Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 April 22

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April 22

picture vs photo

What exactly is the difference between the two? Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.202.209.246 (talk) 01:30, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Picture is more general and includes, for instance, drawings. Photo means specifically photograph.—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 01:35, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Extrametricality

The article titled extrametricality does not contain a single example, despite saying

An example of extrametricality is

and

an example of this would be

I can't tell what the article is about, but I suspect I could if there were at least one example. Can someone edit it accordingly? Michael Hardy (talk) 02:23, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

PS: I posted a query at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics. I'm amazed when I look at talk pages of WikiProjects other than the Mathematics project, and see that the most recent edit was days or even weeks ago. I'm accustomed to posting at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics, which is busy all day every day and answers come within hours or minutes. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:23, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

It's rather poorly written and inaccurate by omission in any case... AnonMoos (talk) 04:06, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

I expanded it a little and added a reference. What is now the 3rd paragraph is still rather convoluted, and dubious in places, but I don't feel like dealing with it now... AnonMoos (talk) 04:47, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

/r/

The alveolar trill [r] seems to be the most common realization of the "r sound." I always thought this sound was hard to produce. As an English speaker of course I'm biased, but I've read that native speakers of languages that do feature this sound also have trouble with it, usually only when they are young but sometimes into adulthood as well. Why is [r] so common? Thanks 72.128.95.0 (talk) 03:01, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Do you have any data that the trill is that common? I'm not sure if it's that common. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:42, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

It's somewhat common among European and Middle Eastern languages, but of course they are only a fairly small fraction of the universe of languages. Even among European and Middle Eastern languages, there are many that lack it. Marco polo (talk) 14:45, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Anyway, as a generic answer to the question: keep in mind that ease of production is not the only thing that influences what sounds become a phoneme of a language (if they were, all the world's languages would just be [ma ma ma]), but also how saliently that sound contrasts with others. Alveolar trill is a pretty distinctive sound, which may be part of the reason it's popular across the world's languages (if it is indeed popular across the world's languages). rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:18, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Rjanag -- There's an old linguists' semi-joke that if linguistic markedness is minimized, then you end up with a language consisting of repetitions of the syllable [ta]... AnonMoos (talk) 18:36, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

The alveolar trill is certainly, as a sound, quite common, however, it is uncommon to have it as a phoneme. Exceptions to this are Spanish, Albanian and Catalan. Quest09 (talk) 16:54, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

...and all Slavic languages, Italian, Dutch, and a few more. We have the article Rhotic consonant which makes an overview, but does not really answer the question "why", if it's answerable at all. No such user (talk) 08:00, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

extended meaning of 'kreplach'

In one episode of the Sopranos, Tony's lawyer tells him that a group of FBI arrests constitute, "a major kreplach". The Internet tells me that kreplach is something like a Jewish ravioli, but I can't find any figurative meaning. From the context I'd guess it means, "a big deal", or possibly, "a big blow". Am I close? Henry^Flower 17:30, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

There's "kreplachistan"... AnonMoos (talk) 15:18, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I'd probably understand it as 'foulup'. —Tamfang (talk) 01:03, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

ACT English section

Hey, I'm doing an (unofficial) ACT practice set and there is one question where I disagree with the maker. This is the relevant paragraph:

Flip-books are a perfect basic example of early animation; each drawing in the book has a slight variation from the preceding drawing. When the pages are flipped in rapid succession, an action scene unfolds over a few seconds. Traditional animation films are based on this principle...

This is the question: Which of the following sentences would most effectively introduce the subject of this paragraph and act as a transition from the preceding paragraph?

A. Film animation began as a series of pictures that simulated motion when shown together rapidly.
B. Flip books were a popular "toy" in the 1950s
C. Some graphic artists have no interest in creating motion pictures and are focused instead on print media
D. Film animation has changed dramatically over the decades

The preceding paragraph mentioned was the introduction and talks about how "Graphic artists trained 20 years ago will have a problem finding work if they haven't learned to use computer software. [This] is also applicable to the creation of animated films". The rest of the paragraph goes into more detail about the flip-book method, and the remaining paragraphs talk about how "This old method ... has given way to today's digital ink-and-paint."
My question is: I chose D to be the best answer, because it introduces the remainder of the passage and avoids the redundancy of A with the immediately following sentence. However in the answer key A is given as the right answer, and in the explanation it says "This sentence defines the earliest animation as a kind of flip-book, which is the subject of the next sentence." I disagree, because A introduces a redundancy, hence, I'm here. Which is preferable? Thanks. PS: Sorry for such a long question 72.128.95.0 (talk) 19:54, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

My initial reaction was that "A" was the best answer, despite the repetition. In fact, the typical wikipedia article has a summary which restates key facts that are elaborated upon in the article. In the example you've given, it certainly could have been worded better. But A is more specific to the flip-book concept than D is, since D covers a lot more ground. If it were me, I would put D as an introduction to A! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:02, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

A. "Which of the following sentences would most effectively introduce the subject of this paragraph ...", not the preceding one. Clarityfiend (talk) 20:05, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

"has changed dramatically" is ruled out by the statement "Traditional animation films are based on this principle" - part of the point of the paragraph is that the animation technique hasn't changed much since it's beginnings (it's still basically a flip-book). -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 21:32, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

All films are essentially flip-books. Whether they are photographed drawings or filmed live action or digitized action, they are still frame-by-frame entities, the manually-operated "flip book" having been reconfigured into what's called a "film projector". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:44, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Funny Armenian translation

Just for fun, I sent the US Pledge of Allegiance ("I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.") through Google Translate in the following sequence: English-Czech-Armenian-Maltese-Thai-Russian-Korean-Hebrew-Haitian Creole-Traditional Chinese-Latin-English. My result was "1 United States vowed to the flag, and justice, and the freedom of all sectors, even under the earth fear the God, this signifies Republic of Armenia." Obviously the last little bit crept in during the Armenian translation, but what happened? The relevant bits of the Czech, Armenian, and Maltese translations are "Slibuji věrnost vlajce Spojených států amerických a republice", "Ամերիկայի Միացյալ Նահանգների", and "r-Repubblika tal-Armenja". Nyttend (talk) 23:32, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

What happened is that Machine translation generally sucks; in the sense that it does a terrible job of properly translating idiom and grammar. What you have done is the Google translate equivalent of Chinese whispers; every single translation introduces an error, and you have compounded thoses errors by translating the sentence 12 times. I'm surprised it did as good of a job as it did, since after a while even the errors introduced in early translations would have been mistranslated in later translations. --Jayron32 01:01, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Nyttend, are you sure the Maltese did not also cite the United States as well as Armenia?

I did the same experiment, and some additional research, and here's what the machine gave me as translation results.

English: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic [I'm leaving out the rest of the Pledge]

Czech: Slibuji věrnost vlajce Spojených států amerických a republice

Armenian: Ես խոստումը հավատարմություն դրոշը է Ամերիկայի Միացյալ Նահանգների եւ Հայաստանի Հանրապետության

Maltese: I wegħda lealtà lejn l-bandiera ta 'l-Istati Uniti u r-Repubblika tal-Armenja

What the latter three should mean literally:

Czech

Slibuji věrnost	vlajce Spojených států amerických	a	republice
I pledge allegiance	to the flag of the United States of America	and	to the republic

Armenian

Ես խոստումը հավատարմություն	դրոշը է Ամերիկայի Միացյալ Նահանգների	եւ	Հայաստանի Հանրապետության
I pledge allegiance	the flag of the United States of America	and	to the Republic of Armenia

Maltese

I wegħda lealtà	lejn l-bandiera ta 'l-Istati Uniti	u	r-Repubblika tal-Armenja
I pledge allegiance	to the flag of the United States	and	the Republic of Armenia

All the matter is just that the machine has translated the Czech word "republic" as "Republic of Armenia" into Armenian, probably because whoever programmed the Armenian part of Google Translate considered Armenians were usually referring to their own country when using the word "republic". The United States is there in your final result, as I can see.

Funny, indeed. --Theurgist (talk) 02:44, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I know machine translations are bad; that's why I said it was just for fun :-) I was simply wondering how it brought Armenia in, since that's not even something machines do most of the time. Thanks to Theurgist for the detailed work that I didn't know how to do. Nyttend (talk) 03:03, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

[I am introducing a minor revision to my comment above. --Theurgist (talk) 03:31, 23 April 2011 (UTC)]

Well before machine translation, we had English As She Is Spoke. Alansplodge (talk) 00:18, 24 April 2011 (UTC)