Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 25

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October 25

puit (fr)

Wikidata item d:Q42301898 has the French label "Pierre-Feuille-Ciseaux-Puit", for a game that's a variation of d:rock-paper-scissors. In this context, what's the English-language equivalent of the last French word? -- Deborahjay (talk) 10:23, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

It should be "puits", which is a well - the idea is that the rock and the scissors fall down the well, but the paper can cover the opening of the well (it's explained at fr:Pierre-papier-ciseaux, but in French of course). "Puit" is surely a typo; just guessing, but it's probably the common mistake that "puits" looks plural so the singular must be "puit". Entering "puit" into the French-English dictionary on WordReference.com takes you to "pur" for some reason, which must be the origin of the "pure" translation on Wikidata. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:34, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

The wikidata item linked to by the OP does have "puits" - it appears to have been mis-copied here. Wymspen (talk) 14:10, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

OP explains: Were you to view the sequence of edits on that Wikidata item, I believe you'd find that the restored 's' wasn't present when I posed the above query; it was corrected only after I received the reply. Furthermore, User:Adam Bishop was spot-on in assessing my process, right down to WordReference.com. -- Deborahjay (talk) 08:48, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Beard to the washing

Whilst reading a book about the mayors of Exeter,England,I found this sentence-'...[this mayor] never did any ill to any man, nor did he put his beard to the washing'. I have no idea what this refers to, Google hasn't come up with anything useful, so any ideas what this phrase means? Lemon martini (talk) 21:04, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Probably a variant of "to give one's head for the washing", an obsolete slang term meaning to comply, or to submit to a reprimand, in a meek manner. See the OED entry for "head" where there's a 1601 quote "Such a one as would not give his Head for the polling, nor his Beard for the washing"... AnonMoos (talk) 22:05, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nubia

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author whose first name is pronounced "Tah-nuh-hah-see" rather than the apparent "Ta-nuh-hee-si." The article says he was given an old name for Nubia, but the article on the country does not give such a name as having once been applied to it. When was Ta-Nehisi the name used for Nubia, and in what language?( Reliable source, please.) [http://languagehat.com/ta-nehisi/ a language blog suggests Egyptian. Is there some established transliteration system from that language which says it would be spelled Ta-Nehisi rather than Ta-Nehasi, where the third vowel is rendered the same way as the first vowel? The blog suggests it is somehow a phonetic transcription of southern Black American dialect, where a long "I" would be pronounced "AH." But that would mean a parent read it Nahisi, then someone wrote down the way it was pronounced, with a drawled long I as the penultimate vowel, rather than the way it was spelled. But the father was quite well educated, so this seems doubtful. Edison (talk) 21:50, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Reading through lots of offtopic chitchat at that blog, who would pop in but supposedly the father who gave him the name, Paul Coates, who said "... the pronunciation of his name was not of my doing. his name was given to me along with its pronunciation by Yosef ben Jochannan, who members of the Black community lovingly called Dr. Ben. he was one of our most knowledgeable elders. by birth he was Ethiopian, and was born into the Jewish faith. he was largely self taught as a historian and Egyptologist." So my question then addresses the correctness of Jochannan's transcription and pronunciation. Edison (talk) 22:08, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

It's in our article at Nubia#Nubia and Ancient Egypt -- "Nehset / Nehsyu / Nehsi — Nḥst / Nḥsyw / Nḥsj — Nubia / Nubians". If you want info on the exact details of ancient Egyptian vowel pronunciations, then you're probably out of luck -- ancient Egyptian orthography didn't provide any information about vowels directly, and modern conventional Egyptological transcriptions are often derived by changing Egyptian guttural consonants to "a", semivowel consonants to "i" or "u", and then semi-randomly inserting enough "e" vowels to result in a pronounceable-looking word... -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:23, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

I certainly don't expect to learn exactly what vowel sounds were used in ancient Egyptian. Bu has the puzzling Coates spelling and pronunciation been seen in any scholarly article about Nubia, or is it original with him? "i" as "ah" in the next to last vowel, then :i: as :ee: in the last vowel. I do not dispute his right to pronounce his name however he chooses. Edison (talk) 12:32, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

If you search Google Books for the name, but limiting to the 20th century, you'll get some ghits [1].--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:00, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

The name comes from Yosef Ben-Jochannan as shown above, and his Wikipedia article shows that he is not at all a reliable source on history or Egyptology, so I will consider the pronunciation of the penultimate vowel to be based on a whim ofYosef Ben-Jochannanwithout scholarly basis. Edison (talk) 18:00, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Your "where a long "I", would be pronounced "AH"", Edison, is exactly what occurred to me as a plausible explanation. If Coates' father was from Carruh-LAH-nuh, it is exactly what I would expect. μηδείς (talk) 19:51, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Again here we have the problem of what is meant by a "long" vowel. (This came up in a recent question I asked, Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 11#Vowel length in "Samoa", that never got responses to my full satisfaction, but to be fair the ball was in my court and I had other things on my mind and never hit it back.)

When the term "long i" is used in the context of elementary education in the United States, it means something very different from vowel length as understood more generally. Specifically, the "long i" as taught to children here is the i of "ice", the one that "says its name". So "long" a, e, i, o, u are /eɪ/, /iː/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, /juː/ respectively. (Here I have used the length marker ː as seems to be conventional, though I still do not understand why it is used in phonemic transcriptions, given that English does not have phonemic vowel length.)

So we may have a bit of a misunderstanding — Edison apparently expects the "long i" to mean /iː/, whereas Ben-Johannan, from context, seems to be using it to mean /aɪ/. --Trovatore (talk) 21:55, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Ben-Johannan's pronunciation wouldn't necessarily matter; it would be how Coates' father (a different man) who named Coates pronounced the name. For example, Archie Bunker may have said eye-talian even if he was taught by people who said ih-tallian. This is groundless speculation though, so I guess I'll bow out. μηδείς (talk) 00:17, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Vowel length

Trovatore -- If you want to use linguistically meaningful terminology, then English can be said to contrast the "checked" vowels (which generally do not appear word-finally or directly before another vowel) and the "unchecked" vowels (which can). The unchecked vowels are divided into unstressed or reduced vowels such as [ə] on the one hand, and long vowels and diphthongs on the other hand. This system has some complexities in dealing with many British English accents (where unstressed [ɪ] is unchecked but stressed [ɪ] is checked), but works pretty well for many American accents (where the unchecked vowels other than [ə] are those in the fourth row of File:Initial Teaching Alphabet ITA chart.svg, while the checked vowels are those in the right half of the third row...) AnonMoos (talk) 03:13, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Well, I think that kind of makes my point for me. Four vowels appear in that chart with the length marker, namely /ɑː/, /iː/, /ɔː/, /uː/ — and those four never appear without it in the same chart. So for phonemic transcriptions, the ː seems completely useless, as it is never used distinctively.

So why is it used at all? I wouldn't really care, but it made it hard to get across what I was saying in the other thread about the pronunciation ['saːmoa], where the lengthening of the [a] is very perceptible to an Anglophone listener. --Trovatore (talk) 04:00, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

The transcriptions in the SVG chart are "broad IPA" (not really claimed to be phonemic as such) -- but one feature of the transcriptions that you're complaining about is that among stressed vowels, those written with a single symbol are checked (with [æ] counting as a single IPA symbol/character, of course), while those written with two symbols (with the second symbol being a following [ː] or diphthong offglide) are unchecked... AnonMoos (talk) 08:47, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

P.S. The chart omits complications with vowel + original "r" due to its purpose (covering the ITA alphabet, not English sounds as such)... AnonMoos (talk) 08:52, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

@Trovatore: I'm slightly upset that you have not got your answer for the previous question as I and Jayron really tried, though you didn't respond. So I'll repeat myself here. The vowel length is a reality in, at least, British English. When British phonetician Daniel Jones were inventing his IPA transcription for RP, he bore that fact in mind. And the length marks was essential, because he used the same letters for both short and long vowels. That is the pairs /ɪ/-/iː/, /ʊ/-/uː/, /ɒ/-/ɔː/, /ə/-/ɜː/ were /i/-/iː/, /u/-/uː/, /ɔ/-/ɔː/, /ə/-/əː/ up to the 1960s, when Alfred C. Gimson has decided to show both the quality and the quantity of vowels. In that respect the length mark may become indeed redundant. Particularly for American English, where the length is of no or lesser importance. And this is why American phoneticians like John Samuel Kenyon did not use /ː/. But for British English the length is still very important and perceivable. And as most dictionaries and learning materials are RP-centered, the most "accepted" English transcriptions use the length mark even for American English (leaving out the length mark for British English is out of discussion, as it is ultimately ought to be shown there).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:18, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

But it is not phonemic, even in BrE, correct? --Trovatore (talk) 19:44, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Ah, so maybe the historical stuff does help with that point. I think it's a great pity that the length mark was ever used to make that distinction, given that even in BrE it's obviously not a "pure" length difference. Let me rephrase:

• If you are familiar with the Samoan pronunciation of "Samoa", do you agree that the first a is drawn out much more than the a of "father", even when the latter is pronounced by a BrE speaker? Or are you willing to take my word for it?
• Is there any way to get that difference across in an IPA transcription?

Thanks, I do appreciate your efforts. --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

@Trovatore: No, I know little about Samoan (and, frankly, I have little interest in Pacific languages in general) and I see no place where I could listen to how Samoans pronounce Sāmoa in Samoan (or English, for that matter). However, I've listened to the language a little (an excerpt from the Bible) and from that I can confirm that the Samoan long vowels are quite perceivably long. Though, I do not see how it concerns English at all, and why we should compare these two languages. But let us, for a moment, imagine that the Samoan long vowels are longer than the English ones, and the short Samoan vowels may be as long as the long English vowels. But that hardly matters, as it is enough that within one language the binary opposition "short-long" manifests itself clearly. In (British) English there is an "short-long" opposition between vowels, it is a bare acoustic fact (there have been acoustic studies that showed that the long vowels are around 1.5 longer than the short ones). Of course, there is an additional contrast in quality, but the length difference is present in any case. As this opposition is binary, it is quite enough of how we signify that, respectively with the absence or presence of the length mark (or we could do the opposite, but the long vowels are thought as "marked", so the short vowels are treated as the "basic value" vowels). There are languages with a non-binary opposition such as Estonian, where the vowels can be short, long, and extra-long. In the IPA this can be signified by the half-long /ˑ/ and long /ː/ marks, or their combination. If one want to show the difference, one could go as far as to show six degrees of the length (from shortest to longest): /ă/-/a/-/aˑ/-/aː/-/aːˑ/-/aːː/. However, it hardly means anything in terms of milliseconds, as this notation is relative, not absolute: it is important to know to what language the contrast is being applied. I hope I've answered at least to your second question.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:49, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

So my point is this: It's not like I'm unfamiliar with BrE. I've heard Brits say "father" often enough, and as a kid I might have said, "hey, why does he pronounce it fatha?" but I would never have thought "why does he pronounce it faatha?".

But for Samoa, I did instantly think "they pronounce it Saamoa".

So I think it would be good to get this across when giving a pronunciation guide in the Samoa and American Samoa articles, but I'm at a loss as to how to do it, when the same length marker is used as in the word "father". --Trovatore (talk) 22:14, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

The issue we're looking at here, however, is allophony; beyond being consistent, a sound distinction needs to be meaningful to a language. That is, would a native speaker recognize a difference in vowel length as resulting in a difference in meaning or markedness in words; or is it merely something that exists, in that language as free variation. The way linguists do this is to compare minimal pairs in a language; two words which vary only by the sound being tested. In English, it isn't enough that the "a" sound in father is generally consistantly "long a" (faather), but ALSO that there is a meaningful difference between that sound and the shorter "a" sound. In other words, if I fed 1000 English speakers people saying "faather" and people saying the shorter "father" would they perceive a meaningful difference between those two words, or would they not notice. In they Samoan language (I know nothing about this, but am assuming based on the current conversation) that people would. --Jayron32 10:59, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

I hope it is not wrong to answer in the archive, but a couple of thoughts.

@Jayron32: Not to disagree with you, just to add, that even if there were no distinction in quality between English vowels, it still will be 100% justified to write plain /aː/ for both the languages. Actually, for some dialects they do exactly this: for Australian English they write /e/ for dr'ess and /eː/ for square, even though it may happen that Samoan /eː/ may be longer than the Australian one.

@Trovatore: I agree with you that I also hear the Samoan long vowels to be a little bit longer. It may happen that they are indeed thus, that is 2x longer than the short ones (we need acoustical studies to confirm that). Which differs from (British) English where the long vowels are just 1.5x longer (in American English it is even less so, 1.3x maximum). However, it often does not matter when we consider how to transcribe a language. The transcription is ought to be meaningful within a framework of one language only. It does not have to be meaningful across the languages, until there are some special considerations. Consider other cases. The consonants /t d n/ are alveolar in English, and the IPA manuals requires them to be used as such, but it is more often to write the same plane /t d n/ for the languages where these consonants are dental, that is French, Spanish, Russian and so on. In some circumstances, however, we need to draw a clear-cut distinction, thus we write /t̪ d̪ n̪/ for the latter. The same is for the length mark. Within Samoan it is quite enough and meaningful to write /aː/ to differentiate it from /a/. And the same for English where we often use different symbols as well. But should we write /aːː/ in Samoan just to show that it is longer than English /ɑː/. Why? There is no justification for this. It will more likely cause another complication if Samoan short /a/ would correspond to "extra-long" /aːː/.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:53, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

@Любослов Езыкин: Well, I thought I had explained the reason I wanted the transcription to be meaningful cross-linguistically. The reason is that there is a very salient feature of the Samoan pronunciation that we currently fail to communicate to English speakers. Note that the pronunciation guides in the two articles are inside square brackets and are supposedly phonetic transcriptions; that ought to work across languages. I don't want to seem ungrateful for the effort, but User:Jayron32 explained a lot of stuff that I largely already knew, without addressing this point at all. --Trovatore (talk) 21:29, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

@Trovatore: No bother at all, it was a pleasure to communicate. I just wanted to get what is the issue. So you want to show that the Samoan long vowels are longer than their English equivalents? Well, I'm afraid there is no clear-cut and easy way to show such intricacies with the IPA. Except for what I've proposed above: to use two length marks instead of one. But I hardly saw such a usage. In books about the Polynesian languages (I read a couple) they often even do not bother themselves with the IPA at all, instead using macrons. Second, I doubt that there are many English speakers who are learning Samoan, and I doubt that such a small difference in length is so crucial for them. If they want to sound more like native Samoans, they'd better practice and imitate, then rely on transcriptions. At least in learning materials it is always better to explain it verbally, than to use an intricate transcription. If you mean our articles about things Samoan, you may propose using double length marks, but unlikely many would support your proposal. If you want to remove length marks from the current English transcription, again many would strongly oppose you. An established tradition is very difficult to change.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:48, 2 November 2017 (UTC)