Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 February 18

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February 18

Lost Translation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvvfCwzqVhM

In the above clip, she seems to say something like, "Danka dom hangov day gay ot van see," without intonation or inflection of any kind, except a pseudo-creepy raspiness and intensity. She claims she's reading the Chinese characters on his arm. Any idea what she's saying, or what the writers were perhaps trying to say? Black Carrot 05:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The tattoo is a convoluted version of 鷹擊長空 meaning "eagle hits the sky". The actual tattoo reads 鹰击長空, where 長 is the only traditional character. Don't know what she's saying. z ε n  08:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Where can I get the font you used for that? Black Carrot 23:18, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean that you can't see the characters 鷹擊長空? It's traditional Chinese, unicode. 61.25.248.86 02:58, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Awesome. Good to know. How do I get unicode, then? Black Carrot 05:58, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Macs have it in the International pane under preferences. I'm not sure about Vista, but XP had it under Languages and Regions. Add an input language. z ε n  06:40, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Depending on your OS, browser and other things, you might need to download some fonts and settings from the net. Unicode is very good, btw, worth the effort. 惑乱 分からん 15:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I believe Vista is Unicode by default, as are some new distros of Linux. You basically just need the fonts with the extra (Unicode ranges) characters for different languages, in this case east Asian languages, and then have your browser encoding set to Unicode (which it should be by default for Wikipedia pages). Here are some excellent free Unicode fonts for east Asian characters (click on the East Asian button). 61.25.248.86 00:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

zzz --- last word in the dictionary

just want to know if "zzz" (the sound of a bee) is really the last word in the american dictionaries. thank you.

ah, wait. encarta says the meaning is representation of sleeping or snoring: a representation of the sound made by somebody sleeping or snoring, often used in cartoons (humorous). It has no mention about the sound of a bee. sorry for that. Carlrichard 17:01, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, different dictionaries will have different last words. The last word of Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary is zyzzogeton (a genus of leafhopper from South America). The last word of the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition) is zyzzyva (a genus of weevil). You only asked about American dictionaries, so I won't tell you that the last word of the Oxford English Dictionary is zyxt (an obsolete Kentish dialect form, the 2nd person singular present of see, equivalent to "(thou) seest"). At any rate, none of them seem to list zzz as a word. —Angr 10:24, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem with onomatopeoia like "zzz", "grr", "pfft": How many letters are they supposed to have? 222.158.162.117 12:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. Actually, I just found it in the Encarta (am i allowed to say that?) dictionary. I just want to confirm its acceptation in the vast english-speaking world. Carlrichard 16:29, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Zyxt makes me so curious: does anybody know what the full conjugation is? ;-) --Lazar Taxon 13:25, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, just a rough guess:

I zye
Thou zyxt
He/She/It zyght
We zyne
You zyne
They zyne

Would be interesting to see the real conjugation... =S 惑乱 分からん 15:15, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Zyþ is listed as the 3rd person singular form; zy or zi as the infinitive; and zyeþ as the plural forms. —Angr 16:26, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Aaah, and 1st p. present tense? Same as infinitive? 惑乱 分からん 16:36, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Presumably, but it wasn't listed. Maybe it doesn't happen to be attested in medieval Kentish. —Angr 18:35, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

For some reason I find this sentence utterly delightful. Tesseran 14:32, 20 February 2007 (UTC) [Edited by Tesseran 04:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)]

The last word in the online OED is actually Zyrian. Zyxt doesn't make an appearance. -- Necrothesp 16:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I suppose it depends on your edition. On the CD-ROM version, the last word is zyxt. Perhaps it's in the appendix of the print edition. —Angr 16:27, 25 February 2007 (UTC)