Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Ares Land]

A question about German: is the city on the North Sea Dunkirche or Dunkerque?
(I learned the former, bit it did get me some blank stares.)

[Linguoboy]

TIL that in English, "Mallorca" is sometimes spelled "Majorca". I would never have guessed that.

It's not "sometimes" - the standard English name of Mallorca is Majorca.

Are you saying that’s the only spelling with the official sanction of the Academy of the English Language?

[Travis B.]

TIL that in English, "Mallorca" is sometimes spelled "Majorca". I would never have guessed that.

It's not "sometimes" - the standard English name of Mallorca is Majorca.

Are you saying that’s the only spelling with the official sanction of the Academy of the English Language?

Lol - no. I mean it's standard English the way that Cologne is standard English.

[Kuchigakatai]

I'm not sure if they're so comparable. I've seen Mallorca used in English, but not Koln/Köln. Although I guess Linguoboy alluded above to some people actually using Koln/Köln for Cologne.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've only encountered one individual (who is also a native English speaker) who uses the German forms of German place names (usually) in English, but German was her original field of study, and she spent significant amounts of time in Germany when younger. I think the French-sounding forms (I actually thought "Cologne" was in France when I first heard of it being a place as a very young child because the word sounded French) are mostly so well-established in English they aren't likely to disappear anytime soon.

[zompist]

These things do change. I notice that Google Maps has Zaragoza, Marseille, Izmir, Thiva, Kraków, Livorno, Kyiv where a century ago maps would have Saragossa, Marseilles, Smyrna, Thebes, Cracow, Leghorn, Kiev. FWIW, Google Maps has Mallorca.

Outside Western Europe, regime change often changes the English names used for places.

I'm kind of surprised Google still has Hanover. For awhile travel sites were using Hannover.

[Ares Land]

Oh, later than a century ago: I remember Civ 2 had Rheims, Lyons and Thebes.

[anteallach]

I was once on a train approaching Aachen where the announcements were multilingual, and the English announcement referred to it as Aix-la-Chapelle.

[cedh]

A question about German: is the city on the North Sea Dunkirche or Dunkerque?
(I learned the former, bit it did get me some blank stares.)

The traditional German name is Dünkirchen, but it seems to be falling out of use somewhat. The article on the German wikipedia is called Dunkerque and normally uses the French name (36 times), with the German name appearing 24 times (mostly in the section on history and in links to other articles).

[Linguoboy]

Oh, later than a century ago: I remember Civ 2 had Rheims, Lyons and Thebes.

One of these is not like the others. I’m puzzled what other designation you think we should be using for an extinct Egyptian city other than the name it was known by during Classical antiquity.

[Ares Land]

Oh, later than a century ago: I remember Civ 2 had Rheims, Lyons and Thebes.

One of these is not like the others. I’m puzzled what other designation you think we should be using for an extinct Egyptian city other than the name it was known by during Classical antiquity.

Why, Waset of course!

(No you're right, I mixed up Egyptian Thebes and Greek Thebes/ Thiva )

[Linguoboy]

Where they didn't get Relatinised (for Prussia and Russia, Chaucer uses Pruce and Ruce, I believe), I think most of them were borrowed through Norman, probably because Norman was once the language of the classes who would've talked about such places.

I think their origins are more heterogeneous than that. Look at Italy, for instance. Naples, Venice, and Florence could conceivably have come by means of Norman, but Rome was already found in Old English and Genoa, Padua, and Mantua all retain final -a. (These aren’t relatinisations either; the Latin forms are different.) And then there’s “Leghorn”, basically obsolete except in reference to poultry. It was a minor fishing village at the time of the conquest, not the sort of place the Normans would’ve chatted to their staffs about.

[Ares Land]

The traditional German name is Dünkirchen, but it seems to be falling out of use somewhat. The article on the German wikipedia is called Dunkerque and normally uses the French name (36 times), with the German name appearing 24 times (mostly in the section on history and in links to other articles).

Ah, thanks!

In French we tend to stick to Frenchified names and it sometimes verges on the silly.

It took me an embarrassing long time to figure out that Ratisbonne and Regensburg are in fact the same place!

[Vijay]

This conversation reminded me of how fascinated I was by English Basle vs. German Basel vs. French Bâle when I was younger, and then I suddenly found out that Basle in English is meant to be pronounced like Bâle!

[Pabappa]

crossposted from the CBB.

Finnish has some words like helppo, humppa, olifantti, kurssi, etc with a sonorant followed by a geminate consonant. Does anyone know if there are examples of this type of cluster in native vocabulary? Some of these words are quite old, but are still originally loans. I had thought I knew of more, but my memory was faulty .... for example I thought the word for beach had /ntt/ but it's just /nt/.

But if my impression is right, the pattern requires a sonorant at the beginning, and then a geminate consonant that is one of /p t k s/, which could either be an artifact of the source languages or some constraint within Uralic that also applied to much rarer native words of the same type.

Also do we know if this cluster pattern is a native development within Uralic .... even if it is found only in loans ..... and if it has influenced or been influenced by the somewhat similar situation in Latvian & Lithuanian where sequences like /ar/, /in/, /um/ etc behave as if they were traditional diphthongs rather than a cluster of a vowel and a consonant?

[Vijay]

I don't think you can even have a CCC sequence in native Finnish words, but I have noticed this same pattern in the orthography in Malayalam specifically with r + some other consonant.

[Pabappa]

thanks for the information. however i found a few examples that arent transparent loans .... a lot of them seem to be from some sort of diminutive process, for example
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kunkku .... probably from kuningas .... source is a loanword, but the coinage is native
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kumppari .... made of originally foreign morphemes, but clearly a novel coinage since the loans are from different sources.
https://fi.wiktionary.org/wiki/pimppa .... baby talk, so likely of recent origin. possibly a variant of pimpsa

possibly different is
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tamppu less likely than the others to be a diminutive, but its not even in the Finnish wiktionary so who knows?

Im fairly confident now that it's at least a native process, even if all of the words seem to be traceable to loanwords or other types of newly coined words. but i still wonder if there might be some that dont have all the asterisks on. in the proto-language, i think, there were three consonant lengths, and it's at least possible that there were examples of "RCC" at that stage as well.

[Zju]

I wonder what our resident Uralic expert has to say on the matter. I haven't seen him here in a while, but he's still active over on his blog.

[Travis B.]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kunkku .... probably from kuningas .... source is a loanword, but the coinage is native

Note Swedish kung, derived from Old Norse kongr.

[Vijay]

but i still wonder if there might be some that dont have all the asterisks on.

I don't understand what you meant here.