Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 November 13

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November 13

Myanmar character

What is the ဵ character? My screen displays the little box indicating that I don't have the right character set. Google tells me that it's "MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN E ABOVE", but I don't know if this is a Latin E with a diacritical mark used primarily in Myanmar, or an E-equivalent character in Burmese, or something else. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:50, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

There is an article on the Burmese alphabet which shows a sympol like that in the list of diacritic signs - and then says "Changes inherent vowel to /i/" It certainly won't be any form of Latin E, as the Burmese language does not use the Latin letters. Wymspen (talk) 14:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Okay, so it's a Burmese character. This is why we redirect characters to alphabet articles; little boxes are useless for identification, but a redirect to the alphabet tells me that it's a part of the alphabet. For all I knew, it was used when writing English in Myanmar, but not used when writing English anywhere else. Thank you! Nyttend backup (talk) 14:49, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

That's not the right character. The one Wymspen refers to is U+102E (ီ), the one you asked about was U+1035. They are visually similar - U+1035 has a open side on the right, where U+102E is closed.

The answer is similar - it's a vowel diacritic used in the Burmese script - but in this case not in the Burmese language itself. The character table at Wikipedia:Font on the Burmese Wikipedia indicates that it is used in the Mon language.

Part of the reason for the confusion with the text in Unicode may be the fact that Myanmar is intended not just as the name of the country, but also the name of the majority language and the script in which that language is written. When it says "MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN E ABOVE" it's referring to the Myanmar script, not the country called Myanmar.

Also worth mentioning that this is one of the less well-adopted parts of the Unicode standard. Most people in Myanmar - including on the web - use non-Unicode fonts such as Zawgyi that use the same code points but put different characters in each place. Looks like Zawgyi doesn't actually use U+1035 but in the general case you may find that what is intended is actually something completely different from what Unicode says you should see. Kahastok talk 21:22, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

W sound in Greek

Does anyone know the reason the w sound disappeared from Greek?? Georgia guy (talk) 20:15, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, the letter for the PIE reflex of /w/ in Greek was digamma, Ϝ, which dropped out of most dialects rather early, although it's common in the archaic, pre-Homeric Mycenaean Greek. The problem with such explanations is that we often have historically attested series like f > h > 0 in the development of Castilian from Latin. But there's a hiatus between Mycenaean Greek and post-Homeric greek where there are no attested texts and the Alphabet is entirely replaced. So the relevant data is speculative. μηδείς (talk) 21:09, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

You can never really give reasons for language change, Georgia guy; all you can do is notice that some changes are more likely (happen more often) than others. Mηδείς has given one example of a labial disappearing, but this also happened regularly in both Celtic (/p/ -> nothing; eg Welsh adar 'birds' is cognate with Greek pteros (wing) and feather; and Irish athair 'father' with Latin pater and indeed English father) and also in Japanese (/p/ -> /h/). In fact there is one isolated instance in Welsh of /ʋ/ disappearing: the word mab 'son' appears in patronymic names in the fossilised form ap which appears to have come from map via a form with a /ʋ/. So it appears that labials are rather labile, so perhaps you might expect the weakly pronounced /ʋ/ to be the most labile. --ColinFine (talk) 21:36, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

• Reasons and stages or trends are indeed two different things. But ease of production and lack of contrast are often given as causes for phonetic change. That is, if /h/ is easier to produce than /f/, and the language lacks /h/, then such a change doesn't lead to confusion, so it is not prevented by an increase in semantic confusion. The direct and unconditioned change from /w/ to /0/ is highly unusual. Some dialects of English have hwa > hu > u for "Oo's 'at at te door, luv?" in the development of the standard word "who". But the historical development of PIE /k^w/ to /hw/ to /ʍ/ or /h/ before rounded vowels to /0/ is much better attested and explained. Presumably there were intermediate stages in Greek as well; they are just not attested as far as I am aware. μηδείς (talk) 21:52, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

BTW, athair is derived from the reconstructed ɸatīr, so p > 0 is not assumed, and the same development is presumed in Japanese, where p > ɸ (> h | i) is assumed, and ɸ is still found in the Ryukyuan languages in conservative forms. In the Rusyn language, PIE w > w/v/f depending on context, but the /f/ has not progressesd to /h/ or /0/, given /h/ is not an allophone or dialectal variant of /g/ as it is in Great Russian, but a phoneme in its own right. μηδείς (talk) 05:34, 14 November 2017 (UTC)