Via Mark Liberman at the Log, a deeply bizarre problem: How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’. I’ll let you visit the links for the details of the problem; this user comment will give you the idea:
“Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”
The interesting thing is the reason that “Google translate still thinks that ‘yes’ in Spanish means ‘forks’ in English”; in Mark’s words:
That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter ‘Y’ in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.
I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure that out.
That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter ‘Y’ in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.
What if you realize that in some varieties of Spanish the name of the letter is i griega?
So? Nobody’s saying ye is the only name of the letter y, but it’s the one relevant to this issue.
During a language exchange in Oaxaca, a teenager told me that in his school they use i griega as the usual name for Y,* but ye in math. I’ve asked one or two other people since then, and they’ve told me that even in math they were taught to say i griega.
*No personal allusion to any Hatter is intended.
Yeah, in the words of that Wiktionary article I linked to:
Maybe I’ll use I Griega if I ever need an internet pseudonym.
Or I Gringa ?
Y tu gringa también.
I was wondering about the difference between “i griega” and El Greco and apparently the answer is that, gender aside, Sp. griego/a is the direct descendant (with I guess a standard set of sound changes) of the Latin lexeme that was then separately borrowed directly from Latin many centuries later as greco/a, thus creating a doublet.
Consistency eludes Google. In Search, if you set the source language to Spanish and enter “yes”, it returns “yes” as the English translation. In the Google Translate app, as noted in the original post, it translates “yes” in the Spanish entry—you have to force that as it detects English—as “forks”.
V could use the pseudonym B. Chica, too.
I was fortunate to attend an elementary school with a bilingual education program ( the school was and is predominantly Mexican-American ) and I was taught that Y is “i griega” both at school and at home. “Ye” is the odd man out here, I think “i griega” is what’s used by the majority of Spanish speakers, at least in Hispanic America and certainly in Mexico.
This was long ago enough that “ch”, “ll” and “rr” were still officially listed as separate letters in the Spanish alphabet, called “che”, “elle”, and “erre” respectively . Also, unlike in some countries, W is “doble u” and not “doble ve”, and the the way to distinguish B and V when spelling is to say “be grande” for B and to say “ve chica” for V. However, it’s just as common ( or more common) for Mexicans to say “be de burro” for B and “ve de vaca” for V.
I still think of ch, ll, and rr as separate letters, I say “che”, “elle”, and “erre” when I recite the alphabet and when I am made ruler of the world my first act will be to restore ch, ll, and rr to their rightful and honorable place in the alphabet.
The various Welsh digraphs ch, dd, ff, ll, ph, rh, th are treated as separate letters in alphabetical ordering, too. I think the idea is to confuse such of the English as were not already rendered helpless by the initial mutations.
Tony Naden’s various Western Oti-Volta dictionaries somewhat annoyingly treat the digraphs for long vowels (aa ee ii etc) as separate letters too. Gets me every time. Happily, none of the Oti-Volta dictionaries composed by Francophones does that. (Some them do do weird things with the alphabetical ordering of French accented letters though. But I suspect that is some sort of artefact induced by using US-developed software tools.)
Also be larga and ve corta or maybe the other way around; yet elsewhere be and uve.
weird things
French itself does a weird thing when sorting words with multiple accents: the rightmost accent dominates. Thus because acute precedes circumflex, cote precedes coté, which precedes côte;, but côté follows all three because the acute is dominant. In other languages, the leftmost accent would be dominant, so côté would sort third.
Does Welsh alphabetize its ch after c? Ch is the only digraph that makes it into Czech alphabetic order, but to keep you on your toes it comes between h and i, being /x/ to h’s /ɦ/.
There’s a chess tactic where, if Black has castled kingside, White plays BxPh7+ offering Black the option of KxB. For Black, taking the bishop might be enticing, but it can sometimes enable White to attack Black again. It’s called a Greek gift. Sometimes this name is explained as a reference to the Trojan Horse. But the player Gioachino Greco often used it, and as his surname means “the Greek”, it’s been suggested that the name actually refers to him.
Does Welsh alphabetize its ch after c?
Ffyrc.
Irrelevant plug for Charles Portis’ Gringos.
‘S wonderful. Read it.
@rosie: It’s interesting that that tactic is called a gift I’m not sure if this actual chess terminology or something that I intuited for myself, but I interpret the use of gift instead of gambit as an indication that the sacrifice is known to be unsound. The reason to play it is force an opponent into an unfamiliar line, hoping they will make a blunder when their kingside pawn structure is disturbed. In contrast, a gambit involves the sacrifice of material (typically a pawn) for a sound positional improvement.
Sometimes, the gambit even provides the positional advantages with no permanent loss of material. The queen’s gambit involves the early sacrifice of white’s c pawn, but not only does it give white command of the center, black has no way to prevent losing the pawn back. So hardly anyone playing black accepts the offered pawn. Accepting the gambit is actually uncommon enough that, as with the Greek gift, it can be a valid strategy simply because white players often do not know how to play more than a few moves along the relevant line.
Also be alta and ve baja.
Y: “V could use the pseudonym B. Chica, too.”
I don’t identify as female, though.
In Pompeian graffiti, the alphabet ends with X. No Y, no Z (and of course no J or U). Also no trace of the letters the Emperor Claudius had added to the Latin alphabet.
V: Me either, but the Spanish letters do.
@rosie: It’s interesting that that tactic is called a gift I’m not sure if this actual chess terminology or something that I intuited for myself, but I interpret the use of gift instead of gambit as an indication that the sacrifice is known to be unsound. The reason to play it is force an opponent into an unfamiliar line, hoping they will make a blunder when their kingside pawn structure is disturbed. In contrast, a gambit involves the sacrifice of material (typically a pawn) for a sound positional improvement.
I’m not a very good chess player, but for what it’s worth, that’s not how I see it at all. The “Greek gift” sacrifice is sometimes sound and sometimes not. A “gambit” is almost always in the opening, not the middlegame when the “Greek gift” is played, and some are sound and some aren’t. In the 19th century they were played all the time to get an attacking position, which was considered good strategy at the time, but now better defensive methods have been developed and most gambits aren’t considered to be effective ways to get an advantage, though some are still played.
By the way, in my limited chess reading in the days of descriptive notation, I remember only “the bishop sacrifice at R7”, not “the Greek gift”. I wonder whether the latter name has become popular because in algebraic notation you’d have to say “the bishop sacrifice at h7, h2, a7, or a2”. (Not that I want them to go back to descriptive notation.)
@Jerry F.: I don’t know chess well enough to comment on the details, but in my capacity as a native speaker of AmEng I will say that “gambit” typically carries an implicature of being a sensible/rational thing to have tried – it may not have a 100% chance of success, certainly, but it presumptively reflects a sensible/accurate balancing of potential risk against potential reward. Whereas “gift” carries an implicature of “something you don’t want to give your opponent and wouldn’t if you were thinking sensibly.” Unless of course it’s a Greek gift evoking the Trojan horse, in which case irony or something.
The various Welsh digraphs ch, dd, ff, ll, ph, rh, th are treated as separate letters in alphabetical ordering, too.
Vietnamese is similar, at least for some of them.