Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 May 1

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May 1

Tank legend

A Soviet M4A2 at Grabow in eastern Germany, May 1945.

Could someone kindly translate the Russian slogan chalked on the side of this Lend-Lease Sherman tank please? Alansplodge (talk) 13:19, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

"Forward to victory", although победе is misspelled as поведе for some reason. Xuxl (talk) 13:40, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, it appears to be a Б, the majuscule form of the б, with a long serif descending from the upper horizontal stroke. Вперед literally means "in the lead", "in the front".  --Lambiam 14:06, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

It's 'v' followed by 'p', but yeah. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:38, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Marvelous - thanks all. Google finds that it's a well-used phrase and alliterative to boot.

File:Аввакумов. По вражьей земле. Вперед к победе!.jpg Alansplodge (talk) 18:39, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Resolved

Vpered k pobede is arguably not alliterative, considering Russian consonant clusters. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:19, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

I stand corrected, I was getting my Cyrillic characters muddled. Alansplodge (talk) 16:42, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

It's actually вперёд with the ё, pronounced something like vpyeriyód. Sound file at Russian wiktionary. The diaresis is often missed out by Russians, especially in capital letters as in Alansplodge's poster. There's probably a widely-understood pronunciation rule somwhere. MinorProphet (talk) 00:13, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

It apparently is or was a controversy on Russian Wikipedia; see the images in commons:Category:Russian letter Ё... AnonMoos (talk) 17:44, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. I was lucky enough to learn Russian at school to O-level (GSCE), plus a year at university (not even worth an Ægrot. as per Sellar & Yeatman). I might feel bold enough to raise the point at ru:helpdesk/refdesk or equivalent. MinorProphet (talk) 00:26, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Deventer pronunciation

Does anyone here know why our article on the Hanseatic city of Deventer says Dutch: [ˈdeːvəntər], when everyone in the city as well as those driving and marshalling intercity trains to it seem to pronounce it more like [ˈdæjvəntər]? Is that pronunciation in brackets when it should actually be in slashes or am I just tone deaf? Thanks! – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 19:45, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

I guess the local pronunciation might be considered dialectal and not official in Standard Dutch. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:18, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Wiktionary gives the pronunciation /ˈdeː.vən.tər/, between slashes. In Northern Standard Dutch as commonly spoken today by e.g. TV anchors, the /eː/ is realized as a diphthong [eɪ̯]. The Dutch Low Saxon spelling is Daeventer, in which ⟨ae⟩ presumably reflects the local pronunciation.  --Lambiam 06:42, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

It would be best to put it in slashes, not brackets.

I find Dutch phonetic transcriptions here often overly narrow, as if attempting to pinpoint the exact town the speaker comes from. There is a dialect continuum, ranging from Low Saxon, as spoken in Twente on the eastern border of the Netherlands, to Northern Standard Dutch, as spoken on the west coast and used by most TV anchors (and, somewhat derogatory, called Randstad Dutch by those not coming from the west). Sallands, spoken around Deventer, is near, but not at, the east end of that continuum. The east has monophthongs, the west diphthongises the tense vowels; in the east, the vowels tend to be a bit more closed than in the west. City dialects are often a bit different from the surrounding countryside; less conservative and sounding more western. I don't know any people originating from Deventer, although I've a cousin currently living there. [æ] for the the first vowel sounds a bit too open to me, but I don't know the local city dialect. There are places where /e/ can be realised as such.

The standard announcements on trains are pre-recorded, by a small sample of voice actors. The pronunciation is usually non-local, sometimes completely wrong. Live announcements are spoken by the guard of the train, who can come from anywhere in the country and is usually not familiar with the local dialect. They are supposed to use reasonably standard Dutch, but there's no official standard and only the guards originating from the Randstad are likely to use Randstad Dutch. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:20, 2 May 2024 (UTC)