Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 10

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.

March 10

Etymology of the shogi dragon horse piece. Did it use to be an agate dragon?

On [1] it says that the dragon horse used to be an agate dragon: "The diagonal slider is here an "Angle Goer". Its move is exactly as the European Bishop. Its promoted form is a Ryuuma or Dragon Horse moving like a Bishop or stepping 1 space orthogonally. It is often named just Uma, simply meaning Horse. Etymologically, it was a Ryumeno, meaning Agate Dragon." Unfortunately I could not find any other sources to corroborate this. I aksed on the Shogi talk page and in addition to some very interesting information it was suggested to ask my question here. This is the information I got so far:

Not sure where they got their information from, but the character 馬 (uma) (meaning "horse") in 竜馬 (ryūma) (or its older version ) has a couple of different on-yomi. The most common (standard) one is ば (ba), but there are also non-standard readings such as ま (ma) and め (me). Apparently ryūma can take the meaning "fast horse" when read as "ryūme" in addition to the "promoted horse" shogi meaning. The word "Agate" in Japanese is menō which can be written in kanji as . One of the components of the character is and the other is (which can mean jade/jewel). Agate is jewel-like, isn't it?　So, I guess it's entirely possible that at one point in time was written as , pronounced as "ryūme", and taken to mean "dragon agate/agate dragon". Over time it just was changed to what is more commonly known today as 竜馬 (ryūma). Total OR on my part, but it doesn't seem totally implausible. Just for reference, googling or got me a hit for the name of a race horse and for pages of dragon-motif jewelry/good-luck beads that appear to be connected somehow to feng shui. You can try asking at WP:RD/L since editors really knowledgeable about languages often hang out there. -- Marchjuly (talk) 06:40, 9 March 2016 (UTC) [Note: This post was posted as a reply to Talk:Shogi#Dragon horse used to be agate dragon? and was copied and pasted here by the OP (possibly for reference). -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:39, 10 March 2016 (UTC)]

Is there anyone who knows more about this? MarSch (talk) 12:26, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

The Japanese Wikipedia doesn't mention anything like this. If it's unsourced and there's nothing we can find to support it, perhaps we should delete it from the article? Could be a simple error like someone misread 竜王馬 from a shogi log as 竜瑪 -> dragon-agate. Can you identify the user who inserted the content? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 15:59, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiBlame can be used to find the originally responsible editor. It can be a bit of a hassle, but still much easier than manually searching. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:28, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Oops, I misread the OP, this claim was not made in the Wikipedia article, but an external one. But thanks for the tip, that's a nifty tool. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:53, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Waiting game

Is it grammatically or at least colloquially correct to call it "dinner waiting game" when the game is about who can wait the longest without losing temper until the dinner arrives? Or should it be called "waiting-for-dinner game" even though it sounds a bit wordy? --BorgQueen (talk) 18:21, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

It is not a formal game with a recognised name. Call it whatever you like.109.150.174.93 (talk) 19:02, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

I see your point -- certainly no one stops me from calling it "rose picking game" even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with roses. But I believe a name has to be relevant to what it refers to, and I'd prefer to avoid grammatical gaffes. --BorgQueen (talk) 20:36, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

The 2nd option looks best to me, as the first could be a waiting game played while eating dinner, like waiting to see who will pick up the check first. StuRat (talk) 19:03, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, but could the first option mean what I've described too, without too much of a stretch? I'm not a native English speaker, which is why I am confused over this. --BorgQueen (talk) 20:28, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

It could mean that, but only if people were already wise to the game. I mean, who could work out what "chess" or "scrabble" or "bridge" or "canasta" mean just from the words themselves, with no prior knowledge of the games? In the context in which you want to use it, if it's clear the "dinner waiting game" is as you describe it, and not some other possibility such as StuRat's "waiting to see who will pick up the check first", then it's fine to use it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:59, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Jack. --BorgQueen (talk) 21:02, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

"Waiting-for-dinner game" is well-formed; it is of a type found mainly in colloquial language, but that is not a problem in this context. "Dinner-waiting game" would be suboptimal (though not impossible) because "dinner" is the indirect object of "wait", not the direct object. "Dinner waiting game" (without the hyphen) is OK if there is also, say, a "lunch waiting game" or a "breakfast waiting game". In this case, "dinner" is a noun adjunct, not of "waiting" alone (as in the hyphen case), but of the compound "waiting game". jnestorius^(talk) 12:28, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

One value to "dinner waiting game" is that "waiting game" is already a somewhat common phrase in English [2], and your first option includes that phrase, while the second option does not. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:40, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

On the other hand, "waiting-for-dinner game" still includes the two words in the usual order, so it would be easily recognized as derived from the standard expression. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 00:29, 12 March 2016 (UTC)