Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 October 11

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October 11

Chinese names of fictional characters

Hi! What are the Chinese names of the fictional characters in The Nine-tailed Turtle? Kang Jisheng, Wang Suqiu, Zhang Qiugu

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 06:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

The first seems to be 康己生 Kàng Jǐshēng, according to ch.79 of the online edition. The second is 王素秋 Wáng Sùqiū, named in ch.115. The third is 章秋谷 Zhāng Qiūgū, likewise mentioned in ch.115. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 08:39, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

May I also have the name of Chen Wenxian, the girlfriend of Zhang Qiugu? Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 09:11, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Can't find it that quickly. Do you know which chapter it would occur in? Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:08, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Actually, there seems to be a person called 陈文仙, Chén Wénxiān, introduced in ch.8. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:20, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 13:36, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Translation of Spanish with misspellings/nonstandard forms

I've been asked to help translate a Spanish text (probably from South-America), and am having some problems: "Se me llorociaron los hojos y me erice completemente...". The ellipsis is part of the text, and indicates that the sentence is intentionally unfinished. Another sentence follows (which I understand). I assume "hojos" should be "ojos", and that "llorociaron" maybe is a nonstandard 3rd person plural past tense conjugation of llorar (It gets some 350 google hits). Google is of no help in translating "erice", too many irrelevant hits. The text has been written by a native speaker, but for confidentiality reasons I can't give much context. My attempt at a word-by-word translation is: "My eyes cried and I ____ completely...". Does anyone have any idea of what "erice" might mean? And is "llorociaron" a variant of "lloraron", or is there a difference in meaning? Thanks, --NorwegianBlue ^talk 17:21, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

The ears of Ms Bono and Medeis should be burning right about now. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:25, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Se me llenaron de lágrimas los ojos y me ericé... ericé (with an accent on the e) comes from the verb erizar (to stand on end). I've never heard the verb llorociar in my life, I'm afraid it is not a word, so I guess it's the same as to have tears in one's eyes.

One common mistake by native speakers is add h where there is not or not adding it at all when it's needed; like ombre instead of hombre and hojos instead of ojos.

Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 19:38, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

My eyes cried and I completely stood on end or I was close to tears and I completely stood on end Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 19:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Which I don't know is wheter To have goose pimples is the same as to stand on end Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 19:51, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast! "Have your hair stand on end" = "Get goose pimples" makes complete sense in the context. (Miss Bono: The idiom stems from the observation that when the hairs of your skin stand on end, your skin gets the appearance of the "pimpled" skin of a plucked goose). Thanks a lot! Also, for those with unrestricted Google access (sorry, Miss Bono): llorociaron gets enough Google hits to show that it is used in some regional variants. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 20:13, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Yep, I thought about it, maybe it's used in other regions or countries. We have that kind of words here that you won't find in any dictionary lol. No problem, Blue... if you need something else regarding the translation, just ask :D. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 20:19, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

I have no idea what llorociar means, but erizar is to get goose pimples, or have one's hair stand on end. From context it looks like the author means to say "My eyes teared up on me and I was covered in goose pimples." But that's a guess for the first verb. You can find llorociar as in "me encato esta cancion su vos es la mejor me hizo llorociar lo ojos en esa cancion" [sic], where tear up is about the only reasonable guess as to meaning. μηδείς (talk) 20:23, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I see, ... Medeis voice translates as voz with a z, but I guess you know that. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 20:31, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed the mispelings, which is why I added the [sic] tag. Didn't we just have a discussion on sic? μηδείς (talk) 20:47, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks again. I suppose the [sic] covers "encato" = "encantó" and "lo" = "los" too. The sentence makes sense now. Erizar was a nice addition to my Spanish vocabulary. I knew "poner los pelo de punta". Are both used in the Spanish of both Spain and Latin America?

There is a part at the end of the text that confuses me. Part of the problem is that the text lacks accents, punctuation and capital letters. So I'm uncertain whether a couple of the words may be proper nouns. Would "att" before the name of a person make sense, near the end of a message? --NorwegianBlue ^talk

I have never heard erizar used in speech, but have come acrost it in literature. Att is probably atentamente (atte.) if it is the signoff before a name, see http://www.dr1.com/forums/spanish-101/75838-spanish-abbreviations-abreviaturas.html. The use of lo here is odd, since final s doesn't usually drop out before a following vowel in speech--it should be taken as a typo rather than a substandard spelling. μηδείς (talk) 21:51, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

That's it! The sentence was "att la [Probable female name, not capilalized]". Thanks! --NorwegianBlue ^talk 22:31, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Agree on atte., and the correct way would be "los ojos" because it´s in plural. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 22:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

To explain, "me encato esta cancion su vos es la mejor me hizo llorociar lo ojos en esa cancion" was a quote I found as a comment about a music video on youtube, not something I made up myself. I wonder if llorociar is not llorosear? Some Mexicans pronounce mear as mier. μηδείς (talk) 00:37, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Llorosear it is, definitely! Thanks! --NorwegianBlue ^talk

Great, I am glad you found that. I searched yesterday when the suspicion came upon me, but didn't find it myself. My "official" translation, then, is "My eyes teared up on me, and I got covered in goosebumps." μηδείς (talk) 16:09, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Thanks, Miss Bono and Medeis! --NorwegianBlue ^talk 11:24, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Mooki Ana Low-Hey song translation

Could anybody with the competence in Hawaiian (?) translate this song? There is the lyrics but in Anglicized spelling unfortunately.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

I would suggest that you go to the Hawaiian language Wikipedia, perhaps here (the talk page of the Hawaiian language article), and ask your question in English. Duoduoduo (talk) 21:38, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

I tried to ask a local en-wiki user with the knowledge of Hawaiian , but still no respond. Until the topic goes to the archive, can anybody show me where is the page in Hawaiian Wikipedia which lists all the user by their activity/number of edits/status (admins etc.)? I couldn't find that.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Cyrillic Polish

Do people ever write the Polish language in the Cyrillic alphabet? --66.190.69.246 (talk) 18:22, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Some strange people do :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); October 11, 2013; 18:29 (UTC)

If there were Eastern Orthodox Poles, they might. It should be noted that the Cyrillic/Latin split among Slavic alphabets almost exactly mirrors the Catholic/Orthodox split among the same peoples. Slavic Peoples who were historically Catholic use the Latin alphabet. Compare, for example, the Croatian language to the Serbian language, which as spoken are so mutually intelligible that many linguists treat them as a single language, Serbo-Croatian, however Croatian is written in the Latin script, and Serbian in Cyrillic. Unsurprisingly, 85% of Croats are Roman Catholic, while 85% of Serbs are Orthodox. Other parts of the Slavic world show similar splits. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, etc. (Catholic Slavs) all use Latin scripts. Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians etc. (Orthodox Slavs) use Cyrillic Scripts. --Jayron32 20:32, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

There were printed some books in it in the 19th century[1].--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:02, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

• Ruthenian, which basically lies equidistant between Slovak, Polish, and Ukrainian, uses both scripts. While most Ruthenians are Catholic, they identify(ed) historically as Russians. (My grandmother taught me "Ja Rusyn byl i budu, Rusinom rodilsja", which she said meant "I am Russian..." My mother's mother's only schooling was a few years through her Catholic church in Great Russian in the Cyrillic script, which I was shocked to find out she read when I later studied Great Russian myself. μηδείς (talk) 22:00, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Aren't most Ruthenians Eastern Catholics of the Byzantine Rite? That would mean they were Eastern Orthodox at the time they got a writing system, I think, just as Eastern European Protestants (Estonians, Latvians, Sorbs, Protestant Hungarians, etc.) were Roman Catholic when they got their Latin-alphabet writing system. European Muslims (Bosniaks, Albanians, Turks) nowadays also use the Latin alphabet, though they previously used the Arabic script. And Jewish languages tend to be written in the Hebrew alphabet, though I think there's a fair tradition of Ladino being written in the Latin alphabet as well. I've often felt that Yiddish is better suited to the Cyrillic alphabet than the Hebrew one (at least, Standard Yiddish and Litvish dialect are), but extralinguistic, sociological considerations prevented any use of Cyrillic to write Yiddish. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:21, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Your assumptions are correct, and your conclusion makes sense, but what I can say is that my relatives lived in what was then Austria-Hungary (mostly from what was then Austrian-Hungarian Galicia) when they migrated to the US, and wrote in the Latin alphabet, often with Polish (e.g., sh=sz) orthography and sometimes Slovak, but never Cyrillic. I have a letter from my great-grand-father written in Ruthenian using Polish orthography. All my relatives' passports were in Slovak orthography, their names eventually using those spellings in English, but with the hacheks omitted. Even my father's mother's name, which is Hungarian in origin, was written in Slovak, not Hungarian orthography. Nonetheless, they seemed familiar with Cyrillic. μηδείς (talk) 21:49, 14 October 2013 (UTC)