Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 December 1

= December 1 =

Is Satan pronounced same as satin?
Is Satan pronounced same as satin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Satin#Satan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin (look @ "Not to be consufed with Satan."). 78.156.109.166 (talk) 09:41, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * According to the pronunciation given at Wiktionary, they're not pronounced similarly enough to warrant confusion. I've removed the "not to be confused with Satan" tag from satin. J I P  &#124; Talk 10:22, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Confusion doesn't necessarily only come from homophones, but also words with similar spellings, in which case those two words do seem to qualify. StuRat (talk) 10:43, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * That "not to be confused with" sounds like somebody's idea of a joke. Satan rhymes with Peyton and satin rhymes with Patton. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:31, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems like they DO pronounce the same to me. I've said them verbally to check.
 * Michael Jackson. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.156.109.166 (talk) 15:36, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Then you're pronouncing one of them the wrong way. Unless you pronounce "rate" and "rat" the same way. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:20, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

The most prevalent pronunciations using transcriptions according to Wikipedia IPA for English conventions are Satan = [seɪtən] and satin = [sætɪn]. In many American English dialects, the second syllables of the words would become syllabic nasals, and the original contrast between the unstressed vowels would disappear. The 14th edition Daniel Jones pronouncing dictionary lists [sætən] as an "old fashioned" pronunciation of Satan, but I've never heard it, and I don't think it would be understood in most areas of the English-speaking world... AnonMoos (talk) 16:18, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

From my experience as a native English speaker, I've never gotten them confused or heard of anyone getting them confused--I think that the quasi-redirect in question was intended as a joke as well. Cogito-Ergo-Sum 03:07, 2 December 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by CogitoErgoSum14 (talk • contribs)


 * They're distinct to those of us in the Great White North too. The Church Lady demonstrates how the first should really be pronounced. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:26, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Distribution of Cyrillic
Why do some places that have been under Russian control for centuries, such as Poland and Estonia, use the Latin alphabet and not Cyrillic? → Σ σ  ς. (Sigma) 10:22, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * In general, controlling another nation doesn't always mean you want to force it to change to match your own, whether we're talking about the alphabet or something else. The Romans seemed to understand this, and often allowed the conquered nations to retain their own languages.  To force them to abandon their own culture would ensure more resistance to Roman rule. StuRat (talk) 10:46, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Σ -- Choice of alphabet actually correlates most closely with religion: predominantly Catholic or Protestant = Latin alphabet, while predominantly Eastern Orthodox = Russian alphabet. That explains why Serbo-Croatian was written with the Latin alphabet in Croatia but mainly with the Cyrillic alphabet in Serbia.  However, Romania switched over to the Latin alphabet in order to align itself with the other Romance-language-speaking nations... AnonMoos (talk) 16:06, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * In the 1920's, Soviet scholars developed standard Latin-based scripts for most of the languages of the Soviet Union that did not already have their own script. In the 1930's these were all replaced by Cyrillic scripts. Only the long-established cases of Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Armenian, Georgian and Yiddish were left uncyrillicised. Outside the Soviet Union, I know of no language which changed to use Cyrillic apart from Mongolian: as AnonMoos says, the other Cyrillic scripts in Europe are traditional, and used where the Orthodox Church was traditionally strong. --ColinFine (talk) 18:00, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Because there was never official policy to enforce Cyrillic until 1930s. And even so, the communists imposed Cyrillic only to those who either have never had strong written tradition (many people of Volga-Ural region, Syberia and so on) or had the Arabic script (so the communists tried to struggle against Muslim fundamentalism this way, the Latinisation ten years before also had this goal).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:37, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Back in the Russian Empire Nicholas I did try to introduce a Cyrillic alphabet for Polish but was unsuccessful, for the reasons mentioned above; see . Estonian literature does not have as long a history, but the prestige language in the Baltic region was German, which used the Latin alphabet (or more precisely Fraktur, which Estonian also used; see ). Lesgles (talk) 02:33, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
 * You oversimplify the matter. The tsars were not super-humans who were only responsible for every doing and who controlled every aspect of the life in the country. The "Cyrillization" of Polish (and to a lesser extent Lithuanian) was an initiative of the local Orthodox clergy with a dozen or so of printed religious books for no-one (obviously, the Poles and Lithuanians did not read them). And Nicholas I was initially quite generous to the Poles and Polish aristocracy until their risings, when his and his successors' policy toward Poland turned around. In the Baltic and Finland everything was ruled by the local Baltic German or Swedish aristocracy as well as Lutheran clergy, so the tsarist administration entire relied upon them and therefore indulged them. As you can understand they (Germans and Swedes) were not interested in Cyrillization so the Russian administration wasn't. The similar tsarist hands-off policy was applied to Caucasian and Central Asian peoples.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 03:23, 2 December 2013 (UTC)