Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 February 5

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 5

Judeo-Yemenite

This is a bit of an odd question... but then again, that's what the RD is for! So, I'm working on a school project and I have a song that I've come across in Judeo-Yemenite - that is, the dialect of Yemeni Arabic spoken by the Temani Jews. However, it's written in Hebrew letters (not Arabic) without vowels, but translated into Hebrew. This means that a) I can't look it up in a dictionary and b) I can't transliterate it. I can guess at the transliteration, but here's my question. Does anyone know Arabic well enough that if I give you my attempt at transliterating the song and my translation of the Hebrew translation you could figure out how the original should be vocalized? Or, does anyone see another way around this? I figured I'd ask here before asking random Arabic speakers. Thanks so much! СПУТНИК^{CCC P} 00:47, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I can't help you with the translation, but I can say your idea is the best course of action. If you translate the song (or have a translation), and supply the transliteration of the Arabic from the Hebrew letters, it should be fairly easy for an Arabic speaker to vocalize it for you, after all they are used to seeing everything written without vowels. However, I must point out, that if this is in Judaeo-Yemenite, it is likely that the vowels will be different from standard arabic. Practically every major dialect of arabic deviates from the standard regarding the vowels, vis-a-vis quality, length, ommission/addition thereof. But best of luck, anyway.--KageTora (talk) 10:38, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

There was a well-developed medieval tradition of Jews writing the more or less standard Classical version of the Arabic language with the Hebrew alphabet according to fairly strict alphabet correspondences (i.e. Arabic ع always as Hebrew ע , Arabic ح always as Hebrew ח etc.), and furthermore, transcribing Arabic letters differentiated by diacritic dots with corresponding dots over the Hebrew letters (so Arabic ظ would be written by ט with a dot over it). Specialists in medieval Arabic have no difficulty in reading Hebrew-alphabet texts written in this way. However, when it comes to a modern colloquial dialect of Arabic written in an ad-hoc manner in the Hebrew alphabet, without special diacritics, and given that there's no real established way of writing Arabic dialects even in Arabic script, you would probably really have to know the language to make much headway... AnonMoos (talk) 23:20, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

English language [lessons for Arabic speaker]

hi evry one ... iam from asia ... and i'am willing to learn english ,,, I dont know how to start ,,, and i need a web site that can help me with it. and some sort of practice ,,, thank you ,,? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.173.218.112 (talk) 10:08, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

The best way is probably to find a site in your language, and we don't know what that is unless you tell us! :) Also, this should probably be moved to the language desk, but I'm not quite sure how to move properly, so I leave that up to someone else. -- Aeluwas (talk) 10:18, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

my native language is arabic ... thank you for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.249.41.11 (talk) 10:56, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science" --Milkbreath (talk) 11:30, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Not to spam...and this site is oriented towards French students of English...but you can try www.anglaisfacile.com.. It's a free site.

Tons and tons of exercises here:http://a4esl.org/

Rhinoracer (talk) 12:50, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

The OP would appear to be from Jordan, so I don't know what value a site in French might be. A quick search of 'online English course for Arabic speakers' doesn't turn anything up. However, for (apparently) free language exchange with native English speakers learning Arabic, the OP may want to go to this website. Good luck in your studies!--KageTora (talk) 13:56, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Here is a web site that will help you learn English. Marco polo (talk) 14:28, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

If your English is good enough to post here, and to understand our answers, then your level is high enough to benefit from the BBC's site for learners here. Have a good dictionary to hand and learn how to use it. For reading practice, use the Simple English Wikipedia. Good luck! BrainyBabe (talk) 15:34, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Arabic for "the sublime"

I wonder if there's anyone who might know, or be able to find out, what the best or most common Arabic translation for "the sublime" might be, as it is used in, for example, Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Immanuel Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Critique of Judgement. My best guesses would be something like عَلَّى and/or جَلَال, but I'd like to make sure.

Thanks for any help you might be able to give. Cheers. —Saposcat (talk) 12:04, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I got out my trusty الدّاليل قاموس انجليزي عربي

Hopefully this will give you some colorful expressions that you won't find on the Internet...

For "sublime", (adjectival form)

سَامٍ جَلِيل رَفِيع

and for "sublimity" (nounal form),

سُمُوٌُ جَلاَلَةٌ رِفْعَةٌ

Caution should be used that as such words can be, according to context, reserved for the divine.

Hope this helps, Nimur (talk) 15:18, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

This biographical sketch translates Burke's book as تحقيق فلسفي في منشأ أفكارنا عن السمو والجمال. Hope it helps a little.--K.C. Tang (talk) 17:10, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

As Nimur says, جلیل and جلال , adjective and noun respectively, are the best equivalents to the sublime . --Omidinist (talk) 05:47, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

relationship between sanskrit and hindi

Hi, I've checked the ref desk archives, and there are a lot of similar questions to this one, but I'm looking for a bit more clarification. How close are Sanskrit and Hindi in terms of grammar, vocabulary, historical relationship and mutual intelligibility? Is the Latin/ Italian analogy reasonable, or would we have to go, say, to Latin/ French, or even further like Latin/ English? I'm considering learning Sanskrit one day, so I guess I'm effectively asking how "dead" the language is. It's been emotional (talk) 17:03, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

See Sanskrit, especially Sanskrit#Sanskrit's usage in modern times.

-- Wavelength (talk) 21:48, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on Sanskrit or Hindi, but as far as I know the relationship is best compared to that between Classical Latin and Italian. Unlike French, Italian is in a direct line with the Vulgar Latin without interference from any non-Latin substrate language or other seriously distorting influence. Vulgar Latin ("Latin of the people") was actually spoken in the streets while Classical Latin was the artificial standard cultivated in literature, political discourse, and by the elite generally. That's how it was with Sanskrit also. Though the details and motivation are disputed, the very word Sanskrit appears to mean "cultivated", "perfected", "confected", or "artificial". A Prakrit language, analogous to Vulgar Latin, is best taken as the true source of Hindi.

All that said, Italian (along with other European languages) has always turned to Classical Latin as a treasury from which to make new words. Hindi, along with other Indian and other South and South-East Asian languages (including even Indonesian), has had that same relationship with Sanskrit. Both Italian and Hindi have, however, borrowed from many sources.

Sanskrit is probably at least as "alive" as Classical Latin is: both are hugely important culturally in their respective spheres. There is a Latin Wikipedia, and there is active cultivation of Sanskrit in India. A few people actually speak it in everyday life. Both are, of course, core languages for major world religions.

Some specialist may well correct a detail or two here, and supplement with more specifics; but I think you'll find that's how things are in general terms. Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word deals well with questions like this one. I recommend it.

–_⊥^{¡ɐɔıʇǝo}Noetica!^T– 22:53, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Classical Sanskrit is basically the state of the language as standardized by Panini almost 2500 years ago (which was not really a fully colloquial vernacular even then), so it's linguistically somewhat remote from modern Indic languages, which are separated from it by about 3 or 4 cycles of language standardization, due to previous written languages becoming too remote from ordinary everyday speech (Pali, prakrits, apabhramsas, and then modern languages). As one simple comparison, most Hindi nouns have 2 or 3 distinct number/case forms, while a Sanskrit noun would typically have over 15. That said, there is much borrowing of Sanskrit vocabulary into Hindi, and many of the same sounds which are difficult for English speakers are found in both languages (aspirates, retroflexes, etc.). The overall mutual intelligibility is probably less than Latin and Italian (though definitely greater than Latin and English). AnonMoos (talk) 22:54, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Hindi, in relation to Sanskrit, is really not analogous to Italian, which developed in a relatively (but not completely) direct line from Vulgar Latin. Hindi has a strong component of Persian vocabulary, because under the Mughal Empire, Persian represented a superstrate. French might be the better analogy among the Romance languages after all, due to the substantial Germanic influence on that language. However, as AnonMoos has pointed out, all of the Romance languages have a closer organic relationship to Classical Latin than Hindi has to Classical Sanskrit. Classical Latin was formalized about 2,050 years ago on the basis of the actual spoken language of maybe only 50 years earlier. So the Romance languages and Classical Latin diverged from common ancestor only about 2,100 years ago. By contrast, Sanskrit was formalized about 2,500 years ago on the basis of a language actually spoken nearly 1,000 years earlier. So Hindi and Sanskrit diverged from a common ancestor 3,500 years ago, almost twice as long ago as the Romance languages. As a consequence, Hindi and other Indic languages are more remote from Sanskrit (apart from direct borrowings) than the Romance languages are from Latin. Since we have no record of European languages as ancient as Sanskrit with surviving descendants, there is no close analogy to be made to European languages. Marco polo (talk) 00:19, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Nice! I think that is pretty well argued, MP. We agree on the general model, but achieve a different result when we apply the principles it incorporates. I had neglected the significant effects of Persian, which do tend to make French a better analogue. I am not convinced concerning the time differences, since the rates and kinds of change are likely to have differed also. Compare the relative similarity of Modern Icelandic and Old Norse, next to the stark divergence between, say, Anglo-Saxon and Modern English.

I am also not entirely convinced concerning the formalisation of Classical Latin being restricted to taking earlier spoken language as a model. Weren't there always purely literary conventions that it incorporated, and wasn't there a good deal of pure artifice involved? Same for the Paninian standardisation of a kind of Vedic, I had thought.

It's all an approximate matter anyway. Why should we expect to find a close isomorphism between the histories of Indic and Romance? Fun though; and useful enough.

–_⊥^{¡ɐɔıʇǝo}Noetica!^T– 01:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

The conservativism of Icelandic is partly an illusion, since the basic stability of the orthography masks a number of significant sound changes which have occurred over the centuries. Anyway, classical Paninian Sanskrit is not really the language of 1500 B.C.; if anything is the language of 1500 B.C., it's Rig Veda Sanksrit. AnonMoos (talk) 02:58, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Sanskrit is alive (not dead); Sanskrit is a living language.

Thank you Wavelength. I didn't check whether there was a Sanskrit Wikipedia, though I suspected there might be. (So much work you put into these things! Too much, do you think?)

–_⊥^{¡ɐɔıʇǝo}Noetica!^T– 06:25, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

(Part 1) You are welcome, Noetica, even though my comment referring to Australia was addressed to the original poster, It's been emotional, who, like you, inhabits the same continent. (Part 2) I am not certain of whether your question is rhetorical, but I decided that this was something worth pursuing, and the ideas kept coming to me. Sometimes, in my comments on this page, I have explained how I found some information, showing how easy it was, and helping others to follow the same methods. I did Google searches for "sanskrit radio", "sanskrit newspaper", "sanskrit google", "sanskrit lessons", and "sanskrit australia". My Google search for "sanskrit bible" did not yield any results which I deemed good enough to include. (Part 3) Unfortunately, another editor, AnonMoos, has compressed some of my comments, making them more difficult to read, whereas I have been careful to avoid (a) splitting a link over two lines or (b) splitting my signature and timestamp over two lines.

-- Wavelength (talk) 16:23, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, your list of links took up a large amount of vertical space without containing any actual commentary or discussion on the questions raised (which is the real main purpose of these Ref Desks in the first place). If you can figure out a way to reformat your linkfarm more clearly without presenting it as 20 different paragraphs, all separated by double spacing, then by all means do so... AnonMoos (talk) 17:12, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Gee whiz, rather good as always. Thanks folks, It's been emotional (talk) 20:22, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Wavelength, I think this is another occasion for the use of navboxes (perhaps with drastic reduction in fontsize also), so that vertical space, understandably prized by AnonMoos, can be conserved. That would improve readability of the section and of the whole page. I think we should all use navboxes far more often.

I like the "linkfarms" you make a habit of providing, but I worry about the amount of time they must take you to produce. At least we should ensure that they are well labelled for retrieval from the archives. This can be done well by starting a new subsection – salient on the present version of the page, and in archives. So why why not adopt a compound solution? See below. The only difficulty I can foresee is that people will post contributions at the end of the new subsection, rather than in the main section where they belong. There might be ways around that, but I can't think of any that are as simple as we'd like. This should be taken up in Talk, along with the general matters of navigability and of labelling and structure that are friendly for archiving.

–_⊥^{¡ɐɔıʇǝo}Noetica!^T– 23:16, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Sample of a subsection with a navbox

[See discussion above.–_⊥^{¡ɐɔıʇǝo}Noetica!^T– 23:16, 7 February 2009 (UTC)]

Noetica, thank you for your advice. I have applied a navigation template to a consecutive set of my past comments. An earlier comment is not included because it is immediately followed by comments from other editors. -- Wavelength (talk) 04:16, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

I diversified the keywords, for search engine optimization.

-- Wavelength (talk) 05:20, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

I added links to a tutor web page, 6 online dictionaries, an entirely Sanskrit website, and a list of Sanskrit-speaking Wikipedians. -- Wavelength (talk) 21:57, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Canadian accent on the word sorry

What is the merger going on when Canadians say sorry like sore-ry, while Americans say it like saw-ry —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.123.216.47 (talk) 21:58, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm from Detroit and don't say it either way. Mine rhymes with starry. StuRat (talk) 22:01, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm initially from Brooklyn, N.Y.C. and pronounce it like StuRat does. Same goes for other words with the [or] cluster (AHrange, fAHreign, AHregon, FlAHrida...). I didn't make the switch to the "ore" pronunciation when I relocated to Southern California at age seven, though my four-year-brother (now a longtime resident of "OREegun") did. -- Deborahjay (talk) 17:03, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry apparently is influenced by sorrow (cf. borrow, tomorrow). Something at North American English regional phonology#General_American. AnonMoos (talk) 22:35, 5 February 2009 (UTC)