Language desk
< May 21	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 23 >

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.

May 22

Difference between words

There are several words in English for "boundary between land and water": beach, shore, bank, strand, maybe others too. In Finnish there is just one: ranta. What is the difference between the English words? JIP | Talk 07:38, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Beach implies small rocks or sand.[1] Shore is land bordering a large body of water.[2] Bank indicates an earthen incline next to a river.[3] Strand is similar to shore, and while the EO entry doesn't say it, perhaps ranta and strand are connected.[4] Another possible term of interest is "coast", which comes from French and means both the side of the land and the side of a hill, and is used both ways in French.[5] Another term which really needs no explanation is "water's edge". Another term sometimes used is "seaboard", whose second syllable is related to "border".[6] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:29, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is coast ever used for a hillside in English? —Tamfang (talk) 20:09, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Only indirectly, as in the expression "to coast down a hill". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:25, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If so, then coast and down suffered very similar semantic drift. —Tamfang (talk) 20:12, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean any hillside, or a steeply rising or vertical cliff facing the ocean? In the first case, never. In the second case, "coast" is a general term for the boundary where the sea and land meet; it never depends on the terrain, which can be flat beach or vertical cliff or anything in between. Akld guy (talk) 21:34, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In French, côté means "side" and côte means "coast". The latter also means "rib", from the Latin costa, which is where terms like "coast" and "accost" originate - pertaining to the "side" of something, be it human or geographical. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:29, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In French, côte means "coast" on the seaside, and it means "hillside" in the wine hills regions, see Côtes du Rhône, see also many names like La Côte-Saint-André everywhere in France, not especially near the sea. Akseli9 (talk) 07:26, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oui. I became aware of this phenomenon while watching the Tour de France on TV. The commentators talked about this French usage of cote to mean "hillside" as well as "coast", as the cyclists were climbing one of those hills at the end of one of the stages. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:49, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Akld: coast includes any boundary between land and sea, where "sea" means the ocean or an arm of the ocean. There is also seacoast, which emphasizes this part of the meaning. Shore is similar but more inclusive, because with shore the water can be a lake. --69.159.60.83 (talk) 22:07, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, as implied by Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:20, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There's also "littoral". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:10, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Also foreshore which is the area between the high tide and low tide lines. Akld guy (talk) 16:07, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect there will be more different words to describe the ranta in a country/culture that has many different kinds of rantas, and there will be only one word in a country/culture like Finland which has always the same kind of ranta everywhere, on lake sides as well as on sea sides? Akseli9 (talk) 16:54, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In French, la plage means, as well as beach, the tracks on a CD or LP, so they must a beach must connote to them a strip (of sand) between land and sea, like "strand" or "ribbon" Djbcjk (talk) 06:24, 23 May 2016 (UTC)djbcjk[reply]

Yes, and in the same vein la plage is also used like the word "range", like for example "la plage des régimes maxi d'un moteur", speaking of the range of maximum power RPMs of an engine. Akseli9 (talk) 07:19, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's funny how languages will take a word that originally meant something specific, and apply it to other things that remind someone of the original. The evolution of the Latin costa is like that. And the word "track" is like that in English.[7] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:55, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Strand is actually more akin to beach in meaning than to shore, but it is an old and obsolescent word that is seldom used any more in most English dialects except in poetry. A strand, like a beach, is a shore with a slope gentle enough that a person could wade ashore. A coast is a type of shore, specifically a shore along a sea, but whereas shore is used narrowly for the line where a body of water meets land, coast can also refer synecdochically to regions extending some distance inland, such as the east coast of the United States, which may include entire cities, counties, and even states. Banks occur only along rivers, where they refer to fairly steep shorelines. Shore is the most inclusive term and maybe the best translation for ranta. Each of the other terms refers to a type of shore. Marco polo (talk) 14:04, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Aside from the London feature called "the Strand", that word is mostly used as a verb, to mean left behind or abandoned. Of course, it originally meant to be run aground on the shore... or the beach, hence "beached", the original sense of "stranded". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:13, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See Grand Strand. --Jayron 32 01:08, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Strand in London is a long road that runs from the western border of the City of London to the eastern border of the City of Westminster. It follows the course of the Thames at a short distance from it. It gets its name because it used to run along the water's edge - either the watercourse has moved or the river was wider then than it is now. The other meaning of "strand", for example in "a strand of hair", presumably comes from the common feature of elongation. 188.221.78.117 (talk) 15:22, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Different origins, per EO:[8] And the current Strand, London runs less than a mile, but it connects to other roads with different names. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:28, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Less than a mile" IS "a long road" in London terms. All things are relative. For example, a major thoroughfare called Poultry in the City is only 360 feet long, while Gracechurch Street stretches to an impressive 800 feet. Alansplodge (talk) 17:11, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's all relative. A distance you could walk in 15 minutes doesn't sound all that long, though. Compare with Peachtree Street in Atlanta, for example, which runs a number of miles. Or Western Avenue (Chicago), which runs 23 1/2 miles. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:20, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@JIP: I always thought that Finnish has a lot of marine vocabulary, so it struck me that Russian, the language of a rather continental nation, has more synonyms even if some are borrowed: beach = pl'azh (< Fr.), shore = bereg, poberezhye, bank = nasyp', strand = polosa, so I cannot imagine any problems for a Russian speaker in making difference between these English words, it is quite enough to look into an English-Russian dictionary. I hardly know Finnish, but in a English-Finnish dictionary, that I could find, there is indeed only ranta, just with some determiners (uima- "swim", hiekka- "sand", -penger "bank" (< En.?). How has that happened that Finland has so many lakes and a long seashore, but the language lacks such terminology?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 11:11, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The reason is probably that all Finnish seashores and lakeshores look the same, are of the same nature, even the salinity of the Finnish seas is close to zero. In Finland, if you wake up in a car after a hangover, you cannot guess whether you are standing by a lake of by the sea, you cannot know whether the island you see is in a sea or in a lake, and if the lake you see is in an island or in the mainland... Akseli9 (talk) 11:21, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Long roads often appear to be shorter than they are. There's a straight road that runs between Forest Gate and Maryland in east London alongside the railway. You can see one end from the other, and on one occasion I made the mistake of walking instead of taking the train. From one end of Murray Street in Perth, Western Australia, you can see the church at the other. I never made the mistake of attempting to walk that. 86.151.48.25 (talk) 22:53, 27 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

spanish

how would you call the underground neon in spanish? I am talking about the tuning thing--Ip80.123 (talk) 15:06, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

We need to know what it is in English first. A stroboscope? A magic eye tube? A railway signal? Tevildo (talk) 17:25, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Neon lights" would be luces de neón. The word "underground" is literally subterráneo, but it appears Spanish favors metro to mean "subway". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:23, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I expect the OP means tuning as in putting on aftermarket modifications to a car, and is referring to the neon lighting often attached to the undercarriage of such modified cars. I have no idea what the answer is, however. --Xuxl (talk) 08:56, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

WP:WHAAOE: Underglow. That being found, I don't know what would be a Spanish equivalent, and our article does not have a Spanish interwiki link. Check out the ads at es.aliexpress.com/promotion/promotion_underglow-lighting-promotion.html (blacklisted) – they variously call it "iluminación underglow", "luces underglow" and "luces bajo el coche" No such user (talk) 15:10, 23 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Xuxl and No such user , nice to know that there are some persons outside whch mide have played need for speed underground... [9] but "luces de neon bajo de coche" is really really looooooong. sad that there is nothing shorter--Ip80.123 (talk) 09:14, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It took me quite some time to figure out what this question referred to, but they are apparently luces UnderGlow. They were a brief fad and quickly banned in most of the US, and I have never heard of the term in either language until today. μηδείς (talk) 02:39, 25 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology of sphygmomanometer

sphygmomanometer is a device which measures blood pressure and pulse. The word "sphygmo" means pulse, but I don't understand what is the meaning of mano. According to Wiktionary the meaning of "mano" is thin or rare. but I don't understand the relation between these words to the function of this device, and I'd like to get your opinion about.93.126.95.68 (talk) 20:07, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

According to this page, the manometer was so named by Pierre Varignon in 1704 as his device (the U-tube manometer) was capable of measuring rarefication as well as positive pressure (that is, it can measure gas pressures below atmospheric). The term was subsequently used for all types of fluid pressure measurement devices. Tevildo (talk) 20:40, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This was also asked on the Science desk, and this answer was posted there:

A manometer is a pressure gauge. Here is the etymology. The greek word for "thin" is used because the term originally was used to describe devices used in vacuum gauges, to measure very low pressures. The term eventually got broadened to mean any pressure measuring device. --Jayron 32 20:45, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Transferred here by-- 69.159.60.83 (talk) 22:21, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]