Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 October 23

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

October 23

Questions about the Cyrillic alphabet

1. Why are there special letters for soft vowels that differ from those for hard vowels?? (Example: A looks like an A; Ya looks like a backwards R)
2. Why was the Cyrillic I derived from eta as opposed to iota??
3. How did the letter Zhe get its alphabetization??
4. Why is there a special letter for the super-affricate shch?? (For curiosity, do any languages using the Latin alphabet use a single letter for a super-affricate??) Georgia guy (talk) 01:30, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Many articles we have on Cyrillic letters describe their history. For just one example, based on your first question, I found Ya (Cyrillic), which describes how the character evolved over time. If you go to the Wikipedia article titled Cyrillic script, and look around the middle of the article, there's a large table with clickable links for each Cyrillic letter. I would start there to help you research the answers to your questions, and if THAT is unsatisfactory, then I would use the sources and references for those articles as the next place to look. --Jayron32 12:23, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- remember that the Cyrillic alphabet was originally devised for Old Church Slavonic, not for Russian. In fact, letters derived from both Greek Eta and Greek Iota existed in spelling Russian until the Iota letter was abolished soon after the Bolsheviks took power (see Reforms of Russian orthography). Letters for y-preceded vowels were the way that was chosen to write the palatalized or "soft" consonants which were a basic part of the phonology of Slavic languages... AnonMoos (talk) 19:22, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

See Iotation#Orthography for coverage of the latter. No such user (talk) 10:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Regarding Щ, see Shcha, ru:Щ, Russian phonology and ru:Русская фонетика. In Russian, the pronunciation [ɕtɕ] (soft sh + soft ch) is dated, while [ɕː] (long soft sh) is now the standard. The same goes for a few letter combinations such as ЗЧ, СЧ, ШЧ, ЗЩ, СЩ, although some of them are still pronounced [ɕtɕ] in certain words. Turns out that contemporary mainstream Russian has [tɕ] (Ч), [ɕː] and [ɕtɕ], but no simple [ɕ].

In Ukrainian and Rusyn, the Щ indeed represents [ʃtʃ] (sh + ch), while in Bulgarian it's [ʃt] (sh + t). All other languages currently using it are non-Slavic and use it in loanwords only.

And I think that no language uses a single Latin letter for a "super-affricate", unless some language in some weird special case does. --Theurgist (talk) 22:27, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

@Theurgist: Russian [ɕː] may become shortened in certain environments, e.g. word-finally. Щ is used in native words of some languages, mostly North Caucasian (long /ʃː/ in Avar, Lak, and "soft" /ɕ/ in Adyghe, Kabardian, Abaza).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:33, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

@Georgia guy: 1) Initially they were combinations of two Greek letters: ΙΑ, ΙΕ, ΙΟΥ. The latter was shortened to ΙΟ very early on, so there are no written examples of ΙΟΥ (ІОУ) in Slavic texts; another reason for that there was no /jo/ combination in Slavic at that time. Further evolutions happened: (1) Because Ꙗ, Ѩ, Ѧ started to sound the same, Ѧ was chosen as a more economic way of writing. Later it has evolved into Я. The mirrored similarity with Latin R is deliberate, because Peter I the Great while reforming the Russian alphabet wanted it look as close to Latin as possible. However, Ꙗ is still written word-initially in modern Church Slavonic by tradition. (2) Е didn't happen after vowels in native Slavic words as well as word-initially, so practically there were no reasons to write Ѥ (or rather it looked like ІЕ), hence it was abandoned. However, during the following centuries Russian have borrowed a lot of loanwords (mainly from Greek and Latin), so a need arose to write non-iotated /e/. The letter Э was invented. (3) Latter in Russian the vowel /e/ had changed into /o/ in certain environments. At first, in the 18th century, they tried to write ІО. However, in 1783 the letter Ё was invented by the example of the German umlauts (in Russian this vowel alternation Е/Ё works somewhat similarly). (4) ІО didn't change much, but it became one letter Ю early on.

2) Most probably because the iota was used for the above-mentioned combinations.

3) Nobody knows, really. Probably because it sounds like the zeta.

4) The same, nobody really knows.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 17:25, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Irregardless and the like

Whether or not irregardless is a solecism, it's interesting. I think that most native speakers of English would regard the prefix as superfluous, and yet the result sounds natural and is easy to understand for most of us. I've occasionally noticed similar affixation elsewhere, though offhand I can't come up with examples. Is there a term in lexical semantics for this kind of thing? ("This kind of thing" meaning, I suppose, something like: "affixation by analogy for semantic effect, (ir)regardless of the fact that the desired meaning is already there;" though this perhaps could be improved.) More.coffy (talk) 02:08, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Irregardless is used as a synonym for regardless, but it's actually an antonym. How deeply do you want to get into this? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:26, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

(antonym) Do you mean as a synonym for "not without regard for"? I can't imagine anyone using it in this sense and expecting to be understood. Jmar67 (talk) 19:34, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm saying "irregardless" is used as a synonym for "regardless", but as a word it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:12, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Some times the same affix can mean both "intensifier" and "negation". Consider "in-". For "Inflammable" it means "very able to burn", where "in-" is an intensifier, but for "inanimate" it means "not animate". --Jayron32 12:31, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Etymology doesn't determine meaning, but for what etymology is worth, "in-" is not an intensifier. And as an L1 speaker of 20th/21st-century English, I have never thought that "in-" in "inflame", "inflammatory", "inflammable", etc was an intensifier. Rather, it's "en-". Oh, hello, RMW Dixon calls the latter (when attached to verbs, as in "enwrap", etc) an intensifier (Making New Words, p.188). Well well. -- Hoary (talk) 13:20, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Tell that to the in-famous El Guapo. --Trovatore (talk) 00:32, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Note the origins of "infamous".[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:37, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

If you haven't seen the film, you're not going to get it. Probably not worth explaining here. But definitely worth seeing the movie. --Trovatore (talk) 00:43, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Jayron32 -- It's not the "same affix" but two prefixes which have fallen together in pronunciation in Latin -- see Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2007_September_9#Confusion_about_in-_and_un-... AnonMoos (talk) 13:38, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Our page on pleonasm gives this as an example of morphemic pleonasm. Is that what you mean? Beware however: that section cites no sources and the phrase morphemic pleonasm isn't one I remember having heard before. --Antiquary (talk) 21:21, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the move, User:JackofOz. I'd like to respond there but unfortunately I'm not authorized to do so. I fear that responding here will just make more work for somebody, but I beg your patience. Could somebody please put this in the Language page, in the section on "irregardless"? Thanks?

User:Baseball Bugs, I suppose some may say that (among many other examples) "awful" is another word that doesn't "stand up to scrutiny": it "should" mean "filled with awe", "bringing about awe", or similar; although ignoramuses use it in a very different way. However, a word is defined by its uses, like them or not--and Tim Moore is no ignoramus, and was right to title an (amusing) book of his You are awful (but I like you) with "awful" meaning "crappy".

I may have expressed myself obscurely; apologies if I did. But User:Antiquary understood what I meant. Thank you, Antiquary; though I agree with you on the quality of the article you point me to.

Here's another example. If we ignore capitalization, the great majority of recent uses of out-trump mean something like "more Trumplike than." But a large minority have nothing whatever to do with POTUS. Instead, it's a verb that's seemingly a synonym of the verb trump (in figurative use, away from the card table), created by analogy with outbid, etc. I haven't looked up out-trump and trump in the OED, but in today's English the prefix out here seems utterly redundant. Etymology aside, irregardless and [lowercase]] out-trump seem to belong together. More.coffy (talk) 08:13, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

The word "awesome" has come to be a replacement for the original meaning of "awful". For "irregardless", I figure the ones who say that also say "overexaggerate" and "I could care less." They probably also caused the need to invent "flammable" because they thought "inflammable" meant "non-flammable". As for proper names, they lend themselves to all sorts of plays-on-words: Nix on Nixon. Good news / Bad news / Agnews. Dump the Hump. Ronald Ray-Gun. "Lick Bush". And so on. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:10, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

I thought I'd look in Google Scholar for irregardless. My findings: (i) Whatever "language experts" and the like may care to believe, it's widely used. (ii) There's a fair amount of piffle written about it by "language experts". Example (from the Illinois Bar Journal, no less): "Regard/regards: Regard is a word. Regards just isn't. Regardless/irregardless: Regardless is a word. Irregardless isn't (and I find it particularly annoying)." -- Hoary (talk) 13:20, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. Tony (talk) 13:25, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

"Regards" is a word.[2] I would say it's most commonly used with a signature on a letter: "Kind regards", "Best regards", etc. A plural for emphasis, kind of like "many thanks". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:30, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

• I refer people to the book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper, where you will find an entire chapter of 16 pages on the word irregardless (and the related issue of condemning other people's usage as wrong). One thing I was surprised to learn there is that there are people who use the word irregardless, not just to mean "regardless", but as an intensive (emphatic) variation of "regardless". --76.69.46.228 (talk) 09:03, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
  • "Regardless" means "without regard" and "irregardless" means "not without regard". It's safe to say that most everyone who uses it means "regardless" rather than "not without regard". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Bugs, can you cite a single dictionary that defines "irregardless" as meaning "not without regard"? You can't just invent a meaning for a word based on what you personally think it _should_ mean based on its morphology. A word's meaning is defined by how it is used, and "irregardless" is simply a synonym for "regardless", according to The Cambridge Dictionary [3], Mirriam-Webster [4], Oxford Dictionaries [5], and dictionary.com [6] CodeTalker (talk) 17:48, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Just to complement the above post, see also etymological fallacy. Words don't mean what their parts or history indicate they should. Words mean what they are used to mean. --Jayron32 17:52, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

EO calls it an "erroneous word".[7] If someone said "irregardless" to my face, I'd be inclined to ask them which elementary school they dropped out of. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:53, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

For the case where a word contains two negative elements one of which has to be ignored, as with irregardless, the name is apparently redundant, expletive, or pleonastic negation [8], though Dr Johnson preferred the expression “barbarous ungrammatical conjunction of two negatives” [9]. For the general case I'm still going with pleonasm, which is usually applied to phrases but can apply to single words. One of the OED's definitions of pleonastic is "Of a syllable, word, or phrase: superfluous or redundant" (my emphasis). --Antiquary (talk) 17:17, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, 76.69.46.228, for pointing me toward the book by Kory Stamper. (I hadn't heard of it or her.)

Baseball Bugs, "ASCII" (for example) is a technical term. If I say that this or that IBM 8-bit code page is "extended ASCII", then I'm using "ASCII" as many people used to do, yet I'm using it erroneously, and you'd be right to say so. By contrast, irregardless is not a technical term. We have plenty of evidence that it's widely used, with the meaning "regardless". When I think of this, I find it mildly amusing. I exercise my freedom not to use the longer word. Yet I don't see how a well-established word can be erroneous, and certainly I don't insult those who use it.

Thank you again, Antiquary. As I think more about this, I come up with more examples. There's lesser (which of course occupies a quite different niche from those of less, which can't substitute for it). And close to it (though different) are farthermost, lowermost, and the like. More.coffy (talk) 09:01, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Don't overexaggerate your case. "They're", "their" and "there" are also widely used interchangeably, but that doesn't mean it should be encouraged in school. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:55, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

I've said previously that language change almost always proceeds from error and continues in ignorance, until such time as it achieves unimpeachable lexicographical authority, at which point we embrace it. Some words and usages once considered dead wrong are now fully accepted (and vice-versa); others have yet to gain acceptance.

For example, it's rare these days to see the intransitive verb "lie" used in the sense of a person resting flat on a bed; most people say "lay" in the present tense (he was laying down, rather than he was lying down; etc.). "Lay" traditionally meant to place something down flat (it's also the past tense of "lie", which does confuse matters, but anglophones are normally more than a match for tricks like that). Some of us old timers still object to this misuse of a transitive verb used in an intransitive construction, but the weight of numbers is making us increasingly marginalised, and there will no doubt come a time when we will have to capitulate (probably through gritted teeth). However, "irregardless" is not yet at that stage, and may never get there; a lot of people say it but it is still widely regarded as an error, and we can happily object to our hearts' content. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:39, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

How long will it be before "there" and "their" are the same thing? For that matter, how long before "our" and "are" are the same; and "have" and "of" are the same? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:12, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Never, I hope. They're [sic] still stuck at error and ignorance. Not all widespread errors lead to language change. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:21, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

I dunno. At our office some years ago, someone had posted a sign saying "Help Keep Are Break Room Clean." When I ridiculed that, I was told I was being "picky". All I could do was weep for the younger generation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:59, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it's become sort of un-OK to note, correct, comment on the spelling/grammar mistakes of others, in social contexts. The rule there now seems to be: "If the meaning is clear, it is completely immaterial and unimportant how the message is spelt, and unhelpful and pedantic to draw attention to so-called errors". God knows how we ever got to such a point culturally, but there it is. On the other hand, if you were a book reviewer, or if you received an official letter from the government, or if someone erected a huge sign on a building or public structure, and the author made such an error, you'd be well within your rights to draw attention to it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:29, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

One I forgot to mention is the proper possessive "its" vs. the pseudo-possessive "it's". That's an easy mistake to make when typing. The scary part is the segment of the population that doesn't seem to care. :( ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:15, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

The new rule for apostrophes seems to be: If traditional spelling says leave it out, then put it in. And vice-versa. Hence, "I own two house's, but neither is as big as my mothers house". "Its amazing how many people cant get there apostrophe's right". And other such ugh!-ness. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 03:59, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Much of the blame can probably be laid on newcomers to the English language, such as Asian students. In this edit, I'm heading towards 3RR edit war with someone, presumably Asian, who insists on "speeded", probably because the "ed" suffix is the tense version that's almost always the rule for other verbs. Irregular forms may not survive this onslaught by new learners. Already, the word "sank" seems to have disappeared, as in "the boat sunk at its mooring". When you see these things in the MSM, it's too late. Akld guy (talk) 19:48, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

That doesn't account for the countless native-English speakers who use these erroneous words. "Speeded" at least makes sense. "There" instead of "their" (and vice versa) do not. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:27, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Reading the tail of this thread, I wonder about why a "reference desk" should host such chitchat.

1. I too would not insist on "speeded". But I'd hesitate before insisting on "sped". Why? Because I have evidence that "speeded" is established in English. COCA currently provides 299 examples of the latter: more than can be dismissed as flukes. The sources aren't merely conversation, but also Massachusetts Review, New England Review, History Today and so forth. Do please take a look.
2. As for the notion that "'There' instead of 'their' (and vice versa) do not [make sense]", of course they make sense. The very claim that one string of letters should instead be another string of letters shows that the former is interpreted as the latter and therefore that the former makes sense as the latter. Mutual interpretability is probably not a good argument for using the spellings interchangably, but if there are good reasons for retaining the conventional distinction (and I think that there are), then let's hear them, and not fictions.

You are, and I am, getting older. Language changes, and the English used by increasingly many people differs increasingly from yours and mine. This, in itself, doesn't make their different English erroneous or even bizarre. If the English that you and your acquaintances happen to speak is, for you, the only acceptable English, and if either looking for evidence or thinking these matters through dispassionately is onerous, then remember that this is a reference desk, not a bar or your living room, and at least qualify your comments with "in my own English" or similar. -- Hoary (talk) 07:43, 28 October 2018 (UTC)