Humanities desk
< March 28	<< Feb \| March \| Apr >>	March 30 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 29[edit]

"sing three songs of araby" theme and allusion in joyce's "araby" analysis[edit]

Is there a website that shows a text that has the following in its analysis: summary, binary oppositions, context, anomalies, habitual thinking, assumptions, subjectivity, modes of persuasion, thesis, use of dialectic, what were the primary and secondary sources, and style and language?Donmust90 (talk) 03:12, 29 March 2018 (UTC)Donmust90Donmust90 (talk) 03:12, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(Smells like homework) Have you tried Cliffs Notes:[1] & SparkNotes:[2]? They aren't as comprehensive as you need, however. -- The short story is not very long; it would probably take less time to read it than to find the answers online. —2606:A000:4C0C:E200:51D9:C715:1A1D:7336 (talk) 08:07, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The song is called "I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby". Thee (= You), not Three. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:04, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

German to English translation[edit]

Hi, Can somebody please translate this:

Jede Namensänderung beeinträchtigt die Erkennbarkeit der Herkunft aus einer Familie, erleichtert die Verdunkelung des Personenstandes und verschleiert die blutmässige Abstammung. Eine Namensänderung kann daher nur dann erfolgen, wenn ein wichtiger Grund vorliegt, der die Namensänderung rechtfertigt

Thanks. scope_creep (talk) 14:17, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are better off posting this at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language. Alex Shih (talk) 14:19, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Alex Shih, no I'm not. The quality of translation is atrocious on that board. I tried it on and off for about a year and a half. I do a ton of translation and its a much better quality of translations here. scope_creep (talk) 15:00, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting, although it makes a lot of sense. Do you need this translation in a hurry? Alex Shih (talk) 15:36, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

wikt:Wiktionary:Translation requests —Tamfang (talk) 07:23, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Scope creep: Here you go:

Every name change affects the perceptibility of the origin from a family, makes it easier to hide the marital status and the ancestry by blood. A name change can thus only occur if an important reason to justify this change exists.

Not quite literal but legal German is a nightmare to translate literally. Feel free to contact me directly if you need more translations. Regards So Why 15:54, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks So Why. That was quick. Alex Shih, It depends. The longest I think I've waited is two days. Usually I park the article on a todo list and go back and grab the text later. I tend to work on multiple articles, so I can split the work up, and it is not all translations that go here. Machine translation is pretty decent now, as you probably know, but when it comes too text which that is prefixed, if that is the right word, with male and female gender semantics, then the translation engines are not capable of doing a decent translation. They have come on leaps and bounds in the past 3-5 years, but for that specific use-case, they almost useless. And that is when I tend to come here. Regarding this board, it is excellent. Thanks for the translation.

Except that the translation is by no means perfect. No offence to SoWhy, but he's not a native English speaker and a phrase like "perceptibility of the origin from a family" makes little or no sense. And a literal translation is exactly what is not required – what is required is an idiomatic translation that retains the meaning while still being something that a native English speaker would write. I would render the first sentence as something like "Each change of name affects the ease with which one's family origins can be discerned, makes it easier to conceal one's marital status and obscures the familial ancestry." But I defer to User:Sluzzelin in all matters related to German translation. --Viennese Waltz 17:40, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I never claimed it to be perfect. Of course, an idiomatic translation would be superior but scope_creep did not indicate what they needed the translation for, so I tried to be as literal as possible. A more idiomatic translation might for example read Every name change makes it harder to determine family ties, true marital status and ancestry. Therefore the name can only be changed if an important reason exists. Regards So Why 19:03, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah that's much better than your first attempt, and a lot better than mine as well. Thanks. --Viennese Waltz 19:09, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent. Thanks everybody. I will change the Hans Globke article section and use So Why translation. I've never heard the term idiomatic applied to translations before. I'll need to ask for that the next time, as it drives quality into the article. Thanks again folks. scope_creep (talk) 19:17, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I had to look it up myself ;-) Regards So Why 19:35, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Idiomatic translation is a very normal concept. You translate idiomatic text from one language into idiomatic text in another, and it is ok if you have to change or lose a little bit of the meaning in order to do this. You usually want this for literary translation, if your goal is to create a reading experience similar to what the original author gave to readers of the original language. For legal translation you probably want to preserve the meaning as much as possible, even if the result is awkward in the target language. The article Anna Karenina has a section near the end comparing the merits of various English translations that discusses the issue of idioms. And Le Ton beau de Marot is a 500+ page book about translations of a single French poem that's around 20 lines long, with each line having 3 syllables iirc. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 08:29, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Added: I just looked at SoWhy's link and it's pretty informative, and gives a different definition of idiomatic translation than the one I gave (it says idiomatic translation is when, for example, you translate ancient text into modern idiomatic style, such as some biblical translations). The photo at the bottom of the article is a page from the book Le Ton beau de Marot that I mentioned, showing the French poem and two translations. The book contains dozens or maybe 100s of other translations of the same poem. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 08:56, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Counting the hours (back when 6 AM was called the 1st hour)[edit]

Important note: The title of the section originally was Counting the hours (European Middle Ages) but thanks to a friendly and pertinent observation from AnonMoos I've now changed it to the more accurate Counting the hours (back when 6 AM was called the 1st hour). I have not struck out the changed part in the title (like so Counting the hours (~~European Middle Ages~~back when 6 AM was called the 1st hour)) but deleted it instead because I imagine the wikicode would make it more tricky to search for. Sorry about that. Basemetal 15:24, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I was taking a look at Liturgy of the Hours#Canonical hours (never mind why) and something struck me: if 6:00 AM was the 1st hour and 7:00 AM the 2nd hour, what did they call 8:00 AM? Not the 3rd hour because that apparently was what they called 9:00 AM! Can anyone explain? Thanks. Basemetal 18:58, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't about telling the time - it is about praying eight times a day, at roughly equal intervals. Nobody would have bothered to think of names for intermediate periods, because they were not needed. If they had ever needed to describe what we would call 8.00 am they would just have said it was between prime and terce. Wymspen (talk) 22:23, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oh really? You know that for a fact, do you? If you don't know an answer then there's no need to make stuff up. It's ok not to answer. And if you're gonna make stuff up, do it when you can come up with something a bit more sensible. Incidentally my question of course had nothing to do with the canonical hours and praying. The only reason I referred to that article was because it uses the phrase "the 1st hour", "the 3rd hour", etc. Not because I was somehow confused and thought the canonical hours were a way to tell the time. I'd never imagined someone could conclude that. I thought that was clear from the way I worded my question and never imagined that it could confuse any one. You point at the moon and they look at your finger! So if this confuses anyone remove the previous wording, remove any reference to the Liturgy of the Hours article and replace my question with this wording:

I'm told they called 6 AM the 1st hour, 9 AM the 3rd hour, 12 PM the 6th hour, 3 PM the 9th hour, etc.

Does anyone know what they called 7 AM, 8 AM, 10 AM, 11 AM, 1 PM, 2 PM, 4 PM, 5 PM, etc.?

Whew. Thanks. Btw, I don't know for a fact that 7 AM was the 2nd hour. I was speculating. It was part of the question. I was guessing. Just to make that clear. I could as well have guessed, I don't know (which means I don't know), that 7 AM was "one hour from the 1st hour" and 8 AM "two hours from the 1st hour", in which case there would be no problem. But, again, I don't know what they did. That's why I'm asking this question. Basemetal 07:03, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Look at the etymology of "hour". Its origin is in the sense of "season" (i.e. the appropriate moment for something) rather than the modern sense of an interval of fixed size. In the pre-timepiece era, when it was largely impractical to measure such an interval, the first meaning makes more sense and is of more practical use. The term "hour" was even used like this in a calendar sense, meaning a month or season - see book of hours. It would be most surprising if the liturgical hours were numbered 1,3,2 and out of sequence, but their varying interval just wasn't an issue at the time. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:33, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't put too much weight on the values given in the Wikipedia article (for "Prime" = "6am" etc.); it's not obvious to me whether and how they are sourced at all. In any case, this is a bit speculative, but I suspect the hour names were not so much names for time *points*, but names for (approximate) time *spans*, so "first hour" would have meant anywhere between 6 and 7 am, "second hour" anywhere between 7 and 8, and so on. Also, Latin didn't have a convenient way of speaking of a point "zero". So, "at the third hour" could easily be understood as referring to a time point "three hours from the beginning of the day", but if you wanted to refer to the very beginning itself, "zero hours from the beginning of the day", there was no way of saying "at the zero-th hour", so you had to call it "at the first hour" instead. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:05, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West By Robert F. Taft has a long preview on Google Books. Alansplodge (talk) 09:42, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Alan. Basemetal 15:19, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Future Perfect at Sunrise -- It's very noticeable that on modern clock faces, "12" plays the role of zero. Most people in ancient times and the middle ages who paid attention to hours divided the time between sunrise and sunset into equal intervals, and the time between sunset and sunrise also into equal intervals (but of course a night hour would have usually had a different length from a day hour). Abstract hours that were 1/24th of a full day were mainly of interest to astronomers, and played a negligible role in most people's daily lives... AnonMoos (talk) 10:10, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not in the daily lives of the characters of stageplays: "Madam, an hour before the worshipped sun peered forth the golden window of the east, a troubled mind drove me to walk abroad, where underneath the grove of sycamore that westward rooteth from this city's side, so early walking did I see your son" or "Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour" or "And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death thou shalt continue two and forty hours"... Not all occurrences of "hour" refer to "clock hours" but many obviously do: "What o’clock tomorrow shall I send to thee? By the hour of nine. I will not fail." or "Come, stir, stir, stir! The second cock hath crowed. The curfew bell hath rung. ’Tis three o’clock." including mentions of half hours and quarters of an hour. Clocks have been around for a long time. The oldest clock tower in England dates back to 1288 and even earlier on the continent I think. Basemetal 11:28, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Shakespeare is obviously not medieval, so I really don't know what purpose you think quoting him here has. Mechanical clocks certainly played a big role in establishing the concept of the hour of uniform length (1/24th of a full day) in the mind of the general public, but public clocks were very thin on the ground in most cities until rather late in the medieval period, close to the renaissance (and of course almost non-existent outside of cities). AnonMoos (talk) 14:31, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

His time is included in my question. The whole period where people called 6 AM the 1st hour is obviously included. Except for the title of the section (a grievous fault and grievously you're making me answer it) there was no mention of anything necessarily medieval at all. Basemetal 14:38, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note that by Shakespeare's time, the Reformation in England had swept away the practice of the Liturgy of the Hours, except for a few recusants who carried it on in private. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer prescribed only two daily services for private devotion and public worship, Morning Prayer which replaced Matins, Lauds and Prime, and Evening Prayer which replaced Vespers and Compline. Alansplodge (talk) 16:43, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In general parlance, 6 a.m. was "the twelfth hour" [3], [4]. 92.19.171.33 (talk) 16:33, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey that would make sense. That's the closest they could possibly have gotten to calling it the 0th hour (see Future Perfect's answer). If that's true then that solves everything, the 1st hour would be 7 AM, the 2nd hour 8 AM, the 3rd hour 9 AM and so on. So the name "Prime" for the Office of around 6 AM would not be connected to the designation of that hour but simply to the fact it was the first one? Basemetal 18:02, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The hours were often sung in sequence with no gaps in between (one of the reasons why Cranmer combined them) but they are making a comeback [5], [6]. 92.19.171.33 (talk) 18:21, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, the English "noon" comes from a word which originally referred to the ninth hour (approximately 3PM, or more precisely ¾ of the way between sunrise and sunset). Its meaning seems to have drifted over the centuries... AnonMoos (talk) 23:40, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Etymonline gives several explanations for that drift, of which the most amusing to me is "In monasteries and on holy days, fasting was ended at nones, which also perhaps was incentive to push it forward." In a similar vein, when did 12 o'clock become Midnight instead of 6 AM? Basemetal 00:15, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Numbering the hours from sunrise and from sunset fit in with the traditional practice of cultures with lunar observational calendars of starting the month when the thin lunar crescent is first visible at sunset. Days which start at midnight are more convenient in that most people are asleep at midnight... AnonMoos (talk) 04:17, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Roman Catholic Church has a foot in both camps [7]. You can see why Cranmer did what he did. 86.169.57.223 (talk) 11:26, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]