Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 August 27

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.

August 27

Italian question

I asked sometime earlier about the meaning of a quote from an Italian Donald Duck comic by Giorgio Cavazzano something like this: "A che cosa servire?" direte voi! "Serve, serve!" dico io! but I remembered the quote too badly for the question to be answered.

It just happens that I have recently bought a Finnish Roope-Setä comic which appears to have a Finnish translation of the story this quote appears in. Here's my rough translation to English from the translation from Italian to Finnish:

"But what use could such a thing be of?" you may ask! "A great deal!" I reply!

Based on this, could anyone manage to reconstruct the original Italian quote in perfectly grammatical Italian? JIP | Talk 18:00, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I probably won't be able to help, but could you give the story code, please? (In the first panel, presumably starting with I-...). --Wrongfilter (talk) 18:33, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be anything like that on the first panel, but at the lower left corner, where Cavazzano is stting at his desk, facing the viewers, is a code saying "?-262-A". I can't make out the first glyph. It could be a capital "I", or the digit 1, or the digit 5. JIP | Talk 18:39, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

It's I AT 262-A, right? That's a Mickey Mouse story, though. --Wrongfilter (talk) 21:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's the one. Donald Duck is more popular here in Finland than Mickey Mouse so we call the comic books "Donald Duck comics" even though they also include Mickey Mouse stories. There are scans of the original Italian version here, but the text is very small. From what I can make out, I remembered the original Italian quote quite well, but not perfectly. JIP | Talk 04:15, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Ha, amusing to learn that Donald Duck is especially popular in Finland in light of this pervasive urban legend. -Elmer Clark (talk) 05:54, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Here's something similar: Donald Duck is trying to sell a pen to a Bedouin in a desert: ""Che cos'è? A cosa serve?". Paperino pensa: ecco, sono arretrati, non sanno manco cos'è una penna, di certo farò affari. Quindi spiega: "Serve a tracciare dei segni sulla carta, delle lettere, serve a comunicare…". "Insomma - risponde il beduino - serve a scrivere". E Paperino, stralunato, "Ma come, conosce la scrittura e non riconosce una penna?". Il beduino fa "mi segua" e lo conduce nella sua tenda. Dove gli mostra un computer superattrezzato. "Ecco - conclude - io uso questo"." = ""What is it? What use does it have?" Donald thinks: look, they are backwards, they don't even know what a pen is, I'll definitely make a good deal. Then he explains: "it's used to draw marks on paper, letters, it's used to communicate..." "In short," answers the Bedouin, "it's used to write." And Donald, bewildered, says "What, you know about writing and don't recognize a pen?" The Bedouin says "follow me" and leads him to his tent. Where he shows him a super-equipped computer. "There," he concludes, "I use this."" Lesgles (talk) 23:27, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Native Italian here. One of the possible translations: ""Ma a cosa potrebbe servire una cosa del genere?" Ti potresti chiedere! "Un vero affare!" Sarebbe la mia risposta!"--151.41.160.11 (talk) 19:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I am totally confused. I can read but not speak Italian, and comprehend what has been said above. Why are we offering an Italian translation of an Italian utterance? BTW, the original English translation of the Italian (which makes perfect sense to me when I pretend it is Spanish) is loose, but seems fine. μηδείς (talk) 20:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The OP indicated that they could not remember the original Italian phrase, so they are trying to derive it from an English translation of the Finnish translation of the original Italian phrase. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 20:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Translations aren't always faithful. I have in mind a scene in Asterix in Britain: there's a quarrel between a fruit vendor and a customer, and in the next panel Obelix asks (in French) "Why is that Briton wearing a melon on his head?" — but in the English version he asks an unrelated question. (Usually such changes are due to the difficulty of translating a pun.) —Tamfang (talk) 21:56, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Wow, that's a 30-year flashback. Are you telling me there really is something called Asterix? I always though my French 101 teacher was making that up, lol. μηδείς (talk) 01:48, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Asterix has been going since 1959. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 02:27, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I was told in the early 80's that if I persevered and took four years of French I could go to Paris as a senior and buy these French comics about a Celt named Ass Tey Reeks. I did take four years of French, but also took three years of German, and instead toured the Alps, and came home with various liqueurs and a switchblade I smuggled in my lead-lined film case and a rather kinky Austrain porn stash, all of which I resold to my classmates in the airport as we arrived home at a nice profit. μηδείς (talk) 02:53, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

(PS, not that I was a total cretin. I bought various collected works of Sartre and Hugo and two plays by Rostand and even Le Seigneur des Anneaux in French translation for my own pleasure. (also, Der Wuesten Planet, and Der Kleine Hobbit, two great German originals.) μηδείς (talk) 02:58, 28 August 2012 (UTC))

I blame Astérix for such fluency in French as I have. —Tamfang (talk) 21:02, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Moved my question here for better visibility. Judging by the rather low-resolution scan, the original Italian quote is: "A che cosa servira'?" direte voi! "Serve, serve!" dico io! Now could anyone tell me a direct translation of it to English? And by the way, I've heard the story of Donald Duck being banned in Finland (which is not true) so many times I've become bored of it. JIP | Talk 17:44, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

"'What's it good for?' you say! 'It's useful, it's useful!' I say!" ... Unfortunately I can't think of an English translation that preserves the parallel use of the verb. — May I presume that by servira' you mean servirà? —Tamfang (talk) 21:51, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I mean servirà. The text in the scan was a bit difficult to make out. JIP | Talk 04:24, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Three days I have been trying to find an elegant translation of the Italian phrase into English. It's easy to translate it to Spanish. To English impossible. μηδείς (talk) 16:41, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

"To google" or "to Google"?

Google has become such a de-facto standard among web search engines that it has become a verb in common usage. This may be against Google's wishes, while they would prefer such constructs as "make a search with the Google search engine". But this question is specifically about Google as a verb. Is it written "to google" or "to Google"? In my native Finnish, I would definitely always write googlata, not Googlata, because in Finnish, the only words that are capitalised (except when beginning a sentence) are proper names. Any derivatives thereof are non-capitalised. But I think the capitalisation rules in English are different. For example, in Finnish we say Suomi (Finland) but suomalainen (Finnish) because, as my grade school teacher said, there's only one Finland, but many Finnish people. (Not to be confused with Kari Suomalainen, which doesn't mean "the Finnish Kari", but Suomalainen is his actual surname.) But how is it like in English? Is it "to google" or "to Google"? JIP | Talk 18:27, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

See http://www.onelook.com/?w=google&ls=a.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:31, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Formal English style would currently require this to be capitalized, since Google is a proper noun. (Much communication in texting and on the internet is purposefully informal.) That may change over time as with band aid or kleenex as it becomes a genericized trademark. μηδείς (talk) 18:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I have not heard of genericized trademarks of other search engines (see List of search engines).

—Wavelength (talk) 18:58, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

The fact that Google is commonly used as a verb suggests the process has begun, but check back in 20 years. The important thing is to capitalize it in formal usages at this point. μηδείς (talk) 19:04, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary:google doesn't seem to support that. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 20:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

What is the that that wiktionary doesn't support? μηδείς (talk) 16:39, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

In "formal" usages, I would say it shouldn't be used as a verb at all. --Trovatore (talk) 20:37, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the OED capitalizes Google in its two definitions relating to the search engine, but also has a note: "Forms: also with lower-case initial." Of the six quotation examples given three are capitalized and three are not. They also occur as Google, Googled, and Googling. Oddly in the quotations only "google" is shown lowercase only, the others occur both ways. Pfly (talk) 00:44, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

@ Trovatore, if you were referring to Michael Crichton's Next you might have to refer to Googling and Wikipedia in a formal context. You could always use scare quotes if you had to. μηδείς (talk) 01:45, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I have adopted the habit of telling people to Search for something in emails, etc, implying that I intend them to use one of the proprietary search engines without advertising one or the other. --Mirokado (talk) 16:36, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I have heard several youngsters say that they "will Wikipedea that" (ie look it up on Wikipedia). That's an argument for another day. Alansplodge (talk) 18:14, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

How to formulate a sourced lack of source?

Hello everyone!

I have a source which says that the father of Francis Marrash remained in Paris for some more time after his son's departure, but he remained in Paris for reasons which are unknown to us (those reasons may very well have been known to his family and friends but no source has been found mentioning them). So I'm not sure how to formulate this:

"His father remained in Paris for some more time, for reasons which are not known to us.[reference]"

Is it acceptable? Is there a way of writing this without using the pronoun "us"? (WP:FIRSTPERSON) Thanks for your help! Bryan P. C. C. (talk)

Just leave out the "to us". Clarityfiend (talk) 22:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Just leave out the whole "for reasons...". —Tamfang (talk) 22:33, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Removed that part of the sentence completely. It does look better now haha! Thanks to both! Bryan P. C. C. (talk) 00:08, 28 August 2012 (UTC)