Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 November 29

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November 29

Ann

Who is this woman? She suppose to be a Anna of Burgundy who was the bastard daughter of a Valois Duke of Burgundy.--Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 05:07, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Via check usage, I note this image is also used on the dutch wikipedia article nl:Anna van Bourgondië. Might be worth a looksee. Nanonic (talk) 05:29, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

From which you can also see her husband nl:Adolf van Kleef-Ravenstein—— Shakescene (talk) 10:10, 29 November 2009 (UTC) ¶ It also gives her dates of birth (about 1435) and death (1508). Since I don't know Dutch, I can't tell whether 1470 is the date of her marriage to Adolph or just of her betrothal. There's also a useful link to the picture's source the nl:Recueil d'Arras, which shows another picture of Anne of Burgundy (presumably the same Anne), nl:Bestand:Anne van bourgondië.jpg. —— Shakescene (talk) 10:26, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

¶ If you click on the image, it will open the picture's file and caption (including the artist) at Wikicommons. It will also allow you to see the image at full size, which may allow you to read what I presume is either an original inscription, or at least one written closer to the time it was drawn. The Wikicommons captions says

Description Anna van bourgondië.jpg

Portrait of Anne, Duchess of Cleves. Drawing. From the Arras Codex (Recueil d'Arras). Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale.

Inscription(s): Anne bastarde de bourgogne II femme de Adolph de cleves // et de Ravesteyn
Date

16th century
Source

Jozef Van Damme, Adolf van Kleef en van de Mark, heer van Ravenstein, onuitgegeven licentiaatsverhandeling, KU Leuven, 1967.
Author

Anonymous

The image was uploaded to Wikicommons on 9 June 2009 by Vincent Steenberg with the following original information in Dutch:

|Description=Portrettekening van Anna van Bourgondië als jonge vrouw in het Recueil d'Arras. Arras, BM. |Source=Jozef Van Damme, Adolf van Kleef en van de Mark, heer van Ravenstein, onuitgegeven licentiaatsverhandeling, KU Leuven, 1967.)

The image was scanned in May 2005. My non-expert translation of the inscription would be: "Anne, bastard of Burgundy II, wife of Adolph of Cleves and of Ravensteyn". My completely ignorant translation of the title of Josef Van Damme's book (since I know no Dutch) is "Adolph of Cleves and of the Mark, Lord of Ravenstein". English Wikipedia's stub article on Adolph of Cleves, Lord of Ravenstein (1425-1492) says that

Following Beatrice's death, Adolph married his cousin Anne of Burgundy (a natural daughter of duke Philip the Good). He didn´t have issue from this second marriage.

("Natural", of course, has the same meaning here as illegitimate or bastard.) See also the sketchy genealogical links from this article for Adolph of Cleves, Lord of Ravenstein and Anne of Burgundy (not to be confused with Anne of Burgundy, 1404-1432, the Duchess of Bedford).

Adolph's first marriage in 1453 was to the Portuguese princess, Infanta Beatrice of Coimbra (1435-1462). They had two children—who I presume would have become Anne's step-children—Philip (1459-1528, a future Admiral of the Netherlands, see nl:Filips van Cleef) and Louise of Cleves.

• [I knew absolutely nothing about any of this, apart from vague and irrelevant knowledge of Anne of Cleves, before seeing the query. The evidence, as Sherlock Holmes might have said, was sitting in plain view before anyone, including you, me, Dr Watson and Inspector Lestrade, who cared to look. It may be time for a refresher course at Queen Elizabeth's School for Little Spies.]

—— Shakescene (talk) 09:54, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Datasets for phonetic and cognational analysis of natural languages.

I am starting a programming project for conlang vocabulary generation, using phoneme frequency tables and markov chains. However, I would like to be able to offer the option of weighing the generated vocabulary by natural language equivalents (translations) of supplied terms.

For this, I am searching for usable (free) datasets of two kinds, for different natural languages:

• phonetic dictionaries (a table of words for some natural language and their pronounciations according to the international phonetic alphabet or some equivalent description schema)
• cognation/etymological structure. information regarding the particles of words in natural language and (ideally) their antecedents to create an etymological tree-structure allowing for a cognation metric.

For the former I am most hopeful, as I'm sure such datasets exist. As to the latter, there may be some data employed, for example, in stemming algorithms, that give the component parts of words in various natural languages. It is even possible that someone has already undertaken the task of creating an etymological hierarchy for some languages. In which case, such data would be greatly useful.

Unfortunately, I am not a linguist, nor am I familiar with the literature or canonical tools of computational linguistics, and as such request your help finding these data.

Sincerely, -nsh 78.32.249.98 (talk) 19:06, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

For the French language, you may like to see Le Robert oral - écrit. l'orthographe par la phonétique, in which words are listed according to their pronunciations. If I remember correctly from seeing this book at the local public library many years ago, the symbols are mainly IPA symbols, but with a few variations. For some sounds, the author(s)/editor(s) devised new symbols to accommodate recent trends in vowel merging. For example, there is one symbol representing both the open sound [ɛ] and the closed sound [e]. Another new symbol represents the merging nasal vowel sounds [œ~] and [ɛ~]. As a consequence of this arrangement, homophones such as French "vair", "ver", "vers", "verre", and "vert" are listed together, as are the words "un" and "hein" with merging vowel sounds. -- Wavelength (talk) 20:25, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Can you please tell something more (without confusing unnecessarily) about the purpose of the table of list?

Does ‘conlang’ mean to you ‘cognate’?

Does the phoneme 'frequency' mean that the frequency is measured in a X or Y scale (e.g. in hertz) or numbers of times?. Is this meant that you are searching something not of an alphabetic order but in a frequent hierarchy?

The 'Makov chains' is fine. But what do you mean by ‘However, I would like to be able to offer the option of weighing the generated vocabulary by natural language equivalents (translations) of supplied terms’? Can you give an example of this or attach something that you have already undertaken?

This is fine--phonetic dictionaries (a table of words for some natural language and their pronunciations according to the international phonetic alphabet or some equivalent description schema)--then you are searching something that is arranged in the frequency order?

But for this--cognation/etymological structure. information regarding the particles of words in natural language and (ideally) their antecedents to create an etymological tree-structure allowing for a cognation metric--do you mean a) ‘natural language’ as any language but a non-constructed language, b) ‘particle’ as ‘verb particles’(you are not searching of nouns or just to mean for ‘form of words’), c) ‘cognation metric’ as ‘cognates’ (or the ‘metric’ is something special to you )?

Also, i think the term ‘canonical tools’ usually refers to something that is ‘traditional’ (which is not evidential empirically). So you may explain something more about this query? Mihkaw napéw (talk) 16:13, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Conlang (he presumably wants to make his artificial-language words sound like they could be from a natural langage...). AnonMoos (talk) 17:28, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

For North American English, there is the CMU Dictionary.—eric 17:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)