How do you say - - ?

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Liis
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Re: How do you say - - ?

Post by Liis »

Thank you, Jo and Juta! :bow:
Juta, your Synaraamat is very helpful, it shows not only the results for precisely the word that one enters but related spellings and inflections.

A very great help in languages where the words themselves change radically to reflect meaning - eg tuba (room) - toa (room's) - tuppa (into room)
In a standard dictionary you would have to know the language to know what, actually, to look up!
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Post by Liis »

The tree sparrow is described as having a "bright greyish brown" back

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
Can greyish brown ever be bright? - Synonyms brilliant, vivid, dazzling, sparkling ...

Estonain readers: "kirgas" :help:
Liis
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Post by Liis »

The writing of dates seems to fit in here!
From viewtopic.php?p=197777#p197777 and previous & following posts ...
Eden wrote:
Sorry - do you mean 130121 A.D. or 130121 B.C. :slap:
Wouldn't presume to give such a precise date* for BC. :innocent: Unless it were an average, in that case stated with the customary +/- margins.

As for 130121, AD - crystal clear, isn't it?, although admittedly slightly short-hand version - even in logical Europe there are several ways and officially approved standards for writing dates. Here descending order, YYMMDD.
My bank wants it that way when I log in. :innocent:

So, unless we wipe out our respective habits, and implant some common standard, Jo's suggestion of writing the name of the month is eminently sensible.

Why BC but AD by the way?

EDIT: *Curious but I automatically read a (supposed) BC date as years only, this then being 130121 years BC. Some ice age event?
Yes, it might of course have been January 21st, year 13 BC - who did what then?
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Post by Jo UK »

Liis, thanks for moving this topic to here.

BC = Before Christ
AD = Anno Domini or Year of the Lord.

Current use and more politically correct forms are
BCE = Before Common Era
Next is a piece from Wikipedia about Current or Common Era http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
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Post by Liis »

Thank you, Jo!

They had some trouble with the BC, AD in true Soviet times :mrgreen:

My problem was actually, why the shift from C to D? Although I can see that a strictly literal interpretation of "BD" would maybe not be quite acceptable.
And AC = after Christ would beg the question, year after birth or death?

Swedish custom is consistent, f. Kr / e. Kr . Sometimes specified as before/after birth.

The BCE, or corresponding - Hmmm, would cause a minor political commotion, "common era" being a narrow European view.

Easy to see why standardization committees happily live on, years on end. :innocent:
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Post by Jo UK »

Wouldn't it be easier to leave aside religious and political references to time, and simply have a BP - Before the Present - standard?

At the moment, when I am watching an archeology program, they dig up something from 2,000 BC. Then there is the mental arithmetic of adding 2013 years to that - grumble, grumble -
I expect the exercise is good for us :whistling:
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Post by alice44 »

I think in archeology they do usually use BP. But Jo I remember reading a book that said some number of years BP. I checked when the book had been published and added 8 years to their years BP. :slap: I was just trying to get the facts right. :mrgreen:

When I taught history of science I don't think more than a couple of my students knew what AD stood for, although more than half of them more or less knew the concept. Those who had thought about it thought AD was after death.

I sort of have a recollection that people in Early Modern England often wrote -- 1549 in the year of our Lord. I think American tradition got rid of that, along with most honorifics, so I guess it is not surprising that young Americans don't know what AD stands for (Latin is not taught anywhere).

Luckily none of my students had trouble with Common Era or Before Common Era.

Liis I think our narrow European view does dominate. I think only my Saudi students think in terms of a different calendar, but I am not sure. I will try to ask some people.
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Post by Liis »

But the original question still stands - why the shift from C to D, BC to AD?

BP - is it ever actually used as before present meaning literally before this year?! Interesting consequences ...

130121, BC - if read as YYMMDD, difficult to find out if something interesting happened precisely then, most timelines don't bother with details BC. But for what it is worth, Emperoro Augustus ruled, and poets Virgil and Horace (Horatius for us non-English) lived.
If read as 130121 years BC, then northern Europe had the Eem glacial period, Sangemon for N. America :mrgreen:
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Post by alice44 »

Liis wrote:But the original question still stands - why the shift from C to D, BC to AD?
I think BC does not come from Latin... when medieval Europeans wrote in Latin they didn't worry too much about Latin -- but philosophers certain read works of the Greeks. I don't know maybe they did not worry about dates much.
Traditionally, English has copied Latin usage by placing the abbreviation before the year number for AD.[11] Since BC is not derived from Latin it is placed after the year number (for example: AD 2013, but 68 BC). However, placing the AD after the year number (as in "2013 AD") is also becoming common usage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Christ

As far as I can tell it does not talk about what term was used for BC before an English term was adopted.
I am not sure how to ask the question so that I will be given an answer.
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Post by NancyM »

I'm not sure there is a real answer to that question - B.C. is English, A.D. is Latin. I suspect it was just a matter of terminology coming into usage, being adopted or not, changing or not, over time ... I doubt anyone made a specific decision. (Liis asks hard questions!)
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Post by macdoum »

Apparently The Bible has answers for you Liis. :innocent:

http://www.gotquestions.org/BC-AD.html
Question: "What is the meaning of BC and AD (B.C. and A.D.)?"

Answer: It is commonly thought that B.C. stands for "before Christ" and A.D. stands for "after death." This is only half correct. How could the year 1 B.C. have been "before Christ" and A.D. 1 been "after death"? B.C. does stand for "before Christ." A.D. actually stands for the Latin phrase anno domini which means "in the year of our Lord." The B.C. / A.D. dating system is not taught in the Bible. It actually was not fully implemented and accepted until several centuries after Jesus' death.

It is interesting to note that the purpose of the B.C. / A.D. dating system was to make the birth of Jesus Christ the dividing point of world history. However, when the B.C. / A.D. system was being calculated, they actually made a mistake in pinpointing the year of Jesus' birth. Scholars later discovered that Jesus was actually born around 4-6 B.C., not A.D. 1. That is not the crucial issue. The birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ are the "turning points" in world history. It is fitting, therefore, that Jesus Christ is the separation of "old" and "new." B.C. was "before Christ," and since His birth, we have been living "in the year of our Lord." Philippians 2:10-11, "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

Recommended Resource: The Quest Study Bible.
:mrgreen: :wave: Want more ?
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Post by NancyM »

I think there are other scholarly sources that Liss could consult. :dunno:
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Post by Liis »

Ahum - I think we are fast approaching the problem of the Holy Trinity.
BC, yes, and AD as Anno Domini, yes. But Domine as Christ, God or both (or indeed all 3, although the holy spirit has not yet entered the quest)?

Otherwise, I stubbornly maintain, it is Before somebody, but then Year of someone else. :mrgreen:
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Post by NancyM »

OR (if you believe what you read on the Internet :innocent: )

The term Anno Domini is Medieval Latin, translated as "In the year of the Lord", and as "In the year of our Lord." It is sometimes specified more fully as "Anno Domini Nostri Iesu (Jesu) Christi" ("In the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ")

Since 1856, the alternative abbreviations for the Common Era, CE and BCE, are sometimes used in place of AD and BC, which have historically been associated with Christianity.
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Post by Liis »

Hind, rear, back leg (or paw) ?
Please, what would a wolf have? what would it not have? :help:



After having used up hours hunting for what the things are called* that leave those small marks in an elk foot print I feel like having done my share of zoology research for tonight!
(*Dewclaws. Maybe. Or rudimentary - or vestigial - toes. The Estonian word is the same as used for the pastern of a horse ... :book:)
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Post by alice44 »

(About the BC thing being in English -- I think I am guessing that when education became more secular they worried more about per-Christian dates, but I am curious what term was used in France, or Germany or...

And I talked to a Saudi student I think he thinks in terms of the real dates or 2013 American date :slap: )


I think hind, rear and back paw work.
I think the sources using hind and rear look slightly better. Hind and rear foot also turned up reasonable sources. Hind leg probably refers to the leg above the ankle mostly.


I had never thought about the spot below the main hoof print of an elk (I do not think I have ever seen one on a live track). I looked up elk prints and found a picture with the spots and there was the term dew claws which it said might show for a galloping elk.

Totally unrelated, in searches I was doing on Kokopelli -- an ancient & modern Native American symbol -- I found that some better sites only seemed to pop up via an image search.
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Post by macdoum »

Liis wrote:Hind, rear, back leg (or paw) ?
Please, what would a wolf have? what would it not have? :help:

A wolf will leave paw prints on the snow from front or hind legs..or all four pawprints. :wave:
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Post by Liis »

The elk - dewclaw marks showing in gallop tracks: a galloping elk makes deeper imprints so it seems logical, on consideration, since dewclaws sit a little higher up on the leg. In snow or soft ground, for the same reason.

Dewclaws seems to be a word used by dog owners, at least these days. But it is a quite reputable word, some 400 years old. Some think "dew" is a distortion of "toe". A more poetic explanation said that these claws sit higher up foot / hoof / paw so they just touch the dew on grass... :mrgreen:

The wolf
@Macdoum - feet, legs: oh yes, that problem. Estonian gets away with the same word - "jalg". So sometimes I find that I have just picked whichever happened to be uppermost in memory. Birds are tricky - does the author mean the foot or leg in particular or both? Do they have foot or leg rings?

@ Alice - thanks for the comment on better chance to get some reasonable results by way of Google image search!
Getting through the masses of blog hits probably made the sõrgats / pastern / dewclaw search many times longer than it would have been only a few years ago (and trying to exclude blogs in the search doesn't work very efficiently).
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Post by Liis »

Numbers, figures and words

I am more used to numbers written in figures mostly; easier to "understand" and to find in a page that way, for instance.
In the Estonian LK articles words are used to a much greater extent than in English, or Swedish, or German generally.

As readers - which do you prefer? What is easier to read?

(I have more or less followed the Estonian texts; actually most languages have rules, such as that numbers greater than, say, twenty are written in figures).
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Post by NancyM »

Liis,

I usually write numbers as words up to ten (one through ten), then use numerals after that (11, 12, etc). Reading large numbers as words is not as easy to grasp as seeing the number itself (25,000 vs twenty-five thousand). However, non-scientifc texts (e.g., novels) often use the numbers written out.
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