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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 28

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January 28

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Questions

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  1. In English, "half hour" refers to the previous hour, but in other Germanic languages it refers to next hour. Is it a Romance influence in English, and are there other Germanic languages that do the same?
  2. In English, can the words past, to, o'clock and half be used in hours 13 to 23?
  3. Is there any Slavic language which allows long sequences of vowels in hiatus?
  4. Is there any Romance language which has phonetic aspirated consonants?
  5. Is there any Romance language where Classical Latin /h/ never became silent?
  6. Is there any Western Romance language which pronounce letter H in all contexts?
  7. Is there any dialect of Spanish where j / soft g is a coronal sound?
  8. Is there any Romance language that uses letter K in native words? Why does Romanian not do that?
  9. Is there any Slavic language with phonemic consonant length of all consonant?
  10. Is there any dialect of English that has retained noun gender?

--40bus (talk) 21:04, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

1. "Half hour" by itself means a roughly 30-minute interval, and can be used in various ways. Where are you seeing that it somehow refers only to the "previous" hour? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:38, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's about "half six" meaning 5:30 or 6:30.  --Lambiam 23:43, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the UK I've never heard that used to mean anything other than 'half past six' (am or pm), never 'half-past five' (or "half-to-six", which is entirely unknown). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
German es ist schon halb sechs means it's already half past five. The post asks how come English does this differently from its next of kin.  --Lambiam 11:55, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Southern German has the advanced forms viertel sechs and dreiviertel sechs (meaning 5:15 and 5:45 respectively). --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:16, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
British English "half n" for "half past n" is fairly recent, I think; this ngram seems to show it really only since 2000 in books, though I'm sure it goes back to at least the 80 in speech. I have always suspected that it arose at least partly from people hearing the German expression and misinterpreting it, but I have no evidence for that. --ColinFine (talk) 12:45, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I (elderly Brit) have been familiar with it for decades, and my feeling is that it arose naturally. I doubt that enough BrE speakers were so conversant with colloquial German that they picked it up (wrongly), even though my family (like others in the Army) lived in Germany for a couple of years. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 18:50, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
American here. Never heard "half six" used for either 5:30 or 6:30. It has always been "half past [the previous full hour]". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:57, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or half past the next hour. As in, "I'll call you at half past." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:33, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah. I've heard that. But that's a different usage. If someone asks me the time, I might say simply "half past" if I have reason to believe that they already know the hour. Otherwise, I would say, for example, "half past 5". I might say "I'll call you at half past" if I am confident that context has established that I mean the next hour or some other previously specified hour. Like, "I leave work at 8, I'll call you at half past", meaning 8:30. But the previously mentioned usage of "half five" is totally foreign to my experience. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Likewise. I'm just trying to figure out what the OP means by "in English, 'half hour' refers to the previous hour". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
2. In British English, none of these are usually used in conjunction with explicit use of the 24-hour clock, which itself is common – bus and train timetables, for example, always use it, and since the advent of digital watches it has become unremarkable in everyday speech, even to this elderly Brit.
Of course, in the hours before noon, it may sometimes be ambiguous as to whether someone stating the hour is thinking in terms of the 12- or 24-hour clock, but mental translation between the two mostly occurs (I think) at a subconscious level. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.103.187 (talk) 23:45, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
5. The loss of /h/ apparently happened with Vulgar Latin, see Latin phonology and orthography#Pronunciation shared by Vulgar Latin and Romance languages and Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance. Based on this and the general rarity of /h/ beyond cases where it reappeared later (see below, also note that modern /h/ usage is often not in conjunction with the actual letter H), it seems unlikely that any current Romance languages ever had /h/ just not disappear. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:39, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
6. In conjunction to the answer to the above question, the article on the letter H mentions that there are only a handful of Romance languages which currently have some form of /h/. Romanian reborrowed it from neighboring Slavic languages, and is irrelevant to your question since it isn't Western Romance anyways. Spanish as a whole redeveloped /h/ but then lost it again. Finally, apparently some Spanish and Portuguese dialects developed /h/ as allophones of other sounds, but this doesn't correspond to always pronouncing the letter H. So in general, it would appear that the answer to your question is no. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:44, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It seems from the article that Western Cantabrian preserves the /h/ that Middle Spanish still had. Double sharp (talk) 18:28, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I completely missed that since I only looked through H's history section. The articles on Andalusian Spanish, the Extremaduran language, and Canarian Spanish all mention the preservation of /h/ as well. I may have to edit the history section later to explicitly mention these as being non-allophonic sounds. GalacticShoe (talk) 03:50, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
8.I. Walloon, Judeo-Spanish. Burzuchius (talk) 20:19, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
8.II. According to Romanian language, the Latin orthography was mostly based on Italian, which barely uses K. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:24, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to UCLA, the Latin orthography was only introduced in 1859, which makes it easier to confirm that K was only introduced for later loanwords. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:24, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
10. See the answer to your previous question GalacticShoe (talk) 21:11, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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