Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 July 16

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July 16

Chinese Characters

Is there anything on the internet where I can actually write a character to look up its pronunciation or meaning? Japanese IME on Windows has an IME Pad where you can do this, but the Chinese IME does not. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I just found http://www.nciku.com/ and my first tests seemed to work. —Kusma (t·c) 13:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

That's perfect, thanks! KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:07, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

"Jaam"

I know that "jaam" is Estonian for "station". But I have never been able to figure out why. It doesn't resemble either the Finnish word "asema", even though Finnish is one of Estonian's closest relative languages, or the Indo-European word "station" (or variations thereof). What could possibly be its etymology? JIP | Talk 19:14, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Our article on Estonian vocabulary merely mentions it as a Russian loan word, but from which Russian word it comes, I cannot guess. Maybe someone with better Russian than myself can comment. This page (in Estonian) mentions that it is a contraction. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 19:41, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

By transliterating it into Cyrillic, we get ям, Russian Wiktionary defines it as an obsolete term for почтовая станция, (using English Wiktionary to translate that, we get 'post station'). V85 (talk) 20:08, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

We have an article on the Russian/Turkic yam which for some reason has the title "Ortoo."--Cam (talk) 20:28, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Which is the Mongolian word, but the article has a section on Etymology, which says that the Russian word is probably from Tatar. --ColinFine (talk) 22:05, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

That article continues on to suggest that the Tatar / Turkic word is probably itself from Mongolian: "…where it probably is a Tatar (Turkic) loan word. The Turkic word root again is related to the Mongolian "Zam" (road or way). However, in the Mongolian Empire, both the postal system and the individual stations were named "Örtöö" ("Örtege" in Classical Mongolian)." While I think that article probably should not be named "Ortoo", at least the text might be helpful.  dalahäst ^{(let's talk!)} 22:37, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, that "for some reason" was a reaction to the edit that moved the article without changing any of the text.--Cam (talk) 00:53, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

ям is related to the word ямщик (yamshchik; also romanised as yamstchik), meaning a coachman. The connection is pretty obvious. There's a famous folk song "Ямщик, не гони лошадей" (Yamshchik, nye gonyi loshadyei; Coachman, don’t hurry the horses). Here’s Ivan Rebrov singing it. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 22:46, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

This made me think it was the same song as the famous Finnish song Ajomies ("Coachman"), famously performed by Topi Sorsakoski and Agents, whose lyrics contain: Ajomies, älä kiirehdi suotta, pakoon pääse ei kohtaloaan ("Coachman, don't hurry in vain, one cannot escape one's fate"), but once I listened to the Russian song on YouTube, I realised they were entirely different songs. JIP | Talk 20:11, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Still, "ajomies" and "yamshchik" aren't too far apart, even though the Finnish and Russian languages are technically unrelated. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 03:50, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

My limited knowledge of Finnish says that "mies" is "man", so I don't think your hunch is correct. --ColinFine (talk) 11:28, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

No, it still sort of hangs together. The -shchik ending in Russian denotes one (a human) who does or is involved in the thing in question. Thus, yam (postal station) > yamshchik (one who collects and delivers mail, traditionally by coach). Compare yam with ajom, and ... But maybe it's pure coincidence. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 12:40, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

It is, unfortunately, coincidence. The word ajomies segments clearly into ajo- "driving" mies "man", both of which roots trace back to the Proto-Uralic language. μηδείς (talk) 17:39, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought it was too good to be true. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 22:28, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. User:Medeis is right, it's ajo-mies, not ajom-ies. JIP | Talk 05:26, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

What does this mean? (Serbo-Croatian, I think)

Can anyone explain what this edit summary means? Ethnic edit wars have been going on at that page for years, and I'd like to at least understand people's reasoning. (Earlier this month, I left a note about edit warring at the ethnic conflicts noticeboard.) Thanks! Zagalejo^^^ 22:45, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Google Translate renders it from Serbian as "What do you mean here?", which seems good enough, although perhaps not very helpful. Looie496 (talk) 23:56, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, "what do you (pl) want to say with this here?" is how I would express it. μηδείς (talk) 02:31, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Hm, OK. Thanks! Zagalejo^^^ 05:49, 17 July 2012 (UTC)