Language desk
< October 17	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 19 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an 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 18

looking for the spelling of the name "SARAH" in hebrew

Hi there could anyone please send me the spelling of Sarah in hebrew.

kind regards

220.238.52.139 06:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The article Sarah gives the name in its current and Biblical forms in both Hebrew script and Latin transliteration. -Elmer Clark 08:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No i need the spelling of sarah i hebrew —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.238.52.139 (talk • contribs)

שָׂרָה It's in the article, download some Unicode font that manages Hebrew... 惑乱分からん 13:17, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

could some one translate the spelling of princess into hebrew

is there princess in the hebrew text thank you

Why didn't you jusk ask for princess Sarah in the first time ? (I have no translation for now) -- DLL ^{.. T} 17:09, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the latin alphabet, Princess is 'Suri', as in Suri Cruise (which is partially where her name comes from). As for the Hebrew alphabet, I don't know. La ï ka 18:33, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Suri Sara"? ;) 惑乱分からん 19:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Snuck"

There's a discussion of snuck over on the Humanities ref desk which should probably be here... AnonMoos 08:23, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

dont and duquel again

There was a decent discussion earlier about dont and duquel, the French pronouns. Could some of those involved in that discussion have a look at wikt:dont and wikt:duquel, to see if the Wiktionary entries make sense and are informative. Thanks. --Dangherous 09:13, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I started that discussion:). Those interested can read it here [1]. I'll take a look.Evilbu 23:36, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The difference between these pronouns is, I think, well explained here (emphasis in bold is mine): "Vois-tu la maison à côté de laquelle on a construit la nouvelle école ? The last example shows how lequel and its female and plural forms are used in combination with de. The forms duquel, de laquelle, desquels and desquelles are normally avoided in favour of the simple relative pronoun dont, except when de is part of a complex preposition (such as au milieu de; cf. Voilà une route au milieu de laquelle ('in the middle of which') il y a une rangée d'arbres) or is triggered by a noun which itself depends on a preposition (cf. Voilà des gens sur l'aide desquels ('on whose help') on peut toujours compter). These constructions prohibit the use of dont". - Mu 21:19, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unsure about word

I found the word "authochtonous" in the article Turks and Caicos Islands, googled it, and found it only got 581 google hits. With a little more poking around I found what seemed to be an alternative spelling of "authochthonous" which was used slightly more but I still couldn't find a definition. The full sentence was:

However, this attitude might change should the territories of Yukon or Nunavut - with about 30,000 people each, both largely reserved for authochtonous peoples and wildlife - ever become provinces.

From the context of that article and others I could find on the web, I gathered it meant "indigenous" or "native", so I changed the offending word to "indigenous". My questions are:

What is the origin of the word? I assume it's Greek and hence different ways of transliterating the Greek alphabet account for the different forms of the word, but what root words is it derived from?
Why on earth would you need to use such a word anywhere? Is it to make the document sound more important or for other reasons? I certainly intend to replace all instances of "authochtonous" or "authochthonous" in wikipedia articles with much more common words if it wouldn't change the meaning. I don't think wikipedia should use such uncommon words where their definition can't be found online.

Thanks, Graham87 12:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The correct spelling is "autochthonous", which gets 755,000 google hits. It's not as rare as you think.

The Greek root it derives from is chthon (χθών), "earth". --Ptcamn 13:05, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that makes more sense. Now that helps me find the wikipedia article Autochthon which explains the definitions of the word and explains why the misspelling appeared in a few geology papers. Graham87 13:23, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And does that mean the substub Autochton should be merged with autochthon? I can't make much sense out of the article Transliteration of Greek to the Latin alphabet because my screen reader won't read the unicode characters there. Graham87 13:28, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, they do mean different things. The "th" word relates to individuals and cultures, while the "t" word relates to rocks. Although Wikipedia is not a dictionary.... --Charlene.fic 15:15, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As Ptcamn says, the word is hardly a freakish rarity, and I hope this will dissuade you from removing it from all contexts. In some contexts (for example, in referring to peoples' own traditional self-understanding—rarely historically accurate—as having lived in their traditional homeland through all eternity), there is no equivalent term. While I'm not bothered by your edit to Turks and Caicos, I think it would be ill-advised to try to improve articles by replacing words with which you're not familiar. The possibility of losing the intended meaning is just too great. While I agree that the Wikipedia should not be gratuitously filled with difficult words, it's not worth degrading the content to save folks a trip to the dictionary. Wareh 20:31, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've done some more research and realized that, in fact, autochton is also not a correct spelling for the geological sense. See further what I've just written at Talk:Autochton. Wareh 20:47, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've corrected a few misspellings of "autochtonous" / "authochthonous" but I haven't substituted them for anything as anyone can look up the word in wikipedia or on google. However, I did find that "autochton" seems to be a genus of Spread-winged Skippers as shown by this google search; it was assigned in 1834 according to [2]. A google search for autochthon+skippers doesn't produce anything relevant. In all other instances, , "autochton" is a misspelling. Graham87 00:49, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Good call on the butterfly genus. It looks like Hübner in 1823 got away with using what is an acceptable German spelling in what became the official "Latin" genus name. Wareh 01:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

German for Hot

What is the German equivalent of Hot, as in 'The girl is hot?' Reywas92^Talk 20:50, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly "hübsch" or "geil", otherwise, you could ask the question at the message board at leo.org for more info. 惑乱分からん 20:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You could use also heiß or scharf, I believe. --RiseRover|^talk 21:06, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is the question only referring to women, or also in senses such as cars, sports goals, dance moves, movies etc... 惑乱分からん 22:45, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that that sort of hot is 'ich bin heiß' as apposed to 'mir ist heiß' meaning warm.

Just about every German teenager would say geil. scharf and heiß are a bit corny. hübsch simply means pretty, without any sexual connotation. --Janneman 21:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Geil, of course, has strong sexual connotations, but I thought perhaps that it could be ambiguous whether the sense was hot, or hot for you here, whereas the latter just might be wishful thinking... 惑乱分からん 21:41, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, geil does or can have sexual connotations, meaning "horny" in its original sense. For years now, however, a movie, a song, a cellphone design, anything can be geil or vollgeil etc., meaning "cool", or "like totally awesome", or whatever your choice of ecstatic adjective is. In these cases the connotations are no more sexual than that of "fucking" in modern adverbial usage. In order to make it clear that you mean the original horny sense of geil, you'd probably add the object of the person's horniness: ...auf dich, ...auf ihn, and so forth, unless the context is unambiguous. ---Sluzzelin 23:21, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's nice that the people have such a positive attitude about their sexuality... ;) 惑乱分からん 01:25, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I was taught that 'ich bin heiss' was inappropriate for polite situations, meaning 'horny', not 'uncomfortably warm', and also not 'attractive'. But I was also taught German from books that used 'ss' everywhere in place of ess-tset (probably written by some kind of spelling-reform fanatics), so don't believe everything I say about German. -- The Photon 23:08, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Translation

Can someone give me the word for "language" in Hindi and sanskrit? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:41, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wiktionary only seems to have Hindi's bhāshā. For future reference, check wiktionary first for translations. Æµ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:58, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Sanskrit word is practically identical: bhāṣā in IAST. —Keenan Pepper 01:22, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

wikt:Language has had the Hindi and Sanskrit as भाषा for quite some time, so I'm not sure what you mean Æµ§œš¹. And yes, that is a good first place to check for translations. - Taxman ^Talk 03:58, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think bhasha is originally from Sanskrit. This word is found in most Indian languages and even Indonesian/Malay. --Satchitananda 01:21, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it looks like the Indonesian word bahasa is borrowed from Sanskrit. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Sanskrit is from the same PIE root as the Latin fārī and the Greek φωνη (phōnē). —Keenan Pepper 01:32, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks everyone! Can you transcribe them into devanagari? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:46, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In Hindi and Sanskrit it is भाषा.

-Vineet Chaitanya

Thank you! The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 13:26, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]