Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 December 13

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December 13

Is Erciyes a Turkish (or some other language spoken in Anatolia) word for shimmering?

Per this source that claims that "Erdschias-Dagh" means "shimmering" mountain. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:42, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

According to the article on Mount Erciyes, the name arises from the Turkish adoption of the Greek name Argaios (Ἀργαῖος), which may be from the name of Argaeus I of Macedon. wikt:Ἀργαῖος has further information on the name and its etymology, being from argós (wikt:ἀργός) meaning "bright, shining, white" and -aîos (wikt:-αῖος) meaning "of." GalacticShoe (talk) 17:01, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict)That name only appears in older German lamguage texts, it's known in English as Mount Erciyes or Turkish Erciyes Dağı. The Etymology section of our article says:

Erciyes is the adoption into Turkish of the Greek name Argaios (Greek: Ἀργαῖος). The latinized form is Argaeus (a rarely encountered alternative latinization was Argaeas mons, Argeas mons). The Greek name has the meaning of "bright" or "white"; as applied to the mountain, it may have been eponymous of Argaeus I (678 – 640 BC), king of Macedon and founder of the Argead dynasty. The Turkish name was historically spelled Erciyas, and it was changed to Erciyes to conform with vowel harmony in the 1940s-1960s.

Alansplodge (talk) 17:08, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Etymology and usage of "pop" in the context of art and design

I'm using Wiktionary as a reference example before asking my question:[1]

Something that stands out or is distinctive to the mind or senses

a white dress with a pop of red

a pop of vanilla flavour

2023 November 4, Kim Duong, Megan Uy, Tarah-Lynn Saint-Elien, “22 Best Shackets to Get You Through the Chilly Fall Weather”, in Cosmopolitan‎:

"Nothing screams fall like corduroy! I'm loving this deep seafoam green shacket—made of the thick, ribbed material—that'll give a fab pop of color to a muted ensemble."

For the last year or so, I've been seeing this use of color popping increasing in the popular vernacular, much more so than I've ever seen it before. About a year or two ago, practically everyone on the art, design, and engineering subs on Reddit just started using it out of the blue, very similar to how people went nuts using the word "adjacent" in regular conversations many years back (I still have no idea how that happened, but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, as it came out of nowhere and took over popular culture; see "Why Is Everything 'Adjacent' Now?").

Just today, I ran into the use of popping in an article I was reading here for the very first time.[2] "There was an effort to make the outlines pop and to use broad areas of colors". That example surprised me, because the content was about the motivations of artists from the 11th and 12th century, and the source, Medieval Art (2004) doesn't use that term. The source says: "The painters of the nave vault, therefore, intended that their painting would be intelligible from a distance. They worked on a large scale, emphasized outlines and broad color areas, and simplified internal modeling of figures." I completely understand that the editor was paraphrasing using the modern concept of digital color popping to summarize the text, but to my mind, this feels anachronistic, as the term "color pop" seems to have entered the popular lexicon in a large way due to the popularity of digital editing tools which highlight this feature, not from the practices of artists more than 800 years ago. Can anyone explain what is going on, how color "popping" came about (was it even popular before Photoshop?) and should we really be using hyper-modern terms to describe the practices of ancient artists? Viriditas (talk) 19:03, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Here is an example of usage of colors 'popping' in a November 1985 issue of Popular Mechanics. Since Photoshop wouldn't pop up for another 2 years, it's reasonable to assume that this usage was reasonably in vogue before then. GalacticShoe (talk) 19:27, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

And here is another example, in the December 1985 issue of Popular Photography. GalacticShoe (talk) 19:28, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Predating these both, a November 1966 issue of Billboard mentions colors popping out. GalacticShoe (talk) 19:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Is it reasonable to assume the term was in vogue? It looks like it was unique to advertising and marketing. I'm talking about how and when it crossed over from niche to popular culture. Viriditas (talk) 19:43, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, at the very least, it was in vogue with advertisers. I'll try to find examples in other media, but in general I'm not so sure that it was necessarily Photoshop specifically that led to the advent of colors "popping" becoming more popular GalacticShoe (talk) 03:02, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

@GalacticShoe: Can you find any usage in popular culture by writers, authors, journalists, or professors in newspapers and magazines? I'm talking about something other than advertising copy. However, if that's the best you can find, then is it reasonable to suggest the term was invented to sell products? Viriditas (talk) 19:50, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

"Pop" has many uses, as noted in EO.[3] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:54, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, but I'm referring to only one usage. What's your take on the color pop? Have you noticed an increasing use of this term in popular culture? I was recently participating in a discussion about the colors of cars in another off-wiki forum, only to find many people talking about how "colors pop" in regard to their favorite car colors. It seems to be a very popular expression. Viriditas (talk) 19:59, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't follow fashion and such, but the usage of "eye-popping" seems to fit, i.e. it catches your attention. A similar idea was expressed in the old TV series Color Splash. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:59, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Sure, but this is used quite differently than "eye-popping". It's often phrased as "that color pops". Is that something you've heard before? My argument is that internet culture around digital imaging has made it mainstream. Background: "Color popping is a digital effect in which part of an image is shown in color while the rest part is in grey or dull monochrome. It’s a simple but effective way to make your subject pop to create an effect that is pleasing to the eye." While it's true that "eye-popping" has been around forever, I only began hearing and reading "that color pops" (and various permutations) in everyday usage within the last several years. Viriditas (talk) 21:19, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's all that different. I saw one item in Newspapers.com where a designer equated "pop of color" to "accent color" - something that makes an item stand out or catch your eye. One thing to be cautious about is a type of confirmation bias, in that some object such as a word gets your attenton and then you start seeing it frequently, even if it was there all along. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:57, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm quite aware of confirmation bias. I think this situation is identical to the rise of the use of "adjacent" (see the NYT article linked above) and may have similar roots in the tech community. I've been reading and writing about design for a very long time and I haven't seen the kind of usage like we see in the 2023 Cosmopolitan article up above reach such a critical mass like this before. It has not always been with us on such a large scale, and aside from marketing and advertising, I don't see a single example of a writer, journalist, author, or professor using this kind of word in this context. This is a new phenomenon. Viriditas (talk) 23:39, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I used the google ngram viewer on the phrase "color popped"... based on the "American" corpus, this start around the late 1980s and grew during the 1990s and grew somewhat faster over time until about 2008, when it started really "popping". In the "British" corpora, however, there seems to be no usage at all. Of course, this is limited to just one specific phrase. Fabrickator (talk) 00:23, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, that’s helpful. I’m curious about your reaction to this usage. If you went to buy a car in your local region, and the salesperson was showing you all the different colors and remarked, "Now take a look at this beauty, the white exterior really makes the red seats pop", how would you respond? That’s an example of how it is used here. And I find it incredibly odd. I am often reminded of when "my bad" came out of nowhere and it seemed like everyone was using it, as if a mind virus had taken over the country. It feels like that. Viriditas (talk) 00:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

I suspect this use arose as a shortening of pop out, as seen used in 1918, when someone reports that a big sign "popped out" at him, and in 1922, where a color "pops out". If so, the core meaning is "to command attention", originally with a connotation of abruptness, applied to something in one's visual field.  --Lambiam 16:15, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

That makes perfect sense. When did people start shortening it to just "X pops"? From where I stand, it was very recently, let's say, within the last decade. Viriditas (talk) 22:24, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Pronunciation of (Donald) Tusk

Our article gives the pronunciation (presumably in English) as /tʊsk/, but in Polish as [tusk].

If it's [tusk] in Polish, why in the world wouldn't it be /tuːsk/ in English? That seems much closer. The "long" marking is conventional anyway and doesn't mean much in modern (at least American) English. --Trovatore By the way, I consume news content almost exclusively in the form of text; I shun news videos (or worse yet, broadcast news) with extreme prejudice, so I can't say how the newsies pronounce it. (talk) 21:14, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Also compare English [mɪnˈkaʊski] with German [mɪŋˈkɔfski] (for the surname of Hermann Minkowski). And note that the name Chomsky in the original Ukrainian is Хомський, which I guess is pronounced more like [ˈxɔmsʲkei̯] and not as [ˈt͡ʃɔmski].  --Lambiam 22:59, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Those don't seem extremely relevant to the instant question. Changing a w to an /f/ is not very intuitive to Anglophones, but u pronounced /uː/ should not be a problem. I wouldn't be confused if Anglophones pronounced it /tʌsk/. --Trovatore (talk) 23:02, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

The audio file present on Donald Tusk's page registers to me as being closer to /ʊ/ than /u/, and since (based on the file's metadata) the creator of the audio is Polish, I'm fairly certain that this is how the name Tusk is supposed to be pronounced. So I think the question shouldn't be why the name is listed with an /ʊ/ sound, but rather why Tusk is pronounced like that in the first place despite Polish's nominal lack of an /ʊ/ sound. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:56, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I see. So maybe [u] and [ʊ] are allophones in Polish, and the represented English pronunciation was taken from someone who used [ʊ] for that phoneme? --Trovatore (talk) 06:24, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

According to the article Polish phonology, the Polish [u] is somewhat more open than the cardinal [u], thus bringing it close to [ʊ].  --Lambiam 15:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Trovatore is quite right. To a Polish ear, there's no difference between [u] and [ʊ]. I'm Polish and my pronunciation of "food" is close enough to "foot" to have led to confusion on at least one occasion. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:09, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

/uː/ is a closing diphthong whose starting point is close to [ʊ] (i.e. [ʊw]) in many accents, so before a voiceless consonant, where vowels are shortened, it can be difficult to determine whether a vowel is /uː/ or /ʊ/. Nardog (talk) 03:15, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Not necessarily. English speakers will only use sounds (phones) that are available in the language and phonotactically permissible in combination. Beyond that, English speakers won't necessarily follow the original pronunciation of a name in a language that uses a Latin-based alphabet such as Polish, French, or Turkish; they may just pronounce it as they would an English word spelled that way. Sticking to Polish, ask an English speaker how they would pronounce Lech Walensa, Marie Curie, Lodz, Krakow, or Wroclaw. Mathglot (talk) 08:13, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

I think everyone here is aware of that. The matter at hand is that [u] is available in English, so there's no obvious reason why it should be replaced with [ʊ]. — Kpalion^(talk) 12:12, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the question should be directed to Omnipaedista, who added the English phonetic transcription to the article back in 2017. The user claims (via user language templates) to be fluent in IPA, but not in Polish. — Kpalion^(talk) 18:03, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

As someone else said above, English speakers won't necessarily follow the original pronunciation of a name. The crux of the matter is that it is not trivial to determine whether a vowel in an English pronunciation of a foreign name is /uː/ or /ʊ/. I admit it's not trivial and I am happy to revert my edit until we find an authoritative source. --Omnipaedista (talk) 21:20, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Nardog's comment of 03:15, 15 December 2023 (UTC) should not be ignored. I don't think I had ever thought of /uː/ as a diphthong before, but the explanation in that comment has the ring of truth. --Trovatore (talk) 22:24, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me that neither of the two "oo" sounds in the inventory of English vowels is a perfect equivalent to the Polish /u/. The vowel /uː/ is too long and /ʊ/ has a different quality (though, again, the difference is barely perceptible to a Polish speaker). So it's a matter of choosing one imperfect equivalent over the other. The Polish /u/ certainly isn't analyzed as a diphthong, although a vowel + glide sequence is possible, as in "Pułtusk" /ˈpuwtusk/. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:04, 20 December 2023 (UTC)