Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 October 19

= October 19 =

What language does the following word sound like, to your ears?
What another language does the word [ jira'ʃuha ] ( = yi-ra-shoo-ha) sound like, to your ears, besides Kinyarwanda/Kirundi (in which this word means "is heated" according to Goggle-Translate)? I'm not only asking about the real languages this word belongs to, but also about real languages this word could hypothetically (i.e. phonetically/morphologically) belong to? Just as the Jabberwocky poem sounds like English, at least hypothetically, even though it's not really English. GoogleTranslate identifies also the Swahili word [ira'ʃuha] (=i-ra-shoo-ha), which is phonetically pretty similar to the previous word (and which means "is overflowing"). 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 10:34, 19 October 2023 (UTC)


 * It's a genuine Hebrew word form, occurring twice in the Old Testament: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/yirashuha_3423.htm 147.234.66.217 (talk) 12:30, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * The only language I can think of which would have  as a diphthong [yi] is Finnish (and the  rules that out) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 13:11, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * $⟨y⟩$ probably stands for IPA (the palatal approximant) in the OP's transcription. Sol505000 (talk) 16:08, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Correct, I've just fixed it, according to your comment. 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 18:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)


 * It sounds to me somewhat like a Glaswegian speaker accusing someone of being a farrier. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.68.252.202 (talk) 16:46, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? What's the Galswegian word for a farrier (or for accusing of being one)? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 18:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * "You're a shoer". Shells-shells (talk) 19:37, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * This question is basically meaningless/unanswerable because how stress is realized varies by language and the IPA doesn't give you the wherewithal to specify how long each segment is. So [jiraˈʃuha] can be read to sound like virtually any language. Nardog (talk) 18:59, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * yirashuha can't sound like English, nor like Russian, French, Spanish, German, Greek, nor like any European language I'm aware of. 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 19:13, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Of course it can (except maybe French and Russian, which don't typically have [h]). If you're asking whether it's plausible as a word in the native vocabulary, then it's a different question. Nardog (talk) 19:27, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * How can [ jira'ʃuha ] ( = yi-ra-shoo-ha) sound like English? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 21:52, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Just with the prosody that an English quadrisyllable with penultimate stress would take—long/loud, short/quiet, long/loud, short/quiet, with a falling pitch over the last two syllables (if it is utterance-final)—and with a single contact [r] so it sounds more like [ɾ]. Nardog (talk) 22:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * yi occurs in Chinese most commonly as 一, one. Chinese doesn't use 'r' like that, But Japanese does. As a whole it looks a lot like Japanese as it breaks down into Mora but my knowledge of Japanese is too limited to identify what it might correspond to.--2A04:4A43:90AF:FAB6:B020:AD92:FF61:CC7C (talk) 22:26, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * While there is an i, there is no yi in Japanese. See Yi (kana). GalacticShoe (talk) 00:34, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
 * For the phoneme spelt "yi" in pinyin, it's the same sound as /i/ (there are at least like 150 Chinese words pronounced like this). For pinyin "yin" and "ying", the pronunciation more closely matches the romanisation, with initial /ji–/ Folly Mox (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
 * So what about [ira'ʃuha] (=i-ra-shoo-ha) ? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 07:24, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
 * It's possible. You could write it as いらしゅは (which would probably be transliterated as irashuha.) This doesn't have any standard/common meaning though. GalacticShoe (talk) 13:46, 20 October 2023 (UTC)