Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 April 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 20

English/Chinese proverb

Many little things done in many little places by many little people will change the face of the world is supposed to be a Chinese proverb.

(a) Can anybody here confirm that?

(b) Into which aspect of Chinese philosophy would this proverb fit?

(c) Any person with Chinese as mother (or father) tongue who could give the Chinese translation for further research?

(d) All wrong? A Westerner invented it and made it more interesting as "Chinese proverb" (as it is also found occasionally als "African proverb"?

Very curious... GEEZER^{nil nisi bene} 08:12, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I would be more curious to know why you have linked to a Danish Google Books site which has nothing to do with the question, but rather more about primary health care. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 13:53, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Sorry. When you search this sentence, it is mentioned (and shown) as chinese proverb in this book. GoogleBooks! I'll get back at you!!! GEEZER^{nil nisi bene} 05:43, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

It is not obvious to English speakers with no knowledge of North Germanic languages, but if you click the little button on the linked Danish page labeled "søg" ("search"), you will find a snippet from this healthcare text that quotes the supposed Chinese proverb. I can read Chinese and have come across a number of Chinese proverbs, and this does not sound like one to me. They are usually pithier and less optimistic. However, I cannot say with certainty that it isn't a Chinese proverb. Marco polo (talk) 14:55, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Cheers, Marco. I do actually understand Danish - how else would I have been able to identify the language and not mistake it for Norwegian? I just wasn't sure how to use the site. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 04:59, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

• The phrase "Old Chinese Proverb" is subtext for . Meaning, when you append the phrase "Old Chinese proverb" to a bit of Wisdom, what you mean to say is "There's this aphorism that no one knows the origin for, so if I just call it an "Old Chinese proverb", I can get away with sounding wise or learned." That's all it means. --Jayron32 15:04, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh, come on. You make it sound like there's no such thing as an old Chinese proverb! I take your point, and often these claims are unsourced/uncited, and cannot be traced to any old-ish texts.

But that doesn't mean that the claim of "Old Chinese Proverb" is never true. Consider a counter-example. A Chinese friend told me a story that her parents told her. She didn't give it any source, other than her parents told her it was an old story. With a little bit of googling, I found this nice page [1], telling various versions of the "Taoist Farmer" - though most of the cited sources are modern. A little more searching and I'm fairly confident the tale is contained in Huainanzi, which is a few thousand years old, as translated here [2]. Probably, it would be better described as a parable rather than a proverb. If you want a more canonical proverb, how about "To be truly happy and contented, you must let go of the idea of what it means to be truly happy or content.", from Liezi. Here's a whole list of proverb-ish quotes from old Chinese texts [3], including Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and the aforementioned Liezi. Granted, I don't read any sort of Chinese, so maybe all these translations and attributions are lying to us, but that doesn't seem parsimonious to me :) SemanticMantis (talk) 16:51, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

@SemanticMantis:, now this is spooky FUNNY ! I wrote the article about the parable of the old Daoist for the de:WP. :-) In the original it is called something like Good luck in bad luck - and bad luck in good luck. Feel free to use it. ;-) GEEZER^{nil nisi bene} 05:51, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

The Chinese have proverbs, and Albert Einstein[4], Winston Churchill[5], and Abraham Lincoln[6] all said witty things. I just take no belief such attributions as true or false without further proof, given the number of times it's wrong. It's not that all of them are always false, it's that the truthfulness of it is undetermined. Or to put it more succinctly: I didn't say I knew it was wrong, I said I didn't know if it was right. That's all means, after all. --Jayron32 19:14, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

• Fwiw, some related Chinese proverbs. I cannot personally verify the veracity of the site, but it looks more credible than most lists of Old Chinese/African/Jungle Sayings. Abecedare (talk) 19:29, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

• This is a classic 1970's commercial, for which I should not be blamed if it seems to play on stereotypes. μηδείς (talk) 03:02, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Sasseneire

How do you pronounce Sasseneire, a mountain of the Alps? Analphil (talk) 16:00, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Youtube is often a great tool for this kind of information: see this video around 0:12. - Lindert (talk) 16:19, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

As I suspected: /sas nɛʁ/ —Tamfang (talk) 06:34, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Year in article head

Articles for Bandy World Championships have recently been moved from (e.g.) Bandy World Championship 2015 to 2015 Bandy World Championship. Is this due to some rule in the Manual of Style which I can't find or is it a general linguistic rule for English? Skogsvandraren (talk) 16:50, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

It is more common, in English, to put the year first. You could put the year last, but then I'd put parentheses around it. StuRat (talk) 17:11, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know of a general rule, but this is consistent with individual instances of the FIFA World Cup (e.g. 1966) and Olympic Games (e.g. 2012), whose titles have the year first. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:17, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(events)#Conventions is the relevant guideline. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:40, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

That's how it's usually done with the sports seasons, tournaments and championships articles on Wikipedia. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:14, 20 April 2015 (UTC)