Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 March 6

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March 6

What is "乾亨行"

Moved from WP:RDH. Nyttend (talk) 00:43, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm reading about Sun Yat-sen, and it says of the Revive China Society in 1894 that, 'They disguised their activities in Hong Kong under the running of a "Qianheng Company" (乾亨行).' I can't figure out what that means. I can't read the source, but it has some pictures of horses, riders, and a paraplegic celebrity. Searching "乾亨行" and "Qianheng" yeilded nothing useful (except for this article [1], which is apparently a landmark on the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail.) If you know the meaning of "Qianheng", please tell me. -68.49.184.206 (talk) 12:41, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

"Qian" means "Heaven" and "Heng" means "smooth/prosperous". Both characters are popular for use in business names. The third character (Hong) means a trading company or shop. Together, this was simply the fictitious business name chosen by Sun and his associates for their premises at 13 Staunton Street to disguise its true nature. The name is also transliterated/translated as "Kuen Hang Club" by other sources. --165.225.80.125 (talk) 13:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I see the latter translation is missing from our article - I will add it in. --165.225.80.125 (talk) 13:25, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! --68.49.184.206 (talk) 00:50, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

get smart to sth.

I came across a sentence:"More and more companies get smart to the benefits of keeping a remote staff. " Does "get smart to sth." mean "become aware of sth "? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.221.154.63 (talk) 07:33, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

It means something more like "become aware of the advantages of sth".--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

So, in this sentence, "become aware of the advantages of the benefits of keeping…"? —Tamfang (talk) 09:38, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

It is informal, colloquial speech meaning "to become more knowledgeable about" --Jayron32 14:03, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Like "get wise", "get hip", etc. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:10, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

but unlike "get bent", "get lost", etc. --Jayron32 20:39, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

and also unlike get high, get laid ... —Tamfang (talk) 09:38, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

not at a soccer game instead of a client meeting

I saw a sentence that I suspect doesn't make any sense. What do you think? It is "How do you know that they aren’t at a soccer game instead of a client meeting?" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.221.154.63 (talk) 15:30, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

You might be finding the sarcastic phrasing confusing. A shorter but less sarcastic way of saying it could be, "Do you know for sure that they're at a client meeting and not at a soccer game?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It makes perfect sense in English. The speaker (or writer) is asking you to consider a possibility (the rhetorical question marker "How do you know that..." Is often used in English to point out a misconception or get the listener to consider a different point of view.) The rest of the sentence is giving two possibilities: a soccer game (which you, dear listener, have assumed they were at) and a client meeting (that is, perhaps, where they actually were). The only non-standard constructions here may be the use of "...instead of..." in place of "...rather than..." (though they're pretty much synonyms idiomatically) and the use of the idiomatic "negative-positive" in the word "aren't". Some dialects of English use this negative-positive in certain constructions, see for example here or here which explains the construction in regards to New England English. --Jayron32 15:40, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree with that, except that I would interpret it as meaning that they should be at the client meeting, but may have gone to watch a football match instead. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 15:43, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

It does indeed make perfect sense to a native speaker. The OP geolocates to China, so might not understand all of our language's subtleties. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:45, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Not that any native speaker could so claim either. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:51, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

There ya go. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:53, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

• I think the OP has a good question here. A native English speaker knows exactly what this means, but it does not explicitly state its meaning. The intended meaning is "How do you know that they are at a client meeting? They might be at a soccer game." -Arch dude (talk) 04:11, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

  Well, that's how being a native speaker works: You understand idiom, sarcasm, cultural context, etc. --Jayron32 11:39, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

What language can be typed by more humans than any other?

With understanding, not just copying (i.e. I could copy Burmese books very slowly with hunt and peck but that doesn't mean I understand the language (I don't)) When was the last time the language that could be typed by the highest percent of the world population changed?-- Sagittarian Milky Way, 18:19, 6 March 2017‎

May I ask you: Do you know English? Your question does not make sense.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:30, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean on a typewriter, or do you just mean sufficiently literate in a language to write it? Are you looking for absolute numbers of people, or as a proportion of world population? Dbfirs 20:15, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Or electronic device. Typing Chinese in Romanized Pinyin or complex radical/stroke/shape/decomposition order keyboards is sufficiently different from writing that it seems literacy is not necessarily sufficient to type a language. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:07, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Typing has undergone a sea change over just the past twenty to thirty years. Prior to that, virtually no one could type in most languages that do not employ the Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic alphabets. What might pass as typing in Japanese or Chinese had little similarity to English typewriters, and the equipment was expensive and difficult to use, and the resulting typed pages were usually of poor quality. In some languages that used the Roman alphabet, typing was nevertheless problematic due to diacritics. Vietnamese newspapers were produced without diacritics, and then the diacritics were added by hand using an ink pen. Even after fonts and keyboards were developed for Arabic, the fonts were begrudgingly accepted only for body text, and headlines were done by calligraphers. Urdu newspapers rejected the available fonts altogether, and no typing was considered acceptable for Urdu. Even in languages that could be reasonably typed, such as English, German, French, and Russian, typing was a vocation reserved for the female gender. Men rarely learned to type, and those who did learn, used typing mainly for their college work.

Today, even though some languages are spoken by many millions of people, there is not always a big need for typing, since some countries block social media sites and even the Internet. My guess is that, considering everything, English always was and still is typed by more people than any other language. —Stephen (talk) 15:45, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I suppose you might be right. If so then maybe Chinese would overtake English in the future as Internet penetration rates rise (and already knowing English from school makes Pinyin easier to learn if they don't already teach Pinyin in English class anyway). (Maybe Chinese Wikipedia will rival English in size one day) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:07, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

You're wasting your time and effort because the OP still hasn't clarified what he wants to know. How many people type (on a computer or other device) in a language? Clearly, right now the majority of people must have been typing in Chinese, English, Spanish, and so on; one could just consult the language ratings by number of speakers.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:03, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

When were Vietnamese newspapers produced without diacritics and the diacritics added by pen? I don't see how that would work, because they would have been typeset in metal before printing. Perhaps during the American War? But even then I don't think that was often the case. The French introduced typewriters with diacritics. Vietnamese is really hard to read without diacritics, so much so that a special way of writing with extra characters was developed for telegrams. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:17, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I set foreign language type for many years before I retired a few years ago. I used to see Vietnamese newspapers set using computerized phototypesetting equipment, but with all of the diacritics added in by hand. This was not metal type, it was phototypesetting. Yes, of course Vietnamese is difficult to read without diacritics, and that's why the diacritics had to be inserted before printing. For an even older case, see here. Here is a more recent one, from 1986. —Stephen (talk) 23:51, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I may assure you that in the pre-hot-type and pre-typewriter era there was nothing difficult in having additional letters with diacritics. Of course, you wouldn't find them in any typography, but anybody could order an additional set of characters from type-cutters. With hot-type (Linotype, Monotype) it was slightly more difficult (the size of the keyboard, and hence the number of characters, was limited), but I'm sure they overcame that problem somehow in Vietnam or whereever. As for typewriters, typewriters with diacritics must have appeared very early, starting from French and German, but then for other languages. If accented letters were few (like in German) they just added a couple of buttons, but if letters were many (like in French or Vietnamese) then the dead keys were used. I suppose Vietnam was lagging behind slightly and Vietnamese typewriters must have appeared by the middle of the 20th century.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:51, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I worked for decades as a foreign language typographer and I used to see a few Vietnamese newspapers and other printed matter where the diacritics had all been added by hand. I still have a Vietnamese book, printed in the 1960s, which was typed on a manual typewriter. The typewriter did have diacritics, but the appearance is of poor quality and some words are difficult to make out. —Stephen (talk) 23:51, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for your practical input. My knowledge is largely theoretical. Though I still do not clearly understand why they couldn't typeset books with diacritics. People had been typesetting in languages with diacritics all around Europe and in polytonic Greek for several centuries. Maybe, as I noted, Vietnam was lagging in many ways and knew a shortage of proper equipment. Some typographies there might have only characters for French, so a Vietnamese had no choice but typeset without diacritics like today many Vietnamese, French, Czechs, Poles, etc. may type only in ASCII when having technical limitations or no right keyboard. Or on the contrary, the typographies outside of Vietnam might lack Vietnamese letters. Were your examples printed in Vietnam?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 09:54, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

There were several big problems during the era of computerized phototypesetting (approximately 1975 to 2000). The big name in phototypesetting equipment was Compugraphic. Compugraphic worked on the problem of CJK fonts for years, but the memory requirement for Chinese and Japanese (and even Korean) was simply too great. In those days, a big hard drive could only hold 5 megabytes (at a cost of US$10,000), and they could not make a CJK font that could be contained in the available memory. Besides that, there was no technology for accessing thousands of characters from a standard computer keyboard. Compugraphic eventually gave up on producing a typesetting machine for those languages. For Vietnamese, they did manage to create one single font, but it was a horrible font and soon abandoned. Memories were too small; MS-IME did not exist and there were no other practical strategies for accessing characters or multiple diacritics; there were no fonts available; monitors could not display fonts, not even English fonts, and for most of that time could not give WYSIWYG; monitors could not be made to display thousands of different characters; there was no font-making technology such as Fontographer; and, for right-to-left or top-to-bottom languages, direction was expensive, buggy, and awkward. Fonts were extremely time-consuming and expensive to make, and the computer technology in the machines was too primitive and the necessary technology simply did not exist yet. —Stephen (talk) 01:32, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Small world. My dad worked for Compugraphic and later Agfa-Gevaert for over 30 years. He worked on raster image processors and later film recorders/computer to film processing and was just getting into computer to plate printing equipment when he retired about 7-8 years ago. Hadn't seen anyone mention the company in many years. --Jayron32 17:58, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I disagree that "typing was a vocation reserved for the female gender." I used to work in a newsagency. They employed both male and female staff but the staff who typed the messages were male. They had old manual typewriters which I never saw operated by women. I never saw a female teleprinter operator either. Elsewhere in Fleet Street the workers I saw were all men - the Linotype machines were incredibly hot and noisy and I doubt that any women worked them. At sea and in combat zones there simply would not have been any women present to operate the machines. 80.4.70.229 (talk) 17:14, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I did not mean that, out of the total population of the country, there was not a single male typist. Yes, a newspaper had no difficulty in fielding a staff of males who could type. But if you, as a man, took a typing class in the 1960s, you would usually find yourself the only male in a class of 30 students. Today, almost everyone can type, and gender is not a factor. Prior to personal computers, it was rare to find men who could type, while typing class was usual fare for high school girls. —Stephen (talk) 23:51, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

The first practical Typewriters came on the market in the late 1800s. Presumably that fact should influence the context of your question. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:34, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Do men attend typing classes these days? From what I've observed they type using two fingers. When the new technology came in male managers prided themselves on their inability to type and left the work to their secretaries. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 08:37, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Present participle of verbs ending in -ie

The verbs die, lie, and tie all have -ying words as their present participle. Why is the present participle of pie pieing instead of pying?? Georgia guy (talk) 20:21, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Dunno, but you'll discover that researching "PIE" as a word is made quite difficult by Proto Indo-European. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 20:25, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Interestingly, the earliest usages did use the spelling "pying", and another word that appears with both spellings is "vying/vieing", but I can't work out the rule unless it is just that the root "pie" is more recognisable than "py", and the verb is relatively rare. Dbfirs 20:33, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Someone with the OED should probably check the verb for "to pie" for its etymology. I suspect that, because "pieing" is a fairly recent coinage, it is more likely to follow regular patterns (i.e. just adding -ing to the infinitive) than would be older words like "lying or "dying" all of which are probably old enough to predate 18th century spelling reforms and/or became standardized (that's standardised for our British folks) early in English orthography. --Jayron32 20:37, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I did, and the early spellings were indeed "pying". The etymology is straightforward: just pie+ing. Dbfirs 20:50, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, but the OP's question "why not like..." is probably then unanswerable by anything except "<shrug shoulders> <roll eyes> English?" --Jayron32 21:05, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)As I suggested (with a shrug), it's just a recent innovation because it's easier to recognise the root. According to Google ngrams, "pying" is still the most common spelling, so the question has a false assumption. In the case of "vieing", that spelling was popular in the 1800s (though not predominant), but is now rare. Dbfirs 21:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I've never heard of "pieing" before: we live and learn. Appropriately, today is the start of British Pie Week, [2] although the focus is on eating them rather than throwing them. Alansplodge (talk) 21:11, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I'd never heard of it before, either. Dbfirs 21:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

In the sense of shoving a custard pie into someone's face, apparently. This is now called pieing them. Wymspen (talk) 21:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

You would think that would leave the victim "pie-eyed", but apparently not: [3]. StuRat (talk) 15:37, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Ah, the onward march of civilisation! Alansplodge (talk) 22:11, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Well, it is a well documented linguistic phenomenon known as conversion. That you have a feeling about the process (such as annoyance, disgust, or ambivalence) does not actually mean it doesn't happen. Oddly enough, an individual's emotional response to a phenomenon doesn't change that phenomenon at all! --Jayron32 14:42, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

That's odd. Scientists would argue that the act of observing a phenomenon does change the phenomenon. I wonder why it's different for language change. Or is it ...? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:28, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Observing it may changing it, but feeling a certain way about your observation does not. --Jayron32 02:38, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

@Dbfirs: Google Ngram results are very often misleading, and such strange fluctuations are especially suspicious. If you look closely at the results there are a lot of OCR errors like occu-pying or even Pying-Yang and very few actual ghits (and even then they are rare cases like, citation, "Pying (as it is called in fome places) is a good method of preferving potatoes in winter." I haven't corrected Fs to long Ss just to show you how actually inaccurate the Google OCR may be.)--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:27, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree that Google n-grams can be misleading, and they were especially so in this case, but my claim that "pying" is a valid spelling is supported by no less than the Oxford English Dictionary which has four different verbs "to pie", starting with an obsolete sense from 1653: "To make an alphabetical index of rolls and records". The potatoes sense seems to be spelt "pyeing" but the modern sense (from 1977?) seems to have the modern spelling "pieing", and I think my and Jayron's guesses for the reason are as good as any. Dbfirs 17:14, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I did not doubt the OED, did I? Neither I claimed pying is not valid. I have no access to current edition, but in the 1st edition[4][5] I see no particular preference for pying over pyeing (not only for potatoes), though they indeed did not know pieing then.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:57, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Also there is at least one example of "vieing(e) from 1565 [6] and many examples in Google Books.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:16, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

You were correct to criticise my use of Google ngrams without checking for scannos. I think we were in agreement on other matters. Dbfirs 20:37, 8 March 2017 (UTC)