Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 April 25

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April 25

Ancient Greek Seas

Did the Caspian Sea and the Atlantic Ocean have a specific name in the Ancient greek language? Thank you! 82.52.31.81 (talk) 14:51, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

As noted at the Wikipedia article titled Atlantic Ocean (which you linked and presumably read), in the first section after the lead, titled "Toponymy" discusses several ancient Greek names for the Atlantic Ocean. In the Wikipedia article Caspian Sea, under the "Etymology" section, it states "Among Greeks and Persians in classical antiquity it was the Hyrcanian ocean." which is, admittedly, not referenced to a great source. However This source and This source are far better and confirm the name. --Jayron32 15:09, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your quick answer! How would you write "Hyrcanian Ocean" in Ancient Greek (I mean translated and written in the Ancient Greek alphabet)? --82.52.31.81 (talk) 15:17, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

This has the spelling of Hyrcania as Ὑρκανία, which matches the Wikipedia article. Presumably something like " Ὑρκανίασ θάλασσα", Herkanias Thalassa, though I'm not 100% sure I have gotten the adjectival form of Hyrcania correct here. Someone who knows a bit more about Ancient Greek can probably correct that better. This suggests the people who lived there were known by the demonym Ὕρκανοι, Hyrkanoi, which in Latin was Hyrcani. this source is an english translation that contains the word Hyrcanian, which in this greek text is written Ὑρκανοὺς, Hyrkanous. So perhaps Ὑρκανοὺς θάλασσα, Hyrkanous Thalassa, would be the best option for Hyrcanian Ocean. --Jayron32 16:20, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

According to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, ancient Greeks called it Κασπία θάλαττα and Κάσπιον πέλαγος and Ὑρκανία θάλαττα.(There's a scanning error or something in that last one on the Pegasus Project page; I've supplied Ὑ rather than Γ as the initial letter.)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Deor (talk • contribs)

Good find. I tried only looking under Hyrcania there. It appears both "Hyrcanian" and "Caspian" we in use. --Jayron32 16:54, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Also, I'm pretty sure the scanning error was much worse than you presumed, φάλαττα is probably supposed to be θάλαττα, thalatta, the attic form of thalassa, ocean. See [1]. The φ, phalatta or falatta seems to be gibberish. --Jayron32 16:57, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

My error as well as a scanning error. I just stupidly grabbed the wrong letter in the dropdown Greek menu at the bottom of the edit window when I was trying to fix up what the reference had. Deor (talk) 17:04, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Depending on whether the sea would have been named after the landscape (Ὑρκανία, Hyrcania) or after the people (Ὑρκανοί, Hyrcanoi), it would be Ὑρκανίας θάλασσα, Sea of Hyrcania, or Ὑρκανών θάλασσα, Sea of the Hyrcanoi. In both cases the case has to be genitive, hence not -ους, but -ων. Another detail is that in this part of the Ancient Greek world, it would probably be θάλαττα (thalatta) instead of θάλασσα (thalassa), cf. Thalatta! Thalatta!. --T*U (talk) 16:58, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

In Ὑρκανία θάλαττα the first word is an adjective. This source states, "Ὑρκανία θάλαττα is sometimes used in the sense of Caspian Sea; sometimes it merely indicates the eastern part of it."  --Lambiam 21:20, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Is how gendered a language is a measurable quantity?

I often hear that English is less gendered a language than Hebrew or Spanish or Hebrew as for English, boy and girl can be simply switched out in "The tall boy quickly jumps onto the green horse" where in other languages, putting in girl for boy can change other words. Additionally in some languages horse and sheep may be gendered (not the gender of the animal) causing green to have different forms for each. Are there any ways of quantifying this, so that Spanish gets an 8.6, Hebrew a 9.5 and English a 2.4 (to make up random numbers). Presuming there is some way of measuring it (or even looked at subjectively), what languages are "less" gendered than English? Naraht (talk) 19:47, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

If a language has different words for a male parent and for a female parent, is it gendered? Or if it has different words for a male monarch and for a female monarch? Apart from such things, the only aspect in which modern English is gendered is in the singular third-person pronouns and personal determiners (he/she/it, him/her/it, and so on) where the first two of each triple have to agree with the natural (non-grammatical) gender of the implied referent (not counting the affectation of referring to ships as she). In many other languages, all nouns have a grammatical gender, and there may be grammar rules requiring that various parts of speech (articles, adjectives, verbs) "agree" – that is, assume different forms accordingly. For more, see Agreement (linguistics) § Gender. Different gendered languages have different gender systems; see Grammatical gender § Gender contrasts. One measure of how gendered a language is, is the number of genders (sometimes called noun classes). Tuyuca may be the record holder in the number of classes. Another measure is the number of parts of speech that need to agree, but it is not always clear how to count this. (For French, it is articles, personal possessive determiners, adjectives and participles, but one can say they are just all modifiers.) The product of these two measures is an indication of the complexity. There are also many languages that have no grammatical gender at all, including Afrikaans, English, Persian and Turkish. Turkish also has no natural gender for pronouns; the pronoun o stands for he/she/it.  --Lambiam 20:32, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Lambiam -- As far as I know, just about every language in the world has different basic stems to express the meanings "mother" and "father", except a small number of Polynesian languages, which have one word to express "mother", "father", "uncle", "aunt", and other non-in-law relations of one's parental generation. The Hawaiian word is makua, but of course this can be differentiated by suffixes (makuahine "mother, aunt" vs. makua kāne "father, uncle"), just as English can differentiate "male cousin" and "female cousin". Esperanto has a very unnatural system, where the word for "mother" (patrino) is bizarrely formed by adding a feminine suffix to the word for "father" (patro)! AnonMoos (talk) 10:36, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

I've occasionally idly wondered which was more gendered, English of the first half of the 20th century, which had separate "he" and "she" pronouns, but a small and declining number of nouns distinguished by sex, or Finnish of the first half of the 20th century, which had no female/male pronoun distinctions whatsoever, but where it was pretty much obligatory to add the female -tar/-tär suffix onto nationality, occupation, and agent nouns referring to women. I don't have any answer which could be expressed as a numerical point score. AnonMoos (talk) 10:54, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

OP. I know there are some elements of gender in just about all languages, but English seems to have chucked most of them to the curb, though the Turkish o seems to have us beat in that particular area. As an English native speaker (with *minimal* knowledge of other languages), noun classes just make my head hurt.:) Naraht (talk) 14:09, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

In Japanese, male and female speech often diverge significantly, although that might not be gendering in the strictest sense(?) I.e. the words for "you" differ depending on the adresser, not the adressee. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:58, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Same with Thai, e.g. for ”hello”, a male speaker would add “khrap” where a female would add “kha”:

1. สวัสดี ครับ (sawatdee khrap)
2. สวัสดี ค่ะ (sawatdee kha)

cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 02:52, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Burmese has two polite terms of address similar to English "sir" and "ma'am", except that in English the choice between them is determined by the gender identity of the addressee and in Burmese by the gender identity of the speaker. Men address people of all genders as ခင်ဗျာ hkămya, while women address them as ရှင် shin. I have no idea what Burmese-speaking enbies do. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:08, 28 April 2023 (UTC)