Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 12

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March 12

Chinese restaurant signage

Hello. Maybe this is too frivolous for the Reference Desk, but everyone here is so friendly that I think I will ask. I am making some buildings for a model railroad layout, and in the town I want to include a Chinese restaurant. But I want the signs on the front to be accurate. Is there someone here who could help me with coming up with the proper text? Thank you.

Would these signs make sense:

金鴨小酒館

餐廳

自助餐

Any other suggestions? Ideas?

   → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 07:00, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Googling images for chinese restaurant sign brings up plenty.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:32, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

True, but I see the images and I don't know what they mean. Nor can I reproduce them.    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 06:01, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Frivolous? Hell no! Asking about names for a Chinese restaurant for a model railway is a whole lot better than some of the troll questions that get asked here.

"金鴨小酒館" - "The " would be what the restaurant's sign would be in English - is a fine name for a Chinese restaurant. There are actually a number of restaurants of that name according to Google.

"餐廳" just means "restaurant". Calling a restaurant "Restaurant" would be OK if it was retro-1990s place, I guess. But instead of a tank with live lobsters, it would probably have a shark preserved in formaldehyde. Eww.

"自助餐" means "buffet". So, a style of dining, not the name of an eatery. Well, maybe, if it was crowd-funded, the staff had sleeve-tattoos, and there was ample parking for single-speed bicycles.

--Shirt58 (talk) 10:19, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

"小酒館" sounds like a place for drinking (with small dishes, perhaps), rather than a restaurant - like an Izakaya. Whereas "小館" is a common suffix for a small restaurant. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 11:00, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Referencing an old joke's punch line, what would be the characters for "cheap but good"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:27, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

"超值" (exceeding value) is something frequently seen in advertising to indicate something is good value. A restaurant might put something like "超值套餐" (super-value set meals). More literally, "經濟實惠" (economical but good value) is also something you might put on a shop sign to indicate "cheap but good". A more modern idiom is "性價比高" (high specs-to-price ratio), but probably less likely to be on a sign. --[[User:PalaceGuard008|:PalaceGuard008] (Talk) 10:57, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

謝謝, PalaceGuard008. I was actually going to ping you about this thread, since it needed someone who can actually speak Chinese rather than some shmendrick who relied on reading the signage of restaurants he passed by. If we are going to do this well, perhaps we need a rough Cantonese transliteration of "金鴨小酒館". Not the "Yale", not the "Jyutping", but what it would be if it was a real Cantonese cuisine restaurant.--Shirt58 (talk) 11:37, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

That's an interesting challenge Shirt58! I'm not fluent in "restaurant Chinese", but in my experience "金" - which is frequently encountered in restaurant names - is usually spelled either "Gam" or "Kam", sometimes "Kom". "鴨" is not so common, so if we take the usual conventional transliteration ("Ap"), we get "Kam Ap" or "Gam Ap". How does that sound? "Kam Ap Restaurant"? Or "Kam Ap Tavern"?

Google turns up a couple of 金鴨 restaurants in different parts of the world, but they all use "Golden Duck" (or something else-Duck) rather than a transliteration. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:35, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

謝謝 all! Some good ideas here. I think I will use the Cantonese name and the same name in English. I will post photos when it is done.    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 14:01, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Moonmilk

Would you help me translate a bit of renaissance Latin?

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k93851n/f59

I want to know what Conrad Gessner has to say about "moonmilk". I see Lac Lunae mentioned on that page, but I can't figure out what he says about it:

... mihi enim verisimili quod ad ianuam non fit, caetera facile credo, quod and ex aliis audierim, & ex sene bumolgo viro bono, qui se ultra centrum orgyias progressum in eo specu dicebat, & inde ex fornice attulisse quod Lac Lunae appellant, de quo infra pluribus scribam.

"to me it really appears to be true what to a double-doored entrance they aren't made, the rest easily believe, what and from another I had heard, and from an old bumolgo gentleman, that he himself progressed beyond the center of the orgies in that cave, he declared, and thence from an arch I bring forth what they call Moon Milk, from below which many more he wrote."

I'm fairly sure ianuam can't really mean "a double-doored entrance", bumolgo is a mystery (a place name?), and orgies sound unlikely in the context of hunting for minerals in a cave on Mount Pilatus. But none of that really matters. What I particularly wanted, if you don't mind looking at the rest of the source, was to see whether he actually says why they call it moon milk - are "moon rays" actually mentioned in the source as a mechanism for its creation, or is that just an extrapolation that's crept in over time?

Also, the preceding chapter of this book (or compilation) is De Lunariis Herbis, which as I understand it is a general study of bioluminescence. The word Lunae shows up an awful lot there. Is he superstitiously ascribing any other natural phenomena to the action of moonlight? Perhaps everything that glows in nature is supposedly under the spell of the moon, according to Gessner?  Card Zero  (talk) 10:54, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I'll try to translate the passage. "ianua" refers to an "iron door" mentioned in the previous sentence. "bumolgus" is glossed in some sources as "milker", and "orygias" appears to be a unit of length sometimes glossed as "fathom". Thus:

"... in it, there is a cave commonly called Manloch or better Moonloch, i.e. the "man-cave" or "moon-cave", whose entrance they say is narrow as a door; its inner space is accessible and admits some amount of light; there is a pathway by which a person can advance about a hundred cubits or fathoms; it finally leads to water, and some claim that if you were to proceed you would arrive at an iron door at the end of the cave. Now as little credible this thing with the iron door seems to me, the rest I will believe readily, as I have heard it from others too, and I also heard from an old milker, a good man, who said he penetrated beyond a hundred cubits into the cave and retrieved from a vault something they call "moonmilk", of which I will write more below."

Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:37, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh centrum was hundred. This is very good. Do you mind finding out for me what more he writes of it below? Guessing is a lot of frustrating effort for me, the point in time when I want to learn about Latin tenses never coincides with when I want to actually read things.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:47, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Below: "An der Decke einer Höhle findet sich eine schwammige weisse, leicht zerreibliche Masse, eine Art Felsenschwamm oder Lerchenschwamm (agaricum saxatile) hier Mondmilch genannt, nach der weissen schäumigen Masse aus der dieser Stein erhärtete, vorausgesetzt dass man ihn überhaupt Stein nennen kann. Mit Wasser vermischt färbt er es mit einer weissen Milchfarbe, er ist ohne Geruch und Geschmack. Er trocknet, ohne beissend zu sein. Er ist rauh, vergeht mit dem Speichel im Munde, insbesondere der Bessere. Er wird nämlich auch fetter oder rauher angetroffen. Es gibt sogar abergläubische Leute, die ihn für heilkräftig gegen jede Krankheit betrachten, deshalb wird schon das blosse Nennen des Kranken beim Gewinnen der Mondmilch in der Höhle für heilbringend betrachtet." --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 00:08, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Is that from the same work? I couldn't find it in the link at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k93851n/f59, although I can find it here. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:46, 14 March 2016 (UTC)