Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 December 17

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December 17

English cognate of dies (Latin word)

Wiktionary says that the English day is unrelated to Latin dies. What if the Latin word did have a native English cognate?? What would it be?? Georgia guy (talk) 02:40, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Following the links in Wiktionary will take you to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic cognate *tīnaz. You can see the descendants there and follow the links to get an idea of what an English cognate may have looked like. Also, going back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form from which the Latin derived, there is *dyḗws. You can follow the links there as well and see if there are any English reflexes. One (borrowed from Greek) is Zeus, but that of course isn't a "native English cognate". Barring the finding of an existing cognate, however, it would just be speculating to guess what one would look like. You will probably get as many answers as there are linguists.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 04:13, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Jove and Jupiter are descendants of Proto-Indo-European *dyḗws ‎(lit., “the bright one”). —Stephen (talk) 05:01, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

William's comments are correct, and the Tue in Tuesday is a living cognate (reflex of the same root). μηδείς (talk) 20:51, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Dies comes to English directly in the word diurnal and less directly in the word journal. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:10, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

See http://wordinfo.info/unit/2459/ for additional words.—Wavelength (talk) 02:55, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Poem meaning

What does "Beso a beso recorro tu pequeño infinito" mean. I understand it's by Pablo Neruda, but I'm not quite sure the significance of it. 2601:196:4A00:C297:5C51:1031:C52A:FAE1 (talk) 03:53, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, one translator has rendered it "Kiss by kiss I course your small infinity". The "significance" is that the speaker is describing his osculatory exploration of his lover's body. Deor (talk) 04:18, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Kiss by kiss, I travel/tour your little infinity (naked body). —Stephen (talk) 05:05, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

pautaje

Does anyone know the Ecuadorian Spanish word pautaje? It is related to the Spanish word wikt:pautar (to advertise). I don't find it in any dictionaries. —Stephen (talk) 05:11, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

It seems to mean publicity or advertising. The suffix -aje is cognate with the noun-forming suffix -age in English. See departamento de pautaje (use the translate the page to english function to see the text without registering) where it is explained that the department of pautaje determines the placement and timing of advertising. μηδείς (talk) 20:45, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, it seems to mean placement or scheduling of ads in a given medium. —Stephen (talk) 04:04, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Software for accent reduction

Which options are there for software for accent reduction? And how well do they work? Is software so developed that it can detect a foreign accent or a regional accent and evaluate their distance from a standard accent? Llaanngg (talk) 19:57, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

I can assure you this is far beyond the capability of any software we have today. It requires actual intelligence, in the way that we do not have AI that can train you to be a prima ballerina. What you need is a voice coach. μηδείς (talk) 20:48, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Actually he needs more a dialect coach than a voice coach.Hofhof (talk) 06:07, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I did not mean to imply he needed singing lessons. μηδείς (talk) 22:49, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Last time I used speech recognition software it sometimes had difficulty understanding good English. I know there have been vast improvements over the past few years, but I don't think software is quite at that stage yet. The speech-recognition routines can learn your own accent if you read to the machine, but I don't think electronic elocution teachers have been developed yet. Dbfirs 21:05, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

It wouldn't necessarily have to recognize speech. You could just select a word, select the desired accent, and hear the proper pronunciation, then try to emulate it. This is doable today. StuRat (talk) 05:07, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

"Try" to is the operative word. Because we are used to the sounds of our native language, the way a sounds is made in another language can be hard to reproduce, simply because we have trouble hearing it the right way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:31, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Like anything else, it just takes practice. The more you hear words pronounced "the right way" (however you define it), the more you will start to speak that way. StuRat (talk) 14:55, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

• I think most voice recognition systems can repeat their interpretation of what they think you say. So it you say "Alexa: lhat ma far" in a southern Appalachian accent, your Amazon Echo will reply "did you mean "light my fire?'" in a standard American accent. This is effectively the same sort of feedback a mother gives to a child who is learning the language. -Arch dude (talk) 08:14, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Maybe Amazon Echo replies: "did you mean you'll move far?". The problem with dictation software is that it won't tell you what's wrong, and it might learn to ignore your mistakes after some training. This is effectively a different sort of feedback a human speaker would give to anyone. Analyzing and correcting spoken language implies understanding it, something computers do not. Hofhof (talk) 09:48, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

I see a technical error in your example: I think it should be "laht" rather than "lhat". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:38, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

The idea that it just takes practice is naive or oversimplified. It is very rare, without coaching, for adults to change their accent, for the mere fact that they don't hear it. They don't perceive the phonetic difference, just the phonemic one.

That is, for example, although native English speakers consider the "p" sound identical in all instances, it actually has at least two allophones; an aspirated one initially, and an unaspirated one after an initial ess. Hence, the p sounds in speak and peak are different. Peak has aspiration, a puff of air after the consonant but before the vowel [p^hik] and without the puff in [spik]. (I am leaving out a lot of information here not relevant to my point, this is a simplification.) Although English speakers don't hear the difference between these two pees, speakers of Mandarin and Hindi do, since [p^h] and [p] are totally different consonants in those languages, as different as [p] and [b] are in English.

Having a foreign accent results from the fact that an adult tends to apply the allophonic rules of his own language to the foreign language. This is illustrated brilliantly in the classic Italian Lesson sketch by Monty Python. The students speak perfect Italian, the teacher speaks Italian using the proper phonemes ("letters") but he applies English phonetic rules without realizing it, murdering the vowels and other sounds.

This becomes immediately clear when you hear the students repeat the line "Sono inglese de Gerard's Cross" which he has pronounced as "So-w-no-w ingle-y-ze-y de-y Gerard's Cross", applying the English phonetic rule of adding off glides (Standard American and RP add a y sound after long ee and ay and a w sound after long you and oh) to the phonemes of Italian, which has no such rule. Native English speakers apply this and other rules like aspiration of initial voiceless stops unconsciously.

Adult speakers without linguistic training or a rare talent for mimicry need these effects to be brought to their conscious attention. Hence the need for interaction with a live person who can point out the differences and recognize and correct errors where they are made. Technology has not progressed to the point where human coaching of beginning learners can be removed from the equation.

μηδείς (talk) 02:46, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Posting by banned user removed. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Given my dad was born in Philly, and can quote FUNEX verbatim, I doubt that. μηδείς (talk) 04:24, 24 December 2016 (UTC)