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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 June 7

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June 7

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Questions

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  1. Why the ⟨r⟩ is pronounced in French infinitive suffix -ir, but not in -er?
  2. Is there any Germanic language which uses letter C in native words and never pronounces it as /k/ or /s/?
  3. Does Modern Greek have /j/ sound?
  4. Does any language use letter T with acute, Y with caron, J with caron or Z with cedilla?
  5. Is there any language other than Old English which pronounce digraph ⟨sc⟩ as /ʃ/ before all vowels, not just before front vowels like Italian?

--40bus (talk) 16:23, 7 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2: With a sufficiently strict definition of "native words", Dutch uses c in native words pretty much only in the ch digraph, which is pronounced /x/. When foreign words have been used long enough to get a regular Dutch spelling, c tends to be replaced by k or s, but in a root where the sound alternates between /s/ and /k/ depending on suffix, c can hold on for quite a while. PiusImpavidus (talk) 16:59, 7 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
2: Similar with German ch, in that case. There are borrowings like 'Computer', 'Caps Lock' etc. though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:10, 7 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Don't overlook the suffix -isch in Dutch and German, which does not involve an /x/ or /ç/.  --Lambiam 00:54, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
-isch is pronounced as /ɪs/ in Dutch, though, unless I'm mistaken. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:06, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, the article Dutch orthography states '/ʃ/ is used mostly in words of German origin. It is also /s/ finally in older Dutch spellings, which are now spelled with just ⟨s⟩', I see. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:24, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
-isch is indeed a suffix that kept a somewhat older spelling (respelling it as -ies has been proposed). It's pronounced /is/ in Dutch. Still, you can't say c is pronounced /s/ there; it's part of a multigraph, where only the combination of letters gives a pronunciation. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:37, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
How should we classify the ⟨c⟩ in Brücke?  --Lambiam 00:59, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would clearly guess that the answer to #3 is no, because whereas the Latin alphabet got J and later recognized it as a separate letter from I, Greek never got a new consonant letter separate from iota. Can anyone disprove me?? Georgia guy (talk) 11:52, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Whether a language has a certain consonant phoneme has little or nothing to do with whether it has a dedicated letter for it. Modern Greek certainly does have [j] as a sound (although our article on Modern Greek phonology transcribes it as [ʝ] instead, but that difference is minor). Whether it's a separate phoneme is open to theoretical debate – some analyses will treat it as an allophone of /ɣ/, because in many environments it is is complementary distribution with the [ɣ] sound, but to maintain that analysis you have to posit the existence of "silent" underlying /i/ segments elsewhere, to explain why [janos] and [ɣanos] are still a minimal pair. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:19, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Like "το γατάκι στο γιατάκι"?  --Lambiam 09:39, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, that's a nicer example of such a minimal pair. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:57, 10 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But is iota ever pronounced as /j/? Are words like Ιούλιος and Ιούνιος, as well as place name Ιωάννινα, pronounced with initial /j/? --40bus (talk) 17:29, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's a slightly more complicated issue of varieties and style. In words from the learned tradition (i.e. those internally borrowed from Ancient Greek), the prescriptive rule is that inherited prevocalic iota is pronounced as a vocalic segment, so it's /iˈu.li.os/. In the colloquial 'demotic' tradition, such words have come to be pronounced with /j/, but in those words where that pronunciation is now the norm, the spelling has often been changed to reflect that, using <γε> or <γι>. So, for instance, learned <Ιανουάριος> has a demotic doublet <Γενάρης>; learned <Ιωάννινα> has a variant <Γιαννενα>, ancient/learned <υιος> /ios/ is now <γιος> /jos/, and so on. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:13, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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