Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 May 9

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 9

Russian propaganda lessons

I wonder if this is the correct place to ask someone to confirm the translations of the names of topics covered by the Russian propaganda lessons?

This is because I am making a list of Russian propaganda lessons (currently at User:Minoa/Propaganda) and I want to make sure the translations do not drift too far from the original Russian text. Best, --Minoa (talk) 03:56, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Translators available may have some people to contact to help you out. --Jayron32 11:40, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Questions

1. Why in Latin, the dictionary form of verbs is the first-person singular indicative present, rather than the infinitive? Is there any Romance language which has same?
2. Is there any Romance language with morphological passive voice?
3. Is there any Romance language using letter Ç to indicate soft C pronunciation before back vowels where soft C sound is other than /s/?
4. Does English use hyphen when one of the parts of closed compound is a number, sign or abbreviation, like HIV-infection, @-sign, A-class?
5. Does Spanish have any word-final consonant clusters?
6. Are there an Spanish words ending in consonant which get just -s in plural ending, and not -es?

--40bus (talk) 15:49, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #4: Absolutely. See Mercedes-Benz A-Class for one example of the "letter hyphen word" construction. There's uncountable numbers of other examples. Regarding #5: apparently no: [1], though there may be loan words which provide rare counterexamples. --Jayron32 16:01, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

• If the question was does English ever use the hyphen like that, then yes, absolutely. But "HIV infection" and "@ sign" are standard, and "A class" could go either way. --174.89.12.187 (talk) 17:18, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

They only said "Does English" and I took the examples to be representative, NOT exhaustive, here. Providing one usage case meets the requirement for "Does English..." The answer is an unambiguous "yes". I can find a second example if you think it would help; it certainly isn't hard to find them. --Jayron32 17:57, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #6: This has some examples of spanish words that end in consonants and use -s for plural (bonus content: It also has one of the loan word counterexamples I allowed for above, "los icebergs"). Of course, all of those -s plurals would also be words that end in consonant clusters. --Jayron32 16:04, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #3, Ç notes some different sounds (/dz/, /ts/, /θ/ and /ð/) in earlier versions of Portuguese and Spanish, but either changes in pronunciation (as in Portuguese) or in spelling reform (as in Spanish) has eliminated these uses. Occitan alphabet notes that it can be pronounced as /ʃ/ before the u vowel in the Auvergnat dialect, Catalan orthography#Ce trencada (c-cedilla) notes that it become voiced as /z/ in some contexts. --Jayron32 16:12, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Regarding #2, This paper, which I haven't read myself more than just skimming, may be useful in your research. --Jayron32 16:17, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Re #1, the traditional presentation of Greek and Latin paradigms for verb conjugations started with the first-person form of the present indicative: λούω, λούεις, λούει, ... and luō, luis, luit, ... One would then say that bibō (for example) is conjugated like luō. When dictionaries were first compiled, these forms were chosen to represent the verbs.  --Lambiam 09:06, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

The paradigms of e.g. Italian, Spanish, Polish, English and Finnish start with the same form. But why these languages have the infinitive as dictionary form instead. Also, does Spanish have any verbs ending in -güer or -güir? --40bus (talk) 17:17, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

First question: Because scholars in different countries independently decided to follow different conventions: there was no secret international cabal of grammarians' manipulating scholarship worldwide. (But I would say that, wouldn't I?) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.210.77 (talk) 15:29, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

№ 4: My rule, at least, is to put a hyphen in such compounds only when using them as adjectives: "an A-class car" but "in A class" (or more usually "in class A"). —Tamfang (talk) 02:19, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I support that. I'm tired of being told that a three-year-old person is "three-years-old" [sic]. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:52, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Open central unrounced vowel

The open central unrounded vowel. I know that the reason why IPA has not assigned a specific symbol to it is because it is not reported to contrast with other open vowels (a, ɑ). But why it has not been assigned plain /a/ symbol even though languages with just one open vowel have usually central, not front of beack vowel? In my opinion, the /ä/ symbol is ugliest IPA symbol ever, and it is, like all vowel symbols with centralised diacritic, very "shocking". This is what I would do if I could change the vowel charts:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i y	ɨ ʉ	ɯ u
Near-close	ɪ ʏ		ɯ̽ ʊ
Close-mid	e ø	ɘ ɵ	ɤ o
Mid	e̞ ø̞	ə	ɤ̞ o̞
Open-mid	ɛ œ	ɜ ɞ	ʌ ɔ
Near-open	æ̝ ɶ̝	ɐ	ɑ̝ ɒ̝
Open	æ ɶ	a	ɑ ɒ

You can see that plain /a/ stands for central vowel, /æ/ for open front vowel (current /a/ and near-open front vowel (current /æ/) is raised /æ̝/. --40bus (talk) 18:20, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- There was a kind of pamphlet published in 1942 by Bloch and Trager, "Outline of Linguistic Analysis", well-known to earlier generations of U.S. linguists, which has a completely symmetric vowel rectangle, where all degrees of height and fronting can freely co-occur, and all these combinations can occur either with or without lip rounding. I would guess that phoneticians have not found this as useful as the IPA, while for phonologists, it would allow a lot of theoretical low vowels which are rarely found to contrast phonemically with each other in languages. AnonMoos (talk) 01:07, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

The biggest thing your missing is that vowels are a multidimensional continuum. You can transition between any two vowel sounds continuously, and travel through a literally infinite number of vowel sounds. In order to represent these sounds, by necessity, you need define a discrete set of symbols, which means each symbol represents not a single sound, but rather a small part of the multidimensional spectrum that most languages would consider "close enough" to consider all the same sound. However, there will always be edge cases where some vowel sounds may be classified with two different IPA symbols because they lie on the edge of what those symbols represent. This is unavoidable any time you try to fit a continuum phenomenon into a discrete set of classifications. No system would be free of this. Basically, it is always going to happen, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Now, regarding your " why it has not..." question: Those are unanswerable. It just wasn't. Also, related to that question and on your emotional responses to symbols (finding them "shocking"), that's mostly irrelevant. Symbols are ultimately arbitrary, and no one thought at the time they were inventing the IPA, what your future emotional response would be. --Jayron32 12:47, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

It is also easy to overlook that the IPA phonemes are essentially labels; the positioning of these labels in the multidimensional continuum of vowel space is not absolute. Another multidimensional continuum is colour space, in which red is a region, not a single point. The red in the flag of Turkey is considerably brighter than the "Old Glory Red" of the flag of the United States. Likewise, the /a/ of French is brighter than the German /a/.  --Lambiam 19:08, 11 May 2023 (UTC)