Language Overflow

CowperKettle

17:00

That's hypocoristic for "Catija"

And also, accidentally, the name of the famour WWII rocket launcher.

Katyusha multiple rocket launchers (Russian: Катю́ша; IPA: [kɐˈtʲuʂə]) are a type of rocket artillery first built and fielded by the Soviet Union in World War II. Multiple rocket launchers such as these deliver explosives to a target area more quickly than conventional artillery, but with lower accuracy and requiring a longer time to reload. They are fragile compared to artillery guns, but are inexpensive and easy to produce. Katyushas of World War II, the first self-propelled artillery mass-produced by the Soviet Union, were usually mounted on trucks. This mobility gave the Katyusha (and other...

Which was named after a popular Russian WWII song, Katyusha

Katyusha (song)

"Katyusha," also transliterated "Katusha", "Katiusha" or "Katjusha", (Russian: Катю́ша - Little Catherine) is a Russian wartime song composed in 1938 by Matvei Blanter with lyrics from Mikhail Isakovsky. It gained fame during World War II as an inspiration to defend one's land from the enemy. The song combines elements of the heroic, upbeat battle song and of a peasant song depicting a girl longing for her absent love. Standing on a high riverbank, a young woman, Katyusha, sings of her beloved (compared to "a gray eagle of the steppes"), who is a soldier serving on the border far away. The theme...

Катюша! Моя любимая песня в детстве! Валерия Курнушкина!

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Anonymous

@CowperKettle Like the thing you wear on your head?

Anonymous

Wait, Japanese Wikipedia says hair bands are only called katyusha in Japanese.

Anonymous

But it's from Russian.

Anonymous

That's weird :-)

Anonymous

17:08

You don't call those katyusha in Russian?

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I'll admit that I have no good word for that, not in any language!

Hmm... there is "katyusha hair band" on the web, but it looks too short for a hair band for me.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I guess you can call it a hair band or an Alice band.

Damkerng T.

Word of the Day: Alice band

@snailboat Thanks for a new word!

Another website calls it a "hair bow". :-)

Anonymous

Apparently the Japanese term katyusha (to refer to a kind of hair band) comes from the name of the main character from one of Tolstoy's novels.

Damkerng T.

Ahh

Anonymous

17:16

Resurrection (novel)

Resurrection (Russian: Воскресение, Voskreseniye), first published in 1899, was the last novel written by Leo Tolstoy. The book is the last of his major long fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as an exposition of injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of institutionalized church. The novel also explores the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which Tolstoy had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life, and explains the theory in detail. It was first published serially in the popular weekly magazine Niva in an effort to raise funds for t...

CowperKettle

@snailboat No!

(0:

Anonymous

There's a character in this book named Katyusha, and somehow in Japanese a kind of hair band was named after her.

CowperKettle

We surely don't call them Katyusha, although I'm not in the habit of wearing them, so I'm not sure how girls call them.

@snailboat That's great. Tolstoy is a very good writer. Glad to hear that Japanese made Katyusha a loanword based on that book.

Anonymous

Oh, it seems there was a man named Yasushi Akimoto

Anonymous

And long ago he told everyone that the actress who played Katyusha in the drama wore the kind of hair band he was selling.

Anonymous

17:18

He wanted people to buy them! :-)

Anonymous

So he called it the Katyusha.

Anonymous

But he was lying! She wasn't wearing a hair band.

CowperKettle

A smart man!

Damkerng T.

Oh, it's probably like "xerox" or "fab" over here.

Anonymous

But the name stuck, so now they're called Katyushas in Japanese today :-)

Anonymous

17:19

I never knew that story until just now.

CowperKettle

(0:

Anonymous

I always figured Katyusha was a Russian word for hair band.

Færd

Weird stories behind names.

CowperKettle

Nope. That "Catherine", in a hypocoristic way.

Yekaterinburg was named after St. Catherine.

Anonymous

This is my silly question of the day:

Anonymous

17:20

3

Q: Why are the high-pitched voices of children 'yellow'?

I was reading a little book called 『ひらがな物語』 and came across this passage on page 119: 　大臣といえば明治初期の文部大臣森有礼が「めんどうだから、いっそのこと、小学校教育は英語にしようか」　と、おおまじめで、いい出したこともあった。もし森文部大臣の発言が通っておれば今頃、　パパ　ママ　マイホーム　と、小学生が黄色い声を、張りあげていたかも知れない。しかし森発言は、エール大学のホイットニイ教授のアドバイスで中止された。一国の文化を、外国語で継承するとは、不見識も...

CowperKettle

@snailboat "Yellow voices"?

Damkerng T.

Oh, the sound of color, or the color of sound!

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Yep! They'd cry out in yellow voices, "Mama, papa, my home!"

CowperKettle

Probably because children have incomplete d-subshells in coordination compounds.

(a chem joke)

Anonymous

Yellow here refers to the shrill or high-pitched cries of women or children.

Anonymous

17:22

But I have no idea why the Japanese word for yellow would have that meaning.

CowperKettle

But to tell frankly, I can see why "yellow" can mean "high" (voice)

Damkerng T.

Haha! I just recall that Thai has a "green" voice, too!

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Oh really?

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh really? ×2

CowperKettle

@snailboat A "black" voice is a low voice.

Anonymous

17:22

@CowperKettle Oh really? ×3

CowperKettle

Yellow is kind of "thin"

Damkerng T.

Hehe!

Anonymous

I'm out of oh reallys. :-(

Anonymous

I spent them all in one go . . .

Færd

I've heard of violet scream in Farsi. Not sure about yellow though.

CowperKettle

17:23

Also, small birds are said to be "yellow-beaked" in Russian.

Anonymous

@Færd But if I had another, I'd use it now!

Damkerng T.

เสียง-เขียว (lit. "voice-green") means "angry voice".

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Wow!

CowperKettle

A very young kid is "zheltorotic" in Russian, "yellow mouth"

Anonymous

What is a violet scream in Farsi?

Færd

17:24

@snailboat I have to look it up.

CowperKettle

Here. Young sparrows have yellow beaks.

Damkerng T.

Oh! I couldn't make out what part of the head was yellow!

CowperKettle

Hence "yellow mouth" for a young kid.

Damkerng T.

Ahh

CowperKettle

Hence, "yellow" is kind of immature color.

As is "green".

Anonymous

17:29

Green tends to pop up in a lot of languages with that meaning, I think due to an association with plants.

CowperKettle

It could also be that in Japanese, the word for "yellow" is pronounced in a way that makes it sound immature.

Anonymous

Many plants ripen and mature, but are green until they do.

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

In Japanese, green was historically considered a shade of ao, which can now be translated 'blue' in most contexts.

Anonymous

Although ao today makes most people think of blue, in a number of fixed contexts it's still used to mean green, and one of those is for unripe plants.

CowperKettle

17:31

nods

Anonymous

So ao has that connotation in Japanese, too.

Anonymous

In English we say green with that meaning.

CowperKettle

nods

Færd

@snailboat And in traditional Farsi literature the sky was sometimes considered to be green. It was always weird to me.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle There's an expression in Japanese: mada kuchibashi ga kiiroi (lit. 'beak is still yellow') = immature

CowperKettle

17:32

@snailboat Just like in Russian. Nice.

Anonymous

Maybe it's borrowed from Russian :-)

CowperKettle

I doubt that. (0:

Anonymous

It only goes back 300 years.

Anonymous

@Færd Color conceptualizations change over time. It's interesting!

CowperKettle

But beaks are yellow in birds, so it's quite logical that this expression would crop up.

Anonymous

17:34

In Japanese, midori wasn't really split off from ao as a basic color in its own right until the last hundred years.

CowperKettle

In Russian, the color of the sky is not blue, but sky-blue, a separate color (goluboy \ голубой )

Anonymous

@CowperKettle It can be a bit derisive in Japanese.

Anonymous

Like mocking someone for being inexperienced.

CowperKettle

@snailboat Same here, especially when referred to a.. you said it.

Færd

@CowperKettle As a shade of blue? We have that word too, and maybe many others alos.

CowperKettle

17:36

> Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination (an article in PLoS)

2

> English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”).

Damkerng T.

Oh, Russian blues! I knew only Prussian blue!

CowperKettle

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Anonymous

@CowperKettle Thanks! It's a fascinating topic :-)

CowperKettle

You're welcome!

@Færd Nice!

Damkerng T.

I guess a shade of blue in Thai คราม is going to become obsolete soon.

CowperKettle

17:39

> The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner.

Damkerng T.

Interesting!

Færd

@CowperKettle Okay. So you don't see navy blue as a shade of blue. I can understand that. We have a separate term for navy blue too.

CowperKettle

In Russian, "blue" is dark blue, and "goluboy" is light blue (like the sky).

Færd

@snailboat A violet scream is a very high scream, or a scream that doesn't deserve attention, or something like that. It was first used by a poet about 50 years ago, and became a popular term after that.

CowperKettle

A goluboy is a gay man (a homosexual)

Damkerng T.

17:42

Ugh!

Are they okay with being called 'goluboy'?

CowperKettle

This slang term appeared saliently only in the 1980s.

@DamkerngT. No, there's widespread state-fueled homophobia right now.

Damkerng T.

I see.

CowperKettle

There are laws against "gay propaganda".

Anonymous

@CowperKettle :-(

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. Oh, the homosexuals themselves are okay with being called "goluboy", that's not very offensive, I guess.

Damkerng T.

17:44

A-ha!

CowperKettle

But the word was tainted by this association a little.

For instance, there's a nice cartoon called "Goluboy puppy" (light blue puppy).

When the cartoon was produced, "goluboy" did not have that pejorative meaning.

But in the 1990s it became weird to watch this cartoon.

Damkerng T.

Phew! -- For some reason, goluboy sounded pejorative to me the first time I read it out.

CowperKettle

Мультфильмы: Голубой щенок

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It's not very pejorative. The cartoon is like a rock-opera. I liked it as a kid.

A bit psychedelic, in the late USSR way.

Damkerng T.

Maybe it was my familiarity with other words ending with boy. "anything-boy" doesn't sound very nice to me.

CowperKettle

English words ending with "boy"?

Damkerng T.

17:48

Could be. It could be in Thai as well. I'm not sure about my intuition about these -boy words! :D

(For example, bullyboy, callboy, etc.)

CowperKettle

nods

Damkerng T.

BTW, คราม is suggested to be translated as cerulean, indigo, or sapphire. Now, that makes me wonder about the differences between the three words!

BTW, cobalt blue was one of my favorite colors. I tried to use it every time I could in my art classes. :-)

CowperKettle

(0:

Damkerng T.

Cobalt blue and yellow, especially lemon yellow!

CowperKettle

Ha. I've found Treasure Island, a Soviet cartoon, with English subtitles.

Treasure Island (USSR, 1988, Kievnauchfilm) with English subtitles

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Damkerng T.

17:55

I didn't know that USSR made lots of cartoons/animations, too!

CowperKettle

Did Thailand make cartoons?

Damkerng T.

Our pioneers got this kind of criticism: "..ตัวการ์ตูนไม่ต้องกิน ทำไมถึงแพง อย่างนี้จ้างคนเล่นไม่ดีกว่าหรือ..."

(lit. cartoon characters don't eat, why is it so expensive? If it's like this, wouldn't it be better to just hire people to play the roles?)

CowperKettle

Ah. Too bad.

Damkerng T.

nods -- Indeed

One of our pioneers took two years and his left eye to push his animation through: th.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

CowperKettle

In Treasure Island, they even translated the songs to rhyme in English. Nice.

Damkerng T.

18:00

สุดสาคร 2

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^His work.

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. Nice!

Damkerng T.

Thanks! I'm glad we had him!

@CowperKettle I didn't notice that! That's really nice!

CowperKettle

Phra Aphai Mani

Phra Aphai Mani (Thai: พระอภัยมณี) is a 30,000-line epic written by Thailand's best-known poet, Sunthorn Phu. It is also part of Thai folklore and has been adapted into films and comics. The main protagonists are Prince Aphai Mani, a mermaid, and a female yak or ogress. == Plot == Phra Aphai Mani and his brother, Sisuwan, are Thai princes. Their father sent them away to study with the hope that they would gain knowledge to help them rule the country. Sisuwan learned to sword fight and Phra Aphai Mani learned to play a magical flute that could put people to sleep or kill them. When they returned...

Damkerng T.

Yes! It's a classic!

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. Some phrases from that cartoon's songs are household sayings like "greed has led Bill to his death". That one is sometimes jokularly referred to Bill Gates.

Damkerng T.

18:03

Hehe!

CowperKettle

(0:

"Zhadnost Billa pogubila"

It rhymes, that's why it turned into a saying.

Damkerng T.

A-ha! Billa -- bila

CowperKettle

The song is at 1:11:40

They are singing the song to Long John Silver to dissuade him from being greedy. LOL

Damkerng T.

Haha!

CowperKettle

> Great subs, aside really-really minor typos, I have to commend the author of the sub, whether you're the one who posted it or not. Gotta give credit when it's due. Shoutouts to the wife, too

From a YouTube comment.

Damkerng T.

18:10

Nice! But Shoutouts to the wife?"

Sounds like an inside joke.

CowperKettle

nods

I did not get that too.

Damkerng T.

Hey, there's a translation of พระอภัยมณี (Phra Aphai Mani) in English, too!

(It's here: sakchaip.tripod.com/bookworm/sunthorn/abhai_a.html, you can download its PDF from this page: e4thai.com/e4e/…, just look for PDF eBook on the page.)

Interesting that the book spells อภัย (aphai) as "abhai". This style might be more popular back then. I think it was for a better alignment with Pali-Sanskrit.

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. Nice!

> But indeed these strange things are necessary elements of the world of classics - a world built entirely by its own rules and finished by its own laws.

"furnished with its own laws" probably

Damkerng T.

18:27

I think finished is the right word, according to our common belief.

Wait, but by its own laws?

Hmm...

CowperKettle

Some mistranslation from Thai.

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I think it's finished indeed.

I think the idea is like, in this kind of world, there are rules that create it, govern it, and finally end it.

CowperKettle

shrugs

Damkerng T.

It's an idea related to the religion, everything will return to nothing.

CowperKettle

nods

Google translate translated

> Read the English version of Moby Dick.

> อ่าน พระอภัยมณี ฉบับภาษาอังกฤษ

Damkerng T.

18:32

Hah!

LOL

CowperKettle

(0:

Damkerng T.

I suppose that Google Translate thinks they both are classics!

CowperKettle

nods

Damkerng T.

fancying translating it on my own...

CowperKettle

Why not? It's a noble effort. There must be many good Thai literary works to translate into English.

Damkerng T.

18:36

I'm thinking it could be a good opportunity for me to dig deeper in Thai literature as well.

CowperKettle

nods

Damkerng T.

One obvious problem is the original is a poem.

CowperKettle

Ooops.

That would be too hard.

Damkerng T.

nods -- Very.

CowperKettle

I believe you've got to be an English poet to really be able to translate any poetry.

Damkerng T.

18:38

I'm not sure about this translation. (I just found out about it.) But it looks like the translation is written in prose.

CowperKettle

Shakespeare was translated into Russian not by translators, but by poets.

Damkerng T.

@CowperKettle nods -- I think perhaps that's why the translator chose to translate it that way.

CowperKettle

And Evgeny Onegin has a score of translations into English. The biggest is by the great writer Nabokov, and basically is a prose retelling with heaps of advanced commentaries explaining every aspect.

Anonymous

Tolkien was famously translated into Japanese by a poet :-)

Damkerng T.

@snailboat That's very nice!

CowperKettle

18:40

@snailboat LOTR was translated by a poet?

Anonymous

Teiji Seta

CowperKettle

> The wind was on the withered heath,
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.

> Mr. Teiji Seta (1916-1979) was an expert of classical Japanese literature
and a Haiku poet; these facts explain why his use of Japanese is so
beautiful.

> Seta translated "Strider" as "Haseo", which is composed of two kanjis
"Haseru" (run, reach far) and "Otoko" (man). Some readers insist that
it sounds too Japanese for a character in a Western story, especially
when they read the English original first.

Damkerng T.

To translate "Strider", which is a name, is interesting.

Anonymous

It is a name, but not an opaque one.

Damkerng T.

Come to think of it, I think perhaps all That translation of Second Foundation translate "Mule" as well.

CowperKettle

18:48

Russian translators opted for "Brodyazhnik", which means "Wanderer"

To leave it as "Strider" would have wrecked the whole spirit of the book in Russian.

It sounds too modern\Western.

Damkerng T.

A-ha! I think there's a good reason! Thai's "mule" means defecate!

CowperKettle

And nobody in Russia would understand that it means "wanderer".

@DamkerngT. (0:

Damkerng T.

@CowperKettle It could be very awkward. ;-)

CowperKettle

> it is not difficult to find Russianisms in Nabokov. You cannot “listen the sound of the sea” in English; this is a Russianism: in English you have to listen to something.

Even Nabokov made mistakes.

> In the commentary, you find “a not-too-trust-worthy account that a later friend of Pushkin’s…left us,” where the English requires “has left”; but there is only one past tense in Russian where we have three, and Russians often make these mistakes.

Really? Is "has left" obligatory there? Hmm.

> Nabokov translates literally “Увижу ль вас” where the English would be, “Shall I ever see you again?” Such passages sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English.

Ha. The article is dated 1965.

There were already some early computerized translation systems.

Word of the day: obelize

Anonymous

I don't see why has would be necessary there.

CowperKettle

19:03

So do I.

Damkerng T.

Me either.

CowperKettle

Or "So don't I".

Anonymous

Neither do I.

Damkerng T.

I think Britons would say "Neither do I".

CowperKettle

It's from a large critical article about Nabokov's translation of EO by Pushkin

Anonymous

19:04

Well, both AmE and BrE speakers would.

CowperKettle

> Winter…the peasant, feeling festive,
Breaks a fresh fairway with his sleigh,
Snow underfoot, his nag is restive
And, barely trotting, plods his way.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat A-ha!

CowperKettle

Wow. This is a very good translation from the Russian original. (about the nag)

Damkerng T.

I'm still thinking about "listen to the sound of the sea".

> popsci.com/listen-to-sound-gravitational-waves

If we can listen to the sound of gravitational waves, I don't think there's any problem with the sound of the sea.

> While living at the hermitage up on the mountain, I used to listen to the sound of the wind.

First example of "listen to the sound of" in Google Books!

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. The author commented on the lack of to in Nabokov's translation.

"Listen the sound of the sea"

A calque from Russian.

> Except in dictionaries, grammars, and schoolbooks, the ë is rarely given its dots but is simply written like e, because the Russians know where it occurs and do not feel they need go to the trouble of making their language easier for foreigners.

Damkerng T.

19:09

Oh, he didn't use "to"!

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. Yes, because in Russian we don't use it.

Damkerng T.

Now that sounds like a grammatical mistake.

Apparently, I inserted "to" automatically when I read his sentence!

A native-Thai English teacher also said "lie my mom" in a video promoting an English school over here.

CowperKettle

(0:

> The commentary, if one skips the longueurs, does make very pleasant reading, and it represents an immense amount of labor—labor which the author, in a letter, once described to me as “аховый,” a delightful Russian adjective which means that something makes you say “ach.”

Yes, an adjective derived from the word "Oh!"

"Oh-icious"

"His oh-icious labor of translating Evgeni Onegin"

> The volumes of Pushkin’s notes and miscellaneous papers published by the Soviet government—Tetradi Pushkina and Rukoyu Pushkina—contain many extracts from English writers which Pushkin has copied out in English: passages or whole poems by Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Barry Cornwall and a quotation from Francis Bacon.

I did not know that. Pushkin self-studied English by copying out large chunks of text into copy-books.

Damkerng T.

19:24

That sounds like a good way to learn English!

CowperKettle

> These volumes contain passages, poems, and documents in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, and show that with Hebrew and Arabic he had at least got as far as the alphabets. He was capable of composing Latin epigrams and at the time of his death had been studying Greek. He had transcribed and translated two odes of Sappho.

Wow. He was a real scholar.

@DamkerngT. Indeed!

I print out English verses. Maybe I should also write them down. (0:

Damkerng T.

:D

CowperKettle

19:36

Good night!

Damkerng T.

Good night!

Damkerng T.

21:15

Because you limit the answer to only those three choices, I'll put my thought here, as a comment. For me, there are several other possibilities, e.g., due to, caused by, during, as an effect of, as a result of, etc. (each suggests a different angle of your article). If you really want to save words, this would work, too: Plant-based diet: pathophysiological changes. Too short? You can also use this: Plant-based diet and its pathophysiological effects. — Damkerng T. 10 secs ago

I think our learners are tethering their answers between being too loose (which may look like a proofreading request) and too tight (which may get answerers' hands tied).

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