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

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June 17

Tirwedd Cenedlaethol (Welsh mutations)

The new branding for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the UK is National Landscape, and per Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Wales, the Welsh translation is Tirwedd Cenedlaethol. This is found, for example, on the Welsh-language website for Natural Resources Wales, Landscapes Wales, and the logo of the Wye Valley National Landscape.

Now, tirwedd is a singular feminine noun, and according to both Literary Welsh morphology and Colloquial Welsh morphology, adjectives qualifying singular feminine nouns take the soft mutation, which would surely imply Tirwedd Genedlaethol? So my question is, what have I misunderstood? Is this a grammatical error on the part of the various official bodies? Or is there some reason why in this instance the soft mutation is not appropriate? Or is it optional?

I note that the Welsh Wikipedia page on AONBs doesn't seem to use the term at all, and I wasn't able to find the term (in either form) on websites of AONBs in more Welsh-speaking areas (like Llyn AONB). Kahastok talk 19:06, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

My information on Welsh is limited, but I wonder if instead of Noun + Adjective, it isn't Noun + Noun (with implicit genitive), as in "pren gwybodaeth" for "tree of knowledge" etc. AnonMoos (talk) 02:57, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

There are official-looking documents that use both forms in close proximity, such as [1]. That suggests there's some intentional distinction. As a wild guess, maybe "Cenedlaethol" should be taken as modifying "Ardal" (area) instead of "Tirwedd" (landscape)? In the document I linked, it seems to mutate in the phrase with singular Ardal, but not in the phrase with plural Ardaloedd. I can't see how some of the other examples follow that rule, though. --Amble (talk) 16:54, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales has Tirwedd Genedlaethol. Alansplodge (talk) 20:19, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Latin alphabet

Why Russian and Arabic have not switched to Latin alphabet yet? If Russia joins EU in the future, then the switch would be good to make. Also, awkward un-Slavic romanisation for English is also avoided by switching. Wht Arabic did not switch to Latin alphabet when Turkish did? --40bus (talk) 21:25, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

You asked that question three months ago, and a year before that. Nardog (talk) 21:45, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

The Bulgarian language is already one of the Languages of the European Union. Euro banknotes already have Cyrillic on them. The Bulgarians (who are EU members) don't seem to feel the need to switch. Why would the Russians (who are not pursuing EU membership) want to do so? --Amble (talk) 22:53, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

40bus -- As has been explained before, both Russians and Arabs would feel it would be a denial or negation of their cultural heritage to switch, while some Arab Muslims would feel that it's tantamount to renouncing Islam. I really don't know why you discount these cultural factors, when they're important to many of the speakers of the languages in question. As for Turkish, the Arabic alphabet was a very poor fit for the vowel harmonies of the language, and the form of the language that was written using the Arabic alphabet was a kind of Turkish-Persian-Arabic hybrid which was a literary plaything of a narrow class of Ottoman elites. Adopting the Latin alphabet for Turkish was a kind of reset maneuver, which allowed for a phonetically adequate writing system useful for recording something much closer to the spoken language, and which would be easier to learn, and so suitable as a foundation for mass literacy. The Arabic alphabet was invented to write the Arabic language, so there's simply not a situation comparable to that of Turkish. AnonMoos (talk) 02:45, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

At least I think that English should always romanize Russian using scientific transliteration of Cyrillic because it makes words look similar to Slavic languages using Latin alphabet. Why don't every language in the world romanize Russian as such? Finnish romanization looks very similar to Slavic Latin alphabets. Why English cannot write Juščenko every time instead of ugly Yushchenko? Czech names contain carons in English texts, so why Russian names cannot? --40bus (talk) 06:44, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

This at least helps distinguish Russian from Czech names, doesn't it? --Theurgist (talk) 08:20, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Because English readers, most of whom don't know anything about Slavic languages, would pronounce it as /dʒuˈʃɛŋ.koʊ/. With the ugly spelling, they get closer: /juʃˈtʃɛŋ.koʊ/. Not perfect, but better.

Romanisation systems for non-scientific use are tuned for both the source and destination language. The same letter may be transcribed differently when coming from Russian, Ukrainian or Bulgarian and also when going to English, French or Dutch. The purpose is to make the audience intuitively use the best possible approximation of the original sounds. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:17, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

40bus -- The Czech haceks are used in Americanist phonetic notation, but the broader English-speaking public is overall rather resistant to diacritics, unenthusiastically tolerating their optional presence in in a few semi-unassimilated loanwords, and that's about it. During the period when Wade-Giles was the standard English transliteration of Chinese, English-language newspapers (except for a few low-circulation specialist publications) generally ignored all the diacritics and apostrophes, making an already ambiguous situation much more ambiguous. Similarly, in the first wave of newspaper computerization in the 1970s and 1980s, there was often no ability to use diacritics (true of the Los Angeles Times, and probably many others). Anyway, when diacritics are borrowed into English, by far the most prominent source is the French written language, with German, Spanish, and Italian as secondary possibilities, while Finnish and Czech are basically off the radar. AnonMoos (talk) 18:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

What is so objectionable about using "sh" for ш, when Polish (another Slavic language using the Latin alphabet) has a digraph here too: "sz"? Or do you want the Poles to change their orthography as well? Double sharp (talk) 07:38, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

German has tetragraphs or quadrigraphs: "tsch" and "dsch" for the voiceless and voiced affricates written "ch" and "j" in English -- "Tscheche" Czech and "Dschungel" jungle. (That means that the single Cyrillic letter Щ might be rendered in German with seven letters.) But maybe using the letter J to write the "y" consonant sound (IPA [j]) scores so many points with 40bus that he'll forgive German and Polish all their other sins! -- AnonMoos (talk) 22:42, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

"because it makes words look similar to Slavic languages using Latin alphabet." I would think that making the words easier for English speakers to pronounce would be higher priority than "looking Slavic". And a native English speaker is much more likely to pronounce "sh" correctly than "š". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:03, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Russia isn't preparing to join the EU. Quite the opposite: they're trying to destroy it. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:17, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Why has Finnish not switched to chosŏn'gŭl yet? If Finland becomes a North-Korean colony in the future, then the switch may be mandatory.  --Lambiam 18:49, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Why has Revised Romanization yet been applied for North Korean names too? The new romanization was invented due to ambiguity when apostrophe and breve was not available. But North Korean names still use it. Why? --40bus (talk) 14:46, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Because they are used to it. Why do you think that other languages should do things the way you want them to?-- User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:51, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

North Korea has minimal neutral relationships with Western countries, anyway. Romanization is probably a very small concern, locally. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 18:13, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Uriminzokkiri needed some system, but that's apparently recently been discontinued. AnonMoos (talk) 22:50, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Now I'm curious: is Cyrillisation any more of a concern for North Korea? Double sharp (talk) 07:17, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Regarding the Latinisation of Turkish, there were also political reasons why a switch to Latin was chosen. According to Turkish alphabet, some other writers had previously proposed reforming the Arabic script to better fit Turkish, but Atatürk favoured a wholescale script change. I'd guess that a hypothetical reformed Arabic script for Turkish would have been similar to what Ahmet Baitursynuly did for Kazakh, as well as to the 1951–1954 script reform for Uyghur in preparation for a mass literacy campaign. Those reformed scripts write out all the vowels and remove redundant Arabic letters not needed for the Turkic languages they write. Double sharp (talk) 07:23, 24 June 2024 (UTC)