Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 22

= August 22 =

Which other languages pronounce ‹eu› like [ɔʏ̯]?
The article Betelgeuse contains the unsourced statement “Pronunciation in German and several other European languages is ” (my highlighting). Are there any other European languages that generally pronounce ‹eu› like [ɔʏ̯]? Or is that supposed to be a specialty of this particular name? (In which case it would need a reference, and we could close this general question here.) ◅ Sebastian 12:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Hmmmm...it might be due to the fact that de:Beteigeuze is spelled differently, and subsequently pronounced differently. I see now real gain in keeping the statement about different pronounciations in the article. Lectonar (talk) 12:59, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your quick reply, Lectonar. What gain do you see? I might see some benefit talking about the significant spelling difference of ‹el› vs ‹ei›, but none really for the pronunciation; at least not for German alone, since that's just the standard any other word with these letters would be pronounced. On that note, I should add that a few other wikipedias spell the name with ‹ei› like German, but these are just German dialects, since they don't have their own navy. ◅ Sebastian 13:09, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's supposed to say no real gain, sorry. I need some coffee. Lectonar (talk) 13:12, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm glad we agree on this. ◅ Sebastian 13:18, 22 August 2023 (UTC) Some coffee might be good for me, too. I just corrected the first ‹ei› to ‹el›. ◅ Sebastian 13:20, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Re. “it might be due to the fact that de:Beteigeuze is spelled differently”: I don't think so. The different spelling of the second and the fourth syllable have no effect on the third syllable in German standard pronunciation. ◅ Sebastian 13:18, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I think that statement can safely be removed. The claim about German and "several other languages" was first inserted without any comment by an IP in May this year, but with a different pronunciation of the "eu" syllable ([eu:]), which is of course quite implausible even for German itself; it was then "corrected" (for German) by another editor pointing to the German Wikipedia article. Maybe the original IP meant to say just that German and several other languages had a hard "g" sound rather than the English [dʒ]? In any case, the statement is pretty much off-topic even if it were true, so nothing is lost by removing it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:33, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Fut.Perf.; I see that you have already done that, and agree with it - that was just unresearched OR. So, back to the original question: in reality no other [ɔʏ̯]ropean language has the same odd pronunciation of ‹eu›, right? ◅ Sebastian 14:31, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Probably not, at least I can't find any comparable pronunciation listed at List of Latin-script digraphs, or on Wiktionary pages for wikt:Europa and its cognates. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:03, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, with that we can close the question. ◅ Sebastian 15:40, 22 August 2023 (UTC)