Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 13

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March 13

T (not Th) adjective

My daughter writes short stories. She titles them using alliteration, always four words. She is making a story about hunting down a pirate treasure. After many weeks of hunting, she has been unable to think of a word for the title. It needs to start with t, not th. What she has is the T... Tortuous Treasure of Tortuga. I've suggested Terrifically and Trying. Neither gets at what she wants. She wants it to mean that it is perilous or dangerous. We've looked through a lot of words in the thesaurus (which is where Tortuous came from). Any suggestions for the first word or how to find one - as opposed to searching blindly through a thesarus? 209.149.113.5 (talk) 18:26, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Why search blindly? [1] [2] Bazza (talk) 18:36, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

I'd go with treacherous, myself. Deor (talk) 20:37, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

How can treasure be perilous or dangerous? Do you mean the hunt for it is perilous or dangerous? Akld guy (talk) 23:58, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Treasure can't be dangerous? Wagner's Ring and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings wouldn't have much of a plot otherwise, and I'm sure the OP's daughter can do better. --Antiquary (talk) 12:10, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Tainted conveys the sense that there's something not kosher about it. Akld guy (talk) 00:09, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Terrifying(ly)? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.211.131.202 (talk) 09:44, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. We sat with the dictionary and I started with tzupo and went backwards, mentioning every word I recognized. She settled on the Truly Tortuous Treasure of Tortuga. I never would have got such a simple word from the thesaurus. I did get a joke though: "My thesaurus is not only terrible, it is terrible." Now, she is busy naming the pirates. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 13:38, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Dental fricative spellings

We have 2 dental fricatives; voiceless and voiced. Why do we spell both of them with th as opposed to the latter with dh?? Georgia guy (talk) 20:03, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

For details, see Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩. The answer is broadly, for historical reasons as with a lot of English spelling. Originally they were allophones of the same phoneme, with the voiced version appearing between vowels. Hence e.g. "mouth" vs. "to mouthe".

But also worth mentioning that this distinction carries a very low functional load. There are a few minimal pairs (e.g. "mouth" and "mouthe", "thigh" and "thy"), but most of them can be distinguished easily by context alone. While history caused the two sounds to be spelt the same, it is also significant that modern English has no pressing need to distinguish them. Kahastok talk 20:20, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Interestingling, the Welsh language has two different spellings, "dd" for the voiced version, and "th" for the voiceless version. So there are languages that draw distinctions. I believe some languages (Norse ones) have also pressed either eth or thorn into usage to draw such distinctions. --Jayron32 19:31, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Cornish has "dh" and "th". Alansplodge (talk) 15:49, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- what Kahastok has said is true, but it's also relevant that "th" is an ancient European spelling used by the Romans to transcribe a Greek aspirated stop, while "dh" does not have any such old cultural history. "Dh" also didn't grow naturally out of medieval English spelling practices, the way that "gh" and "sh" did. It wasn't until quite recently that "h" has been abstracted as a generalized digraph letter and has been used to create brand-new spellings such as "zh" (now quite well known in foreign proper names) or possibly "dh".

Jayron32 -- Old English had both the graphemes "ð" and "þ" which theoretically could have been used to write voiced and voiceless sounds distinctly, but in practice this was not done. Instead, it was the Norse who took these symbols from Old English, and started using them distinctly (see First Grammatical Treatise), though nowadays this is irrelevant for the mainland Scandinavian languages... AnonMoos (talk) 21:57, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes, they didn't. Which is why I didn't bring up Old English. --Jayron32 23:09, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

AnonMoos, I would guess your first sentence about Romans transliterating Greek words (specifically those with theta) is because Greek had voiceless aspirated stops (in this case theta had the sound of th in knighthood) but didn't have voiced aspirated stops (in this case the dh in bloodhound.) Any corrections on the reason?? Georgia guy (talk) 22:15, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. Many attested Indic languages. starting with Sanskrit, have both voiced and voiceless aspirated stops, so "dh" as a transcription arises quite naturally there, but very few words transcribed that way are known to most Westerners ("Buddha" and maybe "dharma"). Greek had only one series of voiceless aspirated stops. In other Indo-European branches, the aspirated stops have become other sounds, though the reconstruction process is quite complicated (the glottalic hypothesis would say that aspiration was not actually a defining feature of the ancestral IE sounds in question, etc. etc.). AnonMoos (talk) 22:29, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

The "dh" in Cornish is a feature of the revived language in its various forms, Middle Cornish used a character rather like "ʒ" or alternatively "th" for both sounds. See A Handbook of the Cornish Language . Alansplodge (talk) 22:15, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

P.S. You can also take a look at what the Initial Teaching Alphabet did... AnonMoos (talk) 22:34, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

You left out Gandhi; or maybe you didn't. Ghandi anyone? —Tamfang (talk) 23:09, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

In Albanian, <th> and <dh> are used precisely in this way for the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives, as in thua (claw) and dhëmb (tooth), and according to our article List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#D, also in Swahili and a version of Cornish. Our article Voiced dental fricative has a few more languages use this spelling, all of them indigenous North American languages. All of these are languages with a fairly recent (200 years or less) writing system, which seems to support AnonMoos's statement that the "h" has only recently been abstracted to form new fricatives digraphs. --Terfili (talk) 07:30, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Might I suggest the delimiters ‹› if you want to avoid unwanted markup —Tamfang (talk) 23:09, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Terfili -- I was referring to the creation of new digraph spellings in English orthography (such as "zh") when I made the statement above. By the way, the first ever historical use of a digraph with "H" was when the ancient Etruscans took their version of the Greek letter digamma (which looked like "F" and had a sound value of [w]) and combined it with their version of the Greek letter heta (which looked like "H" and had a sound value of [h], unlike the eta in later versions of the Greek alphabet) to come up with a spelling "FH" for the sound [f], which didn't exist in Greek (since Φ was still an aspirated stop). When the Romans took over a version of the Etruscan alphabet to write Latin, "F" alone was then used for [f]... AnonMoos (talk) 11:50, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm sort of curious why the Etruscans needed an "FH" digraph for the sound [f] when according to this table they already had a single letter with that value? I wonder whether that Etruscan letter, apparently the last letter of the Etruscan alphabet, so presumably an Etruscan addition, which looks like a figure 8 could not in fact be interpreted as a variation on their heta. (No Unicode for Etruscan?) Incidentally, note that table gives the Etruscan pronunciation of that symbol as a bilabial f (IPA [ɸ]). That looks odd to me, for two reasons: one, that sound is pretty uncommon, and two, how can you tell that the Etruscan [f] was bilabial and not labio-dental? Basemetal 16:01, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Reading Etruscan alphabet a bit more carefully I got the answer to my first question: the new sign for F in the shape of an 8 replaced the older spelling, the FH that AnonMoos was talking about. Still curious about that Etruscan bilabial f though. Basemetal 18:31, 21 March 2018 (UTC)