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February 28

Usage frequency dictionary

Are there dictionary-like resources that show usage frequency for a given English word and/or phrase? I became interested after encountering the phrase "in spades" which sounds flamboyant, so that if I use it, most English speakers would know the meaning. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 12:38, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Google ngrams is a good resource. --Jayron 32 12:44, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, the origin of the phrase "in spades" comes from card games like Auction bridge, where Spades are the highest scoring suit, see here. --Jayron 32 14:08, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

March 2

Why this disambiguation?

Can anyone offer any insight into this question? ---> Talk:Chernobyl (disambiguation)#Why is this entry included?. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:30, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

See Chernobyl#Etymology. Card Zero (talk) 01:41, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. --184.144.97.125 (talk) 07:32, 2 March 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.144.97.125 (talk)

This is the second time: the explanation in the disambiguation page was removed in 2019 by User:Leschnei, leaving edit summary "format tweaks". I don't know if that was by accident or whether it was over-fussy application of some rule about keeping encyclopedia content out of disambiguation pages. Card Zero (talk) 08:07, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why I did that. I should have just unlinked Chernobyl and left the link to Artemisia vulgaris. Thanks for fixing it. Leschnei (talk) 12:23, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, all, for both the explanation ... and the intervention / fix. Much appreciated. Thanks! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 03:06, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Vietnamese and Cantonese `no'

Is the Vietnamese word for `no' cognate with the Cantonese word? Or is that just a coincidence?

Duomillia (talk) 16:22, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Could you specify which Vietnamese and which Cantonese word you are thinking of exactly? Fut.Perf. su 16:27, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The words listed at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no/translations#Particle don't seem similar... AnonMoos (talk) 02:12, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking không and m̀ but then I saw on wiktionary that không comes from a different word so my answer is no. Duomillia (talk) 04:14, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

March 3

Signor Majeroni

In starting the article Eduardo Majeroni I boldly discounted "Edoardo" and "Edouardo" as misspellings, based on . . . can't remember, maybe published advertisements . . . but now I'm not so sure, as in going back I find the advertisement his widow placed in "Family notices", as "Edoardo". Doug butler (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I would not describe those as "misspellings" without better evidence. I tried searching in Italian-language pages (which doesn't seem to work too well -- many of the hits were clearly in English) and "Eduardo" and "Edoardo" seemed to get similar numbers of hits, of similar quality. I think "Edoardo" is the more common cognate of "Edward" in Italian (but I'm not sure of that; it's a pretty rare name in either spelling and I don't recall knowing anyone by that name).

You didn't ask about this, but I would be skeptical of giving the pronunciation as "M'rony" based only on an Australian newspaper entry. The Italian pronunciation would be /majeroni/ (mah-yeh-ROH-nee), just like it's spelled. It could certainly be that "M'rony" was what contemporary Australians called him. --Trovatore (talk) 20:50, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That ref surprised me too, hence its inclusion. Doug butler (talk) 21:09, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like pretty thin sourcing for such an odd claim. I would leave it out unless you can find a better source. --Trovatore (talk) 21:14, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am ashamed to say that, despite Australia being often called the most multicultural nation on earth, Australians generally have tin ears for any names - and words generally - not from the Anglo-Celtic heritage. I've mentioned this here before; a lot of Aussies seem to regard it as a badge of honour to have to struggle with foreign words. But it's very important to struggle unsuccessfully. They think they're doing really well when they pronounce Giovanni as "Jee-o-vahni". Anyone who has any facility with foreign languages is at risk of being looked upon as a bit pretentious. So please, take that advice to pronounce Majeroni as M'rony with all the salt you can muster up. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:12, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Point taken; I'll delete it after everyone's had a go at the long-suffering Aussie. My pet peeve is radio announcers proclaiming as a virtue having failed arithmetic ("mathematics" they call it). But we digress. What do I do about Eduardo? Doug butler (talk) 22:26, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You might do something like

Eduardo Majeroni ^{[nb 1]} (1840 – 20 October 1891) was an actor...

It's not perfect, but it might be the best you can do with the sources you have. --Trovatore (talk) 23:27, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

^ Some sources have Edoardo or Edouardo.

To complicate the issue, in an 1875 booklet on the occasion of Ristori's company performing Victor Hugo's Lucretia Borgia in New York as part of Ristori's farewell tour, the name of the actor is given as EDUORDO MAJERONI.^[1] I can just imagine someone first wrote "Eduardo", and when someone else told them the name was written with an "o", they applied a "correction" but changed the wrong vowel. This announcement in an 1862 issue of a Florence (Italy) newspaper has "Edoardo". In the 19th century, people were not as fussy about the spelling of their names as they tend to be now. Passports were generally not needed, also not for international travel, and most people did not have any identity document issued by an authority. The name on someone's marriage certificate could use another spelling than their baptismal registration. For use abroad, it was not uncommon to switch to the local equivalent; Theodor from Königsberg could sign his name as Théodore when in Paris. --Lambiam 00:19, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Case in point, Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin became Frédéric François Chopin on arrival in Paris. He did not in any formal sense change his name; he just used a localized variant. --Lambiam 00:28, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Thanks all. Doug butler (talk) 01:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So, Maj- is pronounced like Mah-? It sounds more like Spanish than Italian to me. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:23, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect this was in response to my respelling as mah-yeh-ROH-nee? I was giving "mah" as the pronunciation of "ma"; the j goes on the next syllable, and is part of the "yeh". --Trovatore (talk) 18:24, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The notes above suggest that it's "Ma-", and not "Maj-", that is pronounced "Mah-"; and that the following "j" is a vowel as described at Italian_orthography#J,_K,_W,_X_and_Y. Bazza (talk) 12:05, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The name is likely an orthographic variant of Maglieroni, which would be pronounced /maʎ.ʎeˈrɔ.ni/. --Lambiam 14:22, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

With the open o, ya think? Open v closed o isn't used especially distinctively where I was in Italy, but my intuition would have been closed. --Trovatore (talk) 21:01, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

They are indeed hardly contrastive even in stressed positions. Wiktionary gives us /fi.larˈmɔ.ni.ko/ for filarmonico and /mak.keˈrɔ.ni.ko/ for maccheronico, but /a.li.men.tatˈ t͡sjo.ne/ for alimentazione. There are also regional differences in the pronunciation, which makes it hard to be definitive, especially for possibly regional names. --Lambiam 22:05, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Those pronunciations are intuitive to me. I wonder if an o in a stressed penult tends to be closed, but open in a stressed antepenult? --Trovatore (talk) 00:19, 5 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In sacerdozio /sa.t͡ʃerˈdɔt.t͡sjo/ the first o is open in a stressed penult, while it is closed in the stressed antepenult of polvere| /ˈpol.ve.re/, if we may trust the pronunciations given by Wiktionary – but the Italian Wiktionary agrees. So there may be no hard and fast rule. I don't know if there is a minimal pair establishing these as separate phonemes more than as preferential allophones. --Lambiam 08:40, 5 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The syllabicity of sacerdozio seems a little ambiguous to me. I would probably think of the first o as being on the antepenult, notwithstanding that the io part is sort of legato. --Trovatore (talk) 04:52, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

March 6

Origin of tone

When and where did the first occurrence of a word that had the meaning of tone, appeared? Tone as in "(linguistics) The pitch of a word that distinguishes a difference in meaning, for example in Chinese." (from wiktionary). I have searched on scholar.google.com, scholar.archive.org and did not expect results. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IloveUveryMuch (talk • contribs) 18:04, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It is very likely that tonal languages appeared in early prehistory, hundreds of centuries before the invention of writing. (And if not, it is impossible to prove this.) There is no hope of pinning this down in any meaningful way. --Lambiam 21:25, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As I read it, the OP isn't asking for the first tonal language, but for the first usage of a term to denote "tone" in this sense. I may be wrong, though. Deor (talk) 23:36, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Deor, you are completely correct on my main point here. --IloveUveryMuch (talk) 00:36, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Here's some general info:[2] --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:46, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The ancient Greek word "tonos" meant most literally "stretching" or "thing stretched", and so in an extended sense could refer to voice pitch (a strained voice), and thus to Greek pitch accent (and also to ictus, or stress added to certain syllables in poetry). I'm not sure when the distinction was first made between pitch-accent languages (like ancient Greek) and tonal languages (like modern Chinese or many sub-saharan African languages)... AnonMoos (talk) 01:43, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A contribution to the Bulletins de la société d'anthropologie de Paris, published in 1872 but originating from a lecture delivered 21 December 1871, calls Thai a tonal language (langue à tons), just like Chinese and Vietnamese (annamite).^[3] A very similar passage is found in the entry thaï in the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle,^[4] in volume 15, which was issued in 1876. The entries chinois and annamite in earlier volumes do not mention tonality. --Lambiam 10:04, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:LambiamIs it the first occurence of the word? IloveUveryMuch (talk) 22:37, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

March 7

[1] Some sources have Edoardo or Edouardo.

[nb 1]