Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 October 20

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October 20

Extended vowels in Chinese

Whenever I overhear different people speaking what I think is Chinese, they often make an "Ahhhh!" or "Ohhhh!" sound that lasts much longer than I would expect a word to last. In English, those sounds would signify surprise, worry, or a sudden realization. Do those sounds have specific meanings as words in Chinese, or are most of the Chinese people that I'm overhearing very often surprised by what each other are saying? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.115.199.34 (talk) 02:55, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think you may be hearing one or more of the sentence-final particles, which can be drawn out like that.--Cam (talk) 05:00, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think Cam is probably right. In addition, Chinese vowels (at least Mandarin) in open syllables tend to be phonetically long, particularly in certain tones; this may cause vowels to sound longer than what you're used to in English. rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:04, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for answering so quickly. I have a related question. I know that changing the tone of voice can change the word spoken in Chinese, so does that make it impossible to say something sarcastically, flirtasiously, sadly, or happily? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.7.158.34 (talk) 05:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

No. rʨanaɢ (talk) 06:07, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

For more information on how tone languages work, you can check out Tone (linguistics). rʨanaɢ (talk) 06:09, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I am just learning Mandarin Chinese, so I cannot offer an expert response, but the questioner may have been hearing syllables such as 啊 (a) or 哦 (o), whose tone may vary depending on emotional content. These interjections occur fairly often during Mandarin conversation, usually between sentences. Also, regarding the last question, I have observed, when listening to recordings of native speakers, that there is some degree of nuance in Mandarin tone contours, and that those nuances often have some emotional content. So, by altering the tones of certain words slightly, but not enough to give an entirely different tone to the word, a speaker can indicate an intention of sarcasm, flirtation, and so on. Marco polo (talk) 14:06, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Marco Polo seems to be saying that exaggerated tones can indicate sarcasm. Is that the fact? Is there no morpheme which indicates sarcasm? Does any language have a morpheme which indicates sarcasm and only sarcasm? μηδείς (talk) 21:20, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Is there an English <-> Sign Language translator anywhere?

Google Translate doesn't have an option to translate to Sign Language for some reason, even though it undoubtedly has employees who know it.

Why can't there be an animated video of an avatar giving off sign languages of the words you type and submit? (As well as a speed adjustment bar?) Is there any website that does anything like this?

(Of course there are sign language "dictionaries" but they will only process one word at a time, not whole sentences like Google Translate can with numerous languages.) --70.179.174.63 (talk) 04:53, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

What you are asking for would require either an advanced computer or a human being I would think. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | ^{Say Shalom!} 22 Tishrei 5772 05:07, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think automated translation from English to ASL is definitely possible, and not much more complicated than other translations, (though generating videos on the fly will have a heavy computational cost), but there is simply NO demand on google. Everyone who uses google can read, so why would they need the text to be signed? They already understand it if they have written in into the translate text box. Also note that there are many sign languages in the world, not only ASL, so the cost of creating a translator is not just a one-off. --Lgriot (talk) 08:06, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Agree with your last point. As I understand it, American Sign Language, British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language have seperate origins and are not mutuallly intelligible, although they share a few common signs. Alansplodge (talk) 10:18, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I did Japanese Sign Language, and that is also completely different. Also, I was talking to a friend who does British Sign Language, and she said that even within that, there are regional dialects, as one of her teachers went to London for some convention and she came back saying she had a hard time understanding a lot of the people there. Furthermore, Google Translate is going defunct in about 6 weeks' time. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:05, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The service isn't going defunct; the announcement was that the API, the automated interface for bulk queries, would be shut down. (In the event, it seems that the API will remain in existence, but on a commercial rather than a free basis). Google Translate, the general-use web service, doesn't seem to be going away; note that the service has actually been extended, with additional languages, since the API shutdown announcement. Shimgray | talk | 12:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. This ties in with what I said below about there being a paid version, and makes more sense to me now. Thanks. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:35, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there _is_ demand for it. But not enough to make it profitable enough for Google to invest in it (they support 63 out of about 7000 languages that exist [they are the 1%]). But if anybody got some spare million dollars it should be easy to change that. --::Slomox:: >< 09:04, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Our article seems to only discuss the cancellation of the API. Will this also affect the individual use of the web page? —Akrabbim^talk 12:25, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure. I'm getting my information second-hand. Some translation agencies are advising their translators to switch to Bing Translator if they need to use MT, though one developer of a software I use for translation memory has just added a Google API plugin for a paid version of Google Translate. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

There is software which can come close: Next Wave Solutions' iCommunicator[1][2] can convert speech or text to video ASL. It's rather expensive, though, and it seems to do word-by-word translation rather than producing true ASL. Computer-generated fingerspelling has been implemented.[3] This page discusses an upcoming seminar on computer-generated sign-language animation, which discusses some of the problems. --Colapeninsula (talk) 15:33, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The answer to "Why can't there be...?" is always "Who's paying?" μηδείς (talk) 16:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Right and it would be much more expensive than generating an automatic translation system for other languages. Google translate gets its knowledge from bilingual texts and there are plenty of them available for any written language. ASL, or any other sign language, is not a mainly written language, with lots of translations which could be parsed by a computer. Oct21 (talk) 01:40, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

The fact that Google has employees who know ASL is not hugely relevant: Google Translate is based on statistical translation methods, which need a large corpus of bilingual training data (at first they relied chiefly on UN documents which are available in many languages, I believe). I doubt there is any large corpus of text in both English and ASL. Furthermore, the ASL would have to be in some machine-understandable format -- it would probably take man-decades to convert enough videos into some usable notation, or otherwise Google would have to develop computer vision software to do this, which would be completely different to how the other translations are done, and is probably quite hard (and less well-studied that statistical machine translation, which AFAIK has benefited from substantial funding by the US Department of Defense). --146.141.1.91 (talk) 09:24, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Does Wilmer = Vladimir ?

What is the origin of the given name Wilmer? Is it a variant of Vladimir? If not, where does it come from? Thanks. Hurriquake (talk) 19:42, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Wilmer is an old Germanic name. The "Wil" means "will" (as in strong will, good will), and the "mer" means "famous". Vladimir is an old Slavic name. The "Vlad" means "to rule", and the "mir" means "peace, order". No relation between them. BTW, I had an older neighbor from Poland who had the name "Włodzimierz" (the Polish spelling of "Vladimir"). He went by the name "Wilmer" after he moved to the States. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 19:57, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Do you have a source? Because my understanding is that Waldemar is cognate to Vladimir. See vladimir (name). My only real question was whther wilmer was the same as waldemar, and if so what specific germanic language was its source. Hurriquake (talk) 20:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The Wiktionary articles on Waldemar and Vladimir, which are more detailed, disagree with you, Vobis, and agree with Hurri. --Orange Mike | Talk 20:42, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Try this source: [[4]]. The "mer" of "Wilmer" is the same as the "mar" in "Waldemar". The first parts of the names come from completely different stems, though. Neither has anything whatsoever to do with "Vladimir". The resemblance is coincidental. It MAY be possible that, deep down Germanic "Wald" may be cognate with Slavic "Vlad", but even so, the names were coined independently of each other. Germans may use the name "Waldemar" as a "translation" of "Vladimir", but it's not a true translation. They just sound sorta similar.

As for what specific Germanic language is meant, these names go way back to the time when "specific Germanic language" didn't mean very much, to before or just after the Germanic tribes split apart. The same goes for Slavic. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 21:00, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

In Polish there is both Włodzimierz (Vladimir, diminutive form Władek) and Waldemar (diminutive form, Waldek) (for example Waldemar Łysiak). In general, I don't think even Germans generally translate Włodzimierz as Waldemar except in some idiosyncratic personal cases. Pretty sure DV is right.  Volunteer Marek  21:16, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Mallory and Adams has Vlad as cogneate with English wield and Latin valeo. That doesn't necessarily mean Wil- in Wilmer comes from will rather than wield. μηδείς (talk) 21:19, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Just as an aside, it should be noted that names which look related aren't necessarily. Theodore and Theodoric look like they should be connected; they are not. So there isn't anything particularly compelling about Waldemar and Vladimir being unrelated. --Jayron32 01:42, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

According to our article, the Welsh name and name of the dynasty derives from Theodore. And according to our other article, it derives from Theodoric. Itsmejudith (talk) 18:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Domine, the website you linked to also says that "Waldemar is a Dutch, German, and Scandinavian form of the Czech, English, and Hungarian name Vladimír." [5] So either you are wrong or the source is not reliable (and I wouldn't be surprised, if the latter were true). — Kpalion^(talk) 07:08, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Here is a much better source, however its focus is on proving that Slavic Vladimir did not originate from Germanic Waldemar. However, it does conclude that "Based on our discussion so far, we could regard the matter as settled, with Scandinavian Valdemar stemming from Slavic Vladimir. (32)" No such user (talk) 15:59, 21 October 2011 (UTC)