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January 18

Old useful geography encyclopedia?

Not sure if I should ask this here or in the Humanities section. I have been researching and recording exonyms for various major cities and towns across Europe in multiple European languages, most particularly the ones that are not used anymore and have sufficient differences from their respective endonyms in term of spelling and/or pronunciation. Of course, I believe I have already went through all the exonym lists and relevant articles for cities in all the Wikipedias for languages I am concerned with (as of now: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish). While they give me a lot of great ones I am looking for, I am sure that they are still very much incomplete. One lucky find I came across while browsing the Italian Wikipedia is this early modern Italian geography encyclopedia. Link: https://books.google.it/books?id=fsHY3KDbcmEC

Needless to say, it is very comprehensive containing ton of Italian names for cities and regions across Europe that have not been in use for centuries and so it is a goldmine for my research. Is there any similar books like this that is easily accessible for the languages I have listed above? 70.95.44.93 (talk) 09:04, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

am on mobile so can't do proper search, but fyi quickly found some old french atlases by searching google books for the french term for "atlas". Here's one from 1762. interesting project! 70.67.193.176 (talk) 19:25, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

List_of_Latin_names_of_cities might be interesting to you. There's a similar page on the Latin-language Wikipedia that I couldn't find. Temerarius (talk) 01:01, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 22

The second o in control

Although the second o in the word control is long, why is the l doubled in the form controlling?? Georgia guy (talk) 02:09, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In American English because the stress is on that syllable. Jmar67 (talk) 02:30, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

So that it rhymes with "extol(l)ing"? But you've got me interested: Although a single "?" at the end of a sentence suffices to indicate that the sentence is a question, why do you double it? -- Hoary (talk) 02:35, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The word "extol" also has a long o. Words with long o normally don't double the final consonant before adding -ing. Words with a short o normally do. Georgia guy (talk) 02:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here you are again, trying to make sense out of English. Anyway, here's the etymology of "control"[1] and "extol".[2] Note that both of them come from words with double-l. And also note that it's "extolling". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:46, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

At least in AE, the stress rule takes precedence. Elsewhere such a consonant is generally doubled (e.g., "travelling", AE: "traveling"). Jmar67 (talk) 03:53, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For me (Southern England, now Northern England), both control and extol have "short" /-ɒl/, not "long" /-əʊl/, so the double l makes perfect sense; though I know that is not true for everybody. --ColinFine (talk) 10:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Georgia guy: I don't know how many times we can explain this to you, so we'll explain it again. English is not consistent. No natural language is consistent, but English is especially noted (especially in its orthography) for being inconsistent. There are some general rules, but every rule has so many exceptions that learning to read and write English is often an exercise in just memorizing specific words and how they are spelled, as any rule you can come up with has so many exceptions. You keep asking questions like "XXXX is a rule in English, so why does YYYY not obey that rule". If you spent any considerable amount of time around English, you quickly begin to learn that there often are not any useful reasons to explain why. I have previously linked you to several videos and articles on this very concept. Please go back, read those, and understand why your repeated questions in this vein rarely lead to simple or satisfying answers. --Jayron 32 13:04, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Remember, this is a language where the words rough, plough, through, though, cough, and thought do not rhyme, but pony and bologna do. A language where you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway. Where all my belongings were burned up when my house burned down. After which I had to fill out a form by filling it in so that I could turn it in to my insurance company. Quit trying to make sense of it. --Khajidha (talk) 15:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

“Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways? Just to be silly!” –George Carlin 2606:A000:1126:28D:B10C:26A0:A0FF:5576 (talk) 01:16, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And, in keeping with this madness, not all of the above applies to all variants of English in the same way. In British English pony and bologna don't rhyme, but parkways are railway stations, and downs are the highest points of some areas of the country. Bazza (talk) 15:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Also, a driveway is essentially a short (or possibly long, if you are rich enough) private road leading to a house or garage, so you do drive on it, just not very far. Iapetus (talk) 09:57, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The question is rather dispiriting, but some of the ingredients of some of the (non-) responses are too, and none more than the advice to "Quit trying to make sense of" (apparent oddities in?) English. Trying to make sense of apparent paradoxes in English seems an honourable enterprise to me. The problem is of how you go about this, and what your premises and expectations are. Also, I'm puzzled by the way in which a small number of people repeatedly ask questions about English without making it clear that they've digested, or attempted to digest, the relevant parts of relevant books. Duckduckgoing quickly turns up Edward Carney, A Survey of English Spelling; D W Cummings, American English Spelling: An Informal Description; Greg Brooks, Dictionary of the British English Spelling System; and more. -- Hoary (talk) 02:57, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 25

Translation of Chinese from Alchemical Source

The following comes from the Yellow Court Classic. I'm reading about alchemy in English sources, but I'm not sure how to translate the following: "至道不煩無旁午，靈臺通天臨中野，方寸之中至關下，玉房之中神門戶，皆是公子教我者." I know in the context of alchemical literature, 靈臺 refers to the heart-mind and 方寸, while sometimes referring to the heart-mind, likely refers to the lowest of three dantiens where the mind is focused. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 17:40, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]