Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 October 13

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October 13

Gived

Listening to my recording of the The Kings' Singers performing "Annie Laurie", I was once again struck by phrase, "it was there that Annie Laurie gived me her promise true". What can you tell me about this regular past tense of give? Is it strictly poetic, or was/is this a common substitute for "gave" in Scottish English or any other dialect? if it's a typical feature of, say, Scottish English, are there other typically irregular verbs that they regularize? LadyofShalott 04:04, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

The lack of ablaut is obviously not a metrical device. μηδείς (talk) 04:38, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, "gived" was used occasionally in Middle English and is still retained in some Northern English dialects, including Scottish, but "gied" is much more common in Scots. It is difficult to be sure whether some literary usages are intended to represent dialect or just uneducated speech. Dbfirs 06:49, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Would gived be one syllable or two? --Trovatore (talk) 06:52, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

As this is the language desk, I should perhaps point out the that the group is The King's Singers - named after King's College, Cambridge, which is in turn named after a single king. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 09:13, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Our article on Annie Laurie has "gi'ed". I suspect that the King's Singers gave it a wee tweak to "gived", one syllable, just to make the lyric more comprehensible to listeners outside Scotland. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:47, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

True that, Andrew - it was a typo that I placed the apostrophe incorrectly. It is sung with one syllable (and I saw that the article said gi'ed, but in that recording at least, they did pronounce the v). LadyofShalott 09:50, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Need help contacting scholar -- must speak French

I am trying to contact Heather Stoddard, a specialist in Tibetan Studies who works at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. I have tried contacting her through the publisher of her book, but nothing has come of this. I would have tried to contact her through the Institute's webpage, but I don't know French. Prof. Stoddard does speak English, so I only need someone to find her contact information on the site. If it can't be found easily, hopefully whoever agrees to help can contact the head of the appropriate department. This is regarding some of my research that she may find interesting. Thanks. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 06:55, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

<heather.stoddardinalco.fr> - Nunh-huh 07:00, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for the quick turn around. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 07:05, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Phrase on the gates of a Chinese Pure Land Buddhist temple

I'd be grateful if someone could give me a meaningful interpretation of the following phrase from either side of a Pure Land Buddhism temple gate in Changchun, China: 登清凉地入解脱门. The first four characters were on the right, the second four on the left of the main doorway, if that is significant at all (I suspect not). I can translate it literally, but am curious if there is a more substantial meaning here... or if it is referencing a well-known sutra, etc. Thank you. The Masked Booby (talk) 07:54, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I showed it to my Chinese-speaking spouse without any context -- immediately recognized it as a Buddhist phrase, saying it has a theological meaning that's difficult to translate. It is actually 2 phrases. The second 4 characters signify something like discarding your burdens. Don't know about the first 4. ~Amatulić (talk) 20:14, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Is Yiddish German?

Is it right to say that Yiddish is German? In the same sense that we could say a German dialect is German? Quest09 (talk) 13:39, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Have you read the article on the adage "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"? Gabbe (talk) 13:45, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Another way of defining languages versus dialects is the criterion of mutual intelligibility. A speaker of standard German can make sense of many German dialects (but maybe not Swiss German) after a short period of adjustment. I would say that this is also true of most of the basic vocabulary of Yiddish. A speaker of standard German can probably get the gist of Yiddish speech. However (and this is a big however), a substantial part of the Yiddish vocabulary is not Germanic at all. It is Hebrew or Slavic. Most other German dialects lack this external element. (Exceptions would be dialects such as Swiss German, Alsatian, or Luxembourgish, which have a large vocabulary derived from French, and which are often considered separate languages as a consequence.) Because of this non-Germanic vocabulary, while a speaker of standard German could make out much of a Yiddish utterance, the German speaker would be left scratching his or her head at some of the expressions used. For this reason, mutual intelligibility would be lower than for many German dialects. So, if we consider Swiss German or Luxembourgish a separate language on the basis of limited mutual intelligibility (and I think we should), we should consider Yiddish a separate language as well. Marco polo (talk) 14:32, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Just to emphasise the "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" idea, the Nazis even classified English as a Low German dialect. -- Q Chris (talk) 14:56, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

That was linguistic nonsense -- English actually belongs to the "Anglo-Frisian" or "Ingvaeonic" grouping of West Germanic, which is outside the Low German / High German continuum... AnonMoos (talk) 16:51, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, what did you expect from those boys but nonsense? It's typical of their "science." --Orange Mike | Talk 17:42, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it is correct to call Yiddish a dialect of German, specifically one of the High German languages. It is about as different from standard German as Scots is from standard English. μηδείς (talk) 15:48, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

The linguist Theo Vennemann writes "English is a substratally Celticized, superstratally Romanized Low German dialect." [1]. To get back to the original question: a linguist would not call Yiddish (or Dutch or Luxemburgish) a German dialect. A simple man in the street, coming into contact with Yiddish speakers, would perhaps call it a German dialect, noting only the similarities, not the differences. I heard a witness in the TV saying: "In WW II in Poland our driver was speaking Yiddish, as a young boy I did not know that this was not German". --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 15:59, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

You'll be hard put to find any Celtic substratum influence in English beyond some loanwords and perhaps the influence Tolkien [2] ascribes to Welsh on the Old English to be verb. But to say linguists would not call Yiddish a High Germanic dialect is simply an absurd assertion. The conflation of the Low Germanic Dutch with the High Germanic Yiddish and Luxemburgish is also confused.μηδείς (talk) 17:19, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Vennemann is well known as a proponent of the argument that English has a significant Celtic substrate; he's also well known as a proponent of the argument that Celtic has a significant Afro-Asiatic substrate, though, so one doesn't have to take his assertions too seriously. Angr (talk) 17:24, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Technically speaking, Yiddish is/was originally Jews writing their host country's language in the square script. It later came to mean a language that combined elements of Hebrew, German, and various other languages. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | ^{Say Shalom!} 15 Tishrei 5772 16:10, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

---

Quest09 -- It's indisputable that Yiddish is a Germanic language, belonging to somewhat the same sub-branch as German. However, Yiddish speakers do not judge whether or not a sentence is correct Yiddish based on whether it conforms with German constructions -- the standard of Yiddish correctness is completely different and independent from the standard of German correctness, and in that sense Yiddish is a language with strong written literary use independent from German (unlike any of the German dialects other than Dutch). As far as mutual comprehensibility goes, there would be fairly good mutual understanding of basic common vocabulary -- but as soon as Yiddish speakers started to use somewhat slangy vocabulary, or began a discussion of Jewish customs and concepts, the ability of German speakers to understand Yiddish would decline dramatically... AnonMoos (talk) 16:47, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Yiddish has borrowed words not only from Romance, Slavic, and Hebrew, but also from German, i.e. some German-looking Yiddish words were not inherited from Middle High German but simply borrowed from Modern High German in and after the Enlightenment era. The word for language, shprakh, for example, is not a native Yiddish word, but is a loanword from German Sprache. (If it were native it would be *shprokh.) Such loanwords "artificially" increase the German-lookingness of Yiddish. Angr (talk) 17:04, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I recall driving near Brumfiss with my father, flipping through the radio, and finding a broadcast with a German speaker with a very heavy NYC accent. "Was hat er gesagt?!?" asked my father. After a few moments I smacked my forehead and said, "Oh, it's Yiddish!"

One interesting thing about Yiddish is its use or mir rather than wir for the 1st pers pl. I read an account that said this was a Slavic adstratum influence. But aren't there other High Germanic dialects that use the mir form? μηδείς (talk) 20:17, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Moll, mir mached's au. (Yes indeed, we do it too.) ---Sluzzelin talk 20:43, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Gleich wie ich gedacht hatte. Aber was eigentlich bedeutet "Moll"? (BTW, funny the only time I ever really understood spoken German in Europe was in Luzern).μηδείς (talk) 21:19, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

"moll" = "doch", used as an emphatic particle here, stressing contrast/certainty. "mir", or better perhaps "mer" can also be heard colloquially in contractions such as "hammer" for "haben wir" and "sammer"/"simmer" for "sind wir". Famously in the song "Zehne der Brüder sammer gewesen, hammer gehandelt mit Wein ..." (one of the and then there were none-type songs. I mean outside my dialect now. Bavarians too say "mir san" for "wir sind". ---Sluzzelin talk 23:42, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

It's definitely no Slavic adstratum. It's just plain regular High German. You can see a map of this feature in the Digital Wenker Atlas here (you need a Java applet or plugin to view it). In the west the border between predominantly initial 'w' and 'm' is almost identical to the border between Low German and High German. Low German only knows 'w', High German is predominantly 'm' but with occasional 'w' scattered over all High German areas. I don't know whether this coexistance of 'w' and 'm' is an old feature or a recent influence from Standard German.

Standard German got the 'w' from the eastern dialects close to the Low German border that were the base of Luther's bible. Yiddish originated from southern Germany, so the 'm' is natural. --::Slomox:: >< 09:07, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Is that right that Yiddish is "about as different from standard German as Scots is from standard English"? I thought Yiddish was substantially more different. 86.181.173.100 (talk) 00:03, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

That sounds about right. Scots is a language English speakers have no difficulty understanding as long as the vocabulary is cognate, but once the unfamiliar lexical items start popping up, you can get lost. In that sense, perhaps Yiddish is to German as Yeshivish is to English. I imagine that a Yeshivish sentence (borrowed from our article) like "He caused a lot of nezek, but l'basoif was moideh b'miktzas and claimed he was shoigeg" is about as comprehensible to an English speaker as its Yiddish translation would be to a German speaker. Angr (talk) 05:41, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

The difference between language and dialect will always be contentious... Our article dialect offers:

Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:

because they have no standard or codified form,

because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,

because they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech)

or because they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

The last bit explains the Nazis' nonsense about all Germanic languages being dialects. Nowadays surely the only criterion of these which applies to Yiddish is the second one? And if we apply this across the board then we make a fair amount of assumptions about languages which happen to be in the same family (Sami is a dialect of Finnish? Rusyn of Ukrainian?) - filelakeshoe 07:55, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

In no valid linguistic sense is Saami language a dialect of Finnish, and the Rusyn language is not a dialect of Ukranian as in descended from an earlier version of Ukranian, but a dialect of Slavic intermediate between Polish, Slovak and Ukranian, It stands on the border between East and West Slavic. μηδείς (talk) 17:24, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes I'm very aware of that, I was making a point about denying a language is a language for not having a state of its own. - filelakeshoe 09:37, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, you would have to be being arbitrarily pointy to deny that a literary standard like Yiddish is not a language. μηδείς (talk) 16:06, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Those distinctions in the sense of dialect are ones laymen make. In linguistics to say A is a dialect of B is to say nothing more than that A is a variety of B. In that case, Proto-Germanic is a Dialect of Proto-Indo-European, English is a dialect of the West Germanic languages, and Yiddish is a dilaect of the High Germanic languages, that group, like English, being a dialect of West Germanic. And if the OP is not a German or Yiddish speaker, he can rest comfortable in the comparison that Yiddish, is on the order of as different from standard German as Scots is from standard English.μηδείς (talk) 17:18, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Sluzzelin and Slomox for your very interesting answers. As to the IP OP, for the Scots/Standard English analogy, Angr's comments on the vocabulary are quite correct. Scots does have plenty of vocabulary not known in standard English, but things like wee bairns are not quite so foreign to English speakers (weeny borns) as the outright Semiticisms of Yiddish are to standard German speakers when they hear it. My experience as a Mediocre German speaker, has always been, upon hearing Yiddish, to think it is German, to process it as if it were standard German spoken by someone with a dialectical accent, until I hear the Hebrew words. This is quite different from my experience with Portuguese. As a fluent Spanish speaker, I can read Portuguese without effort. But I have never heard a full sentence of Portuguese that didn't strike me as obviously not Spanish. It is also different entirely from my attempts to eavesdrop on natives in Bavaria and Switzerland speaking their dialects. I can usually figure out Portuguese by pretending it is drunken Frenchman attempting Spanish. I find spoken Bavarian and especially Swiss dialects entirely incomprehensible. μηδείς (talk) 03:27, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think anyone outside of Swiss German speakers can understand Schweizerdeutsch. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | ^{Say Shalom!} 17 Tishrei 5772 20:15, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

On a tangent: There has been a major reverse influence from Yiddish to specific German dialects. I live in Vienna, a city which had a significant Jewish community prior to the Third Reich. There are hundreds of Yiddish words (some Germanic, but used in a Yiddish sense, some of Hebrew or Slavic origin) which have been absorbed into the local Viennese vernacular. Most of the time, a user would not even be aware of the fact that a given word has roots in the Yiddish language. Anybody with a working knowledge of German may want to look at this list. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 20:51, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Name for minimum screen size when the rendering of compacted text breaks down

I debated whether to place this here or the computing desk. Anyway, using a mac, my computer screen renders Wikipedia's (or other websites') textual content relative to the size I drag the screen to. I can go huge, or tiny and the page content will squeeze up or widen on the fly, allowing you to read and see all content at any size--to a point. There is a point of making compaction where it breaks down. Instead of squeezing further, the content remains constant and the edge of the window instead moves to cover the content. I know the description may be hard to follow but I think those who know what I mean, will know what I mean, as it were. I wanted to know if there is an actual name for this minimum screen size point when the text no longer compacts. There may very well not be, but I thought I'd ask. I have a good reason for seeking the name, but I would need to tell you a story and make this much lengthier.--108.27.98.230 (talk) 16:17, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

You have much better odds of getting a useful response on the computing desk. Looie496 (talk) 18:49, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

If you're talking about behavior in browsers, this is typically controlled by the CSS properties min-width and min-height, which the web page author applies to the page container element. I don't believe this behavior has a name. It's just a web page styling property. See http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_dim_min-width.asp ~Amatulić (talk) 19:25, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Chinese measure words

I went to Google's language translating site and translated "That is a big mountain." into simplified Chinese and got "这是一座大山。" I turned it around to see what English translation it gave for "座" and got "Seat, base, place, pedestal, stand." But when I switched "mountain" for "hill," or even "seat," "base," "place," "pedestal," or "stand" back in again, the measure word changed to the quite general purpose "个." What are some other things that use the measure word "座"? I've been trying things in Google translate for fun that I thought would be associated with large bases but no luck. 20.137.18.53 (talk) 16:23, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

In studying Japanese years ago, I found no logic or sense to the measure syllables they appended to things. It's just something one learns, like one learns irregular verbs in English. The same situation may be true in Chinese, seeing that both languages share the same traditional alphabet.

I have scant knowledge of Chinese (being married to a Chinese speaker). The measure character applies to the word "a", translated as "one measured" or 一座. "Big mountain" is 大山 of course. One could probably use the generic 一个 as the translation of "a" too, and still be understood.

I suspect this is all a plot so that natives can more easily recognize foreigners. ~Amatulić (talk) 19:40, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

You can find a lot of information in our article Chinese classifier; that article also includes an in-depth discussion of the logic (or lack thereof) behind which classifiers get paired with which nouns. If you're just looking for which classifier a given noun takes, you can check our List of Chinese classifiers or look it up in an online dictionary that gives classifier information, such as http://nciku.com. For a list of words used by a given classifier, you can use the same list of Chinese classifiers or a list such as this one (warning: it's in Chinese only).

Another strategy is to search a text corpus such as http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/advance_search.htm . If you search for a classifier (along with a number of demonstrative, for instance 一座 or 这座) you will find hundreds of examples of that classifier used with nouns in a sentence context. rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:56, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

In itself, 座 means seat, base, pedestals etc, but as a counting word (as in 一座, or "one zuo of"), it does not match well with these senses. To me, 座 connotes something stable, firmly and squarely situated - seated if you will. Thus a mountain is a zuo, and so is a city, a bridge, perhaps a large monumental stele or statue. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 21:08, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Eo Prepositions

Does anyone know where I can find a comprehensive list of Esperanto prepositions and how to use them all? I've done some searching of my own, but it appears that the best Wikipedia has is this basic list of rules and all other sources just list them without explaining their uses. Helpu min, bonvolu! Interchangeable|talk to me 18:29, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

[Apparently you mean Helpu min, mi petas! or Bonvolu helpi min! instead of the construction with two imperatives.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:54, 13 October 2011 (UTC)]

There's this at mylanguages.org. The Esperanto HyperCourse section on prepositions starts here. There's the booklet Anglaj Prepozicioj en Esperanto by J.W. Prent, if English is your native language; it's available from the Libroservo of the UEA. Alberto Mair's Kompleta traktado pri la prepozicioj (veraj kaj ŝajnaj) kaj pri la akuzativo per ekzemploj en Esperanto was published in 1926 in Vienna, so it might be a lot trickier to find. Eugen Wüster's Die Verhältniswörter des Esperanto : zugleich eine allgemeine Funktionslehre der Verhältniswörter seiner Quellsprachen was published in 1924 and reprinted in 1968; good luck with that one, too. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:04, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Orange Mike, that first link is exactly what I did not want. It just explains the meanings without explaining how to use them. I don't want to have to resort to je all the time. The second link looks great, though; I'll check it out sometime. Interchangeable|talk to me 22:42, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

The origin of the name "KODAK"

The name KODAK which the founder Mr. Eastman gave to his company puzzeled many. the explanations for the name given in the Vikipedia is not convincing. My father who idulged in Photography in the begining of the 20th century and used at that time film emultion on glass plates told me that he had a friend. a jew, a proffesional photographer, who knew Mr. Eastman. Upon the discovery of applying film emultion on celluloid that was much thinner then the glass plates, he mentioned the Hebrew words "KO DAK" which means "SO THIN". I have no way to substantiate this. I contacted the Kodak headquarters in 1977 inquiring about the name KODAK. their answer was that there is no explanation for the name in the company official records.

Abraham Mardor [identifying info removed for privacy and to prevent spam]

 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.138.98.5 (talk) 20:01, 13 October 2011 (UTC) 

Our article Eastman Kodak explains the origin of the name. It is apparently somewhat random. Marco polo (talk) 20:18, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I recall reading in a book called "The Serendipity Effect" that the camera was named after the sound it made when a picture was taken - something like "ko-DAK", but I doubt that this is true. Interchangeable|talk to me 22:40, 13 October 2011 (UTC)