Language desk
< October 6	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 7[edit]

Questions[edit]

Is there any language where word derived from Latin hora has /h/ sound?
Is there any Romance language where word derived from Latin habere has /h/ sound?
Are there any words in Japanese with /l/ sound?
Is there any Western Romance language which has retained noun cases?
Can words kanji, manga, hiragana, katakana, hangul and hanja be used in plural in English?
Why does English not have a Germanic word for "peace"?
Is there any dialect of English that has still retained grammatical gender for nouns?

--40bus (talk) 21:20, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1. Albanian herë. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:40, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1. Also English horary and horarium, depending on how to interpret the query. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:25, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

3. /l/ is not a separate phoneme in Japanese. It could be a variant of /ɾ/ in refined, female speech. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:40, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Never heard that one before. [l] is a pretty common allophone of /r/ across the gender spectrum, especially utterance-initially. Nardog (talk) 06:25, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It was maybe a hasty analysis... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:30, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

6. The word 'frith' exists, although it's rareöy used outside of heathenry or paganism. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:40, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to friþ, Old English apparently also had sibb, which descended into sib meaning "to bring into relation; establish a relationship between; make friendly; reconcile." GalacticShoe (talk) 22:24, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also stilly can mean peaceful in the calm and quiet sense, see Oft, in the stilly night. Alansplodge (talk) 10:17, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

5. If you're referring to the symbols themselves and not the whole system, then yes kanji can be plural. Manga too. I don't believe I've heard of hiragana and katakana being used directly as plurals before; every time I've heard people refer to multiple such characters, they've added a plural word afterwards, e.g. "hiragana characters", "katakana letters", etc. At the same time, I imagine that it still follows the same rules as can probably be used directly in plural. GalacticShoe (talk) 22:15, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

4. The general consensus appears to be no. From what I've seen after a quick search, French apparently retained a case system up until the 14th/15th century, and some speakers of Franco-Provençal retain case specifically for articles, but not nouns. GalacticShoe (talk) 22:47, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1. I thought of (English) 'horology', but the SOED says it comes from Gk 'hora'; I wonder how they distinguish between Greek and Latin 'hora' in the etymology of an E19 century word? -- Verbarson ^talk_edits 22:55, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the Wiktionary entry for horology, it appears that it comes from Latin horologia, where both horo- and -logia came from Greek. So the SOED is probably digging to the ultimate root. GalacticShoe (talk) 23:01, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It is an instance of a general recipe for baking learned neologisms. Step 1: come up with an Ancient Greek neologism, typically based on components for forming words attested in original Ancient Greek texts. Step 2: transmogrify the new word like the old Romans would have done if they had had the occasion to borrow the word from Greek. Step 3: borrow the word from (New) Latin into a present-day language, adapting it the same way as happened with Classic Latin words that were borrowed. Applied to this case, Step 1 gives ὡρολογία by combining ὡρο- (as in Ancient Greek ὡρολόγιον) with -λογία (as in Ancient Greek ἀστρολογία). Step 2 turns this into horologia. Step 3, with English as the borrower, gives us horology. Ancient Greek ὥρα is only indirectly involved as having lent its stem to ὡρο-. --Lambiam 12:34, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

7. It appears from a quick search that the answer is no, as I was unable to find any mention of any dialects of English that still preserve grammatical gender. However, some dialects of the closely-related Scots language, in particular Insular Scots, apparently still do retain it. The article on the Shetland dialect specifically mentions grammatical gender for nouns. In terms of the other two Anglic languages, there doesn't seem to be any mention of a system of grammatical gender for Yola, and I highly doubt that there is enough actual information on Fingallian to glean much on its grammatical systems. GalacticShoe (talk) 14:13, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2. I may be wrong, but I believe the German haben has an aspirated h (if that's what you're asking about). 81.158.225.228 (talk) 23:25, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

German is not a Romance language, and haben is not derived from Latin habere/habeo, but a native word. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:13, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You are right that German is not a Romance language. I'm afraid I forgot that the question was about Romance languages. It is also true that haben is not derived from the Latin habere. However, some experts say that haben and habere share a common Aryan source, for example: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/Annotated/haben. Therefore, it is technically correct to say that haben is not a native word, in the sense of aboriginal. 81.158.225.228 (talk) 01:22, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't "Aryan" mean Indo-European in this case? Besides, I think the hypothesis is considered outdated by now, with German haben being cognate to Latin capiō, and Latin habeō being cognate to German geben. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:00, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Question 3[edit]

Are there any dialects of Japanese which have /l/ phoneme, distinct from /ɾ/?--40bus (talk) 13:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No. Otherwise a certain portion of the speech community would be exempt from the problem of the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers. Nardog (talk) 14:04, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]