Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 January 3

= January 3 =

Parent Languages of Arabic
Hi, I came across an article that was trying to identify a certain style used in Quranic Arabic. In his claim, the author wrote that Arabic's parent language is Hebrew, and Hebrew's parent language is 'Ancient Arabic' in which letters themselves also represented words like Chinese.

I was wondering if some knew what language he is referring to (Akkadian? Syriac?) And if Hebrew is considered to be 'parent' language of Arabic? I have searched all across the Internet, Wikipedia, Encarta etc, but nowhere was I able to find an explanation of what language tree does Arabic follow. Omer (talk) 07:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)


 * We have Semitic languages, and Afro-Asiatic languages. If you're looking for a family tree, you can get one here. If you're thinking of writing systems, you can take a look at cuneiform script.--K.C. Tang (talk) 07:38, 3 January 2008 (UTC)


 * It sounds like the author of that article was thoroughly ignorant and then some. --Lambiam 12:38, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The oldest versions of Sinaitic have letters that are considered somewhat logographic or ideographic, but not like Chinese. I'd say the article's author was a little confused. Steewi (talk) 00:18, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The more correct term is probably "acrophonic" -- many letters were stylized pictures of a word that began with the sound which the letter wrote, so that the name of the letter used to write the sound [b] was probably something like baytu ( a word meaning "house"), and the letter looked like a stylized drawing of a house. But there's no evidence that the letters were used to write words, rather than simple consonant sounds (for example, the letter named baytu was used to write the consonant [b], not the whole word baytu itself). AnonMoos (talk) 14:10, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Malayalam spelling and transliteration
Could someone please walk me through some Malayalam transliteration? The title മാര്‍ത്തോമ്മാ is used for Mar Thoma (St Thomas, from ܡܪܝ ܬܐܘܡܐ). At first I would transliterate it as 'Mārttōmmā', but I believe that ത്തോ is 'ṯō' (the fricative as in 'thin') rather than 'ttō'. Is this correct? Is the spelling of the part മാര് 'mār' correct, or is it മാറ് 'māṟ'? What is the reason for the doubling in മ്മാ 'mmā'? Thanks. — Gareth Hughes (talk) 14:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * According to Malayalam language, Malayalam doesn't have a fricative /θ/ as in "thin", and the sound transliterated ṯ is an alveolar stop. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 15:49, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Angr. I think that it is a convention in Malayalam to represent a non-native fricative. As I've been working with churchy borrowings in Malayalam, I've come across കത്തോലിക്കാ 'kattōlikkā' and ഓര്‍ത്തഡോക്സ്‌ 'ōrttaḍōks'. In both cases, I've been told that ത്ത് 'tt' is used to represent /θ/. I'm not sure what gemination in other letters achieves, but I assume it's something to do with syllable weight, stress or reflecting an assumed pronunciation. — Gareth Hughes (talk) 16:15, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * What about plain "t" or Greek "τ"? Is that rendered with a geminate too? Kattōlikkā and Marttōmmā make it looks like gemination might not be related to fricativity. I've read that Tamil has lenition of single voiceless stops (but not geminates) to voiced fricatives in intervocalic position; if Malayalam does that too, maybe they write kattōlikkā rather than katōlikā because the latter spelling would suggest [kaðo:liγa:]. But that still doesn't explain the geminate mm in Marttōmmā. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 19:14, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Vietnamese
http://www.svnl.net/dien_dan/viewtopic.php?t=768&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=84ec3c94f83137a7e3c5f28093544b3e

What's this about? I'm told it's in Vietnamese. Looks yummy... By the way, don't click the link of you're at all squeamish. Seans Potato Business 17:47, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * See the forum posting on this very url at snopes. Foxhill (talk) 18:35, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Mmmmm yummy! I'll just de-link the link so that other people won't click on the link before reading your whole post like I did. --antilivedT 22:34, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It's a rehashed claim that the Chinese eat fetuses. DHN (talk) 02:42, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Chinese
Does Chinese have two different sh-like sounds, transliterated as sh (like in shang) and hs (like in hsuan, but read as "shuan")? Or is it really one single sound that carelessly or by some convention has taken two different representations in English? --Omidinist (talk) 18:42, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It's two different sounds, transliterated as sh (a low-pitched voiceless retroflex fricative) and hs in Wade-Giles/x in Pinyin (a high-pitched voiceless alveopalatal fricative). However, they might not be separate phonemes since they don't occur in the same environments: x only occurs before the high front vowels /i, y/, while sh never occurs there. Incidentally, Polish has (more or less) the same two sh-like sounds: the retroflex is spelled sz and the alveopalatal is spelled ś (or s before i). —Angr If you've written a quality article... 18:50, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Russian also has these two sounds. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  22:29, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your care. Omidinist (talk) 16:04, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Native English speakers often have trouble discerning between "sh" and "x", since the latter doesn't appear in English. That could be a source of some confusion. And then, you have the people from Southern China who have trouble discerning between "sh" and "s". That always mixes me up.  bibliomaniac 1  5  20:42, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, neither appears in English. The English sound represented by sh might be described as a sound in between the two. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  20:52, 5 January 2008 (UTC)