Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 30

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January 30

Gulag

in sentences like "he was sent to a prison camp" is it more correct to say "a Gulag" or "the gulag" and should it be capitalized? Elinruby (talk) 02:35, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

It's capitalized in our Gulag article. The phrase "a Gulag" might be a little unusual in English -- the only occurrence in the "Gulag" article is in an image caption... AnonMoos (talk) 03:50, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

The Gulag is a unique system of labor camps, as its article notes, so it makes no sense to write "a Gulag", any more than it would to refer to "a Statue of Liberty". There doesn't appear to be a clear consensus on whether it should or should not be capitalized. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

"He was sent to a Gulag camp" would make most sense in my opinion. — Kpalion^(talk) 09:25, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

In Russian the whole acronym is capitalized, ГУЛАГ. Usually (but not always) acronyms in English are likewise capitalized: NATO, DARPA, SWAT. It would make sense to retain this across the transliteration and use "GULAG". Wiktionary makes a distinction between "GULAG" being the agency running the system, "Gulag" being an alternative letter-case form of "gulag", and the latter meaning:

1. (historical) Also GULAG: the system of all Soviet labour camps and prisons in use, especially during the Stalinist period (1930s–1950s).
2. (by extension)
   1. A prison camp, especially one used to hold political prisoners.
   2. (also figuratively) A place where, or political system in which, people with dissident views are routinely oppressed.

All case forms are found in books, with "Gulag" being the most and "GULAG" the least popular.^[1] Personally, I'd avoid using Gulag or "gulag" as a common noun in writing as being too colloquial and use "a Gulag prison camp" if it needed to be made clear that a prison camp was part of the Gulag system. However, this use is common and also found in the book titles of serious works: The Gulags: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Soviet Labor Camps; Stalin, the Five Year Plans and the Gulags: Slavery and Terror 1929–53; Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia.  --Lambiam 09:58, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

thank you for the answers.

I believe GULAG would strictly speaking be the agency, right? I have personally only ever seen it in "send (someone) to the gulag" but always in a metaphorical sense, whereas I am seeing this in Baltic history articles where the subject yea verily went to a prison camp, probably someplace remote in the East. So I would like to get this right. Speaking of which, I am going to update the "starting to" question to say that since so many people said it was correct as written, I put "starting to" back in and rewrote the verbs a bit to bring out the timeframe. Mea culpa; vague question, bad example.

Back to this, I did see that it's usually capitalized in our articles. I guess somebody made a style decision? It seems wrong to me, but I have other fish to fry.

Follow-up question: were Gulag prison camps specifically for Russian political prisoners? Or, when there were forced population transfers, were the people involved also sent to Gulag prison camps? or just the working-age men?

Thank you again. Elinruby (talk) 05:57, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Being forced to work in a Gulag prison camp was a punishment. There is no sharp border line between political and other prisoners, but many Gulag prisoners were there for non-political crimes, such as theft.  --Lambiam 12:12, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Exile of Jews in the Soviet interior during World War II. 2A00:23D0:6EA:DB01:3D32:231E:20A4:4F3F (talk) 12:45, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Pre-Latin Native American translation

Are there websites or other resources that have translation vocabulary for pre-European scripts of any Native American language of the US (as in wiigwaasabak or petition of the Ojibwe chiefs) and can we reliably translate English text without neologisms to such scripts? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 11:04, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Are these really scripts in the traditional sense? To me, they do appear be more like pictograms used as a symbolical and mnemonic device? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:29, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

PICTOGRAPHS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS by Garrick Mallery (1886). Alansplodge (talk) 18:06, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

New questions

1. Is there any instance of a language being written in same script over 1,500 years and having had a very high historical and cultural prestige and then switched to a new script and completely abandoning the old script?
2. Do these letter combinations occur commonly in any language:

• ææ
• øø
• řř
• ťť
• ňň
• ďď
• ľľ
• ëë
• áá
• éé
• íí
• óó
• úú
• ýý
• äaä
• ïï
• ÿÿ
• əə
• ðð
• þþ
• xä
• cä
• qä

3. Is there any Spanish dialect that has a /v/ phoneme?
4. Are there any native non-compound words in Swedish where letter Ä occur more than once? Could e.g. mälä be a native Swedish word by its structure? Why letter Ä is used more in Finnish than Estonian and Swedish?
5. Are there any words in Spanish with letter Ï?
6. Are there any words in Polish with letter combinations sc+ vowel, such as nonsense word scila, cn, kc or cs?
7. Why letter V is not used in native words in Polish?
8. Why letter Y is not used in native words in Estonian, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese or Latvian?

--40bus (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 1: Is there any instance of a language being written in same script over 1,500 years and having had a very high historical and cultural prestige and then switched to a new script and completely abandoning the old script?

At issue is every language changes an awful lot over a millennium. Scripts can also be fairly dynamic. Then "historical and cultural prestige" -- you mean at that time in that place, or now in another place? I suppose obvious examples (~ 7th century origins, so not quite 1500 years) are Arabic and Cyrillic scripts, which several countries have dropped for a Latin script (Turkey dropped Arabic as well as interesting other cases; former SSRs dropped Cyrillic (note rather that some were forced to adopt Cyrillic from Arabic or Latin in the 20th century).)

Maybe the cleanest example I can think of is the use of Classical Chinese to transcribe Korean, going back millennia. This was replaced by the Hangul alphabetic script beginning in 1443 CE. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:27, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

I guess Ancient Egyptian language that switched to Coptic script to become Coptic language. --Error (talk) 11:23, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 2: Do these letter combinations occur commonly in any language?

See Wiktionary: créée. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:57, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Also Icelandic ææ which is an elongated interjection, and Southern Sami Nøørje which is an alternative form of Nöörje meaning "Norway". Less dubious than those two, there's:

1. Turkmen iňňe meaning "needle"
2. Isthmus Mixe xëë meaning "sun, day, fiesta, holiday, name"
3. Numerous Navajo terms containing áá, íí, and óó, e.g. bááh meaning "bread", díí meaning "this, these", and dóó meaning "and"; see Navajo language#Orthography
4. Gokana súú meaning "thorn" and Chuukese wúút meaning "rain"
5. Jumjum jïïn meaning "scorpion" and Ulch sïïŋna meaning "gift, present"
6. Numerous Azerbaijani terms starting with təə, including təəssüb meaning "honour" (archaically "religious intolerance, fanaticism, bigotry), təəssüf meaning "regret", təəssürat meaning "impression", and so on
7. Numerous Orok terms starting with xä, including xäwčilä meaning "rib", xämugdä meaning "insides, intestines", xäkku meaning "heat, fever", and so on
8. Numerous terms containing cä to the point where I'm not even going to summarize any, Wiktionary has plenty of examples there
9. Tatar qäğäz meaning "paper" and Menya eqä meaning "water, river"

Old and Middle English had plenty of þþ's to go around, and Old English had oððe as an alternative form of oþþe meaning "or", but otherwise I couldn't find any living examples of either of those two digraphs. And while the Anguthimri language had "non-contrived" ææ-containing words like ðææɲa meaning "to bury" and d̪ææwat̪i meaning "greedy", it has gone extinct, though the article on it doesn't seem to know exactly when. GalacticShoe (talk) 08:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

You won't find a double þ in any living language, because the only one that uses the letter, Icelandic, does so in morpheme-initial position only, so neither gemination nor compounding can produce -þþ-. Regarding ð, it only occurs in Icelandic, Faroese and Elfdalian. The former two do not use it in morpheme-initial position (so no compounds with -ðð- either) and also do not geminate it either, and I'm not sure about Elfdalian – if you even count it as a language; the Swedish Wikipedia describes it as a 'variety'. --Theurgist (talk) 23:17, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 3: Is there any Spanish dialect that has a /v/ phoneme?

The same as 26 days ago. --Error (talk) 11:38, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 4.1: Are there any native non-compound words in Swedish where letter Ä occur more than once?

Would bärsärk (inherited from Old Norse) count? GalacticShoe (talk) 09:08, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Technically, I guess it might count as a compound, although the word bär meaning björn is obsolete in Swedish. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:21, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Hm, perhaps härbärge, where the original Old Norse herbergi was apparently borrowed from Middle High German? Note though that the original Proto-West-Germanic *harjabergu is actually a compound of *hari and *bergu. GalacticShoe (talk) 06:13, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Question 5: Are there any words in Spanish with letter Ï?

It is possible in poetry, to force a hiatus. Double sharp (talk) 09:24, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 6: Are there any words in Polish with letter combinations sc+ vowel, such as nonsense word scila, cn, kc or cs?

Yes for at least three of the four you asked about: cnota, scena, kciuk. Double sharp (talk) 09:29, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

⟨cs⟩, on the other hand does not appear in Polish. It does in Hungarian, where it stands for roughly the same sound as the Polish ⟨cz⟩. — Kpalion^(talk) 14:34, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

However, ⟨sc⟩ cannot be followed by ⟨i⟩, as in the nonsense word provided. That would have to be read /stɕi/, which is not permitted in the language; ⟨ści⟩ /ɕtɕi/ and ⟨scy⟩ /stsɨ/ are. --Theurgist (talk) 23:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 7: Why letter V is not used in native words in Polish?

Polish orthography is standardized so that /v/ is written using W. It wasn't always that way though. History of Polish orthography goes into more depth, but you can see in the first example table that early on some writers did use the letter V for /v/. It is only in the later orthographies where, although V appears as a letter sometimes, the actual /v/ sound appears to be mostly represented by W. I am unsure as to what led to W specifically, as there is no explicit mention of the /v/ sound in the article, but there is mention that Zaborowski's early 1514–1515 orthography was inspired by Czech, which early on used W for /v/. I would have to confirm, but the section on Czech orthography#History suggests that W was used there for /v/ because the actual letter V was coincident in the Latin alphabet with U, which might be the ultimate reason for W's use in Polish. GalacticShoe (talk) 07:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

My guess would be that Old Czech ultimately copied the use of ⟨w⟩ from German, which to this day is the only major European language, other than Polish, to use ⟨w⟩ for /v/. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:42, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

I thought this might be the case too but I was initially hesitant because German orthography#History of German orthography didn't mention /v/ or the letter W. Looking a bit more into the page though I just found that the section German orthography#Typical letters indicates that German /w/ shifted into /v/ in the 17th century while preserving the old lettering. This statement appears to be unsourced, and I found a StackExchange post that seems to place the actual time at an earlier and broader range of time, so I'm not sure to what extent it is accurate. In any case, it seems possible that Old Czech used German's method of orthography, but without further clarification on German phonology at the time I'm a bit unsure. GalacticShoe (talk) 17:52, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 8: Why letter Y is not used in native words in Estonian, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese or Latvian?

See Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 November 25#Question 9. Portuguese is derived from Latin, and as far as I know, Latin didn't have a Y either. 2A00:23D0:6EA:DB01:3D32:231E:20A4:4F3F (talk) 12:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

For Romance languages I'm pretty sure it can indeed be boiled down to either there being a continued use of Latin-based orthography, or there being no new vowel sounds that require distinguished separation of Y. As for the other languages, it appears that all of them are fairly modern orthographies often encoded into law.

1. Modern Estonian orthography is based on Eduard Ahrens' late 19th-century Newer Orthography.
2. Latvian orthography was developed in 1908 by a linguistic commission and introduced by law in the early 1920s.
   1. Notably, the related Latgalian language actually does use the letter Y to represent /ɨ/, an allophone of /i/ absent in Latvian.
3. Dutch orthography and German orthography are similarly regulated by law.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily explain why Y is not preferred for all of them, and why they have been absent for some time, but it does explain why native spellings involving Y are essentially completely absent; they were standardized away. It seems reasonable to me to assume that the reason that Y was never chosen for any of these orthographies is simply that, like with the Romance languages, there wasn't much incentive to use a relatively rare letter for sounds that do not need it. GalacticShoe (talk) 18:46, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

"Need" is debatable. Since Estonian, Dutch and German all seem to have fairly large vowel inventories, including either the close or near-close front rounded vowel - except for historical reasons, it wouldn't be completely illogical to use it. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 04:06, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Very fair, I suppose the better way to phrase it would be "for sounds the people creating the orthographies felt did not need it." Although of course that raises the question of why said people would not feel a need for such letter usage. GalacticShoe (talk) 06:00, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

For Dutch, see IJ (digraph). Basically, Y was not uncommon in older spellings of Dutch, but when it was standardized, 'IJ' was chosen over Y in Dutch, though Afrikaans retained the use of Y. - Lindert (talk) 22:24, 4 February 2024 (UTC)