Talk:Italian orthography

message: The letters J, K, W, X e Y are not part of the Italian alphabet, so why are they in the list?
Because there were taught and used with the other letters; sometimes were used even in italian words (expecially latin and greek derivates, as "fidejussione" (Surety) from the latin "fideiussio" and "xilofono" (Xylophone) from greek ξύλον xylon (wood) + φωνή phone (sound)), Names (Kevin/Jacopo/Walter/Yara common names in Italy, but not italian wich could be Calvino/Iacopo(Giacomo)/Gualtiero/[not traductable]) and for foreing loanwords (as JoYsticK,) .
Nickh ²+, --151.18.144.36 (talk) 00:46, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The foreign letters 

message: May 5th, 2007
As a native speaker, I'm quite puzzled by the paragraph Substitutes for foreign letters.
Said paragraph seems to suggest that foreign words, before being used in Italian texts, undergo a transformation whereby [for example] the spelling of 'whisky' should turn into something like 'uhischi'. I'm not aware of anything like that; I'm indeed quite used to seeing words imported in their original spelling: whisky, jet, ketchup, etc.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent behind the paragraph? Rgiuntoli
:Such unchanged loanwords are probably not regarded as Italian, but rather as foreign. FilipeS 18:10, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Substitutes for foreign letters ?? 

message: Someone asked a question in the main article:
<R> may represent one of two rhotics, an alveolar flap  or an alveolar trill  -- is this one or two phonemes?
I believe they are two phonemes. FilipeS 18:09, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonemes R and RR 

message: How do the Italians pronounce the name for the letter C?  The article says it's "Ci," but is that by the English or Italian pronunciation?  In other words, is it "See" or "Chee"?  My books on Italian aren't particularly clear on this either.J.J. Bustamante 16:40, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: C before y is not always pronounced as IPA /s/. It may also be /tʃ/: in the surnames Cya and Cybo, in the name of the liqueur Cynar, in the Latin expression "in cymbalis". "Cyberspazio" may be pronounced in both ways, with /sai-/ or with /tʃi-/, and can also be spelled "ciberspazio".  5.18.238.150 (talk) 21:12, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: C

message: Sorry for reverting again, but the only name for letter J in Italian alphabet is i lunga (at most i lungo, in case you consider these names as masculine), not "jay" or "gei". The English word jay, though popular, is still not accepted by dictionaries as a loan word. Even the most flexible Italian linguist, Tullio De Mauro, makes no mention of it. Compare . Best regards, --Erinaceus Italicus (talk) 19:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The only name? I know five: i lunga, i lungo, iod, iota (each of them recognized by Hoepli) plus jay. While jay is not accepted by dictionaries, I believe it's still worth mentioning since everyone uses it. Lupo Azzurro (talk) 11:27, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not use it, for it is a useless loanword. In any case, standard Italian is not determined by the popular usage but by a well-educated one (ask the Accademia della Crusca). Finally, please avoid specious arguments: i lunga and i lungo are the same name (though it has two genders), while iod and iota, according to Hoepli, do not refer to letter j, but to Hebrew letter yodh, Greek iota and the sound /j/. --Erinaceus (talk) 20:03, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Letter J's name

message: It doesn't seem appropriate to have the picture of Dante in the box on the top right.
Does this follow any type of standard? If contributor wants to include Dante, perhaps he can create a section on some of the greatest Italian writers pulled from the Italian writers page.
Mjpl (talk) 19:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Picture of Dante 

message: Some spellings are missing from the list:  gn, gli, diphthongs, triphthongs, doubled consonants, pronunciation of the trilled r and of sc as the English sh.  
Explanations of the pronuciation of these spellings would help English speakers who are learning Italian.
A more complete list of Italian spellings is available here:  https://www.ipasource.com/diction-help
Cwkmail (talk) 18:50, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggestiongs for improvements

message: What sound does "ì" make, as in Resìna? ZFT (talk) 20:05, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diacritics 

message: User:IvanScrooge98 has been adding "*" to some transcriptions, e.g., "scialo /ˈ*ʃaːlo/". I don't believe * is a standard part of IPA, and I don't understand what it means in this context. Can someone explain? --Macrakis (talk) 23:55, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I just added links to Help:IPA for Italian in the very first section, so that a reader who doesn't understand the asterisk can check out (inside the help article there is also a short explanation about syntactic gemination and the link to the main article). --IvanScrooge98 (talk) 10:21, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, that covers my third point. But my first and second remain. What does syntactic gemination have to do with Italian orthography, the topic of this article? And why notate it if it is regular? In English, the "p" of "pin" is aspirated and the "p" of "spin" is not, but this is not notated in phonemic transcriptions //, only in close phonetic ones []. --Macrakis (talk) 10:49, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: * Orthography and pronunciation are closely related in languages such as Italian, Spanish or Polish, where to one sound correspond one or at most two spellings, unlike in other languages like French or English. Also, it is useful to mark when any type of consonant gemination occurs in certain languages, to be easier to understand for an English speaker: if scialo was rendered as , maybe you wouldn't believe that lo scialo is pronounced ; so on English Wikipedia * becomes more necessary than on the Italian one. Syntactic gemination, by the way, isn't completely regular like the aspiration of p in English: for instance, di Dio ("God's") and qualche volta ("sometimes") are read  and . --IvanScrooge98 (talk) 12:05, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I realize that Italian spelling is largely phonetic, except for the voicing of s/z, the quality of vowels, and the position of stress. But I don't see how that is relevant to notating syntactic gemination in the phonemic glosses in this article. There is, after all, a separate article on Italian phonology. As for the irregularities in syntactic gemination, it's an interesting topic, but again completely irrelevant to orthography, and not necessary to notate in the phonemic transcription of every Italian word that is subject to it. And the irregularities may be as much about the context as about the individual word. --Macrakis (talk) 13:05, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

text: This phenomenon has nothing to do with orthography. The asterisks are just confusing and not useful to the reader, with or without the link to IPA for Italian. And I think every case in the article is regular (stressed monosyllable etc.), so the notation adds no information. --Macrakis (talk) 08:03, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Asterisk in IPA

message: Greetings, Wondering what these two WikiProjects have to do with this article? I just don't see the connection. Should these be removed from this talk page? Regards,  JoeHebda (talk)  19:19, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relevance of WP Christianity & WP Catholicism? 

message: "⟨G⟩ is also used to mark that a following ⟨l⟩ or ⟨n⟩ is palatal, i.e. /ʎ/ (only before ⟨i⟩) or /ɲ/ (everywhere), respectively (this is not true in words derived from Greek, where ⟨gl⟩ is a plain /ɡl/, like in glicine, 'wisteria'). "
Is it only true for words derived from Greek? Negligente is not Greek, but the <g> is pronounced and isn't only a palatal marker.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.146.41.16 (talk) 15:30, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean the /i/ in the etymon AL(L)IUM or the i of the spelling aglio? Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:49, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

text: I agree, shouldn't this be considered a trigraph instead? 159.20.29.42 (talk) 10:11, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes. Trigraph in aglio, digraph in agli. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 14:46, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

text: Good catch. Yes, glissando is an exception. It's a partial Italianization of French glissant. I've added it to the exceptions. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 21:02, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  gl 

message: "/ˈaʎʎo/ aglio"
What happened to the "i" in aglio?
—DIV (1.129.106.87 (talk) 12:36, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean the /i/ in the etymon AL(L)IUM or the i of the spelling aglio? Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:49, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

text: I agree, shouldn't this be considered a trigraph instead? 159.20.29.42 (talk) 10:11, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes. Trigraph in aglio, digraph in agli. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 14:46, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: aglio

message: The article on glissando says the pronunciation of "glissando" in Italian is [ɡlisˈsando] but this orthography article suggests it is pronounced as [ʎisˈsando] which is probably not correct. Is this word an exception? Because if not, then the rules need to be modified in this article a bit. The ⟨gl⟩ is followed directly by ⟨i⟩ and also the word is not from Greek origin, so it should be pronounced like [ʎ] right? Nope. I found on an external source (from here) that says that at the start of a word, ⟨gl⟩ is pronounced like [gl]. Can anyone verify this, and if this is true, modify the article too? Thanks.
:Good catch. Yes, glissando is an exception. It's a partial Italianization of French glissant. I've added it to the exceptions. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 21:02, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: glissando

message: Why is there no reference to Q as one of the few salient exceptions to the shallow orthography of Italian? There ought to be a short note on Q versus C and when each is used. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bearsca (talk • contribs) 16:56, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps because while systemically, C, CH and Q (and little-used K) represent /k/, Q itself is uniquely /k/, i.e. there's nothing exceptional about Q per se... other than (and this could be mentioned) it appears only before U, to represent together /kw/ (or /kʷ/, depending on the analysis), with QU /kw/ normally etymological (QUATUOR > quattro) but CU as /kw/ not (e.g. COR > cuore). Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 18:28, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Q