Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 March 30

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March 30

Chinese question:

What is the Chinese text in File:Taiping Cable Car.JPG? I want to annotate the image with it. Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 03:05, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

歡迎你乘坐黃山太平索道！ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.7.144.60 (talk) 18:01, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Small correction: it's 您 instead of 你. --Bowlhover (talk) 18:44, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

And which, I think, says Welcome aboard Huangshan Taiping cableway, not exactly what is written underneath it. 120.145.97.4 (talk) 00:49, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 17:13, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

attribution of languages

A discussion above provokes a new question: What languages are now known not to have been spoken by the people for whom they were first named, and have any such languages been renamed? —Tamfang (talk) 04:03, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

In the early days of Cuneiform decipherment, when the Sumerian language was not understood very well, it was sometimes called "Scythic"... AnonMoos (talk) 05:02, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

The Hittite language may or may not have been used by the Biblical Hittites for which it is named. Rojomoke (talk) 07:03, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

And it's pretty clear that the people that we know used Hittite did not call themselves or their language Hittite. --ColinFine (talk) 10:38, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

• The terms you are perhaps looking for, User:Tamfang are exonym and endonym. Many people simply call themselves "the people" and their neighbors "the enemy" and are in turn called "the enemy" by their neighbors. They are often named when English speakers ask their neighbors what the strange people down the river are called, and the former answer, the "blahblahs", meaning the enemy. My grandmother called our language po naszomu ("our way", "by us") and the Germans the nemecky, i.e., "don't talks". The latter is the source of the last names Nimitz and Namath. μηδείς (talk) 05:22, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

• I don't understand what exonym, endonym, and your grandmother have to do with the question. 186.93.131.249 (talk) 22:27, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Language groups often acquire different names over time according to historical accident of who is asking whom what a group's name is. The slavs called the Germans nemcy meaning "mute" (literally "don't talk") This usage was borrowed by the Hungarians from the Slavs, by the Turks from the Hungarians, and by the Arabs (al-Nimsa) from the Turks (Nemçe). Similarly, the Arabs encountered Western Europeans during the Arab expansion and the crusades in the form of the Franks, a Germanic people. (This even though the French speak a Romance, not a Germanic language.) This lead to Europeans being called faranji (yes, the same as Star Trek's Ferengi) and the word for white person in Ethiopian being faranj. Now, obviously, my grandmother played a small but significant role in all this. μηδείς (talk) 17:14, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

The part about the Franks (see also lingua franca) is the first relevant thing you've said here, unless the Slavs mistook the Germans for some other people when they called them nemcy. —Tamfang (talk) 08:13, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I seem to have annoyed you, Tamfang, so I apologize. But the issue of naming languages is a complex one. Cases where group A calls Group B Group C when Group C is actually a separate and totally unrelated ethnos are rare. There are all sorts of misclassifications, where a dialect is early on classified as belonging to one group of languages, only later to be found it belongs to another. This happens in Africa, where, because of race, it is assumed a "black" tribe's language must be the same as their other "black" neighbors, when they are actually speaking an Afro-asiatic language ultimately more closely related to Semitic than Swahili or Maasai.

There's the case of the language of my country, America, perversely called English, spoken by a politically separate and for the most part genetically unrelated nation. The case AnonMoos gave of the Sumerians being called Scythians is actually a common one, with a lot of vaguely known peoples of SW Asia being called Scythians by scholars during the Enlightenment. But no one historically ever called the Sumerians "Scythians". The people we call the Hittites conquered and or replaced the indigenous Hattians who were apparently unrelated to them. But the Hittites seem to have called their own language Nešili. In regard to languages which have been renamed, there are all sorts of examples in academic linguistics, such as the preference for Khoekhoe and Nama for Hottentot, an exonym now considered disparaging. The same with innumerable indigenous languages of the Americas. These are all related phenomena I thought might interest readers, not insult you. μηδείς (talk) 17:30, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

For what it's worth, μηδείς, I enjoyed this a lot. The Nimitz/Namath thing is really interesting. Matttoothman (talk) 19:38, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the language called English is spoken by the people known as English, though not only by them. The rarity of answers to my narrow question is not, in my humble opinion, a good enough reason to pretend that I asked for examples of exonymy in general. —Tamfang (talk) 04:42, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

AnonMoos's and Rojomoke's answers are examples of what I was after, thanks. —Tamfang (talk) 06:13, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Rifle platoon leader v. infantry officer (platoon level)

In the US military context, are these two terms synonymous? Gullabile (talk) 20:01, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Platoon#United States organization explains American military terminology here. --Jayron32 00:45, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. My question better worded would be: Are all infantry platoons rifle platoons in the US military? Gullabile (talk) 20:58, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

No, ~3:1 Rifle:Wpns. 70.174.141.142 (talk) 21:22, 31 March 2014 (UTC)