Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 January 20

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January 20

Allophone?

I'm not sure if the thing I'm talking about is strictly an allophone; bear with me. Your article says that allophones are different sounds that are used to express the same phoneme in different "situations", if you will; what about sounds that a completely or nearly interchangeable in a language, or (subtly different) sounds that are not distinguished within a language. I will give an example from a dialect that I do not speak because we do not tend to notice them in our own dialects: in the Sichuan dialect of Chinese, for example, the word 湖 (lake) can be realized "hu" (sorry I don't know IPA for CHinese) or "fu", and these two are used interchangeably. What is this called? The concept is somewhat similar to a merger. Thanks. 24.92.70.160 (talk) 02:36, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

In Sichuan, are the "f" and "h" sounds indistinguishable? Perhaps the environment, such as the last sound of the word preceding, does influence the use, which would make them allophonic. In English, the classic example is the /p/ sound, which comes in aspirated and non-aspirated allophones. The aspirated p appears in the word "pot" and the non-aspirated p appears in the word "stop". English speakers cannot hear the difference, but many langauges consider these meaningfully distinct sounds and would not use one in the place of the other. In English, there's also the issue that certain dialects will consistantly pronounce letters differently, such as the way rhotic and nonrhotic dialects deal with the letter "R". Which situation better describes what you are going after?--Jayron32 02:51, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, using an example we're not familiar with can make it much more difficult to figure out what is happening just because there's not enough information. However, based on your description alone, it sounds like you're describing a case of free variation. Voikya (talk) 03:09, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

OP may need to clarify what he means by 湖 being pronounced as either "hu" or "fu". Do you mean this changes by context (as Jayron32) described? Or do you mean that it always comes out as something between "hu" and "fu"? I ask because some speakers of southern dialects pronounce the Mandarin "h" sound as something like "f" because those two sounds do not exist as distinct sounds in their native dialects. This is similar to the well-known phenomenon of "r" and "l" being undistinguished in Japanese. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 11:47, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Meaning of Czech name: Ořešila

Does such a name exist? Would it have been used in the 16th century? What does is it mean? (I suspect 'nut' - is this correct?) Also, is the given spelling correct? Thanks, Ratzd'mishukribo (talk) 15:54, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Never heard of such a name, but it does not sound impossible. The meaning or etymology is not clear to me, it could be derived from ořech "nut", but it could also have something to do with řešit "to solve", or it could be a mangled form of some name of foreign origin. The spelling looks OK.—Emil J. 16:20, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I should have made the purpose of my question clearer. I encountered references to a 16th-century woman, a prominent member of the Jewish community of Prague, whose Yiddish/German name was Nüssel, i.e. nut (in diminutive form). Hebrew sources quote Czech documents that give her name as "אורשילה", which later sources interpret as "Ursila", a variant of Ursula. This seemed unlikely to me (in fact, historians who did not see the Jewish community records and knew her only by her Czech name stated with certainty that her Jewish name "must have been" 'Reizel' or something like that. However, I thought I may have found a more plausible explanation. Ratzd'mishukribo (talk) 16:51, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, that's intriguing. Do the Czech documents quoted in the Hebrew sources still exist, or are they only known through the Hebrew quotation? Otherwise I don't think this is solvable more reliably than guesswork. Nüssel does not have a native Czech equivalent as a name; the literal translation of the word (preserving the diminutive) would be oříšek, but being a masculine noun, this is unsuitable for a woman's name. In view of this, I can well imagine someone inventing Ořešila as a translation of the name, it's cute enough after all. That is, your explanation is possible, and I tend to agree with your sentiment that it is more likely than a mangled version of the name of a Catholic saint, but as I said, all this is just guesswork. The only Google hits I got for something like Ořešila used as a name are [1][2][3][4], none of which seems to have anything to do with anything Czech.—Emil J. 18:32, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

The documents definitely still exist; I have a recent (90's?) book written by a researcher who saw them in the Prague archives. He goes so for as to give a precise reference to at least one mention of her name: "Manuscript 2118 folio 398b". As I mentioned, older (more careless) researchers rendered her name in a way that suggests a German variant of Ursula, but not this recent transcription (who seems, throughout his book, to have examined the archives quite thoroughly). Ratzd'mishukribo (talk) 21:48, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

洋 (Japanese)

Hi, does anyone know the history of how in Japanese the character 洋 came to mean both "ocean" and "Western" (in the sense of European/American)? 86.161.85.97 (talk) 20:47, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

There are two words 東洋 and 西洋. According to this page, the origin of the word 西洋 seems to be China. 洋 means Western in Chinese too. See this. And there is a ja idiom, 洋の東西を問わず. See [5] and [6]. 西洋 is shortened to 洋 and used to mean Western. 東洋 is not shortened. Probably because it is less used in daily life. Most of the time people use country names like "中華風/a Chinese style" instead of Oriental as Japan is also a part of 東洋. A word 洋楽 might be a good example. It is a shortened form of 西洋音楽 and the meaning is Western music. Oda Mari (talk) 06:30, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

[edit conflict] The word has the same two meanings in Chinese as well as Japanese, so that's where it probably comes from. The "ocean" meaning came first, as you can see from this page (use the tabs to see the definition from 2 old Chinese dictionaries, the Kangxi Dictionary and Shuowen_Jiezi); I don't have a reliable source but the second meaning is probably because foreigners came from over the ocean. Oda Mari's explanation is more likely to be correct 59.108.42.46 (talk) 06:39, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

In Chinese (and I'm quite certain the sequence in Japanese usage is broadly the same) 洋 means "ocean", and from thus, "overseas". Lands over the seas are classified according to the direction from which one travels, over the seas, to reach them. Thus 西洋 means the "western ocean" or "land(s) beyond the western ocean", 東洋 means the "eastern ocean" or "land(s) beyond the eastern ocean", 南洋 means the "southern ocean" of "land(s) beyond the southern ocean". 北洋 only means the "northern ocean" but not "land(s) beyond the northern ocean" since there were no lands that were reached by crossing an ocean towards the north.

With me so far? Now to map these words to actual locations - these meanings changed as Chinese maritime exploration progressed. In the Ming dynasty, 西洋 or the (land beyond) the western ocean meant lands to the west of (approximately) Brunei, since Brunei was the country reached by sailing directly south from the south coast of China. Thus, large portions of south-east Asia, India, and the east coast of Africa, would have been seen as "(land beyond) the western ocean" - hence why the voyages of Cheng Ho were known as 下西洋, "down the western ocean". Over time, as China came into contact with Europeans in the modern era, who by and large also came to China through the "western ocean", Europe was added to the set of lands that was "beyond the western ocean". Eventually, due to the cultural dominance of Europeans in other parts of the world, 西洋 came to mean the whole world other than Japan and South-East Asia (see below), as more of a cultural concept than a geographic one. It was this expansion in scope of the "western Ocean" that led to 洋 gradually displacing 西洋 as meaning "Western" rather than just "foreign".

東洋, or the eastern ocean, on the other hand, has almost always meant Japan. Other nearby states such as Korea or Ryukyu were not included in 東洋, since they were close vassals of China and so were not strictly "foreign".

南洋, or the southern ocean, meant those lands which lay south of China, and included the Phillipines, modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia, and sometimes Indochina as well. The Nanyang Archipelago is roughly the same as the Indonesian archipelago.

However, in the Qing Dynasty (and continuing into the early Republic of China era), 南洋 also had an alternative meaning. For the purposes of regulating international trade, the Qing government divided the country into two zones. The Minister of Beiyang Commerce ("Commerce of the Northern Ocean") was in charge of trade and, at times, foreign affairs in the northern part of the country, while the Minister of Nanyang Commerce ("Commerc of the Southern Ocean") was the counterpart for the southern part of the country. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:16, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks for the great answers folks. Very interesting. 81.151.33.21 (talk) 12:35, 21 January 2011 (UTC)