Language desk
< October 5	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 6

‘Apple bobbing’ in Danish

What is the Danish translation for this?83.74.109.234 (talk) 10:22, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Does that game exist in Denmark? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:45, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

l do not know.83.74.109.234 (talk) 14:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Whether they do or not would indicate whether they have a term, or whether you would have to invent one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:32, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here it’s called Dyk efter æbler (presumably noun) and dykke efter æbler (verb, but I don’t know how that is inflected since I don’t actually speak Danish). Cheers ⌘ _hugarheimur 05:33, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How did you find it?83.72.43.217 (talk) 09:26, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you can trust Google Translate, those words mean "dive for apples". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:47, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A little multilingual bonus: I knew the game’s called Apfeltauchen ("apple diving") in German, then used Google Translate. Cheers ⌘ _hugarheimur 22:50, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you really want to know this, then try to find the Danish dub or subtitles for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season 2 episode 4 "Luna Eclipsed". This not only mentions bobbing for apples in the dialog, but also shows it on screen, so it will probably appear in the dialog. If you can't find that, then find the Swedish dub or subtitle instead. – b_jonas 12:29, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OK. If anyone is still interested, I've finally found the time to look into it. The Danish translation is "Æbledykning" which literally means apple diving. See [1].--Ipigott (talk) 14:43, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Andantino

In Italian, should applying the diminutive -ino to andante as a pace ("going, walking" on Wiktionary) correctly make it clearly mean "faster than andante" or "slower than andante"? Or is it unclear without further explanation? What should andante molto really mean (e.g. Schubert's D 568/ii)?

Composers have used andantino to mean both, but Italian tempo markings written by non-Italians are sometimes incorrect Italian (e.g. alla ingharese from Beethoven's Rage over a Lost Penny, Op. 129). Since this question is about what these constructions ought to mean in correct Italian, I've asked it here rather than at the Entertainment or Humanities desks. Double sharp (talk) 17:02, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt the term has any clearly defined meaning outside music, and I also doubt the intended distinction to "andante" was originally one of tempo in the strict sense. These terms were originally markers of character, not of speed as such, and a diminuitive suffix would generally have meant something lighter and gentler in character – that's a characteristic quite orthogonal to whether it's faster or slower. You might find out something more by following the ref given in the German de:Tempo_(Musik) article, which cites New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for the statement that andantino was sometimes understood as slightly slower than andante "in the 18th and 19th centuries", but is otherwise mostly treated as slightly faster. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:07, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Franz Schubert's Music in Performance (p. 213) has a table showing various composers' ideas on the relative speed of musical terms and notes that: "Concerning Andantino, Czerny and Schubert (along with Krahmer, Junghanns, and Swoboda) were in agreement [that it was faster than andante], but were opposed by Rigler, Petri, Preindl, and Hummel. Beethoven does not use the term Andantino". Alansplodge (talk) 19:26, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I could interpret andantino as a noun meaning "short, moderately slow passage", analogous to wikt:concertino. Jmar67 (talk) 09:22, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On the linguistic issue, how is it that andante is universally rendered as "walking"? Literally, andante is the present participle of andare, "to go", so it should be "going". It's not in my experience a word generally used in modern Italian in a non-musical context, so it's hard to be ultra-sure, but the general word for "to walk" is camminare, whose present participle would be camminante, although I don't think that's a word I've ever encountered (the present participle being just barely productive in modern Italian). --Trovatore (talk) 23:17, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What was andante generally taken to mean when it was introduced into the musical lexicon, in Italian and internationally by non-Italian speakers of the language? Many words change their colloquially primary meaning over a couple of centuries or more, and anyway may be taken up and applied by specialists in a different sense than the commonest one. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.121.161.82 (talk) 06:10, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]