Language desk
< July 27	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	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.

July 28

Poetic names of Japan

In this book a few literary names of Japan are listed: https://archive.org/stream/themikadosempire00grifiala/themikadosempire00grifiala_djvu.txt A few of them are problematic to me. How would you write them in kanji? I'm referring to: "Ni To" (Sun's Nest), "Uragusu no Kuni" (Country of Peaceful Shores), "Nan Sen Bu Shiu", the Southern Country of Brave Warriors, "Kuashiboku Kitaru no Kuni" (Country ruled by a Slender Sword). Can you help me? Thank you! 79.55.51.86 (talk) 08:02, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Initially, the genitive no ( の ) found in several names is almost never written in kanji, to my knowledge. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:40, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"... no Kuni" is "...の国" ("Land of ...").

Ni To: Perhaps "Ni To" refers to the archaic name 日東 Nittō for Japan. Literally, this means "Sun-east". If this is what is meant, the translation "Sun's Nest" is itself by poetic licence.
Uragusu no Kuni: 浦 (ura) can mean "seacoast", but the part -gusu (or -kusu) and the peacefulness remain elusive. 偶数 (gūsū) means "even number" and 樟 (kusu) means "camphor tree".
Nan Sen Bu Shiu: 南 (nan) means "south"; 戦 (sen) can mean "war"; 武士 (bushi) means "warrior", "samurai".

For the rest I'm drawing blanks. --Lambiam 15:14, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting, thank you! Apparently other sources give what could be slightly different names (so probably some misspelling was involved): "Kuwashio-Kochitaru-no-Kuni" (land of plenteous weapons), "Urayasu-no-Kuni" (country of peaceful shores) and "Nansen Bushin" (southern country of brave warriors). --79.55.51.86 (talk) 16:28, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that kusu relates to wikt:子, which has so many readings it may be sheer coincident. Besides ku- or -su it can alsmean ne" north". Sinologically related wikt:了 has a kun reading "shimau" (s before i always palatalizes), cp.shimaru "to be closed", which is perhaps interesting in view of the word shima "island". Or in the spelling of Wakuran ;) 2A00:20:6019:40EB:2C04:1B1:B47D:A409 (talk) 16:20, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm actually not sure on which spelling you refer to, although my Japanese is quite limited. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:26, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wakuran -- Everything was written with kanji in the ancient Man'yōgana script, though that was a long time ago! AnonMoos (talk) 20:19, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It seemed there was some spelling of "wakuran"/"惑乱" that used 了, which I'm not aware of. And Japanese is unreadable enough even with hiragana... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:14, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Mixed R2L and L2R text

Does a support group exist for sufferers of mixed left-to-right-to-left-text? I wouldn't mind a listicle of tips, but what I really need is a virtual hug and comfort that it is not as bad as it seems to be.

Besides (maybe not the right place), the page which I tried to link to is not yet created: wikt:ק-ו-ה (may appear in blue anyway). Mikveh is suggesting ק-ו-ה "to collect", but a search for the trilateral root in Wiktionary finds only wikt:תקווה, which is not readily derived from "to collect". Yiddish wikt:tovel indicates no such thing. Was the root reanalyzed? b) Is there a prefered template to link to the Wiktionary? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.40.242.193 (talk) 15:15, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes it helps to add &lrm; right after the RTL text is over, to force it back to LTR mode. &rlm; also exists, with the opposite function. If you're editing on wikis, there are also templates that can help with this, e.g. on the English Wiktionary, {{m|he|קוה}} will generate a link to the entry, while also preventing the directionality from leaking into the broader text. It looks like {{lang|he|קוה}} on the English Wikipedia has a similar effect.

Anyway, that root does exist, see [1]. Klein lists three separate roots ק־ו־ה‎ (q-w-h), with the following meanings: 1. to wait for, expect, hope. 2. to collect (water) 3. to call, invoke. Mikveh is from the second one. Strong's H6960 also mentions the meaning "collect", but tries to relate the first and second senses, which Klein does not. (In my experience, Strong tends to have idiosyncratic ideas about root etymologies, but the meanings provided are solid.) For example, Genesis 1:9 refers to gathering the water of heaven, and uses this root. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 16:42, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I thought at first you were referring to boustrophedon, but apparenly that wasn't the case. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:24, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reversing lines after line break woukdn't be half as bad because there is a clear delimiter. Adding &aml;lrm; (apparently in plaintext) &lrm after must be some sort of irony because "after" is not well defined when the direction is not strictly linear. If I can get there, I can just type on, and this works with arrow keys. But if I use touch, or the mouse, I never know if the cursor associates with the left hand or the right hand site and end up backspacing into a copy-pasted text. Of course this is implementation dependent, won't fix. I was worried there are worse bugs to expect. 2A00:20:6058:5800:C0E2:37F2:1EF7:5CF2 (talk) 17:55, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

109.40.242.193 -- the absolute worst is when you're typing Hebrew or Arabic text fragments mixed with plain-ASCII Wikipedia markup or HTML elements inside a web-form box. The Unicode "BiDi" algorithm is re-applied after each and every single character that you type in, so that an RTL text fragment can move back and forth to widely-separated locations based on what happens to surround it at any given instant, and it can be difficult or impossible to select a string of characters that you want to copy or cut (not only across an LTR-to-RTL boundary, but even within purely RTL or purely LTR text which is just close to such a boundary). There was a proposed update to the "BiDi" algorithm which would supposedly make it easier to handle mixed-directional URL's, but I don't know if was adopted, and if it was, it was too late to help with the problems that I was having about ten years ago... AnonMoos (talk) 20:16, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Origin of the given name Lefong

In online bullet chess, the "Lefong trap" can arise in several move orders, but for example 1. d4 g6 2. Bh6??. This is objectively terrible, but is played in the hope that the opponent will premove the fianchetto 2...Bg7??, allowing 3. Bxg7!, and indeed in the Lichess database this is the most common follow-up. This dirty trap has even been known to work against strong players on occasion.

Anyway, this got me wondering about the origin of the name "Lefong". I know it's named after FM Lefong Hua, but I can't find any more details about the language of origin, or any record of other people with this given name. The family name Hua is typically Chinese, but I don't know which variety of Chinese it would be in this instance. I don't think Lefong is from a standard romanization scheme like Pinyin or Jyutping, because there would likely be more hits if it were. Does anyone here have any idea what the name would be in Chinese script (or even in a standard romanization scheme like Pinyin)? 98.170.164.88 (talk) 17:27, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) He was interviewed by the Chess'n Math Association [2]. You can contact them at [3]. 2A00:23A8:0:3D01:F86A:E447:175F:DBC0 (talk) 18:46, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know any Chinese, but it looks like the FM is from Canada. IMDB mentions a Won Lefong from a 1924 movie, apparently from the USA (older transcription standards may be at play). I sometimes found it written as "Le Fong", we have a disambiguation page for Fong, as a surname, with various variants. A quick search gives some unrelated results for "Lefong", mostly commercial and not only from China, I can't really tell how useful they may be and they can be easily found; since they may be considered advertising I prefer to avoid links, some of them have some possibly more clear non-latin script at least in the logo, also one showed the variation Lifeng/Lefong, which may be telling. As I said this is hardly my field so take everithing with caution and excuse my likely errors. 109.119.250.133 (talk) 00:30, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the information! 98.170.164.88 (talk) 19:20, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Accents in England

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language&oldid=1100826970#Accents_in_England So the British accents are Southern English, Northern English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. But other English accents sound like the way the Scottish and Irish pronounce words. Right? 86.149.32.193 (talk) 18:28, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A lady I knew (who is no longer with us) could read passages from the Welsh Bible perfectly (but couldn't understand a word). The history of Britain is that the Celts (Welsh and Scots) were pushed to the periphery by the invading Anglo-Saxons. They didn't penetrate to Celtic Ireland till much later. The Celts learned English, and as it was not their native tongue they spoke it with an Irish, Scottish or Welsh accent as the case may be (and still do). The Anglo-Saxons (as the name implies) came from various places and spoke with various dialects. These became the English, and this diversity is responsible for the multitude of English accents. The dialects of the English are not influenced by the languages of the Celts, with whom they were not in contact. 2A00:23A8:0:3D01:F86A:E447:175F:DBC0 (talk) 19:03, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget the effect of the invading Danes (see Danelaw), who spoke Old Norse, and the invading Norman troops, most of whom spoke a dialect of Old French. They each brought not only a host of new words, but also their very non-Anglo-Saxon pronunciations. More importantly even, the pronunciation of English has changed considerably in the nine-and-a-half centuries since the Conquest. These changes have not been uniform across Britain. This has resulted in considerable regional differences that cannot simply be derived from regional differences in Old English. --Lambiam 01:35, 29 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

86.149.32.193 --- Please see the comment I left at the end of Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 July 20. If you're not capable of understanding or learning from the answers, maybe it's time to stop asking the same questions -- especially since many of your questions are based on incorrect presuppositions. AnonMoos (talk) 20:15, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Per AnonMoos, your question contains presumptions which are not true: dialects and accents exist on a dialect continuum and it really is arbitrary how accents and dialects are classified or named; there are dozens of named accents and dialects, but the clear boundaries between them are quite fuzzy. Your desire to find a canonical and complete list of accents is not possible, because such a list does not exist. There are many well known accents, but they bleed into each other quite a bit; there is considerable overlap between Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Cockney, for example, and these are just three accents spoken by some people in some parts of London. --Jayron 32 12:32, 29 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

... the clear boundaries between them are quite fuzzy.' Brilliantly put. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:18, 31 July 2022 (UTC) [reply]

There were changes in pronunciation in Southern England in the 1800s that did not spread to the North. The accent became non-rhotic (dropping of Rs) and mass became moss, for example. That's a major reason Northern dialects have similarities with the so-called Celtic fringe. In fact, the countries remain similar genetically. One reason for the difference in Scotland Ireland and Wales is that they learned English centuries after it had become the sole language of England. Don't forget Cornish btw. TFD (talk) 23:15, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's certainly true that Highland English has Gaelic influences, but overall is not as divergent from modern standard "English English" as Lowland Scots traditionally was, but otherwise what you're saying is too simplistic to be useful in that form... AnonMoos (talk) 21:37, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note that there was considerable Anglo-Saxon settlement in southeast Scotland from the 6th century, the Kingdom of Bernicia, and the Scots Language developed there in parallel to English, and is a sister language rather than a derivation. It amuses me that the Scottish Government has bi-lingual Gaelic signage in areas where Gaelic has never, ever been spoken; the languages of Lowland Scotland were the now-extinct Brittonic languages - Cumbric and Pictish - along with Scots. Alansplodge (talk) 12:25, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]