Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 June 4

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June 4

Why Italia and not Itaglia?

In my idle hours I sometimes find myself wondering why the Italian name for Italy is spelt "Italia" and not "Itaglia".

This video seems to have something to say about it, but as I speak no Itaglian I have no idea what she's saying. Can anyone elucidate? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:35, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Well - my Chambers says it comes from the Latin Italia and my Cassell's Latin dictionary says Italia means Italy. So why might a G be added to a word that doesn't need one?--Phil Holmes (talk) 10:24, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

In Italian (not Latin) "gl" is a spelling for the IPA [ʎ] palatalized lateral sound. Even in Latin, "gn" was not pronounced [ɡn]! AnonMoos (talk) 16:25, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

• Interesting question. According to this Italia is a learned form continuing the Latin tradition, and the popular form would be indeed Itaglia, Idaglia. The Tarantino and Emilio-Romagnol Wikipedias name the articles Itâglia, Itaglie. Шурбур (talk) 10:44, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

In the video, Fiorella is saying that she's been observing a trend, also by speakers on television, of pronouncing Italia, as though it were spelled Itaglia (see palatal lateral approximant). She's noticed this with other words such as "esilio" (exile) pronounced "esiglio", "millioni" (millions) pronounced "miglioni". She mentions that people sometimes jokingly mispronounce Spaghetti aglio e olio as "aglio e oglio". Anyway, she doesn't explain why Latin "Italia" remained Italia, while "familia" became "famiglia", she's more interested in the mispronunciation among current-day Italians. ---Sluzzelin talk 11:35, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

By the way, the article I linked to (palatal lateral approximant) gives "million" as an example of this sound in General American. There's a lot of discussion about this on the article's talk page, but anyway ... in order to hear how Italians would distinguish "Italia" and "Itaglia" in speech I guess one better listen to Jack's clip rather than compare it with "million" in General American. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:55, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

In a few Italian placenames the intervocalic -ni- has undergone a similar change and has become -gn- (pronounced /ɲɲ/), such as it:Spagna and it:Sardegna, although in many others it has not: it:Germania. --Theurgist (talk) 13:47, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

As a general but hopefully relevant observation, word spellings, which often used to be individually self-chosen and consequently more mutable prior to the 15th century, became relatively fixed by the spread of printing, so although sound shifts continue to happen in languages, the spellings of the words concerned tend to lag behind. {The poster foremrly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.177.55 (talk) 15:03, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

I think this is very much a matter of taste. For example, compare the Portuguese words concelho (council) and Brasília (the federal capital of Brazil). I don't know how the stress accents work in Italian (or even if they have them) but in Portuguese the first spelling makes the stress accent redundant. On the point raised by Theurgist, the corresponding Portuguese construction is e.g. Espanha (Spain) and Polónia (Poland). 2A00:23C4:5D0C:D500:305F:D789:20A:9B8 (talk) 17:30, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

The most probable and widely accepted solution is in fact that it's a loaned form. If it was inherited the regular development would indeed be *Itaglia, which is present in some dialects (as quoted above) where there are no severe orthographic rules conserving an obsolete spelling and potentially leading to an "artificial" pronunciation. In any case the pronunciation with [ʎː] is rather frequent, and not by chance the nonciclopedia article about the Italian language uses the corresponding form. By the way, the process [lj] → [ʎ] is and was productive in many languages, of course, while the palatal lateral itself is rather unstable. Galtzaile (talk) 15:16, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

• All very enlightening. Thank you. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:54, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
• It's the same reason why it's "famiglia" as a noun but "familiare" as an adjective. Those pairs are abundant in the Italian language and nothing really special. Words that have undergone sound change are inherited words from Latin, while words directly borrowed from Latin haven't. --94.134.89.80 (talk) 15:44, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

No Chinese place name translation in Japanese

Why most placename outside Chinese region are not translated into Chinese, rather pure Japanese, such as Australia are not translates into 豪大利亞 rather オーストラリア？ or such asニューヨーク市は、アメリカ合衆国ニューヨーク州にある都市, not 紐約市は、米利堅合衆国紐約州にある都市? Why foreign place not chooses to translated into any Chinese text in Japan, rather than pure Japanese?Hmht45tgree3d (talk) 17:09, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Country names are written using katakana, which is basically a phonetic way of writing foreign names. 68.115.219.130 (talk) 18:16, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Your premises are only partially true. See: List of Japanese exonyms. For example Australia: 濠太剌利 and New York: 紐育. --93.70.70.198 (talk) 21:52, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

That's true, but both your examples (like most of the kanji forms in that page) are now archaisms. -- Hoary (talk) 05:35, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Hmht45tgree3d -- in the 19th century, some convenient abbreviated terms such as 米国 for USA, 英国 for UK etc. were established in the East Asian cultural sphere, but the modern tendency for dealing with foreign placenames in Japanese is katakana transcriptions. AnonMoos (talk) 03:04, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, but I don't think that 米國 (literally "rice nation") was used other than within Japanese (or perhaps than as a Nipponism). Within Chinese and Korean, the name was, or more commonly was, 美國 (literally "beauty nation"). -- Hoary (talk) 05:35, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Wild guess: when the kanji version of a name is more troublesome to handwrite/input than is its katakana equivalent, and the katakana version is widely used, and the kanji is widely known to be ateji and thus merely a fairly recent invention, there's little or no reason for use of the kanji, other than as an affectation. -- Hoary (talk) 05:35, 6 June 2019 (UTC)