Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 December 18

= December 18 =

Russian Proverb
what does it mean "Полезные заметки Креветку, лобстера или гроб, насколько вы можете определить их, можно описать как смесь кальцийподобных белков и удалений нарциссов. Они часто пересекаются в начале дня, во время сеансов с ранжированием по стоимости или при достаточно песчаной погоде. Все эти объекты (или причины) также могут быть использованы сознательно. Хорошим примером этого является тот факт, что теноры (а иногда и сопрано) часто тренируются с помощью невидимого телефона. Это может произойти во всем мире, потому что его практичность имеет множество полезных свойств, таких как название этого эссе."

thank you 176.138.68.94 (talk) 18:07, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The Google Translate translation is rather hilarious, and suggests that either Google Translate has seriously screwed up in this case, or the original text is intentionally somewhat devoid of meaning. It sounds rather like a piece of Lewis Carroll's nonsense.Useful notes Shrimp, lobster, or coffin, as far as you can define them, can be described as a mixture of calcium-like proteins and daffodil removals. They often intersect early in the day, during cost-ranking sessions, or when the weather is fairly sandy. All these objects (or causes) can also be used consciously. A good example of this is the fact that tenors (and sometimes sopranos) often practice using an invisible phone. It can happen all over the world because its practicality has many useful properties, such as the title of this essay. CodeTalker (talk) 21:08, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Is this generated by a Russian chatbot? --ColinFine (talk) 11:10, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The Russian version of Lorem ipsum perhaps? fishtext.ru and generator-online.com apparently generate random Russian text for that purpose:
 * It is often the case that the meaning of the text is not important, but only the length or structure of the text. The online text generator allows you to specify the number of words that will form the number of paragraphs you specify. However, the generated text will not make sense, but that's not what we need!
 * Alansplodge (talk) 15:22, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * See Greeking - or in this case perhaps "Russianing". Alansplodge (talk) 17:39, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Lugal
I think I understand what (LUGAL) means, but what do  and   mean? List of cuneiform signs redirects them to LUGAL. Are they variant forms? Error (talk) 18:30, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * According to this YouTube video, means "king of kings".  --Lambiam 09:32, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Crop characters
includes:
 * ⌌ ⌍ ⌎ ⌏

which are described as "bottom right crop", "bottom left crop", "top right crop", "top left crop". They all redirect to cropping (image) but they are not described there. How are they used? Are they used to mark how an image must be cropped? -- Error (talk) 18:43, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * They're for cropping a page: you cut the left side of the paper so that the ⌍ and ⌏ marks are removed, and the top so that the ⌎ and ⌏ marks are removed, and so on all around. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 20:03, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe they should redirect to Bleed (printing) or Book trimming then. --Error (talk) 20:27, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * IMO the current redirect target is fine topic-wise, but the use of these crop marks should be described there. For book trimming they are worse than useless, and they also have uses for images without bleed. --Lambiam 09:17, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Few questions
--40bus (talk) 19:37, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * 1) Why capital Ÿ is in Latin Extended-A, but small ÿ is in Latin Supplement? Why letter Ÿ is way less frequently used in languages than Ä, Ë, Ï, Ö and Ü?
 * 2) Why it is voewl and consonant sounds, not letters which decide whether English indefinite article is a or an? For example, one and unicorn begin with vowel letter  but consonant sound, and hour does opposite? When I read words in my mind, I think them as if they were pronounced like in Finnish, and thus I think yellow as if it were pronounced as [yelːov], and it thus would begin with vowel letter, and I may sometimes write an yellow.
 * 3) Do near-close vowels have semivocalic equivalents?
 * About 2, from an:
 * (now quite rare) Used before one and words with initial u, eu.
 * 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], OCLC 964384981, Numbers 24:8:
 * God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.
 * Historically, an could also be found before one and many words with initial u, eu (now pronounced with initial /juː/, /jʊ/, /jə/), such as eunuch, unique, or utility; this is still occasionally encountered. This is as these words formerly started with a vowel sound, though the writing of an before words spelt with initial u, eu was usual until the 19th century, long after these words have acquired initial consonant sounds in standard English.[2]
 * From English_articles:
 * The form an is used before words starting with a vowel sound, regardless of whether the word begins with a vowel letter.[7] This avoids the glottal stop (momentary silent pause) that would otherwise be required between a and a following vowel sound.
 * Glottal stops aren't written in standard English. They appear between adjacent vowel sounds. So their avoidance using an appears only for sounds, not for letters. See English articles for the transition as some vowels and changed in the hsitory of English.
 * They appear between adjacent vowel sounds. -- no, in English they don't: instead, various glide sounds appear, e.g. /ɛə/ in Altair and Beersheba, both of which, in their original languages, had a (phonemic) glottal stop between the adjacent vowels. --82.166.25.153 (talk) 12:39, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
 * There are orthographic changes related to letters rather sounds. There are some words in English that I don't remember now that are spelled with o because a more phonemic u could be misunderstood for a v.
 * English orthography is (very imperfectly) aimed to the use of native English speakers. Finnish speakers had no influence on it. Hence, the possibility of confusion among Finnish speakers is disregarded.
 * --Error (talk) 20:19, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The article on English articles makes it sound as if the [n] is epenthesised, as an alternative to a glottal stop or to an intrusive R, in order to avoid vowel hiatus. In fact, the opposite is true: an is the original Old English form of the indefinite article, and its [n] gets assimilated before consonants, though preserved before vowels. That's why "epenthetic Ns" don't appear anywhere else in English. --213.137.66.36 (talk) 08:59, 19 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Re 3, our article Afrikaans phonology shows several occurrences of ⟨⟩, which I take to denote a semivowel corresponding to the near-close near-back rounded vowel ⟨⟩. --Lambiam 22:13, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Re 2, we write an where, in careful speech, English speakers say, or, in stressed positions, . How English speakers pronounce words does not dependent on whether they can read, so it cannot be a matter of the spelling of the following word. That is why we find both  a herb&thinsp; and  an herb; this reflects different pronunciations of the word herb. --Lambiam 22:27, 18 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Re 1: Ä, ö and ü are common in German and languages with an orthography influenced by German, like Swedish and Turkish. Ÿ is not. Y isn't used in native German words, an umlauted version wasn't needed at all. Why? Arbitrary choice by those who devised standard German orthography. Two dots on a letter can also be a diaeresis, indicating that the letter that has the two dots isn't part of a digraph with the preceding letter. I and e can in many languages be the second letter of a digraph, by y only in few, if any. Do you need a deeper reason? But this means that very few languages need ÿ. Furthermore, it's common to drop accents from capitals and, unless you write in full caps, a diaeresis is never needed on a capital as a diaeresis cannot occur on the first letter of a word. So Ÿ is even rarer than ÿ, and those designing latin-1 decided to drop Ÿ and put ß on that position instead, as ß (which doesn't have a capital version) is far more common. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:38, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Capital eszett:
 * Until 2017, there was no official capital form of ⟨ß⟩; a capital form was nevertheless frequently used in advertising and government bureaucratic documents.[10]: 211  In June of that year, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a rule that ⟨ẞ⟩ would be an option for capitalizing ⟨ß⟩ besides the previous capitalization as ⟨SS⟩ (i.e., variants STRASSE and STRAẞE would be accepted as equally valid).[11] [12]
 * --Error (talk) 11:12, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * ÿ is used in a few French words, but mostly proper nouns. A famous one is L'Haÿ-les-Roses, a small town south of Paris, where the tréma on the y, as it's called in French, means the first word is pronounced in two syllables and not one as would be the case were it spelled "Hay". The second famous instance is the writer Pierre Louÿs; in his case the diacritic doesn't affect the pronunciation of his last name - it's just a spelling variation which he made up himself, since his true surname was the very common "Louis". So, basically, the letter is extremely rare. Xuxl (talk) 14:34, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * 2 is because the rule about a vs an is a rule of English, not of the artificial construct called written English. --ColinFine (talk)
 * Finnish keyboard also has ability to type ÿ but not Ÿ. Is there any language where Ÿ is a common letter and can occur at the beginnin of the word? --40bus (talk) 16:41, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * In Dutch, ÿ is a nonstandard but (formerly?) common alternate for ij; see IJ (digraph). —Tamfang (talk) 20:23, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Afaict, the lowercase graphic variants included ij, ÿ and y; and uppercase, both IJ and Y, but never Ÿ. --62.90.112.145 (talk) 08:19, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Possibly, ÿ was considered an italic variant of ij, but capital IJ didn't have any diacritics. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:59, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
 * By the way: I know this wasn't what your question was about, but few is a negative polarity item. English speakers would only say "few questions" if there were already an expectation that there would be many questions. The neutral (non-negative polarity) item is a few.
 * an unicorn isn't remarkable in Elizabeth/Jacobean English as it was pronounced with a diphthong at the time. What is remarkable is KJV's use of an before h, as in an house and an hundred, which were certainly pronounced with  in the early 17th century. I don't know whether an house and an hundred occurred in everyday speech at the time (are there any examples in Shakespeare's prose passages?) or whether it was a learnèd affectation after the model of Latin and Greek (where h was treated more like a voiceless vowel than a consonant even before it disappeared in both languages). —Mahāgaja · talk 16:14, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * According to the OED, The phonetic tendency to lose initial h- in inherited words, especially in unstressed syllables, and uncertainty about the pronunciation of initial h- in borrowed words led to a widespread, originally hypercorrect, practice of writing an before initial h- even when it was not silent. Also, the use of "an" before a word beginning with "h" persisted in writing for some time after it had disappeared from speech: But in unaccented syllables, many (perhaps most) writers down to the 19th cent. retained an before sounded h and some even before eu, u, as an historian , an euphonic vowel , an united appeal , though this was all but obsolete in speech CodeTalker (talk) 17:04, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * $⟨o⟩$ for and  is especially common before $⟨v⟩$, because of the potential for confusion if it had been spelled $⟨uu⟩$: above, dove, glove, love, shove and move, prove. —Mahāgaja · talk 16:23, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The other place where $⟨o⟩$ for, and  is common is after $⟨w⟩$, for the same reason: wolf, woman, womb, won, wonder, worry and of course $⟨wor⟩$ before a consonant is almost always  (elsewhere $⟨or⟩$ is usually  while  is often $⟨ur⟩$): word, work, world, worm, worse, wort, worth etc. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:58, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Damn, I always pronounced Pierre Louÿs as Louiiis thinking it was the correct way to say it: now I know it was an affectation I shall have to go right over the top with Louiiiiiis. MinorProphet (talk) 18:22, 20 December 2022 (UTC)