Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 March 27

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March 27

Questions again

1. Why does the English pronunciation respelling not differentiate between long and short variants of same phoneme, e.g. [i] and [iː] are both ee, and they are not assigned different respellings?
2. Is there any modern Germanic language which uses some form (doubling, diacritic) to indicate long vowels consistently like Old Norse did with acute accent? So, is there any language where bare single vowel letters cannot stand for long vowels?
3. Can consonants be geminated after long vowels in Estonian? So, if words of type tak, taak and takk are possible in Estonian, are words of type taakk also possible?
4. Is there any language which marks all its geminate consonants with diacritics, like languages which mark all their long vowels with diacritics?

--40bus (talk) 17:13, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #1: In english vowel length is allophonic, which is to say that English does not draw meaningful distinction between, say, [i] and [iː]. There a no natively English words for which there is a minimal pair where the difference between [i] and [iː] would result in different meanings. There may be dialectical differences, where one dialect may use [i] and another [i:], or they may exist in free variation with each other. You'll find more on this at Vowel length#In English; to wit "Vowels show allophonic variation in length and also in other features according to the context in which they occur." There are a few dialects, such as noted Australian English in that article, which does have a few cases of non-allophonic vowel length, but those are rare, even in dialects where they occur, and even in Australian English, the distinction is mainly due to the difference in historical R-coloration, where Australian vowels went from, say /ər/ --> /ɚ/ --> /ə:/. --Jayron32 18:08, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- Hebrew and Arabic mark gemination with diacritics (dagesh and shadda respectively), as does Ursula K. Le Guin's fictional Kesh language. Note that the Hebrew dagesh diacritic is ambiguous (but only for the six letters writing the sounds p, b, t, d, k, g) since it has the dual function of writing gemination, and also indicating lack of fricativization of those six sounds... AnonMoos (talk) 18:49, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

2: The spelling of Dutch is pretty consistent when it comes to indicating vowel length: so much so that even forms of the same word sometimes are spelled with single letters and sometimes with double ones. See Dutch orthography#Morphological alternations. Short vowels (except the schwa) must always be checked, so bare single vowel letters actually stand for long vowels.

4: Greenlandic did so until 1973. Different diacritics above the vowels indicated gemination of either the vowel itself, of the following consonant, or of both. See Greenlandic language#Orthography. --Theurgist (talk) 18:56, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #1: because there was no impetus to distinguish them. Writing systems are (usually) not planned or designed, and as long as they serve the needs of their users, there is no reason to change them. (Note that there is also usually no impetus to alter them to assist learners, whether children or foreigners).

As for #2: Old Norse did not consistently mark this. In normalized texts, and sporadically in the manuscripts, long vowels are distinguished by an accute accent except æ and œ, which are always long - Gordon, An introduction to Old Norse, p. 266 (emphasis added). Again, a writing system needs to be good enough to meet the needs of its users, not to meet anybody's idea of how it should be patterned.

Number 4#: Arabic and biblical Hebrew both mark geminates with diacritics. ColinFine (talk) 18:57, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

ColinFine -- That makes Old Norse sound not very different from Old English, where there was an acute-like "apex" diacritic to indicate long vowels, but it was rather sporadically used... AnonMoos (talk) 19:03, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Although one talks about long and short vowels in Dutch, it's more a difference in quality than in length. Vowel length isn't really phonemic in most Dutch dialects. It may have been in the past. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:18, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Speaking of this, why long vowels in Finnish and Estonian are not considered to differ in quality, unlike in Swedish and other Germanic languages?

--40bus (talk) 18:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I think you use the word "considered" incorrectly, here. Anyway, the quality/ length distinction is shared with Norwegian, so I guess it might be a Late Old Norse development. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:08, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I meant why Finnish and Estonian short high vowels are [i], [y] and [u] are transcribed as [i], [y] and [u] even in phonetic transcription, and not as [ɪ], [ʏ] and [ʊ]. But I have read form something that they are more close to [ɪ], [ʏ] and [ʊ].

--40bus (talk) 13:36, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Finnish and Estonian don't seem to have any near-close vowels, after reading through the articles on Finnish and Estonian phonologies, and the articles for the vowels, themselves. I also think that in Finland-Swedish, the distinction of quality might be absent or less prominent, although I need some sources. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:56, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

5. Is there any language which pronounced the Cyrillic letter Х (Kha) as /h/?

Sure: Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet --2A02:5080:2D12:B00:F5F1:E1B0:669F:A977 (talk) 07:03, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

6. Off-topic: can titles of content pages contain non-Latin characters? In Finnish Wikipedia, articles of Cyrillic letters have letters themselves as names, but in English Wikipedia, they have their English names as names, like Ш in Finnish Wikipedia versus Sha in English Wikipedia.
7. Are there any loanwords in Estonian ending with Ä?

Here are words in Estonian ending in Ä: [1]. Some of these words are native monosyllables and their derivatives, others are foreign geographical names. Perrä is labelled as a dialectal word (probably from South Estonian), the geographical names Küllätüvä and Sännä are also South Estonian.Burzuchius (talk) 11:55, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

8. Are there any native suffixes in Estonian with O?
--40bus (talk) 19:20, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Policy at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:35, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Re 6: It is technically possible, but would go against policy.  --Lambiam 22:26, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

About item 5, I recall reading in Harpo Marx's autobiography that in Russia they spelled his name the Cyrillic way, i.e. it looked like XAPПO MAPKS. That X would have been like a guttural "H". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Oh? They didn't write it Нагро Магх so that it would be pronounced Nagro Magkh? Amazing. — I have heard that not all Russians are aware that the linguist Ноам Хомски is related to the polemicist Ном Чомски. —Tamfang (talk) 03:33, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Disregarding the sarcasm, Russian regularly transcribes or readapts borrowed words with initial h- as either kh- (the ach-laut found in Scottish loch or German Achtung) or g-, although there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason for whenever which sound is chosen, so it's gamburger for hamburger (food) and khip-khop for hiphop (music), also, it seems to be Garri Potter and Khagrid, for some reason. My knowledge of Russian is very basic, and I have a poor grasp of native speakers' linguistic connotations, so it might need some check-up. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

See this previous thread, as well as the other threads linked therein. Deor (talk) 14:02, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

The main reason (mentioned in that previous thread too) is that the Standard Russian pronunciation mandated Г=/ɣ/ until the Bolshevik Revolution, at which point the colloquial pronunciation as /g/ was promoted to become the new standard, and the /ɣ/ branded as belonging to Church Slavonic, and mocked together with everything else church-related.

So, words in common use by 1917 (such as Harry) kept their Г-spelling, whereas words unheard until after 1917 (such as Hagrid) got an Х-spelling. A notable example: Aldous Huxley, who started writing in the 1920s, is ru:Хаксли, Олдос, whereas his father Thomas Henry Huxley, who died in 1895, is ru:Гексли, Томас Генри 81.218.172.220 (talk) 16:46, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

And... "gamburger" got a g (Г), due to the relationship with the German town "Gamburg" ? ... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

On the periodic table: гелий (helium), гольмий (holmium), and гафний (hafnium), but хассий (hassium). On the other hand, hafnium was discovered in 1923, so maybe the Г-convention was not abandoned all at once, but slowly. Double sharp (talk) 02:45, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Note also that the G/H ambiguity applies in both directions, thus a currency of Kyivan Rus is Grivna, but the identically named currency of modern Kyiv is Hryvnia 213.137.66.10 (talk) 20:16, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, the transliterative systems of Russian and Ukrainian are not identical. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:20, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

6: There are three cases I'm aware of where article titles contain non-Latin characters:

• mathematical constants, e.g. Approximations of π
• disambiguators of Chinese surnames that are romanized identically, e.g. Li (surname 李), Li (surname 栗) and Li (surname 理)
• some internationalized country code top-level domains, mostly Cyrillic (.рф, .мкд, .қаз, etc) and one Armenian (.հայ); other such domains are transcribed though: e.g. emarat and .bangla

Otherwise redirections from foreign-script native names are common: e.g. ኢትዮጵያ redirects to Ethiopia. --Theurgist (talk) 16:54, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Even articles about letters in foreign alphabets get romanized, a bit curiously. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)