Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 October 25

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October 25

hiver

You hear [ivɛːʁ] or [ivaɛ̯ʁ] in the file Media:Fr-hiver-fr CA.ogg ? Fête (talk) 20:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I hear the latter (or something more like the latter). You? —Tamfang (talk) 04:20, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Instead of an R-coloured vowel, I hear a /ʁ/ "coloured" with /a/ in the .ogg file. Would be the French of the Académie française as /ivɛʁ/ since there is no short and long vowel differentiation. --Shirt58 (talk) 12:00, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Assonance

I'm kind of confused on this. I know it is the repetition of vowel sounds but does it count if the repetitions are two different vowel sounds? Example: Is "later light" an example of assonance? There are two different vowel sounds in it. A and I. My teacher told me it is but I don't understand.184.97.240.247 (talk) 20:26, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Your teacher probably meant to say consonance instead of assonance. - Lindert (talk) 20:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

You probably meant to link to Literary consonance instead of consonance, which links to an article about music theory. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 20:39, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, thanks. - Lindert (talk) 20:41, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh yea right! Thanks!184.97.240.247 (talk) 21:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

V & W

I have been teaching in Hungary for a few months, and I have noticed that many people, when speaking English, pronounce 'v' as 'w', and 'w' as 'v', with very few exceptions. This seems to happen mainly with adult speakers - the kids at my primary school have near-perfect English accents (and some even speak in Scouse!). I knew a few Scandinavians who also did this. Is this a known phenomenon? I cannot think of a reason for this, as 'w' is absent from all of these languages. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:13, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I've noticed this with native German-speakers who say "v" instead of "w" ("Vot's ze matter vith you?"), as the German "w" is pronounced like the English "v" (and there is no labio-velar approximant in German phonology). And sometimes I hear Germans who are obviously somehow aware of this pitfall hypercorrecting their speech and saying things like "wague" instead of "vague". Our bit on non-native_pronunciations_of_English#Hungarian partly ascribes it to hypercorrection too. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:31, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

That's the word I was looking for - hypercorrection! Like my own dialect of English drops the initial 'h' for every word which has it, but uses 'haitch' instead of 'aitch' for the name of the letter 'H'. Thanks. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:21, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Are they actually swapping perfectly formed v's and w's, or are they pronouncing an intermediate β sound for both, which sounds too close to w for v, and too close to v for w? μηδείς (talk) 17:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

My partner spent his first 22 years in Sri Lanka. He's always spoken (SL) English as well as Sinhalese; his mother was even an English teacher. He is very prone to pronouncing initial v as w, and so do most of his family and friends from there that I've met. He says "wiolence" and "wiolin" for violence and violin, etc. He's less prone to saying v where w is required (it's never "vicket" for wicket, for example; but I'm sure it's happened). These things bother me much less than the weird stress patterns he uses, like saying "AH-mrka" for America (there are schwas in the latter syllables but they're so short as to almost vanish); and pronouncing "airport" as "yah-port" when he does not generally pronounce air as "yah"; and always referring to New Year's Eve as "thirty first night". -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 19:24, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Are you sure you're not hearing /ʋ/ in place of both /v/ and /w/? When you expect /v/ it sounds like /w/ (relative to what you're expecting), and vice versa. —Tamfang (talk) 20:00, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I have actually talked about it with one of my Hungarian colleagues and he acknowledges that he consistently pronounces 'v' as 'w' and 'w' as 'v', and says it's because of German, for some reason. And he still does it. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:59, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

For the record, I haven't noticed this phenomenon, but then I'm not really good in English pronunciation. I for one often pronounce /v/ for the letter “w”, but I don't think I ever do it the other way. – b_jonas 17:54, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmm wait. Could you have heared words like “over”, where if you pronounce the /v/ weakly enough the previous diphtong could make it sound like you tried a /w/? – b_jonas 18:03, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Tangent

This question puts me in mind of Sam Weller and other lower-class (Cockney? I don't see any mention of it in our Cockney article) characters in 19th-century British fiction who also interchange v′s and w′s—Sam pronounces (and writes) his boss's name as "Pickvick" while saying "wery" for "very", for instance. Are there any current British dialects where this happens? Deor (talk) 13:34, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

John Wells’s phonetic blog says it "is utterly unknown in Cockney today" but "In present-day English such occasional interchange of the two consonants has been reported from parts of the Caribbean, particularly the Bahamas". He references to Accents of English by John C. Wells (same person as the blogger?). Our article on Bahamian English mentions "poor distinction between the [v] and [w] sounds in Bahamian English. The contrast is often neutralized or merged into [v], [b] or [β], so village sounds like [wɪlɪdʒ], [vɪlɪdʒ] or [βɪlɪdʒ]. This also happens in the Vincentian, Bermudian and other Caribbean Englishes." ---Sluzzelin talk 14:34, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

At the time Dickens was writing, the East End of London was home to many Jewish and Eastern European immigrants, and when I studied Dickens a long time ago, my lecturer told me that the affectation Dickens portrayed here was an attempt to replicate the effect all this immigration had on the Cockney accent. I have no ideas as to whether this is true, but as the lecturer was Howard Jacobson I tend to believe him. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:21, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that's correct. In my part of London (which would have been rural Essex in Dickens's time), there's an area called Whipps Cross which was originally Phyppys Crosse (1517), the change in the initial consonant being a product of the local accent. There was a recent discussion here about this issue; a source I found then suggests that the "v" (or "f") and "w" switch was already obsolete when Dickens wrote it down, but was a well known Cockney stereotype. Alansplodge (talk) 18:06, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

In New Zealand, isn't wh (in Maori names) pronounced f? —Tamfang (talk) 20:03, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

That sound in the Maori language is the voiceless bilabial fricative signified by ɸ in the IPA. It is like an eff pronounced with the two lips, rather than the upper lip and the lower incisors. μηδείς (talk) 22:18, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Did you perhaps mean the lower lip and the upper incisors? -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 22:29, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

D'oh! μηδείς (talk) 16:47, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

So a historical characterisation of that is that when Maori was first written in Roman script, they decided to use "wh" to write that non-English sound. Some New Zealanders approximate the sound with an English /f/, but it is only incidentally true that /f/ is written "wh". The point is that this is a purely orthographic matter, and has no connection with the phenomena being discussed above. --ColinFine (talk) 09:47, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

"No connection" meaning that the choice of «wh» to write /ɸ/ was not motivated by any fancied resemblance to the (now marginal) English phoneme /ʍ/? Okay. —Tamfang (talk) 20:59, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, the sounds ʍ (Voiceless labio-velar approximant) and ɸ (voiceless bilabial fricative) are not that far apart. The symbolism is hardly baseless. μηδείς (talk) 21:09, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The phonemena are not the phenomena. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 21:42, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The question is not asking if people actually do this. It is asking what it is called. The only term I've heard is "lallation." However, I believe that is only for swapping R and L sounds, not W and V. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 14:57, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Chinese reading question

• For A.mart: in 遠百企業股份有限公司 = Yuan?bǎi qǐ​yè gǔ​fèn​yǒu​xiàn​gōng​sī - Is "Yuan" read as "yuǎn" or "yuàn"?

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 18:14, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Yuán. Fête (talk) 18:49, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• That's interesting. "Yuán" for "遠" doesn't appear in the dictionary at http://www.mdbg.net/ that I use for Chinese characters. The only choices it gives are "yuǎn" and "yuàn" WhisperToMe (talk) 20:22, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Tone sandhi, 2 adjoining 3rd tone will result in the first being modified to a second tone, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#Mandarin_Chinese — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.70.114.87 (talk) 21:25, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, ok. Thank you! WhisperToMe (talk) 05:32, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Uighur and Chinese help

What is the Uighur and Chinese seen in the following images?

• File:Khotan-ciber-d01.jpg (I need the Uighur of the main sign. the Chinese I have of the main sign is "九大行星网吧", but it would be nice to have Chinese and Uighur of the smaller signs too)
• File:Yining.jpg (the Chinese is 胜利南路 so I only need the Uighur)

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 20:24, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the smaller gold sign is the usual warning against minors attempting to access an internet bar: 未成年人，禁止入內 (minors are prohibited from entering). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.70.114.87 (talk) 21:33, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I added that to the annotation WhisperToMe (talk) 22:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

The first sign has already said it itself:
توققۇز پىلانت تورخانىسى toqquz pilant torxanisi "Nine Planets" internet café
The second (smaller below) ones are more difficult. Although they are not entirely unreadable but only a native can easily recognize from this picture what they say.
The last picture has too low quality that it is practically impossible to see anything.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:34, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

However the white upper small sign says
ئاگاھلاندۇرۇش agahlandurush "warning"--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:04, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

A note about your description: the "linux style penguin" is actually the QQ penguin. I've edited the English part of the description, but don't know what to change the Spanish to. 59.108.42.46 (talk) 03:58, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! The description was originally written by the uploader, I think. But I trimmed it down a little. The English name of the cafe seems to be "Toqquz Pilant Internet" - I just used "pinguino de QQ" in Spanish WhisperToMe (talk) 05:12, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

For "Warning" in the context of it being an interjection, would "警报" be a good Chinese translation? WhisperToMe (talk) 05:25, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The "p" in "pilant" seems to be a regular Arabic ba to me. --Soman (talk) 07:03, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

In the sign or in the text? Uighur is a language spoken in Hotan, but I do not believe Arabic is spoken much there except maybe in religious services. WhisperToMe (talk) 20:56, 31 October 2012 (UTC)