Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 April 19

= April 19 =

"Sitzfleisch" (German)
Aspiring pilots train their seat flesh (sit-flesh, or sit-meat) as a 6th or 7th sense for the flight attitude of their aircraft in the (real) flight simulator (on three pairs of hydraulic stilts). (I had the flight simulator to maintain and debug.) What do American or English pilots call this sensory organ? --Virtualiter (talk) 13:41, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Organ? It's an ability. As a capacity to endure long periods of sitting, Wiktionary claims it's become an English loanword. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:31, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I know the ability to sit for long periods of time from Leo.org. I mean the 6th sense.
 * Is that sense in actual usage? It's not mentioned at German Wiktionary. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:58, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * In (German) flight simulators for instrumental flight. Elsewhere this usually means Popo. --Virtualiter (talk) 14:54, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Not a matter of endurance, but one can fly by the seat of one's pants. DuncanHill (talk) 14:43, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * The idiom is already heading in the right direction (flying with your butt). But do pilots actually say that? German interpreters don't know this meaning at all:https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idForum=2&idThread=838577&lp=ende&lang=de (Following your intuition and hoping that something will come out of it. But targeted training is different.) --Virtualiter (talk) 16:44, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * When flying or driving, the moment-by-moment variable forces (both lateral and horizontal) seemingly sensed by the posterior give useful feedback. There may also (my speculation) be an element of psychologically induced proprioceptive sensation, since particularly risky vehicle movements (such as nearly skidding in a car) induce an enhanced feeling in that area (see also "half-crown tanner", a piece of British slang I cannot for the moment find any formal reference for).
 * @151.227: Sixpence is "a tanner" and two shillings and sixpence is "half a crown".  In what circumstances did you encounter the phrase "half-crown tanner"? 2A02:C7B:100:AA00:D9ED:5C02:4C7B:F3D7 (talk) 10:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * https://www.trucknetuk.com/t/foden-park-brake/107528#:~:text=tanner and https://www.dartsnutz.net/forum/thread-36170-post-580324.html#:~:text=tanner suggest the phrase "half-crown tanner" is used to signify an alarming experience. Bazza 7 (talk) 12:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Presumably because a half-crown tanner is five times the worth of an ordinary tanner, and thereby really off the charts. --Lambiam 18:45, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It is actually a description of the supposed variation in the diameter of one's anus in frightening moments, as the half-crown was the largest-diameter coin in common circulation and the 'tanner' (sixpenny piece) the smallest. I should strictly have written it as "half-crown–tanner".
 * As for the 'circumstance[s] of [my] encountering the phrase', it has been a lifelong part of my ideolect, being in widespread use both in The East End of London whence my family hails, and in the British Army within which I grew up as an 'Army brat'. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 151.227.134.31 (talk) 16:04, 22 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I seem to recall that a current Formula One driver recently(?) said words to the effect that the posterior is one of the most important sensory organs when racing. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 151.227.134.31 (talk) 17:28, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * If we need a term for this fundamental ability to sense attitude, I propose posterioception. --Lambiam 09:35, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Did you mean Proprioception? --Virtualiter (talk) 16:56, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * A Google search didn't find much, bur in the comments section of this article, a contributor uses the term "butt sensors" (presumably American, but the use of "butt" over "bum" is gaining ground in Britain too). Alansplodge (talk) 12:04, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Is this the right place to ask for IPA transcriptions?
Hello, is this the right place to ask for IPA transcriptions? I have two doubts. Stephen was reported to have a minority pronunciation [ˈstɛfən] (Philippines?) but there were no sources and so I deleted it. Karkade Arabic pronunciation (كركديه) is [karkaˈdiːh], right?-- Carnby (talk) 18:55, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Some questions about Japanese
1: Are there some morae or syllables that occur either primarily or only in kango? (Gairaigo is ignored for the sake of this question.)

2: For kanji that are phono-semantic compounds, is the idea that two characters with the same phonetic component would have the same or similar pronunciation only applicable to the Chinese-derived on'yomi, or is it also applicable to the native reading as well?

3: Did Old Japanese have long vowels or were they a later development? If the latter, is it known which specific developments resulted in their emergence? Primal Groudon (talk) 22:07, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * 2. Since kanji were borrowed from Chinese hanzi, native correspondences seem unlikely on any level higher than pure chance. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:10, 19 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Primal_Groudon -- For an interesting discussion of the Japanese writing system which won't necessarily answer your specific questions, but is very illuminating as to the details of the ways that Chinese characters are used in it, see chapter 9 of "Writing Systems" by Geoffrey Sampson. -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:20, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Which is a good read anyway. —Tamfang (talk) 23:55, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * According to the WP article, Old Japanese did not have long vowels. The following should be double checked as it's about a topic I haven't looked at for a very long time, but if it can be useful to you here it is: Long vowels in Modern Japanese appear mostly in onyomi. The northern Chinese language, Mandarin Chinese, at the time of the earliest borrowings at least, still had syllables ending in -p, -t, -k. When borrowed into Japanese those ending in -t and -k became disyllables ending in -tsu and -ku (sometimes -chi and -ki), for example "koku" the onyomi of the kanji that means "country" 国 (the kunyomi is "kuni"). But those ending in -p became words ending in long vowels (not words ending in -hu or -hi for some reason, which I do not remember, even though dissyllables ending in -hu or -hi do exist in Japanese). Chinese syllables ending in -ng also produced long vowels in Japanese ("mei" or "myou" from 明 "ming"). However not all long vowels in Japanese are in onyomi. For example long a "aa" cannot be produced this way and I don't think it ever occurs in onyomi. You'll have to look for another development. Maybe a consonant falling off between two syllables. Also there's long o and long e in kunyomi (mostly long o). Sometimes the spelling is different. Long o in onyomi is always written "ou" whereas in kunyomi it may be written "oo", e.g. 遠に hiragana とおい "tooi" "be far away". Note also there's "ou" that is not the long vowel o but simply o + u, e.g. 思う "omou" "think", but then the "u" is written separately as hiragana, it is native, and is never part of the reading of a kanji. I've ignored modern borrowings where long vowels can also occur as in コーヒー "koohii" from English "coffee", etc. In katakana long vowels are not written by adding a kana to the short vowel but with a dash. I do hope this proves useful but like I said double check everything. 178.51.93.5 (talk) 13:39, 20 April 2024 (UTC) PS: Article On'yomi or Kun'yomi claim all onyomi are monosyllabic. Not true (as I show above): "koku" and hundreds of others!
 * Apparently Old Japanese is hypothetized to have had three more basic vowels than Modern Japanese, so I guess it might have been more like Korean in that aspect. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:26, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Actually it's complicated. The analysis of the manyogana used in the verse parts of the Kojiki (the prose is in Chinese) shows 88 distinct syllables (89 in Miyake 2003). But only three or four columns of the syllabary (k-, g-, m-, and in Miyake 2003 p-, but not b-) have all 8 variants. How those 88 or 89 distinct syllables map to distinct vowels is not at all clear. There are several systems and as you can see some add 1 vowel, some 2 vowels and some 3 vowels to the 5 vowels of modern Japanese, and some add no vowel at all and work with the 5 vowels of modern Japanese. Incidentally I have no special knowledge in this matter, I'm simply quoting from the article. One thing I don't understand is how the various variants of the syllabary are correlated: on what basis Bi1 goes with Pi1 and Bi2 with Pi2 and not Bi1 with Pi2 and Bi2 with Pi1. The article doesn't explain but I'm sure there is an explanation. Maybe the Chinese vowels (this is not modern Chinese) or the tones? However the article also quotes Miyake 2003 on the danger of circularity because the values of the vowels in ancient Chinese are themselves in part based on Japanese (and other) data. So it's more complicated than saying that Old Japanese had 8 vowels. It'd be more accurate to say that Old Japanese is a headache. 178.51.93.5 (talk) 10:00, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I’m having a hard time finding a place where the article explicitly states Old Japanese to have not had long vowels.
 * A little tidbit; borrowings from ancient Chinese syllables ending in p did originally become words ending in -pu. This later became -fu in (if I remember correctly) Early Middle Japanese as the old P shifted to an F-like sound. A later change caused F to become W between vowels, but since the syllable wu never existed in Japanese, the -fu ending just became -u. This -u later combined with the nucleus to form long O with A or O, yō (Y-consonant with long O) with E, and yū (Y with long U) with I. Primal Groudon (talk) 02:44, 4 May 2024 (UTC)