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September 21

Meaning of /L in German

In an old German academic journal, the following occurs:- Unter Mitwirkung der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft herausgegeben von E. GRÜNEISEN, Marburg / L. M. PLANCK, Berlin. or "Published with the collaboration ...... " What does the / L. after the town name signify? Dionne Court (talk) 13:56, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

"Marburg an der Lahn, as opposed to Marburg an der Drau (which was the German name of Maribor in Slovenia). It's a similar naming convention as still used in "Frankfurt/M" for "Frankfurt am Main". Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:02, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Not to be mixed up with "Frankfurt/O"? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:34, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Exactly. Although locally they seem to prefer the spelling "Frankfurt (O)" there. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

That makes sense. Thank you Fut.Perf. Dionne Court (talk) 00:32, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

The King's Joke

What did King Charles say in his speech at the French Senate today that made the lawmakers laugh? (YouTube clip at 11:25) Something to do with the Rugby World Cup, but it defeated my schoolboy French and the translator didn't bother as the rest of that segment was in English. Alansplodge (talk) 17:28, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Alansplodge: "pas de coups bas, et que le meilleur gagne!" ("no dirty tricks, and may the best win"). Bazza (talk) 18:25, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

His accent is quite atrocious, but it's also translated here. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:32, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you both - his Dinner for One gag at the Bundestag was better. Not sure if his accent is much worse than Macron's English but at least he made the effort. Alansplodge (talk) 20:36, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

Charles also seems to have made some questionable choices for his accent, such as using the "poetic pronunciation" of French with (some of) the final vowel sounds pronunced. In standard French, it's only done in poetry, singing or occasionally rapping (I guess), and it sounds strangely forced in a basic conversation, particularly when his accent already is quite thick. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:34, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

"Choices for his accent"? What planet are you living on? People learning a foreign language don't "choose an accent". They struggle with alien grammar and syntax, and with sounds that not only can they not make but they can't even hear in the first place. I daresay you have no difficulty at all choosing the correct accent for every occasion in the litany of languages you say you speak, but have some mercy on the rest of us who a) are at least making the effort and b) find it really fucking hard. DuncanHill (talk) 11:01, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I suspect that pronouncing the final vowel sounds is a fairly common error for English speakers reading a French text. Personally, I always thought there should have been a French version of Professor Henry Higgins, who would teach the French to pronounce their word-endings properly and make it easier for the rest of us, but that seems infinitely improbable. Alansplodge (talk) 14:35, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Conversely, when my Father was teaching numeracy and literacy to British Army recruits of diverse disabilities (e.g. dyslexia and dyscalculia), backgrounds (e.g. little formal education) and nationalities, one of his pupils had the whole unit stumped. This gentleman was half English and spoke it well, but was raised in France and his English spelling was weirdly poor. Finally they realised that, knowing a word ended in a vowel sound, he assumed from French orthography that it must be followed by some consonant or else it would be silent. 51.198.107.25 (talk) 16:46, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

English learners of French shouldn't really have any difficulties with avoiding pronouncing the final vowel in gagne, I believe. The pronunciation of vowel sounds like 'ue' and 'eu' would be affected by accent, but pronouncing the final -e in gagne seems more like a deliberate choice, or merely a misunderstanding of French orthography. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:31, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Contrariwise, I find it impossible to pronounce gn without a hint of a following vowel. —Tamfang (talk) 22:17, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, can't be done. DuncanHill (talk) 22:37, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

French pronunciation has probably not been entirely static over the last century, and His Majesty is an elderly man who doubtless learned French over 60 years ago, probably from French-speaking English teachers who themselves learned French some time before that.

Also, he's not trying to pass for French. Everyone knows he's not, and expects him to speak it as all we English do – imperfectly. His object was to communicate, and I doubt his minor flaws were an impediment to that. 51.198.107.25 (talk) 23:00, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

You've probably heard the old story about when JFK said "Ich bin ein Berliner" that he was technically saying he was a type of pastry. I asked a native-German colleague about this once, and he said it was no big deal, because "we knew what he meant." So even if the language wasn't perfect, the effort was appreciated. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 03:11, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

This is interesting, because that story is not true. Double sharp (talk) 08:06, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

So my German colleague was just humoring me. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 10:21, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Not necessarily. The linked article says that Berliners didn't use the term to refer to a doughnut, but also that it was so used in other regions of Germany (which even Berliners would likely have been aware of). Thus the possible double meaning would doubtless have occurred even to some Berliners, although they wouldn't have interpreted it as a "mistake" on Kennedy's part. Elsewhere in Germany the double meaning would be more obvious, so even at the time jokes about it likely circulated, and some Germans, particularly children, might have taken them at face value. 51.198.107.25 (talk) 14:56, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

As a footnote, this French news video of the speech has eliceted only complementary comments from Francophones praising his French; "Bravo l’anglois! C’est sympathique de faire un discours en français, l’accent est bon en plus!" and "Charles III parle très bien français bravo!".

However, I suspect that Samuel Johnson's maxim has come into play here and it was "...like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all". Alansplodge (talk) 18:08, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

September 23

A few questions

1. Are there any varieties of Spanish where J / soft G is not /x/? Are there any dialects where it is pronounced as /ʃ/ or /ʒ/?
2. Why Spanish does not contract de to d' before vowels, unlike Catalan and French?
3. Are there any words in Spanish which have ll or ñ in coda?
4. Is there any Romance language with aspirated consonants?
5. Are there any varieties of English which lack aspiration of unvoiced stops?
6. Are there any strong verbs in German and Dutch which have same stem vowels in all forms?
7. Is there any Romance language with phonemic velar nasal?
8. Why is Icelandic not a pro-drop language, despite that there are different forms for all verbs in all six persons?
9. Portuguese has semivocalic /j/ in diphthongs as in leite /lɐjtɨ/. But does it also have non-semivocalic /j/ like English y in yes and Finnish j in jalka?

--40bus (talk) 13:27, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

       10. Are there any words in French where plural suffix -s is pronounced before a pause?
--40bus (talk) 16:25, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 1

I think it varies between dialects. It could be closer to /h/ for instance. To my knowledge, all Spanish dialects would pronounce native J and X identically, though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:08, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Spanish words with a double-ll or a y in them are pronounced like that in some dialects. Yo can sound like "zho", for example. But as far as I know, j and soft-g are guttural - "like the ch in the Scottish word loch"" is the typical explanation. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 16:43, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, that pronunciation ("zho") was typical for Argentinian Spanish, but rare outside of the country. (Edit. Seems closer to "sho", though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

When I've heard yo pronounced that way, it sounds a lot like "Joe", to my American ears. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 00:45, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

"X" was /ʃ/ in some 16th-century versions of Spanish, and was used to transcribe some American Indian languages with that value. See IPA under Chicxulub crater, to start with... AnonMoos (talk) 20:58, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

In some loanwords, at least. The Royal Academy would like people to write yudo and yudoca but RFEJYDA uses judo and judoka.

It can also be silent in some positions/speakers. I think I have seen reló for reloj in some tango.

Spanish phonology says:

after another consonant, the voiced obstruent may even be deleted, as in iceberg, pronounced .

--Error (talk) 14:56, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 2

Another "why" question which cannot be answered. True, Spanish has Inés de Oliveira Cézar while Portuguese has Luís Paulino d'Oliveira Pinto da França, but there's no "rule" - cf. es:Francisco D'Intino. 31.55.242.67 (talk) 15:28, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Some Romance languages use apostrophes, but Spanish generally does not. The closest I can think of in normal Spanish usage are things such as using del instead of de el and al instead of a el. Googling the subject, there are occasional apostrophes in Spanish, but mostly in words borrowed from other languages. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 16:39, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 3

Proper nouns from Catalan like Sabadell, Martorell, Pedro Alemañ. However, people who are not familiar with Catalan will probably pronounce them as "Sabadel", "Martorel", "Alemán". --Error (talk) 15:03, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 6

I doubt it. It sounds to be the opposite of the basic definition of a "strong verb". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:08, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

In Dutch it depends indeed on the definition of a 'strong' verb. Strong verbs in Dutch are characterized by two features: 1. Changes in the stem vowel, 2. A past participle ending in -en rather than '-t' or 'd'. However, some verbs have only 1 of these 2 features, but are still often counted among the 'strong' verbs (or called 'half-strong'). An example of these would be 'bakken' (meaning 'to bake'): ik bak, ik bakte, ik heb gebakken). (Dutch source) - Lindert (talk) 16:22, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I meant if there are any verbs which get neither ablaut nor -te/-de ending in past tense. --40bus (talk) 17:54, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

So you're asking about verbs were the past tense is identical to the present tense, except (in Dutch) 3.SG and 2.SG without inversion (where the present gets a -t suffix). I'm quite sure they don't exist. As you may know by now, I'm a native Dutch speaker. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

The only traditional "strong" Germanic verbs that I know about with the same stem vowel in past and present are some Gothic class 7 verbs (but of course the past forms are reduplicated). Brief discussion at wikt:Category:Gothic class 7 strong verbs... AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 7

I see some Romance languages in Voiced velar nasal. In some of them it is marked as an allophone, but not in all of them. --Error (talk) 15:14, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 8

The same reply as for similar questions before. It just is. German works similarly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:21, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- There aren't always six different person/number verb forms in all Icelandic verbs in all tenses (2nd. singular and 3rd. singular are the same in some tenses). But an interesting question... AnonMoos (talk) 21:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

P.S. Japanese is pretty much a pro-drop language, despite not having any person/number inflections at all! AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

For a more complicated pro-drop case, see the Finnish language. Its finite verb forms are inflected unambiguously for person/number combinations, but only 1st and 2nd person pronouns can usually be omitted. If a verb has a specific third-person subject, pronouns cannot be omitted. However, dummy subjects of impersonal verbs (the "it" in "It's raining", etc) are not expressed by a pronoun... AnonMoos (talk) 19:15, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Languages love to have some redundancy. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:01, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 9

Before the spelling reform the name of a well-known American city was written Nova York. Now it's written Nova Iorque. 31.55.242.67 (talk) 15:02, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I guess the answer is yes, if we're talking about the Portuguese of Portugal. Cf. iogurte 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:06, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Also iodo ("iodine") in both Portugal and Brazil, according to English Wiktionary. Double sharp (talk) 10:15, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 10

It's not entirely clear what you mean, cf. Liaison (French). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:16, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I mean that if les œeufs were pronounced /le‿zœfs/, with final -s pronounced (it is the last consonant before a pause). Are there any such instances?

In sentence-final position it is not pronounced. A seeming counterexample is par ici il n'y a pas d'ours ("there are no bears around here"), which in standard French is pronounced like /pa.ʁ‿i.si.i.l‿n‿i.j‿a.pa‿d‿uʁs/. The final ⟨s⟩ is, however, in this case arguably not the plural suffix.  --Lambiam 18:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Is this sandhi?

In Ancient Greek, if an oxytone word (one with an acute accent on the last syllable) is followed directly by another word, the acute becomes a grave. Is this an example of sandhi? Primal Groudon (talk) 15:40, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

The definition of the concept of "sandhi" is so broad that it would be hard to state definitively that this is not an example of sandhi. Although Ancient Greek was strictly speaking not a tonal language, this might even be called a form of tone sandhi.  --Lambiam 18:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

What the orthographic grave means is the deletion of a pitch accent in some circumstances when there was a closely following pitch accent in the next word. AnonMoos (talk) 21:03, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

When is a neologism no longer a neologism?

I occasionally read (on wiki and off) that a word or phrase is a neologism. It seems to me that some of these have been around for quite a while and no longer can be considered new. So my question is: how long after a word or phrase is coined is it no longer new and cannot be called a neologism? Obviously (I think) we can't nail down an exact duration such as 12 years and 7 months, but are we talking decades or centuries?

As an aside, is there a word (maybe a retronym) that describes words and phrases that are not new?

Thanks in advance! 76.14.122.5 (talk) 23:09, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

The opposite of "neologism" might be "cliche". ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 00:44, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Surely the opposite would be "archaic". Shantavira| 08:50, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

"Not new" isn't the same as "rarely used". Kleenex isn't archaic. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:46, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

The definition in our article has two parts, "relatively recent" and "accepted into mainstream language". In that sense, "archaic" (i.e. old and fallen out of use) is not so bad. Of course there's nothing that could unequivocally be considered as the opposite of "neologism". --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:28, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Once people start using a word without realizing it is a newcomer to the lexicon, simply expecting their audience to know its meaning, it ceases to be a neologism. An antonym is paleologism.  --Lambiam 17:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for all the replies. --76.14.122.5 (talk) 04:54, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

It is relative: We have Category:12th-century neologisms. --Error (talk) 15:17, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

September 24

Official renaming of months in Turkish

In 1945, the Turkish government officially changed four Turkish months: kânunusani → ocak (January), teşrinievvel → ekim (October), teşrinisani → kasım (November), kânunuevvel → aralık. I wonder:

1. How quickly were the new months adopted by the Turkish population? (today no one uses the old ones in Turkey and most young people don't even know their existence)
2. Turkish is spoken outside Turkey, especially by Turks in the Balkans, Meskhetian Turks, Iraqi Turkmen (although their variety may constitute a separate language), Syrian Turkmen and Lebanese Turkmen. Did these people adopt the new months even though they lived outside Turkey and were not subject to the Turkish gov mandatory change? For instance, I know Bulgarian Turks who don't use the standard Turkish names of the days of the week but instead birinci gün, ikinci gün, etc. as in Old Turkish.
3. What about other Turkic languages? It looks like most of them (Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek at least) use the Russian names. But what about Crimean Tatar, Chuvash, Qashqai, Karakalpak, Yakut, Tuvan, and others? Is South Azerbaijani using different names than North Azerbaijani? Didn't old Turkic have names for month? Gagauz seems to use "Kasım" as well. Uyghur has a Russian system and a Sino-Turkic one.

a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 17:36, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Re 1, did you mean to write that today no one uses the old month names? From my experience, the Turkish spoken by Syrian Turkmen is indistinguishable from that in Turkey. The names in Tatarca can be seen in Wiktionary: wikt:Category:tt:Months. For many other languages, just replace "tt" by the two-letter language code.  --Lambiam 05:32, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, the old ones indeed. Thanks, I'll check. I wonder if/how all speakers suddenly, almost overnight, changed using words as common as month names to adopt the new ones, including those speakers not living in Turkey! Were these words already in informal use, at least in some dialects/variants (seems to be the case of kasım in Gagauz)? a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 07:52, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Two useful articles Arabic names of Gregorian months and Assyrian calendar. There is no incentive for Turks in the Levant to use the new names, which would only confuse the local population. 2A00:23D0:E9E:8301:C53E:26E3:CBBC:836F (talk) 09:20, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

FWIW I asked another Bulgarian Turk friend: she speaks perfect standard Turkish with us, although with a Bulgarian Turk accent. However, when she speaks with her Bulgarian Turk friends, she speaks their local dialect which is fairly different (see tr:Türkiye_Türkçesi_ağızları#Örnek_metinler and Bulgarian_Turks#Distribution_of_Turkish_dialects_in_Bulgaria). She didn't go to school and only learned Istanbul Turkish through TV (the incredible soft power of Turkish television drama!). She uses standard Turkish names for days of the week and months, including the post-1945 ones and she had never heard teşrinievvel and other pre-1945 ones. I asked an Azerbaijani friend as well: same, never heard the pre-1945 ones. So it's possible that the new names just quickly spread throughout the Turkish speaking world (and even crossing the Iron Curtain!) due to the prestige of Istanbul Turkish and the softpower of Turkish media? a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 10:15, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the List of Turkic languages and the Wiktionary categories for month, many aren't listed (e.g., Kyrgyz , Qashqai , Karakalpak ...), but among those on Wiktionary:

• Uzbek, North Azerbaijani, Uyghur, Tuvan: only use Russian months
• Crimean Tatar: Russian months but also "saban ayı" for March
• Kazakh language : use their "own" months: wikt:Template:list:Gregorian calendar months/kk, a mix of Persian, Arabic, and proto-Turkic words, including Nowruz for March and a cognate with temmuz for... August!
• Bashkir language : both Russian and "own" names: wikt:Template:list:Gregorian calendar months/ba
• Chuvash language : "own" names: wikt:Category:cv:Months
• Kumyk language : both Russian and "own" names: wikt:Template:list:Gregorian calendar months/kum
• Yakut language : "own" names: wikt:Category:sah:Months

However, when these Turkic languages use their Turkic names for months, they don't seem to use the same at all. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 11:02, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

According to the template, the Zazaki names are çele, şibat, mert, lisan (misprint for nisan?), mayis, heziran, temuz, agistos, keşkelun, tişrine, kelverdan and gagan. The 1945 change involved a translation of the original Arabic name for January into Turkish. Previously, both December and January had the same Arabic name (differentiated by "I" and "II") and December was also given a Turkish name. The Judeo-Babylonian name for October (today is the Day of Atonement) was also replaced by a Turkish word. I would imagine that the population would have taken a favourable view of the Turkification of their calendar. The last name change prior to 1945 was possibly Sextilis to Augustus in 8 BC. If there were popular antagonism to a name change it would probably not be made, so all these changes may be expected to have been readily accepted. It's very different when the calendar itself is tampered with. Thus after the change from old style to new style in 1752 people showed their disapproval of the new Good Friday by disrupting church services on that day. They soon found out that occasionally the "new" date was the same as the old (the first time this happened was in 1755). 92.10.100.221 (talk) 13:44, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

September 25

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