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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 15

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August 15

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Questions

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  1. Is there any Romance language where letter Y represents a vowel sound which cannot be represented by any other letters?
  2. Why English does not have any native words where letter Y appears in beginning of word before consonant?
  3. Is there any Slavic language with front rounded vowels?
  4. Are there any varieties of Spanish which has retained initial [f] in words from Latin such as harina, hijo or humo?
  5. Why letter Š is not in Latin-1?

--40bus (talk) 19:15, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding item 2, many English speakers have names such as Yvonne. And do you consider the elements yttrium and ytterbium to be foreign names? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:58, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Middle English used to have plenty of verb forms spelled with initial y—descended from ge- in OE—such as the still occasionally used (not entirely seriously, I think) yclept. Deor (talk) 20:47, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yttrium and ytterbium are named after the Swedish village of Ytterby. (Apparently there are four elements named after this little place, the other two are erbium and terbium.) It's strange that there are Scandinavian words such as ytterst, yet despite the influence of Old Norse on English, no English ones on this pattern (except yngling, which is borrowed from Norwegian). I suppose the influence happened before the orthography (they were still using runes). Yvonne, Yvette, Yves, and so on are French names, are there French words on the same pattern? There are also Welsh words such as ychydig. England seems surrounded by countries which form words in this pattern, so their omission is peculiar.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:08, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
While we're listing Swedish loanwords used in chemistry/nuclear physics, we should mention yrast (and yrare).
The origin of the name Yves (and the related Yvette, Yvon, Yvonne) is unclear, but it's not French. It's either from Celtic or Germanic. Double sharp (talk) 16:12, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
About item 4, the Latin facere became hacer in Spanish, but fácil, which also derives from facere, has retained the "f". Similarly, humo is from fumus, while fumar retains the "f". For any Spanish word derivations, you can use https://dle.rae.es/ ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:13, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are many examples of retentions of initial efs, like forma, familia [many of them learned words], and many examples of transformation into (firstly sonant, later silent) h. Hermoso is derived from latin formosus, though in old Castillian the word is formoso. In Argentina, we have a state (Formosa) that have origin in that old form.
The change from initial f to h happened in Medieval times, and to my knowledge is present in every variety of Spanish.
The OP may want to check this article. Pallida  Mors 23:41, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In case anyone wondered: the other Formosa (Taiwan) comes from Portuguese (where initial f remains today). Double sharp (talk) 16:15, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
About item 5, do you know any Latin words containing that Š? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:00, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
5: Latin-1 is an 8-bit character set designed for Western European languages like Danish, German and French. After including most characters for those languages and some miscellaneous characters considered useful, while remaining compatible with 7-bit ascii and some set of control characters, there was no more room left for Š. No problem, as it isn't used in Western European languages. For that reason, Latin-2 was invented, covering Slavic languages written in Latin script. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:36, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Š is used in 40bus' native Finnish for foreign place names, e.g. fi:Biškek and fi:Dušanbe. Note that neither Finnish nor Kyrgyz nor Tajik are Slavic, and Latin-2 isn't relevant for any of them. Crash48 (talk) 20:49, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It seems as if all the major languages that use Š natively, are either Slavic or Baltic. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:57, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And why does the Finnish code page not include Š and Ž? Nor these two letters have equivalents in Finnish Braille, Finnish morse code and Finnish Sign Language. And they are present only in some Finnish keyboards (I wonder why they were not added to normal keyboard in time when these letters where first started to be used in Finnish. The Š and Ž could be added to normal Finnish keyboard with shortcuts AltGr + S and AltGr + Z. And if Š were in Latin-1, it would also be available in more fonts. --40bus (talk) 14:37, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No room. ASCII is a 7 bit character set designed for English. Code page 1103 is another 7 bit set derived from ASCII by dropping [ / ] ^ ` { | } ~ and replacing them with Ä Ö Å Ü é ä ö å ü. Bad enough that those characters are missing, in particular if you want to do some programming. To get Š Ž š ž, they would have had to drop some more characters. And it looks to me that in Finnish, they're only used for some loans or transcriptions from Cyrillic.
Then computers settled on using 8 bit bytes, so it was easy to add 128 characters to ASCII. That's not enough to cover all European languages with Latin script, so multiple standards were made. Latin-1 is for Western Europe (primarily Germanic and Romance languages), Latin-2 for Central Europe (primarily western Slavic languages, but also support for German and Hungarian). For the Finns, Sámi, Latvians etc. there's Latin-4, with both Å and Š. Fortunately, all those competing 8 bit encodings are obsolete now, as we all use multi-byte Unicode. PiusImpavidus (talk) 22:25, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
40bus -- See ISO/IEC 8859-15 for an adjusted version of Latin 1... AnonMoos (talk) 00:08, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
(4) Ladino in some dialects: wikt:fija but also wikt:ija. Double sharp (talk) 04:21, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Initial "y" in English is generally pronounced /j/. Forget archaisms (yclept), personal names borrowed from other languages (Yvonne), and scientific pseudolatin derived from Scandinavian villages (Yttrium), think about normal English words: yet, yes, yawn, yellow, etc. I'm not sure a consonant cluster beginning with /j/ is even possible. A sequence of Y followed by another consonant would need to use "vowel Y",not "consonant Y". And all the words I can think of that start with "vowel Y" are special cases like the ones listed above. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 10:44, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Finally, I can stop trying to say ylang ylang that way.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:14, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There's also "ypsiliform", although one might consider that to be scientific pseudo-Latin, even if it's not derived from a Scandinavian village. CodeTalker (talk) 22:42, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. I can't think of an English word that starts with "vowel-Y" that has any real currency in general discourse. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:49, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
4: Pity @40bus: has resigned about using subsections.
Besides what has already been said, some dialects have doublets such as hierro/fierro where fierro has several slang meanings in the Americas.
Some dialects such as Andalusian Spanish keep some of the aspirations resulting from initial f-. This gives doublets in the Spanish of Spain such as huelga/juerga, both from follicare.
--Error (talk) 15:22, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
(3) According to Slovenian phonology, they exist in unassimilated German loans into Slovenian. Double sharp (talk) 02:26, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
2)"Y" is a word in both French and Spanish (with very different meanings). It has essentially the same sound as "I" however. Elinruby (talk) 23:29, 21 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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