Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 January 18

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.

January 18

German - sealed envelope

what is AR-Beschluss zur Kuvertrunde see http://www.schienenfahrzeugtagung.at/download/PDF2007/1Tag%20Vormittag/2_Wehinger.pdf Slide 7

From the context I assume it refers to "sealed envelope bids" , but I can't work out what AR-Beschluss is exactly. Thanks in advance.Sf5xeplus (talk) 01:54, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Google translate says it means "AR-round decision on the envelope". That's not too helpful, but it's a start. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:06, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Above translation of "big G" is useless. Ar-Beschluss is shorthand for Aufsichtsratsbeschluss meaning "Decision of the board of directors", sealed envelope bids should be correct, it is part of the bidding process for the referenced purchase. As a whole it reads in translation: A [waiting] period of nine months from the decision of the board (of directors) to the sealed envelope bid. --129.206.196.116 (talk) 08:15, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks - so that must mean the decision of the board of directors took place 9 months after receiving the sealed envelope bids.Sf5xeplus (talk) 08:16, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Let's not inflame this further. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:37, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

And I want to thank the German drive-by for the personal attack. Aufsichtsratsbeschluss zur Kuvertrunde literally translates as "Supervisory Board decision to cover/envelope round." Not a very idiomatic translation, but at least a hint of what it's about. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:24, 18 January 2011 (UTC) But that's not what you said at the first attempt Bugs. It was useless and not worth posting. We have enough unhelpful answers already, you have demonstrated that you can at times be very helpful - but not on this occasion, as you said yourself. Sometimes nothing is more helpful than irrelevance. Caesar's Daddy (talk) 08:46, 18 January 2011 (UTC) It was a hint to the OP to consult Google and to try Google Translate. If you think those kinds of sources are "useless", I don't know what to tell you. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:32, 18 January 2011 (UTC) Then you should just have said "try Google Translate", except that that would have been equally useless. When someone asks for a translation, they can expect a proper answer from someone who knows the language. We have plenty of German speakers on this desk, you didn't need to jump in with your useless intervention. --Viennese Waltz 10:38, 18 January 2011 (UTC) Open your insulting trap again and we can meet on the talk page. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC) Personal attacks tend to reflect more on the attacker than the attacked. You merely shame yourself, Bugs. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:45, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Bugs, we should not be referring Language Desk querents to Google Translate, because it sucks for most translation purposes. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:51, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

It's not perfect, but I've had pretty good luck with it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:05, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

(ec) "Beschluss" is "decision", but more often in a slightly formal sense. I strongly suspect that "AR" is short for "Aufsichtsrat", usually "board of directors". "Kuvertrunde" seems to be a very Austrian word, but from the way it is used in various documents, it's indeed a sealed bid round. However, unlike the more familiar one-step process, it seems to be the last step in a multi-round negotiation. So first all potential bidders negotiate in the open, and then they hand in their final bid in a Kuvert, i.e. a (closed) envelope. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:26, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Firstly let me say that I did not mean my comment about "Big G" to be an attack on the one posting it, merely a colloquial pointer towards the inaccuracy of the translation. Secondly I agree with Mr. Schulz, that it means a period of nine months from the decision to buy to the actual contract of purchase, while the period of nine months is the bidding period during which competitor may enter the bid. --129.206.197.81 (talk) 10:28, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I now know what "AR" refers to.

Resolved

Linguistic future

Seeing the question above about singular they made me think... Are there any credible works published about what current aspects of non-standard grammar are becoming standard? Obviously the future of language evolution is far from simple, but I would be curious to see what trends are gaining momentum. Falconus^{p t c} 02:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

The current exhibition at the British Library is Evolving English, which deals with these issues. Their advertising features textspeak and innit, for example. The catalogue of the exhibition, by everyone's favourite avuncular linguist David Crystal, bears the same title. BrainyBabe (talk) 22:50, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't have any references handy right now, but lots of published articles in journals like Language and the Journal of Pragmatics, especially syntax-oriented ones, specifically discuss such aspects of grammar. (For instance, there is an entire subfield specifically about "gonna".) rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:36, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

There were many theoretical linguistics articles about the syntax of "wanna" ca. the 1970s, and at one point new articles about the syntax of "wanna" were supposedly banned from the journal Linguistic Inquiry... AnonMoos (talk) 09:20, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Cool, thank you. Falconus^{p t c}

This book [1] The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher, does not only address the current evolutions of modern languages, it also addresses past evolutions, but it certainly explains a lot regarding the mechanisms through which the evolution happens, and the current example are well described. I learned a lot from it. --85.119.25.27 (talk) 18:15, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Corridor coach

Is there an North American term equivalent to "corridor coach" ? Sf5xeplus (talk) 02:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Are you talking about those train cars often seen in British films, with each compartment having two bench seats facing each other... as if they had taken several stagecoaches and mounted them on a flatcar? Do they even use those in America? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:59, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

That would be it. We even have an article for the Corridor coach which explains its original purpose. HiLo48 (talk) 08:06, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

You might be thinking of Compartment coach which are seen in very old Sherlock Holmes films... there were "corridor coaches" in The Cassandra Crossing if that helps. Just to confuse you there are lots of scenes in corridor coaches in this sherlock holmes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8mooMMPpYA or here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy4lcH1SNew&feature=related 1.50 to 2.30mins Sf5xeplus (talk) 08:25, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

All of those are British or otherwise European. They tend to turn up in Hitchcock movies, for example. But are they / were they ever used in America? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:16, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen them in American movies (The Sting?), but I guess we'll just have to wait for the US folks to wake up and supply the answer. The eponymous article could do with expanding.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:21, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Bugs is American, and so am I, but we still don't know for sure, because hardly anyone travels by train in the U.S. anymore. The few times I've been on a train in the U.S. (between Philadelphia, NYC, New Haven, and White River Junction) there haven't been any corridor/compartment coaches, but the smallness of the sample size means I can't definitively state they don't exist. If they ever did exist, then presumably in the "golden age" of rail travel in the U.S., between about 1880 and 1930. Pais (talk) 11:47, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

What we need here is a ferroequinologist. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 12:19, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Somewhat confusingly, information on American corridor coaches are located in the Compartment coach article: see Compartment coach#American corridor coach. According to this, corridor coaches were an American invention and were also known as "American coach" or "American system" elsewhere. If this is true, then it is somewhat sadly ironic that we are discussing whether such trains even exist in the US anymore. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

And even more confusingly, Open coach says it was the open coach that was called "American system passenger coaches" or "American coaches". Pais (talk) 14:06, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Anyone trying to tidy up or reconcile these articles might like to note that the corridor connection article is more comprehensive than the others.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 15:54, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Corridor coaches do exist in the US, but I think they are mostly just called "sleeping cars" (I think the corridor and compartment model is the only construction currently used in this country). The most relevant information seems to be at Sleeping car#Modern times. Lesgles (talk) 16:32, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

The mention of Hitchcock above brought back memories of his very effective use of the train tunnel metaphor in North by Northwest. Nice short YouTube sample here. That train had a corridor. HiLo48 (talk) 22:26, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

---

Okay, let's get this straight. There are three designs of single-deck passenger coach that have been in common use.

An "open" car typically contains one big room and is entered by doors at one or both ends. It normally has a central walkway and seats on each side. On busy railways, like subway (metro, underground) systems and some commuter lines, additional doors are often provided at intervals along each side. Open cars were adopted as standard in North America very soon after passenger railways began operating.

"Compartment" cars consist of a bunch of separate rooms (originally modeled after stagecoaches) spanning the full width of the train. Each room has two bench seats facing each other and its own separate door to the outside. Once the train leaves the station you must stay in your compartment. These cars were adopted as standard in Britain and I believe in many European countries in the early days of passenger railways, but when it became normal for long-distance trains to have facilities like dining cars and toilets, compartment cars were no longer suitable. In Britain they continued in use for commuter services for many years, but are no longer used in regular service. I believe this is for both safety and cost reasons.

A "corridor" car is a compromise between the above designs. It has a bunch of separate rooms, but they only span most of the width of the train, because there is a walkway -- the corridor -- along one side. Usually these cars have entrances at one or both ends and maybe in the middle, although they can be built with doors on one side leading directly into the compartments and on the other side leading into the corrdor directly across from each compartment. Corridor cars were standard for long-distance trains in Britain and Europe for many years; you'll normally see them in any movie made there in the black-and-white era where people are traveling by train in the daytime. But I have never heard of them being used in North America and I do not believe there is an American term for them. If speaking of them without sufficient context, I would tend to refer to them myself a "compartment-and-corridor" cars to avoid any confusion on the listener's part.

As noted above, sleeping cars in any country often have a layout resembling a corridor car. (Other sleeping-car layouts have upper and lower berths lengthwise on each side of a central walkway, or small rooms on each side of a corridor.) But the term "coach" is not properly applied to sleeping cars. In North American rail usage it specifically means an ordinary passenger car with seats for day travel.

Sorry, no references. I have a lot of familiarity with these things both from reading and actual use in various countries, but I don't know a single place where it's all written down together.

--Anonymous, 05:08 UTC (minor edits 11:45), January 19, 2011.

Re "I have never heard of them being used in North America": Wasn't the setting of the good guys' attempt to scam Beeks out of the crop report in Trading Places a compartment in a corridor car? (Was the New Year train supposed to be a Washington, D.C. – Philadelphia run? I can't recall.) I have no idea whether such cars are used in the real world, though. Deor (talk) 12:48, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Haven't seen it. A sleeping-car bedroom in its daytime configuration would have a similar appearance, though. Two things to look for: a bedroom probably has a closed upper berth above each seat and no windows on the corridor side, whereas a compartment in a corridor car probably has windows to the corridor and a shelf above the seats for light hand baggage. --Anonymous, 18:45 UTC, January 19, 2011.

Excellent delination of the different types of carriages by Anon. I also recommend The Man in Seat 61 for all long-distance rail travel queries. BrainyBabe (talk) 20:50, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Grammar

Is there a website where they have a game that will increase your English Grammar and as well as vocabulary?
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.89.43.48 (talk • contribs) 19:24, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

FreeRice is pretty good. Lexicografía (talk) 21:00, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Ha, I (German) took the test and my very poor knowledge of school French helped me a lot more than my German and English knowledge combined did... is that actually supposed to be a French test?--178.26.171.11 (talk) 17:33, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Presumably they assume more latinate words are more difficult for English speakers than germanic words. But it does have some strange biases, and I often find myself baffled by the 'difficulty' assigned some of the words: there's a good amount of dialect in there, which seems odd, making it easy for some and ridiculous for others. And I always find myself disputing some of the 'right' definitions :) 86.164.164.183 (talk) 10:51, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I got up to the low 40s and it started getting difficult. But if you know German and French, then you pretty much know English. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:34, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

It might be good to point out that FreeRice is turned into a grammar game (rather than the default vocabulary game) via the "change subjects" link. (I for one did not know about this.) 81.131.12.91 (talk) 02:32, 20 January 2011 (UTC)