Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 March 17

= March 17 =

mercurial breasted
It's in a book from five centuries ago titled A History of the Levant Company. What does it mean? Omidinist (talk) 07:01, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * More context, please, like the full sentence it's used in. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:42, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Sure. 'The mercurial breasted Mr. Harborne so noised the name of our island among the Turks that not an infant of the cur-tailed, skin-clipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their prophet's tomb at Mecca.' Omidinist (talk) 07:49, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * That passage contains a number of insults against Muslims in the space of a few words ("skin-clipping" means circumcising). I would guess that "mercurial breasted" could mean that he's changeable in his emotions (unless it's some kind of fixed phrase). AnonMoos (talk) 11:54, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Tuchman is quoting Thomas Nashe, who published this description of Harborne in his last work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The passage is also quoted in the entry on Harborne in the Dictionary of National Biography. Other compounds with -breasted I found were foule-breasted in a sermon by Thomas Adams (1583–1652), true-breasted in a play by Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) and a poem by Thomas Heywood (early 1570s – 1641), and open-breasted, out-breasted, sweet-breasted, all in a 14-volume edition of the works of Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), where -breasted is glossed as meaning -voiced. This fits with the other uses, foule-breasted meaning "foul-voiced" in the context of the sermon, and true-breasted meaning "speaking truth". So it appears that Nashe is implying that Harborne spoke in a mercurial manner, that he was (quick)silver-tongued. The term "noised" supports the hypothesis that the attribute is meant to characterize his way of speaking.  --Lambiam 12:38, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * What about an association with Mercury, the god of commerce, financial gain, but also eloquence and trickery? --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Silver-tongued seems to be the exact meaning. Thanks everyone. Omidinist (talk) 19:10, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Tobacco smoke enema
"blow smoke up someone's ass" is a common expression.

Tobacco smoke enema was an old medical practice.

Are the two related in anyway? Because their concepts are very similar. OptoFidelty (talk) 17:45, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * According to Snopes, there is no direct connection; the vulgar idiom came into use only long after rectal fumigation was no longer practiced. Notwithstanding Wiktionary's claim that the verb blow smoke arose "By shortening of the full expression blow smoke up someone's ass, deemed less vulgar", my original research leads me to think that the direction is the reverse, and that we are dealing here with a humouristic lengthening – very possibly informed by the abandoned 19th-century medical procedure – of an idiom originally not related to medicine, but more to the production of metaphorical smokescreens. --Lambiam 22:56, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * @Lambiam Thank you! OptoFidelty (talk) 06:23, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * OptoFidelty (talk) 06:23, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Letter usage

 * 1) Why German uses Ü instead of Y for /y/ sound?
 * 2) Why Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian (outside digraphs) or Romanian do not use letter Y in native words?
 * 3) Is there any Germanic language that never uses letter C for /k/ or /s/ sound in native words, but uses it for another sound in native words?
 * 4) Why word price in English is not spelled by an S, despite that it has /s/ sound?
 * 5) Is there any language that uses letter C but not letter B?
 * 6) Is there any language in Europe that does not use all of the letters A, E, I, O and U in native words?
 * 7) Why so-called identification marks, common in Romance languages, that are diacritics put on letters to signify sound change or stress, are almost always added to vowels and almost never to consonants? --40bus (talk) 20:36, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * 4. Because prise means something else and is pronounced differently. Similarly device and devise, advice and advise. And then there's practice and practise. Bazza 7 (talk) 20:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Funny enough, price used to also be spelled prize. GalacticShoe (talk) 22:02, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * 1. The vowel mutation found e.g. in the irregular plurals of some German nouns (called "umlaut" – not the diacritic but the phonemic switch) was originally denoted by adding the letter after the mutating vowel:, ,  . For the plural Brueder, see e.g. these manuscripts: , , . Later, instead of writing an  after the vowel, a small  was written over the mutating vowel, like . When the shape of a handwritten letter  changed to a zigzag (see Kurrent), the small superscript  followed suit. The former  now looked like 0.33em. The next step was to replace the superscript zigzag by two  strokes, still common in handwriting: 0.33em. Finally, in printed text, the strokes were replaced by dots: . There was simply no reason to treat the digraph  differently from the digraphs  and .  --Lambiam 22:29, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * 1. It does use Y in Greek loanwords, e.g. Psychologie /ˌpsyː.ço.loˈɡiː/, Elysium /eˈlyːzi̯ʊm/, Typ /tyːp/... Double sharp (talk) 06:48, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * 1) Why -se at the end of word is pronounced /z/ and not /s/?--40bus (talk) 20:49, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Why do people who write questions like these not know how to construct questions in English? --142.112.220.50 (talk) 21:35, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Because they're Finnish, evidently... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:44, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Here at the Reference desk we do support such questions. --Lambiam 22:31, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * More importantly, why does 40bus continually fail to understand that "why" is not really a valid question to ask in most of these cases. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * It's not always. Practise, as I mentioned above. Bazza 7 (talk) 22:56, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * As for question 4, "price" does not have original etymological [s] (from Latin pretium), while "ice" does, so that the spelling of "ice" could be considered more striking. Of course, the purpose is to have a spelling which unambiguously means [s], without any possibility of being interpreted as [z]... AnonMoos (talk) 01:31, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Of course English could have spelled [z] as z, so that s would unambiguously mean [s] and there were no need for ce, but why take the easy solution? PiusImpavidus (talk) 13:30, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In Old English, the sounds [s] and [z] were allophones of the same phoneme, while the letter Z occurred rarely, and with the sound-value [ts]. The letter Z often meant [ts] in Old French as well.  The contrast between the sounds [s] and [z] didn't become fully phonemic in English until the loss of word-final schwas in Middle English (some of which have visual remnants as so-called "silent e" in modern English spelling).  The association between the sound [z] and the letter Z didn't take hold until even later, when there came to be substantial numbers of loanwords from ancient Greek in English, maybe too late to use the letter Z to radically re-shape English spelling.  Z has always been one of the high-value Scrabble tile letters in English (along with J, X, and Q -- though J wasn't a separate letter from I before the 17th century).  In any case, it might not really be much of an "advantage" if the English noun plural ending, noun possessive ending, and verb third-person singular present ending, were all to be spelled with "-s" when attached to some words, but "-z" when attached to other words... AnonMoos (talk) 23:26, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

5. Is there any language that uses letter C but not letter B?

 * As for question 5, if you go way back, Etruscan did not have a contrast between voiced and voiceless stops, so it did not really have any use for letters for [b], [d], and [g]. This meant that when Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet of Cumae, the letters B/Beta and D/Delta were kept in the theoretical "model alphabet", but were not actually used to write Etruscan sounds, while in some versions of Etruscan writing practices (the version which most directly influenced the Romans), the letter Gamma was used to write [k] before the vowels E and I, the letter Kappa was used to write [k] before the vowel A, and the letter Qoppa was used to write [k] before the vowel U (the vowel [o] did not exist in the Etruscan language, so that the letter O also only existed in the theoretical "model alphabet" in Etruscan).  That's how the descendant of the Greek letter Gamma came to write [k] in Latin, and was the origin of the Latin letter C, so that the Romans had to create a differentiated letter G (i.e. C with an added line) to have a symbol to write the sound [g].  So it could be said that Etruscan (some versions at least, and discounting letters which were only in the "model alphabet" without actually being used to write Etruscan), had C without B... AnonMoos (talk) 01:31, 18 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I guess my answer to question 5 also answered question 6! AnonMoos (talk) 01:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Some versions of the Quechua alphabet for native words. --Error (talk) 01:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

2. Why Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian (outside digraphs) or Romanian do not use letter Y in native words?
In the case of the Romanian alphabet, I think it is because they followed Italian. I thought that avoiding confusion with U (Cyrillic) in the Romanian transitional alphabet may have had an influence, but our article says it used uk (Cyrillic). --Error (talk) 01:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

3. Is there any Germanic language that never uses letter C for /k/ or /s/ sound in native words, but uses it for another sound in native words?
Some of the transliterations methods listed in Yiddish orthography and Cimbrian and Wymysorys languages, from a glance at their pages. --Error (talk) 01:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Hard to prove a negative. Dutch uses c a lot in the ch digraph (pronounced /x/) in native words: 43300 of 418690 words in /usr/share/dict/dutch have ch. The other uses of c are typically pronounced /s/ or /k/ and I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of those 49484 words are loans, or at least have the c in a borrowed morpheme, but it's a lot of work to prove that none are native. Many of those loans have been around for centuries. The same applies to Frisian, which is more aggressive in making native spellings for loans, substituting an s or k for the c. PiusImpavidus (talk) 13:09, 18 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Most of the Germanic languages have one or several di- tri- or tetragraphs containing C, but I guess that these combinations were excluded from the question. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

===7. Why so-called identification marks, common in Romance languages, that are diacritics put on letters to signify sound change or stress, are almost always added to vowels and almost never to consonants?=== Is identification mark a phrase in English? Do you mean diacritics? --Error (talk) 01:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

You are of course ignoring the Cedilla and the Romanian Ș. Off the top of my unexpert head, I suggest it's because vowels are much more open to variant pronunciation, while most consonants are fairly consistent, or their variations are less often significant and noticed in Romance languages, unlike in, for example, Indo-Aryan languages. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.213.188.170 (talk) 04:48, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

When those marks apply not to a single phoneme, but to the entire syllable (like stress marks), it makes sense to put them on the nucleus of the syllable, which is normally a vowel. PiusImpavidus (talk) 13:16, 18 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Of course, that wasn't good enough for the inventors of the International Phonetic alphabet, who chose to decree that the IPA stress marks should be placed BEFORE the stressed syllable, something which I've always found rather unintuitive and awkward (at least I'm very awkward at using this cumbersome and strange convention -- I've always left out stress marks from my transcriptions whenever I could possibly get away with it...) AnonMoos (talk) 23:27, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Ah, that would explain why in the past you have mistaken mine, placed after the syllable, for an apostrophe. {The poster formerly knwn as 87.81.230.195} 51.241.39.117 (talk) 05:43, 19 March 2024 (UTC)