Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 May 18

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May 18

Translating Rohan

In translations of The Lord of the Rings, how is the speech of Rohan most commonly rendered? Is it typically left alone, or is it typically rendered in an ancient form of the destination language? The latter seems more in line with Tolkien's wishes (I can imagine him appreciating the Rohirrim speaking Old Church Slavonic in Властелин колец and their poetry following ancient Slavic forms), but that would potentially require someone skilled in the older form of the language, and I can imagine it being cheaper just to leave the Mercian Old English in place and retain the alliterative half-line structure of the poetry. I suppose that the other languages are typically retained unchanged, as the only other related speech is the potentially Indo-European speech of the House of Bëor (see discussion of Finrod Felagund's name "Nom" in their speech in The History of Middle-Earth, perhaps in The Lost Road) and the Elven speeches and Khuzdul have no relationship to the Mannic speech rendered as English in the original text. Nyttend (talk) 01:55, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Tolkien wrote up some notes for translators, the "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", in which he advises not altering Rohirric names (as is the case with almost all names and terms which are not predominantly modern English)... AnonMoos (talk) 03:19, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Not sure of the copyright status, but you can read those notes here. Alansplodge (talk) 15:54, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

'To share a measure in common'

Is this expresion a pleonasm? Our article on irrational numbers says that two line segments are 'incommensurable' if they 'share no "measure" in common'. Isn't it redundant?

I suppose 'they share a measure' is equivalent to 'they have a measure in common' or 'they have some common measure' (a measure being such a smaller length which, if considered a unit, makes both segments' lengths whole numbers).
Using both 'share' and 'in common' in one expression seems incorrect to me. Am I right?

And if I am, does it need fixing in the irrational number article? --CiaPan (talk) (non-native speaker) 06:17, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

"incommensurable" seems to be just another way to say that one or both of the segments is an irrational number, hence the two can't be expressed as a ratio. If a right triangle's legs are both of length 1, then the hypotenuse is the square root of two. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:37, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

@Baseball Bugs: No, no, no. A segment is not a number, either rational or irrational. Segments are geometric objects, and a natural number (in Ancient Greek maths) expresses how many times one of them fits in another. Often this can't happen, so the Greeks invented an idea of a fraction, telling how many times a common measure (some 'unit length segment') fits in each of two given segments. Incommensurability is a situation when such a common measure does not exist.

But that's not what I asked about. See, this is a Language, not Math RD, and I seek for explanation of 'share sth. in common' in/correctness. --CiaPan (talk) 10:06, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I should have said the length of one or both segments is irrational. Actually, it doesn't matter, since no matter the size of the triangle it can always be said to have a measurement of 1, while the hypotenuse can always be said to have a measure of square root of 2 in relation to each leg. Trovatore's explanation is what I was trying to say, only he said it better. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:34, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

It's a very old-fashioned way of putting it. I mean really really old-fashioned, like to the days of the Pythagoreans, though of course they didn't speak English. They had a rather rigid view of mathematics; as I understand it the only "numbers" they recognized were the natural numbers greater than or equal to 2. (Not only was 0 not a "number"; 1 was not a number either, but rather the generator of numbers.) This was akin to a religious belief.

So for them the only way to express the proportion of two lengths was to find a third smaller length, such that both lengths were natural-number multiples of the smaller one. That would be the "measure in common".

It came as an unwelcome surprise when they found out that the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle could not be thus compared with one of its legs. There's a story that they forced the one who discovered it to drown himself. I think it's just a story, but it goes to how they felt about it.

With the modern conception of the real numbers, this all seems a little bit silly (perhaps more importantly for the reals specifically, so do Zeno's paradoxes). But it was important at the time, and to some extent it has survived in language, albeit very dated language. --Trovatore (talk) 09:42, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I re-read your question, and now I realize that wasn't what you were asking about. I guess share...in common is a tiny bit redundant, but it doesn't sound bad to me. "Share a measure" doesn't make a lot of sense. You could substitute "have a measure in common", maybe, but I don't think it's an improvement. --Trovatore (talk) 09:56, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

@Trovatore: Actually, I'm not going to improve the article at the language level – I don't speak English well enough. When asking the question I aimed my own learning, not Wikipedia improvement. I just tried to learn something new about the language in the part of 'feeling correct'. :) Thank you for the explantion. --CiaPan (talk) 10:12, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I've reworded it. --76.71.6.254 (talk) 23:10, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

It seems clearer now. But did you intend to tell us your location? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:30, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

What's that got to to with the question? --76.71.6.254 (talk) 02:23, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Your IP address can be tracked. A registered user ID cannot. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:21, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

And? Why do you need to know the OP's location? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:29, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't. But someone with less honorable intentions might abuse that information in some way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:17, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Registered users post stuff while logged out, all the time. You're making an issue out of nothing. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:59, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

It's not my issue. I'm just trying to provide some friendly advice to the user. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:05, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

I do not perceive the current phrasing as being clearer now. The previous wording share no measure in common reflects imho in a very appropriate way the word in-comm(on)-(m)ensurable, which to explain it is intended. BTW, this wording was there for years (since 2004), already. Additionally, while tinkering around this paragraph in March, I did like the mutual corroboration by redundancy of share and in common, as pointing to a core concept of irrationality. The current formulation appears as clear to me, but also as not an improvement. Purgy (talk) 09:04, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

"Share no measure in common" is a reasonable exegesis of the etymology of "incommensurable", but it doesn't make sense, in English, for the concept being described. The word "measure" does not mean "submultiple of an interval".

So I wouldn't object to putting the phrase back as an explanation of the etymology, but we shouldn't use it as though it actually made sense, because it doesn't. --Trovatore (talk) 09:15, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

In no way I intend to modify the status quo of this paragraph, nor do I object to the notion measure having a special meaning in math (often), but I want to remark that I left the quotes around this word specifically to allow for the desired interpretation as some arbitrarily small line length (for heaven's sake, no infinitesimal), as an etalon, like the mètre des archives, to exhaust other line lengths. Purgy (talk) 09:42, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

What did Russian ca. 17-18th C. really sound like?

If someone were transported from 17th C. Russia/Muscovy/whatever into the $current_year, would they have an accent? What would that sound like? 80.171.99.241 (talk) 16:26, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Are you asking whether a Russian from that time period would sound different to modern Russians? Someone with knowledge of Russian might know, but consider this: If you beamed an English speaker of similar vintage into modern times, he might well sound different, and also he would be unfamiliar with modern idioms and slang. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:29, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

We have History of the Russian language, but it is not very detailed, and deals more with spelling and vocabulary changes. The most important changes that affect Moscovy Russian compared to other dialects are akanje, and the other types of vowel reduction in Russian and the development of the yers, unstressed forms of short 'i' and 'u'. Unfortunately, our articles don't give time periods for these changes, but they are the main reasons for the differences between the modern Eastern Slavic languages.

For example, one, nine, and rain in the Rusyn language are /'jɛdɛn/, /dɛwjat/ and /dɨt͡ʃ/, while due to akanje and ikanje, "one" is /ad'in/, nine is /'djevɪt'/, and rain is /dɔt͡ʃ/. These are all stress-induced changes, with Rusyn slightly closer to Old Slavonic, but /dɨt͡ʃ/ being an innovation in a word that originally had a yer vowel, like 'book'.

I highly suspect a 17th Century Muscovite would sound like a Ukrainian to a modern Russian, as Ukrainian is more conservative in its vowels. I'd ping Lyuboslov Yezikin, but he spells and signs his name so incongruently I can't recall it at the moment. μηδείς (talk) 00:33, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

@Любослов Езыкин:. —Stephen (talk) 01:30, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I have little to add, Baseball Bugs has explained it above. Russian is hardly different from any European language in that respect. If the OP wants more details he might read Russian historical grammars (though there exist only a couple of them in English/German, namely by V. Kiparsky and by W. K. Matthews).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:30, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

@Medeis: Jeden is a borrowing from Slovak or Polish, the Eastern Slavic form is odinъ (Ukr./Rusyn odyn; Russ. odin, but due to akanye the first syllable is reduced to an a-like vowel). In "rain" you seem to have misrepresented the last consonants, must be /ʃtʲ/ or /ʃt͡ʃ/.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:42, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I should have checked the Russian дождь, I was paying attention to the vowel. But the Rusyn is indeed dycz. Rusyn isn't really Eastern Slavic, it's intermediate between Ukranian and Eastern Slovak, and there's no standard, and had pronounced differences between villages. It rains (as my Grandmother pronounced it) is "Dycz pada", although Magocsi gives docz for the Prešov dialect. In any case, the Old Slavonic had a yer: *dъždžь. Jeden is just as much Polish as it is Slovak. Wiktionary calls Rusyn East Slavonic, but agrees with my pronunciation, see edinъ. μηδείς (talk) 22:23, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I have no objections to the fact that yer in Rusyn can have been reflected into y, I did only not expect that the last consonant had simplified as well. Although, there is a parallelism with Russian, where the colloquial pronunciation has the last consonant /ʃ/.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:16, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Rusyn "one"

I did not mean Rusyn is not Eastern Slavic, but that just this particular word for "one" is a borrowing. But it is impossible to identify the source language as the word sounds identical in both Polish and Slovak. Anyway it has nothing to do with Russian akanye.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:16, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree with you that akanje has nothing to do with jeden. But wiktionary edinъ seems to show the (j)e and o forms were in free variation, and perhaps Rusyn simply fell on the Western side of that isogloss. Another complication with Rusyn is that there's an isogloss uniting eastern Slovak and Polish in having penultimate stress; some Rusyn dialects have free stress like Russiaan, some have penultimate stress. At some point, everything about Rusyns would end up explained as a borrowing, except for their genetic uniqueness. μηδείς (talk) 15:43, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

No, it's not a free variation. Proto-Slavic initial *e- turned out je- in the West and the South but o- in the East (see also W.&S. jezero, jesen’ vs E. ozero, osen’, etc., consult, e.g, The Slavic Languages by Roland Sussex and Paul Cubberley, p. 46). There are several explanations why Rusyn has turned out as such but it's certainly off-topic.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:13, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

So, Msr. Fermat, you have a proof, just not enough room in the margin? :) I asked if you had a source that says (explicitly) that jeden is a borrowing in Rusyn from Slovak. (Such a borrowing would be highly unusual.) Should I take it that you don't? μηδείς (talk) 16:25, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

I've given you a source, even the page. Unless you consider Rusyn West Slavic. What are the Rusyn words for "autumn", "lake", "deer", "alder tree", "sturgeon"? I couldn't find a proper full Rusyn dictionary.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:17, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Alright, from Uzhgorod: осень, озеро, олень, ольха, осетер. Strikingly East Slavic. With such a consistency you cannot say jeden has come miraculously directly from Proto-Slavic. Particularly with typical West Slavic *ь > e.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:28, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Autumn is восінь [wɔsin']. I don't have a dictionary, and the other words are not ones that came up in conversation. μηδείς (talk) 20:15, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I am curious, @Любослов Езыкин: is this source from Uzhhorod recent? Does it purport to be Rusyn? And importantly, what is the form of the third person nominative masculine pronoun "he"? μηδείς (talk) 00:21, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Игорь Керча, Русинско-русский словарь (2007), Русско-русинский словарь (2012). He has based his dictionary on modern publications, but much of his material comes from the 1880s to the 1940s. "He" is un, (o)wun. Wosin’ is a perfect Ukrainian form with protetic w- and o > i. Magocsi gives wosin’ for Prešov and osyn’ for Transcarpathia. Alright, but how does it matter?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:11, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, @Любослов Езыкин: for your help and patience. I asked about "he" because the Preszov Magocsi has він, (and його) while my grandmother said [wɪn] and ['jɛhɔ].

It seems the Preshov/Lemko dialect has more in common with Standard Ukrainian than the Transcarpthian dialect. Seems expected since the Carpathians prevent the communication, while the Lemkos might have come to Slovakia from the north through Poland and not from the east. But why does it surprise you? Proto-Slavic *onъ (which in Ukranian/Rusyn has got prosthetic w- and underwent o > i) has a different root on the oblique cases *jь-. And in any case it has nothing to do with East Slavic isogloss *e- > *o-.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:51, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

You may be interested in Атлас української мови (here at the bottom). The western part is volume 2; the word "he" is map #52 (p.159 in the file).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 21:58, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Classifying sounds: consonants and vowels vs. obstruents and sonorants

When young children learn to classify the sounds of language, they learn to use consonants and vowels. Wikipedia, however, says that the classification into obstruents and sonorants is more natural. Which classification is more natural?? Georgia guy (talk) 20:14, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure that children distinguish consonants and vowels in any conscious meta-linguistic way unless they become literate in an alphabetic writing system. In traditional Chinese society, any segmentation going beyond syllable onset vs. syllable rhyme was mainly of interest to some specialized scholars, and I'm not too sure how aware ordinary Chinese-speakers were of individual consonant and vowel segments which did not form a whole syllable onset or a whole syllable rhyme. AnonMoos (talk) 20:40, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

In English, it's easier to learn the vowels versus the consonants, because the vowels can be said with the mouth open, and relatively little other motions of the mouth other than lip rounding and position of the root of the tongue. Also, one has such sets as beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, bot, bought, but, boat, boot and book. Once you learn about syllables, you can learn that butter, battle, bottom, and button all end in syllables without real vowels, although we pretend, and say there is a schwa present. But one can't always substitute a sonorant for a vowel. Bert is fine as brt. But there's no such word as the impossible /bmk/ in English. μηδείς (talk) 00:39, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Look at Wikipedia's template at the top of several articles, including Affricate. It DOES say that obstruent vs. sonorant is important. Georgia guy (talk) 01:36, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

No classification is "natural", they are all created by people for their own convenience. When you ask which classification scheme is "better", you need to specify better for what. Also, what linguists do is different from what teachers do; how a language is taught is pedagogy which is different than how linguists might want to study the phonology of language. Two totally different fields with two totally different classification schemes for two totally different reasons. --Jayron32 10:55, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Are there some ways the obstruent vs. sonorant classification is better?? Georgia guy (talk) 14:33, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Better for what purpose? --Jayron32 14:48, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Your post implies that there are some pros of the obstruents vs. sonorants classification. How is it important?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:17, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Languages differ greatly in their phonetic systems. As I mentioned above, in English, the vowels form a coherent class, and any vowel can replace any other (with a very few exceptions like *theenk) and create a word that fits in the phonetic system of English. Sonorants can also be syllabic in English, but they cannot substitute for vowels in all cases. But in other languages, you can have items like the surname Ng or other Vowel#Words_without_vowels. How to analyze those languages depends on their nature.

There is not one ideal system that fits all languages, any more than there's a single way to classify vertebrates. For example, whether an animal lays eggs, or has placental or marsupial development of "liveborn" young is an ideal way to distinguish the three major living clades of mammals. But that method of classification would be totally useless if applied to birds. Words (concepts) are tools we use to investigate reality. If the words we are used to using don't fit with the reality we want to describe, we don't shoe-horn reality into our terminology, we change or develop new terminology that better fits the reality we are dealing with. μηδείς (talk) 19:28, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

• When my niebles were infants I used to sing them Swingin' the Alphabet. I've got a pretty good singing voice, and I could do a modified version using -ch- for -c- and -sh- for -x- that would hold them entranced on car trips. After a while, they would giggle if you suddenly broke the rules mid-song. I think there's clearly a capacity for the implicit distinction between vowels and consonants even without written learning. There's also the use of assonance and alliteration in originally purely oral traditions, like Beowulf. Miriam Makeba's version of Mbube, one of the popular songs in world history, is also worth a listen. μηδείς (talk) 01:03, 25 May 2017 (UTC)