Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 December 2

= December 2 =

]?
I've got a source that gives a possible derivation of the word loon (the bird) as the "early Scandinavian" l]m or lumme. What is the ] character called? Ericoides (talk) 06:27, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Where did you see this? It looks like a typographical error for "lum"; the section §&thinsp;Etymology and taxonomy of our article Loon has, "The North American name "loon" likely comes from either the Old English word lumme, meaning lummox or awkward person, or the Scandinavian word lum meaning lame or clumsy." Judith W. McIntyre, author of The Common Loon: Spirit of the Northern Lakes, is quoted as writing, "Our word loon comes from the early Scandinavian word lumme, meaning clumsy." No "" to be found. A problem with both is that "Scandinavian" is a very broad indication, in this context comprising all North Germanic languages. No Old English dictionary that I can find has an entry lumme.  --Lambiam 10:47, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks Lambiam. The source is indeed Judith W. McIntyre, The Common Loon: Spirit of Northern Lakes, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. On p. 2 she writes: "Our word loon comes from the early Scandinavian word l]m or lumme, meaning clumsy."


 * The ] sign looks like it's been set simply with an italicised closing bracket. I guess one way round this would be to check another edition of the book to see if it's a typo or an approximation of an archaic character. Ericoides (talk) 13:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * loon says 'from Old Norse lómr (“loon”)'. Alansplodge (talk) 12:18, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Both the Bokmål Wikipedia and the Nynorsk Wikipedia offer that etymology as well, although they are slightly more specific and classify lómr as Old West Norse. --Lambiam 23:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Just a thought: could it be a mistake (by or by the typesetters] for a long "j". The combination "ij" is common in, for example, Dutch, such that it may be printed as a ligature and may be alphabetized as a separate letter. I don't know about its prevalence in 'Scandinavian', whether old or modern, but might the word have been "Ijm? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.249.29.80 (talk) 02:21, 3 December 2022 (UTC)


 * The first letter is an L, not an I, so clearly not. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 08:07, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Oops! Confusion in the small hours. I sometimes get thrown by the non-seriffed font. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.249.29.80 (talk) 09:29, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Ah, those were the days... The ] sign is simply a remnant from early days of computer coding, when the 7-bit ASCII codes for the alphabet went (from Hex code 58 to 5E): X Y Z [ \ ] ^. There existed in parallell a "Norwegian ASCII" standard with X Y Z Æ Ø Å ^, see tables at no:ASCII. It happened regularly that these were misinterpreted in the process of printing, so we got used to instant mental decoding: V[R -> VÆR, S\T -> SØT, V]R -> VÅR. In this case, it must have been an attempt at explaining the pronunciation of the bird name 'LOM' as 'LÅM' to indicate that it is pronounced with the |ɔ| sound, not with |o| (which could easily be the case from the spelling). --T*U (talk) 12:49, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
 * A minor mystery is then that the letters 106% and 106% are minuscules, so was this a text-encoding mishap of what should have been a camel-cased 106%? --Lambiam 04:18, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, I wondered about that. My guess is that the text at some point went through a 'convert to lower case', which would not affect the ']'. --T*U (talk) 07:51, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, T*U. Ericoides (talk) 14:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Palace brawl
Sparks flew at a Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday hosted by Camilla Parker Bowles when a guest, Ngozi Fulani, said she was "based in Hackney". A former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth asked her "where do you really come from?" Ngozi replied "I don't know", as her ancestors "didn't leave any records". Having many friends among the west African community, her Christian name strikes me as Nigerian, and specifically Igbo. Indeed, her article links to a piece in which she says her father discussed Nigerian heritage with her. Ngozi was born Marlene Headley, and the twitterati are saying that Igbos would never combine "Ngozi" and "Fulani." The word Fulani is a Portuguese term describing someone whose name is unknown. They were the original colonisers of west Africa (Lagos is the namesake of a Portuguese seaport and Forcados at the mouths of the Niger river means "forked"). So are the twitterati right? 95.145.0.90 (talk) 12:01, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Also, it's quite common for Ghanaians and Nigerians in Britain to adopt an alternative English Christian name. There's nothing sinister in it. 95.145.0.90 (talk) 12:30, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Her article says her parents are from the Caribbean, which is not very specific, but enough to suggest they could easily give their child a first name that has a different origin from their last name. List of placeholder names by language says that Al-Fulani is used a placeholder surname in Arabic (and Fulano as a placeholder first name in Portuguese and Spanish), but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a real last name as well. Presumably it originally denoted someone of Fulani ancestry. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * That article reference

Fulano (optionally surnamed de Tal)

doesn't mean to imply that the word is not used as a substitute for a surname in Portuguese - Senhor Fulano (abbr. Sr Fulano) is a common construction (the word Senhor (Sr) means "Mister" (Mr). 95.145.0.90 (talk) 13:03, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Bible names/places which start with the same letter in English but not Hebrew/Aramaic/NT Greek.
I was thinking of doing a "We are not alike" meme and it sort of spread. I'm looking for Biblical names where the most common English transliterations (KJV, I presume) start with the same letter in English but in the the source (so Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek) the start with different letters. So far I have come up with
 * 1) E - Ezekial starts with a Yod, Eve starts with a  Ḥet (having gone through  Ḥeva, Heva, Eva and Eve on the way to English)
 * 2) J - Jerusalem starts with a Yod, Job starts with an Aleph.
 * 3) Z - Zion starts with a Tsade, Zachariah with a Zayin.

Note, if the Hebrew word is translated rather than transliterated (like Mizraim becoming Egypt), then it isn't part of what I'm looking for. I'm not sure of a good Samekh vs. Shin/Sin pairing. Ideas for other letters that have examples? Naraht (talk) 15:47, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Sidon is another Tsade, but Sodom is a Samech. Gomorrah starts with an Ayin, so there's scope there. I found Sodom by looking at he:קטגוריה:יישובי המקרא so you may well find other examples there. ColinFine (talk) 17:29, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * There's one entry in that Category that starts with a Tet: he:טבחת (Tivkhat), which says (if my Hebrew serves me) that it was one of the cities of Hadadezer ben Rehob, but I can't find an English version of the name. The he-wiki has no interlanguage links, the en article on Hadarezer doesn't mention it, and I don't think the he-wiki version does either; and I can't find it in the Hebrew of the verse it cites (2 Samuel 10:16). ColinFine (talk) 17:53, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I guess the English alphabet is relatively comparable to the Greek. (I consider Greek, Latin and Slavic as basically the same close family.) But comparisons to Semitic alphabets seem complicated, since they function so differently, and many sounds are different. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:11, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Gibeon in Hebrew starts with a gimel, so it can be paired up with Gomorrah. The KJV transliterates as Tibhath. While Tibhath in Hebrew starts with a tet, Teman starts with a tav.  --Lambiam 22:49, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you. The he-wiki article on Tivkhat cites a Hebrew encyclopaedia which I haven't got access to and also cites the verse in 2 Samuel I mentioned, which does not refer to Tivkhat. I didn't think of looking elsewhere in the bible. ColinFine (talk) 09:54, 3 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Naraht -- For the record, most Biblical names in English follow the 1769 spelling and punctuation update of the King James Bible. Some English versions of names have more conservative aspects than in the Hebrew text.  For example, Gaza began with a "gh" sound, which was probably pronounced differently from `Ayin in Hebrew during much of the 1st millennium B.C. (though always written with the letter `Ayin), but eventually merged with the voiced pharyngeal sound mainly written by `Ayin.  The second "e" in English "Jerusalem" reflects an older pronunciation of the name than the "ayi" in Hebrew Yərushalayim... AnonMoos (talk) 00:44, 3 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Speaking of initial letters, even the apostles St Philip vs St Peter present such a pair. (Their initial sounds are different though, as they were in the original Greek.) --82.166.199.42 (talk) 09:34, 4 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Also bear in mind that many Biblical names had been Anglicized during the medieval era and these were preserved by the Reformation translators. Alansplodge (talk) 11:57, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Original Poster responses

 * Sidon (Tsade) vs. Sodom (Sameck). Perfect example. The only words in English that I've seen where the Tsade ends up as a Ts or Tz are those which only came into English in the last two centuries (like Tzedakah or Tsitsit). (Though that seems to be words coming into english from the Askenazi pronunciation)
 * Gomorrah (Ayin) vs Gad (Gimel). Looking this up took me down a rabbit hole of the Ayin/Ghayn merger split between Arabic vs the Western Semetic languages. I truly wonder which pronounciation (English vs. Modern Hebrew vs. Arabic) of Gomorrah is closer to the pronunciation 300 years ago. :)
 * Tivkhat (Tet) vs. Torah (Tav) This one I sort of expected, I just need a good Tet one. Tib(ch)ath and Tobiah are also good choice for Tet.
 * Philip vs. Peter. I'm having problems coming up the initial letters from the same language. Greek would have split them, I think (Phi vs. Pi,), but Aramaic does the same thing that Hebrew does with P & F sounds coming from the same letter.
 * The ending of Jerusalem in Hebrew is in the Dual form (as opposed to Singular or Plural). I haven't seen anything indicating that that combination was pronounced the same way as a modern Segol (short e).Naraht (talk) 16:32, 5 December 2022 (UTC)


 * In the Septuagint and other ancient transcriptions, "e"-type vowels are found: Ιερουσαλήμ. When that's combined with the fact that there's no yod between lamed and mem in the Hebrew spelling, there's a strong suspicion that this word does not have a genuine ancient dual in Hebrew... AnonMoos (talk) 22:30, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
 * In the Bible, the names Philip (Φίλιππος) and Peter (Πέτρος) are only found in books of the New Testament, originally written in Greek. --Lambiam 02:55, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Just as a side note, Peter was likely never called Peter to his face by other contemporary Jews, even Jesus. Jesus named him כֵּיפָא, commonly transliterated Cephas, and Peter is just the Greek translation of the meaning of כֵּיפָא.  (i.e. "petros", c.f. petroglyph "rock writing" for example).  The modern name came from Greek writers of the New Testament translating the meaning of the name, rather than simply reproducing the sounds in the Greek alphabet.  Philip, OTOH, was a common enough Greek personal name already (Phillipos meaning "Lover of Horses" roughly philo-hippos).  His name in the Bible seemed to work the other way, it was a natively Greek name that would have been transliterated into Aramaic or Hebrew as something like פיליפוס.  -- Jayron 32 19:19, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
 * , the article on Jerusalem indicates the Hebrew spelling at יְרוּשָׁלַיִם, but I've found Jewish bible sources that spell it without the second yod. I wonder when *that* changed. (Note, that's apparently a fairly significant rabbit hole to go down, I've started at https://etzion.org.il/en/tanakh/studies-tanakh/core-studies-tanakh/bechukotai-yom-yerushalayim-names-jerusalem-tanakh and there is more to research) Naraht (talk) 04:50, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
 * , the article on Jerusalem indicates the Hebrew spelling at יְרוּשָׁלַיִם, but I've found Jewish bible sources that spell it without the second yod. I wonder when *that* changed. (Note, that's apparently a fairly significant rabbit hole to go down, I've started at https://etzion.org.il/en/tanakh/studies-tanakh/core-studies-tanakh/bechukotai-yom-yerushalayim-names-jerusalem-tanakh and there is more to research) Naraht (talk) 04:50, 7 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Naraht -- To be specific, a "yod" occurs before the final "mem" in the Bible only in the verses Jeremiah 26:18, Esther 2:6, 1 Chronicles 3:5, 2 Chronicles 25:1, and 2 Chronicles 32:9, according to my sources. In all other occurrences of the name Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible (over 500 of them), no such letter "yod" occurs. AnonMoos (talk) 05:31, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
 * And by pretty much any measure, these are some of the last written books of the Tanach. So the change is within the Tanach...Naraht (talk) 03:31, 8 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes, that means that the dualized form of the name was probably just starting to get established at the tail-end of Late Biblical Hebrew, but the Tiberian pointing has retroactively imposed it everywhere in the Bible. By the way, if "Yerushalayim" was a true dual, then the "m" should disappear in the construct state, so that if you took the "shel" out of "Yerushalayim shel Zahav", then it might change to "Yerushaley Zahav".[[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 10:46, 8 December 2022 (UTC)