Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 February 18

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February 18

Help locating possibly Arabic tweet?

I've been having a bit of trouble believing The Daily Mail, as strange as that may seem. They've said an al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula-linked Twitter account called the killing of Muath al-Kasasbeh "conclusive proof of Isis' deviance". Those English words only show up on the web in reference to their story, as far as I can see, and searching for the Google Translation (دليل قاطع على الانحراف إيزيس) doesn't find anything.

Is that translation accurate, and is there any evidence of something like this being said by someone like who it's attributed to, or is this another hazy "Too extreme for al-Qaeda" deal? InedibleHulk (talk) 23:35, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't know what إيزيس is, but it's certainly not the Arabic quasi-acronym corresponding to ISIS/ISIL, which is داعش... AnonMoos (talk) 00:28, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

According to Google, it's lowercase "Isis" (like the goddess), which is actually the form The Daily Mail used. Tweaked my capitalization above. How am I supposed to paste the new word in place of the old one? Goes at the "front", regardless of where I try, and I can't type it. Even trying to highlight it is confusing. Can you (or someone) try looking for the correct phrase on Twitter, and tell me what you find? InedibleHulk (talk) 00:56, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

There are well-known browser interface issues when editing mixed LTR and RTL text (due to the fact that the Unicode "bidi" algorithm is applied recursively each time a character is added or deleted), which you may be encountering. I would feel it necessary to do some intensive dictionary work to verify whether the rest of the Arabic makes any sense before I did any searching, and right now a nap sounds more appealing, sorry... AnonMoos (talk) 01:04, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

No, that's fine. I completely understand napping, even when dreams don't reveal the truth. Thanks for the Isis/ISIS distinction. Every bit helps. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:25, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

This is the best I can do without expending an inordinate amount of time: site:twitter.com انحراف OR تحريف داعش site:twitter.com. The phrase تحريف داعش appears to get some results on Twitter... AnonMoos (talk) 15:15, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

"Distorts Syria", eh? InedibleHulk (talk) 23:22, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Nope, تحريف داعش is a plausible rendering of "ISIS/ISIL deviance/deviation" (though I don't know if it's what was used in the tweet). In general, Google translate cannot override dictionaries. AnonMoos (talk) 00:59, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I meant the last thing you said. What appears to get some results. What's that by the dictionary? InedibleHulk (talk) 02:24, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I really don't know what you're trying to say. As I mentioned, تحريف داعش is a plausible rendering of "ISIS/ISIL deviance/deviation". If Google translate gives a radically different translation, then Google translate is flat-out wrong... AnonMoos (talk) 07:33, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, brainfart. That last phrase is the same as the second. I could've sworn I looked twice before my last comment, and they looked different. Weird. Anyway, yeah, Google Translate's apparently not up to that task. A lot of what I read on the Twitters sounded like nonsense, too. I've asked the writer. He should know. Thanks for your patience. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:39, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't think that Google Translation is going to be useful - whatever its merits, it's extremely unlikely that something translated into English and then back into Arabic is going to have any resemblance to the original Arabic. In any case, do we have any idea what this AQ Twitter account might be? If we knew that first, it would be certainly be easier to find. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:51, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

If I knew that, I wouldn't have gone the long route. It's possible they're trying to avoid driving traffic to what could be seen as enemy propaganda. Or they could just be making it up. But yeah, machine translating something back and forth is often better for shits and giggles than anything helpful. (But yes, something translation back and forth often the best machine for shits and laughter of anything useful.) InedibleHulk (talk) 23:21, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Just spent a good while longer than I should have auto-translating what I found through the above terms and the various names AQAP uses. Aside from maybe getting on a few watchlists, I'm still at square one. For a few of them, the relevant dates are beyond where Google lets me scroll, so maybe there's hope there.

It might be easier for me to just ask the guy who wrote the article where he'd heard it. I'll try that, if nobody else yells eureka soon. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:20, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Pronouncing /sts/ in English

As a non-native English speaker, I'm having trouble with pronouncing /sts/. When I try to pronounce it, such as in 'lists' or 'costs', I end up mumbling some sort of /s/ with a partial stop.. it doesn't sound right and my tongue fumbles. If I pronounce it slowly, I can pronounce the full /sts/ with the back of my tongue touching the roof and blocking air / producing a stop, but when I pronounce it quickly and try to do that I just end up mumbling. I've read that some speakers skip the /t/, is that common for BrE (specifically Australian spoken English)? How exactly should my mouth positions be for pronouncing /sts/? ☃Unicodesnowman (talk) 13:34, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

The important thing is whether you systematically pronounce this differently from /s/, /st/, and /ts/, not whether you can identify three clearly distinct segments in sequence in your pronunciation of /sts/... AnonMoos (talk) 15:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that [tɛksː] would be interpreted as texts by those around you with no trouble. Now, if you started saying [ˈtɛksəs], like my brother does, then there might be some confusion. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 15:36, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Can you say "tsar" and "star"? How about "boots"? I'd work on those, then move to "boosts" - and I totally second AnonMoos - intelligibility is what you're after, and that comes from making the proper distinctions, not from pronouncing things exactly the way a native speaker does. In case it helps, when I say "boosts" the stop is very brief, and though the whole tongue is engaged, the back never fully hits the palate, and the main action is on the sibilant, with the front of the tongue. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:48, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it is hard to pronounce, and requires slowing down to do so clearly. So, if preparing a speech, say, I'd look for another word with the same meaning. For example, in "John boosts many charitable causes", I would substitute "promotes". StuRat (talk) 17:23, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

• Can we ask the OP's native tongue? See Blackfoot language if you want to see more interesting consonant clusters. μηδείς (talk) 23:02, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

There are artifacts of an earlier-learned language that don't hamper comprehensibility of a later-learned language so I would just "pronounce it slowly" as you say "If I pronounce it slowly, I can pronounce the full /sts/..." Bus stop (talk) 23:14, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Slowing it down will produce better results in general. As with the "I'd've / Ida" discussion recently. Talking at normal speed, words like "costs" sound a lot like the "t" has been dropped. I'm reminded of how Victory Borge used to say Franz Liszt: "List-s-s-s". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:22, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

He also used to refer to the "Second Hungarian Rhapsody by Schlitz". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:10, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

• My advice would be to repeat the sentence "List six best songs" or the like (make up your own) over and over (a dozen times each, a few times a day, for week) until the sequence becomes easy. Russian has the consonant shch as one sound (shchistya "happiness"). English speakers can learn this by repeating "fish chips" and gradually deleting the fi- and changing it into "'sh chips". μηδείς (talk) 02:01, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

  There is a Ukrainian town called Shchastya (Щастя), which apparently means "happiness" in Ukrainian. The corresponding Russian word is schastye (cчастье; note the initial consonants are spelt and pronounced differently, albeit slightly). Afaik, there is no such word as shchistya. The only ghits for "shchistya happiness" produce this very thread. Searching for "shchistya" alone gets us only 3 more hits, and I’d guess they're misprints. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:10, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

• • Or she thrusts her fists/against the posts/and still insists/she sees the ghosts. --Trovatore (talk) 05:54, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

• What I was trying to suggest was putting together two separate words of which neither has the full /sts/ sequence in it, but which, like "best" "songs", Unicodesnowman could probably pronounce separately without trouble.

The sequence would be to say "best s/ongs" then "best/s ongs" then drop the ongs and now, with practice, you can say bests.

This is how you can learn difficult initial sounds in Russian and Zulu. "And where...?" In Russian is "a gdye...?" Gdye is impossible in English, but "a/g dye" is not.

Likewise in IsiZulu, Mina ngifunda... "I read..." has the impossible ngi- sequence for English speakers. But "Mina/ng ifunda" is quite easy, and with practice one can drop the "mina" and just say ngifunda. μηδείς (talk) 19:17, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

And then you can jump straight to Polish and try to pronounce words like kostce [ˈkɔst.t͡sɛ]. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:15, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Ah, yes, the people who say psziepsziepszie according to my grandmother. μηδείς (talk) 19:19, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Heaven forbid we're related! That is exactly how my late ex-mother-in-law characterised the speech of Poles. (She was a Croatian-born russophone with a Serbian father and Polish-Jewish mother.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:46, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for all the help! I can say tsar, star, etc fine, just /sts/ bothering me. I'll just concern myself with making myself intelligible, I've practiced it more and I think I'm getting the hang of it. ☃ Unicodesnowman (talk) 10:17, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

That's funny, I thought /θs/ is a lot harder, but then I'm German and I don't know what your native language is ... --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:30, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Is the sentence "He have bought a new car last week" grammatical?

Is it right the sentence "He have bought a new car last week". -- 17:13, 18 February 2015 117.194.152.25

Only if you remove "have". (You could put "had" in place of "have", but it's better without it, in my opinion.) StuRat (talk) 17:16, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. "He bought a new car last week" is better, because it specifies a definite point in time (i.e. 'last week'). If you replace the 'have' with 'had', then that would require an explanation of context, such as "and that's when he used it as a security for a loan", for example - i.e. another action which happens after the original action of buying a car. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 17:26, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

For reference: simple past, pluperfect, past perfect. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:48, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

117.194.152.25 -- Verb agreement requires "He has"... -- AnonMoos (talk) 01:10, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

"Has" could work, but it still sounds awkward, like a non-native speaker saying it. Kage's initial response is the better way to say it, i.e. leave out any form of "have". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:18, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

It's still a grammatical error. "Has" is present tense, but "last week" is in the past. Unless the speaker has a time machine, I don't see how that could work. — kwami (talk) 01:23, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Leaving it out was my initial suggestion. StuRat (talk) 01:25, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Oops, yes, it was your comment first. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:32, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

The present perfect is not used when an adverb of past time is also used. In a declarative sentence, "has bought" and "last week" are normally mutually exclusive. The pluperfect, "had bouht" can be used with "last week" as long as another verb more recent is given. "The car he had bought last week got stolen yesterday." μηδείς (talk) 01:50, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I can think of an example where it kind of makes sense: "He has bought a new car just last week." However, it's still awkward phrasing. Your counterexample works. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:32, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

It's arguably grammatical with a very strange meaning. If you interpret the word have as being in the mandative subjunctive mood, you could read the sentence as "let the past change to make it the case that he bought a car last week". Of course I'm really just quibbling here as that's not a meaning that really even makes sense, as the past to the best of my knowledge is immutable, and even if the meaning did make sense, I don't think there are many sane native speakers who would naturally produce that sentence to express it. But I like quibbling :-) --Trovatore (talk) 05:30, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Keeping in mind that "He have..." does not work. "I have..." or "He has..." or "I/he had..." are grammatically valid in the right circumstances. "He have..." isn't. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:34, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Bugs, I don't think you really read and understood my point. --Trovatore (talk) 05:50, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

• Unless "He" is the name of a band, and we're speaking BrE... — Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:46, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Let's put it this way. "He has bought a new car" on it's own, without an actual time reference is fine, as it means 'he bought a new car sometime fairly recently and still has it'. Compare "He has gone to the bank" (implying he is still there) and "He has been to the bank" (implying he has visited the bank recently and has returned). However, when a time reference is added, we use the simple past - "He bought a new car last week." - as it is a specific point in time, rather than a continuous experience. "I have been to China", for example, means that I actually have the experience of going to China still in my mind, but when adding a specific point in time, "I went to China in 1992" would be correct. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 08:42, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Spanish phrase

Hi. Trying to verify a translation for líneas tiradas a hilo sobre tabletas. Might it mean 'lines drawn continuously (e.g. boustrophedon) on tablets'? Currently translated as "lines drawn with a string". — kwami (talk) 21:16, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd need the wider context to be sure. It seems to mean lines drawn on tablets by thread, which is what I would go with without a wider context. μηδείς (talk) 00:08, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I concur with Medeis. Hilo generally means "thread" but can also mean "wire" (electrical wiring, etc) or "cable" (internet cable, telephone cord, etc). AFAIK, it doesn't have the sense of "threaded" as in English "a threaded conversation", making "boustrophedon" unlikely. Tirada a hilo translates directly to "drawn by thread" or "thread drawn". But, as Medeis also points out, more context would help pin down the meaning.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 00:31, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

The context is our article Rongorongo, I would assume. Tevildo (talk) 01:19, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes.

I thought a hilo was an idiom for "continuously".

Not much of a context: it was a translation of the Rapa Nui kohau. They might have been aligned by thread, I suppose, but that seems odd. — kwami (talk) 01:22, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I suspected, and from the above it is obvious, they are talking about a thread drawn taut and used to make a straight line. See chalk line, where a carpenter snaps a taut inked or chalked thread to make a straight line on the underlying surface. This has nothing to do with boustrophedonic writing per se, just the way of making the lines. (What threw me was a hilo, which is not an idiom I know, I would simply have said hilo tirado. The curve you see in the image at rongorongo is simply due to the curvature of the surface. I would go with "lines drawn on a tablet using a taut thread." As my father's eldest child and, hence, little helper I used to use this method with him whenever he was doing a project that needed a temporary plumb line represented on a flat surface. μηδείς (talk) 01:38, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm familiar with that from carpentry, but have not come across an account of doing that for rongorongo. (If anything, one would be more likely to draw or score the wood along a thread.) I'll leave the translation alone, though. — kwami (talk) 03:09, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Tirante means taut, so I think you would be justified in changing it to a taut string. The problem is that tirar means draw as in pull, but not as in make an image. (Perhaps the spanish is a bad translation from English, and we are looking at a reverse translation.) Again, the terms lineas and hilo seem reversed. Otherwise I don't disagree with you. μηδείς (talk) 05:24, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

The Spanish is the original. If anything, it's the English which would be bad. It can't be the string that's taught taut, and "lines pulled with a string" doesn't make any sense. — kwami (talk) 18:09, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I am assuming taught is a typo, and you do realize I have been talking about a taut (tight) string? A taut string over the curved surface you see depicted in the article rongorongo would give the lines shown. μηδείς (talk) 01:08, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

But if that's not what the Spanish says, what difference does it make? The string isn't taut, the lines are, and that doesn't make any sense. — kwami (talk) 02:14, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Variants of tirar a hilo get less than ten hits. In any case, lines (meaning straight marks on surfaces) cannot be taut, only string can. μηδείς (talk) 18:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Exactly. So tirada can't mean "taut". So if it doesn't mean "lines drawn with a string", and it doesn't mean "lines with a taut string", what does it mean? — kwami (talk) 18:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

"Drawn" in English means both taut and sketched. So tirada can certainly mean drawn in the sense of stretched. There's still something funny going on, since like I said, tirar (or a variant of it) a hilo gets nowhere near 10 hits on gogle. I expect the Spanish is a poor translation from the English, or we're dealing with a dialectal or archaic for. A link to the original Spanish source might help. μηδείς (talk) 23:51, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

The original "Spanish" source was a description of Rongorongo made by Sebastian Englert, a German Franciscan Friar who presumably learned Spanish in Chile where he spent many years as a missionary to the indigenous peoples there. Spanish was not his native language and his acquired Spanish was probably a Chilean dialect of the early 1900s. This may contribute to the difficulty here. The WP article notes give the quote as "Kohau are defined as "líneas tiradas a hilo (hau) sobre tabletas o palos para la inscripción de signos" (lines drawn with a string (hau) on tablets or sticks for the inscription of signs). Englert seems to be using the Spanish word he knows as "hilo" to translate the Rapa Nui word hau. So IHMO, it's really anybody's guess as to what Englert was trying to say.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 01:17, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps it is a problem with his Spanish. Though, since he wrote an entire dictionary, I would think his Spanish was generally pretty good. — kwami (talk) 04:58, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

The problem is that tirar means "to draw" in the sense of "to pull, drag"; not in the sense of "to sketch". So "líneas tiradas a hilo sobre tabletas o palos para la inscripción de signos" means "lines pulled by string over tablets or wood [i.e., pieces of wood] for the inscription of symbols." The word línea is ambiguous in that it can mean straight mark in the geometrical sense or it can mean a physical line, like a phone line or a power line. Given hilo means "string, thread, wire" we would have to assume línea means "straight mark" hear, not thread. So we get "marks pulled by thread over tablets or [pieces of wood] for the inscription of symbols". The meaning is still obvious, they used taught threads to make the lines used to guide the inscription of symbols, even if someone might have editted it for clarity if they had read the remark. μηδείς (talk) 18:25, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

I have found the usage of lineas tiradas meaning lines drawn from a point and lines of text removed from a source. But a line drawn from point a to point b is again more analougous to a string tied to post a and pulled tight connected to post b than it is to a line depicted in a sketch. μηδείς (talk) 22:46, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

That helps. Thanks! — kwami (talk) 21:46, 23 February 2015 (UTC)