Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 May 27

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May 27

interpretation question

What is this video on youtube actually about? It is in a foreign language. Thank you. --Badder Ińsk (talk) 09:00, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

It's a mixture of English and Afrikaans. Gauteng is a province in South Africa, and 'Gautengeleng' seems to be a funny variation on that. The lyrics basically say that it's good to live in 'Gautengeleng' even though crime is rampant. Can't find the full lyrics, but this summarizes it: ""Gautengeleng Gautengeleng, I wanna stay in Gautengeleng, Die crime is streng (crime is severe), but what the heng (what the heck) dis lekker om te lewe hie' in Gautengeleng! (it's good to live here in Gautengeleng)" - Lindert (talk) 09:18, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

"Not like it wasn’t the first time."

So was it the first time or not? 98.27.255.223 (talk) 10:47, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Some context would help, but logically the phrase means "Like it was the first time" because the double negative cancels out. However, double negatives are so common among uneducated people, that the meaning often becomes ambiguous.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:59, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

(e/c) I think someone's mixed up two expressions: (1) Not like it was the first time, and (2) It wasn't the first time. These both mean it wasn't the first time. But the one you gave us means it was the first time. I suspect it was meant to say the opposite of that, but without a context it's impossible to be sure. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 12:00, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

No. When your kid is late for school every day for a month, the latest incident could be described as "Not like it wasn't the first time". The literal meaning is the opposite, but the extra negative ("wasn't") is either hyperbolic or simply due to carelessness. Matt Deres (talk) 19:47, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

How can you possibly know that the intended meaning is opposite to the literal meaning? To me it's just a nonsensical sentence. HiLo48 (talk) 20:59, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

See here and here and here and here for a discussion of some dialects of English where the negative construct is understood idiomatically to be positive, all the time, and without further explanation. It does happen in some dialects of English where the understood meaning is the exact opposite of the literal meaning. --Jayron32 01:41, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

I admit that I find "not like it wasn't the first time" difficult to parse literally, even when imagining it within a fitting context. But what about "it's not like it wasn't obvious (yet he kept believing no one had noticed)", or "it's not like it wasn't allowed (but lighting a cigar in the doctor's waiting room still would have been frowned upon in the 1930s)"? Wouldn't these intuitively be understood literally? ---Sluzzelin talk 11:34, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Supposedly there is a phrase "wicked good". Is that similar? Bus stop (talk) 11:51, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Not really. Same dialect, unrelated idiom. In New England English, "wicked" is an exact synonym of "very"; that is a general adverbial (never adjective) intensifier. Wicked good, wicked awesome, wicked huge, wicked long time, etc. etc. --Jayron32 22:43, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps it is a feature of a New England dialect to contain jarring contradictions. Perhaps people speaking this dialect take a perverse pleasure in the shock value of certain uses of terms or ways of speaking. "Good" and "wicked" are almost opposites if one is not thinking of "good" meaning "very". Bus stop (talk) 11:00, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps, but "wicked" meaning "cool" or "very" isn't confined to just that area. Seems to me that it enjoyed wider popularity in the early 90s, maybe late 80s. "That band is wicked!" (i.e. "the band is very impressive", not "the band has sinned", though I suppose it would be easy enough for a good rock band to do both at once). I'm from SW Ontario and would understand "wicked good" the way intended. Matt Deres (talk) 11:26, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

In these cases I think the intended meaning is always clear—even to one unfamiliar with the particular usage. Nevertheless there could be a lingering thought in a listener's mind as to the oddity of a particular sentence construction or word choice. Bus stop (talk) 11:58, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

@HiLo - the very fact that's it's nonsensical read literally flags it so. Matt Deres (talk) 11:26, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Chinese versions of English names

I've been looking and comparing English names and their Chinese pinyin transliterations.

• Peter becomes Bǐ dé.
• Paul becomes Bǎo luó or Bǎo ěr.
• James becomes Zhān mǔ sī.
• Maria becomes Mǎ lì yà.

Can anybody tell me why the P changes into a B or the T changes into a D, even though there is actually the B sound and T sound in Mandarin? Even in native English speakers, the T sound may be silent, so the name Peter sounds like Peler. The same P-to-B transformation applies to Paul. Personally, I think Pó would sound closer to the original English name. Why does the J turn into a Z in James? And why does the R sound in Maria turn into a L sound, even though there is actually a R phoneme in Mandarin? Can anybody tell me who made up these transliterations? Are there pinyin transliterations of other foreign names (Spanish, German, Russian, etc.)? 69.174.58.108 (talk) 17:08, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

You should look at pinyin, especially pinyin#Rules given in terms of English pronunciation, b and d in pinyin are not the same as English: b is between English p and b, while d is between English t and d. Zh meanwhile is pretty good approximation for English j - the j in pinyin is quite different.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 17:35, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

The sound spelled in pinyin as 'b' is actually an unaspirated /p/. English does not have that sound at the beginning of a syllable. Likewise, pinyin 'd' is an unaspirated /t/. The distinction between 'p', 't', and 'k' on the one hand and 'b', 'd', and 'g' on the other, is not between unvoiced and voiced stops as in English, but between aspirated and unaspirated (unvoiced) stops. Mandarin does not have voiced stops as phonemes (though they sometimes occur as allophones). Maria is not transliterated into Mandarin using a character with the pinyin spelling ri because that syllable has a very different vowel from the /i/ in Maria. In pinyin, 'r' represents a retroflex approximant that, to my knowledge doesn't occur in any European languages. So a character with an initial 'r' in pinyin would be be a good transliteration for a European syllable with an intial 'r'. In Mandarin phonotactics, the retroflex approximant cannot be followed by a front vowel such as /i/. Marco polo (talk) 17:49, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

The fact that Mandarin doesn't have voiced stops tells me non-native English speakers, whose native language is Chinese, have a tendency to pronounce English words in chunks. Instead of lettuce, they may lai bu shi. Instead of thank you, they may san ke you. Instead of thank you very much, they may say san ge gou wei ma chi, which may then sound hilarious in Chinese, because it'd sound like "three dogs are fed to a horse". 69.174.58.108 (talk) 18:13, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

"English does not have that (b) sound at the beginning of a syllable" – Actually, for many English speakers, initial b, d, j, g are partially devoiced, so they are as (or maybe more) similar to Mandarin b, d, j, g than they are to Continental European b, d, j, g. — kwami (talk) 18:35, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

69.174.58.108 -- "Peter" may make more sense if you look at it in Wade-Giles (the most commonly used method of transcribing Chinese into English until at least the 1950s). Also, some of these equivalences of common Biblical names may have originally been established between Cantonese and Portuguese, or whatever (not between Mandarin and English)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:51, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

One reason I believe there is some fishy with Marco polo's analysis is that the pinyin transliteration Pūkè for Poker actually has a P sound. Also, the claim that the Zh will sound like a J seems to be how Americans would pronounce the Zh in names like "Zhang", even though native Mandarin Chinese speakers do pronounce the Z in Zhang like the Z in English. 69.174.58.108 (talk) 12:38, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

"Native Mandarin Chinese speakers do pronounce the Z in Zhang like the Z in English." – I don't think so. English z is usually [z]. As far as I know, Pinyin zh as pronounced in Modern Standard Mandarin is a retroflex affricate, and not (or only slightly?) aspirated. Examples: syllable 4 of 5, syllables 5 and 10 of 15. Pinyin zh is a digraph, so it doesn't make sense to say native speakers pronounce "the z in zh" some way; it's not z+h but zh. 82.83.68.77 (talk) 17:26, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Agree with 82... There may be a variation in Mandarin-speakers from Shanghai who tend to ignore the h in the Pinyin double consonants. However, even then the Pinyin z does not have the same pronounciation as the z in English. -- 160.62.10.13 (talk) 04:29, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I saw this question shortly after reading this post, which deals with an amusing result of the P/B confusion, on Language Log. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:03, 28 May 2014 (UTC)