Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 October 19

Language desk
< October 18 << Sep | October | Nov >> Current desk >
Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded 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 19

edit

What language does the following word sound like, to your ears?

edit

What another language does the word [ jira'ʃuha ] ( = yi-ra-shoo-ha) sound like, to your ears, besides Kinyarwanda/Kirundi (in which this word means "is heated" according to Goggle-Translate)?

I'm not only asking about the real languages this word belongs to, but also about real languages this word could hypothetically (i.e. phonetically/morphologically) belong to? Just as the Jabberwocky poem sounds like English, at least hypothetically, even though it's not really English.

GoogleTranslate identifies also the Swahili word [ira'ʃuha] (=i-ra-shoo-ha), which is phonetically pretty similar to the previous word (and which means "is overflowing").

2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 10:34, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's a genuine Hebrew word form, occurring twice in the Old Testament: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/yirashuha_3423.htm 147.234.66.217 (talk) 12:30, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The only language I can think of which would have <yi> as a diphthong [yi] is Finnish (and the <sh> rules that out) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 13:11, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
⟨y⟩ probably stands for IPA [j] (the palatal approximant) in the OP's transcription. Sol505000 (talk) 16:08, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Correct, I've just fixed it, according to your comment. 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 18:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds to me somewhat like a Glaswegian speaker accusing someone of being a farrier. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.68.252.202 (talk) 16:46, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What do you mean? What's the Galswegian word for a farrier (or for accusing of being one)? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 18:47, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"You're a shoer". Shells-shells (talk) 19:37, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This question is basically meaningless/unanswerable because how stress is realized varies by language and the IPA doesn't give you the wherewithal to specify how long each segment is. So [jiraˈʃuha] can be read to sound like virtually any language. Nardog (talk) 18:59, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
yirashuha can't sound like English, nor like Russian, French, Spanish, German, Greek, nor like any European language I'm aware of. 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 19:13, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Of course it can (except maybe French and Russian, which don't typically have [h]). If you're asking whether it's plausible as a word in the native vocabulary, then it's a different question. Nardog (talk) 19:27, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
How can [ jira'ʃuha ] ( = yi-ra-shoo-ha) sound like English? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 21:52, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Just with the prosody that an English quadrisyllable with penultimate stress would take—long/loud, short/quiet, long/loud, short/quiet, with a falling pitch over the last two syllables (if it is utterance-final)—and with a single contact [r] so it sounds more like [ɾ]. Nardog (talk) 22:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
yi occurs in Chinese most commonly as , one. Chinese doesn't use 'r' like that, But Japanese does. As a whole it looks a lot like Japanese as it breaks down into Mora but my knowledge of Japanese is too limited to identify what it might correspond to.--2A04:4A43:90AF:FAB6:B020:AD92:FF61:CC7C (talk) 22:26, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
While there is an i, there is no yi in Japanese. See Yi (kana). GalacticShoe (talk) 00:34, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For the phoneme spelt "yi" in pinyin, it's the same sound as /i/ (there are at least like 150 Chinese words pronounced like this). For pinyin "yin" and "ying", the pronunciation more closely matches the romanisation, with initial /ji–/ Folly Mox (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So what about [ira'ʃuha] (=i-ra-shoo-ha) ? 2A06:C701:7455:C600:5169:C2D6:AB07:4DE9 (talk) 07:24, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's possible. You could write it as いらしゅは (which would probably be transliterated as irashuha.) This doesn't have any standard/common meaning though. GalacticShoe (talk) 13:46, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]