User:Filelakeshoe/RD

Useful stuff from the Reference desk/Language

[ʎ]
Hello all. I am learning Spanish and I cannot get the [ʎ] sound quite right. I usually realize it when I come across it as a [j] or [ʝ], which isn't too bad but I would really like to get it right since the distinction is made in the dialect of Spanish that I am learning. Your article seems to imply that the only difference between [ʎ] and [j] is that [ʎ] is lateral, with air flowing over the sides of the tongue, whereas [j] is central. I don't really understand how to pronounce a /j/ sound to make air flow off the sides of the tongue; can give tips on how to pronounce it? THanks. 72.128.95.0 (talk) 21:06, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It's probably best to start from the [lj] cluster found in English words like million. Basically [ʎ] is an [l]-sound produced with the blade of the tongue against the hard palate (i.e. a palatal consonant) instead of the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (an alveolar consonant). If you try to compress [lj] into a single consonant instead of a cluster of two consonants, you'll be getting close to a proper [ʎ]. (For Spanish, as you mentioned, it's not really necessary to use [ʎ] for ll since increasing numbers of dialects use [j] or [ʝ] instead, but it's good to be able to make a [ʎ] anyway, in case you want to learn Italian, French, or Portuguese later.) —Angr (talk) 21:32, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
 * French? I wasn't aware that it was present in French.  What would be an example word? --Trovatore (talk) 23:33, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Fille, although in most accents [j] is preferred. - file lake shoe 00:01, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Another way you might try is by making a [l] (which is a lateral you probably can do), and then curl the tip of your tongue forward so that rather the tip being on the alveolar ridge, the middle is sort of resting on the palate a bit further back. Or make a [j] and raise your tongue so that it's touching the top of your mouth. Both of those will get you close enough. - file lake shoe 22:07, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
 * What accent are you learning? In Spain the [ʎ] has all but disappeared in recent times, though you can still hear it in rural areas of Extremadura. --Belchman (talk) 23:30, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Just looking at this discussion, [ʎ] seems to be one of those sounds which gets bullied out of languages. In Slovak I swear I very seldom hear native speakers pronounce it.. they seem to replace it with a dark [l] or [w] (like a Polish Ł). Is there any language where it's actually a phoneme in relation to sounds next to it? - file lake shoe 00:05, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * In Polish, [w] replaced [ɫ] (dark l, represented by <ł>), not [ʎ]. — Kpalion(talk) 19:26, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, Italian, apparently: take voglio ("I want") compared with volo  ("flight"). Lfh (talk) 10:08, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Right, voglio sounds very different from volo, but the more interesting question is whether it would be distinguished from *volio, if there were such a word (as far as I know there isn't). I think the rendering of the -gli- sound as [ʎʎ] is a little misleading; that may be the actual phonetics on the oscilloscope, but it's *perceived* more like [ʎj].  --Trovatore (talk) 19:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well then, does maglia rhyme with Italia? In theory, no. In practice, I don't know! Lfh (talk) 20:24, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, it's an off-rhyme. The [ʎ] sound is definitely used, at least in the area where I lived.  Whether it's used distinctively is another question; can't think of a real example of that. --Trovatore (talk) 20:53, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It's alive and well in Serbo-Croatian. It's not as healthy in Macedonian, despite having a separate letter for it (Љ). No such user (talk) 11:14, 18 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It's a very common sound in many Bantu languages where it is generally written "hl" and is followed by a vowel. Roger (talk) 11:08, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Old Church Slavonic
Which modern Slavic language would you say is closest to Old Church Slavonic? The article says the language is sometimes known as Old Bulgarian or Old Macedonian, but with modern Bulgarian's many Romanian loanwords and both languages losing a great deal of their morphology (e.g. declension) I doubt the two are particularly similar any more. It also says Old Slovenian, which is interesting, as the Slovene language is largely unintelligible with other Slavic languages (even Croats and Bosniaks have told me they have trouble understanding Slovenians) and still retains a few archaic features of grammar. I'd be inclined to guess it might be closest to Slovene. Thoughts? - file lake shoe 13:32, 21 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Rusyn phonologically and Slovenian gramatically. Rusyn is the transitional dialect between East and West Slavonic, and not far removed from Serbo-Croat.  I spoke some to my Russian prof, he thought I was speaking some sort of Old Slavonic, and was able to make myself undertood to a croat well enough to conduct basic business.  I don't believe there is an article on the Ruthenian recension, but see: Ruthenian Catholic Church,  and μηδείς (talk) 04:52, 22 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I can't give much satisfactory input on this, but as far as loanwords are concerned, present-day Bulgarian and present-day Macedonian feature large numbers of Turkish loanwords in their vocabularies, as well as many words with ultimately Arabic and Persian origins that have entered through Turkish (and are erroneously considered by some to be actually of Turkish origin). About the Romanian loanwords in Bulgarian, I wouldn't say that they are many; conversely, significant amounts of the Romanian lexis are made up of Slavic loanwords (for example, there are two common Romanian terms for "love", both of which are of Slavic origin). --Theurgist (talk) 05:38, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Does any Slavic language use the cognate to our dragoste as a word for "love"? I usually only here this form in words like dragoy in Russian (sorry, I suck at both Cyrillic and correct spelling in Russian), which is like our dragă, "dear", and not the actual noun for "love". 80.123.210.172 (talk) 08:25, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Sounds like it's cognate to Czech drahota, which is the noun from drahá, which means dear. - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 08:31, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * What filelakeshoe said. The Slavic root is "drag", which means 'dear' in all (?) Slavic languages. There was apparently a semantic shift within Romanian. No such user (talk) 08:36, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, there was a semantic shift apparently, thanks for the answers. Having two words for "love" is confusing, I don't know why we didn't just stick with iubire. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 08:52, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Isn't iubire a Slavic loanword too? It looks a lot more like Russian ljubov’ than like Latin amor. —Angr (talk) 09:14, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That's right, both their words for "love" are Slavic loans (which isn't too unexplicaple, given that Romanians sometimes refer to themselves as "Romans in a sea of Slavs"). iubire is the long infinitive of the verb a iubi, which descends from Slavic ljubiti. The same online dictionary gives Slavic dragostĩ as a source for dragoste. Supposing they have meant *драгость, that should mean something like "dearness", which is a little less distant form "love" in terms of meaning than "dear" is. --Theurgist (talk) 09:25, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Now that Angr mentions it, we also sometimes use the word amor, as in a face amor instead of a face dragoste or a face sex. It was apparently borrowed from Italian at some point. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 10:39, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * There is a WordReference thread here, which touches on the topic; you could open a new one in their Slavic Languages forum. I would say "Russian and Bulgarian", at least on the lexical level: OCS had the most lasting influence on their lexis (and they share a lot of word stock, especially that of higher register, either through common OCS heritage, or through Russian influence on Bulgarian since mid-19th century). On the other hand, it is true that their grammar (Bulgarian) and phonology (Russian) significantly drifted away from OCS. [Btw, Bulgarian has many Turkish but little Romanian loans.] No such user (talk) 06:38, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Romanian also has a lot of Turkish loans, so maybe that's why the OP thought that Bulgarian loaned words from Romanian. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 08:25, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That might be it - I really have no knowledge of Turkic languages. I did notice some words which are definitely Romance though (like bira instead of pivo) - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 08:33, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I assume you mean bere :P Romanian also has lots of Slavic loanwords, so maybe that's where some more of the similarities with Bulgarian come from. 80.123.210.172 (talk) 08:53, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

"Hand" and "five"
Aside from Toki Pona and perhaps other minimalist constructed languages, is there any language where the words for "hand" and "five" are the same, or morphologically related? - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 01:27, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The word for "fist" is related to "five" in English, German, Polish, Russian and probably a whole bunch of other IE languages. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 01:31, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You are right about Polish, but in Russian (and a few other Slavic languages) the word for "fist" is no longer related to "five". The PIE root of "five" is retained in a rarely-used word that means "metacarpus", and there is a rarely-used derivative of the word "five" that means "hand".--Itinerant1 (talk) 04:25, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * And of course English has the slang "five", as in high five or "give me five". Smurrayinchester 11:17, 21 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The Hawaiian word lima means both "hand, arm" and "five, fifth" (source: The Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary with a Concise Hawaiian Grammar by Mary Kawena Pukui, Samuel H. Elbert, and Esther T. Mookini (1975), p 89. ISBN 0-8248-0307-8). -- AnonMoos (talk) 03:49, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Gee, lima is "five" in Malay too! — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 18:17, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, not an enormous surprise. Malay and Hawaiian are genetically related; ultimately descending from the same proto-language, they both belong to the Austronesian language family :) --Theurgist (talk) 21:20, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In the Berber languages. e.g. in the dialect of Nafusa mountains (in Libya), it is: ufes, and in the dialect of Djerba (in Tunisia), it is: afus. 77.124.2.244 (talk) 08:46, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yep, I knew there must be at least one case of it being the same word. Thanks! - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 13:00, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

I remember a long time ago, in an English language school in Japan, the American owner used to say 'Gimme five!' and hold his hand up, expecting me to clap it with him, despite the fact that hands (in English) only have four fingers (plus one thumb). I always had to use two hands. <font face="MV Boli" color="blue">KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:37, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Where did you get the idea we only have 4 fingers on each hand? In general terms, all 5 of the digits are fingers.  The thumb has its own name in certain contexts, that's all.  --  <font face="Papyrus">Jack of Oz  <font face="Papyrus">[your turn]  20:06, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Maybe KageTora is from The Simpsons - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 21:53, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * As English teachers, it was a common 'joke' we had to teach the names of the fingers. The main four have '[something] finger' as names (we don't use 'pinkie' in Br.Eng), but only the thumb has an entirely unrelated name. In Japanese, all five have '[something] finger' as names, so this is why it was appropriate. I suppose you had to be there.... <font face="MV Boli" color="blue">KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:10, 22 February 2012 (UTC)


 * A little finger is sometimes called a pinky or a pinkie, from a word meaning "five".
 * —Wavelength (talk) 21:44, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Additionally, the Arabic dialect of Djerba (not to be confused with the Berber dialect of Djerba I've already mentioned above), uses the slang phrase: "(please) count my hand" (being:  'ad-yeddi) - for "five", as well as for "Thursday" (as the fifth day of the week), although it also uses the more standard Arabic word for "five" (being: xamsa). 77.125.106.165 (talk) 01:31, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Additionally, the Arabic dialect of Djerba (not to be confused with the Berber dialect of Djerba I've already mentioned above), uses the slang phrase: "(please) count my hand" (being:  'ad-yeddi) - for "five", as well as for "Thursday" (as the fifth day of the week), although it also uses the more standard Arabic word for "five" (being: xamsa). 77.125.106.165 (talk) 01:31, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

This is just an anecdote, but I recall reading—some years ago—that a few primitive tribes in the Amazon rainforest had a numerical system based on 2 (instead of 10, as in modern English).

The thing was, at least one of said tribes, at the time of first contact, was apparently starting to "evolve" to a base-5 system. To wit, they called 3 "one over two—cf. "eleven" from "one over ten"—and they called 4 "two over two"—cf. "twelve" from "two over ten." But, curiously, they (the youngest generation among them, anyway) were increasingly referring to 5 as "my whole hand, all together."

May this be to what the OP is alluding? Pine (talk) 07:17, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You mean the Pirahã language? 21:25, 22 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The Khmer language works in base five, with '6' being 'five-and-one', and so on. I actually use the segments on each finger to count, giving me 12 on each hand, using the thumb to keep count. <font face="MV Boli" color="blue">KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:29, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Exactly - curiosity which stemmed from a discussion about the origin of number glyphs, and how the glyphs for 1 and 5 often resemble a finger and a part of the hand (such as Roman numerals I and V). So it didn't seem inconceivable that the words hand and five would be the same in one spoken language - <font face="Trebuchet MS"><font color="#60B">file <font color="#00B">lake <font color="#0B0">shoe 17:02, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Per KageTora — "thumb" and "thousand" are related, both deriving from an ancient root (Germanic? Proto-Indo-European?  I can't remember) with the sense of "swelled".  Thus the term is applied to the fattest finger, and fifty times twenty is a swelled hundred.  Nyttend (talk) 02:38, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Thinking in one language while speaking another
Imagine you live in a region of a country where a minority language (A) is spoken at home, but people use the national language (B) for most other purposes (work, official communication, writing). Because of the dependence on language B, the speakers of language A gradually begin to speak it slightly differently, using grammar and syntax and vocabulary from language B, which is not used in language A, meaning that the two languages start to become intelligible, even if they weren't before. Is there a word for this phenomenon? <font face="trebuchet MS">- filelake<font color="#0B0">shoe <font color="#0B0"> &#xF0F6;    00:47, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * That seems to be happening in my country!--Jondel (talk) 01:16, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Language convergence Marco polo (talk) 01:17, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Actually, Dialect levelling is closer to the mark. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 04:31, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I can't remember the details, but there was a semi-classic paper published in the 1960s or 1970s examining an area near the boundary between Indic and Dravidian languages. The local village Indic and Dravidian dialects spoken in the area showed strong mutual structural convergence, and were quite different from the "standard" written languages based on forms of speech spoken away from the linguistic boundary. AnonMoos (talk) 04:43, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Had less trouble than I thought I would Googling it; apparently it's "Convergence and Creolization: A Case from the Indo-Dravidian Border" by John J. Gumperz... AnonMoos (talk) 04:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Very interesting, thanks! I wasn't sure if "dialect levelling" would be correct to talk of a whole distinct language being "levelled". Like English and Scots, which were historically far less intelligible than they are now, but the fact that English influence has made a lot of Scots features archaic now leads to people thinking it's a dialect of English. <font face="trebuchet MS">- filelake<font color="#0B0">shoe <font color="#0B0"> &#xF0F6;    10:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Do you mean something like Llanito, which is a mixture of Spanish and English used on Gibraltar? Alansplodge (talk) 14:10, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Not really, that seems to be almost a pidgin ("almost" in the sense that it doesn't seem to be simplified). I mean something more like the recent evolution of the Silesian language as described here - towards the end of this comment, that "literary Silesian" is becoming archaic, because "people have started to think in Polish and translate literally into Silesian. That's why some grammatical structures are disappearing." <font face="trebuchet MS">- filelake<font color="#0B0">shoe  <font color="#0B0"> &#xF0F6;    14:35, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
 * That was exactly the example I was going to use. By far most younger "Silesian" speakers use Standard Polish as their primary language, and when speaking "Silesian" (usually to their grandparents), actually speak a modified form of standard Polish rather than a Polonized form of Silesian. As you say, they think in Polish, and basically change the pronunciation and throw in a few Silesian words and phrases for flavor. The literary language is essentially dead. There is a small, but determined, movement to preserve the dialect, but at this point it's pretty much a lost cause. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 16:08, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Dominus Vobisdu -- in your scenario of a young person talking to grandparents, he or she is what linguists call a Semi-speaker... AnonMoos (talk) 23:14, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks! That article and the article on Language death linked to in it were very helpful. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 00:53, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Filelakeshoe, while there is some merging in practice, Scots language and Scottish English at least have separate articles. --  <font face="Papyrus">Jack of Oz  <font face="Papyrus">[Talk]  18:34, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * ... and Scots was not less intelligible to those of us in Northern England in the past, since Lallans was just a dialect of Northern English, so this is not really an example of convergence, though I agree that Scottish English, like all English dialects, is moving in the direction of standard English.   D b f i r s   20:00, 4 December 2012 (UTC)


 * In addition to the terms mentioned above I would add "stratum". Gabbe (talk) 07:50, 6 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I think the first answer, language convergence, answers the original poster's request best, as it's the most generally applicable term, and includes cases where the languages in question are not dialects of the same language. If anybody wants to read up on it, standard introductions about these kinds of issues are Don Winford (2005), An introduction to contact linguistics; Sarah Thomason (2001), Contact linguistics, or Yaron Matras (2009), Language contact. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:43, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Irregular death in Serbo-Croat
Brian Aldiss, in his Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's, writes that "Serbo-Croat has two words for dying, one referring to human death, one to animal death, although two animals are the exception to the rule. Bees and dolphins are irregular, and take the human form of the verb."

Aldiss did know a bit of Serbo-Croat, but this still seems too good to be true. Is it? HenryFlower 08:54, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Regarding the idea that umreti and its cognates in other Slavic languages should only be used to talk about humans, this may be a prescriptive rule but the actual usage tends to be a little shakier. The same rule exists in Czech (with the verb umřít) but people do quite commonly use that to talk about animals, especially their pets. Conversely, using any "animal death" word (e.g. chcípnout) to talk about humans is horribly insulting and offensive. So some distinction exists but it's not as clear cut as language purists make out. I suppose the same is the case in BCS, as I found plenty of usage of pas umro (= the dog died, using the "human death" verb) on a google search.
 * I asked a Serbian friend about dolphins and bees, and she told me she would use uginuti (that's the "animal death" verb) to talk about bees, but for dolphins either uginuti or umreti is possible. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 11:15, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Re cz:chcípnout see chcípnout. Similar ru:подыхать, подохнуть, pl:zdychać, zdechnąć (etym. 'loose ones breath') neutral for most animals except (in pl) bees and pets, vulgar and offensive for people vs. neutral ru:умирать, умереть, pl:umierać, umrzeć. --CiaPan (talk) 11:45, 19 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks both -- for now I suppose I can classify it as half-true; I'm especially intrigued that bees may indeed have special status. HenryFlower 13:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Here is a quote from a Hyde Park Corner at the readers' forum of a Hunting Daily:
 * "Gdy zginie ostatnia pszczoła na kuli ziemskiej ludzkości zostanie tylko cztery lata życia. To powiedział Einstein. Pszczoła jest odpowiedzialna za zapylanie ogromnej ilości roślin na ziemi. Ok. 84 procent. Więc jeśli zabraknie pszczół to zabraknie jedzenia. Pszczoła zawsze była otaczana wielkim szacunkiem. Pszczelarz z szacunku do dziś nie mówią że pszczoła zdechła tylko umarła."


 * My rough translation, with some help from Google Translate:
 * "When the last bee dies, mankind dies in four years. So Einstein said. A bee is responsible for pollination of huge amount of plants – about 84 percent. So when there is no bees, there will be no food, either. A bee was always deeply respected, beekeepers never say a bee zdechła, only umarła."


 * Minor note: in Polish the noun 'pszczoła', a bee, is of feminine gender, so the two untranslated verbs are sing. fem. past.
 * This of course is not a scientific, lingustic source – but the same I've seen in many places, both in the Web recently and in books in older times, so that's how people commonly understand the difference bees make, and a reason why we use a 'human' verb for them. --CiaPan (talk) 15:09, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

On a side note, an image has been recurring in social media in the recent couple of years that discusses the terms for dying in the Albanian language. See e.g. here. The text is:


 * [English] Die means to die. It also is the singular of dice.
 * [Albanian] "Vdes" means die, but is only used for humans, "ngordh" means to die and is used for animals, but it can also mean starve when used for humans, but you cannot use "ngordh" for bees or battle horses since they are respected animals, so you have to use "vdes" for those, but "vdes" in dialectal tosk also means to exhaust someone to death. There is also dialectal gheg "cof" which means die, but is only used for animals (bees not included again), but used to be for plants, but now "vyshkem" is for plants, that's why whe [text intentionally cut off in source]

--Theurgist (talk) 20:02, 19 July 2019 (UTC)


 * English is not quite that simple, see Tap and die and Die (manufacturing). Alansplodge (talk) 12:58, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

In Croatian you have umrijeti for people and uginuti for animals. You might use umrijeti for some really dignified animal, like when some people talk about their pets, but that's informal and the more callous of us might roll our eyes later on. The hits you're getting for "pas umro" (dog died) are from social media and tabloids. It's also sometimes used for animals thought to be very intelligent like elephants, horses or dolphins, and I guess beekeepers say that for bees but that's all also somewhat informal. On the other side uginuti is just never used for people, it's not even an insult, just something no native speaker would say. There's also crknuti which used to be the normal verb for animal death but became derogatory, and you can use this for a human you despise. Specialized verbs like "drown" apply to all beings equally. Plants usually get these, you can say uginuti for a plant but it sounds kinda awkward.

It's a little like essen/fressen in German or food/feed in English. 93.136.57.171 (talk) 22:58, 20 July 2019 (UTC)