Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language

Welcome to the language section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.

skip to bottom

Select a section:

• Computing
• Entertainment
• Humanities
• Language
• Mathematics
• Science
• Miscellaneous
• Archives

Want a faster answer?

Main page: Help searching Wikipedia

   

How can I get my question answered?

• Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
• Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
• Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
• Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
• Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
• Note:
  • We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
  • We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
  • We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
  • We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.

Ready? Ask a new question!

How do I answer a question?

Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines

• The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.

See also:

• Teahouse
• Help desk
• Village pump
• Help manual

January 18

Past participle of "to burn"

In my mind it is "burned", but I keep seeing it on Wikipedia as "burnt", which I consider an adjective. As a North American who spent years in London I find it *possible* that I merely hadn't noticed a small ENGVAR, and have been skipping the word in copyedits, but due to my current editing patterns I tend to see it in constructions like "the Nazis burnt all the synagogues" or "all the synagogues had been burnt by the Nazis", from which it would be a shame to detract with improper English.

Can someone reassure me that this usage is correct in standard British English? Thanks Elinruby (talk) 11:02, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Note that both forms can also be used as adjectives and I think "burnt" is generally preferred in Brit Eng? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:45, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

As long as people here tell me it is correct in some form of standard English I would be delighted to stop worrying about this. I'll check back in a few days, thanks. Elinruby (talk) 12:04, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Elinruby: When in doubt, check some reliable sources:

• Cambridge reports burnt and burned are both valid verb forms for the past tense and past participle (in British English), with the order reversed for American English.
• Collins notes that the "past tense and past participle is burned in American English, and burned or burnt in British English".
• dictionary.com lists verb forms as burned or burnt in American English, and burnt or burned for the British English version.
• Meriam-Webster is, I assume, American-focused, and lists burned or burnt as verb forms of burn, in that order.

All the above show burnt as an adjective in both English variants, and burned as a verb only. So your example of "the Nazis burnt all the synagogues" seems correct in both versions of English, although an American might prefer "burned" in that context. (Other English variants are available.) Bazza (talk) 12:21, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Meriam-Webster here says: "Both burned and burnt are acceptable forms of burn. Both words can be used as adjectives, such as "burnt toast" or "burned toast," and both are acceptable as the past tense, although "burned" is more common in American English."? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Martinevans123: Perhaps M-W is not such a WP:RS after all: that contradicts its own definition of burned. Bazza (talk) 13:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Perhaps we should both strike out. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:06, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Let me try rephrasing. If the sentence is "The Nazis had burnt down the synagogue", is there anything there that strikes anyone as wrong, or so distracting from the meaning of the sentence, that I should change it? It bothers me a bit, but I have already wrapped my mind around the fact that multiple cultures and educational systems have left me with a rather idiosyncratic ENGVAR, and if that is what this is, the topic area has actual issues with which I could more fruitfully and would rather concern myself. I see you are realizing why I wasn't sure, but that is the context for the question. Or is there agreement on what is the most reliable dictionary would be? Elinruby (talk) 14:04, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

"Burnt" is a verb per the OED [1]. You cannot probably find a better RS than that! Modocc (talk) 14:21, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

The sentence absolutely does not bother me (from a grammatical standpoint, of course: its content does). I regard that burnt as completely normal, and if I saw burned there, I would probably think "oh, that's an American writing that". ColinFine (talk) 15:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Given my stay in the US, it's entirely plausible that my English would have American elements.

I am hearing that "burnt" is correct and it seems the British are unanimous that it's standard English, ie there is no reason to change that verb. That's good; I am looking for certitude because yes, the content is disturbing enough. I'll check back in a few days to make sure there's no dissents. Thank you everyone for the brainpower. Elinruby (talk) 15:19, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

What's the contradiction? Nardog (talk) 01:19, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

banned user
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Certitude is difficult to achieve. Oxford English Dictionary says: The distinction in usage between the two modern forms of the pa. t., and pa. pple. is difficult to state with precision. Burnt is now the prevailing form, and its use is always permissible; burned is slightly archaic, and somewhat more formal in effect; it occurs more frequently as pa. t., or in combination with the auxiliary have than as ppl. adj.] The bracket at the end seems superfluous. 82.32.75.206 (talk) 15:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

really. I would have guessed the opposite, but apparently that just shows what I know. Interesting that this always happens with very basic words. I've had this in French with "sit", "shoe", and "name".

"Prevailing" would seem to be the way to go. Elinruby (talk) 15:55, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

The OED sense is talking about BrE, I presume? I guess I agree that "burnt" is acceptable in all forms, but I think I would use it mainly in fixed forms like "burnt offering". I would consider "burned" the main form.

I think I would find "burned" almost mandatory in cases that would correspond to a Romance-language imperfect tense. We talked as the fire burned, not *...burnt. Curious whether our British friends would agree with this last one at least. --Trovatore (talk) 17:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

"Burned" sounds more like past continuous to me, so yes better than "burnt" for a UK fire. But then I'm all burnt out over this one. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:07, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I really do find this particular point kind of interesting. It seems like there's an intuition that we both share that "burned" works better for this sentence. I wonder, is it more about the imperfective aspect, or is it that it's the intransitive use of "burn", or is it that this sense of "burn" is unaccusative (the fire not really having agency over its burning)? I wouldn't really have predicted that any of those would control which ending to use for the past. --Trovatore (talk) 20:34, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Is there a parallel here with spelled and spelt? As an Australian I routinely use spelt as the past participle of spell, but I have had it "corrected" to spelled several times by American editors. HiLo48 (talk) 00:54, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm British and have been accused of ignorance and illiteracy by Americans for using "spelt". "Smelt" would probably produce the same response. DuncanHill (talk) 01:44, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

So, in card games, are they dealed in the States? ;-)

And, more seriously, I still have trouble seeing "dove" rather than "dived". Bazza (talk) 11:06, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes. I often wonder for a moment how a pigeon got into the narrative ColinFine (talk) 11:54, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Spilled and spilt? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:10, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Girded/girt. 2A00:23C7:9C86:4301:DCCF:5E34:2FB:138D (talk) 13:44, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Here in Australia, the fourth line of our national anthem tells the world "Our home is girt by sea". We are very proud of being girt. HiLo48 (talk) 01:22, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Funny, I thought I knew "Waltzing Mathilda", but I don't remember that line. --Trovatore (talk) 21:20, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

But hope she's not "Dirty Girty from number thirty". Martinevans123 (talk) 12:03, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

In the spirit of MOS:COMMONALITY, spelt (except meaning the grain), smelt (except meaning the fish), and whilst are probably usually best avoided in Wikipedia article space, because their counterparts spelled, smelled, and while are generally acceptable to British readers whereas the former forms come across as affected or archaic to American readers (assuming they recognize them at all). In the other direction, we should probably prefer dived to dove and alternative to alternate (except in the meaning of "alternating"), for the reciprocal reason. --Trovatore (talk) 18:22, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure that is the spirit of WP:COMMONALITY. I'm sure American readers are as comfortable with the British English variations in spelling, which aren't seen by their writers as archaic or "affected", as British (and other) English readers have got(ten) with American variants. The spirit of WP:ENGVAR encourages us to bear in mind an article's natural, agreed or original variant, to achieve consistency regardless, and use WP:COMMONALITY when choosing vocabulary. Bazza (talk) 19:40, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

"Whilst" is alive and well on social media, where users typically (there are some noble exceptions) seem to have little appreciation of the normal rules and conventions of grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. I've asked people why they use "whilst" where "while" would do just as well, and they tell me that "while" is for informal use, while "whilst" is for formal use. How their atrocious utterances qualify as formal use, and how they seem oblivious to all the other rules but adhere rigidly to this fictitious one, escape me, but there you have it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:48, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, I tend (not rigidly) to use "while" before words starting with a consonant, and "whilst" before words with a vowel, but that's just me. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.24.47.60 (talk) 21:39, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Do Brits say “Who smelt it dealt it”? —Tamfang (talk) 02:18, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Of course! DuncanHill (talk)

January 19

Do Americans typically pronounce "Bologna" (the place) as "Baloney"?

I once remember someone on YouTube making a comment in a video about how it seemed appropriate that this guy got his degree from the "University of Baloney". Related to some dubious medical treatment claims that a guy was making for fun and profit. Iloveparrots (talk) 03:18, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

No. It was a joke. Acroterion (talk) 03:38, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

We do have an article on Bologna sausage (no "i") that tells us it is informally known as baloney. It's my impression that that informal naming is in the USA. HiLo48 (talk) 03:55, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Dictionaries show /bəˈloʊni/ for the lowercase (but not anglicized) bolognia bologna. It might have not entirely been jocular. Nardog (talk) 03:59, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I've never seen it spelled "Bolognia" with an i, just Bologna. Is there an alternate or obsolete Anglicized spelling? Acroterion (talk) 04:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Just a note: Googling for "bolognia" gets hits overwhelmingly for a certain dermatologist, and some of the images that accompany the results are...not altogether lovely.

If you Google (or Google Maps) instead for "bolognia -dermatology", there's not much. There's an apartment complex in Mexico, some spot in Colombia, and a TripAdvisor report of an alleged spot in the province of Bologna, but I'm pretty sure that one's just someone's misspelling. --Trovatore (talk) 06:39, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh that was a typo, probably copied from the OP. Nardog (talk) 11:02, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Oops, sorry. That was just my tyop. My bad. Fixed now. --Iloveparrots (talk) 12:12, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

How did "Bologna" become "Baloney" anyway? I remember seeing a question on here about gabagool a few months back. Same sort of thing? Iloveparrots (talk) 16:23, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Here's the etymonline entry for baloney. Unlike "gabagool", it doesn't really make sense as being derived from a regional Italian pronunciation. It seems to be a 19th-century American pronunciation variant, as explained here. I wish I could utter the line "Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not." in an authentic Lugosi accent at this point. Deor (talk) 16:56, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if this is related to a systematic pronunciation of final unstressed <a> as /iː/ which occurs in some accents (compare Tom Dooley). --Trovatore (talk) 19:37, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Also Grand Ole Opry. Deor (talk) 20:00, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Does that mean Missoura is a hypercorrection? —Tamfang (talk) 18:13, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Just by way of coincidence, today I watched part of a rerun of the February 18, 2001, episode of the American version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and this was a $100 question: "The name of which luncheon meat is used as an interjection that means 'nonsense'? (A) Pastrami (B) Corned beef (C) Baloney (D) Pimento loaf." So according to this episode's writers, the meat is not only pronounced but spelled as "baloney". --142.112.220.136 (talk) 23:14, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Despite the anecdote above, the commercial sausage product is universally labeled "bologna" in the United States, though widely pronounced "baloney". In my experience, Americans usually pronounce the Italian city as "Bolon-ya". Cullen328 (talk) 22:18, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

As another American, this has been my general experience with it as well. I imagine that people who don't know that the meat is spelled "bologna" wouldn't have any reservations about looking up how Bologna the city should be pronounced, while those who do know that the meat is spelled that way would probably have the wherewithal to check that the city is not pronounced like the meat. GalacticShoe (talk) 23:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Well, Gwaltney has a product called "Great Bolony", but even that is labelled as "bologna" in the description on the package. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:46, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Homophone-like combinations

How is it called when words become homophones only in combination with other words, e.g.: king's lair vs. king's slayer, Russian ненадолго (nenadolgo, "briefly") and не надо лгать (ne nado lgat, "don't lie"), etc. rather than in its own right? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 08:56, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

If you read the article which you linked, you'll find the answer is "homophone", sometimes "homophonous phrase". Further down the article, the Homophone#Same-sounding_phrases section has some examples.

I don't agree that your example king's lair vs. king's slayer is homophonous, at least in my native British English. lair is pronounced /lɛər/, whilst slayer is /ˈsleɪ.ər/. The merged "s" sounds in king's slayer are longer than the single "s" in king's lair: see Gemination#English. Bazza (talk) 11:00, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

In the American south they might pronounce "lair" like "layer", but otherwise not. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:16, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Even if they were pronounced the same, those two phrases would still not be homophones, for a couple reasons. First, "king's" ends in a voiced /z/ whereas "slayer" starts with an unvoiced /s/.

Second, while gemination is usually not phonemic in English, it can become so at word boundaries. The usual example is "night rain" versus "night train". I think I might have had a much easier time learning gemination in Italian if someone had thought to mention that example to me. --Trovatore (talk) 22:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

English questions

1. Are there any dialects that pronounce suffix -logy with a hard G?
2. Are there any dialects that pronounce words like unit and user with /u/ sound?
3. Are there any dialects that lack aspiration for unvoiced stops?
4. Are there any dialects that do not use schwa?
5. Are there any words in English where word-final ⟨a⟩ is pronounced as /ɑː/?
6. Are there any dialects that pronounce word Christmas as /krɪsmæs/ rather than /krɪsməs/?
7. Are there any words in English where letter C is pronounced as /k/ between ⟨s⟩ and a front vowel?

--40bus (talk) 22:22, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

1. No: -logy words are usually "scholarly" words derived from Greek, so not subject to insular dialectic variations. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.104.88 (talk) 22:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

7. scan, sceptic, perhaps scytale, many other sca- words. --Amble (talk) 23:17, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

a is usually not counted as a front vowel. —Tamfang (talk) 02:24, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure if scare would count. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm going by what I find at front vowel. It lists the near-open front unrounded vowel [æ], as in "scan". --Amble (talk) 01:41, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Good point. Well, we'll have to say that English ca follows its etymology; the softening of /ke/ is far in the Romance past. – Curiously, English cat is rendered in Japanese as kyatto, but I am not aware of such an effect after other consonants. —Tamfang (talk) 18:32, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

I thought it was due to Japanese lacking a native [æ], but I might be mistaken. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:58, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

5. wikt:spa and other examples at wikt:Rhymes:English/ɑː --Amble (talk) 23:21, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

3. Many Scottish accents have weak or no aspiration. See Scottish English § Phonology. This may be a rather quickly shifting phenomenon in English accents -- I believe Early Modern English had unaspirated onset stops (see e.g. Phonological history of English § Up to the American–British split). SamuelRiv (talk) 01:23, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

3 cont.: Note also that in any accents I can think of, stops are unaspirated if they follow a fricative in a consonant cluster (superscript "=" is a nonstandard transcription for "unaspirated"): e.g. "peak" [pʰi:k], "speak" [sp⁼i:k]; "outtake" [ɑʊʔ.tʰeɪk], "mistake" [mɪs.t⁼eɪk], "rifting" [rɪft⁼ɪŋ]; I think even [xt] may have this property for English accents or assimilations with a velar fricative (but since Scottish is the most prominent one that comes to my head, and many Scottish accents don't aspirate much anyway, I couldn't guess either way). SamuelRiv (talk) 19:19, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

4. Certain areas and times of Middle English (Medieval) certainly; modern areas of Indian English maybe in most ways you'd mean: the syllabic-timed stress pattern matches a tendency to pronounce the unstressed parts of words that most accents reduce to a schwa. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:37, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

January 20

Usage of 'Du' in German

Recently I have come across the German form 'Du' on several occasions, which seems to be a more polite form of adressing a single person than lower-case 'du'. First in online advertisements, and second in an e-mail after having ordered some goods from a small, independent German company. My active command of German leaves something to be desired, but my impression was that all adressing between unacquainted adults would use 'Sie', similar to the usage in Romance languages, but possibly there are nuances I am not aware of. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:56, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure that I've seen fairly impersonal (e.g. workplace) Italian communications that used uppercase Tu rather than the more usual Lei (or in some regions voi). I think I saw it on a flyer at a school, addressed to the teachers. I'd just be speculating as to the rationale, but it's conceivable it has political connotations. Historically there was a tu di sinistra used on the political left (whereas Lei was considered bourgeois and voi possibly fascist). --Trovatore (talk) 01:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I would add that it's quite common for mass communications to use tu; few would take offense at being thus addressed by, say, a product manual, or an advertisement. --Trovatore (talk) 01:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Wakuran -- I've had quite amicable discussions on French Wikipedia (though my French is not fluent), except with one semi-annoying person. I wondered if he was subtly disrespecting me by addressing me with "tu", but he informed me that there's a quasi-universal "tu" among French Wikipedia collaborators. I don't think that random people who got into conversations on the street or on transit in French cities would necessarily start off with "tu"... AnonMoos (talk) 06:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I've also found that there's generally a tu for Internet discussions, in Italian. There's also a tu da palestra for people working out in the gym. It's all very complicated and mine-filled; I'm not sure you'd use that tu for your boss, even if you happened to be waiting for the machine he was using. But that's all speculation as I haven't really been in that situation.

But the general tension that makes it so hard for non-Italians to pick the right word is that tu can be insultingly familiar, whereas lei can be stuffy and pretentious, and there's not necessarily a genuinely safe choice. Depends on age, context, maybe even how the other person is dressed. Luckily they don't expect much of Americans so you get a little bit of rhythm for your mistakes. --Trovatore (talk) 07:36, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

The usage of du has generally become more wide-spread and accepted over the last decades, in particular since the 90s, I guess. It is standard in the German wikipedia (de:Wikipedia:Warum sich hier alle duzen). In advertising, it would depend somewhat on the target demographic; Ikea was a bit of a pioneer there as the usage of du transports a kind of Scandinavian flavour. I'm also not surprised that a small company would use du; again it would depend somewhat on the market they're in. As to capitalisation, there has been some confusion on this, with the reform of 1996 first abolishing capitalisation of du and the change of 2006 permitting it again. The current recommendation is to capitalise du when addressing the reader directly (and not doing so when reporting direct speech where someone else is addressed) [2]. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

In the example addressing Elly, the text violates its own recommendation in writing Dir while not addressing the reader directly (except in case the reader is the new chairwoman of the Bach Association).  --Lambiam 10:26, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

As it's apparently Swedish-inspired, it might be worth noting that here in Sweden, the "polite forms" Ni/ Er has made somewhat of a slight comeback, lately, mostly in retail, advertising and official messages from companies, etc. It has been interpreted as a return to the older system, although others have remarked that the older system mostly was a complex system similar to English, where the polite way was to address a person by last name or title, and the "ni"/ "er" forms often a way for the upper classes to talk down to the lower classes, and despite being formal, not being particularly polite. (Most people still won't adress a teacher of doctor with "ni", though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:05, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

But will a knight use it to address others? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 02:24, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Only at knight-time. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:15, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Most Polish people my age have been taught to always capitalize ty ('you') and twój ('your'), with all their inflected forms, regardless of context. Some do it quite mindlessly: the word ci is both the short form of the dative case of ty ('to you') and the virile plural form of the demonstrative pronoun ('these'); I've seen ci capitalized in both of these senses, even though it doesn't make any sense to capitalize it in the latter sense. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:08, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Does "virile plural" mean "masculine plural"? Virile and masculine overlap in meaning quite a lot, but virile is not used in grammar. ColinFine (talk) 11:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

In Polish, there is actually a further distinction – within the "masculine" gender, there is a sub-category of masculine nouns referring to male people, as opposed to male animals or inanimates that just happen to be grammatically masculine. I've seen the term "virile" for this "human masculine" or "personal masculine" category – it's also used that way on the Wiktionary page linked to by Kpalion. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

When speaking of the Russian language, masculine singular nouns for which the accusative and genitive are the same are usually said to be "animate", and the others "inanimate"... AnonMoos (talk) 23:29, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it's the other way around. The condition of animacy determines whether the accusative is the same as the nominative (inanimates) or the genitive (animates). From Russian declension: The category of animacy is relevant in Russian nominal and adjectival declension. Specifically, the accusative has two possible forms in many paradigms, depending on the animacy of the referent. For animate referents (sentient species, some animals, professions and occupations), the accusative form is generally identical to the genitive form (genitive-accusative syncretism). For inanimate referents (simple lifeforms, objects, states, notions), the accusative form is identical to the nominative form (nominative-accusative syncretism). This principle is relevant for masculine singular nouns of the second declension ... and adjectives, and for all plural paradigms (with no gender distinction). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:54, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Latin alphabet

Why has Japanese never been switched to be written only in romaji? --40bus (talk) 22:17, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Romanization of Japanese#As a replacement for the Japanese writing system mentions that in the Meiji era, some scholars actually advocated this, but it never caught on. I can imagine there are a few reasons why, including the difficulty in switching fully, general mixed attitudes on Westernization, and also the ambiguity that might arise when homophonous terms with different kanji get condensed into the same romaji. GalacticShoe (talk) 22:34, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Read Chapter 9 of "Writing Systems" by Geoffrey Sampson for some of the issues that would be involved. It would certainly eliminate a lot of complexity in the current Japanese writing system, but it would make a large amount of scholarly/technical vocabulary confusingly homophonous, and be a huge cultural break with the last 1500 years or so of Japanese cultural traditions. In the case of Turkish, Vietnamese, Korean and so on, the previous writing systems (Arabic, Chu Nom, Chinese characters) had only been mastered by a relatively small elites, and were not fully suitable for teaching large numbers of people to read using basically the language that they spoke. That's not the case in Japan, which has a high literacy rate... AnonMoos (talk) 02:28, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Considering that the Chinese illiteracy rate in 1949 was over 80%, and that even if you magically gave the whole Chinese population in 1949 literacy many would not have been reading the language they spoke due to the wide divergence between varieties of Chinese, I suspect that none of this would have been an issue in any of those cases had there been the political will to preserve the older system. From another cultural tradition, Arabic script fits both Persian and Turkish badly, but it's still used for the former and not the latter. My impression is that this really comes down more to cultural choices, and that lack of mass literacy simply means that change is possible rather than that the old script is unworkable. Double sharp (talk) 18:34, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Whatever the complexities of Chinese writing, it was invented for writing the Chinese language, and handles some of its issues (widely divergent pronunciations between major "dialects" -- which would be separate languages by most linguistic criteria -- and the high degree of homophony in modern spoken Mandarin). The Arabic alphabet is almost ludicrously unsuited to Turkish, given Turkish vowel harmony, and in Ottoman times it was used to write a hybrid Arabic-Persian-Turkish language which was the plaything of a tiny elite, and quite far removed from spoken Turkish, so it was ripe for replacement as a writing system. No doubt the Arabic alphabet could have been suitably fixed to be able to write Turkish well (though the result would have been a very different writing system from the Arabic alphabet as used to write the Arabic language), but if you're going to make a radical change anyway, why not just go to the Latin alphabet, which can be easily adjusted to result in a simple and adequate writing sytem for Turkish? AnonMoos (talk) 00:50, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Why do you think it should? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 04:15, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Good point. There's no particular reason to, and many Japanese speakers seem to be well accustomed to English. Also, they do use western-style numbers. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 04:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

And maybe because people want to be able to read their spouses' diaries.--Shirt58 (talk) 11:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

As there's no reason to do so. Japan has kana which has a similar role to Romanisation, but is better as it much more closely matches how Japanese is spoken. Romanisation is always an approximation, as can be seen from the variety of Romanisation schemes that have been devised, with none clearly correct or best.--2A04:4A43:900F:F1A6:10B1:1D0F:14BE:DD6A (talk) 11:30, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Additional to the above, it's worth highlighting why Romanisations are so varied and all wrong in some way. It's as the Latin alphabet, i.e. Roman letters, have such wildly differing ways of being used in e.g. European languages.

So a Frenchman goes to Japan and devises a Romanisation based on French. A German based on German. A Scot based on Scots. Etc. No matter how close an approximation each is, they will all be different from each other. None is the correct or best; which gets used depends as much on luck or politics as any features of the particular scheme.--2A04:4A43:900F:F1A6:525:195:3223:C1B5 (talk) 21:41, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't know. Hepburn romanization mostly has the consonant sounds similar to English and the vowel sounds similar to Latin or Italian. It's still widely used among Westerners without necessarily having either of the languages as their mother tongue. ± Wakuran (talk) 21:58, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

January 22

Monogenesis hypothesis

According to Proto-human language, it didn't gain much traction in academia. But, if I understand correctly, initial speakers of every language family must have spoken the language of their predecessors to develop a new language. With that in mind, correlation with early human migration routes must produce a chronological chain of emergence of every language family and language isolates from another ultimately leading to the proto-human language, probably somewhere in northern Africa (similar to evolutionary universal common ancestor). Does such reasoning validate proto-human language? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 20:05, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

No, it doesn't, for two reasons. First, that assumes that language developed before humans spread, but that is not necessarily the case. But the stronger argument is that signed languages do not necessarily follow the pattern you describe - in fact, we have solid recent evidence of the genesis of at least one such: Nicaraguan Sign Language. ColinFine (talk) 21:46, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

The origins of some spoken creole languages are almost as extreme as the origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language... AnonMoos (talk) 23:27, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Interestingly, pidgins and creole languages have had their own monogenetic theory, now generally discarded by linguists.  --Lambiam 10:14, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

The Saramaccan language is known to some linguists as a language which has zero mutual comprehensibility with any of its source languages, and where it's often difficult to even trace the origins of words unless you're a specialized linguist (as opposed to many other creoles, such as Haitian Creole, or Tok Pisin, where no matter how limited the mutual comprehensibility with the source language, it's easy to guess the origins of many words). AnonMoos (talk) 23:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Language almost certainly predates modern Homo sapiens by several rungs on our evolutionary ladder, based on the evolution of breathing and mouth structures. (by some definition of speech this was always believed to some extent, but to a sapiens level of articulation the review is newer: Boe et al 2019; lay writeup in [The Atlantic 2019-12-12.) The relative complexity of such language is debated, as there is little evidence of symbolic understandinding or spiritual reflection in non-sapiens hominids. BMC Q&A 2017

I agree however that there's nothing to be found through current historical linguistics techniques beyond an order of 10,000 years. Save for discovering new archaeology, like for example if that idea of extracting recorded audio from pottery engraving had been fruitful. SamuelRiv (talk) 20:18, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

SamuelRiv -- Some have interpreted archaeological behavioral modernity as the final transition to fully-modern human language from something that wasn't yet fully-modern human language (though doubtless still far more complex than anything chimpanzees can manage). AnonMoos (talk) 23:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not in the field, so my opinion's worthless, but I'm more and more inclined to hypothesize that once hominins had finished selecting the hardware for complex speech, hominin language would be in many ways virtually indistinguishable in complexity from today -- even if they're/we're not yet inclined to make art and bury the dead. A lot is unanswerable, at least until you grow yourself some clone of a hominin, or create a plausible model of non-complex non-symbolic human-like language. One could also build a convincing case (with a great deal more neurosci and neuropsych research backing it) that symbolic and abstract expression in art, music, planning, etc is connected to our fundamental language mechanisms. SamuelRiv (talk) 04:05, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

212.180.235.46 -- Linguistic reconstruction produces useful results only to about 10,000 years ago at most, so your assumptions can't be factually cross-checked. AnonMoos (talk) 23:27, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

To test the hypothesis that two languages are related need not involve an intermediate step of reconstructing a common ancestor. One can craft a sophisticated metric for measuring the similarity of two languages. Applying it to a wide variety of pairs of languages that are not known or strongly suspected to be related will result in a probability distribution. Two reconstructed proto-languages, say Proto-Afroasiatic and Proto-Indo-European, could then (conceivably) turn out to have a greater similarity than can reasonably be ascribed to coincidence, while the footprint of any shared ancestry is too thinly spread out over the languages to aid in further reconstruction.  --Lambiam 09:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

I was including that in the 10,000 year round number (which some linguists would consider excessively generous even so). The Amerind languages as posited by Joseph Greenberg have not achieved scholarly respectability as a historically based grouping, as also the proposals of Sergei Starostin... AnonMoos (talk) 23:54, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

P.S. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic were not geographically adjacent, while Proto-Afroasiatic (as opposed to Proto-Semitic) is not very securely reconstructible, which are big problems right off. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic may have been adjacent. AnonMoos (talk) 23:57, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

My main point was that showing statistically significant similarity need not require reconstruction. Here is a trivial example. The following seemingly random strings cannot have been generated independently; there are more commonalities than can be ascribed to coincidence. Yet it is impossible to make a reasonable guess at a common source.

OJHFEUOTIYZYVFOFUVNZGCZRYMLASBMVESKMBIDZKVVRLCECGSRUUOCCFCOCXGCAJ

OGTDINSCBJJALKEUZKKBGAURAOJYSFMWPFZMHEBQGVVRDWERYJQQUVFKOHUFBSCPD

^                   ^  ^    ^ ^    ^     ^^^  ^     ^         ^  

There also does not have to be a generally accepted reconstruction for the language families to be compared; one can (theoretically) develop similarity measures between whole families. The cradles need not have been geographically close if the founders of the proto-languages could have trekked the distance from a common ancestor site in a limited number of generations. Not being geographically close is in fact an advantage; otherwise similarities may be ascribed to contamination by contact; cf. Sprachbund.  --Lambiam 17:24, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

I should have said Proto-Finno-Ugric, not Proto-Uralic. As for your method, that's basically known in linguistic circles as mass comparison... AnonMoos (talk) 00:26, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

To expand, if you're not doing any reconstructing, then supposed "comparing for similarity" can be problematic in many cases. English "wheel" and Sanskrit "chakra" don't have one single sound in common, yet are historically related, while Modern Greek "mati" and Malay "mata" (both meaning eye) are not historically related. AnonMoos (talk) 20:13, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

What does M/S mean in front of Indian company names?

I was reading through some Indian railway literature and noticed that almost every time a company name is mentioned, it is preceded by M/S, i.e. "Three years ago, new electric equipment made by M/S Acme India Ltd. was installed." What does the M/S stand for? --188.23.206.25 (talk) 20:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

According to M/S: Messrs., especially in India as a prefix to a firm or company name. Your example doesn't really capture that. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, didn't see that article since I typed it as m/s which redirects to a different article. Interestingly, it seems to be used also used for large corporations while for me Messrs. would sound more like a mom and pop business. --188.23.206.25 (talk) 21:03, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Only if mom and pop were both misters. It's rather obsolete in Britain, with the exception of legal firms. Alansplodge (talk) 22:51, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

It might depend on the surroundings, but I guess a pop and pop business might pop. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:16, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

January 24

Full stops in Chinese textbook

1912 textbook of the Republic of China, with punctuation marks to the right of characters

In this picture, used as an illustration for our article Chinese punctuation, the little circles indicating full stops abound at the end of the visible text (i.e. to the left). Here's the text repeated with simplified characters. (Minus the end of the previous chapter and the last character, which I would regard as part of the next sentence):
铁达尼邮船遇险记(二)
船既遇险、船张督率船员、百计救护 。既知无可为、乃发令下小艇。小艇既备、又令男子退后、妇孺登艇。男子。闻。令。卽。退、。穆然。无。有。喧。哗 。者。。
Up to the last two columns, the text makes sense to me, as well as to Google Translate. But the abundance of circles in the last two columns distorts their meaning, which, with the circles removed, Google Translate gives as “The men retreated after hearing the order, but no one was making any noise.”. What's the purpose of the circles? Creatively express the bubbles from the drowning ship? But that would be strange, given that this is a textbook which supposedly teaches proper writing. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 14:42, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

I guess it could be emphasis, similar to bold Latin writing. Another idea is that ○ would be similar to a Japanese "maru" sign and signify that the marked text is correctly written. [3] 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:44, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your two suggestions. For the second one, I don't see a reason here, and particularly not to mark。every。single。word。 as correct. But the first one makes sense. I wonder why they would do that in this case. Was it that the rule “women and children first” was so foreign to the readers of the book then that it needed to be particularly pointed out that all men followed it ungrudgingly? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 16:05, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Might it be loud exclamations, similar to an exclamation mark? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:25, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

That seems not so likely for a sentence that says “... no one was making any noise”. I've settled on a combination of your first two answers: If the 丸印 was used in China then, it could have carried the connotation “this is the correct comportment.” ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 07:15, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

We'll see if someone with bigger expertise comes along. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:54, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

January 25

Telescopic ladder

Discussion was started by a banned user. Banned users are not allowed to edit.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The Daily Star Sunday of 31 December featured the usual word ladder - a four letter word has to be transformed to another four-letter word in six steps, each involving the change of one letter. There is a twist, however - the new word is the opposite of the old one. That week's puzzle was DAWN>DARN>TARN>TURN>TURK>TUSK>DUSK. What's the minimum number of steps in which a four-letter word (e.g. FAST) can be transformed to its opposite (in this case SLOW)? 2A00:23C7:9C86:4301:DDA8:3416:7CEB:4CEA (talk) 11:53, 25 January 2024 (UTC) Three? DAD>DAM>DOM>MOM? Oops, you specified four-letter words. I'm reasonably sure, with all the four-letter words out there, there must be a four-step example. Clarityfiend (talk) 12:27, 25 January 2024 (UTC) Voila: KIND>MIND>MEND>MEAD>MEAN. Clarityfiend (talk) 12:37, 25 January 2024 (UTC) There will always be multiple four-step paths for such transformations, but it is quite possible that for a given pair of words, all of the paths will contain at least one 4-letter sequence that is not a word in the English language. Someone IT-savvy (so not me) could probably write a computer procedure utilising a digital dictionary to investigate this. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.24.47.60 (talk) 16:36, 25 January 2024 (UTC) MALE>MALL>GALL>GILL>GIRL. Okay, so "girl" and "male" are not entirely opposite ("male" is not age limited), but it's still a pretty good example. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:15, 25 January 2024 (UTC) WELL>HELL. For example, as in "it went well" vs "it was hell". Modocc (talk) 20:03, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

January 26

Hungarians: Is EMMA (Women’s Association for Birth Rights in Hungary) an acronym?

Not speaking Hungarian, I failed to find it out: Is EMMA (Women’s Association for Birth Rights in Hungary) an acronym? Or is there another reason given why the association is named this way? --KnightMove (talk) 01:51, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Since they don't mention it on their "about us" page (which is in English, btw), they apparently don't want to highlight any acronymic origin it might have had. You would probably get a better answer at info@emmaegyesulet.hu. Why are you asking? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 08:10, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

I guess it's possible, since I could find that 'woman' is 'asszony', association is 'egyesület' and 'Hungary' is 'Magyarország'. Without knowing Hungarian syntax, there is only one M missing. (According to Google Translate, 'birthright' is 'születési jog', though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:53, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

I want to mention it in an article, so I would like to know. Thanks to you both. --KnightMove (talk) 08:28, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

This article refers to the name change to EMMA, which occurred in 2016 (it was previously known as Születésház), but does not say why it was changed. 59.102.15.82 (talk) 14:01, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

What is this called and why does it happen?

In English conditional statements containing an auxiliary verb, the word "if" can be removed and the auxiliary verb placed where it used to be. For example, "If I were to betray you" can become "Were I to betray you," and "If I should win" can become "Should I win." What is this called and why does it happen? Primal Groudon (talk) 05:35, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

It's subject-auxiliary inversion not used to ask a question. See the "Inversion in condition clauses" section on that article... AnonMoos (talk) 09:03, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

January 27

Removing "incidental mentions of authors"

Regarding the "multiple issues template" on the "Crotalus scutulatus salvini" page, I am having trouble finding an explanation for the instruction to "remove incidental mentions of authors." Does this mean that I cannot or should not name an author in a narrative paragraph of, for example, the story about how the identity of the type specimen was resolved and documented? For example, I shouldn't say, "In 1936, Laurence Klauber quoted Gloyd, as well as describing his own examination of the material, before listing salvini as the subspecies"[Klauber ref added]? But, rather, I should amend and shorten to simply say, "Salvini was named as a subspecies in 1936"[Klauber ref added]? It seems difficult to explain an otherwise confusing story without using the authors' names in the narrative. I've searched multiple places for more info on "remove incidental mentions of authors" without success. Just need some clarification, please. Thanks! Scutdude (talk) 23:20, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

I think your best bet is to go to User talk:UtherSRG (the talk page of the editor who added that tag) and ask him to clarify what he meant or what he thinks you should do. Deor (talk) 23:52, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Scutdude (talk) 15:41, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

January 28

Questions

1. In English, "half hour" refers to the previous hour, but in other Germanic languages it refers to next hour. Is it a Romance influence in English, and are there other Germanic languages that do the same?
2. In English, can the words past, to, o'clock and half be used in hours 13 to 23?
3. Is there any Slavic language which allows long sequences of vowels in hiatus?
4. Is there any Romance language which has phonetic aspirated consonants?
5. Is there any Romance language where Classical Latin /h/ never became silent?
6. Is there any Western Romance language which pronounce letter H in all contexts?
7. Is there any dialect of Spanish where j / soft g is a coronal sound?
8. Is there any Romance language that uses letter K in native words? Why does Romanian not do that?
9. Is there any Slavic language with phonemic consonant length of all consonant?
10. Is there any dialect of English that has retained noun gender?

--40bus (talk) 21:04, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

1. "Half hour" by itself means a roughly 30-minute interval, and can be used in various ways. Where are you seeing that it somehow refers only to the "previous" hour? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:38, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

It's about "half six" meaning 5:30 or 6:30.  --Lambiam 23:43, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

In the UK I've never heard that used to mean anything other than 'half past six' (am or pm), never 'half-past five' (or "half-to-six", which is entirely unknown). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

German es ist schon halb sechs means it's already half past five. The post asks how come English does this differently from its next of kin.  --Lambiam 11:55, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Southern German has the advanced forms viertel sechs and dreiviertel sechs (meaning 5:15 and 5:45 respectively). --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:16, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

British English "half n" for "half past n" is fairly recent, I think; this ngram seems to show it really only since 2000 in books, though I'm sure it goes back to at least the 80 in speech. I have always suspected that it arose at least partly from people hearing the German expression and misinterpreting it, but I have no evidence for that. --ColinFine (talk) 12:45, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I (elderly Brit) have been familiar with it for decades, and my feeling is that it arose naturally. I doubt that enough BrE speakers were so conversant with colloquial German that they picked it up (wrongly), even though my family (like others in the Army) lived in Germany for a couple of years. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 18:50, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

American here. Never heard "half six" used for either 5:30 or 6:30. It has always been "half past [the previous full hour]". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:57, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Or half past the next hour. As in, "I'll call you at half past." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:33, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. I've heard that. But that's a different usage. If someone asks me the time, I might say simply "half past" if I have reason to believe that they already know the hour. Otherwise, I would say, for example, "half past 5". I might say "I'll call you at half past" if I am confident that context has established that I mean the next hour or some other previously specified hour. Like, "I leave work at 8, I'll call you at half past", meaning 8:30. But the previously mentioned usage of "half five" is totally foreign to my experience. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Likewise. I'm just trying to figure out what the OP means by "in English, 'half hour' refers to the previous hour". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

2. In British English, none of these are usually used in conjunction with explicit use of the 24-hour clock, which itself is common – bus and train timetables, for example, always use it, and since the advent of digital watches it has become unremarkable in everyday speech, even to this elderly Brit.

Of course, in the hours before noon, it may sometimes be ambiguous as to whether someone stating the hour is thinking in terms of the 12- or 24-hour clock, but mental translation between the two mostly occurs (I think) at a subconscious level. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 23:45, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

5. The loss of /h/ apparently happened with Vulgar Latin, see Latin phonology and orthography#Pronunciation shared by Vulgar Latin and Romance languages and Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance. Based on this and the general rarity of /h/ beyond cases where it reappeared later (see below, also note that modern /h/ usage is often not in conjunction with the actual letter H), it seems unlikely that any current Romance languages ever had /h/ just not disappear. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:39, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

6. In conjunction to the answer to the above question, the article on the letter H mentions that there are only a handful of Romance languages which currently have some form of /h/. Romanian reborrowed it from neighboring Slavic languages, and is irrelevant to your question since it isn't Western Romance anyways. Spanish as a whole redeveloped /h/ but then lost it again. Finally, apparently some Spanish and Portuguese dialects developed /h/ as allophones of other sounds, but this doesn't correspond to always pronouncing the letter H. So in general, it would appear that the answer to your question is no. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:44, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

It seems from the article that Western Cantabrian preserves the /h/ that Middle Spanish still had. Double sharp (talk) 18:28, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah, I completely missed that since I only looked through H's history section. The articles on Andalusian Spanish, the Extremaduran language, and Canarian Spanish all mention the preservation of /h/ as well. I may have to edit the history section later to explicitly mention these as being non-allophonic sounds. GalacticShoe (talk) 03:50, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

8.I. Walloon, Judeo-Spanish. Burzuchius (talk) 20:19, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

8.II. According to Romanian language, the Latin orthography was mostly based on Italian, which barely uses K. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:24, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

According to UCLA, the Latin orthography was only introduced in 1859, which makes it easier to confirm that K was only introduced for later loanwords. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:24, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

10. See the answer to your previous question GalacticShoe (talk) 21:11, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

January 29

Surname ordering

Is there a single article (or several) that goes into this? More specifically, how does it work in Portugal and Brazil (maternal or paternal surname)? Clarityfiend (talk) 03:45, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is definitely and for sure always referred to as Lula. In Brazil I believe we use the second to last name on second reference. I will leave it to someone else to explain what parent that is and why. Elinruby (talk) 04:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

We have an article Portuguese name with subsections on Brazilian-specific patterns and Brazilian surnames.  --Lambiam 11:21, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Clarityfiend, not exactly an article, but Template:Family name footnote has a lot of detail about this, for dozens of languages or ethnicities, which were unified from an equal number of templates by Primefac. There were a few stragglers, that didn't fit easily into the general scheme, and as it happens, one of those was Template:Portuguese name (which also covers Brazil), so that one still sits apart from the general case, probably due to the Portuguese name suffixes like filho and neto. See the template for details. In some cases, you have to know more information about the individual involved, as Filho can be a legitimate last name, or it can also be a suffix (meaning "son", analogous to "Jr." in English). Adding Elinruby. Mathglot (talk) 11:25, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Okay, Portuguese name#Collation says to order by last surname, with nothing about Brazilian ordering (if different). Thanks. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Brazilian probably isn't different. I specified Brazilian because the dialects are apparently quite different and I have only ever attempted Brazilian topics personally. I don't vouch for anything about Portugal.Elinruby (talk) 07:15, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Slavic(?) "starting to do (something)"

in articles about Eastern Europe I frequently notice sentences about how somebody started to do something (in the 9th century for example). A concrete measurable action.

I have been changing the phrase to passé simple and wondering if the person who wrote that first learned a language that doesn't have a past tense? It seems odd, but no odder than not using either definite or indefinite articles? Any thoughts on whether there is such a language and what language(s) this would be? Based on topics (Kievan Rus', khaganates, steppes) I'm guessing Russian or something proto-slavic? ---- Elinruby (talk) 04:25, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

(Slightly later): here is an example from Primary Chronicle#Authorship, and actually this is also in past tense, isn't it. I don't have a word for this.

Based on the 1661 Paterik of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, 17th-century writers started to assert that Nestor "the Chronicler" wrote many of the surviving Rus' chronicles

Elinruby (talk) 04:43, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

As a British English speaker/writer, I find this fairly natural. It indicates that the described action (in this case, asserting something) had not been done previously, and that it went on for some significant span rather than being a short-lived phenomenon. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 07:37, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Slavic languages do have a past tense. What they lack, though, is present perfect (or any other perfect tense for that matter). Which means that if you wish to translate something like "Since the 17th century, writers have been asserting that…" into a Slavic language, you'd have to use instead the equivalent of either past simple: "In the 17th century, writers started asserting that…", or present simple: "From the 17th century (onwards), writers assert that…". Note: Slavic languages make a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs, but that's something else than perfect and simples tenses. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:44, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

A present perfect gives us "Writers have asserted that ..." "Writers have been asserting that ..." combines that with a continuous aspect. English is, amongst European languages, remarkable for its heavy use of the continuous aspect. Something with "Writers started to assert that ..." would also be the normal way to say this in for example Dutch, which has a present perfect similar to English. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:42, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

It is common enough in US English too: "started to notice",^[4] "started to resemble",^[5] "started to wonder".^[6]  --Lambiam 11:10, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Elinruby, Russian (and I believe, other Slavic languages) have a verbal feature that is neither a tense, nor a mood, nor a voice which are all familiar to speakers of English or Romance languages and is called "aspect" which does not correspond to anything in English verbs. Aspect can be seen in the distinction between Russian "шёл" ("went") and "пошёл" ("headed over"; my translations) which is normally used to distinguish completed action for ongoing action, but can also be used to indicate initiating action. HTH, Mathglot (talk) 11:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Aspect is also common in Romance languages, by the way. Just about all of them differ between past actions performed habitually or only once. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:25, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Aspect is a universal category in languages. In Western European languages it is often not discussed, because it tends to be subsumed into the category of "tense". But the distinction between "I worked" and "I was working" is aspectual. ColinFine (talk) 13:06, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Aspect is the word I was missing. But there is a time element that on reflection isn't clear if you aren't up to your elbows in the article. It isn't .that Nestor is thought to be the author and this began in the 17th century. This was was brought up in the 17th century but except for fringey writers, most authors accept that this would involve time travel, since he died before these events took place. Elinruby (talk) 18:46, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

judging from the blank looks and stunned silence, that wasn't very clear, so trying again: In the above text, whether Nestor is the author of the Primary Chronicle is just an example of sentence structure. The words "started to" seem superfluous and misleading to me, since from context it is clear that ir isn't that academics have believed that Nestor was the chronicler since the 17th century, it is that they believed it at the time but today's academics no longer do and haven't for quite some time. The strange sentence construction could be the an idiosyncrasy of a particular editor, but I have seen it quite a bit now, and I am starting to wonder if this has to do with a particular language's (ru?) understanding of verbs, analogous to Spanish not having an indefinite article. I hope that's clearer.Elinruby (talk) 01:09, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

And as I originally tried to explain, that is exactly what this construction, common in English, conveys. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 02:02, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Er, no? It does not convey that somebody did something either once or gor a period of timr, and is no longer doing it. At least not to me. For example if I said "about then I started to wonder if my question was getting bogged down in the details of my example." it would be correct to conclude that I have decided to try the question again later with a different example. I am pretty sure that you.and I are working different conceptions of "that" in your sentence. Thank you to Mathglot for the vocabulary term "aspect".02:30, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it makes sense in context: "17th-century writers started to assert that Nestor wrote many of the surviving chronicles… From the 1830s to around 1900, there was fierce academic debate about Nestor's authorship, but the question remained unresolved, and belief in Nestorian authorship persisted… Modern scholars have concluded that Nestor was not the author."

So the belief in Nestor's authorship was not limited to 17th-century scholars. The assertion that Nestor was the author was something that began in the 17th century and persisted until around 1900. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

what you say is true. i am going with bad example. i don't have another handy though. Elinruby (talk) 20:33, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Update: so many people said it made sense as originally written that I put "started to" back in the sentence and edited a bit. Feel free to comment on that effort if desired. I may come back someday to "starting to". Elinruby (talk) 07:22, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

translation for German word "Aktus"

Hi friends, I know there are native speakers of German here, can you help? The Jan 28 wördle.de surprised me when the second K was gray, and the solution turned out to be: Aktus. I can't find this in any of my dictionaries. So what does it mean? Thank you70.67.193.176 (talk) 16:17, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Not a native German speaker, but this site suggests it's an obsolete word meaning a function, event or celebration. --Viennese Waltz 16:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I believe the classifier veraltet could mean both 'archaic' or 'obsolete', somewhat depending on context. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:49, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Langenscheidt (a well-known German dictionary) says "school ceremony (archaic)". DuncanHill (talk) 16:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Uses on the German Wikipedia show the noun (invariant under declension) had a variety of meanings, some of which correspond to senses of the English noun act. A synopsis of the late 18th-century comic fantasy Leben des Quintus Fixlein shows the term used as meaning some part of festive school ceremony (Schulfeier). It appears to be an archaic or obsolete form of present-day Akt, which also has this range of meanings; in the festive sense, it is a synonym of Festakt. Possibly, traditional schools clung longer to the obsolescent form.  --Lambiam 18:59, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I was rather surprised when I first found out that one of the meanings of "Akt" was "artistic nude depiction"... AnonMoos (talk) 20:08, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

I have never heard that word (and I suppise I know more than average). I really wonder this was still used in the 2nd half of the 20th century. --KnightMove (talk) 23:10, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Cassell's German & English Dictionary (12th ed., 1968) has "celebration; School Speech Day; public act". DuncanHill (talk) 23:21, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Could be seen as a remnant, and have something to do with the tendency in 18/th19th century Germany to use latin, greek and french words and kind of "teutonize" them. Often associated with higher education, see de:Burschensprache (sorry, no English article, but might actually be interesting to translate), for greater context perhaps Burschenschaft. Lectonar (talk) 11:38, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you everyone. I'm surprised it's so obscure but perhaps the creator of that wordle version wants to keep everyone on their toes :) Do you have any sense of how specific it is - would it apply to schools in general or is it something like Montem, applying to one school only?70.67.193.176 (talk) 19:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Got no comment on your question, but I would guess that rather than an intentional word choice, it could be that the creator just has a somewhat outdated word bank. Google Ngram Viewer suggests that the word was used relatively more commonly in the decades leading up to the 2000s, so that might be why. GalacticShoe (talk) 03:45, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

It wouldn't be specific to one school only. Lectonar (talk) 09:09, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you again!70.67.193.176 (talk) 22:01, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

January 30

Gulag

in sentences like "he was sent to a prison camp" is it more correct to say "a Gulag" or "the gulag" and should it be capitalized? Elinruby (talk) 02:35, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

It's capitalized in our Gulag article. The phrase "a Gulag" might be a little unusual in English -- the only occurrence in the "Gulag" article is in an image caption... AnonMoos (talk) 03:50, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

The Gulag is a unique system of labor camps, as its article notes, so it makes no sense to write "a Gulag", any more than it would to refer to "a Statue of Liberty". There doesn't appear to be a clear consensus on whether it should or should not be capitalized. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

"He was sent to a Gulag camp" would make most sense in my opinion. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:25, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

In Russian the whole acronym is capitalized, ГУЛАГ. Usually (but not always) acronyms in English are likewise capitalized: NATO, DARPA, SWAT. It would make sense to retain this across the transliteration and use "GULAG". Wiktionary makes a distinction between "GULAG" being the agency running the system, "Gulag" being an alternative letter-case form of "gulag", and the latter meaning:

1. (historical) Also GULAG: the system of all Soviet labour camps and prisons in use, especially during the Stalinist period (1930s–1950s).
2. (by extension)
   1. A prison camp, especially one used to hold political prisoners.
   2. (also figuratively) A place where, or political system in which, people with dissident views are routinely oppressed.

All case forms are found in books, with "Gulag" being the most and "GULAG" the least popular.^[7] Personally, I'd avoid using Gulag or "gulag" as a common noun in writing as being too colloquial and use "a Gulag prison camp" if it needed to be made clear that a prison camp was part of the Gulag system. However, this use is common and also found in the book titles of serious works: The Gulags: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Soviet Labor Camps; Stalin, the Five Year Plans and the Gulags: Slavery and Terror 1929–53; Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia.  --Lambiam 09:58, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

thank you for the answers.

I believe GULAG would strictly speaking be the agency, right? I have personally only ever seen it in "send (someone) to the gulag" but always in a metaphorical sense, whereas I am seeing this in Baltic history articles where the subject yea verily went to a prison camp, probably someplace remote in the East. So I would like to get this right. Speaking of which, I am going to update the "starting to" question to say that since so many people said it was correct as written, I put "starting to" back in and rewrote the verbs a bit to bring out the timeframe. Mea culpa; vague question, bad example.

Back to this, I did see that it's usually capitalized in our articles. I guess somebody made a style decision? It seems wrong to me, but I have other fish to fry.

Follow-up question: were Gulag prison camps specifically for Russian political prisoners? Or, when there were forced population transfers, were the people involved also sent to Gulag prison camps? or just the working-age men?

Thank you again. Elinruby (talk) 05:57, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Being forced to work in a Gulag prison camp was a punishment. There is no sharp border line between political and other prisoners, but many Gulag prisoners were there for non-political crimes, such as theft.  --Lambiam 12:12, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Exile of Jews in the Soviet interior during World War II. 2A00:23D0:6EA:DB01:3D32:231E:20A4:4F3F (talk) 12:45, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Pre-Latin Native American translation

Are there websites or other resources that have translation vocabulary for pre-European scripts of any Native American language of the US (as in wiigwaasabak or petition of the Ojibwe chiefs) and can we reliably translate English text without neologisms to such scripts? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 11:04, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Are these really scripts in the traditional sense? To me, they do appear be more like pictograms used as a symbolical and mnemonic device? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:29, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

PICTOGRAPHS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS by Garrick Mallery (1886). Alansplodge (talk) 18:06, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

New questions

1. Is there any instance of a language being written in same script over 1,500 years and having had a very high historical and cultural prestige and then switched to a new script and completely abandoning the old script?
2. Do these letter combinations occur commonly in any language:

• ææ
• øø
• řř
• ťť
• ňň
• ďď
• ľľ
• ëë
• áá
• éé
• íí
• óó
• úú
• ýý
• äaä
• ïï
• ÿÿ
• əə
• ðð
• þþ
• xä
• cä
• qä

3. Is there any Spanish dialect that has a /v/ phoneme?
4. Are there any native non-compound words in Swedish where letter Ä occur more than once? Could e.g. mälä be a native Swedish word by its structure? Why letter Ä is used more in Finnish than Estonian and Swedish?
5. Are there any words in Spanish with letter Ï?
6. Are there any words in Polish with letter combinations sc+ vowel, such as nonsense word scila, cn, kc or cs?
7. Why letter V is not used in native words in Polish?
8. Why letter Y is not used in native words in Estonian, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese or Latvian?

--40bus (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 1:Is there any instance of a language being written in same script over 1,500 years and having had a very high historical and cultural prestige and then switched to a new script and completely abandoning the old script?

At issue is every language changes an awful lot over a millennium. Scripts can also be fairly dynamic. Then "historical and cultural prestige" -- you mean at that time in that place, or now in another place? I suppose obvious examples (~ 7th century origins, so not quite 1500 years) are Arabic and Cyrillic scripts, which several countries have dropped for a Latin script (Turkey dropped Arabic as well as interesting other cases; former SSRs dropped Cyrillic (note rather that some were forced to adopt Cyrillic from Arabic or Latin in the 20th century).)

Maybe the cleanest example I can think of is the use of Classical Chinese to transcribe Korean, going back millennia. This was replaced by the Hangul alphabetic script beginning in 1443 CE. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:27, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

I guess Ancient Egyptian language that switched to Coptic script to become Coptic language. --Error (talk) 11:23, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 2

See Wiktionary: créée. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:57, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Also Icelandic ææ which is an elongated interjection, and Southern Sami Nøørje which is an alternative form of Nöörje meaning "Norway". Less dubious than those two, there's:

1. Turkmen iňňe meaning "needle"
2. Isthmus Mixe xëë meaning "sun, day, fiesta, holiday, name"
3. Numerous Navajo terms containing áá, íí, and óó, e.g. bááh meaning "bread", díí meaning "this, these", and dóó meaning "and"; see Navajo language#Orthography
4. Gokana súú meaning "thorn" and Chuukese wúút meaning "rain"
5. Jumjum jïïn meaning "scorpion" and Ulch sïïŋna meaning "gift, present"
6. Numerous Azerbaijani terms starting with təə, including təəssüb meaning "honour" (archaically "religious intolerance, fanaticism, bigotry), təəssüf meaning "regret", təəssürat meaning "impression", and so on
7. Numerous Orok terms starting with xä, including xäwčilä meaning "rib", xämugdä meaning "insides, intestines", xäkku meaning "heat, fever", and so on
8. Numerous terms containing cä to the point where I'm not even going to summarize any, Wiktionary has plenty of examples there
9. Tatar qäğäz meaning "paper" and Menya eqä meaning "water, river"

Old and Middle English had plenty of þþ's to go around, and Old English had oððe as an alternative form of oþþe meaning "or", but otherwise I couldn't find any living examples of either of those two digraphs. And while the Anguthimri language had "non-contrived" ææ-containing words like ðææɲa meaning "to bury" and d̪ææwat̪i meaning "greedy", it has gone extinct, though the article on it doesn't seem to know exactly when. GalacticShoe (talk) 08:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

You won't find a double þ in any living language, because the only one that uses the letter, Icelandic, does so in morpheme-initial position only, so neither gemination nor compounding can produce -þþ-. Regarding ð, it only occurs in Icelandic, Faroese and Elfdalian. The former two do not use it in morpheme-initial position (so no compounds with -ðð- either) and also do not geminate it either, and I'm not sure about Elfdalian – if you even count it as a language; the Swedish Wikipedia describes it as a 'variety'. --Theurgist (talk) 23:17, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 3. Is there any Spanish dialect that has a /v/ phoneme?

The same as 26 days ago. --Error (talk) 11:38, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 4.1

Would bärsärk (inherited from Old Norse) count? GalacticShoe (talk) 09:08, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Technically, I guess it might count as a compound, although the word bär meaning björn is obsolete in Swedish. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:21, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 5

It is possible in poetry, to force a hiatus. Double sharp (talk) 09:24, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 6

Yes for at least three of the four you asked about: cnota, scena, kciuk. Double sharp (talk) 09:29, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

⟨cs⟩, on the other hand does not appear in Polish. It does in Hungarian, where it stands for roughly the same sound as the Polish ⟨cz⟩. — Kpalion^(talk) 14:34, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

However, ⟨sc⟩ cannot be followed by ⟨i⟩, as in the nonsense word provided. That would have to be read /stɕi/, which is not permitted in the language; ⟨ści⟩ /ɕtɕi/ and ⟨scy⟩ /stsɨ/ are. --Theurgist (talk) 23:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 7

Polish orthography is standardized so that /v/ is written using W. It wasn't always that way though. History of Polish orthography goes into more depth, but you can see in the first example table that early on some writers did use the letter V for /v/. It is only in the later orthographies where, although V appears as a letter sometimes, the actual /v/ sound appears to be mostly represented by W. I am unsure as to what led to W specifically, as there is no explicit mention of the /v/ sound in the article, but there is mention that Zaborowski's early 1514–1515 orthography was inspired by Czech, which early on used W for /v/. I would have to confirm, but the section on Czech orthography#History suggests that W was used there for /v/ because the actual letter V was coincident in the Latin alphabet with U, which might be the ultimate reason for W's use in Polish. GalacticShoe (talk) 07:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

My guess would be that Old Czech ultimately copied the use of ⟨w⟩ from German, which to this day is the only major European language, other than Polish, to use ⟨w⟩ for /v/. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:42, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

I thought this might be the case too but I was initially hesitant because German orthography#History of German orthography didn't mention /v/ or the letter W. Looking a bit more into the page though I just found that the section German orthography#Typical letters indicates that German /w/ shifted into /v/ in the 17th century while preserving the old lettering. This statement appears to be unsourced, and I found a StackExchange post that seems to place the actual time at an earlier and broader range of time, so I'm not sure to what extent it is accurate. In any case, it seems possible that Old Czech used German's method of orthography, but without further clarification on German phonology at the time I'm a bit unsure. GalacticShoe (talk) 17:52, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 8

See Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 November 25#Question 9. Portuguese is derived from Latin, and as far as I know, Latin didn't have a Y either. 2A00:23D0:6EA:DB01:3D32:231E:20A4:4F3F (talk) 12:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

For Romance languages I'm pretty sure it can indeed be boiled down to either there being a continued use of Latin-based orthography, or there being no new vowel sounds that require distinguished separation of Y. As for the other languages, it appears that all of them are fairly modern orthographies often encoded into law.

1. Modern Estonian orthography is based on Eduard Ahrens' late 19th-century Newer Orthography.
2. Latvian orthography was developed in 1908 by a linguistic commission and introduced by law in the early 1920s.
   1. Notably, the related Latgalian language actually does use the letter Y to represent /ɨ/, an allophone of /i/ absent in Latvian.
3. Dutch orthography and German orthography are similarly regulated by law.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily explain why Y is not preferred for all of them, and why they have been absent for some time, but it does explain why native spellings involving Y are essentially completely absent; they were standardized away. It seems reasonable to me to assume that the reason that Y was never chosen for any of these orthographies is simply that, like with the Romance languages, there wasn't much incentive to use a relatively rare letter for sounds that do not need it. GalacticShoe (talk) 18:46, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

January 31

The term "The Old Man" for the 30 yo captain in "Das Boot" - mistranslation?

Apparently, in the German war movie "Das Boot" in the English version, the captain is called by the crew "The Old Man" (see en article). I looked on the web and found a part of the original German book (used for the movie) from Lothar-Günther Buchheim in the English translation, where the same English term is used. In the German original, the respective term is "Der Alte" (literally "The Old", hence without "Man"). As we are dealing with the military, hierarchy is (abstractly regarded) far more important than age - what I mean is, in German the term "Der Alte" has (which is a subtle, but clear distinction) the connotation of "the eldest man on board" or "the boss", while the aspect of age is clearly ranked lower than hierachy. Hence, one could say that the term "Der Alte" is more of an informal rank expression than it refers to age. This even more so, as the term "The Old Man", literally translated to German as "Der alte Mann", would clearly have a strong connotation of weakness (due to age), would hence also be regarded as disrespectful, and thus would definitely not be used by a crew for their 30 year old captain (which was a typical age). To emphasize this: If one refers to a man of higher age in civil life in German (today, but probably in WWII as well), to literally call him or speak about him as "Der alte Mann" is close to an insult, suitable would be "Der ältere Herr" or so. Differently said, unless there would be some special, e.g. historical meaning in English to "The Old Man" in a military sense - which I do not know as a German - I assume that the expression was just badly translated to E|nglish long time ago. Does all this make sense, or did I make a logical mistake? Pittigrilli (talk) 17:35, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

In the British military, "old man" is common affectionate nickname for a unit leader, for example:

Squadron Leader R. A. Newbury D.F.C. and Bar took over command of No. 610 'County of Chester' (F) Squadron in January 1944. He remained commanding officer until February 1945. During his tenure as the 'old man', the squadron was involved heavily involved in anti-diver patrols. [8]

It's also worth mentioning that "old man" is also British slang which can mean either a father or husband of whatever age; see our Old man page. Alansplodge (talk) 17:53, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

The only times I have heard this in the British military is to refer to the senior person (captain/commanding officer) not related to age (or weakness). MilborneOne (talk) 17:55, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it means more like "the guv". Everything's relative of course, and in wartime the one with most experience may not be oldest. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:59, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Ok, that it is used in military language is enough to prove me wrong (with the above statement of mistranslation). Thank you very much for the explanations. 19:01, 31 January 2024 (UTC) /later added signature: Pittigrilli (talk) 20:06, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Also "the Old" is not a possible usage in conventional English, as 'old' can only function as an adjective, which needs a noun to relate to. The irony inherent in the senior member of a military unit being under 30 and being called "the Old Man" has been well known since at least World War 1 (where it particularly applied in the early Air services).

Another similar BrE informal title in civilian life is "the Gaffer" which derives from 'godfather, 'grandfather' or both. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.208.215 (talk) 21:18, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

You can use "the old" to refer to a class of people: "State may close Ahtanum View, prison for the old and infirm".^[9]  --Lambiam 22:17, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Though not to an individual: but yes, I was being imprecise. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.208.215 (talk) 02:33, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Pronunciation of zoo- words

(This is about words such as "zooplankton" that start with the Greek prefix zoo- meaning animal.)

Is it common today for people unfamiliar with these words to pronounced them zoo and not the prescribed zoh-oh?? Georgia guy (talk) 17:36, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

zoo-, zooplankton in Wiktionary do not mention a "zoo" pronunciation. zoology does:

The pronunciation in /zu-/ has often received negative comment, but has nevertheless become very common, especially in British English.

zoological has:

(US) (non-standard) IPA(key): /zuəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/

so maybe it is common with familiar words.

--Error (talk) 18:14, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Very common in Australia, even by ABC personalities. Much regretted by older listeners. Doug butler (talk)

The word "zoological" is or at least was normally pronounced "zoh-oh...". The word comes from two parts.[10] When "zoological gardens" evolved into "zoo", I suppose it could have ben pronounced "zo-oh", but just plan "zoo" resulted instead. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:01, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

In some older publications and dictionaries, such words were spelled with a diaeresis, e.g. "zoölogical", to mark the pronunciation. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.208.215 (talk) 21:24, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

The "New Yorker" magazine still uses that diacritic... AnonMoos (talk) 00:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

No, they don't. You're probably thinking of the one they use in "cooperate". --142.112.220.136 (talk) 04:38, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

February 1

Sweetbread

There has been discussion today at WP:HD#Buccellato di Lucca and WP:HD#https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Buccellato_di_Lucca&diff=prev&oldid=1201517214 about this English language word that is about a culinary item that is neither sweet nor a bread. As a result, I started expanding the article. I have read quite a few sources about this topic in recent hours, and pretty much all of them use the term "sweetbreads" with a final "s". Personally, I do not think that this is really a plural term, but rather an unusual word. Perhaps the article should be moved to "Sweetbreads". Any thoughts? Cullen328 (talk) 02:34, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Funnily enough when you eat them they wind up in your bread basket. 41.23.55.195 (talk) 05:02, 1 February 2024 (UTC)