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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 30

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August 30

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A few questions

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  1. Are there any languages which have open front unrounded vowel and no other open vowels?
  2. Can palatalized consonants occur at the end of word in Lithuanian?
  3. Why Greek has not switched to Latin alphabet?
  4. Can click consonants be geminated?
  5. Are there any languages with phonemic voiceless vowels?
  6. Can there be voiceless nasal vowels?

--40bus (talk) 20:16, 30 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Because of the huge historic and cultural prestige of the Greek alphabet -- both ancient pre-A.D. Greek literature and the New Testament were written in it. Also, in Europe, the Latin alphabet tends to be associated with Protestantism and Catholicism, and the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets with Orthodoxy. Romanian made a conscious transition from Cyrillic to Latin to affiliate with the other Romance languages. I don't really know why Greek would change... AnonMoos (talk) 21:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, if the modern Greek language were to be written with the Latin alphabet, there would have to be a choice between transcription conventions suitable for the ancient vs. the modern language (e.g. "Euboea" vs. "Evvia"). In the Greek alphabet, there's a large degree of continuity between ancient and modern spellings (though the two stages of the language have very different pronunciations). AnonMoos (talk) 20:50, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
3. I guess it could be a combination of the pride of historically having been the center of the Western world, and at modern times in practice having turned quite off-center of the Western world. The writing system is a bigger problem to outsiders than to the Greeks themselves, so they don't really see any reason to change it. Although it seems as if Greek has occasionally been written in Latin historically, ever since Greece was run by the Venetians and the Franks. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:24, 30 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
3. It has. Curiously Griko language is still written in the Greek alphabet. And from Pontic Greek:
It is primarily written in the Greek script; in Turkey and Ukraine the Latin script is used more frequently; in Russia and former Soviet countries, the Cyrillic alphabet is used.
Mariupol Greek mentions a Greek-derived and a Cyrillic alphabet.
--Error (talk) 23:18, 30 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
About item 3, I could just as easily ask, "Why hasn't the Latin alphabet been switched to the Greek alphabet?" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:23, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Re 6: see Voicelessness#Voiceless vowels and other sonorants. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.194.81.165 (talk) 11:02, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding #3: Why would it? That's like asking why Quechua isn't written in Chinese characters, or why Hawaiian isn't written in cuneiform, or why Klingon isn't written in Tengwar. Come on now... --Jayron32 18:34, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Question 3

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I'll provide the subsection headers. If your language has used one alphabet for thousands of years, the problems that will arise if you switch to another are mind-boggling. Yes, Turkey switched from Arabic to Roman script, but Turkish is not a Semitic language like Arabic and it was part of a general westernisation, for example hours counted from midnight instead of sunset, date advanced by thirteen days, hijab discouraged. The Serbo-Croat language is written in the Roman alphabet in Catholic Croatia and in the Cyrillic alphabet in Orthodox Serbia. 2A00:23A8:4015:F501:6D20:FFB9:EB08:D5A2 (talk) 16:08, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1) There is no particular affinity between Arabic script and Semitic languages, not any more so than between Latin script and Romance languages. Roughly one half of current users of Arabic script use it for non-Semitic languages such as Urdu, Farsi, Pashto etc.
2) There are many cases when a language switched to another script after millenia of use; think Vietnamese, Korean, or Coptic. 2A00:A041:3BA3:F400:349C:2C82:9F30:D1CA (talk) 21:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The Arabic script has distinct letters such as ح ص ط ظ ع to write sounds which occur in Arabic, but simply do not occur in European languages. Many Arabic-speaking Muslims would regard changing to another alphabet to be tantamount to renouncing Islam. The Turkish, Korean, and Vietnamese languages changed to use new scripts, because their old scripts (Arabic writing a Turkish-Persian-Arabic linguistic hybrid; Chinese logographs; and Chu Nom) were convoluted and by their nature suited only to a narrow elite, and unsuitable as a foundation for mass literacy. And the new writing system for Korean was specifically designed so that Chinese characters could be easily inserted in the middle of Hangul text (though this practice has had various ups and downs over the centuries, and is now banned in North Korea). The only Semitic-language community that has as a whole gone over to a non-Semitic script is Maltese. AnonMoos (talk) 02:51, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Is Chu Nom that much more complicated for Vietnamese than Chinese characters already are for Chinese? The foundation for eventual mass literacy was certainly there: by the 19th century, according to our article Chu Nom, it was the script used by the cultural elites and nearly every village had someone who could read it out for the others, even though that only amounted to a literacy rate of 3 to 5 percent overall. That suggests to me that if the French colonisation hadn't happened, it might be the normal script for Vietnamese today. Arabic script doesn't suit Persian very well either, though in this case religion is certainly a factor. Double sharp (talk) 03:42, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Chu Nom wasn't necessarily absolutely more complex and convoluted than some other writing systems still in wide use, but none of the main reasons for retaining the use of Chinese characters to write the Chinese language applied to the use of Chinese and Chinese-like characters to write the Vietnamese language, which made Chu Nom relatively a bad writing system for Vietnamese (i.e. much more complex and convoluted than was necessary). In China, Chinese character writing has immense historical/cultural prestige, going back 3,000 years, and the use of written characters can help bridge the gap between spoken Chinese "dialects" which are mutually incomprehensible, and also helps with the large number of phonetic homophones in some dialects (especially modern Mandarin). In contrast, Vietnamese have something of an ambiguous attitude toward Chinese culture (they definitely do not want Vietnamese culture to be regarded as a mere subset of Chinese culture) and sometimes towards the traditional Vietnamese imperial system (which Chu Nom was closely identified with), and the problems of widely-divergent dialects spoken by large numbers of people and many homophones don't exist in Vietnamese. AnonMoos (talk) 20:49, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Arabic script doesn't suit Persian very well either - Latin alphabet doesn't suit English very well either, and there had been many proposals for its replacement, but none got traction. 2A00:A041:3BA3:F400:349C:2C82:9F30:D1CA (talk) 05:29, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The thing is, you don't have to use the symbols to represent the same sounds as they do in any other language; it's just a collection of scribbles, they can represent any sounds you want. Take the Cherokee syllabary for example. Sequoyah, in creating his syllabary, used existing characters (which he got from a Bible written in Parallel text of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek), with some modifications (including a number of characters that he invented out of whole cloth) but the sounds do not represent the same sounds they do in those languages. The barrier to adopting a new alphabet is not "This alphabet doesn't have the right characters for our sounds". The barrier to adopting a new alphabet is "We have an existing corpus of literature and writing that will be lost once we change alphabets". As noted it has happened in the past through great effort when done for political reasons, Ataturk had very specific political and social goals in adopting the Latin alphabet for Turkish, none of those exist in the Greek context. --Jayron32 11:40, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Arguably, that has a lot more to do with the historical orthography than the Latin alphabet being particularly ill-suited. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:51, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, the letters that you listed are redundant for writing Turkic or Iranian languages, and are only used in their loanwords from Arabic. This is no different from K and Y being redundant in the original Latin alphabet, and only used in loanwords from Greek. English has inherited a few redundant Latin letters, but the users of English don't seem to have any problem with it. 2A00:A041:3BA3:F400:349C:2C82:9F30:D1CA (talk) 06:01, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, in the ancient Latin language, "K" was used before the letter "A" in a few words which retained archaic spellings, especially "Kalendae" (the first day of a month). It was not generally used in Greek words (it was the letters "Y" and "Z" which were basically used for borrowed Greek words only)... AnonMoos (talk) 20:48, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would hazard a guess that it was due to the represented Greek sounds being missing from Latin, unlike for K. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:21, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That is correct. The Old Latin alphabet ended on Q–R–S–T–V–X. The Y and Z were then added for representing Greek words (mainly proper nouns), which is why they are the trailers in the alphabetical order. The Y was known as I Graeca (Greek I), while the letter Z was referred to by its Greek name Zeta.  --Lambiam 16:48, 2 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For a gauge of what involves changing Greek, @40bus: may read Greek language question and Greek diacritics. An unreferenced part of the last article says:
The Greek Orthodox church, the daily newspaper Estia, as well as books written in Katharevousa continue to use the polytonic orthography.
--Error (talk) 23:24, 3 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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