Language desk
< July 3	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 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.

July 4

Welsh epitaph

What does "Priod hawddcar a thad cofalus, Heddwch iw lwch." mean in English? Thank you, 199.111.188.100 (talk) 03:37, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

'Heddwch i'w lwch' means 'peace be upon his/her dust', and I think Priod is wife/spouse. Dalliance (talk) 22:18, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for that, and the grammatical correction. 199.111.188.15 (talk) 04:01, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

'a thad' means 'and father', so I guess it's something like 'a loving husband and <something> father'. --ColinFine (talk) 22:02, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (the Welsh equivalent of the OED) has no entry for the word cofalus. +An gr 05:14, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! Thanks, it was a capital g, not a c. So it's actually "hawddgar a thad gofalus" (I missed two of them). 199.111.188.249 (talk) 21:49, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Gofalus normally means "careful" or "vigilant". So the whole inscription says "Loving husband and vigilant father, peace be upon his dust." +An gr 06:30, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yay! Thank you very much! 199.111.189.124 (talk) 21:00, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't mean anything in English. It might mean something in Welsh, though. —Tamfang (talk) 04:34, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Soduko

Why can't *soduko be a Japanese word? --88.77.239.146 (talk) 14:40, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Because standard Japanese doesn't contain the syllable 'du' - where you would otherwise expect it, it is normally realised as 'dzu'. So the closest that could occur would be 'sodzuko'. I don't know whether you can concoct a word of this form - I don't think either 'sodzu' or 'tsuko' ('dzuko') exists as a morpheme, so I think it would have to be trimorphemic 'so-dzu-ko'. --ColinFine (talk) 15:37, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't it be a single morpheme with three syllables? Are higashi "east" and midori "green" polymorphemic or monomorphemic? +An gr 19:03, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They are monomorphemic, but sodzu and dzuko (and sozu and zuko) don't occur in morphemes, unlike higa, etc. I don't know why. づ is romanized "du" in Nihon-shiki, "zu" in kunrei and Hepburn. It's pronounced "zu". In practice "zu" is most common and "dzu" probably second most, even though there's no official scheme that uses "dzu". -- BenRG (talk) 23:14, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the poster means "sudoku"; I don't know if スドク translates, but at least it transliterates. Tonywalton ^Talk 21:30, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is Japanese, as mentioned in the article. It's すうどく, not すどく, though. -- BenRG (talk) 23:14, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Babenberg Ladies

Moved to User talk:Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy/List of Austrian consorts#Babenberg_Ladies by --Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 21:51, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure where this Q should go -- but try here anyway....

Should the English speaking nations of the world pay a levy to England for using its language? And thus solve England's current financial problems. --22:18, 4 July 2009 79.75.115.133

Well, no, actually. It wasn't as if they said "Hey, English is a cool language, let's borrow it". No, the British brought it with them to their colonies and to the other places they were active in, and it became the lingua franca. English displaced the existing languages, many of which have now died. For example, there were something like 400 distinct, mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the indigenous Australians, many of which are now irretrievably lost to history. If anything, the English should be paying them compensation for the murder of their languages. -- JackofOz (talk) 22:38, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You'd spend more on accounting than you'd gain, because English itself is derived from many language influences. So in analogy to a common joke you'd get - among others - the Germans, French, Greeks, Italians (claiming Roman inheritance rights) and even the Catalan speakers [1] "calling to ask for their words back". I'm reminded of an enraged reader's letter complaining that "sari" had been included in the latest edition of the Oxford dictionary. In his views that book should have been been limited to "true" English words :-). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.26.74 (talk) 06:35, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That, in turn, reminds me of the odd reader's letter you read now and then in English-language newspapers in Japan about how the Japanese aren't using words they acquired from English in a correct way, and that "training pants" are in no way meant to be sporting apparel. Which completely disregards the fact that these words that are no longer "English words" as such, but rather "words derived from the English language", now conforming to a different logic than they did in the English language. TomorrowTime (talk) 15:03, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As a side note, there is as far as I'm aware no court case that has proven a language can be copyrighted or anything of the sort. Paramount Pictures claims to hold a copyright on the Klingon language, but that has never been challenged in a court of law. --86.135.177.168 (talk) 13:38, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Even if my English is not very good, I can personally pay a reasonable levy to you, if you like. It's not going to solve any financial problem, I fear... --pma (talk) 19:13, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(Re copyright:) One of the reasons why the creators of Lojban rebuilt the basic vocabulary from Loglan was that James Cooke Brown was claiming copyright on the language. Though convinced that such a claim would not succeed in court, they decided to recreate the vocabulary anyway, partly IIRC because even if he wasn't successful it would have been expensive and time-consuming to fight him, and partly because it let them use a more up-to-date list of target languages. --ColinFine (talk) 22:09, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's a silly scheme anyway. They say it makes the vocabulary "neutral", but random generation would do a better job of that. What it really does is make the vocabulary democratic. —Tamfang (talk) 17:14, 21 July 2009 (UTC) [reply]

I like this interpretation of intellectual property law a lot! However, as an Englishman, I am saddened by the prospect of my new-found wealth being inevitably claimed by the Indo-European heartland, wherever that is. Ian Spackman (talk) 23:58, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Britain actually benefits economically from English being a world lingua franca (part of why the British Council exists), so maybe Britain should pay a "levy" to the U.S! It was very noticeable that when Britain's relative share of world industrial output started to significantly decline in the late 19th century, and there came to be more and more rivals to Britain's formerly unchallenged world naval predominance, the use of the English language did not correspondingly decline, but instead went from strength to greater strength. The use of English by the U.S. was probably the most sigificant single reason for this discrepancy... AnonMoos (talk) 20:41, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How about the use of English law in international trade and finance sustaining the widespread usage of the English language? It was some years later that New York law and English law began to share the stage more equally... --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 07:08, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, if we really want to be informative, maybe it is worth adding as a side remark, that the idea proposed in the OP is very stupid, if taken seriously. There is still room for discussing if it is a joke, and if it is funny or intelligent as a joke, of course ;-) --pma (talk) 14:03, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't really related, but this question reminds me of hearing about people in China placing common dishes under copyright. (Both commonly used things.) Maybe they should get a copyright for various Chinese characters; that would be earning money sort of in the same way, albeit to different people. Vltava 68 17:18, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They could tax tattoos, fer sure. —Tamfang (talk) 22:17, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Japanese characters

I someone has a few moments, could they help with the meaning of the characters at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Entertainment#japan image, slightly not safe for work —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.100.250.79 (talk) 23:11, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The katakana on the the left of the image say "Brazil!!", but the kanji in parentheses after that, and the kanji plus one hiragana on the right of the image, I can't read. +An gr 05:10, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

露出度高め means relatively skimpy and （笑）is lol. Oda Mari (talk) 05:43, 6 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks.

Resolved

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 July 4

Contents