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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 April 26

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April 26 edit

Palatal trill edit

Are palatal trill sounds possible? The article says nothing about palatal trills, and in IPA, cell of palatal trills is empty, but not shaded as impossible. Is it so that palatal trills are possible, but they are not known for any language, and there is no symbol for them in IPA? --40bus (talk) 07:55, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they're certainly possible for me. All sorts of noises are possible, such as a raspberry, but that does not mean they get to be used in any language or would be allocated a symbol. Shantavira|feed me 08:14, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Unless you're Freddie "Parrot Face" Davies, whose comedy act depended almost entirely on an affected raspberry lisp. YouTube clip Alansplodge (talk) 10:51, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, our Chart of the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet (extIPA), as of 2015 has ↀ͡r̪͆ buccal interdental trill (raspberry). Alansplodge (talk) 12:27, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There were also some sounds that the International Phonetic Association deemed as technically possible, but too complicated to expectingly be used as regular phonemes in any language, if I recall correctly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:13, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Some reflections on the IPA describes on p. 342 the unresolved question of whether IPA should confine itself to sounds used in language, or all possible human vocalisations, i.e. anthropophonics. Alansplodge (talk) 12:22, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A palatal trill would be the same as a retroflex trill - apical, using the tip of the tongue. You can't physically trill or tap the body of the tongue against the palate or velum. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 11:06, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
According to our Russian phonology article, Russian has a soft (i.e., palatalized) R, which is realized as an apical dental trill. — Kpalion(talk) 21:45, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Grammatical gender edit

A few questions about grammatical genders:

  1. Is there any gendered language with at least 10 noun cases?
  2. Is there any gendered language where none of the personal pronouns are gendered?
  3. Is there any agglutinative of polysynthetic gendered language?
  4. Is there any Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic or Tungusic language with grammatical gender?

--40bus (talk) 15:24, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • This Quora thread seems to imply that the Tsez language has something like 250ish cases; which seems like if you have that many cases, you have no cases at all. The Wikipedia article only says 64 cases though, and the lack of agreement here probably stems from what really is a noun case. Tsez is gendered in the sense that it has four "noun classes" (which read as "gender" to me, anyways), one for male people, one for female people and some inanimate objects, one for animals and some inanimate objects, and one used for inanimate objects only. So, perhaps Tsez is the answer to your first question. --Jayron32 15:48, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And is there any Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic or Tungusic language with gendered third-person singular pronoun? 40bus (talk) 17:10, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I couldn't find any, but if you check Wikipedia articles titled Uralic languages, Turkic languages, Mongolic languages , and Tungusic languages from each of those articles you can follow links to Wikipedia articles on individual languages within those families, and from there research the answer to your question. --Jayron32 17:26, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like Basque satisfies #2. [...] masculine and feminine second person singular. The pronoun hi is used for both of them, but where the masculine form of the verb uses a -k, the feminine uses an -n. That is to say, although the personal pronouns are genderless, any verb gets this clitic -k or -n stuck onto it in order to indicate the gender of the person being addressed (except when speaking in the formal register).  Card Zero  (talk) 17:29, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't know that before you mentioned Basque, which is really interesting and amazing in this context ! 147.236.152.145 (talk) 18:51, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hindi-Urdu has grammatical gender and satisfies #2. Compare, for example, vah baiṭh rahā hai, "he is sitting", and vah baiṭh rahī hai, "she is sitting". Here the pronoun vah, "he/she", is gender-neutral, but the verb baiṭh rahā hai (m.) / baiṭh rahī hai (f.) is gendered. ~Dravidian languages such as Tamil are agglutinative and have gender, but grammatical gender is always identical with natural gender. So depending on your definition of "gendered language", #3 might be satisfied. --Jbuchholz (talk) 11:10, 27 April 2022 (UTC) --Jbuchholz (talk) 11:10, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Quite interesting.
Someting analogous but still a bit different - occurs in English - which is, indeed a gendered language - due to the he-she distinction, yet unable to distinguish between Masculine and Feminine in the other pronouns. However, it does have something analogous to the example you gave in Hindi, as follows: You are an actor (m.), vs. You are an actress (f.). This phenomenon in English is not quite identical to the one in Hindi, though, not only because it's restricted in English to the first and second person pronouns, but also because the inflexion in the English example is not in a verb but rather in a noun. However, the English example helps take in and internalize the phenomenon in Hindi. 147.236.152.145 (talk) 07:14, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Male and female pairs of professions / titles seem common in Western European languages, but I'm not sure whether it relates to grammar. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:19, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I was referring to the regular suffix "ess", reflecting a grammatical inflexion of nouns in English, e.g. actress, administratress, , adulteress, ambassadress, ancestress, and likewise. Don't you want to call it a grammatical inflexion? Call it a morphological inflexion, it doesn't matter that much, because also the Hindi example refers to a morphological inflexion (of verbs though). Don't you want to call it a morphological inflexion? Call it a suffix, it doesn't matter that much, because also the Hindi example refers to a suffix. 147.236.152.145 (talk) 15:10, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
147.236.152.145 -- The use of the "-ess" suffix was never fully regularized in English, and some of those words you cited are highly archaic or technical today. When the word "ambassadress" was in use (which was quite some time ago), it actually meant the wife of an ambassador. Similarly, "actor" isn't necessarily always masculine in English today. What you're looking for works better in languages where adjectives often have separate masculine and feminine forms, such as Spanish and Italian. (Also in Slavic languages where past tense verbal forms are inflected for gender and number, but not for grammatical person.) In such languages, a 1st-person pronoun is genderless, but when gender-distinguishing forms are in agreement with it, then they're inflected according to semantics. AnonMoos (talk) 22:27, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I call the use of the -ess suffix to turn actor into actress a morphological derivation, not inflection, similar to how woman is derived from man. Why? Because the process isn't very regular and because this only applies to a small set of nouns referring to people. There's not the slightest hint of gender in English when not referring to people or animals (barring the occasional personification). English has words to refer to biological gender, but has no grammatical gender. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:39, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about Hindi, but marking of grammatical gender on verbs is also common in the Romance languages, with which readers here may be more familiar. Specifically, gender tends to be marked on participles and gerundives, which act as adjectives. Is it the same in Hindi? PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:00, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ordinal numbers edit

Is Finnish (and possibly related languages such as Karelian an Veps) only languages which add the ordinal suffix to every part of number, i.e. they say e.g. "twentieth-first" (kahdeskymmenesensimmäinen), and not *kaksikymmentäensimmäinen? Estonian says kahe kümnene esimene, and it puts the ordinal suffix only to last word of noun. Are there other languages which say literally "twentieth-first"? --40bus (talk) 17:48, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Polish does it, but only for the tens and ones, e.g., dwudziesty pierwszy (twentieth first), sto dwudziesty pierwszy (one hundred twentieth first), sto pierwszy (one hundred first). Of course, round multiples of 100 also have their ordinal forms, e.g., dwusetny (two hundredth), trzytysięczny (three thousandth). — Kpalion(talk) 21:32, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I think Latin does that. —Tamfang (talk) 01:39, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Chester Alanus Arthur, vicesimus primus praeses Civitatum Foederatarum Americae.  Card Zero  (talk) 09:25, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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