Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 9

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March 9

Chinese verb term for jet lag in English

When I hear Chinese people talk about jet lag, one term I often hear is 倒时差 (dǎoshíchā). This term sounds to me like a verb (i.e. the actions people take to adjust their body clocks before and/or after long distance, transmeridian flights), and when people ask me to translate this term directly into English, I am stumped, since off the top of my head, I cannot think of a English verb or other action phrase associated with jet lag (In English, I can only think of this concept as a noun). Can someone help me out here? 96.246.144.195 (talk) 06:23, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

"recovering/preparing from jet lag"? Note that although jet lag is associated with time shift, it seems also to have a strong correlation with consumption of alcohol while in transit. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:34, 9 March 2016 (UTC).

Alcohol can surely make it worse, but trying to function socially with people who believe it is three in the afternoon while your head and body are screaming out that it is three in the morning is horrendous. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:00, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

"倒时差" is an action (倒 being the verb, 时差 the object), and I second Rich's translation. Literally, it would be "reversing the time difference". The closest corresponding term to "jet lag" itself, at least in the sense usually used in English when we say "I'm suffering from jet lag" and the like, is probably "时差反应", "reaction to time difference". --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:53, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Ratio, rational number

It's clear that a ratio is a rational number, and rational is the adjectival form of ratio. Ratio is the Latin for reason, and our root for for rational in the sense of "a rational person". It also means account or calculation.

Is there any evidence that the arithmetical/mathematical senses of the words arose separately - from the second sense of the Latin word ratio?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:41, 9 March 2016 (UTC).

Not according to https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ratio and Ratio#History and etymology. Loraof (talk) 16:26, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe the two modern meanings were closer to being a single meaning in ancient Greece. That is, they considered any number that couldn't be expressed as a ratio to be an abnormal deviant, if they even accepted the existence of such numbers. Proof of the irrationality of pi, for example, seemed to require calculus. They could have used larger and larger numerators and denominators to approximate pi more closely, whenever a more accurate measurement proved that a previous ratio, like 22/7, was not exactly pi. StuRat (talk) 16:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

The proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2 does not require calculus, and was provided by Euclid. It is said that the Pythagoreans had known that the square root of 2 was irrational, but were sworn to secrecy because it was a dark secret (consistent with the concept that irrational numbers were deviant), and that one Pythagorean leaked the secret, and was killed. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:36, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

You can see how this would have developed. "Irrational" is a synonym for "unreasonable" so there's the idea of unpredictability creeping in. "Ration" is presumably derived from the idea of getting a proportion of whatever is available. 151.224.167.73 (talk) 17:27, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Only [numbers that can be represented by] ratios of integers are rational numbers, thus there are irrational ratios like the golden ratio. Irrational numbers originated during the 5th century BCE, [1], and at that time, Latin was just one of many languages spoken in central Italy.[2] Thus mathematical necessity definitely required that these terms have separate, but similar meanings. -Modocc (talk) 19:01, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

4.5 / 1.5 = 3. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep, I fixed that. --Modocc (talk) 19:36, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Or from another point of view, it wasn't wrong. 4.5 / 1.5 and 3 / 1 are the same ratio (or they aren't). More importantly, the statement that "irrational numbers originated during the 5th century BCE" is expressed from a modern point of view. In ancient times these things would not have been described as numbers. Indeed, as far as I know it wasn't until later that rational numbers were considered a kind of number. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 21:17, 9 March 2016 (UTC)