Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 June 12

= June 12 =

Syria, vs. Libya.
Is there any reasonable explanation for the order, of the second and fourth letters, that turns over, when Syria is replaced by Libya? Additionally, why is the way of spelling Libya/Kenya so different from the way of spelling more than twenty percent of the countries (all over the world), whose names end with "ia", rather than with "ya", including many Arabic country names, like Algeria, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia?

2A06:C701:7456:CB00:7190:3751:4898:4134 (talk) 00:48, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Have you read the "Etymology" sections in Libya and Syria? Libya's name came through Greek Λιβύη, and Greek υ (when not part of a diphthong) is usually transliterated as "y" (as in psyche, hyper-, etc.). Deor (talk) 01:28, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * if you can only answer one part of my whole question, it's quite legitimate, but I don't know why you had to change the last version of my question to an old one that only contained the part you wanted to answer, so I'm reverting it back to my recent version. 2A06:C701:7456:CB00:7190:3751:4898:4134 (talk) 04:06, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Syria came from Ancient Greek Συρία. Libya is spelled with a ⟨y⟩ because it was spelled that way by the Ancient Romans (using the newly introduced letter Y to represent the Greek sound Close front rounded vowel) and there was no good reason to switch to a different spelling, just like we still write Dionysus and not Dionisus. The indigenous Kikamba name of Mount Kenya, after which the country was named, is Ki Nyaa, "Ostrich Mountain". Why should its spelling be homologized, diverging from its pronunciation, with etymologically unrelated country names? It does not make sense, and if it does not make sense, you must acquit. --Lambiam 08:10, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, 'i' and vocalic 'y' are pronounced identically in English, but in many other languages, that's just not the case, such as in Swedish Syrien [syːrɪ'ɛn] and Libyen [liːbʏ'ɛn]. (I'd assume that transcription should be mostly right, but I could be corrected.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:14, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * "Why does this language do this?" type questions are basically unanswerable. That's just the way things happened to turn out. If you could go back and start over, the sequence of events (and thus the resulting language) would probably be quite different. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:20, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * As Stephen Jay Gould loved to point out in another context. —Tamfang (talk) 16:28, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yet, we seem to have the required three explanations now. I suppose the only remaining part is the regular English suffix -ia for country names, which comes from Latin -ia, where we can see that if there was a country of people whose defining characteristic was being absent, they would live in Absentia. Card Zero  (talk) 16:58, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Except that the explanations do not actually answer the question of "why". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * We don't seem to have an article on the why game, commonly used by small children to annoy their parents, but it's epistemologically interesting. How much of an explanation is a complete explanation? When should we be satisfied? Personally I'm satisfied with "because the Romans used y to represent Greek ῠ", and something about ostriches, but we could go on asking endless questions. This doesn't strike me as a reason to dissuade people from starting, just so long as they eventually feel happy and stop. Card Zero  (talk) 18:00, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Listen to Richard Feynman discussing why Aunt Minnie is in hospital: Richard Feynman. Why. --Lambiam 06:28, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I keep six honest serving-men... DuncanHill (talk) 14:49, 13 June 2023 (UTC)