Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 September 15

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September 15

are all charactonyms also aptronyms?

things like Holly Golightly or Walter Faber or Rodion Raskolnikov. I'm asking because aptronym contains only real-world examples. There apparently used to be a charactonym article but it was merged into aptronym in 2012. However, all mentions of the stylistic device have since been purged, whatsmore, attempts to add any are reverted by eager editors (last time in 2016.) Could someone look into this and then either "un-merge" charactonym so it can be its own article again -or- edit aptronym to mention the charactonyms so the article doesn't (falsely?) suggest it's an exclusively real-world thing? Aecho6Ee (talk) 02:14, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

The old charactronym list was here. There is not much hope of being able to restore it without having to footnote every entry like the aptronym article currently does. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 16:00, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

By the way, before the 19th century, it was extremely commons to name minor characters in plays and novels after a leading characteristic of the character. There must be a scholarly paper somewhere which discusses this... AnonMoos (talk) 11:18, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Linear A

Linear A contains the following statement:

It primarily appears in the left-to-right direction, but occasionally appears as a right-to-left or boustrophedon script.

How can we know what direction it's written, since it lacks capital letters and punctuation (and presumably spaces) and hasn't been deciphered? Nyttend (talk) 16:32, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

My WAG: sequence 2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 17:24, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

One possible way to know the direction would be the appearance of the last line of a text, such as:

𐀀𐀐𐀠𐀰𐁀𐁐

𐀁𐀑𐀡𐀱𐁁𐁑

𐀂𐀒

versus

𐁓𐁃𐀳𐀣𐀓𐀃
𐁄𐀴𐀤𐀔𐀄
𐁖𐁆𐁔

—Stephen (talk) 18:37, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Although it's true it hasn't been deciphered, it doesn't follow that the meaning of Linear A is a total mystery. This site, for instance, has examples of accounting lists where the structure of the text (numbers, types of goods etc.) would give a good indication of the direction. Henry^Flower 20:48, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

And, regarding deciphered Linear B (successor to Linear A):  "...some scholars even rudely described the texts as being like laundry lists."^[1] —107.15.157.44 (talk) 21:51, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

If they mean actual laundry lists, they should keep in mind that such writings were serving the needs of the writer and the reader at the time. They weren't concerned about what historians hundreds or thousands of years later might make of them. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:06, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Baseball_Bugs -- the majority of texts are inventories of items held by the palace, lists of supplies issued to palace workers etc. They were for the immediate convenience of palace administrators. There are no literary texts, not even accounts of kingly deeds of the type that were so common in the Middle East. I doubt that there were any actual laundry lists, but re-wo-to-ro-ko-wo lewotrokhowoi (classical λουτροχoοι) are mentioned: "those who pour water for baths/washing"... AnonMoos (talk) 08:28, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Nyttend -- only a few scripts have developed a capital / lower-case distinction, so a lack of such a contrast would be expected for Linear B. Also, it's not really explained in the Linear B article, but Linear B had so-called "ideograms" like Linear A -- semantic characters expressing items to be counted or units of weight and measure. And we do understand the sequence of Linear A characters which spell out the word meaning "Total"... AnonMoos (talk) 14:31, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

You don't need to understand a script/langugage in order to discover its direction of writing. If you know one ore more recurring character sequences you can look for places where they are split between lines. For example, someone not understanding English might note that the combination "United States" occurs multiple times in a text. When he finds a line that has "United" on the right and "States" is found on the left of line below, he can deduce that the text is probably written from left to right, without needing to know what any of it means. - Lindert (talk) 15:35, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

It's often possible to deduce from the forms of individual characters and the relationship between them (particularly when there are overlaps) in which order they were written. In some scripts, there was a convention of which way certain characters 'faced' in relationship to the direction the line went (so in boustrophedon, for example, they would face one way on one line and the opposite in the next.) In the related (though not itself Linear A) case of the Phaistos Disc, some stamped characters overlaid others, confirming the order of writing (which proved to be the opposite of what was expected). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.172.36 (talk) 18:42, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Semivowels

A Semivowel is distinguished from its corresponding vowel because it functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable, right? And there are two definitions of vowel, the phonetic and phonological. So although I can see why a semivowel and vowel are distinguished as phonemes, there doesn't seem to be any phonetic/physical difference between their articulations, other than speed. So my question is this, what is the physical difference between /j/ and /i/? Makuta Makaveli (talk) 17:28, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

From Semivowel#Contrast with vowels: “Semivowels, by definition, contrast with vowels by being non-syllabic. In addition, they are usually shorter than vowels.[3] In languages as diverse as Amharic, Yoruba, and Zuni, semivowels are produced with a narrower constriction in the vocal tract than their corresponding vowels.[6] Nevertheless, semivowels may be phonemically equivalent with vowels.” [bolding is mine] Loraof (talk) 22:53, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

You didn't have to mention the non-syllabic part, I covered that. I knew speed or duration had to be one of the differences. So pretty much, there are only two physical differences between the two, duration, short or long, and narrow or wide constriction of the vocal tract. Other than that they are the same sound. Is this why Romans used V to represent both /w/ and /u/, I for /i/ and /j/? Makuta Makaveli (talk) 23:23, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

• Latin-based and Cyrillic-based scripts, at least, make use of the same letters for both syllabic and regular (non-syllabic) consonants. For example Slovak uses R for both /r/ and /r̩/ and L for both /l/ and /l̩/, as well as accentuated Ŕ and Ĺ for long syllabic /r̩ː/ and /l̩ː/, the same way as it uses accentuated vowels to represent vowel length, such as Á for /aː/. --Theurgist (talk) 10:47, 19 September 2018 (UTC)