Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 December 31

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December 31

US flag

The US flag features two "interspersed" rectangles of stars. I'm wondering if there's a better term for this. Here's a scaled down version:

* * *                  * * *
             * *        * *
* * *    +         =   * * *
             * *        * *
* * *                  * * *  

StuRat (talk) 17:11, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

The sites I've read before consider the design one of alternating rows of so-many and so-many; I don't recall an exact term. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 17:19, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

It might be described as a repeated quincuncial pattern—at least, that is the term used at Francis Hopkinson#Flag controversy. Deor (talk) 17:32, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree -- and "Quincunx" is even one of my favorite words... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:36, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

wikt:interleave (which means regularly interspersed) is a slight improvement on wikt:intersperse (which means irregularly mixed). You could also say arrays instead of rectangles.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:37, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Grandiose; I think it's best described not as two interleaved rectangles but simply as alternating rows of however-many stars. rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:40, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Square lattice calls it a "diagonal square lattice". Perhaps it counts as knurled.  Card Zero  (talk) 17:45, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

In my lifetime the US has gone from 48 states, very easy to turn into a rectangle of stars, to 50 as discussed above. Being a bit of a maths and flag nerd, I've been busting to know how the pattern would be arranged for 51 states. HiLo48 (talk) 00:51, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, that's 3 rows of 17, but obviously that would have the wrong proportions. If you break it into 3 rows of 8 and 3 rows of 9, alternating, that could work:

 * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
 * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
 * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *

StuRat (talk) 01:01, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Our article has two possible designs (here but the one Stu shows is most likely. Rmhermen (talk) 03:48, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure 51 is really very likely, though. The GOP, if they can help it, will not allow Puerto Rico to become a state without a more Republican-leaning state admitted at the same time (George Will suggested Staten Island, although I have never actually heard of Staten Island separatism outside that article). So maybe we should be thinking in terms of a straight jump to 52. --Trovatore (talk) 04:31, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Other ways of achieving a new Republican-leaning state would be (1) separating Upstate New York from NYC + Long Island, (2) separating inland California from coastal California, or (3) dividing Texas into two. But I can't imagine the Republicans allowing a predominantly Spanish-speaking area to become a state under any circumstances, even if they were to receive a Republican-friendly state of their own in return. Angr (talk) 08:26, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

The GOP certainly has a nativist faction that would object to a Spanish-speaking state, but that's not the kind of thing that's going to result in party-line opposition (and the Democratic Party also has such a faction, though it might be relatively weaker). The thing that makes me predict solid Republican opposition is not cultural ideology but self-preservation. No one wants to give their opponents eight electoral votes for the forseeable future. --Trovatore (talk) 23:56, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Splitting California into a coastal part and an inland part is a recurrent conservative fantasy, but it's extremely unpopular among voters (a recent poll found that voters disapproved of the idea 80% to 10%), so I don't see this happening any time soon. Besides, a lot of inland California has recently become hispanic, socially conservative, fiscally liberal, and generally unsympathetic of the GOP; Californian white conservatives want to secede from Bay Area granola liberals, but they don't particularly care for hispanics, either. In 2000, Bush won in every single inland county except Imperial. In 2008, Obama managed to take Riverside, San Bernardino, Fresno, Stanislaus, Merced (by 8%), and San Joaquin (by 10%). The only way to form a Republican state out of California is to push the new boundary all the way to the Sierras. By my count, if we were to form a conservative state by joining all contiguous counties that voted for McCain in 2008, we'd end up with a thinly populated, mostly mountainous state, with the population of somewhere around 2 million (vs. 36 million in the coastal counterpart), no industry to speak of, and with the largest urban center being Bakersfield. --Itinerant1 (talk) 09:24, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

HiLo, there's no such thing as "a bit of a nerd". It's either full Nerdsville or nothing. I think today's a good day for you to come out of the closet, vexillonerdologically speaking. You're among friends here.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 04:23, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

The trouble is, Jack, while as a kid I could recognise just about every country's flag, too many of them have changed since then (flags and countries), and my knowledge of lots of those that haven't seems to have been filed in one of those hard to find brain compartments. Does being a vexillological amnesiac remove one from the nerd team? HiLo48 (talk) 04:59, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Not at all. Just being aware there have ever been countries called Paraguay or Bhutan or Togo, not to mention having even a vague idea of what their flags are or were, not to mention editing Wikipedia with serious intent, puts you in the nerd category these days. I remember the days when every second kid was into flags and stamps and coins and stuff like that, and knew about Trieste and Danzig and Fiume and Port Arthur and all the rest; they were golden days, philatelonumismatovexillonerdologically speaking.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:19, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

These days the kids collect friends. HiLo48 (talk) 22:38, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

I was a total geography nerd when I was a kid. I could name the capital of any country, recognize the shape of the country (except for small island nations, which all look like little circles), and recognize the flag of any country. I could probably still do those things for any country whose capital, shape, and flag haven't changed since 1970, but other countries? Fuhgeddaboutit. Angr (talk) 08:26, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

OK, thanks everyone, looks like I have my answers, either "interleaved" or "quincuncial". StuRat (talk) 15:33, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Resolved

Signing and talking

Could a bilingual person (in sign language and whatever spoken language), sign and speak at the same time? I have only seen it on films, but I know that signs do not reflect the local spoken language (for example, American Sign Language is not the equivalent of English in signs), so, it must be quite difficult to speak and sign at the same time. 88.8.75.198 (talk) 19:34, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

You are correct that American Sign Language is not the same as Signed English. For examples of bilingual people, perhaps a good source might be YouTube. BrainyBabe (talk) 19:39, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Right, but could they do that spontaneously? When people say they are not the same, I have in mind that the grammatical structure is as far as a foreign language. So, it looks like it's incredible difficult, so difficult as writing Chinese while speaking in English (for a bilingual person in both). 88.8.75.198 (talk) 19:50, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I studied Japanese Sign Language in Japan (because I had some hearing-impaired kids in my class I was teaching), and there appear to be two types. There is one for people who still think in Japanese (i.e. learners), and one for those fully born and brought up with only sign language as a base. The former is based entirely on the structure of spoken Japanese itself, whilst the latter seems to be a more simplified (and therefore efficient) version. Of course, this is not so clear-cut, so there are combinations in between. The word order also seemed to be much more free (as is the word order in spoken Japanese itself), as in, I could use either Japanese word order or English word order (to a certain extant - the verb still came at the end), and the meaning would still be understood (in most cases). Speaking at the same time (because I had to interpret for the other kids and teachers), therefore, was not a problem, but this is JSL. I don't know ASL or BSL, but I doubt there is much difference. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:17, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

The JSL article covers this. As in several other countries, there are two (here three) very different languages, JSL and Manually Signed Japanese. It appears from that article that JSL may owe more to Japanese than ASL and BSL do to English, but I suspect that, like them, it is a separate language with a radically different grammar. --ColinFine (talk) 16:24, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Signing while speaking is possible. I've seen it done (in English and ASL). I'm sure it's difficult, but most things involving a second language are, and people still manage it. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:50, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

In the case of ASL, when people sign and speak simultaneously, their ASL tends to approximate English. It's actually not very difficult if you allow yourself to modify your signing to accommodate English, or if you sign pidgin ASL to begin with and thus already approximate English, as a lot of native English speakers do. I imagine it would be much more difficult to sign pure, unaccommodating ASL while speaking English. (It would be interesting to see how this compares with deaf native signers who can speak English, and with hearing children raised by deaf parents.) As for your Chinese example, I've spoken English while reading French (that is, translating while reading), and I think that's more difficult, because with simultaneous sign and speech, both are produced directly from the same thoughts, and no translation is involved. Plus they're your thoughts, and you're less likely to think something you don't know how to say. Sign languages are like creoles, in that there is a "pure" form and a whole series of compromise forms that are closer to the prestige language. I imagine that reading and speaking would be easier if you were reading in French and speaking Haitian creole, because you could adjust your creole to more closely match your input, and that's closer to the situation with English and ASL. — kwami (talk) 22:37, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Joyo kanji

Do native Japanese speakers reliably know whether or not a given kanji is on the Joyo list (e.g. because they remember from school)? I mean, I'm sure everyone knows that all the very common kanji will be on the list, and that very obscure kanji (that maybe they don't even recognise) won't be, but is there a grey area in between where people would be unsure and have to look it up? 86.181.202.9 (talk) 23:51, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I never give thought about joyo kanji. I just use kanji I want to use. It means nothing to most people that whether or not a given kanji is on the Joyo list. Though joyo kanji is important to civil servants and people in media, especially for reporters/writers in news paper companies and telop/tickers writers in TV companies, as they have to use joyo kanji only, fiction and nonfiction writers do not pay attention to joyo kanji at all. Oda Mari (talk) 18:37, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

I understand from your reply that these people do not care whether they are using Joyo kanji. Do you mean also that they don't even know whether they are using Joyo kanji? 86.171.174.74 (talk) 19:48, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Joyo kanji are the ones you learn in school. But while you're at school, you'll also pick up non-joyo kanji. I doubt many people can remember which is which, unless they have to keep track of them for their job. Some are obviously standard, because they're used all over the place. Others are obviously rare: the kanji in the name of your town, say, which you hardly ever see anywhere else. But I suspect some cases would be difficult to judge, and most people have no reason to even try. — kwami (talk) 22:05, 1 January 2012 (UTC)