Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 June 4

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June 4

Harappan Seals Website

I would like a Sanskrit scholar to evaluate my website, Harappan Seals, to determine whether my partial decipherment of Harappan could be valid.

http://harappanseals.piczo.com/?nsrc=none&g=42827102&pg=y&cr=2

Thanks in advance, S. M. Sullivan -- 02:03, 4 June 2010 User:S. M. Sullivan

It could be considered quite problematic to try to connect such signs with Brahmi script letters, since there's no real evidence that Brahmi script predates the Persian empire's adoption of Aramaic as its official administrative language ca. 500 BC (which would have been the first time that there had been significant use of alphabetic writing in areas very closely adjacent to the areas of Indian civilization). What was happening between 1500 BC and 500 BC that would have allowed any kind of continuous tradition to be maintained for a thousand years connecting fallen Harappan civilization with future alphabets? AnonMoos (talk) 03:46, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Brahmi isn't an alphabet, it is a syllabary writing system, as are most Indian writing systems. It's very unlikely that a syllabary evolved from an alphabetic system, what usually happens is that you have a system with pictograms, which simplifies into a syllabary, which develops into an alphabet over time. What was happening in Harappa 1500 BC - 500 BC? Supposedly the Indo-Aryan invasion took place c 1500 BC, but DNA evidence does not support this. People did vanish from Harappan towns during this time period. Since Assyrian power reached a height around 1200 BC, I'm guessing the Assyrians took the Harappans away as slaves. They had a habit of doing this to their neighbors. While you are not a Sanskrit scholar, I see from your user page that you know Arabic. Would you take a look at the seals and see if you recognize any Semitic names? They could be personal or place names, as I am finding. (I should really ask an Assyriologist, but since you responded, maybe you can help.)

One more thing, before you reply again, please read the whole site. You will find many photos of the seals in question toward the end. S. M. Sullivan (talk) 02:56, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

According to the best modern linguistic criteria, Indic writing systems are NOT considered syllabaries, since in a true syllabary, the syllables KA, KI, and KU, for example will be written with completely distinct glyphs, so that it's not possible to separate out any common visual "K" grapheme from these three written signs (and similarly, it's not possible to separate out any common visual "U" grapheme from the three written signs "KU", "TU", "PU"). Take a glance at my previous remarks on Talk:Baybayin, and look at the article on the Japanese kana writing systems to see what a real syllabary looks like. Furthermore, to get at the Indus valley, the Assyrians would have had to conquer Iran, which intervenes between Mesopotamia and the Indus -- and there's no evidence that they ever did so. In any case, the rise of Assyria occurred after the downfall of Indus valley civilization. And the problem with trying to find Arabic names is that Arabic phonology is heavily-dependent on distinctions involving emphatic consonants, guttural consonants, and a number of other contrasts which are unlikely to be represented in any writing system devised to represent a Dravidian language -- which means that it would extremely problematic to use resemblance to Arabic names to try to support an incomplete and insecure decipherment. Also, the evidence is that during the second millennium BC, Arabs were pretty much confined to Arabia... AnonMoos (talk) 10:59, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I've been trying to think of an example of a syllabary which developed into an alphabet, and I haven't been able to find one. It wouldn't surprise me if you can find one, but I don't think your "syllabary, which develops into an alphabet over time" is valid as a generalisation. --ColinFine (talk) 22:39, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

As far as we have semi-solid evidence, there's no real reason to believe that the principle of alphabetic writing was invented from scratch more than once -- when the slightly peculiar Egyptian writing system (not particularly a syllabary) influenced the creation of a consonantal alphabet used to write a Semitic language, probably before 1500 B.C. All subsequent alphabets (even if the letter shapes were completely new, as in Ogham and Hangul) were invented by people who knew about the existence of other alphabetic writing systems... AnonMoos (talk) 03:44, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Since you do not know any Sanskrit, and evidently have not read the site as I asked, please let someone else take this query.S. M. Sullivan (talk) 05:07, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I actually know a little Sanskrit (mainly that which is most directly relevant to the linguistic reconstruction of certain features of Proto-Indo European), though I'm not sure how important that is in the current context. More pertinent is that I have enough general linguistic and basic historical knowledge for several of your assertions to raise red flags. And the more that you indulge in fanciful pseudo-history (such as the Assyrian conquest of Mohenjo-Daro), the less is my desire to carefully read through your site... AnonMoos (talk) 13:35, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Afination?

Is there such word as afination or affination in English? As in the tuning of an instrument.. Thanks for any help 188.81.143.212 (talk) 17:27, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

There's this word [1] to do with purifying and separating.87.102.32.39 (talk) 20:25, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

... and the Wiktionary entry, but no mention of tuning instruments. This is usually just called fine tuning, but the term "afination" does seem to be used occasionally, especially for guitars. Is it borrowed from another language? (I thought it might be French but they don't have it in Wiktionnaire.) Dbfirs 22:26, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

In Portguese it's 'Afinação' and probably similar in a few other latin based languages... I'm living in Portugal now which is what sparked my interest.. Thanks for the help 188.82.154.246 (talk) 13:03, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Đ & Ð

Looking at MediaWiki talk:Edittools, I was surprised to see that there's a discussion about having different buttons for these characters. When I link to them, I see that Đ is a D with a stroke and Ð is an edh; however, I can't quite imagine why we distinguish them. Why don't we just say that Serbo-Croatian and Icelandic use the same character with somewhat different miniscule forms and significantly different pronunciations? Nyttend (talk) 17:31, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Because Unicode distinguishes them. Capital D with a stroke is U+0110 and capital edh is U+00D0. They may look alike to the human eye, but they're semantically different and so to computers they're as different as D and E. If you do a Google search or a word search in Microsoft Word for a Croatian or Vietnamese word written with capital edh, or for an Icelandic word written with capital D with a stroke, you won't find it. And Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias automatically switch between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets - they know to switch between capital D with a stroke in Latin and Ђ in Cyrillic, but if you use capital edh, the software won't know what to do with it. +Angr 18:10, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, there's a third one: Ɖ is U+0189, capital African D. One reason for keeping the three separate may be that their lowercase equivalents all look different: lowercase d with a stroke is đ, lowercase edh is ð, and lowercase African d is ɖ. So if you want your software to convert capital letters to lower case, you have to keep the three capitals distinct so the software knows which lowercase letter to convert it to. +Angr 18:14, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

If I'm not mistaken, that's the same matter as distinguishing Latin Oo, Cyrillic Оо, and Greek Οο. --Магьосник (talk) 01:00, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

But why was Unicode programmed this way? Nyttend (talk) 01:14, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

The fact that they have separate lowercase forms was probably the most important factor. There are explanations of the reasons why Unicode "lumps" some things and "splits" others on the Unicode site itself... AnonMoos (talk) 10:32, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Since you brought up the African D, I read Voiced retroflex plosive and listened to the sound sample. How is this type of consonant different from the "D" as used in English? Peter Isotalo's sound sample sounds identical to the "D" that I use in my American English speech. Nyttend (talk) 01:18, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

The place of articulation is a little different. The English d is a voiced alveolar plosive, which means the tongue tip touches the alveolar ridge. In a retroflex sound, the place where the tongue tip touches the roof of the mouth is further back, closer to the top of the hard palate. The t's and d's of a stereotypical Indian English accent are retroflex rather than alveolar. +Angr 12:57, 5 June 2010 (UTC)