Archive | September, 2017

Pronoun question

9 Sep

Fill in the blanks with the most appropriate first-person singular pronoun:

  1. “They enjoyed you arguing in favour of it and ___ against”
    1. I
    2. me
    3. my
    4. mine
  2. “They enjoyed your arguing in favour of it and ___ against”
    1. I
    2. me
    3. my
    4. mine

Question #1 is easy: it can only be option #b.

Question #2 is hard. I guess it has to be #d. Right?

J. K. Rowling’s international pseudonyms

2 Sep

As every schoolchild knows, Joanne Rowling adopted the pseudonym J. K. Rowling because her publisher worried boys would not read a book if they knew the author was female. At some point I learned that Harry Potter’s German editions are credited to “Joanne K. Rowling”. What about editions in other languages? The following provisional data is from the names of the articles about Rowling in all language versions of Wikipedia that have such an article. The source is the Wikidata page that centralises all these.

  • J. K. Rowling:- Aragonese, Basque, Bikol Central, Breton, Chinese (Min Nan), Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Extremaduran, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Greek, Icelandic, Ido, Iloko, Indonesian, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Northern Sami, Norwegian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nāhuatl, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Scots, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Slovenian, South Azerbaijani, Spanish, Sundanese, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Waray, Welsh, Western Frisian
    • Transliteration/nativization of “J. K. Rowling” (e.g. “Dž. K. Roulinga”, “Џ. К. Роулинг”, “J·K·罗琳”):- Arabic, Assamese, Bangla, Cantonese, Central Kurdish, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Serbian, Sinhala, South Azerbaijani, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, Yiddish
  • Joanne Rowling:- Asturian, Catalan
    • Transliteration/nativization of “Joanne Rowling”:- Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Georgian, Kazakh, Latin, Mingrelian, Mongolian, Russian, Slovak, Tajik, Tatar, Turkmen, Ukrainian
  • Joanne K. Rowling:- Albanian, German, Luxembourgish, Quechua
  • Joanne Kathleen Rowling:- Bosnian, Hungarian, Javanese, Malay, Venetian
    • Transliteration/nativization of “Joanne Kathleen Rowling” :- Sakha