Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 July 1

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July 1

Longest

What is the longest one-syllable word in the English language in letters? 71.146.10.213 (talk) 06:53, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

"Thoughts" is eight, "strengths" is 9... AnonMoos (talk) 07:02, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

See List of the longest English words with one syllable for some possible longer words, depending on your pronunciation. Other nines include screeched, scratched, scrounged, scrunched, stretched and straights. Dbfirs 07:42, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. 71.146.10.213 (talk) 18:28, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

V vs. W

I remember seeing a G.I.Joe cartoon episode on TV where people got phone calls from someone calling himself "The Viper". Both G.I.Joe and Cobra were puzzled who this terrorist-sounding person called "The Viper" might be. In the end it appeared that he was actually "The Wiper", a professional window washer, who was trying to advertise his services. Are the sounds "V" and "W" really so similar in English? In Finnish they are, as Finnish doesn't even use the letter W natively, but this was an English-speaking cartoon. JIP | Talk 18:17, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

No, they are not at all similar in English, and cannot be confused by native speakers. However, native English speakers are aware that foreign speakers of English often get these sounds wrong, especially speakers of German, Russian and Polish, among others, and mix them up themselves when imitating foreign accents. My guess is that the "Viper" in the episode spoke with a (probably fake) foreign accent, and was thus misunderstood. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 18:39, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

In Dickens' novels, some lower-class London characters seem to frequently confuse the two, but I don't know whether that accent still exists... AnonMoos (talk) 19:12, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

That element of London speech is now quite extinct. Accents of English: The British Isles, Volume 2 By John Christopher Wells believes that it was already obsolete when Dickens put it into the mouths of his characters. "As long ago as 1836, Smart, the author of a work entitled Walker Remodelled called the interchange of v and w 'the habit of a more distant generation of Cockneys'". Alansplodge (talk) 21:19, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

In German the letter W is pronounced like English V, so Germans do this naturally. Looie496 (talk) 19:13, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

In old US movies, terrorists had either English or vaguely Germanic accents. Since 2001, they are rather more Middle Eastern. Alansplodge (talk) 21:35, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Without having seen the cartoon, I am thinking it could be possible that the phone line was poor, and as such, the minimal pair 'Viper' and 'Wiper' became indistinguishable. If that's not the case, my guess would be the same as the others: the person was faking his accent. V85 (talk) 22:31, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I heard this joke in grade school. The "viper" definitely has a foreign accent of some sort, possibly fictional Transylvanian. -- BenRG (talk) 14:36, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Why did the viper vipe 'er nose? 'Cos the adder 'ad 'er 'andkerchief. 86.143.135.49 (talk) 19:48, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be "Why didn't the viper... "? 86.160.221.207 (talk) 21:43, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

You'd think, wouldn't you? And yet, the "did" version is what is endlessly repeated on the local playground. In my day, I assumed the question was asking why the viper viped 'er nose on her sleeve, since I associated handkerchiefs and tissues with blowing your nose, whereas wiping your nose was what you got told off for doing. I suppose a viper might vipe 'er nose on a section of her coiled body? Mainly I enjoy this joke (which attained almost call-and-response status in my milieu) for the memory of how my mind was blown when I learnt that vipers were the same snake as adders. 86.143.135.49 (talk) 16:03, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

How did the Cockneys pronounce the merged sound, as /v/, as /w/, or as /β/? μηδείς (talk) 20:52, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

A clip from the episode is available on Youtube. The Wiper speaks with a strong foreign accent, although it's not clear what his accent is meant to be (for one thing, he's inconsistent - "I have come to vipe your vindows [...] I start on west corner.") Smurrayinchester 07:43, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Advice on Irish vs. Welsh

I am thinking of learning a Celtic language: probably Irish of Welsh. No practical reason, I live in the US. I already speak English, Russian (+Ukrainian), Latin (some) and a little French. I am curious if someone here has studied both (and ideally both as a second language), and can advise as to which is easier. Most people seem to know either one or the other (or neither, of course), and mostly think the one they speak is easier, and that's not very helpful to me. I have read Wikipedia articles on both. If possible, comment on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. --Ornil (talk) 23:08, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I speak some Welsh (though nothing like fluently), and have made a few attempts to learn Irish, but with little success; so for me, Irish is much harder. One reason (not strictly part of the language, but will affect most people studying it) is that Welsh orthography, though it looks outlandish for English speakers, is quite straightforward: there are plenty of digraphs (such as 'll', 'ng' and 'ch', but the only letter that has more than one pronunciation for itself is 'y', and the rules for that are fairly simple. In contrast I find Irish orthography nearly impenetrable, mostly because the principle of Caol le caol agus leathan le leathan means that in most instances of two or more consecutive vowels only some of them are pronounced as vowels, but I cannot usually work out which.

A difference in the languages themselvese is that Irish retains some noun declension, which Welsh has lost. But in most respects the grammar is really quite similar. --ColinFine (talk) 23:33, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

(later) Come to think of it, the whole broad/slender distinction is a complication in Irish. Since I learned Russian at school, I don't find any problem with palatalised and unpalatalised consonants, but if you don't know a language which makes this distinction you might find it a stumbling block. --ColinFine (talk) 23:38, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

The thing about palatalized consonants in Irish is very interesting: I didn't know there were non-Slavic languages that had it. The spelling system used for them is pretty unintuitive, but of course it's still more logical than English (what isn't). --Ornil (talk) 18:14, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I dimly remember a thread on some conlang list about writing Irish in Cyrillic ... —Tamfang (talk) 00:23, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I've studied both, and although I occupy myself far more with Irish than Welsh nowadays as I find Irish more interesting, I do think Welsh is easier. Part of what makes Irish orthography so daunting is the fact that there's no single standard dialect. Each dialect pronounces words in its own way, and sometimes that way is not reflected by the spelling. (For example, in Galway, sibh is pronounced as if it were spelled sib, but that doesn't mean that bh is always pronounced as if it were spelled b.) Like English spelling, Irish spelling is much better at telling you how words were pronounced 1000 years ago than at telling you how they're pronounced today. So the spelling-to-pronunciation rules are much easier for Welsh than for Irish, and in general Welsh is easier to pronounce since you don't have to worry about palatalization or about tense vs. lax sonorants (which you don't have to worry about in all dialects of Irish either). The Welsh lexicon may also be easier for you to learn since you've had Latin: Welsh has an enormous number of Latin loanwords dating from Roman Britain. The biggest problem with spelling-to-pronunciation in Welsh is guessing whether vowels are long or short in certain contexts: there are very complicated rules (see Welsh orthography#Predicting vowel length from orthography) which vary according to dialect. The occurrence of the initial consonant mutations is actually easier to predict in Irish than Welsh. In Irish, they're almost always triggered by an overtly pronounced word, but in Welsh, they can be triggered by the syntactic position of the word in the sentence. Another complication with Welsh is that the gap between the colloquial and the literary language is much wider than it is in most European languages, so you have to decide which Welsh you want to learn. The literary language has a wide variety of verb forms that aren't used in colloquial Welsh, which uses a lot of periphrastic constructions you'll rarely encounter in literature; also, the literary language is pro-drop while the colloquial language isn't. Nevertheless I think Welsh is probably ultimately easier for an English-speaker to learn, but they both have their challenges and their rewards. Ultimately you may discover you want to learn both, too! Angr (talk) 18:40, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Another thing you might want to consider is the availability of good course materials for adult learners. I'm using the BBC's Big Welsh Challenge, which is excellent. There is a real movement at the moment to make learning Welsh fun and accessible to adult beginners, you might want to see if there is anything comparable for Irish. Just a thought. Itsmejudith (talk) 20:16, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

No worries there, there's a lot of course material for Irish, maybe even more than for Welsh. Of course if you want to learn from a teacher rather than doing it self-taught (which is always a good idea), it depends on who's available in your area to teach which language. Angr (talk) 20:43, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Another tiny advantage to Welsh is that it has a number of loanwords from Latin just to get you started. Alansplodge (talk) 22:39, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

So related to this, any recommendations of online courses for either of these? I am a fan of traditional approaches rather than immersion-style learning. I have to know the grammar before I read a sentence. --Ornil (talk) 23:45, 2 July 2012 (UTC)