Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 January 2

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January 2

Which is the best online resource for the events in India?

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Which is the best online resource for the events in India? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Divyakpkp (talk • contribs) 07:19, 2 January 2018 (UTC) Define "best". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC) "of the most excellent or desirable type or quality." You could have looked that up yourself in the dictionary. Wymspen (talk) 10:56, 2 January 2018 (UTC) So do you have an answer that will fit whatever the OP has decided "best" would mean? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:00, 2 January 2018 (UTC) No more than you do. Wymspen (talk) 15:00, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

University of London Act, 1898 full text available?

I have been trying to get the full text of this law but none seems to be accessible without payment. Anybody know some source for UK Parliament Acts of this period? --Remadevil (talk) 13:19, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I think if there's someone who still has WP:HeinOnline access—mine lapsed while I was inactive earlier this year and I never bothered requesting renewal—they might be able to help you out. I know the Wikipedia HeinOnline set has the Selden Society publications, and I think it has the English Reports... so I want to say it has Statutes of the Realm as well, which ought to have the Act you're searching for. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 14:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

It is in this collection of historic documents from the university archives, presumably scanned and saved as a PDF - page 62. [1] Wymspen (talk) 15:11, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much. That is a precious find and history of the University to boot. Thank you once again. --Remadevil (talk) 17:12, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Or Remadevil, the same book in an easier format, here. Alansplodge (talk) 17:52, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

That's still better. Thank you Sir.--2405:204:D289:9B16:7D84:B0B4:C4E4:8691 (talk) 13:44, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

What percent of the Japanese people living in Japan speak English?

I really would like to know. 50.68.252.153 (talk) 15:47, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Don't worry, we always assume people asking questions here actually want to know the answer. That's called assuming good faith, which is a central tenet of Wikipedia. Unless they give us good reason to believe they have some other motive, that is. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 16:26, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"While no official data seems to exist regarding the percentage of native Japanese-English bilinguals in Japan, the general perception from desk research and from conversations with Japanese friends and colleagues, is that less than 10% of Japanese have professional working proficiency in English". From Mitsue-Links UX Blog - Bilingualism in Japan: Why Most Locals Don't Speak English. Perhaps a more reliable source is Japan ranks 26th of 60 countries in global English proficiency but no national percentage. Alansplodge (talk) 18:01, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

This article claims that one in ten Japanese of school age or above has studied English, but the ability to actually speak the language is much lower [2], in part because of the difficulty of finding English speakers with whom to interact. The first answer in this quora tread [3] has some actual figures which estimates that around 0.1% of the population is truly fluent in English (as opposed to having been exposed to some English learning at some point). --Xuxl (talk) 18:10, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

From what I've read, it's that, plus most English instruction in Japan focuses on rote memorization of vocabulary, so that most who've gone through Japanese schools can recognize a number of English words but have no idea how to string them into a sentence. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 00:18, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

What exactly do you mean by "speak English"? Note: English-language education in Japan. English education is, I believe, mandatory in Japanese primary education, but, as discussed above, it has serious deficits. Especially in cities, many Japanese will be able to understand a smattering of English from the gaijin, but only a small percentage of Japanese are actually fluent in English. Modern Japanese also has a number of English loanwords, and often-not-very-grammatical English is frequently used in advertisements and the like, but these don't really translate (excuse the pun) to English fluency. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 00:18, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Every single Japanese people in Japan speaks English. Here are their vocabulary:

1. Okay
2. USA
3. Japan
4. SALE
5. X-MAS
6. Police

110.22.20.252 (talk) 06:17, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

The above is the same user that asked why people at the south pole are in denial about being "upside down". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:56, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

It is true that many English words have been adopted into the Japanese vocabulary. That doesn't mean that they recognize them an English or even use them correctly. When I was in Kyoto, I was asked by local Japanese people if I could help them practice "Hollywood." For them, that word means "speaking American English." I also noted that they swapped the words "loan" and "borrow." When I said that I needed to keep a few yen for a "daxi" (they don't pronounce it "taxi"), a man said he would "borrow me some money" and I could "loan it back to him tomorrow." I personally don't see this any different than how English speakers have borrowed words, often using them incorrectly. For example, typhoon and tsunami are Japanese words. I doubt anyone who mentions a "typhoon" suddenly thinks "Oh my! I can speak Japanese!" English people also use adopted words incorrectly. "Katakana" is not pronounced "care-ee-oh-kee". Sake means "alcohol" and isn't reserved for one specific kind of fermented rice. "Ramen" is a specific soup adopted in Japan from China and has nothing to do with the cheap noodle packs college students consume. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 18:36, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Um, no. Typhoon comes from the Greek Τυφῶν Typhōn, which refers to a whirlpool, or a sea monster, and is the cognate with wikt:python and wikt:bottom and various other words that have to do with the depths. The formation tai fung in Chinese is a folk etymology of this term which came from the west. In no sense is typhoon an etymologically native Japanese word, although it does fit Japanese phonetics to a tee. μηδείς (talk) 02:53, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

It is an assumption that the word may have travelled from Greece (where they don't get typhoons), through Persia (where they really don't get typhoons), through the Indus Valley (where they could have at least heard of a typhoon related to a monsoon), and into China. Proof of that route does not exist. Regardless, early use of words like typhoons in English came from China. Use of typhoon itself came from Japan. At no time was typhoons adopted from Greek to English. 71.85.51.150 (talk) 10:14, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Read the history of "typhoon" before you jump to that conclusion.[4] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:02, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

I'd have no problem accepting that Modern English borrowed typhoon from Modern Japanese, regardless of the fact that if it were Japanese, it should be spelt taifun, not in Greek transliteration. But the implication above is that the word is a native Japanese one (i.e., deriving from Old Japanese, and not a borrowing) and no sources have been provided to that effect.

On the other hand, I have read at length on the etymologies of the words deep, bottom, python, typhoon, pythmen and fundus among others (see metathesis for the b(p,φ)/d(t,θ) <--> d(t,θ)/b(p,φ) alteration), in relation to the glottalic theory, which points out the extreme rarity of the /b/ phoneme in PIE and the corresponding rarity of native English words, like deep (PIE /b/ > proto-Germanic /p/) because of this. I think the discussion is in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, but my copy is in storage 300 miles away. So, at this point, unless IP 71 has a reliable source to link to, I'll rest on what I have said above. μηδείς (talk) 18:29, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Um, I don't think many people pronounce Katakana as "care-ee-oh-kee". Did you mean karaoke? Anyway, I think we should distinguish between minor word usage errors by non native speakers, perhaps arising due to words in their native language which may not even be very related or sound the same; and people who only know loan words which may have different meanings in the local language. For example, "borrow" and "lend" are commonly interchanged by English speakers in Malaysia, even those who's level of English is high enough that they will fit many definitions of "English speaker". Probably at least partially because both are the same basic word in Malay [5]. I don't think this is something particularly unique to Malaysian English speakers either, hence [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. And this isn't even all the relevant results from the first 10 in a simple Google search. It sounds like the person in the example you gave probably has a fairly limited level of English with problems significantly beyond this simple mistake given their usage of "loan". But the point is someone can have a decent level of English and still make such mistakes. This is different from the point which I agree with that a person knowing a few loan words, or even with limited knowledge of a few English words (as English words rather than loan words) doesn't make someone an English speaker by most definitions. Nil Einne (talk) 15:12, 4 January 2018 (UTC)