The Reading Room

bobble

00:26

It's very weird for me that I can already access review queues after only 2 questions - I had to work for a while to get into Puzzling's queues!

Bookworm

00:39

0

Q: Why does Coriolanus describe the common people as many-headed?

Coriolanus describes the people and tribunes as many-headed in multiple instances. "[H]e himself stuck not to call us the many-headed / multitude" (2.3.16-17). Here the citizens discuss whether or not they will give their votes to Coriolanus. "You grave but reckless senators, have you thus / G...

bobble

01:07

I finished proofreading my Giant's Drink answer, and am now suddenly terrified of posting.

Eddie Kal

01:42

@bobble Why?

bobble

I'm worried it's bad.

Or that I missed something important.

The worrying is worse because it's my first answer - I got over this (mostly) for Puzzling a while back

Eddie Kal

Fret not. There's no way a carefully proofread answer is going to be a bad answer.

bobble

I'm also comforting myself with the thought that no matter how bad it is, it can't be as bad as the current answer to that question. (currently at -2)

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku So copyright most definitely doesn't figure into this. As it stands my post has a very strong case for fair use. Just to be on the safe side, I asked on Law SE and on the off chance I am wrong we will reduce the quoted percentage, but in my experience quoting a well-attributed news article for the purpose of discussing its content is almost certainly fair use.

@bobble Please post your answer. I'd love to read it. Although having not read Ender's Game I may not know enough to comment on it.

bobble

My main concern is the last part, where I cover all of the parallels. It's just a bunch of (admittedly short) paragraphs, one after the other. Feels like I should be able to make that look nicer.

Bookworm

02:18

0

Q: What does "folds up its paws" and "fixes its eyes on eternity" mean?

An excerpt from "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury: I began to learn the nature of surprises, thankfully, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any de...

meaning ray-bradbury

0

Q: why use "flounder" in " I floundered into a word-association process "?

Another excerpt from "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury: It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened alon...

wording-choice

verbose

@Randal'Thor Great question! I've actually not come across the form "Rabindra Nath". In Bengali, the name is invariably written as one word. The Bangla Wikipedia entry, for example, has just রবীন্দ্রনাথ and does not provide any alternative রবীন্দ্র নাথ with the name being split into two components.

Chinese isn't really comparable, as I understand it? Chinese characters are symbols whereas Bengali characters are just letters. Of course I don't know any Chinese so maybe I'm wrong.

Eddie Kal

@verbose Is "dranath" a meaningful word? I was curious because seems his family had a lot of people with "dranath" in their names

verbose

Certainly Rabindra by itself is a full name, but it's not the case that Rabindra is the dude's first name and Nath his middle name. It's kinda like the forename Annabella. Anna by itself is a complete name but if a person is named Annabella one doesn't typically spell the name Anna Bella.

So Imma say "no, his name isn't Rabindra Nath, it's Rabindranath". One complicating factor is that "Rabindra" is often used adjectivally to describe his work; e.g., the songs he composed are collectively "Rabindra sangeet" (sangeet means music). Or the standard edition of his writings is called the "Rabindra Rachanavali" (= "the array of Rabindra creations")

That notwithstanding, nobody in Bengal or India would refer to the dude himself simply as Rabindra or split up his name Rabindra Nath. The nickname they would use for him would be "Robi" (pronounced "row-bee"); "Robi Thakur" is a common enough way of referring to him. "Thakur" is the Bengali form of his surname, "Tagore" an anglicization; in Bengali, his works are signed Thakur, not Tagore.

@EddieKal Which gets me to your question. "dranath" is not a meaningful semantic unit in Bengali. "indranath" is; it's Sanskritic and means, roughly, "god lord", though of course in English it would be more idiomatic to say "lord god"

So Rabindranath is ravi (the son) + indra (god) + nath (lord and master). His entire family had names with that suffix beginning with his father Debendranath, which is multiply redundant, as it means dev (god) + indra (god) + nath (lord); his paternal uncle Girindranath, which means giri (mountain) + indranath; and all his brothers and male cousins.

Further examples: Rathindranath (chariot + indranath); Satyendranath (truth + indranath); Hemendranath (winter/snow + indranath).

Fun fact, while Rabindranath Thakur gets truncated to Robi Thakur, a fairly common nickname for people named Rabindra or Ravindra in Bengal and Nepal is Robin. The default/inherent vowel in those languages is [o] rather than the schwa. So a Sanskrit name like Ravindra would be pronounced Robindro in Bengali or Nepali. Hence Robin.

It's not from the little red-breasted bird that the female Anglo name comes from; it's not a diminutive of Robert that the male Anglo name comes from. It's pronounced "row-bean" and is a surprisingly common name in Bengal and Nepal.

Whoops misspelled something above and it's too late to edit. ravi = the SUN, not the son.

Worth remembering, however, that when it comes to names, etymologies are beside the point, and when insisted upon, serve only to exoticize. Nobody goes around saying, "Oh! Your name is John! That means 'God is Gracious' in Hebrew! Oh hello, Susan! Your name means lily!" To anybody in India, Rabindranath is just a name, as transparent as Johannes or Vladimir or Sophia would be in their respective cultures.

Eddie Kal

02:50

@verbose A Peter once told me his name meant "stone". Years later, I met a Peter Stone...

verbose

heh

Eddie Kal

@verbose This is all very helpful and interesting! I just realized "indra" probably comes from Vedic Indra, right?

verbose

"Pierre" in French is both a name and the word for stone, so there you have it. And Jesus famously punned too, didn't he? "Upon this rock (petrus) I will build my church" meaning Saint Peter, the first pope.

@EddieKal yeppers. Indra, the god of rain and thunder, Vedic deity, not really a part of the Hindu pantheon in the post-Vedic era (like, no temples to Indra in modern India), but the name generally means "god" or "lord" now and is fairly common both as a name in itself (I have a friend named Inder) and as a suffix (Jitendra, Rajendra, Ravindra, etc. are all fairly popular names in India)

Eddie Kal

@verbose So I think @Randal'Thor probably has in mind a discussion we had earlier about a Latin American poet of Chinese descent whose name puzzled us. Since the romanization systems of Chinese vary a bit, some names are hyphenated in their romanizations, some are not. And that could be confusing when different names of the same person are mentioned in different texts

Rand al'Thor

08:22

@bobble Privilege levels are lower on beta sites. Also you got lucky with a HNQ here.

@bobble It looks good! I haven't read Ender's Game, but that seems like a thorough and well-supported analysis. +1 :-)

@verbose Thank you for the very detailed and interesting answer! The reason I asked was that I saw Rabindra Nath used by someone from India (although I don't know if they speak Bengali). On the other hand, that user isn't the most coherent writer, so it could be just a mistake.

@verbose I'd seen a few of these names, and suspected that "nath" or "indranath" must mean something separately. Interesting how the "indranath" becomes "endranath" in some of those names - I guess there's a name for that effect (vowel shift?) which is very common in some languages like Turkish, where common suffixes vary their vowels according to the immediately preceding vowel in the main word.

@EddieKal Actually no, I'd forgotten about that. I was thinking of some Chinese people I've met or know of IRL.

5

Q: What does "worm of yellow convicts" mean?

I am working on the translation of this story by Stephen Crane, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets", and in the very beginning he describes a fight which everyone around stops to watch. This is the full paragraph: From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant s...

meaning-in-context translation

^ another interesting literary ELU question

(in fact one that would probably benefit from an in-context literary interpretation like we could provide, rather than the direct meaning-of-phrase answer which would be ELU's forte)

Bookworm

0

Q: Chapter 26, Knights and squires, Moby Dick

I am not a native English speaker. I am struggling with the last few paragraphs of chapter 26 of moby dick. I tried using a dictionary and even translating to my native language but the dots don't seem to connect. I am not able to get the intuitive feeling of these paragraphs. I tried reading it ...

meaning moby-dick

Rand al'Thor

08:52

@Bookworm Hmm. From what I can find online, "Just this Side of Byzantium" appears to be an essay written as an introduction to some editions of Ray Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine. How should we tag questions about it? With short-stories, essays, dandelion-wine, or none of the above?

verbose

@Randal'Thor Thanks for the link to that rather incoherent question that used the form "Ravindra Nath". 🤷🏽‍♂️ I guess I was mistaken in asserting that Indians wouldn't ever split the name that way. But it seems very unusual and even wrong to me.

Bookworm

0

Q: Trying to find out the name of a story about a furniture

I studied a novel/story while I was in 7th grade or so. I vaguely remember the storyline. But I am unable to get the name or author of the story. The storyline goes like this: Protagonist buys a multipurpose furniture which can be turned into an easy chair (recliner), ironing board and a ladder....

story-identification comedy

verbose

As for -indra vs. -endra, Sanskrit had a rule that two vowels could not occur consecutively. If they do, then the vowels combine into a different vowel. ravi + indra (two short i sounds) combine into a long ee.

So the dude's name would be iTransliterated raviindranaath. Bengali doesn't distinguish "v" from "b", so it becomes rabiindranaath; see the discussion of "Robin" above. But a workaday transliteration of the name would just be Rabindranath, which is what he used.

When a name component ends with a schwa, such as satya, the a + the i of indra combine to form an eh sound, hence satyendranath The rules of combination are quite uniform. I know them intuitively but can't list them all; in any case, there are too many possible combinations.

Rand al'Thor

Language has so many interesting facets and complications :-)

verbose

Those rules are called sandhi. Here is a list of those rules. The chart at the bottom makes more sense than the list, actually.

Rand al'Thor

09:08

How many languages do you speak? I'm only fluent in English, but can just about hold a conversation in French, with a smattering of various other languages. I always admire people who are fluently multilingual (almost everyone I know is at least bilingual, since I have a very diverse friend group with hardly any native English speakers).

verbose

09:19

In decreasing order of fluency:
- English (speak, read, write natively)
- Hindustani (speak, read, write more or less natively in the Hindi register; can't read the Urdu register but can hold my own in conversation)
- Marathi (speak and read with near-native fluency; write with some hesitation)
- Bengali (speak, but very out of practice, and come across now as a non-native speaker; read only with difficulty; can't write, can type)
- French (read pretty easily, write passably, can't really converse)

I grew up in Bombay. In India it's not at all uncommon to speak at least three languages with relative ease. The college I went to for my undergrad degree was run by Tamilians, and most of my college friends spoke Tamil at home; I still can understand rudimentary Tamil only because it would amuse my friends' mothers to ask me basic questions like "would you like something to eat?" in Tamil and laugh when I replied in English.

Eddie Kal

@verbose I was wondering about this earlier but I didn't want to ask a totally unprepared question. After some Google-fu I didn't find an answer, so here it goes: is the name "Indira" as in "Indira Gandhi" morphologically related to "Indra"?

verbose

@EddieKal I can't speak to the etymology, but the words don't mean the same thing semantically. Indira means beauty or splendor, and it's one of the names applied to the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. Indra is just the king of the gods / the god of the rains, clouds, and thunder.

I just checked my go-to online Sanskrit dictionary. Apparently Indra can mean "highest, chief, prince of".

Tsundoku

09:44

@EddieKal The issue is that you're not actually "quoting a well-attributed news article for the purpose of discussing its content", you're merely quoting it without discussing it. There is no discussion of any of its contents to be seen. Posting it so others can discuss it does not count as "quoting ... for the purpose of discussing".

Napoleon Wilson

10:00

But if the purpose of the question is discussing it, be it in potential answers rather than the question, how is that not for the "purpose of discussing"?

Also, what's "discussing"? Can't asking if it relates to some other discussion, as the question somewhat does, not be seen as a discussion already, too?

b_jonas

10:22

@Bookworm Despite the missing details (which I hope OP will edit in), this question is well-written enough that it's worth for us to edit the title to more specific. Anyone want to help?

Bookworm

11:32

0

Q: Why does Bradbury use "had to" in "what they had to offer."?

An excerpt from "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury: I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer. Why does the author use the auxiliary word "had to" here, making me feel the action "offer" is compulsory? I think it'd be ...

wording-choice ray-bradbury

Tsundoku