Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 October 24

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October 24

Spoken Arabic: Hilwe (as opposed to Hilwa).

I'm not an Arabic speaker.

1. I'm not sure if Hilwe (in Spoken Arabic) must always be written حلوة or it may also be written حلوى, or حلواء.

2. Additionally, must Hilwe always mean "sweet", or it can also mean "candy"?

3. With the meaning of "sweet", can Hilwe also refer to a boy, grammatically speaking? (I'm asking all of these questions, because a native Arabic speaker calls me "ya Hilwe" whenever he sees me even though he knows I'm not a girl. Additionally, I'm fairly sure I don't look like a girl. He also knows I'm not an Arabic speaker, so I wonder why he does that.). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.228.238.26 (talk) 07:35, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

The pronunciation of Arabic can change according to region. I think (but am not an expert) that this pronunciation is Palestinian. Google searches suggest that the meaning can be "something sweet", like candy or a dessert. Maybe it is in appreciation of your sweet character.  --Lambiam 11:22, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

84.228.238.26 -- We have an article imala, which may or may not be useful to you... AnonMoos (talk) 11:36, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Actually my three questions were intended to estimate why he says "ya hilwe" (as a feminime form) rather than the expected "ya hilu" (as a masculine form), so I thought I could get the answer from any native speaker who can answer my first three questions. 84.228.238.26 (talk) 12:29, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

To distinguish masculine and feminine variants of hilwe in speech can be quite tricky. الحلو can definately be pronunced hilwe. The waw in hilwe is not a long u sound by any means. --Soman (talk) 13:44, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. If you are a native (or near native) Arabic speaker, can you also answer my other questions (I have originally put forth three questions). 84.228.238.26 (talk) 14:22, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Rama dama ding dong

Apparently Rama dama is a volunteer cleaning program in Germany, and according to the German article de:Rama dama the name is a Bavarian dialectal form of "Räumen tun wir", meaning "We are cleaning". I can sort of understand how "räumen" becomes "rama", but how exactly did "tun wir" become "dama"? It doesn't sound at all similar. JIP | Talk 23:07, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Think of it as a a contraction: da‧ma. In many Upper High German dialects (Mddle and Upper German, of which Bavarian is one), variations of mir are used instead of wir – in this case, ma. Cheers ⌘ _hugarheimur 23:24, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Mir meaning "we" also appears in Yiddish (see here). I wonder if there might ultimately be some Slavic influence. AnonMoos (talk) 23:36, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Yiddish is really a High German dialect, too. Cheers ⌘ _hugarheimur 00:26, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Not necessarily. Similar forms exist in Old Norse, as well, and the Slavic impact on Old Norse seems to have been fairly minimal. From Wiktionary.

From Middle High German mir (“we”). The form originated through assimilation of wir with a preceding verb form and subsequent unetymological segmentation. This is possibly already an Old High German development, since a common Old High German ending of the 1st person plural was -em, thus bittēm wir → *bittē-mir (modern [bitten wir (“ask we, do we ask”)). The contraction as such is definitely old, though the common form of assimilation, both in written Old High German and written Middle High German, is through loss of the nasal: bittē wir. The form with mir may either be a younger development in Middle High German, or a more colloquial form that only later appeared in writing. Older age is suggested by the great dominance of mir throughout modern dialects of High German. Compare Yiddish מיר‎ (mir), Luxembourgish mir. Compare also Old Norse mit (“we two”), Norwegian Nynorsk me (“we”).

惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:33, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Tun wir sounds in the bavarian dialect liek "tun wa" or even "don wa" (you see the relationship between German and English?). For a German without this dialect, its sounds strange but you can understand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:908:426:D280:7100:3AFC:91AC:329B (talk) 12:13, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

/dun.ʋɐ/ is close enough to Dutch /dun.ʋə/ ("doen we") to be perfectly understandable for a Dutch audience – in the lower-class The Hague dialect ("plat Haags") even the final vowel is identical.  --Lambiam 13:11, 30 October 2021 (UTC)