Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 December 3

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December 3

I want to translate from Albanian into English.

Hello!

I am a volunteer translator for Wikipedia, translating from English->Albanian. How can I do the opposite, translate from Albanian into English?

Albi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Albi Ndoni (talk • contribs) 16:34, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the offer. Pick an article at [1] that doesn't have an equivalent article in English and make an English version of it. --Viennese Waltz 16:52, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

But do be aware of translation, and also of your first article. English Wikipedia's policies may not be the same as sq-wiki's, so a straight translation of a sq-wiki article will not necessarily be acceptable in en-wiki. --ColinFine (talk) 17:09, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Back vowels

I've noticed that in many languages, the words for "shame"/"disgrace" have 1-2 syllables and the accent falls on the back vowel: "honte", "Schande", "sram"... Do they have some common ancestor, is the kiki-bouba effect at play here or is this just a random coincidence that just so happens to be for the words for this particular abstract concept? 93.136.76.86 (talk) 18:21, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

I doubt there's any very meaningful connection, but you shouldn't leave out Hebrew "bosheth" -- some names in the Hebrew Bible have the word "bosheth" substituted for an original pagan deity name (see Ish-bosheth), while others have the vowels of "bosheth" substituted for their original vowels, which is probably why the deity whose name was originally the Semitic word for king ends up as "Molech" in the Hebrew Bible (see Moloch). AnonMoos (talk) 21:56, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Does "bosheth" have the accent on "o"? I don't speak any Hebrew but from hearing it I thought it only had the accent on the last syllable (kind of like French). 93.142.93.173 (talk) 16:00, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

At an early period (before 1,000 B.C.) Hebrew had penultimate-syllable stress, but then the word-final short inflectional vowels (what in Arabic are called i'rab) were generally deleted, so that Biblical Hebrew words came to have final-syllable stress in the majority of cases -- but by no means all. Bosheth is in fact a segholate noun, so in the singular unsuffixed form it has penultimate stress... AnonMoos (talk) 17:04, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

P.S. To the degree that French has stress, it falls on the syllable with the last NON-SCHWA VOWEL in a word (or more commonly actually on the syllable with the last non-schwa vowel in a group of words pronounced together as a closely-connected phrase), so French stress isn't always on the ultimate syllable either. AnonMoos (talk) 17:12, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

One thing to think about is if such a pattern exists, whether the pattern is due to what linguists call a genetic relationship between the languages. This is not a biological relationship (like a DNA thing... it isn't that) but rather it indicates the languages are part of the same language family; thus similar patterns in such words may indicate that all of the languages descend from (for example) the Proto-Indo-European language or something like that. --Jayron32 13:23, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Well they all have different PIE roots, that was the first thing I looked at. It would have to be something older than that if that's the reason. 93.142.93.173 (talk) 16:00, 7 December 2019 (UTC) (OP)

If it's a "kiki-bouba" type thing or ideophone effect, then it would not necessarily have to be old (if there's any real connection at all, that is). AnonMoos (talk) 17:07, 7 December 2019 (UTC)