Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 July 14

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July 14

Do you use italics or not?

For Wikipedia purposes, do you use italics or not in this example?

A: The city is Derby, Connecticut; its Native American name is Paugasset.

B: The city is Derby, Connecticut; its Native American name is Paugasset.

So, "A" or "B"?

In effect, what I am really asking is this:

In the following chart (List of towns in Connecticut), should the entries in the column entitled "Native American Name" (Column Number 8) be listed in italics or in regular font? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:25, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

MOS:ITAL says, "Proper names (such as place names) in other languages ... are not usually italicized"—one of those guidelines that seem to be widely ignored in practice. Deor (talk) 06:10, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Joseph A. Spadaro -- even if you used italics in your example sentence (optionally, to emphasize the word's foreignness), you still might not want to use italics in the chart (which is a rather different context)... AnonMoos (talk) 12:01, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

I think it might be Derby which is actually "foreign" to North America in this case. Alansplodge (talk) 12:13, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, if pronounced Darbee. (Or, if you're from Brooklyn, Doybee.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:50, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't believe that pronunciation is relevant; every one of the 17 places called "Derby" outside of England would have been called something else had the original town of Derby never existed. Alansplodge (talk)

Places in Wales generally have an English and Welsh name, and our articles on Cardiff and Swansea have italicised the Welsh language names Caerdydd and Abertawe. However, when the Welsh name is more commonly used, like Caernarfon, neither the Welsh nor the English name (Carnarvon) is italicised, which shows the difficulty of this approach. Alansplodge (talk) 12:10, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the articles on Cardiff and Swansea use {{lang-cy}}, which automatically italicizes the output. The documentation of Template:Lang says, "While {{lang-xx}} templates output text in italics for languages with Latin-based scripts, if plain text is required, such as for proper names, {{noitalic}} may be used"; but most editors aren't aware of that, so proper names in those templates tend to be italicized in articles. Indeed, the handling of italicization in Wikipedia is wildly inconsistent, bearing little relation to the MOS guidelines. Deor (talk) 13:56, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

The issue isn't the foreign language, but the use of a word that refers to a word. In that case, the word is often either italicized or put in quotation marks. (I think linguists tend to italicize and philosophers tend to use quotation marks, but I'm not sure.) For example, from our article on Derry:

In 1613, the city was granted a Royal Charter by King James I and gained the "London" prefix to reflect the funding of its construction by the London guilds.

Here, the six letters L-o-n-d-o-n make a word referring to the big city in England, but the six letters and two quotation marks "-L-o-n-d-o-n-" make a word referring to the six-letter word that's being used as a prefix.

In the inquirer's example, "Derby" refers to the city and "Paugasset" refers to a word (specifically, the Native American name originally given to the settlement). If the sentence were flipped around I would still use italics or quotation marks for the word that referred to a word, thus: "Paugasset was settled in 1642. It acquired the name 'Derby' in 1675, in reference to Derby, England." The first occurrence of "Derby" names a name, while the second names a town. JamesMLane t c 07:45, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Root 'hild' in modern German

Are there words with the root 'hild' (see [[1]]) in modern German? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clipname (talk • contribs) 20:14, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

"Hild" is a component of some German first names, e.g. Brynhildr, Hildegard Knef, but also see Hilda of Whitby. As a native German speaker I can not - offhand - think of any word (apart from names) which contains this root. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 17:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

In Old High German the word "hiltja", "hilta" was used in the text as well as in the names of the Hildebrandslied. In Middle High German the dictionary form is "hilt", and Lexer's Middle High German dictionary notes that it is only used in proper names and in the following three compositions: hilte-diu, hilte-grîn, and hilt-matte. In New High German the word survives in proper names, see "Hild" sqq. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 09:31, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

alternate wording in Anne Frank diary

I'm wondering about variant wording in the diary. I understand that her Dutch was cleaned up for publication, so maybe one of these was her own wording? Or are there two editions?

In the famous quote where she says she wants to be Dutch after the war, there's:

En al zou ik aan de Koningin zelf moeten schrijven, ik zal niet wijken vóór mijn doel bereikt is.

vs

En als ik aan de koningin zelf moet schrijven, zal ik niet wijken voor mijn doel bereikt is.

I don't speak Dutch, so I can't tell if one has been corrected.

Thanks — kwami (talk) 22:03, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

There are different published editions, and Anne Frank herself also revised part of her diary entries with a view of publishing them. I don't have access to the critical edition, but the first Dutch publication (1947) has the first variant (see here).

Both variants are gramatically correct, but they are slightly different in meaning: The first one literally means "And even if I would have to write to the queen herself, I will not yield before my goal is reached". The second one has "And if I have to write to the queen herself, ..."; the second part is the same. The accents in "vóór" merely emphasize the word 'before'; "zal ik" or "ik zal" makes no difference here. Current spelling requires that koningin (queen) not be capitalized, but in older texts such spelling is not uncommon. - Lindert (talk) 23:59, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

See also answers to the same question over at the Humanities Desk. Alansplodge (talk) 08:49, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. That helps a lot. — kwami (talk) 21:41, 15 July 2017 (UTC)