Last modified: 2025-06-19 by antónio martins
Keywords: flag: word | word: flag | languages |
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Language translation is full of confusions, and there is no way
around it except to explain fully and completely all the subtle
nuances of meanings, in enough depth to be unambiguous. With the
new technology available, it might even be able to display the
scripts of those languages, and maybe even audio files that give
an accurate native-speaker pronunciation of the word, possibly
even with contexts.
Bill Dunning, 11 Aug 2007
What we need here is a way to distinguish between the main translations of "flag" in the various languages and the other words that are subtly or not so subtly related to them. We can’t have a one-to-one list for the simple reason that different languages have differing understandings of what a flag is.
In a mathematical analogy, each word in each language designates a certain set of objects that may overlap for the most part but does not coincide, and therefore we have to include the words used for the grey areas where the main ones don’t fully overlap.
Jorge Candeias, 11 Aug 2007
I don’t think this is a very important vexillological
topic, and I hope no one does. It is just a mildly interesting yet
marginal issue.
António Martins, 15 Aug 2007
Organizing the etyms of our quite large collection of words
meaning "flag", even if at a very crude level (listing
only similarities and leaving aside for now any attempt at finding
branching relationships), other major “families”
pop to the eye, such as Arabic
"al"/"alav",
Dravidian "koti"
and "pataka", and
Indo-Aryan "jhamda".
António Martins, 12 Sep 2007
There are many instances of the semantic relatedness between "signal" and "flag":
These pages register as words just the spellings
(and indirectly orthographies).
António Martins, 18 Aug 2007
Sound / pronounciation could be added right now, whenever an audio
file is available, and/or pronounciation indication by means of IPA
symbols (or the former generated from the latter).
However, there is not a simple one-to-one correspondence between word as
written (which is for now the scope of these pages) and word as spoken.
This is clear for things like sign languages or ideographs, but also for,
say, the recently mentioned alternate spellings for the same word, such as
English "flag" in the regular Latin
based orthography and then in Deseret
or Shavian (which have/had marginal
usage), or the Latin vs. Cyrillic vs. Glagolitic spellings of the same words
in Croatian/Serbian
etc. And I’m
not even considering things like Braille, Morse, semaphore or signal flags
— because their correspondence with mainstream alphabets is
trivial.
The link between writing and sound is not a simple one.
António Martins, 20 Aug 2007
When it comes to words that mean both "flag" (etc.) and non
flag-related things (such as English
"colour"), non "flag"
meanings are not expanded.
António Martins, 11 Oct 2007
Cyphers are excluded from these pages, as they are of trivial implementation:
Shavian is a proper script/alphabet, not a cypher (i.e., there’s no one-to-one correspondence slaved from Latin or other letters, like Morse etc.), and was included for English and not for other languages because it is/was used in English in a minimally relevant way. Same for Deseret in English, Orkhon in Kazakh and Chuvash and other historical/residual script use.
IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) is a notation system for phonetics and phonology, not an orthography. We can/will add IPA transcriptions to these pages, but as an additional data item for each word, not as separate entries.
Sign systems are yet a different thing: some, the spelling signs, are cyphers, others are true languages and here considered as such.
António Martins, 11 Oct 2007
Note that the question marks that may appear instead of letters (or
the squares, or spirals, or boxes, or whatever the not def.
glyph of your browser’s default font) are still the intended characters,
only provisionally lacking a glyph to go with them. Should one copy and
paste the said characters and e-mail them to somobody else (or otherwise
transport them onto another computer) with appropariate font coverage,
they would show as the intended characters.
António Martins, 20 Aug 2007
Anything below this line was not added by the editor of this page.