though the IPA is copyright I would say that the o with a dot under it is a simple geometric shape and therefore allowable to use. On the other hand you will be making your conlang very hard to type and confusing! -- Q Chris (talk) 13:33, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with it. Letters like <t> and <e> are part of the IPA, too, and you wouldn't get punished for using them in something you make up, either. rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:04, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The dot below a vowel is used in Vietnamese to represent a low falling constricting tone (see Vietnamese_language#Tones) so the IPA can't have a monopoly on its use. --Colapeninsula (talk) 14:14, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

In some traditional usages, o with a dot under it denotes a lowered rounded vowel, as in the orthography of the Yoruba language. In writing some colloquial Arab dialects, it can be used to transcribe an o vowel which has had "emphasis" (velar or pharyngeal quality) spread to it... AnonMoos (talk) 15:44, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

In an older version of the IPA (before 1989 I think or maybe 1976) o with a dot under it denoted a raised [o], the sound that nowadays is represented [o̝]. Angr (talk) 17:50, 21 December 2011 (UTC)