Difference between revisions 405029 and 875060 on enwiki

Some old talk can be found in [[Talk:Common phrases in different languages (table)]]
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We need to conform to some other, established way of transcription: the way "gracias" is mangled currently, it seems in any Spanish-speaking country all you have to do is say "grassy Ass" in response to a kindness.  That doesn't capture the sound correctly; we also need a way of indicating where the stress falls in a word, since it does sometimes make a difference.

: I agree that a proper phonetic transctiption would be more accurate.  The problem with some phonetic notations is that most people cannot read them, or at least not without continuous checking back-and-forth to some key.   As for emphasis how about we just capitalize an emphasized syllable: ''hola'' /OH-la/, ''por favor'' /pour fav-OAR/, ''gracias'' /GRASS-ee-ass/, ''ése'' /AY-say/, ''cuánto'' /KWAN-toe/, ''Inglés'' /in-GLAZE/, ''sí'' /see/, ''no'' /no/.

::grAHseeus or grAHs-yus would be closer to correct; and it's only barely three syllables; more like two.  Otherwise it sounds like "Grassy ass for the tay-koes and tuh-males."  Which may be correct in Texas...
:::Some students in high school Spanish classes make bad jokes such as "gracinalgas" (pronounced /GRAH-see-nahl-gahs/) that substitutes the Spanish word for "buttocks" where "ass" would appear. --[[user:Damian Yerrick|Damian Yerrick]]

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Two points:

1) this seems to be, as written, a very English-centric page. This web is world-wide, yes? Perhaps we should move the "English" column out of the "phrases" page and put a whole "words for languages in other languages" table. How do you say "japanese" in Dutch? kind of a thing.
:This is deliberately written in an English-centric way because it is part of the English-language version of wikipedia.  I suggest that other versions of this table be put in the [[wikipedia:Non-English Wikipedias|Non-English Wikipedias]]. --[[:Eob|Eob]]

2) How do we get proper characters on the screen. I mean cyrillic, Japenese, etc. Specifically, how do you write a web page that changes character codepages (iso-8859-? or windows-12??) in mid-stream? That way we could see many more languages, correctly spelled in the native tongue, up on the page.
: As far as I know we can can in general only use latin letters, that is mostly English letters plus the various accented versions of them.  See [[:Wiki special characters|Wiki special characters]].  I think we will just have to use some standard transliteration: someone mentioned Romaji for Japanese; we could use pinyin for Chinese; I assume there are standard transliterations for other languages like Greek, Russian, Hindi, ...  --[[:Eob|Eob]]
::Well, the fact is that the iso-8859-1 special characters are not enough for all the acents even for all European languages, even excluding those that use cyrillic. Specifically, Lithuanian uses characters like a-ogonek, u-makron and s-caron that are in iso-8859-4, but not iso-8859-1. I _think_ that iso-8859-1, iso-8859-2 and iso-8859-4 suffice for all European non-cyrillic languages, and I am certain that they are all necessary. So even without the "more difficult" problems surrounding Russian and Japanese, we need more characters. Does anyone know how to do this? Perhaps it exists in Unicode? [[:Tamulis|Tamulis]] 
:::All these things are in Unicode. The ISO 8859 character sets are not relevant. The N-th Unicode character can be encoded as &#N;. For example, ĉ comes out as ĉ (c with a circumflex -- although it's possible it may not work on your browser). There are some problems if the language isn't written left to right, however (see [[talk:The name of God in Judaism]]). --[[:Zundark|Zundark]], 2001 Oct 10

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''Cuánto'' does carry an accent, but only when used by itself, as a question: "How much?" Otherwise, without the accent, it means "as much as" or "as many as": cuanto como quieras: "as much as you want."

''Ése'' and ''ésa'' do carry accents when used by themselves, as do ''ésos'' and ''ésas''.  They don't when used with a noun, as in "ese árbol."  The same goes for ''éste'' and their variants.  --[[user:Koyaanis Qatsi|Koyaanis Qatsi]]
:Actually, that is an obsolete rule. Now none of them carry accents, either when used as adjetives (with a noun) or pronouns (by themselves)[[User:AstroNomer|AstroNomer]]

You're right; it's been a few years. I do remember, though, that it's "cuanto cómo quieras" :-)

:With all due respect, you remember wrong. <i>Como</i> is accented only when it means "how," not when it means "as." There are sentences in which you could use <i>cu&aacute;nto como quieras</i>, however. &amp;amp;amp;#8212;Eric

''cuánto como quieras'' doesn't make sense, whether you put an accent or not. If you want to say ''as much as you like'', that would be ''tanto como quieras''. By the way, ''cuánto'' is also spelled with an accent when it is an exclamation, as in ''¡Cuánto lo siento!'', which is literally "How sorry I am!"-- [[Calypso]]


PS. I'm using the accents on my Spanish keyboard, I wonder if everybody will see them correctly.

:They work because your Spanish keyboard uses ISO-8859-1 or -15 (ISO Latin) encoding. --[[user:Damian Yerrick|Damian Yerrick]]
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(Humor) Too ridiculous to add to the main page (and not necessarily correct) but:

Dutch-"De enige manier om Godzilla nu nog te doden is met een atoombom."<br> 
English-"The only way to kill [[:Godzilla|Godzilla]] now is with a nuclear weapon."<br>
French-"Maintenant, le seul method pour tuer Godzilla c'est utilizet une arme atomique."<br>
German-"Das einzige &uuml;brige Mittel Godzilla zu t&ouml;ten ist die Atombombe."<br>
Japanese-"Ima Gojira o koroshu hoho wa genshi buki shika nai."<br>
Spanish-"La 'unica forma de matar a Godzilla es con una bomba at'omica."<br>
Russian-"Ubeet Godzilla tolka obraz yadernee oruzhee."<br>
Polish-"Jedynym sposobem na zabicie Godzilli jest uzycie broni atomowej."<br>
Finnish-"Godzillan voi tappaa en&auml;&auml; ydinpommilla."<br>
Esperanto-"La ununura metodo mortigi Godzilon estas uzi atombombon."<br>

I know there are a bunch of other polytranslated bizarre phrases on the 'net; maybe links would be appropriate? - [[:justfred|justfred]]

   
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Maybe we should stop using this "pseudo-English" pronunciation system and agree on some more coherent one?
This problem applies to all Wikipedia pages involving pronunciation, not only "common phrases" --[[:Taw|Taw]]
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One could use [[SAMPA]]. -- [[Karl Palmen]]

:One could, and I rather suspect one should. I've added such to the French section for starters. [[user:Brion VIBBER|Brion VIBBER]]
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Dutch nee is said to be pronounced [[:Common_phrases_in_different_languages/neh|/neh]]/, but how do you pronounce [[:Common_phrases_in_different_languages/neh|/neh]]/? As "nay", or "knee", or something else? -- [[:SJK|SJK]]
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The a in the Danish word "ja" is pronounced somewhat similarly to the English short a, rather than an "ah" sound.  I represented the pronunciation in the table as "ya", but I am not really sure how to represent it so that it is clear that it is more like the a in "cat" than the a in "father".

Is that "cat" when pronounced with a Southern English, or a Northern English accent ?  The "a" will have quite different sounds in each case.  Likewise an American speaker will pronounce "marry" in much the same way that I, with my Scottish accent, will pronounce "merry".   In short this type of "phonetic" spelling can lead to widely different pronunciations depending on what accent the English speaker has.  It's vital that the particular accent used to pronounce the English "phonetic" spelling is specified. -- [[:Derek Ross|Derek Ross]]
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Wouldn't it be more useful to put the languages in alphabetical order? Makes it much easier to look for a certain language.The idea of keeping related languages together is that you can compare similar words, I guess, but this is not easily done in this table. And people are not sticking to the order in the Languages list, anyway. It is obviously not very convenient to have to check that list when you include a new language.
--[[Calypso]]

I agree, alphabetical would make a lot more sense. Also, why is the table on a different page from the footnotes? Why two pages anyway? [[user:AxelBoldt|AxelBoldt]]

:Fixed. --[[user:Damian Yerrick|Damian Yerrick]]
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What are the criteria for selection of languages to be included?
--[[user:Damian Yerrick|Damian Yerrick]]
:Um, what's wrong with the criterion "Some Wikipedian knows what those phrases are in the language and is willing to type them in"?  --LDC
:: Nothing.  (''This issue has been resolved; it's OK to add constructed languages.'')

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Note on the edit conflict <tt>&</tt><tt>amp;</tt> bug that's been rearing its head here; I have fixed this in CVS and asked Jimbo to upgrade the running software. The newer version also includes a diff display in the edit conflict screen, which should be a great help on these long pages... [[user:Brion VIBBER|Brion VIBBER]] 2002/03/26

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quote: "in english toilet refers to the fixture (the toilet itself) rather than the room which contains it". Wrong. Maybe so in US English, but estate agents in the UK will usually refer to a room as the "downstairs toilet" for eg.

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Why "La angla" for "English" in the esperanto section? if we mean the english language, a more appropriate choice would be "Anglalingvo", otherwise, just "Angla" would be right, no need for the definite article. -- [[user:Ydd|Ydd]]

:"Anglalingvo", while a legal construction, seems quite rare in actual usage (total 12 hits on google). "La angla" is far more "correct" from the standpoint of usage. --[[user:Brion VIBBER|Brion VIBBER]]

:: Weird, I've never heard that from anyone before, the sentance "&#264;u vi parolas la anglan?" looks awkward... but, I am not really an authority on esperanto, so I'll take your word for it. -- [[user:Ydd|Ydd]]

::: "Chu vi parolas la anglan?" is the ''only'' way I've ever heard it, and I've been an Esperantist for a number of years. Virtually all names of national languages in E-o are of the form la + adjective form of the name: la franca, la hispana, la portugala - short for "la franca lingvo" etc. - montréalais.

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I believe that Sardinian ''Adiosu'' and Spanish ''Adios'' (good-bye) are not at all [[false friend]]s: apart from having the same exact meaning, the Sardinian Adiosu comes from the Spanish Adios with the mere addition of an ordinary final "u", like in many Sardinian words (Sardinian received a relevant addition from Spanish, and there is plenty of words that are exactly the same in both languages, like ventana, manta, mesa, pregunta, etc.). I hope that who added the statement can give us more details. I'll wait a little before removing it. --[[user:Gianfranco|Gianfranco]]

:I have to disagree on this one, Gianfranco.  The two may have the same ''literal'' meaning in both languages, but are used in ''exactly opposite'' circumstances: In Sardinian, to '''greet''' someone, and in Spanish, to bid someone '''farewell'''.  This would be similar to a situation where, say, "see you" were used as a greeting in one culture, but as a parting in another.  Sometimes the context of use is almost as important in defining a "false friend" as is the literal meaning of the word itself.  After all, ''knock'' has the same meaning in US English and British English, but ''knock up'' means something '''very''' [[American and British English Differences|different]] in the US than in England!!! [[user:Pgdudda|Pgdudda]]

:Well, I was in Sardinia on holidays last week, and I was told Adiosu when I was leaving, not when I had arrived (when I was greeted instead with a warm Salude - as correctly in the article). Adiosu is not a greet for someone who arrives, but an expression for someone who leaves, in fact. So, I still believe the words are used for similar (if not the same) purposes, in (IMO) identical circumstances. 
:To distinguish Adiosu from a lighter "see you soon", I had weeks ago added "A nos bidere" (bye-bye?), to reflect the different expressions for the different kinds of parting. Terms are in bad order in the article, but Adiosu effectively refers to a farewell, the same way as for the french Adieu (not Au Revoir).
:As an incoming greeting, I only know a use of Addio in Tuscany and in Rome, but it is said with a bit of presumable original sarcasm, perhaps a little humour too, that today have been lost, and it is indeed a rare case. But I never heard it in Sardinia, and in my sources there is nothing in this sense.
:I'd add another deep similarity between these two languages: Spanish "Vaja con Dios" (loosely, may God accompany you) has a Sardinian version in "Bae cun Deus", again the same exact meaning, and to be used in the same circumstances. These similarities do have not an irrelevant reason: Sardinia was ruled by Aragon for 4-5 centuries, and many fields of common life were deeply influenced. One could perhaps be a little surprised (as I have been) to find in central Sardinia retablos and wooden statues in pure Toledan style (with golden paint, and with a very close figurative expression). Language was deeply influenced, as Spanish was the official language since 13th century, and the language of most Jesuits who capillarily fought paganism since 16th century, until Savoy kings arrived in 18th century.
:In Naples, this too ruled by pain for a long time, Addio is used again for similar purposes and circumstances; Vaja con Dios has been instead turned into "'A Maronna t'accumpagne" (may the Virgin Mary accompany you), replacing God with the Mother. But the invocation remains the same, and we don't have any more of it in Italy, if not in former Spanish-ruled areas.
:Anyway, on next Thursday I'be in Sardinia again (to work, this time |-(, and I'll ask more detailedly.
:BTW, I didn't find the ''knocking'' difference in the page you indicated me. What is it about?
:''A nos bidere'' (not ''Adiosu'') :-)) --[[user:Gianfranco|Gianfranco]]

::Whoops!!!  You're right about adios/adiosu - I was misremembering the article.  For some reason, I got it in my head that "adiosu" was used as a greeting.  By all means, remove the line about "false friend", since it's patently false!  Now, what did I do with that recipie for humble pie?...
::As to the "knocking" difference:  I thought there was a line in there about "knock up" meaning "to waken someone by knocking on the door" in the UK, and meaning "to make pregnant" in the US - it stuck in my mind as being a miscommunication so bizarre as to be humorous.  *sigh*  Ah well, I suppose I can just take the entire article as an example of how similar words can mean entirely different things, just between two major dialects.
::Slinks off to write "I will always check my sources" 100 times...  ;-)  [[user:Pgdudda|Pgdudda]]

::No problem, Pgdudda, thank you instead for your ''knocking'' note, and I hope you can add more cases: it's always dangerous for a foreigner to use idiomatic expressions in other languages, I hope I never used this with people from the US. You know, when I speak English sometimes people smiles at me, sometimes not properly... ;-)) --[[user:Gianfranco|Gianfranco]]

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It's this entire page against [[Wikipedia is not a dictionary]]? If we shouldn't be adding English language dictionary entries, why would we be adding '''foreign''' language dictionary entries? While mildy interesting, it's hardly encyclopedia material as far as I'm concerned. I think putting a link on each website about a language to webpages containing "X for beginners" would be more than useful. Otherwise we may as well put other tutorials and lessons in here as well... [[User:Jheijmans|Jeronimo]] 06:14 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)
:We do have tutorials and lessons. Look at [[How-tos]] for a list. --[[User:Stephen Gilbert|Stephen Gilbert]]

Oh my, what a terrible list! [[How to avoid cramps while swimming]], [[How to make starch from frosted potatoes]]... Those aren't encyclopedia articles... [[User:Jheijmans|Jeronimo]]
:Probably not a traditional enciclopedia, but [[wikipedia is not paper]]. I think one of the founding fathers of wikipedia thought that the "how tos" where part of the knowledge that defined a culture, so the deserved to be here. We have a [[cook book]] and a [[cocktail guide]] too. (Can someone check those links?).[[User:AstroNomer|AstroNomer]]


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Why not the word for "HELP!" in many languages? --[[Juuitchan#REDIRECT[[Parliament of Northern Ireland]]