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December 7

From German to English, please translate this catchy Pippi theme song?

Can someone translate the lyrics, please? Thanks in advance. --2600:100A:B03B:6996:D13E:4CBE:EF0B:CD17 (talk) 02:14, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here you can read the lyrics in German and here what Google Translate makes of it. --Lambiam 09:32, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As a Swede, I must add that this is a translation from Swedish, with the rhytm slightly altered . [1], [2]. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:49, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Why do the lyrics have basic multiplication done incorrectly? --2600:100A:B051:1A2B:1962:BC0E:1BE6:A1A6 (talk) 20:34, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Because in-universe, Pippi is (in)famously depicted as having a horrible understanding of mathematics, she refers to the "multiplikationstabell" (multiplication table) as "pluttifikationstabell" ("muddlyplication table" or something)... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:14, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pippi’s tendency to equate all school knowledge with “pluttification” (literally “fartification”) and her capacity to outsmart the teacher during her visit at school ridicules the quantification of knowledge and formal learning outside of any practical context. Card Zero (talk) 23:53, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say that's a misunderstanding of the Swedish, fartification would be "pruttifikation" and "pluttifikation" would rather mean "tinyfication". As a noun, I guess "plutt" could also mean a small lump or chunk of something viscous, but it might be a somewhat strained interpretation. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:14, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

惑乱, thanks for your wonderful contributions. This here is a great explanation, and "muddlyplication" is a stroke of genius that's very hard to achieve in translations. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 15:15, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What does the Greek varia indicate?

The character ` (Greek Varia) is represented by the Unicode codepoint U+1FEF.[3]. But what is it good for? BTW, it's not listed in the disambiguation page Varia. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 08:47, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

varia is a modern (?) transcription of βαρεῖα (bareia), the greek name for the grave accent (see also the odd redirect Bareia (accent)). --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:05, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In Modern Greek referred to as βαρεία, also for use in other languages such as French. The original /b/ pronunciation already turned into a /v/ in Byzantine Greek. --Lambiam 09:42, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence for this early transition is in the Cyrillic alphabet! —Tamfang (talk) 21:25, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

But of course - thanks, Wrongfilter! I now see that it's already in the disamb page.
That said, the current link to Greek_diacritics#Grave_accent_rule could probably be improved. Either to subsection Greek_diacritics#Accents or to Ancient Greek accent#Grave_accent or to Grave accent, but then the name “varia” should be added to the linked section.
Thanks also to Lambiam; i read your post after an edit conflict. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 09:59, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okinawan and pitch accent?

Your article Okinawan language does not say a thing about pitch accent. Did you forget to mention it or does the language not have one? If the latter I would submit that pointing out the fact explicitly would make it clearer. There are Japanese dialects with no pitch accent. (For example the one spoken in Miyazaki). 178.51.16.158 (talk) 16:40, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You ask "did you forget . . .", but the article has existed for over 20 years and has had (if I've got the maths right) over 300 contributors, so the absence of mention is suggestive.

On the other hand, web searching the question retrieves (for me) AI assertions (unreliable) that it does, but only a weak statement by a speaker that they think it does (not very convincing) and no positive human-written passage detailing it.

Our article on Ryukyuan languages (of which it is one) states (in more than one place) "Many Ryukyuan languages, like Standard Japanese and most Japanese dialects, have contrastive pitch accent" (or similar wording): of course, "many" implies "not all".

Overall, this seems to me to be inconclusive, and needing the input of a genuinely knowledgeable linguist. Anyone? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.211.243 (talk) 18:00, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Okinawan is considered a lexical pitch accent language".^[4] --Lambiam 23:33, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Featured articles that were deleted.

Hi. i was wondering if there are any featured articles that are not on the former featured article list since they were actually deleted. I see redirected ones but not deleted ones. Please let me know. Thank you. 50.100.44.204 (talk) 19:46, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why this is on the language refdesk, but I remember spoo, which was originally a nice-looking page about the animal/foodstuff from the Babylon 5 universe. Jimbo famously hated it because it was poorly sourced (not sure it had any sources really), but I don't think he put his thumb on the scale, and it was later deleted by the regular process. It's been recreated as a disambig page. --Trovatore (talk) 19:55, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]