Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 December 31

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December 31

हमैं अतीत को भूल जाना हैं और आगे की ओर देखना चाहिए

हमैं अतीत को भूल जाना हैं और आगे की ओर देखना चाहिए...

(translated to we should forget the past and look forward)

This in topic for my FA in hindi, can some one tell me some points/दोहे/poems on it for a essay--Aryan ( है?) 04:42, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Someone simultaneously asked the same question elsewhere; let's keep all discussion in one place. —Tamfang (talk) 09:05, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Pho questions

There are two Vietnamese restaurants near me. One is Pho Dang and the other is Pho Hong. The pho article says that it's a type of soup. Meanwhile, Google Translate tells me that Pho Dang means either "cheese spread" or with various accent marks, "Deputy published", "Deputy party", "Vice Down", or "Deputy Facebook". It also says that Pho Hong means "Deputy Hong". And to top it off, neither of the articles on Hong or Dang say anything about Vietnam.

Could someone both transliterate and translate these two restaurant names for me? (If only they made it easier on us dumb Americans by just naming their restaurants like the local Chinese places, Wok 'n' Roll and Men At Wok.) Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 19:29, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

The most likely thing is that Dang and Hong are names. It's not possible to say for sure without the diacritics (accents). Hong is quite likely a given name meaning Red/Rose (cf the English given name Rose). Dang could possibly be the surname, also used in Chinese, where it's spelt Deng. Pho are rice noodles, usually served in broth with meat and vegetables. This would be the meaning in these restaurant names. With different accents pho can mean "vice" as in "vice president". Itsmejudith (talk) 20:54, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

In Vietnamese it's spelled Phở. The difference is more than diacritics; in the Vietnamese alphabet, the letter "ơ" is a completely different letter than "o". "ơ" is pronounced /ə/ and "o" is pronounced /ɔ/. So "pho" is the wrong word and typing it into a machine translator is like typing "lick" when you're looking for the meaning of "luck". The "hook" over the "ơ" is a tone mark that, in southern accents, indicates a "dipping" tone (Vietnamese is a tonal language). As for transliteration and translation, phở is /fəː˨˩˥/, and refers to the noodle soup itself, the entire dish (the rice noodles are called bánh phở). Your "hong" is probably hồng, since Phở Hồng is a fairly common name for a pho restaurant, in which case judith is right in that it can mean "red" or "rose" (and, less commonly, "persimmon" or "wild goose") and is pronounced /hoŋ͡m ˨˩/. It's impossible to say for sure what "Dang" is without the right letters. Vietnamese has two "D"-shaped letters: D and Đ and three "a"-shaped letters: a, ă and â and six possible tones, making 36 possible combinations (not likely that all would be words though).--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 23:06, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

• I can reassure User:Dismas that it is not at all unusual for Vietnamese restaurants to be soup kitchens (in a non-derogatory sense). I lived for two years off-campus with Vietnamese roommates, and whenever I went out to eat with them to their preferred haunts they only ordered soup (with a specialized ladle) and were dismayed that I wanted platters of appetizers, like mothers telling me I would spoil my appetite. The funny thing was that we were all three cooks, they at Chinese restaurants, and myself at American restaurants (and at one Swiss German) where all the kitchen staff I worked with were hispanohablantes. In any case, you could order whatever you wanted, as long as it was soup. Happy New Year, as they have started the fireworks. μηδείς (talk) 04:23, 1 January 2016 (UTC)