Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 June 4

= June 4 =

Spelling of greek letters
Is there an "official" spelling for the letters in Greek? And did that remain constant from Ancient Greek to Modern Green? For example, Alpha is Alpha Lambda Phi Alpha, but is Beta, Beta- Eta - Tau- Alpha or Beta-Epsilon-Tau-Alpha?Naraht (talk) 01:11, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The answer may depend on the era. In early Greek eta was a consonant called heta; in later Greek it became a vowel. Georgia guy (talk) 01:12, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * If you look up Beta you will see that it is, in βῆτα, or in Modern βήτα. So a Greek person will spell it out like β–η–τ–α, which with the English names for the Greek letters comes out as Beta–Eta–Tau–Alpha. There are two ways to write and spell the name of the letter λ in Ancient Greek, λάβδα and λάμβδα, of which the first seems more common. Modern Greek adds a third possibility: λάμδα, which is the most common version (like taught in school). There are more differences between the Ancient and Modern names: γ is γάμμα in Ancient Greek, but γάμα in Modern Greek. Similarly, for κ we have κάππα versus κάπα. Also, τ is ταῦ in Ancient Greek but can be ταφ next to the spelling ταυ in Modern Greek. --Lambiam 08:07, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The Greek spelling of ALL of the Greek letter names is listed at each Wikipedia article, in the first line, for every one of them. It's an easy thing to find.  -- Jayron 32 15:42, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Or they're all here. Bazza (talk) 16:12, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * There is, and was, quite a bit of variation in how these names are written, and not an awful lot of written evidence for how they were written back in history. One reason for this is probably that they aren't in fact written very much at all. That's not surprising: Greek speakers usually have no more reason to actually spell out the names of their letters than English speakers have to write out theirs. Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw "bee", "cee", "dee" written out? Would you even know how to spell the name of "y"? (Our article suggests "wye"). Letter names are an essentially oral thing; they are what school children learn to recite when first learning the ABC; once they have them internalized, the only thing anybody ever writes down is just the letters themselves, not their names. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:35, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Lexicographers have a legitimate interest in the spelling. Letters are things, and things have names, and names are spelt a certain way. I wonder how Murray et al found sources for whatever spellings they published in the OED. Assuming they didn't just make them up. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Mismatched time references
Here's a quote from a book I've just finished:
 * In the summer of 1976 a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian ... went for a job interview at ... He would not hear the result till the following Monday, so to take his mind off the waiting over the weekend he decided to ....

One could ask, Which is the following Monday after the summer of 1976?, but one would not be so pedantic. Of course the reader assumes the interview took place on a Friday, or at least some time during the work week prior to the Monday of revelation, so there's no huge drama of incomprehensibiity. But it did stop me in my tracks, which I'm sure was not the outcome desired by the writer.

What I'd like to know is what is this mismatch of time references called? (Another well-known one is "I had been driving safely without incident for over 40 years when suddenly a car came out of my left and crashed into me".) --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:14, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I see no "mismatch" in the book passage. "Following" obviously connects with "went for a job interview", so it was the Monday after he went. --76.71.5.208 (talk) 02:28, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * The second one is of a very different kind. I'd rewrite it as: "I was driving, as I had been doing safely without incident for over 40 years, when suddenly a ship appeared on the horizon." If there is a name for this, I don't know it, but it looks like a botched ellipsis occasioned by a mismatched coordination. I too see no immediate mismatch between the time frames in the first sentence. You may just as well write, without change of meaning, "One day in the summer of 1976 a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian ... went for a job interview at the Playboy Mansion ... He would not hear the result till the following Monday". What comes across as strange to me is that the day of the interview could have been any weekday from a Monday to a Friday, so you don't know if he was so busy already Tuesday to Friday that he did not need a diversion, or that the interview took place just before the weekend. --Lambiam 08:51, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I think that's the issue. We have no reference point for whatever came before "the following Monday". We have a general time period ("the summer of 1976") paired with a much more specific one ("the following Monday"). It obviously refers to the specific day of the interview, so referring back to the summer of 1976 is almost an irrelevancy. It's like "I have 3 daughters: Maria was born in 1983, Sandra in 1986, and Hildegarde in the late 20th century".  That may not be an untrue statement as it stands, but it's a mismatch between specific years and a more general time frame. Maybe something to with parallelism (grammar). --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:37, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I repeat (for the only time), there is no issue. "Following" obviously connects with "went for a job interview", so it was the Monday after he went.  --76.71.5.208 (talk) 06:52, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * There's a word for people who far-sightedly see things that others deny. And vice-versa. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  11:42, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * It is reminiscent of something I see all the time in news items, "Attendance at St. Clement's was up by 287, while attendance at St. Mary's increased by only 4%." Which increase is the more substantial? We are supposed to compare while presented with incongruous measures. --Lambiam 08:03, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * And are they even talking about the same time period? Most commonly it's just "Attendance at St. Mary's increased by 4%", without telling us compared to when. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  11:42, 5 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I too see no problem with this sentence, if you are implying there is one. What mismatch are you referring to? It is simply identifying two separate points in time in the past and expressing the second relative to the first. Jmar67 (talk) 12:25, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Guiseppe / Giuseppe
A search for Guiseppe redirects to the name page Giuseppe, where there is no mention of the other spelling. To what extent are the two interchangeable? Are they pronounced the same? (A recent Trove search through 100 years of Australian newspapers for Guiseppe Bertolini and for Giuseppe Bertolini found 80 of the first and 20 of the second, so it's not likely to be a simple spelling error.) Doug butler (talk) 03:51, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I think I disagree. It is a common spelling error made by people such as anglophones who are not familiar with Italian pronunciation and orthographic conventions. Guiseppe would be pronounced (by Italians) as Gwee-seppeh, while the correct Giuseppe gets Jew-seppeh. People often mispronounce or over-pronounce Italian names, such as Giovanni, which is like Jo-vahn-ee, but often incorrectly gets Jee-oh-vahn-ee.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  04:52, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Funny! When I search Google for "Giuseppe Bertolini" it thinks I meant to search for "Guiseppe Bertolini"--and vice-versa. It thinks both are wrong somehow. Anyway, my non-Italian ass parses 'Guiseppe' as a misspelling. It goes back to Iosephus (and further back; but I don't know Greek or Hebrew) and nobody would ever spell that Oisephus. Temerarius (talk) 05:03, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * In Italian, gi is always pronounced with a soft g. The function of the i is to soften the g, not to be pronounced separately. Gi is the Italian way of writing our J, so Giuseppe is equivalent to Juseppe. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:55, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * This specific error may stem from the influence of the spelling of the more common name Guido. One wonders how people who write "Guiseppe Bertolini" pronounce the name. --Lambiam 09:09, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Then there are those who say "You-seppi". And "Yokovich". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  09:44, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks guys, you've been most generous. What an interesting page this is! Doug butler (talk) 20:53, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * In my experience Giuseppe is ways more frequent than Guido. But not only the mistake is made by English speakers, but also by German, French and Spanish speakers as well, probably only when they write, not when the speak. Here we ear possibly an US-American reading the mistaken Guiseppe somehow correctly as Jewseppeh. On the same page you find links to French, Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Indonesian speakers and they all say something like JEW- at the beginning, only the Indonesian seems to pronounce "gi" as "GHI" like in 'LEGGINS'. Well, for Americans and other English speakers the point is that they tend to pronounce U as YOO like in YUNIVERSAYTAY so they probably will pronounce GUI and GIU just the same (JYU). This doesn't explain how the mistake arises in other languages. I think it is a simple swapping typo that most Italian would immediately perceive and correct, that is way this error is somewhat less frequent in Italian texts. But the prettiest error of this kind I ever met was on a pack of noodles called "Macceronchini" (swapping the H).  2003:F5:6F10:0:B933:9D3:80E:608C (talk) 09:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC) Marco PB

"Catamaran" in Greek
What term would ancient (or modern, but preferably ancient) Greek people likely use when referring to a catamaran-style ship, let alone any ship or galley with multiple hulls? Say someone is talking about a trireme with two hulls connected by a middle section, would he call/describe it as "diskáphos triḗrēs" or something similar to this? I've also seen on Wiktionary that someone suggested "dígastro", presumably to attain the literal meaning of "double-stomached". --72.234.12.37 (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Did the Ancient Greeks build or be familiar with Catamaran-type ships? The article Catamaran indicates that the word itself, and the ship style, originated in the Austronesian peoples and spread through the Indo-Pacific world before being discovered by Europeans in early modern times.  -- Jayron 32 15:38, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, there have been several recorded examples of double-hulled ships, almost all of them far larger than the average galley of the time; Tessarakonteres is probably the most well-known example (despite the impracticality). Some barges and obelisk-transporting ships were said to be double-hulled or wide enough to possibly be so as well, such as Thalamegos and Syracusia, especially if those ships existed during the Ptolemaic dynasty reign.
 * The modern catamaran design as most of us would know it is what's descended/evolved from the Oceania outrigger canoe-based design, as far as I'm aware. I know that the ancient Greeks depicted and used double-hulled boats as well, just distinct and separate from the Austronesian natives and not the exact same style as them, let alone used the term "catamaran". I'm wondering if the Greeks have, or had ever used a term that is equivalent or roughly the same interpretation as "catamaran". Or if not necessarily the Greeks, Carthaginians, Macedonians, Romans, or anyone else who built and used galleys. --72.234.12.37 (talk) 16:48, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Modern Greek appears to use Καταμαράν, which is just a direct transliteration of "catamaran" using Greek letters. Interestingly, there does not appear to be a Greek wikipedia article for Tessarakonteres, that would have been the first place I would have looked.  -- Jayron 32 17:59, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * One Greek term, ploion zeugmatikon or "yoked boat" (see πλοῖον and ζεῦγμα), has been interpreted as a type of catamaran "or several small boats yoked together", for example in Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome by Brian Campbell, UNC Press. You might find more informative texts by searching the Greek term, "ploion zeugmatikon" or "πλοῖον ζευγματικóν". ---Sluzzelin talk  18:03, 4 June 2020 (UTC)


 * User:Jayron32, the word is of Tamil language origin, according to Wiktionary:catamaran. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:22, 5 June 2020 (UTC)


 * The earliest recorded use of the word places it on the Coromandel Coast. --Lambiam 14:41, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The statement about "origin" in the article in the Portuguese Wikipedia does not discuss the origin of the word, but of the boat type. The Portuguese Wiktionary agrees that the word is originally Tamil. --Lambiam 14:50, 5 June 2020 (UTC)


 * The origin of the word is interesting to read and all, but to reiterate, I am just simply looking for any possibility of ancient Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians etc. having or using any terms that are equivalent or roughly the same interpretation as "catamaran" or "multi-hulled ship" (because yes, I know that "catamaran" has no Mediterranean root let alone any chance of being a loanword at the time). If there aren't much more, would something like "diskáphos" or "digastro" be an acceptable neologism? For example, if used in a fictional work. --72.234.12.37 (talk) 06:09, 10 June 2020 (UTC)