Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 September 28

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September 28

Misspelling one word in Urdu

This news story is about an eight-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan, who erroneously misspelt one word in an Urdu exam when answering a question about Muhammed. According to the story, she wrote laanat when she should have written naat, or vice versa (the article isn't clear on that), and according to the article, all that caused the misspelling was putting one dot in the wrong place. Because of this, she was scolded, beaten and expelled, and even her mother was switched to work at a different hospital than previously. I don't understand Urdu, so what do these words mean and how are they written in Urdu? JIP | Talk 16:53, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Tangential: this reminds me of the Death of Lydia Schatz, see [1] -- Obsidi♠n Soul 17:02, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

"Laa" could be the Arab negative, but that would be a ligature, not a dot... AnonMoos (talk) 19:44, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I was going to say because la means "not" in Arabic. Should have just beheaded her there, only having half a soul at most, what. μηδείς (talk) 23:06, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Googling {faryal bhatti misspell} produces plenty of publications, although many of them seem to be just copies of one another. Some translate naat as "hymn" and others translate it as "poem of praise"; the other word is given everywhere as meaning "curse", but is sometimes cited as laanat and sometimes as lanaat. Urdu is an Indo-European language and is genetically unrelated to Arabic; it does indeed use a modification of the Arabic writing system and has been borrowing Arabic vocabulary heavily, but I don't think this could have affected something as basic within the Urdu language as its negation. --Theurgist (talk) 23:13, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

I assumed it could be borrowed with fixed phrases and negative-prefixed words (like لاسلكي "wireless"), just as the Greek negative prefix "a(n)-" has been borrowed into English without replacing English "not". Anyway, if it means "cursed", it could come from Arabic root ل ع ن without any connection to negative lā... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:32, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Putting curse into Google Translate produces لعنت laʿanat in Urdu. Then googling لعنت plus the girl's names yields a few hits, like this one, which give the second word as نعت naʿat. In the above-cited news stories, they have omitted the ʿayn in the romanisations, which has made it ambiguous whether the instances of "aa" represent long ā's or combinations of two different short vowels separated by ʿayn (aʿa) or hamza (aʾa). The presence of a relation between لعنت laʿanat and the root ل ع ن l-ʿ-n is, I think, obvious. --Theurgist (talk) 00:47, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

لعنت (la'nat) means curse, but نعت (na'at) means praise. I don't think the two words have a common root or a lexical interrelationship. A little semblance in pronunciation has caused the fuss. Omidinist (talk) 04:59, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Urdu really doesn't preserve Arabic phonological distinctions; once I was baffled by a probable Urdu speaker who wrote of "Tauz" for what in Wikipedia transcription of Arabic is Ta'awwudh... AnonMoos (talk) 10:30, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

See the tables at Urdu alphabet#Alphabet and de:Urdu#Alphabet to track the dissimilarities between the Urdu and Arabic phonologies. The pronunciation of ḏāl, which represents the voiced dental fricative /ð/ in Modern Standard Arabic and is there in taʿawwuḏ, is realised as /z/ in Urdu. There are a few more Urdu letters that write different sounds than they do in Arabic, as well as a few that have been added supplementarily to stand for Urdu sounds not found in Arabic, e.g. /ʒ/ or retroflex consonants. See also Hindi-Urdu phonology. --Theurgist (talk) 14:51, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

So the girl made the mistake of drawing a continuous vertical line when she should have only drawn a stub and put a dot over it. This changed the whole meaning of the word to its opposite. What I find amazing about this was that the girl was punished so severely. JIP | Talk 16:57, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

This same culture rioted over a few cartoons some Danish guy drew too, so you really shouldn't be all that surprised. Googlemeister (talk) 18:30, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

This might be an unsuitable comment, but I tend to agree with the commentators to the news story that she was only persecuted because she is a Christian. I have thought of a theory that one of her classmates changed the "dot over stub" thing to a "continuous line" thing to get an excuse to accuse her of blasphemy. Actually, this reminds me of something I read from a Swedish website: var med i det glada Konsumsgänget means "be a part of the happy Konsum (a Swedish supermarket chain) gang". Draw two dots over the "o" in "Konsumsgänget" and it becomes var med i det glada Könsumsgänget, meaning "be a part in the happy sexual intercourse". JIP | Talk 20:13, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

For those who can't read the Arabic alphabet, here is what caused the whole fuss (assuming the words in this source are the correct ones).

Instead of نعت, the girl wrote لعنت.

• blue = initial or medial lām
• orange = medial ʿayn
• red = initial or medial nūn
• green = final or isolated tāʾ

As the Danish newspaper cartoons were mentioned, we have a (good) article on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, which is (until midnight UTC) linked form Portal:Islam. --Theurgist (talk) 14:12, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure you got the words in the right order? It appears that she wrote la'anat (with the vertical line thingy) when she should have written na'at (without the vertical line thingy), not the other way around. Anyway, this is beyond ridiculous. She didn't even know she was using the wrong word, it's not like she was intentionally trying to defame Islam. And anyway, if the word la'anat is so horrendous that it must never be written anywhere, why does it even exist? JIP | Talk 14:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

You're right, I had got the words in the wrong order, corrected now. As for why the word exists, I think this could be satisfactorily answered by someone who is better at theoretical and historical linguistics than I am, but I believe a good starting point could be taboo deformation (which redirects to euphemism; notice the "Etymology" section, and see also profanity). In general, words can shift, extend, or shrink their meanings as a language develops and as they are borrowed form one language to another, and only become tabooed at some point of their existence.

Notice also that the word in question was there in a religious context regarding the prophet Muhammad; I believe there could be plenty of words to be seen as grossly unsuitable for such a context, even if they're not so "horrendous" by themselves otherwise. --Theurgist (talk) 16:12, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

JIP, "la'ana" is a very useful word in the phrase "لعنهم الل‍ه" "may God curse them" (the pronoun of course can be changed). I see that all the time in Arabic chronicles about the crusades, for example. Adam Bishop (talk) 17:34, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Temperatures in Japanese

Hi, if a temperature change (weather) is described as ５度 in a modern Japanese text, is Celsius to be assumed? 86.179.118.99 (talk) 22:21, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't know anything about Japanese customs in this area, but I do know that only three countries in the world, the USA, Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia are left officially using non-metric measurement systems today. (The Brits are a bit mixed up, but do use Celsius comfortably.) So yes, assume Celsius. HiLo48 (talk) 22:49, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

It's Celsius. See [2] and [3]. Fahrenheit is described as ℉ or 華氏 like this. Oda Mari (talk) 06:34, 29 September 2011 (UTC)