Language desk
< December 28	<< Nov \| December \| Jan >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 29

Verify translation: Korean

Goddess of Victory: Nikke#Development and release, the second sentence reads "Development began between 2017 and 2018 with an internal planning competition for a prototype of the game" with references[1][2], the former quotes portions from the text "니케는 시프트업이 5년만에 내놓는 신작". I used manual+dictionary and machine translation but couldn't find a satisfactory answer. Does it imply that it's five years before the game was officially released (i.e., 2022 - 5 = 2017) or five years before he said that (which would be 2016)? ~~lol1 VNIO (I made a mistake? talk to me) 10:06, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A few questions

Is there any Swedish word where ⟨u⟩ is pronounced [u], not [ʉ]?
Is there any language where conjunctions are inflected?
Why name of letter G in English is [d͡ʒiː] and not [giː]?
Is there such thing as Old English alphabet?
Why did German and Dutch start to use letter J for [j] sound? Why didn't English do the same?

--40bus (talk) 21:09, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re #4: See Anglo-Saxon runes and Old English Latin alphabet. Deor (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The one about J sounds familiar from some months back. In French the J is pronounced like "zh", and that kind of overwhelmed the Germanic pronunciation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re #5: In earlier times, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were two alternative graphemes for the same letter, just like ⟨s⟩ and ⟨ſ⟩, or ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩. Which one was used when was a matter of fluid conventions. Very early on, in Dutch and German manuscripts and later in print, there were only the forms ⟨i⟩ as a minuscule and ⟨J⟩ as a majuscule, regardless of whether the grapheme represented a true vowel or a semivowel or voiced palatal approximant. For example, here we see the spelling ons heerẽ iheſu chriſti, which we can "transgraph" to more modern use of graphemes as ons heeren jhesu christi. Later the convention arose to use ⟨j⟩ instead of ⟨i⟩, still without regard to their phonemic status, in two cases: (1) as the last of a sequence of two or more ⟨i⟩s, so instead of tiit we get tijt (not yet a diphthong but still a long /iː/) and instead of the Roman numeral xiii we see xiij; (2) as the first letter of a word, so we see jn for in, and so on.^[3] (Somewhat inconsistently, the text on the page just linked to has the spelling iair next to Jaer.) Only later did the convention arise to assign different grapheme variants to the different phonemic values. It is not entirely clear why (also in English and French orthography), the variant ⟨u⟩ was given the role of vowel and ⟨v⟩ the role of consonant, but this followed a convention in Latin orthography, thereby making it possible to distinguish voluerunt from volverunt. Likewise, Latinists started to write jaceo instead of iaceo and hujus instead of huius. Since this corresponded in Latin to /j/, and in Dutch and German the grapheme alternative ⟨j⟩ had already been used for this phoneme, it was not difficult for German and Dutch spelling to follow the convention. In French, however, the Vulgar Latin /j/ had evolved to /d͡ʒ/ (later /ʒ/), and Middle English had copied this, so there the Latin recipe could not be followed. --Lambiam 23:06, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Why didn't English copy German and Dutch convention? It would be better if they had copied. --40bus (talk) 10:50, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Says who? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:56, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No close interaction. No direct knowledge of German and Dutch orthography, and no perception of it as an ideal to follow, probably. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:27, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, the first English printers came from the Continent, used Dutch- and German-produced moveable type, and influenced the English orthography quite a lot: e.g. Þ went out of use due to it being absent from the Continental types. Yet, none of the changes to the orthography that the first printers introduced were as drastic as replacing Y with J for no purpose other than making 40bus happy. --2A02:5080:2F07:FA00:179:7213:3B98:5D33 (talk) 18:18, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

40bus -- did you even bother to read my long comment of "05:54, 30 December 2022" below? Anyway, Old English was one of the earliest Western or Northern European vernaculars to develop a written literature, at a time when almost all writing in Romance language speaking areas was in Latin, while other Germanic languages were either written in brief runic inscriptions or not written at all. When Old English orthographic conventions were being established, there was a lot of influence from Latin, some influence from Old Irish, and a little influence from Runic, at a time when there wasn't much else that could have influenced them. Old English orthography subsequently had significant influence on the early development of Old Norse orthography (though Old Norse ignored the "G"=[j] correspondence, which was due to OE-specific sound changes). After 1066, there was heavy French influence on English orthographic conventions. I don't know why you imagine that there should have been heavy continental Germanic influence... AnonMoos (talk) 01:37, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned above, significant continental Germanic influence arrived in late 15th century with the printing press. --2001:BF8:200:392:75C1:B495:6CFD:F6D3 (talk) 08:19, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That kind of nibbled around the edges of English orthography, adding an "h" to the spelling of "ghost" and a few other somewhat minor things, but it did not drastically change the sound-value of any letter commonly used in spelling of English words, nor should it have been expected to. In contrast to the floods of French loanwords into Middle English, there was only a dribble of continental Germanic loanwords into early modern English. AnonMoos (talk) 17:30, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

1. I could assume that ⟨u⟩ would be pronounced as [u] in some later borrowings, although I have trouble coming up with any example right out of my head. In those cases, [ʉ] might probably still be accepted as an alternative, though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:38, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I thought about the borrowing "bullshit", but then I realized that the [u]/ [ʉ] distinction would only hold true for long vowels [u:]/ [ʉ:], and short vowels would instead have [ʊ]/ [ɵ]. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:16, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Wakuran: As per Help:IPA/Swedish, the distinction in Finland Swedish is between /u/ and /ʉ/ even for short vowels. How do you pronounce cappuccino? Thomas Riad's The Phonology of Swedish transcribes it as [kapʊ¹ˈtɕiːnʊ] or [kapʊ¹ˈtɕiːnɔ] (although it's the alternation of the last vowel, and not the ⟨u⟩, that is being discussed), but authoritative online dictionaries suggest the ⟨u⟩ is pronounced as usual. --Theurgist (talk) 00:29, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, yeah. Finland-Swedish would generally seem "simpler" in regard to vowel quality, as well as pitch accent. I guess it's [nʊ], although I'm still a bit unsure on if I'd be using [pʊ], [pɵ] or [pə]. [pʊ], I guess. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

40bus -- The name of the letter "G" in modern English has already been discussed in previous rounds of answers to questions. It's a completely phonologically-regular development of the ancient Roman letter name [ge] along a trajectory from Old French and Middle English through to modern English. The cross-language distribution of the uses of the letter "J" has also been amply discussed -- and of course, before the 17th century, there was no distinct letter "J" (a point you seem to have difficulty grasping). Old English was commonly written in forms of Insular script. I doubt whether conjunctions are ever inflected for typical nominal and verbal categories, but in some languages they're inflected for switch reference. -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:59, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If I'm understanding this article, it says that in Frisian, conjunctions are inflected in the second person singular. CodeTalker (talk) 01:37, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In a previous round of these questions someone pointed out to you that "why" is a very poor question to ask about linguistic changes. I would like to reiterate that here. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 01:38, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if a different phrasing, such as "how come" or "what are the reasons that" would sound better... Then, there are a lot of similar questions posed again and again, anyway. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:47, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, it wouldn't. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 06:19, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For the "why" or "why not" questions, one valid question might be "are there any published theories as to why or why not?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:17, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. One point which I don't think has previously been mentioned here with respect to the English orthography of the "y" semivowel sound (i.e. the sound denoted by IPA symbol [j]), is that in Old English this [j] sound was commonly written with the letter "G" because a palatalized velar fricative had merged with the already-existing Germanic [j] sound at the very beginning of Old English, as explained in the "19:32, 6 December 2022" comment under the discussions of December 5th. So English went from writing the sound [j] with the letter "G" to writing it with the letter "Y" under French influence, and therefore a tradition of associating this sound with the consonantal value of the letter "I" (in the 17th-century later split off into "J") didn't really get established -- especially since (as has often been mentioned before), the consonantal value of the letter "I" in Middle English came to mean a "dzh" sound under French influence. Of course, neither of these factors (previous "G"=[j] or heavy French orthographic influence) was relevant to the medieval ancestors of the modern Dutch and German languages... AnonMoos (talk) 05:54, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]