Language desk
< December 7	<< Nov \| December \| Jan >>	December 9 >

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.

December 8[edit]

CHN - difference in meaning/usage between 规划 and 计划[edit]

Subject says it all. Could someone give me an informative explanation of the differences in usage/scope/meaning of 规划 and 计划? Thank you! 218.25.32.210 (talk) 02:41, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A jihua 计划 is a plan of action. Ji 计 means strategy and hua 划 means, roughly, plan. A jihua can therefore describe any envisioned future action, which may be but need not be detailed, but usually has as its content a series of action. It is, to be simplistic, a list. For example, a plan to invade another country would be a 计划.

A guihua 规划 is a schematic plan. Gui 规 means a rule, a ruler, or drawing instruments in general while 划 means, roughly, a plan. Thus, a guihua would allocate resources, especially land. A 规划, to be simplistic, is (or can be shown as) a diagram (not a flow chart). Thus, a city's planning scheme, which sets out which part of the city would be used for various purposes, is a 规划. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 08:45, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much echoing PalaceGuard... 规划 is more formal, rules-y, often has administrative connotations (it's the same 规 as in 规律、规定、etc.). 计划 can just be a random guy's travel plans or whatnot. In everyday life, 计划 is more commonly used and heard (and, accordingly, it has a higher frequency than 规划 in the Lancaster corpus, and a much higher frequency in Da Jun's bigram corpus; from a relative perspective, 规划 is more common in newspapers and stuff than 计划, which is more common in other modes.) rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:14, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The expression 'late' when referring to a person deceased.[edit]

I am curious about how we use the word 'late' when referring to a person who is deceased. We've all heard the terms 'late husband' or 'the late Tommy Cooper' and so on, but not 'the late Henry VIII' or 'the late Alexander The Great', suggesting that the person referred to passed away fairly recently, but when exactly does this 'recently' thing come into play? Would it still be appropriate to talk about 'the late Winston Churchill', for example? (Also, as a side question, does the word 'late' in this context come from Latin 'latus' - 'taken', and therefore just a coincidence that it could be taken as being related to the 'lately' in 'has anyone died lately (='recently')?') --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 07:09, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to drop out after everyone in the speaker's audience could reasonably be assumed to be aware the person is dead, because labouring a reminder that a person has died wears thin pretty quickly. For very visible people, that happens very quickly, so references to "the late Michael Jackson", for example, stopped pretty quickly.

On the other hand, people who were well regarded in their day but lapsed into relative obscurity might get "the late" for quite some time. For example, Richard Todd died just the other day. A lot of people would never even have heard of him, but for people of my generation he was quite the leading man. So, I can imagine someone referring to him in even 6 months time as "the late Richard Todd" in some context where it would not necessarily be assumed everyone had heard he was now dead, because it got little media coverage.

There's also the matter of respect. "The late" is a mark of that. I doubt one would have heard references to "the late Adolf Hitler" or "the late Pol Pot" or "the late Saddam Hussein", except from those who were sad at their passing. -- JackofOz (talk) 08:29, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)(And that sort of speculation is how etymythology happens :-)). No. OED says (s.v. 'late, a¹', sense 5.a.), "Of a person: That was alive not long ago, but is not now; recently deceased." with no comment on the derivation of this sense from other senses. The etymology given is "Com. Teut.: OE. læt = OFris. let, OS. lat, LG. lât (Du. laat), OHG., MHG. laz (G. lass), ON. lat-r (Sw. lat, Du. lad), Goth. lats, all in the sense of ‘slow, sluggish, lazy’:—OTeut. *lato-; f. *lat- (:—pre-Teut. *lad-, cf. L. lassus weary = *lad-tus) ablaut-var. of *lēt-: see LET v.1" --ColinFine (talk) 08:36, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Slartibartfast: Come. Come now or you will be late.
Arthur: Late? What for?
Slartibartfast: What is your name, human?
Arthur: Dent. Arthur Dent.
Slartibartfast: Late as in "the late Dentarthurdent". It's a sort of threat, you see.
(H2G2 of course) Sussexonian (talk) 09:12, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Better to be a little late, Mr. Brown, than to be the late Mr. Brown." — highway safety slogan of the 1950's or 1960's. But with a little research or jogging of my memory, I think I can find similar puns in Shakespeare. —— Shakescene (talk) 09:17, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict:) Also note the alternative use of "late" for a person who may not be deceased, to indicate a previous position, place or title, as in "late Regis Professor of History", "late of the Grenadier Guards" or "late Lord Mayor of Dingley". This does not mean, for instance, that the Rt Hon. Rev. Dr Ian Paisley, MP, MLA, late First Minister of Northern Ireland, has left this earth, but just that he has retired from one of his posts.

But to respond more specifically to the question, I think that sometimes "late" can distinguish people with the same name or title as in "the late Earl", "the late government" or "the late Senator Gore".—— Shakescene (talk) 09:53, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Or, as I mentioned elsewhere on this page, John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and author of A Study in Scarlet. —— Shakescene (talk) 10:36, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Could the shift in semantics have happened through "Mr Brown, lately of Cambridge", via a euphemism like "lately of this world"? kwami (talk) 09:19, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Late..." meaning "the former..." in both usages. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:58, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Awkward sentence[edit]

From the documentation of a function object:

If one or both of the arguments passed to the predicate are not Widgets, the behavior is undefined.

The structure of this sentence seems a bit awkward to me. Specifically, if you replace "one or both" with "one", the sentence becomes ungrammatical: "If one of the arguments ... are not ..." Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve it? Perhaps

The behavior is undefined unless both arguments ... are Widgets.

Thanks, decltype (talk) 13:02, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the subject-verb agreement is OK, because (prescriptively at least) if the subject has the form "X or Y", the verb needs to agree with Y only. (Or rather, the verb agrees with whichever element is closest to it; that's Y when the verb follows the subject but X when the verb precedes it: thus the prescriptive rule calls for Either John or I am going to the show tonight but Is John or I going to the show tonight? though frankly the second sentence sounds like crap to me.) But I agree your suggested re-write is much easier to understand. +An gr 13:37, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see. I wasn't aware of the the rule, but intuitively "one or both ... are" seemed right, as opposed to "one or both ... is". decltype (talk) 13:59, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect Language link[edit]

Hi to Wiki, There is an incorrect link for a language displayed when you view the Meccano page in English.

The CZECH language link does not display the Mecanno page in the Czech language but links to the MEKUR company.

http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkur_%28stavebnice%29

While I am sure that MEKUR is really a very instructive system and is somewhat similar in its design approach to problem solving as MECCANO is. however the link displayed should not go to MEKUR. If there is no CZECH language translation of the MECCANO page then this link should be removed completely.

Thanking you in advance for reading the above. I await your considered help over this issue.

Yours faithfully

Mr John Edwin Skelton afterdinnermints —Preceding unsigned comment added by Afterdinnermints (talk • contribs) 15:56, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comment. I've removed the link, but in the future, the place to suggest an improvement to a Wikipedia article is on the talk page of the article in question (in this case, that would have been Talk:Meccano). This page is for asking questions about language and languages in general. +An gr 16:08, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

foreign language book of sayings or expressions.[edit]

I have recently discarded an old dictionary which contained a few pages of foreign language expressions such as Carp Diem. Mea Culpable etc. I cannot find another. can you please help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.115.166.236 (talk) 17:38, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Help with recommending a new phrasebook? Or translating foreign phrases themselves? Or something else? As Jerry Maguire says, "Help me help you." Kingsfold (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know whether they still do this (my copy is from the 1980s), but Merriam-Webster's very popular Collegiate Dictionary has or had a section called "Foreign Words & Phrases" at the back, with information such as you specify. If you can try to spell correctly the expressions you're interested in, you can also find information here (there are articles on both Carpe diem and Mea culpa) and on Wiktionary. Deor (talk) 19:46, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has List of Latin phrases, List of Greek phrases, List of French words and phrases used by English speakers, and probably others. Not as much use if you don't know which language the phrase is, but good to know about. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.41.11.134 (talk) 20:17, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Half a page (693) of the 2009 World Almanac and Book of Facts is given over to translations of foreign words and phrases. There were similar pages in earlier World Almanacs, and I'd expect there to be one in the 2010 edition, too.—— Shakescene (talk) 21:51, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To want in Chinese[edit]

I've learned the word "to want" in Chinese to be either 想 or 要. What's the distinction between their usage? Can they pretty much be used interchangeably? Yakeyglee (talk) 23:23, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

想 can only go with a verb (i.e., "I want to go to a movie"), whereas 要 can go with both nouns or verbs (i.e., it can also be used for "I want that shirt"). 要 tends to sound more forceful/demanding. Both also have several other meanings. You can also use 想要, which also means "to want".

There was a long discussion about these recently, I will try to find a link to it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:04, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here it is: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2009_October_27#Chinese. It's a bit confusing, and probably not helpful from a practical standpoint...but there is some more information if you're curious. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:06, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"想" means more or less to wish (literally to think). For example, "我想吃饭" means I want to eat (more literally, I am thinking of/considering eating). However, you could also say "我要吃饭", which would connote "I will eat", which is, as Rjanag correctly says, more forceful. Intelligentsium 02:45, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]