Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 22

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August 22

Which other languages pronounce ‹eu› like [ɔʏ̯]?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The article Betelgeuse contains the unsourced statement “Pronunciation in German and several other European languages is [ˌbetaɪ̯ˈɡ⁠ɔʏ̯⁠t͡sə]” (my highlighting). Are there any other European languages that generally pronounce ‹eu› like [ɔʏ̯]? Or is that supposed to be a specialty of this particular name? (In which case it would need a reference, and we could close this general question here.) ◅ Sebastian 12:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Hmmmm...it might be due to the fact that de:Beteigeuze is spelled differently, and subsequently pronounced differently. I see now real gain in keeping the statement about different pronounciations in the article. Lectonar (talk) 12:59, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick reply, Lectonar. What gain do you see? I might see some benefit talking about the significant spelling difference of ‹el› vs ‹ei›, but none really for the pronunciation; at least not for German alone, since that's just the standard any other word with these letters would be pronounced. On that note, I should add that a few other wikipedias spell the name with ‹ei› like German, but these are just German dialects, since they don't have their own navy. ◅ Sebastian 13:09, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

It's supposed to say no real gain, sorry. I need some coffee. Lectonar (talk) 13:12, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm glad we agree on this. ◅ Sebastian 13:18, 22 August 2023 (UTC) Some coffee might be good for me, too. I just corrected the first ‹ei› to ‹el›. ◅ Sebastian 13:20, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Re. “it might be due to the fact that [[:de:Beteigeuze]] is spelled differently”: I don't think so. The different spelling of the second and the fourth syllable have no effect on the third syllable in German standard pronunciation. ◅ Sebastian 13:18, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I think that statement can safely be removed. The claim about German and "several other languages" was first inserted without any comment by an IP in May this year [1], but with a different pronunciation of the "eu" syllable ([eu:]), which is of course quite implausible even for German itself; it was then "corrected" (for German) by another editor pointing to the German Wikipedia article. Maybe the original IP meant to say just that German and several other languages had a hard "g" sound rather than the English [dʒ]? In any case, the statement is pretty much off-topic even if it were true, so nothing is lost by removing it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:33, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, Fut.Perf.; I see that you have already done that, and agree with it - that was just unresearched OR. So, back to the original question: in reality no other [ɔʏ̯]ropean language has the same odd pronunciation of ‹eu›, right? ◅ Sebastian 14:31, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Probably not, at least I can't find any comparable pronunciation listed at List of Latin-script digraphs, or on Wiktionary pages for wikt:Europa and its cognates. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:03, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, with that we can close the question. ◅ Sebastian 15:40, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.