Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 May 27

Language desk
< May 26	<< Apr | May | Jun >>	May 28 >

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.

May 27

go one's bond

Would you please teach me the meaning of "go one's bond" in the following passage? Many thanks.123.227.223.236 (talk)dengen

• I work hard to support her and I give her all I’ve got left over, and she goes and walks off like I was nothing more than one of them half-assed canaries Ashe Neff’s always talking about. You know what I had to do? I had to go and sign away my next month’s salary check before I could locate somebody who’s trust me enough to go my bond.---Erskine Caldwell, Episode in Palmetto, p.148. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.227.223.236 (talk) 11:17, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Often it would mean lending money for someone's bail (to get them out of jail, or prevent them going to jail). If that doesn't fit, maybe it simply refers to lending money in some other context. 86.146.109.150 (talk) 11:29, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

In Australia there's the expression "go guarantor for" someone, typically an older adult agreeing to be responsible for repaying a loan in the event that the lendee, a younger person, defaults on it. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 11:34, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I would understand it in Jack's sense: not somebody who will actually lend, but somebody willing to agree to pay if the speaker fails to. --ColinFine (talk) 21:20, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

A line from a song called "Cocaine Blues": "Had no friend for to go my bail / They slapped my dried-up carcass in the county jail." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:11, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Double diacritic letters

I'm looking for a character with two diacritics at once: the letter I (preferably lowercase) with a tilde, and then a grave accent on top of that. Has anyone seen such a character online? I need to type it, but I don't know how, and I don't know its official Unicode name; "i with tilde" "grave accent" finds nothing relevant in Google. I even looked through a few articles in the Vietnamese Wikipedia, but I couldn't find this combination of accents on this letter. Nyttend (talk) 22:09, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I with tilde + combining grave accent = ĩ̀.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:19, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! How do you type it? Or did you copy it from a webpage, in which case what's the URL? I needed the letter (and various others) for transcribing Loma, which has lots of otherwise-uncommon diacritical combinations. Nyttend (talk) 00:25, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Never mind; I just realised that it appears on List of Latin-script letters, along with lots of other combinations. I'd completely forgotten about this page, which I appreciate since I won't have to look up how to type the ɔ̃̀ open O with tilde and grave! Still curious: is there a way to type it? Nyttend (talk) 00:30, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I've made these in standard Character Map (also can be done in BabelMap as well). Choose one letter, then one or more combining diacritics, voilà: ɔ̃̀ ɔ̃́ ɛ̃̀ ɛ̃́ ũ̀ ṹ ã̀ ã́ õ̀ ṍ ĩ̀ ĩ́ ẽ̀ ẽ́ ỹ̀ ỹ́ etc. If you type a lot, you'd better create your own keyboard layout with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:11, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

It is amusing to witness a rise of 21st-century myths about webpages which sometimes contain purely fine magical browser codes for displaying exotic characters in a way which cannot be achieved by browsing code charts and learning about Combining Diacritical Marks, as well as about Unicode input. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 05:51, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I didn't understand that comment... what "myths"? what is a "purely fine magical browser"? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:22, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Incnis Mrsi, I only asked because I couldn't find ĩ̀ in Windows Character Map, and how are the combining diacritical marks applicable here? If any of the pages you linked explained the answer to my question, I've overlooked or misunderstood it. Nyttend (talk) 03:48, 29 May 2013 (UTC)