Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 February 9

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February 9

Dasselbe oder die gleiche?

I was watching the show Babylon Berlin, and a character asks a ballistics expert about what weapon fired two bullets. "The same," he says. "Dasselbe oder die gleiche?" the detective asks. I think this was subtitled as "The same model or the same gun?" This was very interesting to me. I'd always understood 'dasselbe' & 'die gleiche' to both mean 'the same' with no difference. But this draws a clever distinction we don't have in English. It delineates 'sameness' in a way we can't.

If I were to go to a doener joint in Berlin, and my companion orders a doener, and I say "Dasselbe fuer mich," the doenerjockey would make me another order of what my friend had asked for. If I said "Ich habe die gleiche," would they understand that I'm sharing my friend's doener that they had just ordered?

It strikes me now that if someone asked me "Sind Sie *der* Dr Livingston?" and I were to try to translate the English "The same!" I would go for "Der gleiche," and never dasselbe. But that might be in hindsight. And in either case it would feel forced to me.

Am I interpreting this line of dialog totally wrong? Is 'das selbe' two words rather than one? I don't remember.

I'm curious about how any language could define 'sameness' to more than one degree. 'Sameness' is an odd concept to go about muddying up: to a logician, if x=x, and x=x, but they're different flavors of xes, what's going on?

'Isness,' too, while we're at it. The question "Was ist?" also strikes me a bit interesting in how it differs from the English, although it may be a simple shortening of "Was ist los?" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:1C1:8100:900:8CA:15B1:ADFB:DF14 (talk) 07:03, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

The distinction between "der/die/das gleiche" and "der/die/dasselbe" is a long-standing prescriptive shibboleth in German. Most people ignore the distinction much of the time in colloquial speech, but according to the prescriptive standard the semantic difference is actually relatively clear: "der/die/dasselbe" means 'the same specific individual/instance', while "der/die/das gleiche" means "of the same type". So the translation in your gun case would actually be the other way round. "Dieselbe Waffe" means "the same particular gun"; "die gleiche Waffe" means "a gun of the same type". In practice, it's a bit more fuzzy in cases where people routinely switch between conceptualizing things as individual instances and of types anyway. For example, in the döner example, I end up getting "den gleichen Döner" (the same kind of doner), but I've chosen "dasselbe" (the same particular menu entry). Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:00, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

• These terms correspond exactly to "itself" and "the like" in English. I thought the Germans were at least as good at parsing their own language as the English are theirs. μηδείς (talk) 22:48, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

"Identical" used to form a similar (if not identical) shibboleth in English. My father would object when he heard somebody using it to mean "exactly similar", and maintained that it should mean "the very same one". I remember him telling (I don't know whether from his own experience or not) of a policeman giving evidence in court who used the word "identical", whereupon counsel showed him two exactly similar objects and asked if they were identical. As my father told it, the policeman said "yes", and the court laughed at him.

Since the OED records the second meaning from 1601, only twenty years later than its earliest record of the first, I suspect that this distinction was not made until some pedant conceived it as a way of belittling others, like most of the rules of prescriptive grammar. --ColinFine (talk) 20:11, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Voynich_manuscript online

Hello,

Is there a text file available online, that contains a transcript of the entire Voynich_manuscript (in some alephbet)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.125.78.146 (talk) 13:28, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

No, that isn't possible, because it isn't written in any known script that is used elsewhere. A text file would presume we had unicode characters to represent the characters in the manuscript. We don't because we don't know what the individual characters represent. There are scans of the pages you can find online, but transcribing the text into a computer text file would mean you would have to have characters coded to write that text. We simply don't have that. There is a code of sorts that was done in the 1940s, as noted in the article, where each Voynich character was transliterated to a Latin character. You can find information about that that by following this link from the references in the Wikipedia article. --Jayron32 14:03, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me that a transliteration, however (necessarily) arbitrary, counts as "a transcript … in some alphabet". —Tamfang (talk) 08:17, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Alund

Does he pronounce [aˈlunð] in the clip? LoveVanPersie (talk) 15:24, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

It's [aˈlun]. The [ð] allophone of /d/ is blocked by a preceding nasal, so it can't be that. Mr KEBAB (talk) 15:33, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Spanish pronunciation of Michael

Is it [ˈmaikol] or [maiˈkol]? [1] and [2] sound the former. But [3] and [4] sound the latter? LoveVanPersie (talk) 16:08, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Since "Michael" is not a Spanish word, it is reasonable to suppose that they would attempt to pronounce it the English way. Just like we would probably pronounce a name like José as "hoh-ZAE" rather than "JOHZ". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:21, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

You mean the stress is on the first syllable? LoveVanPersie (talk) 18:36, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

In English, the stress is on the first syllable for "Michael" - as in "MIKE-uhl". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:58, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I know you mean a loanword is pronounced in the way close to the original pronunciation, but stress doesn't have to follow this... What about the stress of Michael in the four links? Are they also in the first syllable? LoveVanPersie (talk) 19:12, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I can't necessarily vouch for the "theoretical" pronunciation. But in the interview, the questioner in both links pretty much pronounces it the American way, stress on the first syllable. I would say he says it more like "MY-cull" than "MIKE-ull", which kind of betrays Spanish enunciation, but otherwise it sounds like an American would say it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:35, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I'd say that even in the latter two links, [5] and [6], the stress is on the initial syllable of the name. --Theurgist (talk) 16:59, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you both! LoveVanPersie (talk) 21:45, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

About Spanish pronunciations

Dose Leonardo Mayer pronounces y ("como yo", "reyes") [ʝ] and ll ("llenó", "ladrillo") [ʎ]?

Does Diego Schwartzman pronounces his surname [ʃwaɾtsman] or [ʃwaɾdzman] in this clip? LoveVanPersie (talk) 18:57, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

To me it sounds like Diego is saying "SCHWARTZ-mahn". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:00, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

What's your meaning of TZ? Is it /ts/ or /dz/? LoveVanPersie (talk) 19:14, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I think he's saying it like "tz". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:24, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

To my American ears, Mayer is saying "y" and "ll" the same way, or nearly so. Sometimes a Spanish speaker will say a "y" sound more like "zh", as the French would say the "j" in bonjour, for example. Sometimes a Spanish speaker will say a "ll" sound like an "ly". He might be saying it that way, but if so, it's very subtle. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:31, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. LoveVanPersie (talk) 20:52, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

• Bugs, "tz" is an impossibility in English. phonetically, we say [ts] and the only alternative would be Shwardsman, like shards /dz/ of glass. This is do to phonetic assimilation. There's also the OP's odd obsession with /ɛ/, which reminds me of someone who used to ask about how they spoke French in Canada. But that's a whole nother tarbaby. μηδείς (talk) 22:32, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Well, I have no problem enunciating a "tz" as in "Schwartzmann". Maybe it's a regional thing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:58, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
    • German does have /tz/ in connected speech and in compound words, but it's just a sequence of a fortis stop and a lenis fricative, with both of them being voiceless. In this surname though, it simply represents the affricate /ts/. Mr KEBAB (talk) 12:43, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

You mean the tz in the video is [ts]? LoveVanPersie (talk) 23:24, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

@Medeis: I had to correct this guy's transcriptions (mostly Slovak and Spanish ones) almost 20 times within the last two months, which means that about 5-10% of his transcriptions were wrong. It's a lot. Please don't discourage him from asking for input here. Mr KEBAB (talk) 00:01, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Offtopic moved to talk - Mr KEBAB