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I can't agree with façade. If you insist it needs a cedilla, then I must insist it should be treated as a foreign word, requiring italics. If not, not. I see that you have indeed used italics; that must mean you don't regard it as an English word, and hence not relevant to the question. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]19:32, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For #4, there are foreign proper names like "Xhosa" and "Ximenez" which when used in English do not begin with /z/. There are also words like "xray" and "xmas" in which the "x" is pronounced /ɛks/. CodeTalker (talk) 17:08, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In most European languages (wiktionary lists German, Italian, Hungarian, and Slovak, representing four different language branches), xenophobia is spelled with a Latin X-, and pronounced with [ks-]. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 07:39, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In most European languages, such words are spelled with x- and pronounced with /ks-/, but the question is whether they can be considered native words. Most appear to be borrowed from Greek. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:06, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
4) One hears Xavier mispronounced nowadays as "Ex-Avia". BTW, the use of hashes instead of real numbers is unhelpful when replying in the edit window, as we don't get to see the numbers. DuncanHill (talk) 20:07, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Codetalker -- Most often Xmas is pronounced the same as "Christmas" (except on Futurama).
JackofOz, Baseball_bugs -- It's hard to say that the cedilla is "required" there, but the letter "c" in the letter sequence "ca" rarely has the sound-value [s] in English, so some people apparently feel that it's helpful there.. AnonMoos (talk) 20:10, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Re. "xmas", the OED gives both pronunciations. I don't know which is more common, but I'm sure I've heard /ˈɛksməs/ even in non-Futurama contexts. CodeTalker (talk) 20:45, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Chambers gives the eksmas pronunciation before the Christmas one, and I have to say I think eksmas is the more common pronunciation. DuncanHill (talk) 20:48, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Close enough, according to this native Dutch speaker: the a would turn lax and one syllable cut, turning the i into the final part of a diphthong. IMHO, the pronunciation of Dutch as given in Wiktionary or in our article on Dutch phonology suffers from excessive precision. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:58, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
6 is "No", with the caveat that "it depends on which variety of English it is and how pedantic someone is". As noted above, there are some pedants who insist that the only proper way to spell certain words like "façade" and "naïve" and "rôle" and "jalapeño" is with the diacritic, but among most English writers in most of the world (and among most style guides commonly used in most of the world), diacritics are entirely unused. --Jayron3211:41, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In fact, scrub that. Where the fuck do you get off Jayron, you and your uncited baloney? Who are these "some pedants"? Can I call you an idiot if you call me a pedant? DuncanHill (talk) 11:49, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's because I'm an asshole. I'm actually shocked it took you until today to learn I'm not useful around here. Everyone else has known for years. --Jayron3211:55, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"façade The cedilla should always be maintained". [1] Burchfield allows either for naïve, and says while role is the OUP house style, rôle is still valid.
I checked a couple of editions of the Chicago guide, it doesn't seem to mention façade (however spelt) at all, some editions do say that a cedilla is among the minimum requirements for type.
Merriam-Webster has facade as the head-word and says "or less commonly façade". It has "naive or naïve", "jalapeño or less commonly jalapeno", "role or less commonly rôle".
The spell-check on my Windows pc (set to BrEng) marks facade and naive and rôle as mis-spellings. I think that's the first time I've ever typed or written the word jalapeño with or without the curly thing. DuncanHill (talk)
Is Dutch Ë, as in België or cariës, obligatory, as at least acute accents in één or vóór are optional? I think that English should use obligatory diaeresis in words like distinguish (my proposed spelling distingüish) to indicate that the letter U, normally used only to indigate hard G sound like in guess or guitar, is pronounced /w/, like the same use in Spanish and Catalan. --40bus (talk) 17:45, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the diaeresis in words like België, cariës, vacuüm, coöperatie or financiële is mandatory in Dutch, except that it must be dropped when the word gets hyphenated before the letter with the diaeresis, either at the end of a line or because you want to show possible hyphenation: ca-ri-es, co-o-pe-ra-tie, etc. Hyphenation makes the diaeresis redundant. You need at least 2 letters before the hyphen and two after, so you can't hyphenate België before the diaeresis. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:15, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Also, English is mostly a mess in that orthographical regard, anyway, and for a spelling reform, it would probably be easier to import the j spelling wholesale, anyway (such as jin and jinjer). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:30, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the Dutch spelling ⟨ie⟩ is redundant and should just be replaced by ⟨i⟩, thus the ⟨ië⟩ should change to ⟨ie⟩. --40bus (talk) 20:07, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The ie doesn't make a lot of sense in modern Dutch, you're right about that. It would make sense to replace unchecked ie with i and checked ie with ii, similar to how is done with a, e, o and u. In fact, it used to be like that, but ii was respelled ij and pronunciation changed to a diphthong. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:35, 21 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
a, e, i, o, u come in lax/tense pairs. If tense in a normally lax environment, they are doubled (some special rule for tense i and final e), if lax in a normally tense environment, the following consonant is doubled, so that you can predict whether they are tense or lax. oe and eu however don't come in lax/tense pairs, so there's nothing more to indicate in spelling. PiusImpavidus (talk) 23:14, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
3 is also "No", largely because "m" and "b" have identical place of articulation, with the only difference being that "b" is plosive consonant and m is a nasal consonant, which makes it awkward to transition between the two in English without having a following vowel. Word final voiced plosives in English are almost always unaspirated and devoiced, while the same consonant is commonly aspirated in pre-vocalic position (compare "bone" and "cob". If you hold your hand in front of your mouth when you say "bone", for most English speakers, you'll feel a distinct puff of air that you won't necessarily feel for "cob"). An unaspirated plosive following a nasal with the same place of articulation has no way to mark it as distinct. In other words, if you want to pronounce the "b" in "dumb" you need to add something to the end of the word, such as a short vowel sound, like a short "schwa", or you need to forcibly aspirate it. Since it is normally unaspirated, it doesn't stand out from the "m" in any way. --Jayron3211:55, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
[-nd], [-nt] and [-ŋk] are rather common in English, despite having all the same peculiarities that you mention: a nasal followed by an unaspirated plosive, with identical place of articulation. it doesn't stand out from the "m" in any way -- of course it does, by being a plosive and not a nasal. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 13:01, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
82.166.199.42 -- The "same" thing happened in both word-final "mb" and word-final "ng" -- a non-dental voiced stop was deleted -- but of course the deletion in "ng" left behind a now-word-final nasal sound which otherwise only occurred before [k] and [g], while the deletion in "mb" just left behind an ordinary [m]... AnonMoos (talk) 22:50, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
About 7, I think all of them keep cases for pronouns (Haven't I answered this before?). yo, io are the nominative and mí, me are the accusative. --Error (talk) 09:30, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Fulsome and presently both have well-attested use for the meanings you say they do not mean, indeed they seem to be the oldest meanings of them. DuncanHill (talk) 20:03, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
entitled has had a complete change in meaning of recent times. It used to mean exactly what it said, entitled. Now it means virtually the opposite: someone who's NOT entitled but acts as if they were. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]21:26, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really agree with that. "Entitled" still means what it means, though certain locutions like "entitled attitude" or "entitled behavior" have changed. However there's a significant fraction of the population that just uses the word incorrectly (yes, I'm a prescriptivist, as I think are you).
This will be obvious to anyone who follows Facebook listen, it's perfectly natural; almost everyone does it in the United States. Every now and then you'll see a "viral" post taking umbrage at the description of, for example, Social Security as an "entitlement", which is the technical term for the category of government expenditures under which it falls. They'll say: It's not an entitlement! We paid for it!!!11!!1!. Well, right, that's why you would be entitled to it. --Trovatore (talk) 00:38, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The word "sick" is sometimes used as slang to describe something that is very good. Jack, as an Australian, is probably already familiar with the more extreme "deadly", a word in Aboriginal Australian English meaning excellent. HiLo48 (talk) 04:45, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For a specific kind of word that's like this, see auto-antonym, where one word has two (or more) senses which are antonyms. For example, "oversight" can both mean missed/overlooked or closely scrutinized. If you're familiar with one sense, the other sense would appear as an unexpected meaning. And see also perhaps skunked term. Matt Deres (talk) 14:46, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Decimated originally meant one part in ten (removed), now it is conflated with devistated devastated; and, awful doesn't mean "full of awe". 136.54.99.98 (talk) 16:26, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If you mean that decimate could refer to a number much higher than one tenth, I don't think it's due to a conflation with devastate, primarily... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:48, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps "conflated" is the wrong word, but often one hears something like "the invading force was decimated..." or "the town was decimated by a tornado" when "devastated" would be the more accurate word. 136.54.99.98 (talk) 20:05, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, it's basically the same reasoning behind the Swedish usage of "ultrarapid". High-speed cameras photograph a high number of frames per second, and when they are projected on a lower framerate, you would get a slow-motion effect... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:01, 21 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Latitude and longitude invoke a similar paradox to "high-speed camera". It's obvious from the sound of latitude that's it's related to lateral, and so one might assume it means sideways-ness, which from the customary orientation of the globe would mean east-west position. But in fact it's the line of latitude itself which goes east-west, while latitude refers to position among the lines and thus means position north-south. Card Zero (talk)02:03, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was just looking at exactly that just now. :) Seems this is a hangover from the orientation of ancient maps (or at least ancient conceptual geography) with east at the top. Card Zero (talk)02:38, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Strabo's map of the worldAccording to older sources it does not derive from the orientation of ancient maps, but rather from more of the Earth being known to ancient Greek geographers in the "long" East–West direction than in the North–South direction.[4] --Lambiam19:58, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
