Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 September 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.

September 20

Need help to translate to spanish

We are translating the enWP article Remote Astronomical Society Observatory of New Mexico in to the esWP. Which is the proper translation? a) Observatorio de la Sociedad Astronómica Remota

o

b) Observatorio Remoto de la Sociedad Astronómica?

Thnx.,--DanielLZIraldo (talk) 09:11, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

• The English name is subject to various understandings, DanielLZIraldo. If what the English name means is The remote observatory of the Astronomical Society of New Mexico then the Spanish would be El observatorio remoto de la Sociedad Astronómica de(l estado de) Nuevo México. Note that words in Spanish titles are not capitalized unless they are the first word or are inherently proper nouns. Hence without the el the article name would be

Observatorio remoto de la Sociedad Astronómica de Nuevo México or

Observatorio remoto de la Sociedad Astronómica del estado de Nuevo México.

Of course, if my English gloss above is wrong, the Spanish translation would be different. (Whether or not to use del estado de should follow Spanish Wikipedia's established usage.)

In almost no case would remoto be capitalized. "Sociedad Astronómica", which is presumably a formal institution, would indeed be capitalized, along the lines of the Real Academia Española. μηδείς (talk) 18:07, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Full Arabic fonts

Are there (free) fonts that contain all letters/symbols from the Arabic blocks of Unicode? Especially I could not find any with Arabic Extended-A.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:59, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

SIL has Scheherazade, which has all the extensions, and Harmattan, which has most of them. (There are also Presentations Forms-A and -B, which are not supported, but those are only necessary for backwards compatibility.) Scheherazade display differently depending if you have the language set to Kurdish, Sindhi or Urdu. — kwami (talk) 17:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

If you came from the article "Arabic Extended-A", then note, that it was me who has just added the link to Scheherazade. Recursion. :) Thanks for Harmattan though, I did not find it, quite a good-looking, very legible font.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:08, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

A close look reavealed that though Harmattan is good-looking but it lacks many characters.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:19, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

This site says that the "Arabic Extended-A" block is partially supported by default Windows fonts. I have the latest (6.80, 5.28, 5.25) versions of the fonts, but there are no any glyphs of the block in the fonts (I checked in BabelMap). Could anybody check these fonts in his PC, if it's an error of the site or I missed something?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:47, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

And for everybody's information: the latest (8.00) version of GNU Unifont indeed supports everything (but it's much less legible).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 13:54, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Okurigana

Are Okurigana (those Kana suffixes after some Kanji stems) used in Japanese place names, for example names of cities? Do they use only the stem of the Kun'yomi reading or could/must they be added? Is there a rule? Could you give me some example? For example, could 武 be read as take.shi or just as take in a compound place name? Or 上 as a.geru or just a? As a note: I'm aware that Okurigana is only present in some Kun'yomi readings of some Kanji and that a lot of place names use On reading instead. My question is only about place names whose kanji use the native Kun'yomi reading. I'm also aware of non-standard Nanori readings of some place names and I'm not asking about them. --151.41.165.172 (talk) 12:46, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Normally no. Hitachi is just 日立. 上 would probably be age, which is its stem, but there would be no okurigana to indicate that. The only exceptions I can think of offhand are the genitive particles no and ga, the latter often spelled with a small ke (ヶ, historically the kanji 个 though often written as a subscript katakana ke), though even these are often omitted. — kwami (talk) 19:48, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

上 most often is pronounced 'kami' in place names, as in 上前津. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 11:15, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Es singen die Damen und Herren in idiomatic english

I have a German compilation album, Zu schön um wahr zu sein. It has classic German songs from the 20's and 30's, including Marlene Dietrich "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß" and Zarah Leander's "Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen".

My German is rusty, but I had four years in high school and four semesters in college, including literary criticism of mystery novels. I can read and understand everything literally.

But on the top of the left side of the back of the album it says in medium italic print without punctuation: "Es singen die Damen und Herren" above another line in large print "Tonfilmkünstler" followed by the pictures of 24 artists, including the women named above. Now obviously Tonfilmkünstler is "Sound-Film Artists" *i.e., "stars of the talkies"

But how literal is "Es singen die Damen und Herren"? Obviously this literally means, "the women and men sing it". But I get the impression this would have been expressed in English as "This is what everyone's singing" or "What all the men and women are singing". Can I get some help with this phrase? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 20:57, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

An idiomatic translation would be "As sung by [the following ladies and gentlemen]", or just "Sung by". See, for example, this German opera programme, where the phrases used are "Es singen die Damen und Herren der Opernchores." / "Es spielt das Philharmonische Orchester." - "Sung by the members of the opera chorus", "Played by the Philharmonic Orchestra". "Vocals by" and "Music by" are possible alternatives. Tevildo (talk) 21:17, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

A "literal but correct" translation would be something like "It [the music] is played by the Philharmonic Orchestra". Tevildo (talk) 21:24, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Grammatical explanation: unlike what Medeis and possibly Tevildo thought, the "es" here has nothing to do with "it"; it's a non-referential dummy pronoun (i.e. not referring to "it [the music]" or anything else). Its only function is to fill the initial, pre-verbal syntactic slot of German V2 word order, allowing the subject and all other material to occur post-verbally to indicate that it is focussed new information. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:42, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, that is sort of what my question was about, is the meaning really "What everyone is singing" as opposed to "The men and women are singing it." Yours more than Tevildo's answer fits with what I was originally thinking.

But in response to Tevildo, could "Es singen die Damen und Herren Tonflimkünstler", taken to mean "As sung by the women and gentlemen of sound-cinematography (of the talkies)", make sense if we put the two unpunctuated lines together?

The big problem on my end is that I have almost no actual immersion in German or more than maybe a few dozen hours of speech with Germans, mostly at the "Wo findet man" level μηδείς (talk) 21:52, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

I'll defer to Fut. Perf. on the grammatical point - is "Es" the same as the "It" in "It's grim up North" (which _could_ be interpreted as referring to an implied "the situation"), or is it more abstract than that? My experience of German consists in living in Germany for three years and being able to communicate in everyday situations, but I wouldn't describe myself as being fluent in the language. From what I've seen, this is the convention in programmes and similar communications for listing the artists who appear. The essential point is that the vocalists on the record are those people listed after the text - "As sung by these women and gentlemen of the talkies" rather than "As sung by women and gentlemen of the talkies in general." Tevildo (talk) 22:28, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

The "es" here and the "es" in "es ist kalt" ("it's cold") are actually still two different things. The "weather-it", as you rightly say, could be sometimes interpreted as "the situation". But the dummy-es in this case is not even that, it's really more abstract, just a bare syntactic filler. Maybe the closest analogue in English is the presentational "there" in sentences like "there arose a new problem". To Medeis: the meaning is really neither "what everybody is singing" nor "the men and women are singing it". It's literally really just: "the ladies and gentlemen sing", only that the subject ("the ladies and gentlemen") is marked as being focussed/new information, an effect that can't be achieved in English except by turning it into the passive. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:50, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Our article on Claus von Stauffenberg says that his last words were [e]s lebe user heiliges Deutschland, translated as "long live our sacred Germany". That sounds like what would be rendered in other languages as a hortative subjunctive (not sure why it isn't in German). If this were on sheet music, with that as an example, I'd want to render this as "men and women sing", in the sense of an instruction rather than a description. (Doesn't seem likely in context, but I thought it was an interesting sidenote.) --Trovatore (talk) 22:44, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, yes, the "es" in the Stauffenberg sentence is syntactically the same as in our "es singen", but the exhortative effect in the Stauffenberg sentence is due not to the "es" but to the subjunctive form of the verb (and yes, "es lebe" is in fact a subjunctive here; the indicative would be "es lebt"). "Es singen", in contrast, is indicative, so it remains a description rather than an instruction. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh, got it. I should have noticed that. Thanks. --Trovatore (talk) 23:03, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

My thanks for all the comments above, I understand the concepts that have been mentioned, such as topicalization (focussing), but except for "es gibt" was not familiar with such an abstract es. μηδείς (talk) 00:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

If I may observe, you will have a similar effect with topicalization in Slavic languages, by inverting the normal SV order into VS, as e.g. in Russian: "Поют дамы и господа:..." Such inversion obviously requires a dummy es in German. No such user (talk) 13:57, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Using my schoolgirl German I deduced that the third word in Trovatore's example should be unser. Checking the article I see that I am right. 92.25.66.15 (talk) 09:18, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

I thought that was what I had typed. Apparently not. --Trovatore (talk) 02:00, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

I noptyiced it, but figured that one is just as entitled to the occasional typo in German as in English. μηδείς (talk) 17:42, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

I fully agree with Fut. Perf.'s answer, however, there might be one more point: The simple statement is "Die Damen und Herren singen". The reversed word order "Singen die Damen und Herren" in German is the grammatical marker for a question. Hence the "Es" in "Es singen die Damen und Herren" also serves as a marker that the sentence is not a question, but a statement. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 07:45, 25 September 2015 (UTC)