Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 19

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January 19

Do Americans typically pronounce "Bologna" (the place) as "Baloney"?

I once remember someone on YouTube making a comment in a video about how it seemed appropriate that this guy got his degree from the "University of Baloney". Related to some dubious medical treatment claims that a guy was making for fun and profit. Iloveparrots (talk) 03:18, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

No. It was a joke. Acroterion (talk) 03:38, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

We do have an article on Bologna sausage (no "i") that tells us it is informally known as baloney. It's my impression that that informal naming is in the USA. HiLo48 (talk) 03:55, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Dictionaries show /bəˈloʊni/ for the lowercase (but not anglicized) bolognia bologna. It might have not entirely been jocular. Nardog (talk) 03:59, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I've never seen it spelled "Bolognia" with an i, just Bologna. Is there an alternate or obsolete Anglicized spelling? Acroterion (talk) 04:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Just a note: Googling for "bolognia" gets hits overwhelmingly for a certain dermatologist, and some of the images that accompany the results are...not altogether lovely.

If you Google (or Google Maps) instead for "bolognia -dermatology", there's not much. There's an apartment complex in Mexico, some spot in Colombia, and a TripAdvisor report of an alleged spot in the province of Bologna, but I'm pretty sure that one's just someone's misspelling. --Trovatore (talk) 06:39, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh that was a typo, probably copied from the OP. Nardog (talk) 11:02, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Oops, sorry. That was just my tyop. My bad. Fixed now. --Iloveparrots (talk) 12:12, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

How did "Bologna" become "Baloney" anyway? I remember seeing a question on here about gabagool a few months back. Same sort of thing? Iloveparrots (talk) 16:23, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Here's the etymonline entry for baloney. Unlike "gabagool", it doesn't really make sense as being derived from a regional Italian pronunciation. It seems to be a 19th-century American pronunciation variant, as explained here. I wish I could utter the line "Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not." in an authentic Lugosi accent at this point. Deor (talk) 16:56, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if this is related to a systematic pronunciation of final unstressed <a> as /iː/ which occurs in some accents (compare Tom Dooley). --Trovatore (talk) 19:37, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Also Grand Ole Opry. Deor (talk) 20:00, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Does that mean Missoura is a hypercorrection? —Tamfang (talk) 18:13, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Just by way of coincidence, today I watched part of a rerun of the February 18, 2001, episode of the American version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and this was a $100 question: "The name of which luncheon meat is used as an interjection that means 'nonsense'? (A) Pastrami (B) Corned beef (C) Baloney (D) Pimento loaf." So according to this episode's writers, the meat is not only pronounced but spelled as "baloney". --142.112.220.136 (talk) 23:14, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Despite the anecdote above, the commercial sausage product is universally labeled "bologna" in the United States, though widely pronounced "baloney". In my experience, Americans usually pronounce the Italian city as "Bolon-ya". Cullen328 (talk) 22:18, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

As another American, this has been my general experience with it as well. I imagine that people who don't know that the meat is spelled "bologna" wouldn't have any reservations about looking up how Bologna the city should be pronounced, while those who do know that the meat is spelled that way would probably have the wherewithal to check that the city is not pronounced like the meat. GalacticShoe (talk) 23:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Well, Gwaltney has a product called "Great Bolony", but even that is labelled as "bologna" in the description on the package. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:46, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Homophone-like combinations

How is it called when words become homophones only in combination with other words, e.g.: king's lair vs. king's slayer, Russian ненадолго (nenadolgo, "briefly") and не надо лгать (ne nado lgat, "don't lie"), etc. rather than in its own right? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 08:56, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

If you read the article which you linked, you'll find the answer is "homophone", sometimes "homophonous phrase". Further down the article, the Homophone#Same-sounding_phrases section has some examples.

I don't agree that your example king's lair vs. king's slayer is homophonous, at least in my native British English. lair is pronounced /lɛər/, whilst slayer is /ˈsleɪ.ər/. The merged "s" sounds in king's slayer are longer than the single "s" in king's lair: see Gemination#English. Bazza (talk) 11:00, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

In the American south they might pronounce "lair" like "layer", but otherwise not. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:16, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Even if they were pronounced the same, those two phrases would still not be homophones, for a couple reasons. First, "king's" ends in a voiced /z/ whereas "slayer" starts with an unvoiced /s/.

Second, while gemination is usually not phonemic in English, it can become so at word boundaries. The usual example is "night rain" versus "night train". I think I might have had a much easier time learning gemination in Italian if someone had thought to mention that example to me. --Trovatore (talk) 22:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

English questions

1. Are there any dialects that pronounce suffix -logy with a hard G?
2. Are there any dialects that pronounce words like unit and user with /u/ sound?
3. Are there any dialects that lack aspiration for unvoiced stops?
4. Are there any dialects that do not use schwa?
5. Are there any words in English where word-final ⟨a⟩ is pronounced as /ɑː/?
6. Are there any dialects that pronounce word Christmas as /krɪsmæs/ rather than /krɪsməs/?
7. Are there any words in English where letter C is pronounced as /k/ between ⟨s⟩ and a front vowel?

--40bus (talk) 22:22, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

1. No: -logy words are usually "scholarly" words derived from Greek, so not subject to insular dialectic variations. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.104.88 (talk) 22:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

7. scan, sceptic, perhaps scytale, many other sca- words. --Amble (talk) 23:17, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

a is usually not counted as a front vowel. —Tamfang (talk) 02:24, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure if scare would count. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm going by what I find at front vowel. It lists the near-open front unrounded vowel [æ], as in "scan". --Amble (talk) 01:41, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Good point. Well, we'll have to say that English ca follows its etymology; the softening of /ke/ is far in the Romance past. – Curiously, English cat is rendered in Japanese as kyatto, but I am not aware of such an effect after other consonants. —Tamfang (talk) 18:32, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

I thought it was due to Japanese lacking a native [æ], but I might be mistaken. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:58, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

5. wikt:spa and other examples at wikt:Rhymes:English/ɑː --Amble (talk) 23:21, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

3. Many Scottish accents have weak or no aspiration. See Scottish English § Phonology. This may be a rather quickly shifting phenomenon in English accents -- I believe Early Modern English had unaspirated onset stops (see e.g. Phonological history of English § Up to the American–British split). SamuelRiv (talk) 01:23, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

3 cont.: Note also that in any accents I can think of, stops are unaspirated if they follow a fricative in a consonant cluster (superscript "=" is a nonstandard transcription for "unaspirated"): e.g. "peak" [pʰi:k], "speak" [sp⁼i:k]; "outtake" [ɑʊʔ.tʰeɪk], "mistake" [mɪs.t⁼eɪk], "rifting" [rɪft⁼ɪŋ]; I think even [xt] may have this property for English accents or assimilations with a velar fricative (but since Scottish is the most prominent one that comes to my head, and many Scottish accents don't aspirate much anyway, I couldn't guess either way). SamuelRiv (talk) 19:19, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

4. Certain areas and times of Middle English (Medieval) certainly; modern areas of Indian English maybe in most ways you'd mean: the syllabic-timed stress pattern matches a tendency to pronounce the unstressed parts of words that most accents reduce to a schwa. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:37, 20 January 2024 (UTC)