Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 October 20

= October 20 =

How do you pronounce "propanol" and "propanal"?
How do you pronounce "propanol" and "propanal"? Is there a standard pronunciation that distinguishes the two in speech? 71.79.234.132 (talk) 01:19, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Propanol
 * Propanal
 * Plasmic Physics (talk) 01:41, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * /ɵ/ cannot be stressed in English and the secondary stress should be marked in the bottom. RP: /ˈprəʊpəˌnɒl/, /ˈprəʊpəˌnæl/.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:20, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Propanol
 * Propanal
 * Then remove let us not stress /ɵ/, however /ɵ/ is still more correct than /əʊ/. Plasmic Physics (talk) 09:33, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It's English, not French, the stress on the first syllable of both the words.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:52, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Here in England, it's /ˈprəʊpənɒl/ and /ˈprəʊpənal/ (long stressed first syllable). We might add a secondary stress to the last syllable to emphasise the distinction.  US pronunciation uses oʊ in place of əʊ for the first vowel, and this is also sometimes the case in the UK, especially in the north.    D b f i r s   11:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Here in the United States, propanol is normally [ˈproʊpənɔːl]. It is only [ˈproʊpənɒl] for speakers with the caught-cot merger. Like ethanol, propanol is an alcohol, and its last syllable rhymes with that of alcohol. Propanal would be /ˈproʊpənæl/. The final syllable has the /æ/, because it is short for aldehyde. Watch this video for an example of the pronunciation of butanal, an aldehyde like propanal. Marco polo (talk) 14:41, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * ( Yes, the /al/ in modern standard British English is the equivalent of /æl/ in old RP and American. )
 * Does the last syllable of propanol really rhyme with "fall" in standard American?   D b f i r s   16:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, User:Dbfirs it does in my dialect, see below. But fall, folly, rally and Foley don't. μηδείς (talk) 00:19, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * ... so do you say "alcohall"? It's a short "o" in British English ("hol" as in holiday, hot, folly etc.) I know our /ɒ/ is usually /ɑ/ across the pond, and that you don't distinguish between long and short as much as we do in the UK: that's probably why I'm confused, but isn't it just /ɔ/ rather than /ɔ:/?    D b f i r s   09:57, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Alcohol and all are nearly perfect rhymes in many American dialects. The caught/cot merger means exactly that: Americans cannot distinguish between those two vowels, and consider them in free variation.  There are a few dialects in the U.S. that maintain a caught/cot distinction, but not most, and there's one which combines caught and cot, but distinguishes between "father" and "bother" (see Boston accent).  Wikipedia has an entire article on this class of vowels, and their peculiarities in various dialects, at Phonological history of English low back vowels.  -- Jayron  32  11:07, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * In case all the IPA is confusing people, propanol rhymes with fall, call, all, ball, etc. Propanal rhymes with Al, pal, etc.  -- Jayron  32  17:15, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, I'd rhyme propanol with doll and alcohol.   D b f i r s   17:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * "doll" and "fall" rhyme for many English speakers. See cot-caught merger. This is why we should all learn IPA :) SemanticMantis (talk) 17:32, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I see from your link that about half of all Americans fail to distinguish the vowels, but the merger is rare in the UK. Are the people with this merger not aware that BBC English (and standard American if that exists?) has separate vowels?    D b f i r s   21:28, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Not unless they study comparative phonology. A merger means that they no longer perceive the two phonemes as distinct. —Tamfang (talk) 02:11, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Here in the UK, I'm well aware that my home dialect has the occasional merger of vowels that are distinct in BBC English. I recall being slightly confused by one or two of them in my early teens, but soon constructed a mental mapping so that I could reproduce something close to BBC English when required.  I realise that America is a much bigger country without a generally-accepted standard accent, but are those who speak each regional accent not aware that other regions speak differently?    D b f i r s   09:25, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Not quite, the idea of the "merger" means that the speakers of that dialect don't consider the two different sounds to carry any meaningful difference, and so ignore it (see free variation). Because of the way they perceive the two sounds, they really have a hard time hearing the difference in ordinary speech.  If you force who has such a merger to, they SOMETIMES can understand the distinction, but normally they wouldn't notice that someone without the merger was saying two different vowel sounds in those two different contexts.  It isn't confined to that particular pair of vowels.  The same problems exist in other situations.  The famous l/r confusion in Japanese occurs because Japanese considers those two sounds to be in free variation; that is they are simply versions of the same sound, not significantly different letters.  -- Jayron  32  11:12, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm American, and I pronounce them the same way Shakespeare does: [ˈprəʊpənɔːl] and [ˈprəʊpənæ:l] (secondary stress on final syllables, length due to citation form request-the ash vowel is not tense here even if it's lengthened). μηδείς (talk) 18:05, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * We have a fascinating vowel chart at Great Vowel Shift, where you will see that this vowel would have been neither [oʊ] nor [əʊ], but [oː] in Shakespeare's time. Marco polo (talk) 19:35, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The great vowel shift occurred in London before Shakespeare's time, no? There are certainly no signs of the vowel shift not yet having occurred for the settlers of the Jamestown colony or the Plymouth colony. 00:33, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Medeis's pronunciation is a regional one limited to southern New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and maybe Virginia. Marco polo (talk) 19:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * That's South Jersey (there's no such thing as southern New Jersey) and it's the Delaware Valley accent, although our articles on the area dialects overlap and conflict. μηδείς (talk) 19:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * We're looking for the right way to pronounce them, not for affected pronunciations due to accents. We have to look at it objectively, not what each person here would say it like. Meaning it should not suffer from maladies such as the cot-caught merger. There is no way which I can force 'doll' and 'fall' to rhyme without sounding ridiculous, by the same token it does not sound right to add length to the final /ɒ/, to turn it into /ɔː/, it sounds like a drawl. Plasmic Physics (talk) 21:18, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * How is an actual accent described by perhaps the most highly regarded sociolinguist an "affectation" that interferes with the answer? I am reminded of the "I don't have an accent, you do" attitude of non-linguists.  Given he died long, long ago in a realm far, far away, I thought the Shakespeare joke was obvious, but my description of my pronunciation was just as valid and as helpful as that of anyone else here, especially someone who lives on the wrong hemisphere compared to the OP, who most likely also speaks a Midlands dialect. μηδείς (talk) 23:55, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * When I am referring to affections, I am referring to deviations from the progenitor pronunciation. I am not denying that I also have an accent, I am simply stating that each one of us should not assume that their particular accent takes supremacy. We should look at the original intended pronunciation. I have almost no idea about the works by Shakespeare, and even less about that of Labov. The OP explicitly stated that they are seeking the pronunciation without accent. Plasmic Physics (talk) 00:34, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, PP. The issue is, there is no such thing as a pronunciation without accent.  Except for the rhotacism, a Delaware Valley accent is the closest you'll get in the US to an RP accent, unless you go to trained stage actors.  I'd suggest Elizabeth McGovern, the Countess Grantham on Downton Abbey.  She's got a trained/educated Midlands Accent from the US; specificlly, she was born in Illinois, schooled in LA, and trained in NYC.  You won't find a more neutral US accent.  Because I have the [əʊ] vowel for /o:/ when I am not code switching to a NYC dialect, I have often been asked if I speak [RP, since except for my rhotacism and lack of a trap-bath split, it is my native phonology. If it's not native to him, the IP should not affect my centered /o:/ vowel--but otherwise what I have said should serve him well if he wants to speak educated General American. μηδείς (talk) 00:48, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Both the transatlantic accent (see Katherine Hepburn) and the Boston Brahmin accent also have characteristics of RP. See Here for Boston Brahmin.  It sounds like a cross between RP and the standard New England accent.  There's also the Locust Valley lockjaw from the New York area (listen to George Plimpton talk, for example).  All three of these accents (Transatlantic from Philadelphia, Boston Brahmin from Boston, and Locust Valley from New York) have their basis in upper class accents in Northeastern metro areas, so there's probably some bit of "affectation" in their origins.  But they did develop into distinct, natural accents among their social classes.-- Jayron  32  02:28, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * "Affectation" implies an attempt to speak differently from one's native accent, which is why it is "affected". My native accent is not the same as Plimpton's, Hepburn's, Rooseveldt's, Moynihan's or Thatcher Longstreth's, nor exactly Grace Kelly's, although I'd say hers and John Facenda's and Bruce Willis's are the closest to mine. In any case, none of this has to do with upper class education, just literacy. μηδείς (talk) 05:55, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Get back on topic, people. Q: "How do you pronounce "propanol" and "propanal"?" A: Carefully. Shoit Fiddy-Ait aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:54, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * More than "a few" dialects in North America distinguish cot and caught. If you truly wish to propose that only a few dialects in North America distinguish cot and caught, then I propose that only a few dialects in the British Isles distinguish /θ/ and /f/ and /ð/ and /v/. The West Coast and Midwest of the United States is not indicative the country as a whole. I really have to wonder where people got that silly idea in their heads... Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 12:33, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The article kindly linked by Jayron and SemanticMantis above states that about 40% of Americans had this merger in the 1996 and 2003 surveys. My guess is that the proportion has now risen to about half.  If Americans are as aware of differing accents as we are in the UK, then I would guess that less than half of those with the merger are ignorant of the fact that two different vowels exist in varieties of English outside their own immediate area.    D b f i r s   13:00, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I wonder what it would have sounded like before the American-British split in ~1725. Plasmic Physics (talk) 23:50, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Which British? There were likely dozens (probably hundreds) of distinct British dialects in the 1700s, some of which would have only been marginally intelligible to some others.  The English Language in the UK became more standardized with national education programs and the like, but even today less than 10% of speakers of English in the U.K. speak Received Pronunciation, and that's supposed to be the "national standard".  List of dialects of the English language lists 40 different dialects within the UK today, and that's only the ones we have Wikipedia articles for.   -- Jayron  32  02:17, 22 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm asking because that would be the closest to something that approaches a "standard pronounciation", which is neither distinctly American or distinctly British, something that most people would have spoken at the time. Plasmic Physics (talk) 10:30, 22 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I do not find probable there was any word at all ending in "-nol" in English before ~1725. If you are thinking about "alcohol", that word derives from the Arabic "al kuhl", its derivate was simply scientific Latin. "Most people" would then rather mean Pole, Dutch, Portuguese .. --Askedonty (talk) 12:16, 22 October 2014 (UTC)


 * It should be easy to approximate the correct phoneme for the 'o' as it appears within the word, regardless of whether or not there is a precedent. I know that most people who would have used the word weren't English, which is why my question was specifically constrained to those who were English. So the etymology of the word is completely irrelevant. Plasmic Physics (talk) 10:43, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Not quite. Such vocabularies were used mainly written instead of spoken. If you learned them from listening to a teacher the first time it was spelled to a local the first orator had been a foreigner. The other case is a local scientist deciphers it from a written text. Now you have the diversity of dialects Jayron told you about, compensated maybe by some homogeneity in clerical practice. Let us suppose you have to spell that word thus have to find your own pronounciation. That would be called, a prosodic invention. You have choice between two main options for elaborating an intonation: sophistication vs prosaicness. However you are in concurrence with the other one who is trying to reproduce his own good teacher's spelling. An accumulation of those various parameters makes the idea of a standard pronounciation right from the beginning, improbable. I'm eager to learn that it is otherwise. The exception is "crocodile", but that one, is clearly documented. (The Globe)--Askedonty (talk) 14:09, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

What is the correct word? Ensemble.
What is the correct word to describe a TV show or a film in which there are many starring actors, but they are all considered "equal"? For example, a TV show like Friends. There is no real "main star". All six characters/actors were considered equal, with no one out-ranking or billing-over another. I thought of the word "entourage" cast. But, I think there is another better, more appropriate word to describe this scenario. I can't recall that word. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:25, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Seems to fit the first sentence of Ensemble cast fairly well. Also this. &#8209;&#8209; Mandruss (t) 15:27, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Exactly! That was the word I was thinking of.  It was escaping me.  Thanks!     Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:38, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with ensemble, but a related term is "an all star cast", which would be used if the cast were all stars prior to that performance, regardless of if they had equal roles in the current show. StuRat (talk) 04:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Good point, thanks!   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:08, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

To be or not to be.....
....this is my question. This is something I have always wanted to ask. I am a professional linguist, but have never read Shakespeare in any language, including my own (English). I have often wondered, however, how this particular very famous phrase - so famous that even the likes of me who have not read Shakespeare before would know it - would be translated into other languages. Can anyone give any translations of it - with literal tranlations back into English if the words used are slightly different? The best I can do with Japanese is 「存在するか、しないか？それがその問題. 」 - "To exist or not? That's the problem." KägeTorä - (影虎) (Chin Wag) 23:21, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Admittedly, this isn't as good as a native speaker, but online translators are a good start and might suffice for your purposes. For example, at translate.google.com, I get the following in French: être ou ne pas être, telle est la question. But why am I telling you this, you're a linguist! &#8209;&#8209; Mandruss (t) 23:38, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * At https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Hamlet,_Prince_of_Denmark/Act_3, you can find links to Catalan ("Viure, o no viure: la qüestió és aqueixa"), German ("Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage"), Esperanto ("Ĉu esti aŭ ne esti,—tiel staras / Nun la demando"), Spanish ("Ser o no ser, ésa es la cuestión."), Polish ("Być albo nie być, otóż-to pytanie"), and Chinese.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 23:44, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1365408#sitelinks-wikipedia.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 23:49, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * As a native Delaware Valley dialect speaker of American, I have never heard Shakespeare of any value except in Broad English or Great Russian. Here's the Original Russian Soliloquy. μηδείς (talk) 00:26, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * To quote Chancellor Gorkon, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."--William Thweatt TalkContribs 05:58, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Frivolity aside, a similar question was asked in the wordreference.com forums in 2006 with quite a few answers from various languages. Here's the link.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 07:16, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * In Finnish, it's Ollako vai eikö olla, siinä pulma, which is more or less a literal translation from English. You can find the whole text at the Finnish Wikiquote, it's the very first quote listed. J I P &#124; Talk 06:43, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Incidentally, we have an article called "To be, or not to be" with interlanguage links to several languages, including Cantonese and Hebrew. Matt Deres (talk) 16:16, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Those languages are listed on the Wikidata page to which I linked above.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 18:34, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Shakespearean English
I have a related question. How do we know what English in Shakespeare's time sounded like? Obviously there were no mechanical sound recording devices then ... (Pardon me if we already have a Wikipedia article on this.) — SMUconlaw (talk) 09:50, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Early Modern English has some basic information, but sadly, doesn't have any information on pronunciation. Phonological history of English does have information on pronunciation, but the organization makes it hard for me to follow.  This google search I tried turns up some promising references.  -- Jayron  32  10:46, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Borrowings from English into other languages at that time, fauxnetic transcriptions, regular sound change, what words are listed as rhyming with what other words, etc. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 12:27, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Here's some blog coverage of one linguist's take, implicating Tangier,_Virginia as a surviving colony of near-Shakespearean English. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:24, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * There are a few videos of Shakespeare excerpts done in the original pronunciation on youtube, but I am not expert enough to vouch for them. μηδείς (talk) 16:20, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * See this short and instructive video on the topic, with some nice examples: Shakespeare: Original pronunciation Abecedare (talk) 16:22, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I found this video suggested by SemanticMantis particularly interesting. — SMUconlaw (talk) 16:56, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * And there is this link shared by User:Fuhghettaboutit above. One method among many is to check English dictionaries and grammars, which will often inventory words' pronunciation by telling you which other words they rhymed with. Evan (talk&#124;contribs) 18:23, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Depending on the orthography and the writer, an analysis of spelling mistakes can yield clues, too. 82.83.85.21 (talk) 13:04, 24 October 2014 (UTC)