Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 February 23

= February 23 =

Historical Ethnic -ess words?
What are other (Historical!) Ethnic/National/Religious female descriptors other than Jewess and Negress? Naraht (talk) 00:20, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Priestess. Mayoress. Poetess. Actress. (But I digress.) -- Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:05, 23 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Waitress. Stewardess. Princess. Duchess. Countess. Heiress. Hostess. Some of these are listed in Wiktionary. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:14, 23 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Not Ethnic/National/Religious. HiLo48 (talk) 04:34, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Crikey! ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:12, 23 February 2024 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that "-ess" was ever too commonly used for nationality words. The main feminine suffix for this purpose is "-woman", as in "Englishwoman", and some others listed at List of adjectival and demonymic forms for countries and nations (none there have "-ess").  I searched for a few hypothetical "-ess" suffixed forms of nationality words ending with "-an", but there wasn't much (almost all hits were intended to be the word with "-ness" suffix).  Not as relevant to your question, but the peak use of "-ess" was in "maness", an archaic word meaning "woman" found in the OED.  Amusing in English, but not quite as amusing when Patrino, or translated literally "father-ess" is the basic word for "mother" in Esperanto (which is more sexist than any natural language there). AnonMoos (talk)


 * P.S. Poet and writer Robert Graves included a little essay on the "-ess" suffix in his 1951 book "Occupation: Writer", and he was overall pretty negative about it (and highly negative about "negress"), even though this was of course before 1960s radicalism and second-wave feminism, when few were concerned with sexism in language... AnonMoos (talk) 06:49, 23 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Abbess, prioress and deaconess, if that's what you mean by Religious? -- Verbarson talkedits 11:46, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Also anchoress. Alansplodge (talk) 12:10, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * And beyond the Christian religion there is druidess and even goddess. Demon has one reference to a demoness. -- Verbarson talkedits 12:46, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Ethnic also mulattress. Religious also druidess and prophetess. --Lambiam 14:03, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * "Martyress" appears in Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. 2A00:23D0:495:D001:E41A:A7DA:5CBA:89C1 (talk) 17:42, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * SOED lists sextoness and vergeress (but not churchwardeness!). -- Verbarson talkedits 19:00, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Moabitess. --Amble (talk) 19:51, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Nice! First answer directly responsive to the original question.  I can't think of any others myself (and would not have thought of ). --Trovatore (talk) 20:37, 23 February 2024 (UTC) Oh, not quite first; I guess Lambiam's answer counts. --Trovatore (talk) 20:40, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I found some ghits for "Canaanitess" as well. I suppose old Bible translations might provide more examples. — Kpalion(talk) 12:13, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary lists Israelitess, Spaniardess and Swissess, I see. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:02, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Not an -ess, because it's not an English term, but in Arabic a female Muslim is a Muslima or Muslimah. Iapetus (talk) 11:29, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Would the same suffix be used for other world religions, such as Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:45, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Vowel usage
Why do Italian, Romanian and Portuguese use $⟨i⟩$ instead of $⟨y⟩$ for /j/ sound at the beginning of word? --40bus (talk) 18:41, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * No idea "why" &mdash; you might as well as "why" English uses  (not too many other languages do, I think). But in any case  is not part of the 21-letter "standard" Italian alphabet at all.  By the way, neither is , but sometimes  is substituted for &lt;i> in this role anyway.  There's a very nice (if slightly depressing) story called Lo jettatore which I would like to read again if I could find it.  Searching turns up a book by Sergio Benvenuto but it looks like non-fiction. --Trovatore (talk) 20:46, 23 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Trovatore -- Infamous science-fiction author John Norman wrote an English-language story titled "Il Jettatore", but I doubt that's what you have in mind... AnonMoos (talk) 23:38, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Huh. Might be interesting.  Did he really call it "*Il jettatore"?  That's kind of nails-on-chalkboard.
 * Anyway I asked a question at the it.wiki equivalent of the refdesk and they found it for me. I had the title wrong.  It's La patente, by Pirandello. --Trovatore (talk) 00:07, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I suppose you gave them more to go on than that it was a nice yet slightly depressing story. --Lambiam 07:17, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
 * There's a famous short story called "Jettatura" by Théophile Gautier; it's written in French but with the title in Italian. That may be the one you remember. Xuxl (talk) 15:04, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
 * In Neapolitan words may be spelled with a ⟨j⟩: janco, jonta, jugo. --Lambiam 07:24, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, while the Italian alphabet sensu stricto has only 21 letters, leaving out j, k, w, x, y, you can find all five of the missing ones reasonably frequently in written Italian. They tend to be in things like loanwords and foreign names.  The j in particular sometimes substitutes the semivocalic i or the gli trigraph (e.g. zabajone as an alternative spelling of zabaglione). --Trovatore (talk) 18:57, 24 February 2024 (UTC)