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October 31 Information
French translation
Is Page 319-320, a list of donation "to equip the French Army and contribute to an airplane"? And did the people who donated 0,50, donated half a franc?--
KAVEBEAR (
talk)
01:54, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
"Patriotic donations from the French of Tahiti to equip the French Army with an airplane and contribute to the establishment of the fifth branch." "Fifth branch" refers to the predecessor of the
French Air Force. Note that aéroplane is now obsolete; the modern French word is avion. And yes, it seems that 0,50 means half a franc, which today would be worth about €1.62 or $2.10.
[1]Lesgles (
talk)
03:04, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
He used the linked table, which says that a French Franc in 1912 is equivalent to €3.24267 in 2011, according to L'Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques.
Alansplodge (
talk)
21:41, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
At
File:OstasiatischeLloyd28July1911.png - Which characters state the Chinese name of the paper?
Three at the top are "新文德" but I'm not sure about the others
Also what are the Chinese names in the footnotes of
p. 89 and
p. 90 and
p. 93?
p.93: xiii: 米松林; xiv: 研究與進步; xv: 傅吾康; xvi: 上海猶太刊物 (
Shanghai Jewish Chronicle). Note: the last Chinese name seems suspicious to me. It sounds more like the generic description "Jewish publication in Shanghai" rather than the name of a publication. The original publication (based on a Google search) does not bear a Chinese title, so someone at some point may have taken the description (e.g. "Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, a Jewish publication in Shanghai") from a Chinese language source and taken it as the Chinese name. The error could easily have been perpetuated by sources referring to each other. I would suggest verification from a more direct source. --
PalaceGuard008 (
Talk)
15:14, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
It was standard to write right-to-left when writing horizontally, (and top-down, right-to-left in normal print) across the Chinese world up until around the 1950s in mainland China, and much later elsewhere. In Hong Kong, most books and magazines are still printed this way.
So if you see a horizontal tablet hung in or in front of a temple or palace or other traditional building, it will almost always be read right-to-left, a tablet written left-to-right in traditional contexts may well be ridiculed for being illiterate. --
PalaceGuard008 (
Talk)
12:45, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
It was based on the fact that traditionally Chinese was written in columns, top-down then right-to-left. So if characters had to be written to fit in a horizontal space, then you effectively had a sequence of one-character-high "columns", and the natural order would be right-to left. Here's a moderately famous flag with two characters on it read right-to-left.
AnonMoos (
talk)
17:41, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
"Only CHF members will enjoy the privilege of reading this forum. You would need to sign up as a member and login to the forum to read this forum!" - do you mind reposting the image (or whatever it was)?
Some languages have a yes-no-question particle (the only one I can recall at the moment is Esperanto "ĉu", though they occur in natural languages also). English doesn't -- and I think that such particles are more often the same as the word for "whether" in the languages which they occur, rather than the same as the word for "if"...
AnonMoos (
talk)
06:41, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
In Russian this would be «Знал ли он это?». Если "if, whether" came from есть ли "if it is", so если and ли mean very close concepts (originally ли meant "if" but later it became a particle). In Belorussian/Ukrainian this would be Ці знаў ён гэта?/Чи знав він це? - both from Old East Slavic чи/ци "if, or", which is also remained in many Russian dialects. Maybe this is why it sounds so natural for me.--
Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (
talk)
07:14, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
(e/c) Questions can start with 'if' ("If you never slept with her, then how come her baby has your DNA?"), but what I assume Luboslov means by "simple questions" (i.e. ones not containing a conditional clause) do not.
That said, it's always possible to contrive a context for any given set of words, and "If he knew this?" could appear in a dialogue, but it would be understood to mean something like "And how would things be different if he knew this?". --
Jack of Oz[Talk]06:20, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
Spoken Spanish frequently adds initial if to yes/no questions.
¿Si has visto mi carro? "Have you seen my car?"
¿Si tú quieres comida china? "Do you want Chinese food?"
¿Si vamos, o no? "Are we going, or not?"
I have never come acrost it in formal writing (where such questions are rare, anyways) or read a description of it in a grammar book. It's curious whether there are any sources; I'll look. I have even noticed it slipping into my own speech on odd occassions. The other night I asked "If you want to eat Chinese?" and no remark was made to the strangeness of what I had said--although it was obvious to me once I'd said it." I'd advise Lyuboslov never to use it in English since it will be seen as ungrammatical in writing and be taken as a foreignism in speech.
μηδείς (
talk)
16:09, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
In Irish, the interrogative particle an is used in both direct and indirect questions, and in German, ob 'whether, if' is used in indirect questions, but also often in questions you're asking yourself (Ob ich heute eine Jacke anziehe? "Should I wear a jacket today?") and when you repeat a question you've already asked once and the person didn't hear you the first time (Bist du fertig? —Bitte? —Ob du fertig bist? "Are you ready? —What? —[I asked] if you're ready.").
Angr (
talk)
11:58, 1 November 2012 (UTC)reply
"mark for"
"It has also been suggested that school bullying may be a permanent mark for psychopathy." (my italics) This is copied from the psychopathy article and I don't understand the meaning of this "mark for". The dictionary says a sign, a trace, but that doesn't really make sense. So, what does this "mark for" mean in this context?
Lova Falktalk18:30, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
However, the text is not about somebody who has bullied but somebody who was the victim of bullying. The text continues: "Eric Harris, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, had been an occasional victim of bullying and decided to shoot up his school. Consequently, he was posthumously diagnosed as a textbook and clinical psychopath." So, is there another meaning of mark for, or should the first sentence be copyedited?
Lova Falktalk18:49, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, being bullied may also lead to violence, but I don't think that's what the first sentence means. As such, perhaps it should be removed, yes.
StuRat (
talk)
18:51, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
But once more, the text is not about somebody who bullies, but a victim of bullying. So "bullying may be a permanent indicator of psychopathy" isn't correct in this context.
Lova Falktalk18:56, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
You can already see where I'm going with this. Once, that would have been "The best question ever". I'm always reading nowadays about "the first ever" this and "the highest ever" that and so on. It's all changing but I don't know why it's changing, because it wasn't broke to begin with.
The first ever college football national championship awarded (retroactively) was split ….
I'm sorely tempted to edit it to:
The first college football national championship ever awarded (retroactively) was split ….
Have grammar texts caught up with this new-speak? Do they support it, or do they at least require the ever to be attached via a hyphen ("The first-ever championship awarded ...")?
More to the point, what benefit does ever bring to the sentence, wherever it's placed? Why is 'the first championship ever' better than 'the first championship'? -
Cucumber Mike (
talk)
21:40, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
In some cases and contexts, 'ever' is required in order to make clear the thing is not just the first one this year or this season or whatever, but the first one, well, ever. That's ok.
But things like "Obama's first ever news conference after being elected was ..." are just beyond a joke. So, there are two aspects to this issue:
(a) whether "ever" should appear in a certain construction at all; and if so,
Thanks. The thing is, many writers/speakers are effectively treating "best ever", "first ever" etc as compound adjectives, not as adjective-adverb combinations, hence my query about hyphenisation. --
Jack of Oz[Talk]23:14, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
I'd get away from looking at it as a grammatical question, and look at it as a
meme. In a normal voice either order is fine. But the "Best ref desk joke ever" order is part of the "Best...X...Ever!" meme in at least American English (can't imagine hearing
Catherine Tate say it) where there is an exaggerated emphasis placed on all three words and it is said as if it is a complete utterance, no verb needed.
μηδείς (
talk)
23:43, 31 October 2012 (UTC)reply
If you read the adverbs in English link above, I think it is clear that "ever" at the end of the phrase is being used as an adverb of place (here time) analogously to anywhere. That explains the trend to phrase-final word order.
μηδείς (
talk)
18:32, 1 November 2012 (UTC)reply
You do need it in some contexts..."Fido is the world's biggest dog." could be the biggest dog currently alive or the biggest dog that ever lived...so in that case, adding "ever" someplace in the sentence does add some meaning.
SteveBaker (
talk)
01:34, 2 November 2012 (UTC)reply
Yep, as I acknowledged above. That would be "Fido is the biggest dog in history", or "Fido is the biggest dog ever", but the trouble is, many people these days would say "Fido is the biggest ever dog", which bothers me tremendously. --
Jack of Oz[Talk]04:10, 2 November 2012 (UTC)reply
I will assume it bothers you because you are treating it as an adverb of place, as mentioned above, which usually goes at the end of a phrase. But it is an adverb, so it can follow either the verb or the adjective. Even "Fido is ever the biggest dog" would work, although you'd rarely hear it. English and a lot of languages like to have a set conventional order for their modifiers. "The biggest old black dog ever", not "the ever black old biggest dog." That's a matter of habit and convention. Is it possible, Jack, that you are conventional?. :)
μηδείς (
talk)
21:51, 2 November 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, and there ain't nuffink rong wif dat. That's not to say that I reject all change. Far from it. But when change occurs for no comprehensible rational reason other than ignorance, and those who know better not only don't correct them but too easily adopt the "New Ignorance" as the way we speak and write now, that's when I say "Whoa, I don't accept that". If we took a similar line of least resistance with medical training or computer science - or, indeed, encyclopedia writing - we'd be in a fine pickle. That's if the human race still existed. I know this is language we're talking about here, and it's not set in stone and it changes every day of the week. But when news outlets start telling me that someone was the
"oldest ever person", I really wonder what's going on. A very few years ago, I'd have been confident in saying that such an expression was completely unnatural, nobody talks or writes like that (we say "the oldest person ever"), and the sub-editor should be retrained or sacked. (And then sacked again for the inconsistency of writing "oldest ever person" in the headline but "oldest human being ever" in the text.) Something's happened in a very short space of time to make it OK, apparently. What was that something, and why did it happen?
As I said at the start, I'm interested in knowing if any grammar books have yet given this formulation their tick of approval. If so, so be it. If not, I'd feel secure in still regarding it as a sub-standard abuse of language, and I would proceed to carry out my threat to edit
1869 college football season et many al. --
Jack of Oz[Talk]22:38, 2 November 2012 (UTC)reply
It's one of my bugaboos (things calling for Instant Edits because Something Is Wrong On The Internet.) Yesterday, I ran into something like "1947 was the 98th ever season of the South Sydney Wombats". Yikes. --
jpgordon::==( o )16:32, 5 November 2012 (UTC)reply