Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 4

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August 4

Arabic transliteration

Arabic: أور يهوده

Could someone transliterate this? In the Or Yehuda article, it has a "needs transliteration". Ono, Benjamin says that Or Yehuda is built on the site of the Palestinian village of Kafr 'Ana, but maybe that's not the current Arabic name. 123.51.107.94 (talk) 00:42, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

It's just "Or Yehudah" transcribed into Arabic letters. However, the second "h" letter is transcribed in a way to indicate that it would be pronounced (non-silent). AnonMoos (talk) 02:31, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

The Arabic Wikipedia uses أور يهودا. Google translate, when presented with أور يهوده, asks, "Did you mean: أور يهودا "  --Lambiam 12:46, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

gov.il sites use أور يهودا [1] [2] and never أور يهوده; same for road signs [3] 147.234.72.52 (talk) 13:49, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

De surname?

I created De Mowbray, but I'm wondering if this should be merged to Mowbray (surname). Thoughts? Clarityfiend (talk) 15:03, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Probably a MOS rather than a language issue, but I see pre-existing lists organised both ways:

• De Agostini (surname) -- separate from Agostini
• De Beck -- separate from Beck (surname)
• De Carle -- separate from Carle

...

• De Angulo -- merged into Angulo
• De Brouwer -- a section under Brouwer
• De Carteret -- merged into Carteret (name)

... 147.234.72.52 (talk) 16:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot of overlap with House of Mowbray, particularly in the Johns. I see they're all a bunch of phonies anyway. Geoffrey was a companion of William the Conqueror, but he was a celibate bishop, so his heir was his nephew Robert, who rebelled against William the Second, was pardoned for it, started another rebellion seven years later and got imprisoned for it and died childless, and then his wife was married off to somebody completely unrelated who took his name. Normans were fucked up. Mind you I guess a lot of these surnames were based on what lands you owned back in France, and the other guy was given his lands, so fair enough, kind of.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:24, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

I think in this case of de as a French proposition meaning "of", as in "Robert of (the House of) Mowbray". In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography this person is listed as "Mowbray, Robert de, earl of Northumbria".^[4] Our article Robert de Mowbray also uses {{DEFAULTSORT:Mowbray, Robert de}}. The concept of surname is somewhat anachronistic in this context. Compare names like Edith of Wessex, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Emma of Normandy. The latter did not bear the surname "of Normandy" --Lambiam 17:14, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

The sorting order may not be directly related to the issue at hand; in any case, being listed as Mowbray, Robert de doesn't imply his given name(s) being Robert de.

A relevant example is De Charlton, listing two 14th century English Archdeacons, each of them DEFAULTSORTed under Charlton yet not listed at Charlton (surname). 147.234.72.52 (talk) 19:11, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning that. I forgot to state that a big concern was if it was a surname at all for the aristos (not the two hoi polloi). Clarityfiend (talk) 01:00, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

@Clarityfiend: Should you decide not to merge the pages, you should definitely add a De Mowbray entry in the "See also" section of Mowbray (surname). Deor (talk) 18:50, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

Lambian has confirmed my suspicion that it is not a surname (for the most part), so there will be no merger. Thanks all. Clarityfiend (talk) 01:07, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

As a digression, I wonder whether the 'de' might have been derived from the article 'the' rather than the Romance prepositional 'of' for some older names in Continental West Germanic Europe, before getting conflated. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:06, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

As in Felix da Housecat?  Card Zero  (talk) 10:37, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

For the surname de Brouwer we can be pretty sure it was originally a Germanic definite article. But the names of the Norman warriors who accompanied Guillaume II de Normandie, like Geoffrey de Montbray, an uncle of Robert de Mowbray, already were disambiguated with de epithets while still in France.  --Lambiam 20:45, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

English Proficiency Questions

I have two questions to ask about English Proficiency. Keep in mind that I do not wish to cause offence to anyone with these questions. They are just some things I have wondered about how proficient certain peoples are with the English Language and what factors determine a person’s typical proficiency level. Here are the questions:

1. The first question I have concerns the length of time it takes to become proficient in English after moving to a new English-speaking country. This question came into my head after watching a Russian man be interviewed on the internet. Said Russian man has resided in the US for a number of months, but to date still speaks through an interpreter when being interviewed. I am therefore confused about how long it takes to adapt to the native language of the country you have moved to. One would expect, after all, that it doesn’t take long to start to pick up elements of such a language. So, what would be a typical length of time for picking up a new language in a new country? Will the person’s original language have any effect on this, and what difficulties might they encounter? Also, what level of proficiency would remove the need for a translator?

2. My second question is about English proficiency in certain countries. Now, obviously countries such as China and Japan will have low proficiency due to severe differences between English and their languages. That I don’t dispute. What does confuse and intrigue me is why English proficiency is so low in Latin America. One would have thought that Romance language speakers would have some advantages, as English borrows a lot from Latin and French. Indeed, proficiency is higher in Spain, France, Portugal and Italy than it is in Latin America. So why then, are fluent or partial English speakers so rare in places like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico? Mexico in particular confuses me, as it happens to have a border with the one country that contains more English-Speakers than any other. It also has a healthy tourism industry. So why the lack of people who know even a few simple sentences of English?

I hope that a lot of interesting linguistic info is discussed here, as I am a novice with this particular field of study. I also hope that educated discussions can take place here, that don’t become insensitive in certain ways. I do look forward to what happens next. Pablothepenguin (talk) 20:26, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

The ability to learn a foreign language varies greatly between persons, particularly in adults. No general conclusions should be drawn from the case of one particular speaker. As for the second question, exposure to a foreign language is much more significant than linguistic similarities in learning a language. There is a lot less exposure to English-speakers and to English media in Latin America than in Europe, where it has become a de facto lingua franca nowadays. Also, the fact that a lot of English vocabulary is derived from Latin (largely through French) does not override the fact that most basic vocabulary words in English are of Germanic origin, the sounds in English are very different than those in Spanish, and the rules of grammar differ greatly. Outside of the part of the tourism industry that caters to visitors from outside the continent, or the highly educated segments of society, most Latin Americans have little or no practical use for English. Xuxl (talk) 20:40, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

(ec) Personal circumstances play a role, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this. A case in point: My late ex-parents-in-law met in Sarajevo (now Bosnia-Herzegovina, but then part of Yugoslavia), around 1942. She was highly educated, having studied French, German, Russian and English in addition to her native Serbian, and was studying medicine at university. He was poorly educated, having been a child Nansen refugee from the Russian Empire (his parents were Russian although he was born in Ukraine), and subsequently spoke a unique blend of Russian and Serbian, never mastering either. He worked as a mechanic and taxi driver. They migrated to Australia (via Germany, Belgium and Italy) in 1950 where they remained for the rest of their lives (he died in 2001, she in 2010). Her conversational English was at that stage little better than rudimentary, but she improved markedly over the years to the point where she wrote and published her memoirs. She worked as an executive chef and mixed in those sorts of circles. On the other hand, he worked as a market gardener and mechanic, mixed mainly with his fellow Serbian and Russian immigrants, and to his dying day could still only speak English in a rudimentary way. He lived his whole life after the age of 5 in hostile linguistic environments. He also had paranoid schizophrenia; she was the sanest person I've ever met. So, it all depends. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:50, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Some further details to add here:

Question 1: My example of the Russian man intrigues me. Is it normal to still need a translator after residing in the US for nearly a year?

Question 2: How come Mexico doesn’t get a higher English proficiency from the US border? In other words, why isn’t there a sizeable English community in Mexico, comparable to the US Hispanic community? Pablothepenguin (talk) 21:24, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Question 2. (Note that I'm excluding Hispanics from "Americans", not because they can't be Americans, but because they're more likely to use Spanish on a daily basis, and if they move to Mexico, they're not likely to prefer to speak English.) There's a significant socioeconomic distance between US and Mexico, and Americans tend to see much of Mexico as a very dangerous place (an effect of the Mexican drug war is causing crime in Mexico to be really problematic, especially in states near the US), so the number of Mexicans desiring to immigrate to the US is far larger than the number of Americans desiring to immigrate to Mexico. There are exceptions, e.g. these folks, but typically Americans moving to Mexico have ties there already (e.g. business or family ties) or they're wealthy retirees or work-from-home-workers seeking somewhere with a lower cost of living. As a result, these typical American emigrants settle all over the place in Mexico, rather than forming significant concentrations, and because they're a tiny fraction of the population, there's no reason that English would matter much in a particular place. Conversely, many Mexicans entering the US are poorer, so they concentrate in states closer to the Mexican border, which are easier to reach without lots of money. (Imagine that you're walking across the border, or paying someone high rates to carry you in a truck; you'll have a far easier time ending up in Texas than in North Dakota or Vermont.) So between the small number of Americans going to Mexico, and their tendency to spread out, you don't have many areas where English usage is anywhere close to significant. Nyttend (talk) 06:51, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Whether you need English in your daily life is going to have far greater effect on how well you're going to acquire it than the difference between English and your first language. Nardog (talk) 21:36, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

You mos likely would if you intend to live in a country that doesn’t use your native language. Pablothepenguin (talk) 21:45, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

I thought Language immersion might provide some answers, but be that as it may, if you're in an environment where you have no option to fall back on your native language, you're going to pick up the new language faster. However, some individuals do better at it than others, if they have a better-than-average "ear" for language. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:06, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

That's my point. Most people in China and Japan don't. Nardog (talk) 01:00, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Pablothepenguin, you ask: "Is it normal to still need a translator after residing in the US for nearly a year?" Yes it is. It's also normal not to need one. Whether somebody requests the help of an interpreter will depend on a number of factors, such as their expectations of how demanding the questions would be. Thus a Russian–American may be happy to say what they think of the local availability of groceries, but worry about the imperfect expression of any opinion on their nation's war with Ukraine. You ask about the lack of "a sizeable English community in Mexico", by which I suppose you mean a sizeable English-speaking community in Mexico. The reasons would be complex, and historical. You write: "I hope that a lot of interesting linguistic info is discussed here, as I am a novice with this particular field of study. I also hope that educated discussions can take place here". I suggest that you read an introductory text on second language acquisition. There's Susan M. Gass et al, Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course; I've only read an older edition (when it was "Gass and Selinker"), and perhaps there's a better alternative these days. -- Hoary (talk) 22:53, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Surely it depends on how much effort they make to learn the language? I realise people have varying abilities, but if you go to e.g. evening classes, or use a Linguaphone/Duo-Lingo audio method, use the language as much as you can while shopping or eating out, go to language cafés, make friends who will correct your mistakes, buy local newspapers and books with parallel texts, attempt to pick up the accent as well as the vocabulary, within three months of daily application you should have reached a fair degree of ability. In a year you should be fluent. If you sit at home and read Tolstoy in Russian and talk only to Russian expatriates, you won't get far. MinorProphet (talk) 00:22, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

One of the factors in the quantity of people speaking Spanish in the United States is the continuous arrival of new immigrants. In other language communities such as Italians, Ashkenazis, Japanese,..., the first generation might have trouble with English, but the second generation mostly live in an English environment and the third generation blends in so much to forget their ancestral language. With Spanish, it is easier to keep using the language daily so not so many speakers become monolingual English.

About Latin America, even if you travel abroad or meet foreigners, the neighboring countries speak Spanish or Portuguese, so you don't need English so much. In Europe, countries are smaller and your neighbors probably don't speak your language, so you need a foreign language more.

One thing that surprises me is how lots of sportspeople established abroad have different levels of command of the local language. Michael Robinson spent decades in Spain and was a commentator but kept a strong foreign accent in his Spanish. Probably it became his gimmick and saw no reason to lose it.

--Error (talk) 00:42, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Accents and proficiency are only weakly correlated. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:08, 7 August 2023 (UTC)