Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 October 24

= October 24 =

A few questions
A few questions.
 * 1) Is there any word in English where $⟨ai⟩$ is pronounced [aɪ]?
 * 2) Is there any language using Brahmic scripts with front rounded vowels [y], [ʏ], [ø] and/or [œ]?
 * 3) Similarly to ABC, which is an acronym referring to Latin alphabet, do languages using Cyrillic alphabet have acronym АБВ, and Greek acronym ΑΒΓ? --40bus (talk) 17:51, 24 October 2022 (UTC)


 * For the third, there is azbuka
 * ABC gives as translations а́збука and азы́. Error (talk) 18:27, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
 * For the first, it depends what you mean by "in English". Kaiser is in the OED. ColinFine (talk) 19:20, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
 * For the first, "aisle" is one example (the confusing S is by false analogy with "isle"). Some other "foreign" examples are "aioli", "Bahai" (strictly "Baha'i", which perhaps spoils it) and "aioli". AndrewWTaylor (talk) 19:42, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
 * For the second question: maybe, but it's marginal. WALS shows only Tibetan language and Lepcha language as having front rounded vowels within the area likely to use Brahmic scripts. Our article Lhasa Tibetan describes the phonology as including these, but Tibetan script does not mention them. This is presumably because it has a historically conservative orthography that reflects Old Tibetan phonology (from the former article). Our Lepcha language does not mention such vowels ColinFine (talk) 19:43, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

40bus -- Accoding to the "Concise Compendium of the World's Languages" by George L. Campbell, Kashmiri has short front rounded vowels (not long). Of course, Kashmiri is most commonly written with a version of the Arabic alphabet nowadays, but in the past it was often written with Sharada script... AnonMoos (talk) 23:10, 24 October 2022 (UTC)


 * You're right that Campbell lists those vowels, though he says nothing about their distribution, and I can't see any examples in the words and phrases he quotes. Nor does he have a section on Sharada in the "Appendix of scripts". Neither Kashmiri language nor Sharada script mentions them, and WALS does not show them as a feature of Kashmiri. I note that Campbell's references are from around 1970, while our article's references on phonology are post 2000. There are obviously several possible explanations for that disparity. ColinFine (talk) 16:01, 25 October 2022 (UTC)


 * If you look closely at pg. 278 of the "Concise Compendium" where he discusses former word-final vowels which have disappeared but left an effect on the preceding consonants and/or the vowels of preceding syllables, one of the superscript "matras" appears to have umlaut dots, for whatever that's worth... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 22:34, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

3: In Bulgarian you sometimes hear the colloquial two-letter acronym АБ, referring either to the alphabet itself or to the fundamentals of something. --Theurgist (talk) 14:41, 25 October 2022 (UTC)