Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 January 22

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January 22

Kamalieva & Djumaliev

Not being a native English speaker and having learnt English fourty years ago I have steadily gained fluency in English writing over the past five years. After updating the Kasmalieva & Djumaliev article from a dreary Dunglish version I wondered how much room there might be for further improvement, so I would like to invite native English speakers to scrutinize the text for any minor or major issues. Nitpicking encouraged, such as for comma placement which is quite counterintuitive for me in English. Could the text be pinpointed as more British or more US-like, or did I possibly mix up the two? Any unusual choices in prepositions?

Of course anyone wanting to comment by improving the article about the visual arts couple is welcome. And a dissection of this request is also fine to me, including subjective remarks about overly formal or informal writing and any inconsistency in style.

Context anyone? Having learned English in high school between 1975 and 1981 my level of English waned soon afterwards, but in recent years I have been reading English every day for up to eight hours. I have never set foot on English speaking soil and being hearing impaired I can't get the language from TV. I am aware of variations in spelling but have never spotted differences in grammar between the local forms of English. Written British English seems a bit friendlier though and feels slightly old fashioned when compared to the more direct Yankee variation. Bertux (talk) 14:51, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I made relatively few changes to the lead paragraph, focusing on word choice more suitable for an online encyclopedia, and reordered two sentences for logical content. Bear in mind that the artists are the topic of the page, so the internal link to Bishkek is meant to provide geographic content to readers who seek it. See the page's Edit history to "compare versions" and you'll view all the changes opposite their prior version (on the left). I encourage you to keep writing, also by translating from your native language to English. It's the true test of expressive knowledge of an acquired language (with speaking being its oral equivalent) vs. the receptive modes of reading and hearing. You would benefit from reading existing WP pages on topics similar to those about which you'll write. In my experience with acquiring foreign languages as a largely self-taught adult, I believe reading non-fiction material will serve you better as a writing model than would the dialogues you don't hear. -- Deborahjay (talk) 17:49, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I've tweaked a bit too, and concur with Deborahjay's observations re reading well-written non-fiction. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Recommending the one book that helped me the most on writing nonfiction: the highly readable and entertaining On Writing Well by William Zinsser. -- Deborahjay (talk) 08:14, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

How to pronounce "Juergen Bruegl"?

How do you pronounce the name Juergen Bruegl? I cannot read phoenetics; they did not teach that at school. I can read things like "You-er-gen Brew-gle" so breaking it down into common English words or parts of words would communicate to me effectively. Thanks! --78.148.97.148 (talk) 20:44, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

There's no way to express the pronunciation that way. The German umlaut-u, "ü", sometimes written "ue", represents a phoneme that is not present in English. In introductory German class you're taught to shape your mouth to say "oo" ("oo" in the sense of "noon", not the sense of "book") but then say "ee" instead.

That's at best an approximation. You can listen to sound files to help you out, but they have limitations too, because you likely don't really know what you're listening for. You should find a German speaker to practice with. --Trovatore (talk) 20:49, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

You perhaps heard that one, "Führer", because Adolf Hitler is such a worldwide-known dictator you might perhaps have heard in a movie or in a documentary when people around him call him "mein Führer"? Well, it's the same sound, that "ü". The name "Juergen Bruegl" could be written "Jürgen Brügl", and the sound you're looking for is the same "ü" as in "mein Führer". Hope this helps. Akseli9 (talk) 21:06, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

You can also find an identically written and spoken and in that case exessive use of the phoneme "ü" in the turkish language. --Kharon (talk) 06:44, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

And in many others, besides German and Turkish: see Ü#Letter Ü --81.96.84.137 (talk) 07:59, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

In these two sound clips [1][2] (but note the extra "e" in Bruegel) the sounds are (to me) a lot different. Is that just me, or the sound clips, or what? Thincat (talk) 08:11, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

First of all, both are approximations in English, and the second clip gives that of the famous Dutch name, as in Pieter Bruegel the Elder (something like Broygle). "Bruegl"/"Brügl" on the other hand is probably of Austro-Bavarian origin. As for 'ü', our article on Close front rounded vowel gives a list of languages (including a couple of English dialects which do include that vowel sound in their pronunciation of the word "few", for example). ---Sluzzelin talk 09:12, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

For what it's worth: In this clip you can hear a German reporter pronouncing the name of a helmet designer named Jürgen Brühl. Now all that's left is transforming the ending of the surname Brühl into Brügl. That ending comes very close to those you'd use in the English words "eagle", "bagel", etc. Else: here you can hear a German actor saying "Herr Brügl" (and at this timestamp you can hear the surname Brügl said by two different actors using Bavarian pronunciation). ---Sluzzelin talk 23:21, 26 January 2017 (UTC)