Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 November 5

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November 5

Danish tre

Gute nacht all (sorry I don't speak Danish so you'll have to deal with German, close enough ;) I was recently searching idly Danish numbers and tre particularly caught my eye because I thought the /tˢ/ was interesting so I decided to find an audio and have a listen, and I found one here at forvo (scroll down to Danish). However I noticed the vowel is not at all [a] but rather [e] or perhaps [eɪ̯]. I searched for a different pronunciation to compare and I come up with [1] (click on 3) which is the same. Is this a regionalism, or an error in the article? In such a small country as Danmark it is hard to believe there would be that drastic of regional variation. thank you. 24.92.85.35 (talk) 03:21, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't know the answer to your question, but Danish definitely has dialects. Pais (talk) 13:32, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't know Danish either, but the article on standard Danish (not available in English) dk:Rigsdansk says "De fleste vokaler er blevet åbnet betydeligt efter og foran r; modsætningen mellem e/æ og a er blevet ophævet i lukket stavelse foran dentaler og labialer, f.eks. ret = rat, kræft = kraft." (translate as: "... most vowels are opened significantly after and before r; contrasts between e/æ and a disappear in closed syllable before dental and labial, eg. ret = rat, kræft = kraft").--Pp.paul.4 (talk) 15:12, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

My German isn't great, but isn't gute Nacht something you say when parting at the end of the evening, rather than something that starts a conversation? --Trovatore (talk) 08:22, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

You are right, Trovatore, gute Nacht ends a conversation, however, I liked the unusual initial hellos (a little bit of theatre of the absurd). And the idea that Danish might be close to German was also interesting. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 09:55, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the standard Danish pronunciation of tre is something like [tˢʁɛɪ̯ˀ], as heard on the two links you provided, and the pronunciations recorded at speakdanish.dk seem like the standard ones. The [ˀ] is the Danish stød. The vowel in tre has maybe the same quality as in tredje [ˈtˢʁɛð̪jə] (3rd) or tres [tˢʁɛs] (60), lower than in fjerde (4th), but higher than in halvfjerds (70) and definitely higher than in tretten (13) and tredive (30; click on these numbers to hear the recordings). Danish pronunciation is quite an intricate and tough thing to study. Many of the common words are pronounced very much unlike how they're spelt, and even without an 'r' nearby short vowels often undergo a process termed as vokalsænkning (vowel lowering), i.e. they get more open qualities than their default ones. --Theurgist (talk) 02:23, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Black fog

From the Guardian: "A black fog came down and the Iceland truck literally disappeared." Is black fog a UK figure of speech, or a meteorological phenomenon in Somerset? Textorus (talk) 14:53, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

It's just a general term to mean any dense, impenetrable fog. Some online dictionaries also note it is used in some parts of the USA. Nanonic (talk) 15:03, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

It's not special UK vocabulary: it just means a fog which is black, i.e. thick black smoke. Tinfoilcat (talk) 18:55, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Except, fogs contain water vapour, not smoke, so "black smoke" can't be an explanation for the phenomenon. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:03, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, technically fog consists of tiny droplets of water, not water vapor. Of course there's water vapor there too, but that's not fog; that's invisible.

A thick enough fog might blot out the sun, but other than that, I agree, it's not "black" (i.e. it will show white in your headlights). --Trovatore (talk) 20:10, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Wow, what a silly debate. The fog doesn't have to actually be black for the figure of speech to make sense. Fogs are not also made of pea soup, but that doesn't render THAT figure of speech meaningless. --Jayron32 20:33, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

It's not silly, if somebody has never heard the expression before, they don't know. If I didn't know better, I could argue that it's ridiculous to think that sand could be black, because where I live, that doesn't exist. Is "black fog", fog which is black, in the literal sense, something that is not fog at all (as "black gold" is not actually gold), or something else entirely? Well, now we know that it is impenetrable fog, or maybe to some people, very thick smoke. That's the thing about expressions, if you take them literally, well, you'll smell of pickle juice after you manage to somehow get out of the pickle. Falconus^{p t c} 11:00, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Edit: I'm not trying to say that anybody smells or would smell bad, I just chose "smell like pickle juice" because it was the first thing that came to mind.

Also, if I am not mistaken, London was previously notorious for dark fog, which was in fact industrial smoke, was it not? Falconus^{p t c} 11:05, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Or a combination maybe. smog = smoke + fog, I believe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog 86.179.4.128 (talk) 12:44, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Right, that's what I was going to say. Note, however, that smoke from coal fires in homes was also a major contributor. StuRat (talk) 12:58, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

But London smog wasn't black or even dark, it was famously a yellow-green-grey hence the peasouper nickname; but as Jayron says, it didn't contain either peas or soup. I'm just about old enough to rememberr the last ones. (This page says 1962). Alansplodge (talk) 09:45, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

That's interesting. When we have peasoupers down here, we call them that because we liken their impenetrable opaqueness to that of pea soup. It's not a reference to their colour, which is grey-white. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 10:03, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes - due to the sulpher from coal I imagine. Not a thing you could recreate - unless you persuaded several million people each to light a coal fire, add in several hundred steam trains and some unfiltered coal-fired power stations and put the whole lot in a large geographical basin landscape during a temperature inversion in winter. That should do it. Alansplodge (talk) 18:18, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

From context, the crash victim here was probably speaking literally and intending to highlight the unusual black nature of the "fog" that covered the motorway at that point. There is some speculation that the "fog" was in fact smoke from a nearby Bonfire Night event. In the latest BBC report the police are describing it as "a bank of smoke", rather than fog. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:40, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Middle Chinese Swadesh List

Is there a Swadesh list for Middle Chinese available?Van Gulik (talk) 17:05, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

There is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Old_Chinese_Swadesh_list.

—Wavelength (talk) 23:56, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

You could presumably convert that to some form of Middle Chinese by consulting Edwin G. Pulleyblank's A Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin, though I'm not too sure what purpose a Middle Chinese list would be better for than an Old Chinese list... AnonMoos (talk) 12:30, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Help emailing French museum in Tahiti

Can somebody help me email Musée de Tahiti et des îles? I need to ask them for the rest of the identities of the people portrayed in this image in their collections La famille royale de Tahiti.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 23:34, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

The email address is highlighted in white at the bottom of their home page that you just posted the link to. Textorus (talk) 00:27, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I think he meant translating into French. I doubt that that would be necessary, though. It's a museum, and they will certainly have someone on staff who can respond to requests in English. (If you look at their mainpage, their newsletter is available in both French and English). Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 00:34, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Have you tried contacting the blogger who took the photo? [2] rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:10, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

They are both French so how?--KAVEBEAR (talk) 21:24, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Just ask him in English. If he doesn't speak English, you're not inconvenienced all that much by asking. If he does happen to speak English, you win! There's no downside to trying. --Jayron32 01:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Most French people did go to a school where English is taught. French people are generally more conformtable reading and writing Englih rather than speaking it, so even though you may think it to be "only a shot", I think you'll be surprised to get some sort of answer, and if you are quite polite, maybe even a useful answer. --Lgriot (talk) 10:27, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Also, don't ask Parlez vous Anglais?, but rather Do you speak English? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:08, 8 November 2011 (UTC)