Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 February 16

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.

February 16

Japanese text over Japanese text?

In the first sentence of Center versus periphery, there's a section of Japanese text in small font that sits above other Japanese text in a normal size. Is this linguistically significant, or is it more likely to be a coding problem? The code is {{nihongo|''Hôgen Shûken-ron''|{{ruby-ja|方言周圏論|ホウゲンシュウケンロン}}|hōgen shūkenron|lit. "surrounding-zones dialect theory"}}, which produces

Hôgen Shûken-ron (方言周圏論（ホウゲンシュウケンロン）, hōgen shūkenron, lit. "surrounding-zones dialect theory")

in the text. Nyttend (talk) 03:17, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Japanese Kanji can have multiple possible pronunciations, so the text above the words (called furigana or ruby) gives how they are pronounced in this context. See Ruby character. 59.108.42.46 (talk) 04:03, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Using Firefox 10, the furigana do not sit above the text for me. This is a common feature of Japanese, though. You'll find it in books, magazines, newspapers, school textbooks, etc., basically informing the reader of the pronunciation of the word(s). In vertical script, the furigana sits to the right of the kanji. It's just there to facilitate reading. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 04:29, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

@Kage: that's a general browser thing, Ruby characters in firefox don't show up on top but at the side (the same happens for Chinese Ruby annotations). I think if you use IE they will show up on top (but then you have to suffer through IE!). rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:32, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah right. As if I want to go through the agony of using IE just to have the pleasure of furigana appearing on top of my Japanese..... :) I guessed that, anyway, hence my specifying I use Firefox. Cheers. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 05:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

[EDIT] I actually just tried it and it does work in IE. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 05:58, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I removed the ruby per WP:MOS-JA#Ruby. Oda Mari (talk) 09:52, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Uhh, why? I don't see the <ruby> tag anywhere, and it seems that we have a dedicated template for the purpose of enabling this sort of text. Nyttend (talk) 17:32, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

All that the template does is add <ruby> tags (with some parameters specified and stuff). You're right that there is some contradiction here, but the correct place to settle it is either at WT:MOS-JA or at Template talk:Ruby-ja. Either the MOS-JA guideline is right and the template should be marked as deprecated, or the use of Ruby is right and the guideline of MOS-JA should be changed. rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:56, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Arabic name

Does http://www.brookings.edu/lang/arabic.aspx?sc_lang=ar contain the Arabic name for the en:Brookings Institution? If so, what is it?

And how do you say "Headquarters of the Brookings Institution" in Arabic? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 04:50, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

بروكنجز is "Brookings" (they would have done better to leave out the ج in my opinion -- it only provides a useful indication of pronunciation to Egyptian dialect speakers, and is likely to mislead speakers of all Arabic dialects about the number of syllables...). -- AnonMoos (talk) 09:54, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 15:13, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Central Asian languages

Did Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajik languages ever have Russian influence before USSR era or after USSR era? Every time they speak their language, it sounds like Russian and not Turkish and Persian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.92.150.205 (talk) 21:43, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

All of the homelands of those people were part of the Russian Empire, some for quite a long time, so yes, Russia did control those lands. Initially, the USSR respected the native languages, and tried to actively encourage the native languages to be used, see Korenizatsiya. Within a few decades, however, they were actively supressed, as the idea of each community having its own language began to be seen as subversive; this was considered Bourgeois nationalism. See Russification for a complete history. --Jayron32 23:04, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't know about those languages, but I know Uyghur has many borrowings from Russian. Uzbek is very closely related to Uyghur and I think it may as well. rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Russia conquered much of Central Asia during the second half of the 19th century. It was largely through the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that the region had its introduction to modern technologies, professions, and organizational structures. So it isn't surprising that those languages would borrow Russian vocabulary for concepts in those areas. Marco polo (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Whilst in China in 1993 I studied a bit of Uighur, using Chinese textbooks at school, and I noticed a hell of a lot of Russian words (actually originally from German, then even more originally from Latin) in the language, mostly to do with science and politics. There is also a huge amount of Chinese influence - at least in the textbooks I was using. There was a passage about the Four Modernizations, and it had been transliterated from the Chinese 四个现代化 directly into Uighur script. I recognized it immediately because we'd done it in school in England, but my Russian co-students had no clue. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 01:04, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

(interesting but irrelevant aside) There are still a lot of Chinese borrowings, although in recent years at least some speakers have been making efforts to replace these with more Turkic-looking words, since now the relationship between Uyghurs and China is not always great... For instance, for refrigerator they used to usually use bingshang (you can probably tell what Chinese word that comes from!), but nowadays some people prefer to use tonglatqu, which is more Turkic-looking. Actually, that word also is built off of a Chines borrowing--tong, meaning ice, comes from 冻--but it's a much earlier borrowing, and the word for "refrigerator" has been Turkified by being built up agglutinatively (tong-la-t-qu = ice-PASS.-CAUS.-"one-that-does"). So when it comes down to it, both the words for refrigerator are based on Chinese borrowings, although one is more Turkic-looking. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:39, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

About the verb for "to freeze"; if this were a loanword from Chinese, it would have to have came from Old Turkic times, since the Turkey-Turkish word for to freeze (don-mak) is a cognate of the Uyghur (tong-). ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{spik ʌp!} 11:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hm; a Uyghur-speaking Turkologist colleague of mine told me the story about tong, but I don't know if that comes from Turkic or Chinese (or if one of those comes from the other). rʨanaɢ (talk) 13:32, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Looking at Wiktionary, it might indeed be a Middle Chinese loan, but we don't know for sure. Double sharp (talk) 00:44, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

65.92.150.205 -- Some would say that the very definition of the number and nature of written/standardized Turkic languages in the Central Asia region owes a lot to Soviet nationalities policies, and that a number of alternative choices as to which local dialects to elevate to written/standardized status, and how to group different dialects together under the umbrella of a standard language, could have been made... AnonMoos (talk) 01:44, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

They can't sound like Russian as all the Turkic languages have very different phonotactics from the Russian one. The sole non-Slavic language I know which is often perceived like "very Russian" is Portuguese. I suppose Moksha and Irish can sound like Russian (and vice versa) as they all have vowel reduction and soft consonants. Among the Slavic languages only Belarusian can be perceived like Russian, as they have very similar phonetics (moreover there is not any break between Belarusian and Southern Russian, they can be treated as one macro-dialect despite any political borders, though the latter being unwritten; Southern Russian sounds sometimes very Belarusian and vice versa).--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 01:49, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

[EC] I am not so sure. I think the OP may be talking about intonation, rather than actual phonemic values. I did find in China that a number of Uighurs I spoke to (buying the loveliest lamb kebabs imaginable) did tend to use what I would call a Russian intonation pattern (i.e. falling). Hungarian is like this, too, despite being unrelated to Russian, and despite the fact that Finnish (a related language) is more.... up-beat? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 01:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

I've noticed that falling intonation with Uyghur speakers, too. It's quite infuriating, since in that language all the verb morphology that ties the sentence together is at the end of the sentence, and gets lost in mumbling! rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:22, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

• If they sound like Russian because of the falling intonation, then, I suppose, a third or a half of all the languages of the world has this and they also can sound "like Russian". And I don't know how you can hear the intonation but without hearing the other phonetic peculiarities. If somebody speaks Uzbek/Tadjik/etc. it is noticed by Russians at once, and, I suppose, not only because of foreign sounds or strange words, but first and foremost of the unusual intonation. Even Tatars which speak Russian fluently and pronounce all sounds properly have sometimes "Turkic notes" (I don't know how to describe it linguistically). Anyway phonetically Russian influence is petty if not absent in Central Asia.--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 17:51, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

The only one of these that I listened to for more than a few seconds (if at all) is Kazakh, and I don't think it sounds like Russian when spoken. It sounds like Turkish with a lot of "da" (or "də" or something similar) at the end of some words. Also, I noticed that young people in Tajikistan don't seem to know Russian at all anymore, and the older ones speak it with a terrible accent - this is in contrast to the other four "-stans", the Turkic ones. 92.80.18.189 (talk) 11:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Here you can watch Uzbek TV on-line.--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 17:51, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm pretty convinced that statements like "language X sounds like language Y" are mostly subjective.. this does not sound at all like Russian to me. It depends what points of the language you notice when you listen. Belarusian definitely isn't the only Slavic language which sounds like Russian to me, the whole South Slavic group do as well. - filelakeshoe 18:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

They don't to me, so you're probably right that they are subjective. I also remembered that I listened to some Kyrgyz rap, in both Kyrgyz and Russian, and the two languages sound very different (at least when in the same song). Kyrgyz sounds distinctly Turkic. 92.80.18.189 (talk) 19:19, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

As for Irish it was just my supposition. Irish and Russian have many common unique phonetic features, which usually do not exist in other languages, but indeed for me Irish (I don't understand a word of it, just can listen) sounds "too Germanic" (English superstratum?). As for the South Slavic languages they are no more "like Russian" than Italian or Spanish are. Serbo-Croatian also have tones which are absent in Russian. So apart from intonation (?) Russian (with his Belarusian twin) has the unique phonetic complex for Europe (though you can argue that reduction and palatalization are widespread and Russian has not any uniqueness).--Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 19:42, 17 February 2012 (UTC)