Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 May 29

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May 29

Male Elizabeths

Élisabeth Rossel was a man, you may be surprised to learn. His full name was Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel.

How common was or is it that the name Elizabeth (or versions thereof) is given to male children, and what were their parents thinking? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:21, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, The Baby Name Wizard has some graphs online for its popularity for males over the years. It's not the only girl's name to have been given to males: at the risk of copying Wait But Why's examples, here are graphs for Mary (obvious reasons, although I imagine it was usually not the first name), Sarah, and Margaret. Double sharp (talk) 11:57, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Then there's Evelyn Waugh and Shirley Povich. As well as the possibly-fictional "boy named Sue". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:34, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

"Shirley" was not a girl's name until Charlotte Bronte published a novel in 1849. Before that time, it sounded masculine! AnonMoos (talk) 13:14, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Specifically so: "Shirley Keeldar (she had no Christian name but Shirley: her parents, who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted them only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed)" - Shirley, Chapter XI. --ColinFine (talk) 16:58, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Some people must have thought it was masculine relatively recently. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:19, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

That name may well have contributed to his having to defend himself from abuse from an early age, thus setting his career in stone. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:11, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

I'll just point out here that, in Roman Catholic majority countries, it is "the done thing" to give people the name of a male saint and the name of a female saint, as happened in this case. --TammyMoet (talk) 12:39, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

The most common form this takes is "Maria" or "Marie" as a middle name (i.e. not the first in the list), as in Carl Maria von Weber... AnonMoos (talk) 13:14, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Additionally (AFAIK esp. in Spanish-speaking nations) one can give a girl Jesus as a middle name after Maria or give a boy Maria as a middle name after Jesus, hence e.g. María Jesús Matthei and Jesús María Pereda. --CiaPan (talk) 15:33, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

See also Anne#As a masculine name. Lesgles (talk) 16:29, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

"María José" (i.e. Mary Joseph) is also fairly common in Spanish-speaking countries, I think. There are lots of names like Shirley that started out as surnames ending in the /i/ sound, then became male names, then became female names: Beverly, Kimberly, Stacy, Tracy, and so on. Today in the U.S. it seems that the name Courtney is borne almost exclusively by white women and black men. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:21, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Courtney was my grandfather's name. As I understand it, Kimberley became a forename due to Kipling's 1901 novel Kim (the name of an Anglo-Indian street boy) but it seems to have changed sexes around 1960. Alansplodge (talk) 12:47, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

• Thanks, all. Yes, I was well aware that there is a strong tradition in some places of certain female names being given to males, but I'd never heard of Elizabeth being one such name. Double Sharp's link was most informative. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:11, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Resolved

Modern Greek, pronunciation.

[Original form of question for reference: Does Modern Greek have two words, almost-identical - phonetically speaking, except for /g/ replaced by /x/ in the second word? By /x/, I mean the last consonant of the German "buch", or of the Spanish "ojo", or the Russian "x".]

Does Modern Greek have two words, almost-identical - phonetically speaking, except for /g/ replaced by /ɣ/ in the second word?

HOTmag (talk) 20:42, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

I do not know, but FYI, such things would be called a minimal pair, which should help your search. Matt Deres (talk) 02:45, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

How about γκολ /gol/ "goal" (in sports) and χωλ /xol/ "hallway, entrance hall"? Both are borrowings.

The γκ is often found mapping the sound /g/ in newer borrowings. Before hard vowels it represents /g/, whereas the γ is /ɣ/ in Modern Greek. Before soft vowels, they're /ɟ/ and /ʝ/ respectively. --Theurgist (talk) 03:59, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I was wrong. I meant /ɣ/ (rather than /x/). So, does Modern Greek have two words, almost-identical - phonetically speaking, except for /g/ replaced by /ɣ/ in the second word? HOTmag (talk) 06:48, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, e.g. αργκό /ar'go/ 'slang' vs. αργώ /ar'ɣo/ 'I am delayed'. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:15, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Thankxs.

Resolved

HOTmag (talk) 08:13, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

What you want is to create minimal pairs. Luckily there is already software for this[1]. As its MS Windows version works very slow with big word lists I've checked only the most frequent 10k words and got one pair with real native words μάχες:μάγκες and one pair with two loanwords χολ:γκολ (that is hall:goal). Plus there seem to exist a few pairs for foreign proper names (like Harry:Garry). You may do it yourself with bigger wordlists.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:52, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Are you sure μάχες is pronounced /'maɣes/ ? As for χολ, please notice that I asked about /ɣ/, being a voiced consonant, while the first consonant of χολ is voiceless. HOTmag (talk) 13:42, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

No, those are /g/ vs. /x/ ones. (And in the case of μάγκες, since the /g/ is intervocalic, it's not really [g] but usually a prenasalised [g] that might be phonemically /nk/ or /ng/, according to some analyses at least. And the /x/ has its fronted allophone /ç/ in positions like this, before front vowels. ) Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:47, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, it is rather /ç/ vs /ŋɡ/, so there is only one pair left (χολ:γκολ). For /x/ vs /ɡ/ the program returned no pairs, and as for your example the words αργώ and αργκό are not ones of the first 10k (plus the last vowels differ as well, so the program won't see them as minimal pairs). So we might convert Greek to phonetic spelling and use a bigger wordlist, and then the program might return something else. Sorry, HOTmag, I'm not going to do this, but I gave your the idea, so you can do it yourself. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:45, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

HOTmag -- Любослов Езыкин obviously answered the first form of your question (before you changed it). There's no reason to beat him up for it, especially since he obviously did some real research on your behalf... AnonMoos (talk) 13:53, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't know what you're talking about. I've never beaten him up. I only asked him whether he was sure about something, and I also asked him to notice something. Please notice, that he answered the last form of my question, more than four hours after the first form was changed. HOTmag (talk) 14:48, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Dude, he obviously saw the original form of your question, went away and worked on it for a time with his software tools, and by the time he had his results ready and came back here to post them, you had then changed your question (which he may or may not have noticed when he posted). Your question about him being "sure?" doesn't make too much sense, unfortunately for you, since it's predicated on him answering a question which is different from the one that he was answering. When you edit your query to be something different from what it originally was, that doesn't mean that Wikipedia becomes a time machine which changes the past, so you need to take that into account. AnonMoos (talk) 15:29, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

If that's what happened, then I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Anyways, I appreciate his efforts, even if they'd been aimed to answer a wrong old version of my question (which is my fault). HOTmag (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

If you make a significant change to a question, and there's any chance a respondent is off researching an answer to the original version in the meantime, it's always best to strike out ( <s> ... </s>) the parts you're removing rather than just deleting them altogether. That way, these issues will never arise. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:21, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

HOTmag -- No great harm was done, but it's never good when you ask your question in such an inconsistent/confusing manner that you end up confusing yourself... AnonMoos (talk) 07:51, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Confusing myself ? I don't know what you're talking about. Indeed, I'd been wrong in the way I'd written my question, so I rephrased it. Fortunately, User:Fut.Perf answered correctly the correct version of my question - less than half an hour after the rephrasing, so I thanked him. For me, that was the end of the story (that's why I added a "resolved" template just below his answer). However, another editor answered the wrong version of my question, more than four hours after it was changed, so I apologized (from the bottom of my heart) for the confusion. Anyways, I don't see why you think I have confused myself. HOTmag (talk) 19:28, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. I've made up the answer before the other answers, or rather not being aware of the change of the subject. Even though later I saw that the question had been clarified, yet I posted it anyway thinking it might be useful. Sorry, for not clearing that up, I though it was obvious.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 00:26, 1 June 2017 (UTC)