Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 October 25

= October 25 =

Do modern Italians sounds like ancient ones?
Do modern Italians have the same accents as those from ancient Rome? --Romanophile (talk) 06:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * How can they? They're speaking different languages. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:32, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * So? Americans, Australians, British people and western Canadians all have different accents, but they speak the same language. --Romanophile (talk) 11:53, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Are Italian and Latin the same language? And are there any audio recordings from the time of the Caesars? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * No, they’re not the same language and I know that there’re no audio recording from back then. Why are you being so condescending? Do you think that the answer is really that obvious? I don’t get it. --Romanophile (talk) 12:27, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * , "The same/different accent" normally only applies to varieties of a single language. Since Latin and Italian are very different languages, the concept doesn't apply. But to the more general qestion in your header, and to Bugs's question, there is quite a lot known about how Latin was pronounced (which varied over time, of course). From memory, the vowel sounds probably haven't changed much from classical Latin to Italian, but the consonants have quite a lot. Perhaps the most obvious difference is the /ʃ/,/tʃ/ and /dʒ/ sounds (as in 'scienza', 'ciao' and 'Gian') were not present in Latin. Whether the prosody of the language sounded anything like modern Roman is a much harder question. --ColinFine (talk)


 * Thank you, that’s better. I’m not well‐educated on sociolinguistics, so that might be why my question looked odd. I was wondering if there was some way to determine or reconstruct the accents of ancient people, but I suppose that I’m out of luck. --Romanophile (talk) 12:47, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, according to some linguists. The aspiration of the Tuscan dialect of Italian is attributed to an Etruscan language substrate by some. jstor review. μηδείς (talk) 19:34, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about like pronouncing casa [haza] ? --Trovatore (talk) 20:57, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, specifically the pronunciation of p,t, & c /k/ in the Tuscan dialect. The theory is not mine, and I have no opinion on it, but it would match the OP's criterion. μηδείς (talk) 21:42, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The vowel system went from five vowels with length distinction to seven vowels without length distinction. (Broadly, short high vowels (/ĭ ŭ/) and long mid vowels (/ē ō/) became upper-mid vowels (/e o/, written ‹é ó› in Italian stressed syllables), and short mid vowels became low-mid vowels (/ɛ ɔ/, ‹è ò›).) — Latin has many final consonants, Italian very few (nasals and liquids). —Tamfang (talk) 06:49, 26 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Modern Standard Italian (I'm not speaking of dialects) differs very greatly from Latin in at least these respects:
 * Italian lost entirely the distinction between short and long vowels in Latin. Many Latin diphthongs are lost, but many Latin monophthongs became diphthongs in Italian. This all make two vocal systems are very different. Latin vowels sounded more like in Finnish, than in Italian.
 * Italian has the dynamic accent, while Latin had the pitch accent. Again Finnish is quite closer. Finns should have no many problems in pronouncing the Latin vowels properly.
 * A lot of Latin consonants have been changed. The changes are so numerous that it is not possible to list them here, better to read special books on this.
 * Even if we do not take grammar into consideration, both Latin and Italian have little in common. As much as common as humans are similar with ancient Primates. But I agree, that Italian phonetics is a little closer to Latin than that of French. Spanish is somewhat similar with Italian in that respect. Portuguese is somewhat betwixt Spanish and French. Romanian is Italian spoken by Slavs (a joke, but in every joke there is a grain of truth).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 01:32, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * FWIW, when I was studying Latin at school in 1968/9, our Latin teacher told us that the Classical Roman accent resembled that of present day Yorkshire. However, I have no idea of his source for that (if any), or whether he was merely pulling our legs. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:17, 26 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Pitch accent? News to me.  Latin word accent is determined by the syllable structure; pitch accents tend to be more free.  A pitch accent would also seem incompatible with the reconstruction that a preclassical stage of Latin had fixed word-initial stress (to account for vowel changes in prefixed verbs). —Tamfang (talk) 07:25, 27 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I read somewhere, but so long ago that I couldn't give you a source, that, hypnotized by Greek grammar, ancient Latin grammarians uniformly described the Latin accent as a pitch accent, but that they were almost certainly uniformly wrong, and were certainly wrong for vulgar Latin.
 * On the other hand could it be that literary Latin became influenced by Greek to such an extent that it adopted a pitch accent?
 * Literary Latin did after all adopt an entirely foreign quantitative metric for Latin poetry (which completely replaced the stress based Saturnian verse) and it is known that literate Romans were pronouncing Greek borrowings in Latin using Greek phonemes that did not otherwise exist in Latin (e.g. pronouncing Greek upsilon like French 'u', or aspirate pronunciations of ph, th, ch, and rh).
 * Someone with access to Latin grammatical literature may be able to shed more light on this.
 * One related question I find intriguing is that, this being the case, you would expect Latin grammarians to also try to find in Latin an equivalent to the circumflex/acute distinction of Greek.
 * The one way this would be likely to happen (since the place of the Latin accent is completely determined by the quantity of the penultimate syllable) would be to describe the accent as a circumflex if the penultimate had a long vowel, but as an acute if the penultimate syllable was short and the antipenultimate carried a long vowel, as this would result from the simplest pitch accent rule (ignore the last syllable and raise the mora two moras back).
 * Again, if someone has access to Latin grammatical literature, I'd be very curious if any such description is found anywhere.
 * Something to possibly watch for would be if they used Greek terms such as paroxytone, proparoxytone or properispomenon to describe the Latin accent, e.g. if they described the Latin accent as a properispomenon if the penultimate had a long vowel, a proparoxytone if the penultimate was a short syllable, or a paroxytone if the penultimate was a long syllable but had a short vowel.
 * Contact Basemetal   here  03:34, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Wallace Martin Lindsay explained it thouroughly.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:17, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was wrong. I must've confused it with Greek. Some trick of my memory, I remembered about the complexity of Latin prosody (which I still do not quite understand) that led me to think that the Latin stress is different from ours.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:17, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * As a side note: Greek classical prosody and Latin classical prosody (which is essentially a wholesale importation of the Greek system) have nothing to do with the accentual systems of the respective languages. They are purely quantitative: the accent has no relevance to the rules. So no matter how complex those metrical systems may be, they still can say nothing about the accent. In fact it is comical to hear ancient Greek poetry recited by modern Greek speakers: vowel and syllable quantity are entirely ignored. Instead the readers use an (artificial) stress accent (ictus) that hits the first syllable of every foot. So when reciting ancient poetry the modern Greek word accent, which is a stress accent but derives from the ancient Greek pitch accent is also ignored. This is to be contrasted with, for example, the way one recites poetry in English, where the first syllable of a foot is also given an accent but that accent coincides with the (primary or secondary) natural accent of the word. Of course, in the Greek case, consonants and vowels are given their modern values not the ancient Greek ones. Contact Basemetal   here  19:55, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Is the term "one party rule" ambiguous?
in the article Mexico when I read the title "One-party rule (1929-2000)" I had the impression that Mexico was a dictatorship, that it was a one party state or something like that. Do you think that would be a common reaction, or just me? hbdragon88 (talk) 06:57, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The National Action Party (Mexico) has been around almost as long as the ruling party during 1929-2000. In a true dictatorship, would other parties be allowed to exist? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:59, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, a dictatorship can still maintain the illusion of democracy. See South Vietnam. --Romanophile (talk) 12:41, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Hbdragon88, it depends what you mean. Do you mean a legal dictatorship (e.g. Nazi Germany after the Enabling Act of 1933), where personal rule or small-group rule is established by law, or a practical dictatorship (e.g. North Korea) where political pluralism nominally exists but opposition is suppressed?  North Korea nominally has three political parties, with the Korean Social Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongu Party officially existing separately from the Workers' Party of Korea.  In the USSR, there weren't any legal political parties aside from the CPSU (if I remember rightly), but the intro to Politics of East Germany shows that things were quite different there, on paper although of course not in real life.  "Single-party state", "one party rule", etc. can also mean a system where multiparty competition is legal and not suppressed, but corruption and similar tactics make it essentially impossible to compete with the ruling party.  In Liberian studies, these terms are routinely applied to the country's government for most of the 20th century before a military coup in 1980.  Opposition parties were legal, with active competition existing in many elections (in 1955, a former president even competed with the incumbent), but never amounting to much of anything in comparison to the True Whig Party.  For one reason, the TWP was part of the Americo-Liberian identity in contrast to the natives, and with the number of natives paying a hut tax (required for voting rights) and participating in government being comparatively small, there wasn't a ton of reason for interparty competition.  However, cronyism was rampant, and when such competition did arise, the government sometimes resorted to fraud; Guinness considers the 1927 election to be the most fraudulent in history, as the TWP candidate received 243,000 votes even though there were just 15,000 registered voters nationwide

. So while the TWP permitted competition, a mix of identity politics, cronyism, and electoral fraud combined to make the country a single-party state for over a century. Nyttend (talk) 23:22, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * If one party always wins, that does imply a lack of democracy. The only other alternative is that people are so happy with that party they never want anything else, and that just isn't consistent with human nature.  Also, you would expect to see such a nation with the highest GDP per person and at the top of every other quality of life ranking.  However, nations with consistent one-party rule tend to be closer to the bottom, so there's no reason to think the people there are happy with the situation, and wouldn't elect a different government if they could.  (China might be an interesting exception, if they can maintain one-party rule and yet move to the top economically, but somehow I doubt if that will happen.  Economic backlash from their recent military threats to their neighbors might be one limiting factor. )  StuRat (talk) 19:21, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * For which see In 1995, Time named him "Man of the Year" for "his role in ending the four-decades-long Democratic majority in the House". μηδείς (talk) 19:30, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Having a majority in one of two houses in one of the three branches of government is hardly "one-party rule". StuRat (talk) 19:33, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, Gingrich's election proved we live in a healthy democracy. μηδείς (talk) 21:40, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * As did his eventual defeat for screwing up. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:56, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * But Gingrich wasn't defeated, he resigned after attacks by Republicans who missed their days of wine and earmarks. Then came the go-along get-along pork-barrel hero Dennis Hastert after a brief caretaker speakership.  More like a win-win than a defeat. μηδείς (talk) 16:53, 26 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Being essentially run out of town on a rail qualifies as a defeat in my book. And Hastert resigned, and now he's in big trouble for allegedly another type of "pork", and that's another win-win. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:35, 26 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The problem here Bugs, is that Gingrich was not apparently out of town on a rail ridden. He was not defeated for his home seat.  He was not defeated as Speaker on a vote to void the seat, or of no confidence.  He was not simply replaced as speaker.  He was not found guilty of any of the ethics charges brought against him.  He seems simply to have said, "Eff it all, I'm goin' home."  You are the one saying he was actually run out of town on a rail, so could you kname that wrail (whith a link)? μηδείς (talk) 03:03, 27 October 2015 (UTC)


 * This sounds very much like how Nixon left. He wasn't impeached, after all, but only because he resigned before he could be impeached and removed from office.  (And then Ford's pardon made sure he wasn't charged with any crime in the normal courts, either.) StuRat (talk) 03:44, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Hanzi question
Hi all, A person I know has personal name in Chinese as 日 over 立. They bet that I couldn't find that Chinese character over the weekend. Seemed very simple character to me, but I'm demned if I can find it. You thoughts, WP:RDL denizens? --Shirt58 (talk) 13:16, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm relying on your sense of honour not to cheat on your bet, but ... 昱? HenryFlower 20:54, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * (a) 謝謝 Henry! Credit will be duly given to you as per the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL thingummies.
 * (b) Ugh, my 'orrible 'andwritten 'anzi - it looks like it's been extruded from a Rollie Eggmaster. Next time I ask a kanji/hanzi question, I promise to use squared paper and at least try to approximate the correct proportions of the radicals.
 * Pete AU aka--Shirt58 (talk) 08:53, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Testing functional literacy
What are some reliable tests of functional literacy, if it gets at all tested? Where do those statistics about 20% of Americans who can't read a simple text come from? Are they self-reported results (which seems quite unreliable) or tested with a standardized test? Literacy test was not of much use here. I want to know about functional literacy for educational purposes, not past test for discriminating people in Alabama? --Llaanngg (talk) 19:05, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The sort of claim you are citing is often made in a political context. It would be helpful to have a link to the source you are referring to which is making the actual 20% claim.


 * That being said, there are various different agencies that give accredited evaluations of language proficiency, written and spoken. See SIL and ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines which provide information and links on various proficiency tests.  The ACTFL tests are the ones used to certify people as teachers and in other contexts.  There are also various tests given by the US military, such as Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and see also List of standardized tests in the United States. μηδείς (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Russian в
How is в (the prepositional word, not just the letter) pronounced in Russian? wiktionary:в includes a section on Russian that links to File:Ru-в.ogg, a recording that obviously includes a vowel, but (1) no vowel is specified in Wiktionary's "Pronunciation" section, and (2) I'm left wondering whether the vowel in the recording is used by everyone, or if other vowels are sometimes realised, comparable to English "a" or "the", in which the vowel changes drastically from use to use and user to user. Nyttend (talk) 22:59, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * See во.—Wavelength (talk) 23:34, 25 October 2015 (UTC)


 * See also Russian phonology, under the discussion of four-consonant clusters. הסרפד  (call me Hasirpad) 23:41, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Three basic rules:
 * /v/ before voiced consonants and vowels.
 * /f/ before voiceless consonants.
 * /və/ or /vo/ (stressed) may be before consonant clusters especially that begin with another /v/ or /f/ (e.g. во вторник). Though it is quite possible to say в введении /vʲːːidʲenʲiĭ/. Other rules see .--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:40, 26 October 2015 (UTC)