Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language (WP:RDL)

= March 22 =  Do following languages have /j/ sound?Portuguese Greek GeorgianDo following languages have diphthongs?Swedish Russian Georgian Armenian French JapaneseIs there any Celtic language with neuter gender? Does Swedish have any native words with letter combinations ⟨ji⟩ and ⟨jy⟩? Why do Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese forbid sound combinations /ji/ and /wu/? Why did none of the Romance languages inherit word equus for horse? Is there any non-Romanian, non-Creole Romance language which has retained noun cases?--40bus (talk) 17:16, 22 March 2023 (UTC)  Your numbering is confusing, but Portuguese has a /j/ sound, whereas Greek has a fricative allophonic variant, and Georgian seems to lack it. This could easily be looked up in the Wikipedia articles.Swedish has jisses (gee) and jycke (cur, runt), although as they're natively modified variants of loanwords, they might not count. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:51, 22 March 2023 (UTC) The relevant Wikipedia articles are named Portuguese phonology, Modern Greek phonology, Russian phonology, and so on.  --Lambiam 20:12, 22 March 2023 (UTC) Regarding #4, Portuguese has égua for "female horse, mare". CodeTalker (talk) 18:12, 22 March 2023 (UTC) Spanish yegua. wikt:yegua says Compare Catalan euga, Spanish yegua, Galician egua, Portuguese égua, Romanian iapă. --Error (talk) 10:54, 24 March 2023 (UTC) I believe I've seen a map of French dialect words for 'horse', some of which look like cognates of equum.  Likely, though, the intervocalic weakening of the only stop in the word often led that word to be abandoned for homophony. —Tamfang (talk) 02:29, 28 March 2023 (UTC) Yeah, I would assume that, through regular phonological development, it would become something like *'eue' /ø/, and could might counfusion with 'eux' (they) or' œufs' (eggs). Or *'l'eue' /lø/ (the horse) would be confused with 'le' /lə/~/lø/ (stressed the), so the listener would expect some noun to follow. Besides, a word like Gaulish *caballos had been widely borrowed throughout Romance, anyway. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:58, 28 March 2023 (UTC) You have been admonished before about questions of the form "Why doesn't language-X do this differently?" But anyway: if they ever had /ji, wu/ (from what source?), likely they either became plain /i, u/ (perhaps lengthened, as the semivowel assimilates to the full vowel) or dissimilated to something like /je, wo/. —Tamfang (talk) 04:23, 28 March 2023 (UTC)40bus -- Old Irish had neuter gender, but as far as I can tell, none of the other attested Celtic languages of the British Isles does or did (I don't have information about Breton).  As for [ji] and [wu] sequences, [j] is the consonantal version of vowel [i], and [w] of vowel [u].  In many languages, either [ji] and [wu] are forbidden, or [ji] and/or [wu] are allophonic variants of the simple sounds in certain phonological contexts.  (In other systems, [ij] and/or [uw] sequences are allophonic variants of the simple sounds...) AnonMoos (talk) 19:31, 22 March 2023 (UTC)  Swedish has "gift {n} /jɪfːt/", "gikt", "gips", etc, which is pronunced equally as the the "ji" in the informal "jisses". It also has "gyllene", "gycklare", etc. In terms of dipthongs, "Swedish is the only Germanic language which does not have any phonological diphthongs in its Standard Swedish variation." (glottopedia). This is were some of the popular dialects vary a lot. --Soman (talk) 18:55, 23 March 2023 (UTC) 40bus was asking about the spelling/ orthography, not the sound combination. Oh, well... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:52, 23 March 2023 (UTC) The Euro is the European unit of currency, and the Franc used to be the currency unit of France.  Other currency units like dollar, mark, peso, yen, pound, etc. don't sound anything like the names of the places where they are used.  Are there some that I'm missing?  I guess the Swiss Franc kind of sort of counts for historical reasons. Thanks. 2601:648:8200:990:0:0:0:C255 (talk) 19:59, 22 March 2023 (UTC)  The Boliviano. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:03, 22 March 2023 (UTC) The dollar is a corruption of "thaler", which derives from Sankt Joachimsthal, or St Joachim's Valley, a silver mining town then in the Kingdom of Bohemia, but now known as Jáchymov in the Czech Republic. --  Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 20:07, 22 March 2023 (UTC) The euro is also used in places which are not in Europe, as its article shows. Bazza (talk) 20:37, 22 March 2023 (UTC) Note that "Franc" is not named after France (or French) but (like those two names) derives from the Franks. ColinFine (talk) 21:15, 22 March 2023 (UTC) The guinea is named after Guinea. Shells-shells (talk) 22:14, 22 March 2023 (UTC) I assumed at first that Mark could have been derived from a place name, but then it seems that "mark" only got the sense of "ground, soil" in North Germanic languages, so it seems that i was wrong. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:50, 22 March 2023 (UTC)Thanks all.  Boliviano is a good one.  I can't count Thaler except in Joachimsthal itself.  Guinea counts if it was actually used in Guinea.  I.e. if Mexico had a currency called the "Canada" and vice versa, those wouldn't count either, but if would count if they were switched.   Naming it after the people still counts though, I guess, so Franc is still there.  Similarly if Scotland had a currency called the Scot, or the like.  2601:648:8200:990:0:0:0:C255 (talk) 23:51, 22 March 2023 (UTC)  There's also the afghani, the monetary unit of Afghanistan, if "naming it after the people" counts. Deor (talk) 00:40, 23 March 2023 (UTC) There are former currencies: Latvian lats, Lithuanian litas, Zairean zaire. --Theurgist (talk) 06:16, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Score! I wanted to find something and bam: The Florin, once minted in Florence, surviving until today as Hungary's Forint. --Ouro (blah blah) 06:24, 23 March 2023 (UTC) If florin goes, so should bolognino 82.166.199.42 (talk) 07:46, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Among former currencies, there were also Angolan angolar, Geneva genevoise, Português, Somalo and Venezolano 82.166.199.42 (talk) 09:10, 23 March 2023 (UTC)History of Australian currency#Decimalisation tells us that the Austral was proposed as a name the forthcoming decimal unit of currency in that country, but dollar won the day. HiLo48 (talk) 06:27, 23 March 2023 (UTC) That name was later adopted for Argentine austral 82.166.199.42 (talk) 06:52, 23 March 2023 (UTC) How about Sierra Leonean leone 82.166.199.42 (talk) 07:00, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Florins (and, after them, forints) are named after the flower that is the canting arms of Florence. I thought that the ekuele could be related to "Ecuatorial", but it isn't. The name "Naira" was coined from the word "Nigeria" by Obafemi Awolowo.[13][14] However, Naira as a currency was launched by Shehu Shagari as minister of finance in 1973. Livre tournois, livre parisis, European Currency Unit. Eusko is an local currency in some parts of the Basque Country. The ducats from the duchy of Apulia. Local currencies (Complementary currency) usually have local-resounding names. --Error (talk) 11:16, 24 March 2023 (UTC)The Eritrean currency Nakfa, is named after a city in Eritrea called Nakfa. It is official Eritrean currency introduced post-independence in 1998 and it has historical connection as the nakfa region was where Eritrea freedom fighters began to gain victory in the 30 years armed struggle against Ethiopia in the independence movement (Currency and exchange facilities).  Furthermore, there are three faces per currency, on the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and$ 100) of Eritreans from the nine ethnic groups on one side of the currency. On the opposite side of the currency, it contains images of historical moments, places, and infrastructure.  Splinter, H. van der. (n.d.). Currency and exchange facilities. Nakfa - Eritrean currency. Retrieved from http://www.eritrea.be/old/eritrea-nakfa.htm  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.189.94.2 (talk) 20:19, 27 March 2023 (UTC)    = March 23 =  The following Perso-Arabic letters have their sounds changed in Persian. Furthermore, the sounds that they were changed to are sounds that other letters already cover.  The letter ث was changed from a voiceless dental fricative in Arabic to an S in Persian. The letter ح was changed from a voiceless pharyngeal fricative in Arabic to a voiceless glottal fricative (same sound that ه makes) in Persian. The letter ذ was changed from a voiced dental fricative in Arabic to a Z (voiced alveolar sibilant, same sound as ز, ض, and ظ) in Persian. The letter ص was changed from a pharyngealized S in Arabic to a regular S (voiceless alveolar sibilant, same sound that س and ث make) in Persian. The letter ض was changed from a pharyngealized D in Arabic to a Z in Persian. The letter ط was changed from a pharyngealized T in Arabic to a regular T (same sound as ت) in Persian. The letter ظ was changed from a pharyngealized version of the voiced dental fricative in Arabic to a Z in Persian. The letter ع was changed from a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Arabic to a glottal plosive (same sound as the hamza ء) in Persian.Using this information, I’ve devised a theory that these letters are primarily in loanwords from Arabic. My theory also predicts that these letters should not appear in native Persian words (Possible exceptions being the ayn because the homophonous hamza is not really one of the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet and the tha because the sound had the Old Persian cuneiform symbol 𐎰). So far, none of the words I have tested this theory on seem to contradict it. Is this theory generally correct? Primal Groudon (talk) 00:57, 23 March 2023 (UTC)  Certainly in broad terms when the Arabic alphabet was used to write the Persian language, a number of the letters were found to be superfluous for the purpose of writing Persian words, but when Arabic words were borrowed into Persian, they kept their original Arabic spelling.  However, the letter ض was not likely pronounced as a pharyngealized [d] in the form of medieval Arabic which influenced Persian.  Pharyngealized [d] is mainly a modern tajwid pronunciation, created so that modern Arabs can have a way of pronouncing ض and ظ differently using sounds which are somewhat natural for them... AnonMoos (talk) 01:15, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Is there a specific term for the nephew of a nephew (Justin II and Justin I)? Clarityfiend (talk) 01:11, 23 March 2023 (UTC)  If you have three individuals, where A is the uncle of B and B is the uncle of C, then if A's father is the same as B's grandfather and also the same as C's great-grandfather, then A is the great-uncle of C.   Otherwise, I'm not sure any special name exists... AnonMoos (talk) 01:34, 23 March 2023 (UTC)Here's a chart that may or may not help:[1] ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:06, 23 March 2023 (UTC)[Sound of head exploding] Never mind. Now that I think about it, "nephew of a nephew" is actually easier to understand. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:17, 23 March 2023 (UTC) In the case where my nephew's nephew is his sibling's son, that sibling is also my nephew or niece, so the son is my grand-nephew. --  Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 10:35, 23 March 2023 (UTC)Baseball_Bugs -- We have similar, sometimes better graphics on Commons: File:Relatives Chart.svg, File:CousinTree.svg, File:Canon law relationship chart.svg, File:CousinTree kinship.svg, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 23:18, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Hello, again! I have a quick question on how to form comparative and superlative forms of 2-syllable, English adjectives (not including ones ending in the /i/ sound). Namely, the Oxford American Dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and American Heritage Dictionary all list approximately 70 such adjectives that take the -er/-est declension and recommend the more-/most- comparison for the all others. e.g.   able abler ablest common commoner commonest stupid stupider stupidest Wiktionary, however, lists hundreds more. e.g. painful painfuler painfulest foolish foolisher foolishest complex complexer complexest Now, my intuition tells me to use only the -er/-est inflexions recommended by the mainstream dictionaries and take Wiktionary with a grain of salt. Do you agree?  Would native speakers accept forms such as "silenter" and "frequentest" as proper? Thank you for reading this. Pine (talk) 12:25, 23 March 2023 (UTC)  'Native speakers' is a very broad category – this BrE native speaker would (a) understand them but (b) assume the user was either foreign or a young child or older but uneducated or (most likely) joking: so, not "proper." It's possible that Wictionary lists them as having been observed "in the wild", taking an extreme Descriptivist stance. The problem with using such non-usual forms is that although they might be both understandable and possibly not "wrong" as grammatical constructions, their unfamiliarity distracts the listener's/reader's attention from what is being said. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.64.160.67 (talk) 12:49, 23 March 2023 (UTC)Wiktionary actually gives the forms painfuller and painfullest. Note that 19th-century authors had little qualms using painfuller: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. But as prescriptivist proscribe these forms, their use may dwindle.  --Lambiam 23:08, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Translator of English and non-native speaker here. Being 41 this year, I've been learning and using English since I was five. Well, I believe there would be a context, e. g. a loose, informal or perhaps jocular conversation, where I wouldn't shy away from using 'foolishest' or 'complexer', but I don't think I would ever come to use such forms in the professional context, intuitively going with 'more complex' and so forth. --Ouro (blah blah) 02:21, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Thanks for all of the responses!It would be nice, in my humble opinion, if Wiktionary made more of an effort to distinguish between tongue-in-cheek inflections and standard ones.  But I suppose that I mustn't complain since (unlike its competitors) it's completely free of charge, and as the old saying so rightly goes, "beggars can't be choosers."Apropos painfuller, it might have actually made sense back when painful was sometimes spelled painfull before Johnson, Webster,  Jameson, et al standardized English spelling.  (Cf. full fuller fullest.)But nowadays, it actually transfers its intended meaning to the poor reader as well as toward the written character.  :) Pine (talk) 08:46, 26 March 2023 (UTC) I was expanding some Bsharri related wikipedia articles with this source published by the Lebanese army. Per their image policy all images are public domain so I normally upload them. The problem is I don't know what church it is or where it is. I was thinking it most likely says in the article but I don't speak Arabic and a lot of translations don't make any sense. If there is a better place to post this please tell me. Just to clarify I am looking for these 2 churches. Church 1 & church 2 Here is the article PalauanReich (talk) 16:40, 23 March 2023 (UTC)  Here church 1 is captioned as "Lebanon - Bechary District, Tourza – Mar Sarkis Wa Bakhos Church", meaning it is located in Tourza and dedicated to Saints Sergius and Bacchus. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this identification.  --Lambiam 23:27, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Here is an independent confirmation.  --Lambiam 10:10, 25 March 2023 (UTC) Church 2 is identified here as Qannoubine Monastery, Qadisha Valley, Lebanon. So it is not a church.  --Lambiam 23:36, 23 March 2023 (UTC) If the second picture is uploaded, the article Qannoubine would benefit by having it added. -- Verbarson  talkedits 13:26, 24 March 2023 (UTC) There is a theory that George Washington and the rest of Founding Fathers of America spoke in British accents. The people living on Tangier Island and the rest of Islands off Pamlico Sound, Outer Banks, and Chesapeake Bay speak in British accents, which according to scholars and linguists dated back to the Colonial era. 95.144.204.68 (talk) 16:54, 23 March 2023 (UTC)  Which British accent? The forms of spoken English... vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. Bazza (talk) 17:04, 23 March 2023 (UTC) I mean did all Americans during the Revolution sound similar to "Hoi Toiders" or the residents of Tangier Island. 95.144.204.68 (talk) 17:28, 23 March 2023 (UTC)95.144.204.68 -- During the 18th century, there was a process of Koineization in British North America / the USA, which is what happens when speakers of different dialects of the same language are in extensive contact.  Certain dialect peculiarities get levelled out, so that people who came from the UK speaking one narrow local UK dialect had children who grew up in America speaking a somewhat unified form of English which is not identical to any of the source dialects in the UK.  The traditional speech of Tangier Island is an example of a local American dialect which was not much affected by broader American Koineization.   In the 1800s, there was a kind of accommodation between the speech of Whites and the speech of Blacks in the U.S. South (large numbers of Southerners were raised by Black nannies or "mammies"), which is how the Southern accent arose.  I'm not sure whether much is known about George Washington's individual speech, but he grew up in the 1730s and 1740s, when Koineization probably hadn't developed as far as it later would (not sure why he would have had any Tangier Island particularities)... AnonMoos (talk) 17:37, 23 March 2023 (UTC)Americans of this era came from all parts of the British Isles and colonies, so you would have heard accents shaped by the origins of the local settlements, as influenced by the neighbors (the koineization process AnonMoos talks about). But yes, the Americans of that time would sound closer to a generic mix of Hoi Toiders, high-mountain Southern Americans or various British rural dialects of the sort that are currently declining, than they would like "Americans" of our present era. I recommend any of the websites you can easily find which compare and contrast modern-day Shakespearean English to the English of Willie's own day. The latter probably gives you a clearer impression of how the typical American's grandparents would have spoken. As one site puts it, "like a funky combo of Irish, Scottish, and Southern American accents". That pronunciation was already shifting towards something more like modern British by the time of the Revolution (especially in the Court and in London), but the American immigrants, as usual, were not going to be shaped by the modern developments in the Old Country. (Ask any Italian who encounters "Italian-American" cultural events.) Remember that the Founding Fathers, being of the gentry or at least prosperous, would not want to sound like peasants or backwoodsmen. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:56, 23 March 2023 (UTC) To be honest with you guys, I think 18th-century Americans would have sounded more closer to 21st-century Brits rather than 21st-century Americans. The Hoi Toider and Tangier Island accents sound nothing like the rest of American accents. 95.144.204.68 (talk) 20:54, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Again, which "Brits" are you talking about? There is no "British" accent. Bazza (talk) 20:59, 23 March 2023 (UTC) But there's a bunch of accents that clearly identify the speaker as British. --  Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 21:36, 23 March 2023 (UTC) Nearly half of the residents of Pennsylvania during the American Revolution were either German immigrants or of German ancestry. Most spoke the German dialect called the Pennsylvania Dutch language and presumably spoke English (if they knew it) with German accents. Cullen328 (talk) 22:13, 23 March 2023 (UTC) From a certain point of view, all the Americans at the time had British accents no matter what their exact accent.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:29, 23 March 2023 (UTC) The vast majority, those who descended from British colonizers, but not those with other ethnic backgrounds, not a negligible number.  --Lambiam 00:00, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Wouldn't living in a British colony make them British subjects? And the accent of a British subject is, in some sense, a British accent. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 04:36, 24 March 2023 (UTC) When speaking English, Kissinger has a pronounced accent that makes me think of Dr. Strangelove. I think he would surprised to hear that he has, from a certain point of view, a pronounced American accent.  --Lambiam 13:53, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Henry's brother Walter shed all trace of his Bavarian accent. When asked how he had done so while his brother retained such a thick accent, Walter said "Well that's simple. Henry doesn't listen!" DuncanHill (talk) 14:16, 24 March 2023 (UTC) That should be Franconian, not Bavarian. --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC) @JackofOz: "Clearly" is up to the listener, and is often anything but. I have been assumed, by English-speakers from other countries, to be Australian, a label I'd be happy to carry were it not a falsity. Bazza (talk) 10:08, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Are Cockney and Geordie and Glaswegian and Scouse accents not British accents? —Tamfang (talk) 03:25, 28 March 2023 (UTC)Actually, in the period of British Colonization of the New World, most British people spoke with rhotic accents.  Received Pronunciation, which made non-rhoticity the standard for British English, didn't come about until something like a century after the American Revolution.  This video explains some of this very well.  Many of the British dialects of the time (and by extension, many the American ones as well) would have more closely resembled West Country English than any of the more stereotypically non-rhotic British accents of modern times.  Again, watch the video I linked above.  While it is called "A tour of U.S. accents", it explains the historical context of those Accents, and goes into some detail of the sources of and likely features of colonial American English.  --Jayron32 00:10, 27 March 2023 (UTC)   = March 24 =  When looking at, say, English, mainstream linguists will tend to write of verb phrases, preposition phrases, noun phrases, and more. Or of a VP, a PP -- uh, and would it be "a NP" (backed by the claim that this will be read as "a noun phrase") or "an NP" (backed by the claim that this will be read as "an enpee")? My question is both wider and narrower than it looks. Wider, because it's not specific to linguistics: "NP" was merely an example that sprung to mind; one could just as well illustrate this minor conundrum with an example from mechanical engineering or wherever. Narrower, because I'm wondering what, if anything, the MOS prescribes for use here in en:WP; and I (sleepily?) can't find this minor matter mentioned there. (If MOS doesn't prescribe, I'll happily choose for myself.) Though I'll very soon disappear from the interwebs for a couple of days.... Hoary (talk) 01:17, 24 March 2023 (UTC)  I don't think it is a MOS issue, any more than the rule by which we write "a unicorn" but (in American English) "an herb". The choice of "a" versus "an" is governed by the pronunciation of the following word (except, in an old-fashioned style still followed by some, for a few select words like "historical"[7]). And MOS is not about pronunciation.  --Lambiam 03:34, 24 March 2023 (UTC) If we Yanks pronounced the "h" in "herb", we would say "a herb". And if we pronounced the mythical beast like "UHN-icorn" instead of "YOON-icorn", we would say "an unicorn". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:14, 25 March 2023 (UTC)"governed by the pronunciation of the following word  . . . (except, in an old-fashioned style still followed by some, for a few select words like "historical". This 'style' (at least as used by older BrE RP-aspirant Brits like myself) is also governed by pronunciation: if the initial-h word begins with a stressed syllable, e.g. "history", the 'h' is pronounced and the preceding article is "a"; if it begins with an unstressed syllable, e.g. "historical", the 'h' is not pronounced and the article is "an". Its usage is particular to certain combinations of regional accent, class and register. It might hearken back to the Victorian and Edwardian eras when the upper and educated classes all spoke (or purported to speak) French and imitated the French treatment of initial 'h'. It is of course at odds with other modes of speech: in my un-conscious default spoken register, derived from Cockney, initial 'h' is never pronounced and is always preceded by "an", but I would never write in that register unless deliberately representing it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.64.160.67 (talk) 10:11, 25 March 2023 (UTC)I think that if a writer refers to "an NP", they want it to be read as such. They know that the reader probably knows what an NP is, but that's kinda beside the point. The words and symbols actually in the text, and their pronunciation, not the pronunciation of the words those symbols represent, govern the choice of a or an. Of course, these days, many internet users and actual human beings in live conversation do away with "an" entirely. "A" suffices for all subjects - a apple, a orange, a apocalypse, and other soul-destroying utterances. Global Tin Ear Syndrome, I call it. --  Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 02:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC) "The corn is as high as a elephant's eye..." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:12, 25 March 2023 (UTC) Charles Dickens told us that "The law is a ass"... AnonMoos (talk) 21:41, 25 March 2023 (UTC) See Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 February 8#Avoidance of "an". Deor (talk) 22:24, 25 March 2023 (UTC) This came up a couple of months ago, see the discussion here. --Viennese Waltz 07:06, 25 March 2023 (UTC)Well, my "couple of days" of absence dragged out for an extra day, for one reason and another. Thank you all for your input. I'm sorry I hadn't realized that the matter had already been discussed; especial thanks to Viennese Waltz for pointing this out both helpfully and with possibly undeserved politeness. -- Hoary (talk) 10:22, 27 March 2023 (UTC)  No apology required; querents are certainly not expected to search through the archives to see if a topic has been covered in the past. Searching for a topic involving the words "a" and "an" would be a challenge indeed.  I only happened to remember the previous discussion because I was the one who launched it. --Viennese Waltz 12:10, 27 March 2023 (UTC)   = March 25 =  Russian sources, such as here, translate Finnish book title "Putin tulee kylään" as "Putin is coming to us" ("К нам едет Путин"), but Google Translate has it as "Putin is coming to the village". I don't speak Finnish, so which one is correct? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 00:32, 25 March 2023 (UTC)  Both. While the literal meaning of the Finnish noun kylä is "village" (a small settlement in a sparsely populated area), it is used idiomatically for any private place, typically someone else's home, which someone is visiting. So the best translation is perhaps "Putin is coming to visit you".  --Lambiam 09:39, 25 March 2023 (UTC) "Putin comes to visit", I think? Present indicative mood.  Card Zero  (talk) 15:26, 25 March 2023 (UTC) The English present continuous form is coming is also in the present tense and indicative mood: it is stated as a fact, not something that might happen. Unlike English, Finnish usually does not indicate a continuous aspect explicitly. It shares this with many languages; the English phrase I'm coming! is expressed in French as je viens! and in German as ich komme!; turning this in the other direction into English I come! is generally not the most appropriate translation. As we can see above, Google Translate gets this aspect right. I added "you" to express the fact that the idiom is used for visits to someone's home, not for state visits and such.  --Lambiam 17:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC) I've just added a lot of metaphors to the article. There was a comment at the top of the list demanding every item have a reference: but only one of the existing items had a reference. And I suppose really it means that the reference should say "such-and-such is an example of a dead metaphor", but only a handful of my additions have a reference like that. What I discovered when searching for references:  Columnists bloviating about language in magazines will say anything, such as that "dead metaphor" is a dead metaphor. "The fifty fatal flaws of essay writing" is a book that gives a list of cliches, e.g. "avoid like the plague", and calls them dead metaphors. P. Newmark, who wrote books in the 1980s on the subject of translation, says a dead metaphor frequently relies on the universal terms used to describe space and time, such as field, line, top, bottom, foot, mouth, arm and so on. Those may not sound like metaphors at all, but some sources say dead metaphors have ceased to be metaphors ... or not, because the same source quotes somebody else's example of "she is very cold (emotionally)" as a dead metaphor: "from this alternative point of view ... the difference between dead and conventional metaphors becomes fuzzy". Yourdictionary.com starts its article about dead metaphors with similar examples, leg of a trip and body of an essay, but then goes on to give lots of examples which closely match those in the article and are probably due to WP:citogenesis. However, many of them were never in the the article, so perhaps this is a good source? This kind of "dead metaphor" refers to obsolete technology or forgotten customs. Unfortunately the question of what is or isn't forgotten is highly debatable, so it might be wrong to include, for instance, pull out the stops, given that pipe organs and organists still exist. Then there's oddities such as balls to the wall, which is obscure only because most people never encounter aircraft engine controls, or groundbreaking (listed by yourdictionary.com) which is to do with construction. There's also laughing stock, which Wiktionary says is not about being put in the medieval stocks and laughed at, but is merely a somewhat obsolete sense of the word *stock* as in "supply". The first reference in the article (Pawalec) is a long pdf which doesn't seem to contain any examples. It does however reference Winfried Nöth at one point, so I guess I could look at his "Handbook of Semiotics". I already have one example from Nöth: News magazine: originally magazine meant "storehouse". In this conception of a dead metaphor, the meaning has to have shifted so that an original meaning is forgotten. I think he's saying that this is a matter of degree, which may help with disputes about the inclusion criterion. We may recall the original meaning for rhetorical purposes, or ignore it: so pull out all the stops would count after all. Card Zero  (talk) 14:09, 25 March 2023 (UTC)  What the article calls "literalization of a metaphor" should be called "lexicalization of a metaphor".[8][9][10] This is the opposite of literalization, which means taking a lexicalized metaphor literally, a technique used by comedians to create a punchline. Searching for "lexicalized metaphor" instead of "dead metaphor" may help. I expect Caitlin Hines' "What's so easy about pie?" contains more examples than easy as pie.  --Lambiam 17:04, 25 March 2023 (UTC) I'm sceptical of a number of the examples in the article, and in the sources.  Most of those look to me to just be regular metaphors.  Just because people are unlikely these days to have to literally hold their horses, or hear a broken record, doesn't mean they cease to be metaphors.  As examples of truly dead metaphors, I'd nominate describing someone as having a good (or bad) temper or humour - these being references to metallurgy and an ancient medical theory respectively.  Iapetus (talk) 10:15, 27 March 2023 (UTC) The head and the members of an organization. The body of an article and a note at the foot of a page. The hands and face of a clock. The legs of a trip. One reason why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up: wasting time on endless navel-gazing when direct action was required.  --Lambiam 08:06, 28 March 2023 (UTC) Can there be so-called post-uvular or pre-pharyngeal consonants, similarly there are post-velar / pre-uvular and post-palatal / pre-velar consonants? For example, post-uvular / pre-pharyngeal voiceless fricative would be [χ̠ ] or [ħ̟], and voiced version would be [ʁ̠] or [ʕ̟] --40bus (talk) 17:58, 25 March 2023 (UTC)  Articulation is a continuum, so finer and finer gradations can be made if you want to, however, I know of no language that uses such sounds as distinct phonemes and not as allophones of an already existing phoneme.  Which is to say, while one can make symbols or names for such sounds, if no language exists which makes such a sound a distinct unit of meaning-making (which is to say, there is no language which has a minimal pair of words where such sound distinctions matter), then there's no purpose in describing such sounds as worthy of note.  --Jayron32 14:48, 27 March 2023 (UTC)   = March 26 =  I am currently on chapter 4: The Imperfect and Perfect Tenses of The Everything Learning Latin Book by Richard E. Prior. On pages 32 to 34, it talks about how to assemble an indicative active form of a verb in the imperfect tense, taking the continuous aspect root plus the tense indicator ba plus the personal ending. Page 34 shows a table of the imperfect conjugation for the verb dō (infinite dare, continuous stem da-). First person singular: dabam. First person plural: dabāmus. Second person singular: dabās. Second person plural: dabātis. Third person singular: dabat. Third person plural: dabant. Why do three of these lengthen the A of the imperfect tense indicator ba? Primal Groudon (talk) 01:31, 26 March 2023 (UTC)  Actually a long vowel has been shortened in several contexts (before a consonant cluster, before a word-final stop, etc).  You can see much the same in the present indicative of a normal 1st conjugation verb (amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant), except there's no final -m environment there... AnonMoos (talk) 04:55, 26 March 2023 (UTC)   = March 27 =  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? 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? 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? 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)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: [11]. 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)   = March 28 =  What are the chances that the following languages will switch to Latin alphabet in the future?  Russian Greek Arabic Japanese Georgian Armenian Persian Hindi Burmese All other languages of India--40bus (talk) 19:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  "We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate." AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:54, 28 March 2023 (UTC) There have been historical proposals to switch Russian to the Latin alphabet: see Russian Latin alphabet (although I think it is a machine translation from the Russian article). For context, see Latinisation in the Soviet Union. But it never went anywhere because Stalin ordered to halt the project in 1930. For Arabic, see Romanization of Arabic#Arabic alphabet and nationalism for historical attempts in Egypt and Lebanon. Both failed. According to the article, it failed in Egypt because of cultural ties felt to the Arabic script, and in Lebanon because it was interpreted as an attempt at Western (or Zionist) takeover. BTW, one might argue that Maltese is sort of what you want. Japanese writing reform in favour of romaji was proposed in the Meiji period by Japanese scholars, but it failed to catch on. Apparently, it was also considered during the Allied occupation, but it was abandoned. Double sharp (talk) 02:42, 29 March 2023 (UTC)40bus -- The traditional scripts of at least Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Hindi have immense literary, historical, and religious prestige within their own cultures, so it's quite unlikely that they would be abandoned in the foreseeable future.  Many Arabic and Persian (Farsi) speakers who are Muslim would identify abandoning the Arabic alphabet with renouncing Islam.  As for Japanese, the result of writing it with a Latin transcription would often be very ambiguous if the text transcribed went beyond basic spoken Japanese, or was not confined to a very narrow topic.  See Geoffrey Sampson's "Writing Systems" (ISBN 0-8047-1756-7) for detailed discussion... AnonMoos (talk) 09:52, 29 March 2023 (UTC) For Persian, Latin-script Tajik also existed in the early Soviet years. But our article points out (agreeing with AnonMoos) that part of the point of that was distancing from Islamic influence. Double sharp (talk) 13:06, 29 March 2023 (UTC)To answer the question directly, any language could switch to the Latin alphabet.  They likely won't, but there is nothing stopping them.  The most recent major language to do so was Turkish, which did so less than a century ago, see Turkish alphabet.  Previously, it was written using the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which was Arabic-based.  A special note should also be made for Gaj's Latin alphabet, which is used in conjunction with Serbian Cyrillic alphabet to write the Serbo-Croatian language (the two scripts vary in their use depending on the cultural and political background of the user).  Gaj's Latin alphabet was introduced less than 200 years ago. AFAIK, those are some of the more noteworthy transitions into the Latin alphabet from other scripts. --Jayron32 12:21, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Why does Swedish and Norwegian not double long vowel letters? --40bus (talk) 20:02, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  Since it's mostly superfluous according to the orthography. This has been answered before. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:09, 28 March 2023 (UTC)   = March 29 =  In English, does Balzac stand for something indecent???  Because I remember my high school history teacher (who was Polish, with the last name Walczak) telling us that his pet peeve was when students call him "Balzac" -- and, just a couple days ago, when me and a lady friend of mine were at a museum and saw a post-Cubist painting titled "Balzac" (which, TBH, did not look very much like a portrait of the writer), she giggled hysterically as if she had just heard a super-dirty joke which was only intended to be told in all-male company.  So, does it really stand for something else besides the writer's name??? 2601:646:9882:46E0:C63:7399:2917:AFB (talk) 04:10, 29 March 2023 (UTC)  Ball-sack. 41.23.55.195 (talk) 05:32, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Philosopher Immanuel Kant has a similar problem. If you want to avoid such ambiguity you can use the full name "Honoré de Balzac" or use the French pronunciation[12] (not unreasonable for a French name). Random person no 362478479 (talk) 06:26, 29 March 2023 (UTC) It's kind of the opposite problem. Kant's name sounds offensive to English ears if pronounced correctly in German, while Balzac's is fine in the original French. —Kusma (talk) 06:57, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Whichever way you pronounce Kant isn't flattering to him. Either obscenity or hypocrisy. DuncanHill (talk) 11:24, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Pronouncing the name of the writer the French way ([balzak]) does not help much in Holland.  --Lambiam 09:34, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Your teacher was peeved by people misnaming him? I think most people would be. DuncanHill (talk) 07:43, 29 March 2023 (UTC) The OP didn't say "misname". It was likely a nickname. Bazza (talk) 09:16, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Calling him by a name that was not his and which he expressed a dislike to being called by? That's misnaming. DuncanHill (talk) 11:17, 29 March 2023 (UTC)