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

= May 23 =

Three questions
--40bus (talk) 04:42, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * 1) Is there any language where letter A can be pronounced as a consonant?
 * 2) Why does Italian not write the etymological H in words like uomo, uovo, idrologia and avere?
 * 3) Is there any Spanish dialect that has not undergone diphthongization of /o/ and /e/ to /ue/ and /ie/, and thus say ovo, porta, morto and cento instead of huevo, puerta, muerto and ciento?

Question 1
Do you ever get bored with all this minutia? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:56, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * 1. All 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are treated as consonants, including the first letter, alif, which in its long form can be considered the equivalent of the letter A. When used as a consonant, it is unvoiced (to simplify things greatly). Xuxl (talk) 14:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Aleph seems to work that way in Semitic languages in general. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 22:04, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
 * In early Semitic alphabets, all the letters originally wrote consonant sounds (with a slow rise of "matres lectionis" in some languages). However in Arabic as it has developed, the letter 'alif only means a glottal stop when it has a hamza diacritic or similar.  'Alif without such a diacritic is either silent or a vowel letter... AnonMoos (talk) 17:55, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

We could wish that it were a singular minutia, but it is cumulatively many minutiae. —Tamfang (talk) 03:36, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
 * For item 1, I doubt the situation has changed substantially in the last year: Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2023_April_3. —Amble (talk) 15:39, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

Question 2
2. I believe Italian orthography largely goes back to Dante Alighieri, and at that time, it wasn't considered necessary or relevant. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * According to this timeline of the Italian language, "h" and "x" tended to disappear in the latter half of the 16th century, postdating Dante by a couple of centuries. But still, OP presents a stupid question. Why does Italian not write the useless leading H? Well, they do, to differentiate a few homophones. Otherwise, the answer is "because it's useless and scribes got tired of it." --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 16:55, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

===Is there any Spanish dialect that has not undergone diphthongization of /o/ and /e/ to /ue/ and /ie/, and thus say ovo, porta, morto and cento instead of huevo, puerta, muerto and ciento?===

I thought about Castrapo but the reference in the article has only one or two words where diphthongization could happen and the form is the Spanish one with diphthong. I haven't looked into Portuñol.--Error (talk) 01:32, 31 May 2024 (UTC) There is no such dialect which would be categorized as Spanish. deisenbe (talk) 18:41, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

"Wouldn't you like to know?" origin/occurrence
I've been trying to find the origin/early occurrences/etc. of the English phrase "Wouldn't you like to know?" used sarcastically. Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for it, OED just has its origin listed as "1860" with no cited source. It's difficult to search Google Books for because you often don't get enough context to tell at a glance if it's being used earnestly or not (the phrase seems to be used non-rhetorically fairly often even into the 20th century). I find this use in an 1868 periodical, and while it is pointed out explicitly by the narrator that the use is sarcastic, it is clearly not a "novel" use or one that would be unfamiliar to the reader; it thus seems unlikely to me that this sense actually originates in the 1860s (or could language have really evolved that fast back then?). It's a weird set phrase that evolved from a phrase that otherwise has basically no meaning (as a modern native speaker it's hard to understand why one would ask "wouldn't you like to know" non-rhetorically). Google Ngrams shows a massive rise in usage starting around the year 2000, but this is almost certainly just a result of weighting errors (an artifact found near-universally when searching Ngrams). Any earlier sources/theories/similar evolutions would be appreciated -- I find no analogues with other English set phrases.

(As a side note, in asking a breadth of friends/family members/co-workers if they've ever heard a non-rhetorical (or further non-sarcastic) use of the phrase, I found that basically everyone born after Gen X remembers first encountering the phrase in the viral "Wouldn't you like to know, weather boy?" video from 2017. Google Ngrams shows literally zero bump in occurences from 2017, and relative usage actually decreases from then on... Obviously highly anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless.)

Thank you! (fugues) (talk) (fugues) (talk) 05:44, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm seeing it in possibly-sarcastic usage in newspapers as far back as the 1850s. It was also the closing line of a Superman TV episode from 1952, where a seemingly intelligent computer is asked "Who is Superman?" and the computer gives that as the answer. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:28, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * This is an interesting question and having been born in 1952, the same year as the Superman TV episode Baseball Bugs mentioned, I was not exposed to its usage before the portrayal of artificial intelligence in that TV show. I think as a stark phrase, it is almost universally sarcastic and and often confrontational. But I can see it being used in an expanded form in another context. Imagine an educational TV segment about jewelry making where the host starts by saying, "Wouldn't you like to know how to make the delicate gold filigree on this necklace? Well, I am going to show you how." Cullen328 (talk) 08:48, 23 May 2024 (UTC)


 * I can push it back a little to a poem or song in a popular magazine:
 * I know a girl with teeth of pearl, / And shoulders white as snow; / She lives, - ah well, / I must not tell, / Wouldn't you like to know? / Her eyes are blue (celestial hue!) / And dazzling in their glow; / On whom they beam / With melting gleam, / Wouldn't you like to know? The Family Herald, London, 1864 (p. 42)
 * Alansplodge (talk) 14:48, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * A bit more digging finds the sheet music for this, should you wish to sing along. Lyrics by John Godfrey Saxe and music by John Wallace Hutchinson of the Hutchinson Family Singers, dated 1862 in New York. The title of a song popular on both sides of the Atlantic seems a good starting point. Alansplodge (talk) 15:01, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that poem is even older than that. But is it sarcastic, or merely teasing? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The Oxford American College Dictionary gives the meaning of this phrase as, "used to express the speaker's firm intention not to reveal something in spite of a questioner's curiosity". The speaker may intend to mock the questioner, but they may also be merely playful. --Lambiam 08:19, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Kind of a cousin to "That's for me to know and you to [not!] find out!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:40, 24 May 2024 (UTC)