Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 December 16

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December 16

How can I find enything about Hermann Toelcke

Moved to entertainment where it will get more replies

Mandarin Immersion Programs

I'm interested in enrolling in a language immersion program for Mandarin Chinese this summer. For some reason, I'm having a hard time finding anything on Google, although I did find Middlebury College in Vermont, which looks pretty good. Does anybody know of any other good summer programs, preferably in the US? By this summer, I'll have had two semesters of Chinese language study. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, GreatManTheory (talk) 17:20, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

You did mention preferably in the US, however, you might wish to compare costs to attending a Chinese language school. Some of them can be quite inexpensive, although you should check their reputation online, as there are some schools that are simply moneymaking schemes. Steewi (talk) 00:54, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

How about the FALCON program at Cornell university? http://lrc.cornell.edu/falcon/index.html 71.58.58.66 (talk) 04:59, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your responses. GreatManTheory (talk) 14:27, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Pronounciation of Gisele Bündchen

How do you pronounce her name a) in Portuguese and b) in English? --KnightMove (talk) 18:42, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

We had this discussion before; see Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Language/2006 August 9#IPA for "Gisele Bündchen". —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 20:28, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Translation needed of Inscription to the sacrifice of the Swiss Guard

The following is a transcription of an inscription on an altar in a memorial chapel in Lucerne. I am not sure if the word in the sixth line is haeres or heres.

“X. AUGUSTI Iuratæ fidei decus est perstare tenacem, Perstantem decus est in statione mori, Hæcce monere meum, sæclis memorando futuris Perstando fidos et moriendo viros. Ne temnas monitum generosi nominis hæres Helveta gens: prisca stare memento fide! Stabit tuta salus, stabit tibi nomen avitum Si tibi perstiterit virtus avita ____ fides.”LShecut2nd (talk) 20:25, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't seem like it is quite grammatically correct, but: "It is a virtue for a tenacious man to stand firm with sworn faith, it is a virtue that one standing firm dies at his station, to remind my (my something?) about these things by remembering future ages, to remind the faithful by standing firm, and to remind men by dying. Swiss nation, heir of the noble name, you should not despise the warning: remember to stand with the ancient faith! Salvation will remain safe, the ancestral name will stand for you if..." Then "ancestral virtue" and "faith" but the missing word would help. "Meus" sometimes implies "my army" or "my men" or something, so maybe that's what it is here. I assume the word is "heres", since "haeres" means "you adhere" and that doesn't really seem to fit, and "generosi nominis" could go with "heres" or "monitum" (the warning of the noble name). I hope that is of some help. Adam Bishop (talk) 22:46, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

According to a transcription in Mémoires (inédits) de Charles Barbaroux (1822), the word in the sixth line is hæres, and the last word is capitalized: " - FIDES". Nothing is missing in Hæcce monere meum. Xn4 03:43, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, well then maybe it means "You remain, Swiss nation, so that you do not despise the warning of the noble name" or something like that, taking "ne" as a result clause. Or it is a hypercorrection for "heres". Adam Bishop (talk) 03:54, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, it also seems that nothing is missing between avita and FIDES. Xn4 04:03, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The 19th-century manuscript I am working on has "heres." I picked up the possibility of "haeres" from the same source (Mémoires de Charles Barbaroux). If only someone living near Lucerne could go and take a look!LShecut2nd (talk) 14:11, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know, usually these guys are pretty meticulous in copying down inscriptions. It would help if we could go back and ask the author what he was trying to say! Also, if there is no missing word at the end, then I suppose it says "Salvation will remain safe, the ancestral name will stand for you if ancestral virtue stood for you - faith!" Meaning, "have faith" as a kind of interjection (like Dan Rather exclaiming "courage!"). Also, perstiterit can be future perfect or perfect subjunctive, and since it comes after "si" I would want to assume it's subjunctive, but it could work either way. Adam Bishop (talk) 15:58, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Usefulness of the Chinese writing system

The advantage of the Latin script versus the Chinese one is obvious: simplicity. But I was wondering... what could be said in favour of the Chinese one, aside from facilitating the communication between speakers of different Chinese modalities? --Taraborn (talk) 21:46, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

The Chinese characters have nothing to do with "facilitating the communication between speakers of different Chinese modalities". You may as well say that the Latin script "facilitate the communication between speakers of different English modalities". Chinese characters are not "above language", because no script is.--K.C. Tang (talk) 04:58, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Then I must have misunderstood this: "Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character.", from our article Chinese character, have I? --Taraborn (talk) 10:29, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Why, an American and an Australian can understand the same Times article, while they pronounce the words differently (sometimes quite differently)! Think also of Latin during the medieval times, when a German and an Italian scholar certainly read the same Latin text quite differently! So why are Chinese characters so special in this?--K.C. Tang (talk) 13:51, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Because a Japanese person and a Chinese person, who know only completely unrelated languages, can communicate to a degree using the Chinese script, as the same ideograph is frequently used for the same concept in the written form of each language. It's not perfect, and it's not above language, but it certainly helps smooth out some communication difficulties in a way that an alphabet or any semi-phonetic script couldn't.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not about the script. Not at all. A Japanese who has never studied the Chinese language cannot communicate with a Chinese, in writing as in speaking. You may say they can communicate "clumsily" by writing characters. But an English man and a French man can also communicate "clumsily" by writing letters: the French man writes ange, and the English man can guess he means "angel". To quote you, "it's not perfect, and it's not above language, but it certainly helps smooth out some communication difficulties...". There can be misunderstandings, no doubt, but a Japanese and a Chinese can also misunderstand each other by writing characters. What will the Chinese think when his Japanese counterpart writes 娘? Anyone who knows the ABC of Chinese and Japanese can bet. But no one wants to admit the above, anyone? Because everyone wants to think Chinese characters are "special", in the positive or negative sense of the word.--K.C. Tang (talk) 07:15, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Except that French and English are deeply related languages, unlike Japanese and Chinese. Chinese character are "special"; for one thing, they take up more codespace in Unicode than the rest of Unicode combined. The only real question is what ways are they special in?--Prosfilaes (talk) 12:01, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. It's certainly pretty easy to do so, "ange" and "angel" are just one letter away, aren't they? It would be somewhat more difficult if we wanted to do so with Indonesian and German, I'd say. --Taraborn (talk) 16:42, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

That's beside the point. But after all the above discussions, do you see that "speakers of different Chinese modalities" can still communicate well even though they don't use Chinese characters? Please forgive me if I seem to have over-reacted. But the prevailing misunderstandings concerning the Chinese writing system always drive me crazy. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 01:44, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't quite get what you're saying. If you replace Chinese characters with say unique codes for each and taught people to use that instead of Chinese character, then of course it will still work, still retaining the "inter-modality language" capability as it is just Chinese character in another form. If you replace it with a phonetic romanisation, however, it loses that, as it is no longer phonetic-neutral; if you replaced Chinese with pinyin, then you'll need to learn Mandarin to write Chinese, which is mostly unintelligible from eg. Cantonese. It's like Java Bytecde, you read it, and then compiles just in time for the language you're speaking, even though you often have to change it (sometimes significantly) for it to sound natural in the language. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

"Speakers of different Chinese modalities" can communicate in writing with each other because they employ the common written language. It doesn't matter in what script this common written language is represented. If a Cantonese guy can communicate with a Fujian guy in writing, it's not because Chinese characters are used, but because both of them employ the common written language, which was Classical Chinese in the past, and is Baihuawen nowadays. A Hong Kong guy writes his blog in Cantonese, but chances are that a Beijing guy can't quite understand what he's saying, even though what he sees are all Chinese characters. I think you came very close to the crux of the problem when you said "you'll need to learn Mandarin to write Chinese". In fact "speakers of different X modalities" can communicate with each other in writing because and only because they have learned the common written language (replace X with Arabic/Chinese/English etc). Nothing more and nothing less. Ok, it'll be my last post here ... forgive my verbosity, everyone. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 09:04, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

The standing tradition is a big mark in favour of characters. The task of convincing 1 billion and more people to start reading in a script they aren't used to reading in is an enormous one. Although a Chinese person can read in pinyin if they have to, it is actually quite difficult, and takes a lot of concentration. Furthermore there is a cultural heritage ingrained in characters and a character heritage ingrained in Chinese culture. It would be very difficult to leave them behind. Most Chinese people would tell you that there are extra meanings and the like inside the characters that would be lost in a transfer to a romanised version of Chinese.

These reasons are more cultural than anything else. A latin script, from a purely utilitarian perspective, is probably much more appropriate. However, the other reasons are very important and should be considered, too.

From a psycholinguistic perspective, a latin script is a little strange from a Chinese perspective. Where we think in individual sounds (pengyou is p-e-ng-y-o-u), the Chinese perspective is more syllable based (pengyou is p+eng, y+ou), probably something to do with the syllable being the tone bearing unit, therefore the idea of breaking the sounds down further is a little counterintuitive. Keeping a script syllable based seems more intuitive then breaking the syllables up into more pieces. Steewi (talk) 01:04, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see you transcribing pinyin back into Chinese. Learning to read Chinese has quite a steep learning curve, but once you get the system, you can pronounce most unknown character without any thinking at all, and in most cases you will be correct. Chinese characters aren't actually that hard, it's just made up of a number of simple elements (same as Latin script made out of alphabets). It's just that Chinese requires 2D memory, remembering the location of each stroke's (or more appropriately, each radical's) X- and Y- location, as opposed to the 1D structure of Latin script. But even then there are only so many common character structures, so you don't really have to remember much more. In Chinese there are bazillions of homonyms; in Chinese characters each look different, but with romanisation and it take considerable effort to decrypt the message, which very much defeats the "simplicity" of Latin script. Also the aesthetics, the compactness of Chinese characters, and their often very logical etymology of the Chinese characters are some other advantages. I really suggest you to actually know the thing you're trying to improve on before blindly making assumptions. PS: In response to Steewi, pinyin is taught in chunks, so pengyou it's separated as p-eng y-ou, not to each individual letter. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:14, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Initially, the Chinese had a bit of an advantage in pre-developmental stages of the printing press. Since their characters didn't have to be lined up perfectly they developed a stamp-ink system a while before gutenberg. However, the huge number of characters proved damaging in the end when it came to printing, as a printer would have to have thousands of stamps, rather than several copies of the same simple alphabet. Wrad (talk) 05:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that if the Chinese actually wrote text the way they spoke, it wouldn't take any more effect to decipher written Chinese than it does spoken.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Advantages of the Chinese system are several. It's compact. In a sample text on the Unicode website, Chinese was one of the smallest (byte-wise) translations, even at three bytes per ideograph versus 1-~1.5 for Latin text. In the Handbook of the IPA, the Cantonese text written in ideographs takes up half the space of the phonetic transcription. It's easy to typeset; each character fits in a standard square, and there's no kerning, no hyphenation, no ligatures to worry about.

And it's the existing script of centuries of Chinese. One of the things about English, is that anyone can pick up a book that's up to 200 years old, and have no problems reading it; after reading long s, they should be able to read most books back to about 1650, at which point they need to start figuring out blackletter. For the Turkic peoples, material written prior to the last script change, which in many cases was after the fall of the Soviet Union, is illegible to the most recent generation. Cutting off all the past that's not commerically valuable enough to be republished is probably a cost not worth paying.

It's beautiful,isn't that enough?..hotclaws 20:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Huh.. I was under the impression that written Chinese did in fact serve as a means of communication between Chinese "dialect" languages (eg, Mandarin, Min, Cantonese, etc -- but not Japanese!). Reading this thread and investigating some relevant pages has shown me that my impression was incorrect. From what I gather now, it sounds like written Chinese can serve as a way for people of mutually unintelligible Chinese "dialects" to communicate, but only if they have learned a standard written form like Vernacular Chinese. One page compared this to something equivalent to the use of Latin as a lingua franca in the past. Which leads me to wonder and ask -- is learning Vernacular Chinese as difficult for, say, speakers of Min and Cantonese, as learning Latin is for speakers of English? Pfly (talk) 08:22, 19 December 2007 (UTC)