Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 July 6

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July 6

What major languages keep the tongue in the general neighborhood of a neutral position the highest percent of the time?

Where is English on the spectrum between the least and most tongue gymnastic natural language? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:39, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't know about the scientific evidence but, if anectodal evidence is of any use, here in Brazil, we say the British speak "com uma batata na boca" [with a potato in their mouths, i.e. with a very twisted tongue], and generally, Brazilian Portuguese is as twisted as Japanese, so:

Japanese = Brazilian < British

Brazilian Portuguese is also less twisted than European Portuguese (it's easier to understand Latin American Spanish than European Portuguese) Mdob (talk) 09:19, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I want a Hokkien name

I've been inspired to write a Taiwanese Hokkien Unicode proposal to encode the Taiwanese kana after I rewrote 89% of List of Hokkien dictionaries. I'd like to put a Hokkien name on my Unicode proposal, and perhaps my userpage, as:

My given name	Japanese	Hokkien (Tn̂g-lâng-jī)	Hokkien (Tâi-lô)
Fredrick R. Brennan	フレッドRブレナン	浮絡·濆	Phû-le Bùn

Is 浮絡·濆/Phû-le Bùn a believable Hokkien name? This is time sensitive as I need to submit before the looming UTC deadline, so hopefully if anyone answers I see it in time. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 04:44, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

When is deadline (date and time)? Mdob (talk) 09:06, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Mdob: The deadline for submissions to UTC#164 is officially July 10, I believe either UTC or California time. However, submissions are not accepted up to 11:59 on July 9. Individual contributors like me are advised to first have a volunteer look over their proposal, which can take 24 hours, lest they be rejected on a technicality of Unicode procedure that will needlessly delay encoding, as meetings of the UTC happen infrequently. Then, 24 hours at least should be allowed for the UTC Document Register webmaster to number the proposal and put it up on the register, which the UTC refers to. So, really, I should be done on July 7, maybe July 8 if I'm feeling daring/trusting volunteers to move swiftly. Thanks for looking at this, by the way. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 09:17, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Sorry not being able to help (even though Brazil has a large portion of Japanese, I'm not ethnically Asian nor speak any Japanese dialect), but have you tried to post in the, say, Wikipedia Japanese Portal/Task Group (are these still a thing?), I think they won't mind the cross posting, given the understandable urgency and Covid/lockdown/quarantine making everything slower and bureaucratic. Mdob (talk) 09:34, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't speak Hokkien, but broadly speaking it doesn't make sense as a Chinese name. For one, Chinese surnames are placed in the beginning of the name, and 濆 is not a surname listed anywhere that I know. 浮絡 is actually an acupunctural term referring to a type of "luo vessel" underneath the skin. Needless to say it would be very odd to be named after a minor acupunctural term. As a transliteration of your name I think it's creative, but if you want it to be like a Chinese name, it's not particularly convincing. bibliomaniac15 19:06, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Bibliomaniac15: Thank you for the comment! Via Twitter (a popular Unicode account, @FakeUnicode, retweeted me, which was nice of them), I was given two options:

孟福黎	Bēng Hok-Lê
白河洛	Pe̍h Ho̍h-ló

I could even mix them I suppose, which is what I'll probably end up doing, so both people can be credited, as 孟河洛 (Bēng Ho̍h-ló)! So, this is essentially solved. Thanks, everyone who commented. Good idea to ask elsewhere as well Mdob. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 02:27, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Psiĥedelisto, I know squat about Chinese names or about Hokkien. But if I were given two Sino-Japanese names (which of course these aren't), I'd hesitate before remixing their ingredients in view of the widely held superstitions about the total stroke count. I'd uneducatedly guess that these superstitions are similar to, or derive from, those in China. (A quick count suggests that you now have 26; nothing very obviously wrong with this.) -- Hoary (talk) 04:23, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Besides what Hoary brought up, Hokkien is also notorious among Chinese dialects for having a really complicated tonal system. I don't speak Hokkien, but you changing the names might change the pronunciation too. Also, the names that were given to you are thematically consistent as is. Would really just recommend you just choose one or the other (I'm partial to the first one)! bibliomaniac15 05:06, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

@Bibliomaniac15: You make very good points. First one it is. I'll try to remember to write on your talk page when the paper is up on unicode.org. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 05:49, 7 July 2020 (UTC)