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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 22

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March 22

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Origin of Trudgett

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What is origin of name Trudgett??--178.102.66.206 (talk) 02:09, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Basil Cottle in The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (1967) gives
Tredgett N [nickname] ‘juggling, trickery’ OF [Old French], for a mountebank/juggler.
I find no other similar entries. —Tamfang (talk) 06:55, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Trudgett is a variant of Tredgett (also Tredjett, Tredjitt) is from Middle English treget (from Old French).[1]--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:05, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Nadzieja umiera ostatnia"

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I'm researching and editing the bibliography of works by Halina Birenbaum, Holocaust survivor, memoirist and poet. The above is the original title in Polish of her 1967 published memoir's first edition. There's some variance between the titles of translated editions, e.g.

  • Hope is the Last to Die (EN, 1971)
  • החיים כתקווה (HE, 1983 - lit., "Life as Hope")
  • Die Hoffnung Stirbt Zuletzt (DE, 1989)
  • L' espoir ne meur jamais (FR, 2000 - lit., "Hope never dies")
  • {Hope is the last to die} (JA, 2000 - Japanese cover here also with the English title)
  • Nadje umira posledn (CZ, 2010)
  • La Speranza e' l'ultima a morire (IT, 2014)
  • La Esperanza es La Última en Morir (ES, 2015)

Query:What is the literal English translation of the Polish title? -- Deborahjay (talk) 15:10, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Literally - Hope dies last. Nadzieja (Hope) umiera (dies) ostatnia (last). That may not, however, be the phrase which best represents the thought of the author. 109.150.174.93 (talk) 15:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, that's the confirmation I sought. It's similar to most of the translations, and the word order is identical to the German, and apparently the Czech as well. -- Deborahjay (talk) 18:48, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note this is a proverb in many languages -- wikt:naděje umírá poslední, wikt:la esperanza es la última que muere, wikt:de:die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt --51.9.190.146 (talk) 00:10, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Russian texts with accents

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Hi all,

Can anybody share links to webpages with accentuated Russian texts? 213.149.51.220 (talk) 18:34, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Our article on Cyrillic script has some examples, and here [2] is a lorem ipsum generator for Russian. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:00, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A quick google search brings [3] [4] [5] --51.9.190.146 (talk) 21:29, 22 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The first one is outdated. Its spelling, its word use, its realities. It is only interesting from the historical point of view. It is good if you want to know how spoke the Russian 19-century peasantry, but I hardly recommend this for a beginner with an elementary level, who wants to know contemporary Russian. Of course, it is not entirely useless, there must be some good things inside, but it must be used with a precaution. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:22, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Next thing you're gonna say Shakespeare ain't no proper English: his spelling, his word use, his realities. --51.9.190.146 (talk) 17:33, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As an introduction to English for someone with little or no English, Shakespeare - or anyone of his period - would be somewhat contraindicated. It would be like having a beginner piano student study the Rach 3 as their first piece. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 19:36, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That's true; but the OP didn't specifically request texts for beginners, or identify himself as a beginner. --94.119.67.177 (talk) 21:33, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That's also true, but accented Russian texts are typically found only in didactic or pedagogical contexts, because stress in Russian is notoriously mobile (= unpredictable) and it is learners who need the most help in this area. For general (assumed fluent and educated) Russian readerships, Cyrillic letters have no accents (except for the case of ё, which some regard as a letter separate from е, but which others consider merely an accented form of е. In many cases, no distinction is made at all in the text, and readers just have to know whether /ye/ or /yo/ is intended). It's a fair call to believe the q is about beginners. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 21:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A likely use for an accented corpus is analyzing stress patterns computationally. In this case, one would appreciate a wide range of kinds of texts, from nursery rhymes to legal statements. --51.9.190.146 (talk) 22:39, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think it is not a good idea. You hardly find a book with accent marks. I only know children books for first graders. Even in the 2nd and 3rd grade pupils do not read with accent marks. So you might end up to have got accustomed to the thing that is not used at all. I recommend you to listen to audobooks and reading them simultaniously, it is a much better strategy.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:36, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Lüboslóv Yęzýkin, the OP 213.149.51.220 has not given any reason for his request (and there is no reason he should), so you are making unwarranted assumptions about why he wants these links. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:42, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
So are we all free as well to make any assumptions and make any comment or advice in case when an OP has not given his reasons and has not specified his question.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
See The Russian Dictionary Tree.—Wavelength (talk) 22:38, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OP here: I'm a native speaker of Croatian at ease with Cyrillic script. This equates to: 1) I understand some Russian I see. 2) I can read everything in my inner voice, but no way to do so out loud because of notorious unpredictability of the accent. 3) I can't pronounce unknown words right without ru:Знак ударения. Feels like a massive sabotage to an ambitious poor speaker. 213.149.51.220 (talk) 22:58, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Um yeah, but as (Serbo-)Croatian has equally unpredictable and mobile stress, with equal lack of orthographic clue about its position and quality, Russian approach seems like a fair game :). No such user (talk) 18:58, 25 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OP here: Can y'all stop being extremely wrong in your needless postulates (especially user:no such user) and point me to websites with accentuated Russian texts? 213.149.61.1 (talk) 04:56, 26 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(1) The Russian Corpus has the version with stresses. [6]
(2) There is the morphological dictionary with stresses compiled by Andrey Zaliznyak [7] (in one file [8]).
(3) An accenter program [9].
(4) Wikisource.
(5) Sites for children [10] or L2 learners [11]. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:37, 26 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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