Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 November 2

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November 2

"Exposure to college" vs. "collegue exposure"

Are both exactly the same? I used one form here, but others didn't... Maybe I should have gotten more "Exposure to college" or "collegue exposure". 88.9.210.218 (talk) 17:37, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

It's okay where you used it, but they're not quite the same. College exposure might, in a different context, refer to something like publicity for the school or even an academically minded streaker (the latter would particularly apply to "colleague exposure"). (BTW, I fixed your link. "Here" goes to, well, here.) Clarityfiend (talk) 18:47, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Aside: I see what you were trying to do now. In pipelining, what is visible ("here") goes to the right of the slash. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:03, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

This is a confusing question because you've managed the neat trick of misquoting yourself. What you actually wrote on the Humanities desk was "college exposure", which, in that context, was virtually synonymous with "exposure to college". But when I read "collegue exposure" in the header of this question here, I thought you were asking about exposure to colleagues, as opposed to colleges. These are definitely different things: I have exposure to work colleagues every day, but I have no association with any colleges. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:21, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I corrected it. Thanks. Don't get to much exposure to your colleagues.88.9.210.218 (talk) 19:56, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

I had to read that 20 times before I realised "to much" was your way of writing "too much". -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:22, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry again. Apparently you are getting two much exposure to toxic colleagues at work. You just have to comment on every spell....88.9.210.218 (talk) 21:59, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

No, I don't. My infrequent comments are provided as a public service to those who may not be aware of the difficulties to which they are inadvertently exposing their readers. It's just coincidental (or is it?) that the same editor twice confused the heck out of me in a short space of time. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 00:02, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Is the "public service" that your comments are so infrequent ? :-) StuRat (talk) 01:52, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

OMG, dewd, then u must g3t mad at th3 int3rn3t...CUL8R — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.9.210.218 (talk) 02:18, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the internet, I've heard of that. Apparently it's becoming quite popular among the younger ones. Dearie me, what ever will they think of next! -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 10:57, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Hard tellin', but they're very self-involved, hence the popularity of the mePhone. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:33, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Tahrir

In the Ottoman empire, "tahrir" was the name of a type of tax survey undertaken by the government. However, we have a fairly well-established dab page for "tahrir" as a transliteration of an Arabic word meaning liberation. Are the two uses connected in any sense, or is it just a coincidence? I'm no Arabic scholar but with a little googling I've stumbled across a couple of preserved arabic texts with "tahrir" in their (transliterated) title, which all seem to be recensions, so perhaps there is (or was) in Arabic another, literary meaning related to "copy" or "transcript" and from there it's not a big step to a tax survey. Do we have any turkish-arabic linguists who could confirm or deny a connection between the two words? bobrayner (talk) 17:46, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Alternatively: I accept that there's not a 1:1 map between Arabic spelling and English spelling, so there's one more possibility on the list:

• The two Tahrirs are totally unrelated; false friends.
• There are two unrelated Arabic terms which both transliterate to "tahrir"; one is about liberation and the other is related to the Ottoman bureaucratic usage.
• It's a loanword (in either direction, arabic -> turkish or turkish -> arabic) which has gone through quite drastic change. Plenty of opportunity for loanwords in either direction, considering the history of the middle east.
• Something else entirely? bobrayner (talk) 19:24, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

In Arabic, taḥrīr is the verbal noun of the verb ḥarrara, which among others can have the meanings of "to liberate", "to determine", "to revise" or "to issue". No idea if there is a semantic connection between the different meanings, or if they just happen to be homonyms. To make things even more confusing, the same root ḥ-r-r is also the base for the words ḥarr "heat" and ḥarīr "silk". --BishkekRocks (talk) 23:36, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Under taḥrīr, Wehr has "liberation; release; emancipation; record(ing), writing; editing, redaction; editorship (of a newspaper, a periodical); … piece of writing, record, brief, document".--Cam (talk) 02:44, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Groovy; thanks very much for your help. The "determine" meaning is a perfect fit for the tax surveys. (The feudal lord's agent would wander round the countryside determining how many people lived in which village, what land they had, &c and this would be recorded in a defter and used as the basis for taxation). If the Arabic word comes from some ancient root then I presume it was a loanword taken by the Ottomans? A lot of the detail of how the Ottomans governed was simply copy & pasted from conquered states (for instance, land taxes using Byzantine measurements of land); perhaps "tahrir" more than just a borrowed word, it might actually be a borrowed process (ie. maybe a precursor state in the middle east actually had a kind of tax survey which they called "tahrir")...? bobrayner (talk) 14:09, 4 November 2011 (UTC)