Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 December 9

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December 9

Chinese search help needed

Could someone please look for Chinese-language sources on the Four Happiness Boys? If it's what it's cracked up to be, it should have a lot more sources in Chinese than in English, and further sources are definitely needed. Nyttend (talk) 02:24, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

It's called 四喜娃娃 in Chinese, and "four happiness boys" is a terrible translation. 娃娃 means "small child", but can either be male or female, and is in fact usually female. 喜 does loosely mean "happiness", but more accurately means joy or good fortune in this context. Even the "four" is translated ambiguously--there are in fact two children, and the 四 unambiguously refers to the number of joys, not the number of children.

Anyhow, the Chinese Wikipedia has an article on this: [1]. So does Baidu: [2]. I also managed to find an English source here. If you search the Chinese name using Google images, you'll find a lot of examples. Here is one of them. Notice how it depicts two girls, not four boys. --Bowlhover (talk) 01:46, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Learning another improves one’s own usage?

I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that learning another language improves the learner’s usage or comprehension of her or his own language. Is this true? --66.190.69.246 (talk) 12:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

It could work out that way, if it makes the learner more conscious of matters of grammar and usage. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:33, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

It can also help when looking for translations of words from the new language you encounter new words in your native language. Richard Avery (talk) 16:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes. That would be part of "comprehension", if you include "expanded vocabulary" under that topic. It's interesting to study a Romance language and see how many words you "know already but didn't know it." An example is the Spanish word for thoughtful, pensativo. The lesser-used English synonym for thoughtful is "pensive". Not a term the average Joe uses very often, but it might help comprehension. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:16, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

You have to be careful in using apparent cognates, of course. I'm reminded of Spanish-speakers I've known who say "traduce" instead of "translate" because the Spanish verb is traducir. However, the obscure English cognate "traduce" doesn't really mean "translate", it's more like "defame". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:49, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Spanish traducir and English traduce are false friends.

—Wavelength (talk) 20:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Etymology Online says "traduce" comes from the Latin traducere.[3] If you look traducir on the Real Academia site, it says traducir likewise comes from the Latin traducere.[4] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

See Impact of Second Language Learning on First Language and Why learn a foreign language? Benefits of bilingualism by Anne Merritt. Alansplodge (talk) 18:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• Yes, it's definitely the case. Especially in the case of English as a mother tongue if you study a somewhat closely related Indo-European language, and not just in vocabulary. Although I could use the English verb tenses, the terms used to describe them, like "perfect" never made any sense to me until I studied French formally in high school. That first year of French was full of moments where things in grammar suddenly "clicked" for me, and I became a much better writer in English, with a better command over my choices. It's like going from knowing how to drive sitting in the seat to understanding how the gears and the steering mechanism and tires and so forth actually work, and applying that knowledge to what you know about the gear shift stick and the steering wheel.

You can't really form proper cnceptual abstractions unless you have at least two examples of the item you are trying to understand. Rules of grammar are pretty much meaningless words you memorize so long as you only know one language. Learning two or more languages gives you examples you can compare, analogize, and analyze abstractly. You'll also find studying logic and learning a computer language will also help, although a little less directly than will learning a natural language. In addition to the above links, I'd look at implicit learning (versus explicit learning, at second-language acquisition and at concept formation. μηδείς (talk) 18:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Medeis that it strengthens your command of English grammar to learn a kindred Indo-European language such as Latin, French, or German. I would argue that Latin and German are especially powerful. Latin helps you understand the roots of many English words and also the synthetic structures and categories that form the historic basis of English, even though English is a more isolating language. German is even more targeted at those synthetic root structures and categories, since it shares a more recent common ancestor with English. It also has many cognates with English words that offer insights into the original meanings of English words. However, there is also great value in learning a language from an unrelated family with radically different grammar, such as Mandarin Chinese. Studying Chinese, in addition to the intrinsic pleasure and utility of any foreign language, has given me a broader linguistic perspective on English and all of the European languages and how their strategies for making meaning contrast with other kinds of strategies. Marco polo (talk) 19:22, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I think that you could make the argument that the further away from English another language is, the more abstract the level of learning about language. Learning a romance or germanic language will help immensely with vocabulary and to an extent with grammar (especially a West Germanic or one of the Western Romance languages). Greek and Latin will give you the roots of the vocabulary, and a mastery of grammar. Russian, Hindi, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic and Hungarian will give you a grounding in comparative grammar and an implicit understanding of comparative linguistics. Learning a truly distant language, like Chinese, will give you a grounding in the structure of thought itself. μηδείς (talk) 19:51, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Another article that might interest you is multi-competence. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Personal observation: Yes, as others have noted, it helps quite a bit with understand the structure of your own language, and also with understanding the origins of your language's word-stock. However, there is a small however: It is a common experience, after full immersion in another language (at least, a reasonably closely related one), to invent words in your own language that never existed, and not to be quite sure whether they're real words or not. It's a minor drawback, easily corrected, and I certainly wouldn't give it much weight — overall, your competence in your native language is likely to improve. --Trovatore (talk) 20:19, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Personally not sure that's a drawback. See linguistic interference. μηδείς (talk) 21:44, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

See "Polyglotism" and "Cross-training" and "Multi-instrumentalist".

—Wavelength (talk) 02:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for killjoying, but let me wedge myself into the discussion and break the unanimity. :) I think (and I encounter this opinion before), that to do something better you'd better to do it not other things. If you want to know your own language better, then learn it. Good grammar and reference books and active practice are quite good things. There was mentioned Latin, and I recalled this article: "Latin teaches you English." It may do so, but if you want to study English, study English, and you will come out ahead. For sheer vocabulary Latin confers a lot, on the other hand wide reading in English and use of the dictionary teaches you English fast enough. I'm quite agree.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 04:29, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I spoke perfect English before I ever formally studied another language, Ljuboslov. I actually had someone from the next town over ask me if I was English when I was in the 8th grade, presumably because of my speech. But none of my studying it for 8+ years had benefitted me. I remember being taught stress, and told to talk into my hand and feel the puffs. I remember being taught syllabification. I remember being taught the tenses. None of this made sense. "Computer" has only one stress, but three puffs. Once I was formally instructed on French it became possible to compare English and French, and understand the difference. Before that there was nothing to compare English to. I've also formally studied Russian, which has mad clear to me various aspects of verbal aspect and palatalization. Before that such terms were vague approximations and meaningless memorizations. Telling someone who hasn't learned another language to study' English is no different from telling them to memorize a list of labels they don't understand. μηδείς (talk) 05:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

While studying three (if not to count basic Latin) foreign languages my written Russian hadn't changed and was as bad as usual (though better than average). I was formally neither Slavist nor Russist but once I became very interested in Slavistics and Russistics and decided to study them by myself thoroughly and only then with a little written practice my Russian became much much better. And foreign languages didn't help at all. At least if they helped but I did not notice it, now I cannot formulate what their help was. Maybe I became more grammatically conscious but while Russian grammar is quite different, my consciousness is from read by me Russian grammar books not English, German or French ones. But I agree everyone has his own experiment.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 09:53, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Film Footage

I'd like some help explaining the usage of "footage". I know film is measured in feet. You can have one foot of film or two feet of film. Additionally, one may have one foot of footage or two feet of footage. But you can't have two feet of "footages". And you can't have two separate individual (foots?) feet of footages. So is "footage" always used as a plural? Or do the singular and plural have the same word? What other types of words are like this and do they have a name? --209.203.125.162 (talk) 20:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

See mass noun. --Trovatore (talk) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

You can say the films have different footages if you have to. μηδείς (talk) 21:45, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

You can't have two feet of anything plural. Film is also a mass noun (two feet of film) but can be countable (two films). This seems to make footage a superfluous word, see jargon, and for film footage, see pleonasm.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:21, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

The term "footage" is typically used for a segment of a film, such as a particular scene, and was first used that way in 1916.[5] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:37, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that's from the OED cite: "‘B. M. Bower’ Phantom Herd ii. 22 He visualized a stampede and the probable amount of footage it would require." Dbfirs 21:19, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps because "amount of film" might be misunderstood as a measurement taken sideways? "For a large stampede, we'd need to switch to 65mm!"  Card Zero  (talk) 01:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)