Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 September 23

= September 23 =

A few questions
--40bus (talk) 13:27, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * 1) Are there any varieties of Spanish where J / soft G is not /x/? Are there any dialects where it is pronounced as /ʃ/ or /ʒ/?
 * 2) Why Spanish does not contract de to d' before vowels, unlike Catalan and French?
 * 3) Are there any words in Spanish which have ll or ñ in coda?
 * 4) Is there any Romance language with aspirated consonants?
 * 5) Are there any varieties of English which lack aspiration of unvoiced stops?
 * 6) Are there any strong verbs in German and Dutch which have same stem vowels in all forms?
 * 7) Is there any Romance language with phonemic velar nasal?
 * 8) Why is Icelandic not a pro-drop language, despite that there are different forms for all verbs in all six persons?
 * 9) Portuguese has semivocalic /j/ in diphthongs as in leite /lɐjtɨ/. But does it also have non-semivocalic /j/ like English y in yes and Finnish j in jalka?

10. Are there any words in French where plural suffix -s is pronounced before a pause? --40bus (talk) 16:25, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 1
I think it varies between dialects. It could be closer to /h/ for instance. To my knowledge, all Spanish dialects would pronounce native J and X identically, though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:08, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Spanish words with a double-ll or a y in them are pronounced like that in some dialects. Yo can sound like "zho", for example. But as far as I know, j and soft-g are guttural - "like the ch in the Scottish word loch"" is the typical explanation. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:43, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If I recall correctly, that pronunciation ("zho") was typical for Argentinian Spanish, but rare outside of the country. (Edit. Seems closer to "sho", though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * When I've heard yo pronounced that way, it sounds a lot like "Joe", to my American ears. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:45, 24 September 2023 (UTC)


 * "X" was /ʃ/ in some 16th-century versions of Spanish, and was used to transcribe some American Indian languages with that value. See IPA under Chicxulub crater, to start with... AnonMoos (talk) 20:58, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * In some loanwords, at least. The Royal Academy would like people to write yudo and yudoca but RFEJYDA uses judo and judoka.
 * It can also be silent in some positions/speakers. I think I have seen reló for reloj in some tango.
 * Spanish phonology says:
 * after another consonant, the voiced obstruent may even be deleted, as in iceberg, pronounced [iθeˈβeɾ].[146]
 * --Error (talk) 14:56, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 2
Another "why" question which cannot be answered. True, Spanish has Inés de Oliveira Cézar while Portuguese has Luís Paulino d'Oliveira Pinto da França, but there's no "rule" - cf. es:Francisco D'Intino. 31.55.242.67 (talk) 15:28, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Some Romance languages use apostrophes, but Spanish generally does not. The closest I can think of in normal Spanish usage are things such as using del instead of de el and al instead of a el. Googling the subject, there are occasional apostrophes in Spanish, but mostly in words borrowed from other languages. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:39, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 3
Proper nouns from Catalan like Sabadell, Martorell, Pedro Alemañ. However, people who are not familiar with Catalan will probably pronounce them as "Sabadel", "Martorel", "Alemán". --Error (talk) 15:03, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 6
I doubt it. It sounds to be the opposite of the basic definition of a "strong verb". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:08, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * In Dutch it depends indeed on the definition of a 'strong' verb. Strong verbs in Dutch are characterized by two features: 1. Changes in the stem vowel, 2. A past participle ending in -en rather than '-t' or 'd'. However, some verbs have only 1 of these 2 features, but are still often counted among the 'strong' verbs (or called 'half-strong'). An example of these would be 'bakken' (meaning 'to bake'): ik bak, ik bakte, ik heb gebakken). (Dutch source) - Lindert (talk) 16:22, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I meant if there are any verbs which get neither ablaut nor -te/-de ending in past tense. --40bus (talk) 17:54, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * So you're asking about verbs were the past tense is identical to the present tense, except (in Dutch) 3.SG and 2.SG without inversion (where the present gets a -t suffix). I'm quite sure they don't exist. As you may know by now, I'm a native Dutch speaker. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2023 (UTC)


 * The only traditional "strong" Germanic verbs that I know about with the same stem vowel in past and present are some Gothic class 7 verbs (but of course the past forms are reduplicated). Brief discussion at wikt:Category:Gothic class 7 strong verbs... AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 7
I see some Romance languages in Voiced velar nasal. In some of them it is marked as an allophone, but not in all of them. --Error (talk) 15:14, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 8
The same reply as for similar questions before. It just is. German works similarly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:21, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- There aren't always six different person/number verb forms in all Icelandic verbs in all tenses (2nd. singular and 3rd. singular are the same in some tenses). But an interesting question... AnonMoos (talk) 21:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)


 * P.S. Japanese is pretty much a pro-drop language, despite not having any person/number inflections at all! AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 23 September 2023 (UTC)


 * For a more complicated pro-drop case, see the Finnish language. Its finite verb forms are inflected unambiguously for person/number combinations, but only 1st and 2nd person pronouns can usually be omitted.  If a verb has a specific third-person subject, pronouns cannot be omitted.  However, dummy subjects of impersonal verbs (the "it" in "It's raining", etc) are not expressed by a pronoun... AnonMoos (talk) 19:15, 25 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Languages love to have some redundancy. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:01, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 9
Before the spelling reform the name of a well-known American city was written Nova York. Now it's written Nova Iorque. 31.55.242.67 (talk) 15:02, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I guess the answer is yes, if we're talking about the Portuguese of Portugal. Cf. iogurte 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:06, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Also iodo ("iodine") in both Portugal and Brazil, according to English Wiktionary. Double sharp (talk) 10:15, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, according to my Portuguese dictionary, ianque (Yank); iaque (yak); iate (yacht); iene (yen); (i)ídiche (Yiddish); ioga (yoga); ioiô (yo-yo); iugoslavo (Yugoslav). 88.111.190.170 (talk) 13:03, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Question 10

 * It's not entirely clear what you mean, cf. Liaison (French). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:16, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I mean that if les œeufs were pronounced /le‿zœfs/, with final -s pronounced (it is the last consonant before a pause). Are there any such instances?
 * In sentence-final position it is not pronounced. A seeming counterexample is par ici il n'y a pas d'ours ("there are no bears around here"), which in standard French is pronounced like /pa.ʁ‿i.si.i.l‿n‿i.j‿a.pa‿d‿uʁs/. The final ⟨s⟩ is, however, in this case arguably not the plural suffix. --Lambiam 18:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Is this sandhi?
In Ancient Greek, if an oxytone word (one with an acute accent on the last syllable) is followed directly by another word, the acute becomes a grave. Is this an example of sandhi? Primal Groudon (talk) 15:40, 23 September 2023 (UTC)


 * The definition of the concept of "sandhi" is so broad that it would be hard to state definitively that this is not an example of sandhi. Although Ancient Greek was strictly speaking not a tonal language, this might even be called a form of tone sandhi. --Lambiam 18:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)


 * What the orthographic grave means is the deletion of a pitch accent in some circumstances when there was a closely following pitch accent in the next word. AnonMoos (talk) 21:03, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

When is a neologism no longer a neologism?
I occasionally read (on wiki and off) that a word or phrase is a neologism. It seems to me that some of these have been around for quite a while and no longer can be considered new. So my question is: how long after a word or phrase is coined is it no longer new and cannot be called a neologism? Obviously (I think) we can't nail down an exact duration such as 12 years and 7 months, but are we talking decades or centuries?

As an aside, is there a word (maybe a retronym) that describes words and phrases that are not new?

Thanks in advance! 76.14.122.5 (talk) 23:09, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The opposite of "neologism" might be "cliche". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:44, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Surely the opposite would be "archaic". Shantavira|feed me 08:50, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * "Not new" isn't the same as "rarely used". Kleenex isn't archaic. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:46, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The definition in our article has two parts, "relatively recent" and "accepted into mainstream language". In that sense, "archaic" (i.e. old and fallen out of use) is not so bad. Of course there's nothing that could unequivocally be considered as the opposite of "neologism". --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:28, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Once people start using a word without realizing it is a newcomer to the lexicon, simply expecting their audience to know its meaning, it ceases to be a neologism. An antonym is paleologism. --Lambiam 17:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for all the replies. --76.14.122.5 (talk) 04:54, 25 September 2023 (UTC)


 * It is relative: We have Category:12th-century neologisms. --Error (talk) 15:17, 25 September 2023 (UTC)