Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 August 30

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August 30

Chinese root

In Vietnamese, the term "hàn lâm" means "academic" and it seems to stem from a title for a mandarin during feudal times. I'm guessing that it originated from the Chinese term "寒林", but that term means "winter forest". Is there an instance where the term "寒林" is used in any academic sense? DHN (talk) 07:11, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

My guess is that it's 翰林, hànlín, i.e. a member of the Hanlin Academy, where scholar-officials who had passed the Imperial examinations would be assigned before being appointed to government posts. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:34, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! DHN (talk) 19:51, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

One more question: does "Hanlin" literally mean "a multitude of quills"? DHN (talk) 15:30, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I doubt it. In modern Mandarin, 寒 means 'cold' and 林 means small forest. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

We're talking about "翰" DHN (talk) 18:12, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Japanese translation help needed

Hi, over at the computing RefDesk, a question has cropped up dealing with a router that has a Japanese-only manual. We need to disable DHCP on the router. If you're able to translate the relevant parts of the manual, please stop by here - the link to the PDF is in the paragraph starting with the word "Supplemental" - and help us help User:Hoary. Thank you! -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 12:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Is this an example of pathetic fallacy?

Hello, ants. I know you love the smell of the durian mooncakes, but they are to be eaten by me, not you. Please find food elsewhere. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.189.216.150 (talk) 15:58, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

The "fallacy" would be the assumption that ants understand English. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:02, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

"Who would have thought that the rabbits understood Latin?" LANTZY^TALK 16:29, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, Walter. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:46, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about Latin, but they can certainly understand Lapine. —Angr (talk) 17:03, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to me that the pathetic fallacy is really much of a fallacy anyway, at least not in the sense of unsound or mistaken logical reasoning. When you address ants directly, you may be anthropomorphizing them or apostrophizing them or personifying them, but you're not committing a fallacy. —Angr (talk) 16:51, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll concede that they might understand antonyms. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:53, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Homo Sapiens. Sorry, but I don't accept your opinion about who the durian mooncakes are to be eaten by. Hence, I'm not going to find my food elsewhere. I eat whatever smells sweet and tasty. Take care, good luck. Eliko (talk) 17:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Why "Homo Sapiens"? He didn't call you Lasius flavus or something. Also, it's Homo sapiens or even Homo sapiens sapiens. Rimush (talk) 19:50, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh man, we didn't like the way they'd called us ("ants", as if we were ants, while we are Lasius flavus), so we responded them in such a way they wouldn't like either. Sapiens or double sapiens or triple sapiens, who cares? The taste of mooncakes is more interesting... Eliko (talk) 20:41, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

United States presidential election, 2012

There's a section in United States presidential election, 2012 called "speculated candidates". That seemly wrong, grammatically, I'd think "speculated-on candidates", but that sounds awkward. Any ideas? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 18:36, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Speculative candidates? Rojomoke (talk) 18:39, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Possible candidates. --- OtherDave (talk) 18:47, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

'Presumptive candidates' would be best in this context. 'Presumptuous jackanapes' would be more accurate, however. --Ludwigs2 20:28, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

"That seemly wrong, grammatically" - that seemly wrong, too.  :) -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 22:56, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, that's because I can't type, not because I can't grammar.  :) Everard Proudfoot (talk) 18:04, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Or, as the apparently Wiki-departed User:Milkbreath once famously said, "My spelling is better than my orthography would indicate". -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:50, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Power is my mistress

I have heared thied quiote attributed to Napoléon I. Is this an accurate attribution and what is the original in French? 76.230.225.80 (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Not an easy quotation to source it seems, though the English version is all over the internets. On the talk page of Napoleon's wikiquote page it is listed among the quotes that had to be removed because it lacked citations. This book however says it is something he said to Pierre Louis Roederer in 1804. But.. when I look for a French version I can only find "Je n’ai qu’une passion, qu’une maîtresse ; c’est la France : je couche avec elle" ("I have but one passion, but one mistress: it's France. I sleep with her"), noted down by Roederer in 1809. That doesn't mean the English quote you ask about is incorrect, of course, but I do not find anything like it in French. The book to check is probably Roederer's Bonaparte me disait (textes choisis par Maximilien Vox; Le Roman de l’Histoire, Union bibliophile de France, Horizons de France, Paris, 1942). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.171.56.13 (talk) 10:20, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not impossible that he said that, but I find it unlikely because power (le pouvoir) is masculine in French. — Kpalion^(talk) 12:19, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Boodah?

In John Twelve Hawk's novel The Dark River,

"Boodah had an African-American father and a Chinese mother.His nickname came from his enormous stomach, which appeared to protect him from all the craziness in New York."

I don't understand how this explains his nickname Boodah. Does it mean 'Buddah'? Even if so, I don't think Buddah is famous for his enormous stomach.

Any opinion?

--Analphil (talk) 22:23, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

See Budai (aka "the Fat Buddha"). ---Sluzzelin talk 22:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. It makes sense.--Analphil (talk) 23:48, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Possessive reflexives

In English, several reflexive pronouns are similar in form to possessives, for example "myself" looks like "my self", "ourselves" looks like "our selves", etc. Not all of them follow this pattern, for example we have "himself" rather than "hisself" and "themselves" rather than "theirselves". In any case, this possessive-reflexive thing does not happen in any other language that I am aware of, definitely not in German, French, or Latin. Does any reader of this desk know of any language other than English in which any of the reflexive pronouns have a possessive form? (Intensive forms would also interest me.) Looie496 (talk) 23:15, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

See http://latindiscussion.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7059. -- Wavelength (talk) 23:54, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure that Latin discussion is talking about the same thing...but Latin does have a pronoun intensifier ("-met", as in "egomet", "memet", etc). French also has "moi-meme", etc. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:31, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Uyghur (and, therefore, probably Turkish and a bunch of related Central Asian languages) has precisely this. öz is the reflexive pronoun and it takes person-number agreement marker to specify my/your/him/our/etc.-self. That agreement marker happens to be the same as what you see in possessive constructions. See pp. 188-9 of this book. For a quick summary, here are some examples:

• öz-üm "myself" (compare to köl-üm, "my lake")
• öz-ingiz "yourself" (compare to kitab-ingiz, "your book")
• etc

rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:00, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

The Semitic languages. e.g. Arabic: ruhi = myself. Hebrew: atsmi = myself, etc. Eliko (talk) 06:53, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

In Finnish, reflexive pronouns are formed by declining the word itse ("self") as the object of a genitive subject, i.e. as a thing someone is possessing. For example, itseni ("myself"), itsesi ("yourself"), itsensä ("him/her/itself, themselves"). The genitive pronoun itself is omitted because the the subject and the owner of the object are the same. JIP | Talk 07:12, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the answers, it seems that examples are pretty numerous. Would you happen to know how intensive pronouns are handled in these languages? By the way it's curious that the Finnish "itse" is so similar to the Latin "ipse", given that Finnish belongs to a whole different language family. (For what it's worth, my reason for asking all this is that I'm working on book chapter on the concept of Self, and trying to get a grasp of how various language other than English handle it.) Looie496 (talk) 16:50, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

As for the Semitic languages, one simply says: "by oneself", using the preposition "b", that means both "by" and "in/at". Additionally, you might be interested to know that the concept of Self is expressed by the concept of "soul/spirit" (ruh) in Arabic, and by the concept of "bone" (etsem) in Hebrew (so that "myself" is simply "my bone", i.e. "my skeleton"). Eliko (talk) 17:41, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

In Finnish, an intensive pronoun (as in "I did it myself") is always simply itse. I think the relation to the Latin word ipse is pure coincidence. JIP | Talk 17:53, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

On the Syntax of Possessive Reflexive Pronouns in Modern Georgian and Certain Indo-European Languages by Shukia Apridonidze discusses how Russian and Georgian have "both groups of reflexives: personal and possessive". ---Sluzzelin talk 18:12, 31 August 2010 (UTC)