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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 February 17

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February 17

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wanking

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Particularly in UK English, can anyone tell me if this is a male specific term, or does it apply reasonably equally to both genders? Is there a gender neutral term that is similarly concise and evocative? Something that is slang, not the multisyllabic clinical term. Thanks. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:3E6:D4AA:3598:E59B (talk) 09:24, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Afaik, it's a male-specific term. I've heard "frigging" being used for lady-wanking. That said, if you've ever heard the Sex Pistols' song "Frigging in the Rigging", most of the masturbating pirates in that are male. So, maybe it's not universal. Iloveparrots (talk) 09:34, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jacking? I would have interpreted frigging as a euphemism for fucking, though... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:50, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah I'd heard the term frigging but not in that female sense. I had thought jacking was male (maybe derived from ejaculation), and the female counterpart was jilling. I'm still looking for a gender neutral monosyllable. Hmm, does "cum" (as a verb) denote both male and female orgasm? Maybe I can use that. Thanks. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:3E6:D4AA:3598:E59B (talk) 13:20, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So, are you looking for a specifically female term, or a unisex term? I think jack can be unisex, such as in the Prince song 'Jack U off'. Cumming is orgasming, not masturbation. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:31, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pleasuring [oneself]? Not sure if you'd classify it as slang but it's concise and quite evocative: "she was caught in the greengrocers pleasuring herself with a cucumber". I too think of frigging as fucking, wikt:frigging has both uses. --2A04:4A43:906F:F3A7:8C7A:FE6F:89F9:AE8C (talk) 13:27, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I remember that the ribald webcomic "Sexy Losers" frequently used the onomatopoeiae 'fap' for male masturbation and 'shlick' for female masturbation, which somewhat caught on to get some usage outside of the strip. (For simplicity's sake, disregarding the old trans discussion as genitalia for identifying an individual.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:47, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I was just wondering whether "fap" was gender neutral and I guess it's not, oh well. Some version of "pleasuring oneself" is ok in principle (informal enough) but too long. I'll think of something, maybe a different approach. I'm trying to prank someone with an NSFW poem, so I have some flexibility with the imagery, but the scansion constraints are proving kind of hard. Thanks everyone. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:3E6:D4AA:3598:E59B (talk) 15:02, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My impression was that women who talked about such matters, often would appropriate traditionally male terms, since more traditionally female terms such as "pleasuring / caressing oneself" often come across as rather pompous and cheesy... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:34, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think "frigging" should work well for either gender. At least, it served that purpose in Victorian pornography. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 19:29, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sid Finch (2016) suggests, among others: "muff-buffing" and "playing the clitar". His etymology is a bit weak, though. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:42, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks everyone. I finished the poem without using this trope. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:4043:7961:893C:EC1 (talk) 06:44, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Although this has been answered, I wanted to give my thoughts: I am British and have seen and heard 'wanking' used a lot regardless of gender, although afaik it was originally male-only and some people may still see it this way. I have never heard of 'frigging' used in a similar way, and heard the other suggestions here a lot less, if at all, than 'wanking'. If you want to keep it UK-centric, 'wanking' is the way to go as far as I'm concerned. It will be understood certainly. Certainly Britannica and Cambridge Dictionary do not mention sex or gender, while Oxford English Dictionary ([1], [2]) notes '[esp. by]/[chiefly of] a male' but this is not the same as being restricted to males. Here are some examples of articles in the media using the term for women: [3] [4] [5] [6]. That all said, as the definitions suggest, the word is seen as fairly 'coarse' and offensive, so it also depends on what you are trying to get across. Irltoad (talk) 12:46, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Some questions about Ancient Greek

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1. How do the diphthongs υι and ου augment in verb tenses that augment the beginning of the word (i.e., the imperfect, aorist, and pluperfect)?

2. Some verbs with stems ending in plosives have an -αν suffix (exclusive to the present stem), which is commonly accompanied with a nasal infix inserted before the plosive in question (more specifically the nasal infix is ν before τ/δ/θ, μ before π/β/φ, γ before κ/γ/χ). [Reference is Complete Ancient Greek by Gavin Betts and Alan Henry, page 58.] Both this suffix and the nasal infix are deleted everywhere outside the present stem (though the imperfect tense tends to keep present stem suffixes). Since the aorist of these verbs also removes content from the middle of the stem, does that mean that all verbs that have this suffix and the accompanying nasal infix are strong aorist? Primal Groudon (talk) 16:21, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ad 1.: My grammar book (Bornemann & Risch: Griechische Grammatik) notes that augments for verbs with initial long vowel and ου remain unmarked. The example given is οὐτάςω with imperfect οὔταζον (hope the spirits breathings are correct, I find it impossible to tell them apart even after increasing the font size...). My dictionary has no verb with initial υι, so that part of the question is likely moot. --Wrongfilter (talk) 16:52, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you meant to write οὐτάω. The spirits are good, but the flesh is weak.  --Lambiam 17:13, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nope (sort of...), the book has οὐτάζω, except that I clicked on ς instead of ζ... The dictionary has it as well, see [7] (I'm using the latest edition of that one). I'm still beginning... --Wrongfilter (talk) 17:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The only verb I could find that starts with υι is υἱόω ("make into a son"), but I don't know its conjugation.  --Lambiam 17:36, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Questions

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  1. Can English sentence a glass of beer ever be pronounced with fully stressed [eɪ̯ glæs ɒv bɪə̯r] rather than having at least either a or of unstressed?
  2. Do numerals constitute a distinct part of speech in English?
  3. Are there any words in English that end in /h/ sound?
  4. Conversely, are there any words in English that have /h/ before consonants?
  5. Is there any Germanic language that allow /h/ in coda?
  6. Can in English be said in the following way: In Finland is drunk lots of coffee. In this sentence, lots of coffee is the subject. This would mean same as Lots of coffee is drunk in Finland.
  7. Why Icelandic does not use letter Þ in the end of word?
  8. Is there any Western Romance language that uses more than one consonant diacritic?
  9. Are there any instances in French where more than one silent word-final consonant becomes pronounced in liaison?
  10. Are there any singular nouns in French where silent final consonant becomes pronounced in liaison?

--40bus (talk) 20:22, 17 February 2024 (UTC) --40bus (talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

3. I don't see /h/ in International Phonetic Alphabet. What sound does it represent? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:17, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's on the right side of the pulmonic consonant chart, the voiceless glottal fricative. It's the sound usually represented in English orthography by the letter "h", the first phoneme in "hat". CodeTalker (talk) 04:19, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can't think of any actual standard English words that end with this sound but I can imagine someone pronouncing /x/ like this in a word like loch (although I would also imagine that /k/ would be a lot more common.) GalacticShoe (talk) 04:52, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not in the article as /h/, which is confusing. As to its use at the end of a word, the closest I can think of is the sound one makes when breathing on one's glasses to provide some mist before wiping them. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:59, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a little confused about the distinction between [...] and /.../, but [h] is mentioned in the sections "Typography and iconicity" and "Pulmonic consonants". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
4. Just like with 3. I can't think of any actually solid examples which are definitively /h/ before another consonant, but I can imagine someone pronouncing the voiceless labial–velar fricative (which appears in certain dialects of English for words containing wh, elsewhere pronounced /w/) in a manner somewhat similar to /hw/. Note though that our article on the aforementioned fricative explicitly states that it is not the same as /h/ + /w/. You can see more at Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩. GalacticShoe (talk) 05:07, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
6. No, but In Finland, lots of coffee is drunk would make sense. GalacticShoe (talk) 21:12, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It makes grammatical sense, but Lots of coffee is drunk in Finland is the better way to say it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:14, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
7. I believe it contradicts Icelandic orthography and phonotactics. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:01, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

40bus -- English has had a whole thing going for centuries of destressing and restressing of function words. For example, the form of the pronoun "I" without a final "ch" consonant likely originated in a destressed form, which was then restressed, so that the dropping of the consonant extended to all contexts. In American English, if "of" is restressed, then it can only have a central vowel. In some forms of UK English, a back rounded vowel was apparently possible in emphatic forms of "of" into the 20th century, but I couldn't tell you how common it is today. AnonMoos (talk) 04:21, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

1. 40bus, in reply to the (unlikely) question "Would you like some glasses of beer", one wanting only one glass might reply "A glass of beer." (Unlikely because glasses of beer would rarely be so offered, but the grammatical construction and answer would be routine for items more often offered in multiples: e.g. "Would you like some chocolates?" "A chocolate.") {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.24.45.226 (talk) 09:24, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As an extraordinarily contrived example, I can imagine someone emphasizing "a X of Y" when "X Y" (or "Xs Y") is normally associated with a plural. Like "a federation is many states' union, while rule under a federal government is a state of union." GalacticShoe (talk) 10:24, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In a noisy pub, where a speaker has difficulty making themself understood, they might naturally enunciate each word separately and clearly, and therefore schwa-free.  --Lambiam 10:39, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

5. Icelandic has pre-aspirated stops like [ʰp] and [ʰt], which, as "Icelandic phonology" notes, are sometimes analyzed as sequences of [h] + stop, in which case there would be a coda [h] in words like löpp [ˈlœhp] and dóttir [ˈtouh.tɪr̥]. Not the purest of examples, but probably the best one we'll be able to find. --Theurgist (talk) 10:50, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

With respect to 3 above, mid-20th century structuralist linguists claimed that in modern English, [h] and [ŋ] are in complementary distribution -- [h] occurs at the beginning of words, and before a stressed vowel in the middle of words (thus the contrast between silent "h" in "vehicle" and pronounced "h" in "vehicular"), while [ŋ] does not occur precisely in those environments. (A slight complication is that both can occur before a stressed vowel in a compound word, but [ŋ] can only occur at the end of the first stem, as in "hang-out", while [h] can only occur at the beginning of the second stem, as in "guest-house".) According to some naive definitions of the phoneme concept, this would mean that [h] and [ŋ] are allophones of the same phoneme; to avoid this, a special clause had to be added to the classic phoneme test -- see File:Phoneme-allophone-determination-chart.svg and the comments on its description page... AnonMoos (talk) 21:12, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"silent "h" in "vehicle" and pronounced "h" in "vehicular"". It's not a silent "h" in my dialect. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:48, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the second syllable is truly unstressed, then a silent "h" in "vehicle" is the more usual standard pronunciation. AnonMoos (talk) 00:06, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

9. I have not such case in mind, but the liaison can be done with the penultimate consonant with the last remaining silent, for example: un rapport [R] exact) – AldoSyrt (talk) 13:16, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Q3: May I suggest, Bah, as in Bah Humbug, Blah, and Meh. Note that some people may not pronounce the “h” in these words. Pablothepenguin (talk) 12:57, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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