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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 February 28

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February 28 edit

English equivalent for the German expression "Sympathieträger" edit

Greetings! I am looking for the "best" English equivalent for the German expression "Sympathieträger" (lit. carrier of sympathy).
It plays an important role in advertising: Using the halo-effect a "vendor" (company, political party, non-profit organization, religious organization) uses the positive feelings which the public (or a special target group) has towards a person (Tiger Woods), group (Jamaika bob sleigh team), animal ([Free] Willy, Hoover the Seal...), a cartoon character (Smokey t. B.) a "thing" (Tin Lizzy, Love Bug) etc. to promote a product / concept / philosophy.
The term is also used in literature and film and there the acting of the Sympathieträger does not always have to be "politically/morally correct". It is the whole picture that counts (Huckleberry Finn, Dr. House, Dexter, etc.). Any help is appreciated! 213.169.161.126 (talk) 12:17, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there is an equivalent, and the best fit will depend on context. Collins has "popular figure". So does dict.cc, along with "sympathetic figure". Beolingus mentions "appealing figure" and "crowd-pleaser" too. My fat PONS has nothing :-(. Animal Sympathieträger are sometimes called flagship species. Is "everybody's darling" frequently used in English? (It is actually used in German). ---Sluzzelin talk 12:39, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I know: One for All is a pretty strange concept, especially if it's used for soccer players, retired actresses, gay comedians, politicians, polar bear babies and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I will look through the terms you have mentioned above and see whether one or several fit to the different types of Sympathieträger we have identified. 213.169.161.126 (talk) 15:34, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
"Icon" comes to mind. Endorsements by celebrities go way back. Ty Cobb used to appear in Coca-Cola ads, and he was the most famous ballplayer in the land. Left out of those ads for some reason was the fact he owned stock in the company. But he was just one of many who endorsed products and services. Obviously whales don't know they're being used to endorse anything. But they do have iconic status. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:05, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Mascot? Woogee (talk) 19:59, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Poster child? Tevildo (talk) 22:21, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Poster Child probably comes the closest of the ideas so far. It kind of conveys the same meaning - a prominent figure with some problem, in the form of a child which would tend to generates sympathy. The one problem is that the term is often used sarcastically. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:23, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

English into IPA transcription? edit

Does anybody know of a web site that transforms your English input (if there are other languages available, even better) into General American's IPA? --Belchman (talk) 16:43, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The closest thing I know of is Dictionary.com, where words are given in both phonetic respelling and IPA. When you look up a word, the phonetic respelling is given as default, but you can click on "Show IPA". +Angr 16:48, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Do you want the dialect of English to be chosen by the website or by the visitor to the website? -- Wavelength (talk) 16:18, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's not IPA, but I run a website which will transform English input in the conventional alphabet into the Shavian alphabet, and handles homonym resolution reasonably well. I think it would be a fairly simple matter to write a mapping from the Shavian alphabet to General American IPA. You can download the database here. Let me know whether this is any help. Marnanel (talk) 16:44, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I should have said: unlike the other options mentioned here, this works on entire phrases, not word by word. That's how the homonym resolution is possible. Marnanel (talk) 18:50, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia Foundation's own dictionary site, Wiktionary, does this for many words; and you can add {{rfp|IPA for General American}} to any entry to request that the pronunciation be added.—msh210℠ 18:19, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

English to Latin edit

How would the word 'strum' be translated into Latin? I've seen it as 'pulsatus' but is there a more specific way when referring to an instrument? Thanks 87.111.102.76 (talk) 17:37, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That verb is used for playing stringed instruments. "Pulsatus" is the past participle, from puslo, pulsare. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:18, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

affect/effect edit

Wouldn't it make sense to spell "affect" and "effect" the same way? The reason I feel that they should be spelled the same is because I don't think any confusion would result from spelling them alike. It seems to me that one always knows from context what meaning is intended and thus no purpose seems to be served by maintaining two different spellings. Bus stop (talk) 18:02, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We'd lose some potential uses. If I had "I effected the change", I can say for certain that I caused it. In this new system, however, the meaning would be considerable more ambiguous. Similarly, the use of "affect" as a noun would be completely undermined. Admittedly, those are both fairly rare cases, but in any case I can't imagine such a change ever occurring. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 18:07, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Languages don't always do what makes sense. If we relied on context alone we would not need most of the trappings that language has picked up over the centuries. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 18:08, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Even if it were decided to make the move to one or the other, I don't know how we would decide which one to choose. Bus stop (talk) 18:18, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Consider "The storm effected the demolition of the church" vs. "The storm affected the demolition of the church". You are unambiguously churchless with the former, but the latter could just mean there's a bunch of demolition experts stranded at the airport because the runway is closed. Karenjc 18:19, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... maybe you're right. I think I stand corrected. Bus stop (talk) 18:22, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
And my personal effects are very different from my personal affects....--Shantavira|feed me 18:59, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I guess I'm still not sure, though, if it's worth the bother. The alternative is for the users of the language to construct their sentences to avoid the greater potential for ambiguity that would result from using only one spelling for all possible meanings of affect and effect. Those are great examples, but doesn't one have to try pretty hard to come up with good examples? Bus stop (talk) 19:17, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, all the above proves is that we'd have to work a bit harder to effect the change in the English language. But we all know that the harder it is to do, the vastly less likely it is to happen. People's inertia would not be overcome, I think. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:24, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Bus stop, once we oopened that flood gate, we'd then have to sanction the interchangeable use of 'their', 'there' and 'they're'; and 'your', 'you're' and 'yore'. Et al. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:48, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If it were a really necessary distinction, wouldn't we pronounce them differently? — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 05:42, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The noun affect is pronounced differently. Whether the verbs "affect" and "effect" are pronounced differently would need some acoustic analysis, personally I think they sound the same. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 05:44, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
They are often pronounced very similarly, and seems to me I read awhile back that the confusion about these two words goes back centuries, even millennia. This came up in a chat with a Spanish-speaking colleague recently, in reference to afectivo (affectionate, loving) vs. efectivo (effective, true... and also "cash" for some reason). This goes back to Latin. I'm not totally sure, but I think there's a good chance that confusion over these words led to the fall of the Roman Empire. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:22, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
They are pronounced differently by careful speakers of UK English, but I agree that the confusion is widespread, even amongst well-educated people. (I stress and lengthen the initial "e" in the verb to effect to draw attention to the distinction, but this is probably non-standard.) Dbfirs 12:56, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta edit

What does the Latin word Obsoleta mean? Does it mean "obsolete"? I know Elaphe means "deerskin". I am doing a life history on the Black Rate Snake for my herpetology class and I was wanting to put it's Latin binomial into context. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 21:16, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think in this context it means "common" or "ordinary". +Angr 21:21, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The OED gives this as its third meaning for 'Obsolete': " 3. Biol. Indistinct; not clearly or sharply marked; hardly perceptible. Also: very imperfectly developed; rudimentary, vestigial, almost or entirely absent". Of course this is defining an English word, not a Latin one; but if biologists were using "obsolete" in this sense in English, it may well be that they used the Latin equivalent in the same way, or thought that the Latin word had that meaning. --ColinFine (talk) 22:46, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
ColinFine is correct. According to Stearn's Botanical Latin, the meanings of obsoletus in scientific usage are "rudimentary, suppressed, scarcely apparent". Deor (talk) 01:27, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It may be worth mentioning that in 2008 a couple of guys named Collins and Taggart renamed this critter Scotophis obsoletus (see the last item on this page). With absolutely no evidence at all, I'll suggest that the resurrected generic name pretty obviously means "dark snake", derived from Greek skotos ("darkness") and ophis ("snake"). Deor (talk) 18:34, 1 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's now called Pantherophis obsoletus. rowley (talk) 14:33, 20 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Zircons edit

What is the etymology of zircon?174.3.99.176 (talk) 22:35, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

From German Zirkon or French zircone < Arabic زرقون (zarqūn) ‘cinnabar, bright red’. (From Wiktionary: [1]) --151.51.1.230 (talk) 22:39, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adalbert of Prague edit

Looking at the article Adalbert of Prague, my attention was caught by the strangeness of its equivalents in some slavic languages. I'm curious about the translation of the name "Adalbert" in the following languages:

To me, these names have absolutely nothing in common to the name Adalbert. Are they really the same exact name ( like George(en)=Jerzy(pl)=Jiří(cz)=Juraj(sk) ) or are something else, like a slavic rendition or a different name with a similar meaning (something like Theophilos=Amadeus=Gottlieb) or something else?--151.51.1.230 (talk) 22:53, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Czech article says that his name (apparently birth name) was Vojtěch, and his confirmation name was Adalbert. It says that in "foreign countries", he is better known under his confirmation name.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 23:04, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(after edit conflict) The question is also more or less answered under Wojciech. (See also wikt:Adalbert for that name's etymology). ---Sluzzelin talk 23:06, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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