Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 June 14

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June 14

debut novel vs first novel

I'm not a native English speaker but I was under the impression that debut is used for public appearance of a figure such in sport games or performance while premiere or first is used for first appearance of "something" like movie. So after seeing Debut novel I'm confused, is it a good English? Assafn (talk) 05:53, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

See Debut novel#Etymology for some background. Whether or not it's good English, it does seem to be the more common term. The term is accurate in the sense that the novel isn't making a debut, the author is, and the novel is the means to that end. ~Anachronist (talk) 06:05, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

But what about people who are already well known for their plays, poetry, non-fiction writing etc? If they decide to write their first novel, that is hardly the writer's debut. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:25, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

English is neither logical not consistent in usage. The noun "debut" may mean "first appearance", but as an adjective "debut" seems to have become a synonym for "first". Just a-run-of-the-mill shift of usage. - Donald Albury 11:15, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Even if someone is already known in other fields, their first novel is going to be their debut in the field of novel writing. — Kpalion^(talk) 17:25, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Check the origin of "debut". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:07, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Transliteration from latin alphabet to cyrillic Alphanet

How to make transliteration from latin alphabet to Cyrillic alphabet? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.148.171.241 (talk) 17:02, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Some sounds are easy. But I think whoever answers this question should try to focus on those sounds that English has that Russian lacks. Georgia guy (talk) 17:17, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

See Cyrillization. Rojomoke (talk) 17:40, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

There's unfortunately no article for Cyrillization of English. Any reason?? Georgia guy (talk) 17:49, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

The OP did not say that they were transliterating English. To answer the question we'd need to know which language is being transliterated. Also, Cyrillic is not used only for writing Russian. Our article Cyrillic alphabets lists dozens of languages which are normally written in a Cyrillic alphabet, and the representation of sounds is not the same in every alphabet -- that is, there is not a single Cyrillic alphabet but many. So we would also need to know which Cyrillic alphabet is being used for the transliteration. CodeTalker (talk) 19:45, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- some English sounds for which there aren't letters in Russian Cyrillic include [θ], [ð], [æ], [h] (nowadays "h" is usually approximated as "х", formerly often as "г")... AnonMoos (talk) 23:53, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

AnonMoos, for the first of these, it would make sense to use Fita per the fact that the reason it got the f sound was that Russian lacked the th sound. If Russian had the th sound, this letter probably would have been kept for it. For the second of these, I have no good choice unfortunately. Georgia guy (talk) 00:42, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

There exist instructions for transliterating into the Russian script. The most elaborated are those of the Russian cartographic service. There are separate instructions even for Welsh and Maori, as well as for placenames of West African states and so on, no need to think out something. They are not letter-to-letter or phoneme-to-phoneme, rather a mix of transliteration and transcription. For Bulgarian there are too, albeit not so comprehensive. Some links and references are in the aforementioned article, Cyrillization. Шурбур (talk) 07:48, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

"Navigate necesse est, vivere non"

Google translates that Latin quote from Pompey as "Navigate need to live with it". Usually I can extract the gist from Google, but this one has me stumped. What translation would provide meaning? —2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 21:33, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

If you put in the two halves of the sentence separately in Google Translate, "navigare necesse est" and "vivere non est necesse", it actually comes up with pretty decent solutions. "it is necessary to sail" and "it is not necessary to live". Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:40, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

(ec) It should be Navigare necesse est, and it means "We have to sail; we don't have to live." Pompey was commanding ships' captains to sail when they were reluctant because of the threatening weather. Deor (talk) 21:41, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

And I just noticed that this can be found in List of Latin phrases (N). Deor (talk) 21:43, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt and lucid replies! —2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 21:47, 14 June 2018 (UTC) . . . P.s.: this is from the Greek, "πλεῖν ἀνάγκη, ζῆν οὐκ ἀνάγκη" which Google cryptically translates as "more than needed, of necessity" (huh?).

Google Translate only does Modern Greek, not Ancient Greek. Deor (talk) 22:50, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidently, it tries to translate Ancient Greek: —2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 22:55, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it will try; but it assumes that what you entered is Modern Greek, so it can't really deal with it. Deor (talk) 22:59, 14 June 2018 (UTC)