Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 July 8

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July 8

German vs. English word order

"XY nennt hier den in diesem Zusammenhang relevanten Begriff der Seele..." – What would be the word order in a faithful (but, of course, still grammatically correct) translation? "XY mentions the term soul relevant in this context here"? (As there is probably no way to properly place the bold phrase before the word "soul" – like (or as?) in the German original – somehow...)--Neufund (talk) 14:21, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

You could surround the phrase "relevant in this context" with commas. Or you could put it in another sentence "XY mentions the term soul here. This is relevant to this context because blah-blah-blah."--Khajidha (talk) 14:31, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Or perhaps "... mentions here the term soul in the sense relevant in this context". More of the context of the statement might be helpful, as I'm not sure I've understood the German correctly. Deor (talk) 14:41, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks already for your comments! @Deor: Well, this is actually a formulation of my own – with a sightly different context – I was puzzling about while creating a recent edit summary of mine. There I used a paraphrase with as, but I wondered whether there might be a more faithful alternative. Best wishes--Neufund (talk) 14:59, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

New question about F and V

When the Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet, they used F for a new sound and V for both the u and w sounds. Why?? Why couldn't they simply use F for the w sound (as the Greeks did) and V for the u sound, and create a new letter for the f sound?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:26, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Not a full answer to your question, but consider: early italic scripts used 𐌅𐌇 (FH) for the f sound. The Romans shortened this to F because they had no need for a v sign, apparently. Other italic scripts, meanwhile, developed a distinct letter looking a bit like the number 8. Cheers ✦ _hugarheimur 18:58, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

V sign?? V had the vowel sound of u and the consonant sound of w. Thus the V sign had 2 different sounds in Latin. Georgia guy (talk) 19:00, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

I meant a character for the [v] sound. Rgds ✦ _hugarheimur 22:05, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

But no letter had the v sound in ancient Greek. Digamma had the w sound. Georgia guy (talk) 22:31, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

You are absolutely right, of cause. Please disregard. Cheers ✦ _hugarheimur 08:21, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- in early times, the Romans had available to them the Western Greek alphabet of Cumae as modified by the Etruscans, and nothing else. The early Etruscans did not seem to be inclined to invent new letters, possibly because the Western Greek alphabet of Cumae had more letters than the Etruscan language had consonant and vowel phonemes. Digamma-heta (FH) was an early Etruscan digraph for writing an [f] sound which influenced the Roman alphabet. Later on, the Etruscans did invent an "8" looking letter to write [f], but this came too late to have any influence on the Romans... AnonMoos (talk) 23:04, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Etruscan 𐌚 (f) (Old Italis). —Stephen (talk) 18:21, 9 July 2018 (UTC)