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Koramei posted:This perspective is a favorite of historical Chinese historians but it’s really not this cut and dry, the cultural pressure very much went in both directions. Yuan cultural practices lasted generations into the Ming — the Yongle emperor explicitly went on a campaign to suppress it and replace it with Chinese culture, which involved a lot of vaguely informed making things up because Mongol cultural influence meant things were absolutely not the same as they had been before their invasion. So, you're saying it was the angle of the Yongle to take the Mongol elite and beat it into retreat?
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Dec 26, 2022 04:48
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Didnt the Qing also impose a Manchu hairstyle on Chinese people under pain of death to show their racial submission and place in like, their racial caste system? Idk abt how much the banners worked or the Qing empire but it seems wild to say that they didnt impose Manchu culture on a bunch of people
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Dec 26, 2022 05:10
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I have a question that's not really ancient, but since the Turkish Republic is the current legal continuation of Rome, why not? And it really is a historical question, not a linguistic one. Does anyone here know what European languages the people who developed the Latin script for the Turkish language were familiar with? Some of the choices with regard to the way certain letters represent certain sounds are kind of weird and don't seem to match with how most European languages sound. Now if it'd turn out that their version of the script was developed by a few stubborn professors of which one learned Italian at an advanced age and the rest didn't speak any European languages at all (or something like that) that'd be an interesting way to look at how this influenced the early development of the script/language
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Dec 26, 2022 12:46
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EricBauman posted:Does anyone here know what European languages the people who developed the Latin script for the Turkish language were familiar with? The primary individual responsible seems to be one Agop Dilâçar, who spoke "Armenian and Turkish, [...] English, French, Greek, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Latin, German, Russian and Bulgarian." Whether there were other, less famous people who contributed is 
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Dec 26, 2022 13:56
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It's like pinyin. It's designed to accurately represent turkish sounds for turkish speakers, not aid foreigners in pronunciation. Ironically I just posted about latinized kazakh in a different thread- dunno turkish but kazakh is very similar. There's some sounds, like variants of "k", that are differentiated in kazakh but lumped together in most european languages. So you have to massage the letters to fit. When you're designing the alphabet ground-up, especially, you get a leg up in making it as phonetic as possible. As opposed to say, english, where lots of people don't realize "th" makes two different sounds but definitely notice if you say þat ðief instead of ðat þief. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 15:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's like pinyin. It's designed to accurately represent turkish sounds for turkish speakers, not aid foreigners in pronunciation. It does the latter too, if you’re already used to a rational spelling system.
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Dec 26, 2022 17:58
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Maybe I'm just misguided and thinking about it too simply, but my thought process was: The Ottoman alphabet is pretty much the Arabic script but for the Turkish language. Not unlike Urdu and Farsi work the same way to this day. Maybe some small additions to make it fit the languages, but mostly Arabic and people who can read Arabic can at least sound out most of what they see written in Ottoman, Urdu or Farsi (as long as no O or P or other letter that Arabic doesn't have occurs). The people developing the Latin script Turkish alphabet were in effect developing a new, additional method to transliterate Arabic script into Latin script. I kind of figured that they'd maybe look at ways others had done the exact same thing? By the 1920s, there really was no shortage of stuff taken from Arabic script and written down in English and French. Translations and loanwords, place names, names of people. Look at those materials, and you see that the ج (jim) tone (as in Jazeera, Jamahiriya, Jami) is commonly written with a J. If you only hear Egyptian, you may write it as G, but in Turkish it really does sound quite close to the way it does in Arabic. No systems prior used a C for it and the letter C was meaningless to Turkish speakers, so it wasn't like the connection from ج to C was a predetermined outcome. Yet, they did choose to represent this sound with a C, so now Turkish has words like Cumhuriyet and Cami. I know gently caress all about Armenian, but if there was a lot of influence from Armenian linguists on the Turkish switch to Latin script, that could possibly explain some of these oddities. I guess it also fucks with my head that all of this was something done within almost living memory, by someone doing it artificially. Unlike with languages like Welsh, where it's longer ago, and the slide into "English" script was probably something that happened more organically.
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Dec 26, 2022 19:29
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While I don't know for sure what exactly they did, from a linguistic standpoint, if they viewed the latin version of Turkish as transcribing the existing arabic version, instead of transcribing the Turkish language itself, then they hosed up. I highly doubt they made such an amateurish mistake. Glancing through the values of the letters in Turkish, it looks to me like they landed on the value of c probably through a chain of problem solving. Like english, they distinguish /ʒ/ and /ʤ/ (in english there's apparently only two minimal pairs for this, one of which is the thematically appropriate for this thread lesion vs legion). Unlike english, they wanted to have different letters for them. J can only be one of those values, but there's also this letter c which you aren't really using, so you put the other one there. I'm sure it was a lot more complicated than that--if nothing else, Turkish was willing to add non-standard Latin characters like ç--but the basic problem seems to be that there were multiple sounds in Turkish that wanted to be j.
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Dec 26, 2022 19:53
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EricBauman posted:Maybe I'm just misguided and thinking about it too simply, but my thought process was: Your problem is assuming it's taking arabic script into latin. It's taking turkish sounds and trying to spell them coherently with latin letters. It's not a transliteration upon a transliteration. Meniñ atım Édgar Allen Xo, men qazaq tilinde terip jatırmın. Менің атым Эдгар Аллен Хо, мен қазақ тілінде теріп жатырмын. Neither of those is objectively correct, it's just ways to spell the way people actually talk in kazakh.
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Dec 26, 2022 19:54
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Your problem is assuming it's taking arabic script into latin. I guess this is fair and just not the way I thought about it. In my head, it was changing the Ottoman alphabet to Latin script, rather than going back to first principles, taking the spoken Turkish language and mapping it to Latin script. I'd still somehow figured that they'd have taken more inspiration from the way other languages took sounds familiar to them into Latin script.
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Dec 26, 2022 20:39
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I dunno - the whole Turkic language group is pretty far from anything else that's been represented in Latin text. I don't think it's that surprising.
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Dec 27, 2022 04:58
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It's not like all latin-alphabet languages share the same phonemes or even agree on what all the letters or combinations thereof do. Some have a bunch of weird artifacts from centuries of spelling drift, while others go on bizarre directions inventing ways for the alphabet to work that resemble no other country's use of it.
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Dec 27, 2022 05:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's not like all latin-alphabet languages share the same phonemes or even agree on what all the letters or combinations thereof do. Some have a bunch of weird artifacts from centuries of spelling drift, while others go on bizarre directions inventing ways for the alphabet to work that resemble no other country's use of it. English can't even keep c's or h's or any vowels straight just within itself
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Dec 27, 2022 07:13
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cheetah7071 posted:While I don't know for sure what exactly they did, from a linguistic standpoint, if they viewed the latin version of Turkish as transcribing the existing arabic version, instead of transcribing the Turkish language itself, then they hosed up. I highly doubt they made such an amateurish mistake. The Arabic script was highly unsuitable for Turkish because it only has a limited set of vowels (a, i, u); Turkish has eight, e.g., gol and göl mean different things entirely.
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Dec 27, 2022 11:40
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I dunno - the whole Turkic language group is pretty far from anything else that's been represented in Latin text. I don't think it's that surprising. Probably splitting hairs here, but which is closer to Indo-European languages: the Turkish language family or Vietnamese? I have limited knowledge of Vietnamese as a language but "Nguyen" being pronounced "win" is very odd as a native English-speaker
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Dec 27, 2022 14:58
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Judgy Fucker posted:Probably splitting hairs here, but which is closer to Indo-European languages: the Turkish language family or Vietnamese? I have limited knowledge of Vietnamese as a language but "Nguyen" being pronounced "win" is very odd as a native English-speaker I assume the NG is supposed to be the more nasally G that pops up in words like singer, it's more like "Nwen" I think? It occurs in a couple Japanese words too, but there's no specific character for it, it's just an occasional surprise. Personally I think we should add a couple more vowels to Hangul and convert everything over to that. I don't speak a word of Korean but it's a very fun set of characters to use, it's like what if words were Legos.
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Dec 27, 2022 15:17
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Judgy Fucker posted:Probably splitting hairs here, but which is closer to Indo-European languages: the Turkish language family or Vietnamese? I have limited knowledge of Vietnamese as a language but "Nguyen" being pronounced "win" is very odd as a native English-speaker That's just transcription, you get weird spellings even with perfectly IE languages like Irish. Just look up how "Dun Laoghaire" is pronounced.
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Dec 27, 2022 17:25
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Judgy Fucker posted:Probably splitting hairs here, but which is closer to Indo-European languages: the Turkish language family or Vietnamese? I have limited knowledge of Vietnamese as a language but "Nguyen" being pronounced "win" is very odd as a native English-speaker
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Dec 27, 2022 18:03
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Zopotantor posted:The Arabic script was highly unsuitable for Turkish because it only has a limited set of vowels (a, i, u); Turkish has eight, e.g., gol and göl mean different things entirely. Seemed like they did just fine for hundreds of years to a full thousand (as did many other Turkic languages), . And you could just introduce or designate letters to be vowels in the Arabic-script alphabet, I don't think you can tout that as a reason why they changed alphabets. It's political more than anything else IMO.
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Dec 27, 2022 19:03
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uber_stoat posted:what's the Roman version of Marine Todd? Probably the Trial of Trebonius.
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Dec 27, 2022 19:10
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Scarodactyl posted:My understanding is that isn't actually pronounced win in Vietnam, that's a little simplified. It's kind of like ing-win minus the first i sort of but that just ends up omitted. Oh, I knew a family called Nguyen in school. Are you saying "-uyen" is supposed to sound like "-win" in Vietnamese? Otherwise I'm not really sure if we pronounced their names really wrong or really right.  (Everyone always called them "N-Guyen", so it's probably horrible wrong, but they never corrected us.)
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Dec 27, 2022 19:47
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Randarkman posted:Seemed like they did just fine for hundreds of years to a full thousand (as did many other Turkic languages), . And you could just introduce or designate letters to be vowels in the Arabic-script alphabet, I don't think you can tout that as a reason why they changed alphabets. It's political more than anything else IMO. Of course it is political, but for kazakh -the only one I know- popular arabic script wasn't proper arabic, it was, as cyrillic and latin, heavily treated to be kazakh  My understanding is that people fluent in arabic reading kazakh arabic script would sound like they've got alzheimer's or are speaking tongues. Real arabic does the same thing as hebrew, where consonants are one thing and you add vowels to them, while kazakh says gently caress that and each thing is one sound. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 20:00
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A writing system being used for a thousand years is, by itself, a non-political reason why you might want to change it. Languages change but spelling tends to get ossified. If someone talks about how in X language spelling isn't really a thing and you just write words how they're pronounced, you'll almost invariably find a conscious spelling reform within the last century or so if you go looking. Even then you can usually find irregularities that have emerged since then. e: obviously not saying that the decision to change Turkish wasn't political, because even the best ideas need political support to be enacted. Just that "well they used it for a millennium so it must be fine" isn't really how written language works
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Dec 27, 2022 20:55
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Libluini posted:(Everyone always called them "N-Guyen", so it's probably horrible wrong, but they never corrected us.) Speaking as an immigrant with a hard-to-pronounce-name, insisting on having people pronounce your name right is asking for every introduction to take ten to fifteen minutes of increasing frustration on both sides and even if you get them pronouncing it right THIS time there's no guarantee they'll remember next time you meet. Much easier to either choose a Westernized name (which is what most people where I come from do when they emigrate) or to pick an easily remembered and pronounced nickname (which is what I do). I honestly find it MORE frustrating to run into people who insist on trying to say my name right "out of respect" because I just know it's going to end up being a waste of everyone's time and one would think that honoring my request that they just call me by my nickname is more respectful.
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Dec 27, 2022 21:04
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I have a slightly unusual name and and even within my country I usually just to "yeah sure..." when people mispronounce it.. The leeway for outlanders is even larger because I'm used to very few people getting it right and I recognize I belong to a tiny irrelevant ethnic group that most people don't even know exist so anyone even getting close is a miracle. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 21:28
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Tomn posted:Speaking as an immigrant with a hard-to-pronounce-name, insisting on having people pronounce your name right is asking for every introduction to take ten to fifteen minutes of increasing frustration on both sides and even if you get them pronouncing it right THIS time there's no guarantee they'll remember next time you meet. Much easier to either choose a Westernized name (which is what most people where I come from do when they emigrate) or to pick an easily remembered and pronounced nickname (which is what I do). My given name is "Thomas" and my wife's is "Safiya" and we have a co-worker who insists on trying to pronounce them "properly" in french and russian. It's the worst loving thing in the world and good god, Tom and Sophie are real existing english names loads of people have, please god's sake just use those. Neither are even hard names you loving dumbass. e: not to mention there are more than a few people called loving Thomas. In anglophone countries. Just please say loving Thomas you dumb gently caress. e2: second person insults for the coworker, not to poster Tomn Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 21:38
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I work with a Mathieu, who is a French Australian in theory but in practice has lived his whole life in Australia and tells me his French isn't that great. He speaks with no French accent at all (quite a heavy Australian accent instead). We both just pronounce his name Matthew. One of my other colleagues tried to correct my pronunciation of his name, which was bizarre. I checked with him after and yep you just say it Matthew.
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Dec 27, 2022 21:58
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Libluini posted:Oh, I knew a family called Nguyen in school. Are you saying "-uyen" is supposed to sound like "-win" in Vietnamese? Otherwise I'm not really sure if we pronounced their names really wrong or really right.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:04
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People get my white-rear end name wrong all the time (Stephen with a ph).
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Dec 27, 2022 23:02
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My work visa in China was delayed like a dozen times because my name is impossible for Chinese people and they wrote a different name on the forms over and over and over. I worked at that school for four years and not a single coworker ever learned my name, even when sending me emails at my work address, which is my name. loving up names is a universal practice.
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Dec 27, 2022 23:03
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Nessus posted:The way a Vietnamese-American teacher I had put it was, "penguin, but leave out the pe" but that may have been damage control, or at least making it *consistent* among his urban Texan rabble of misfits. Stupidly enough, the German pronounciation of Nguyen and Nguin are almost the same (and also sound the same as in English, weirdly enough), so my old school friend probably was "eh, close enough", at our attempts at pronounciation.
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Dec 28, 2022 00:04
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Grand Fromage posted:My work visa in China was delayed like a dozen times because my name is impossible for Chinese people and they wrote a different name on the forms over and over and over. I worked at that school for four years and not a single coworker ever learned my name, even when sending me emails at my work address, which is my name. I'm pretty blase about how people pronounce my name, but one of my particular pet peeves is when people misspell my name while replying to one of my e-mails. Especially if this is our first contact. Like Jesus Christ man, are you seriously trying to spell a name from memory that you have no idea how to pronounce when all you need to do is to scroll down and copy-paste? It takes like five seconds even to double-check!
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Dec 28, 2022 01:08
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Tomn posted:Like Jesus Christ man, are you seriously trying to spell a name from memory that you have no idea how to pronounce when all you need to do is to scroll down and copy-paste? It takes like five seconds even to double-check! Hey, Jesus has been through a lot, give him some slack
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Dec 28, 2022 01:18
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Tomn posted:I'm pretty blase about how people pronounce my name, but one of my particular pet peeves is when people misspell my name while replying to one of my e-mails. Especially if this is our first contact. Oh, that particular rabbit hole can go even deeper. One of my colleagues (an Italian) send me an email with a customer-request at some point down the line just before Christmas and I was like "hey, this guy wrote your name wrong" and he was like "yeah, he's doing this for some time now". I had to stop far half a minute to process how someone could not only be so stupid as to write a name wrong they can see when answering the original message, but also just keep on spelling the name wrong in multiple interactions, like they're doing it on purpose. The extra farce comes in because his name is really easy to pronounce and write for Germans, so a German aggressivly misspelling his name is either caused by extreme braindamage or extreme xenophobia, I'm not sure which in this case. For that matter, my own name is the bane of all foreigners (disclaimer: maybe not French), as it's one of these weird Ur-German names that look utterly foreign if you're not extremely familiar with the German language. So a lot of people dealing with my name are suddenly entering a nightmare realm of spelling and frustration. Bonus points because there are a ton of slightly differently spelled German names that are pronounced almost exactly like mine. And it's not just foreigners, if more than one of us ends up in the same place, I swear you can see the frustration build up if one of us is called up and suddenly, three guys stand up, followed by a slapstick-routine as we're trying to determine which one of us was meant.
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Dec 28, 2022 01:30
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Grand Fromage posted:My work visa in China was delayed like a dozen times because my name is impossible for Chinese people and they wrote a different name on the forms over and over and over. I worked at that school for four years and not a single coworker ever learned my name, even when sending me emails at my work address, which is my name. my name is also phonetically an adjective and it rhymes with a about 20 other words everyone's a loving poet so i go by my last name which is super rare but sounds very similar to a profession. 9 times out of 10 people hear it wrong the first time unless snap my pronunciation loudly. I feel your pain.
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Dec 28, 2022 01:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Of course it is political, but for kazakh -the only one I know- popular arabic script wasn't proper arabic, it was, as cyrillic and latin, heavily treated to be kazakh I mean that's the case for pretty much any language using the latin alphabet as well. They use the same letters but they are pronounced differently to suit the language, some languages, like Polish, take this much further than others, but it's the case all around and is basically the normal way a writing system is adopted to any language. Persian and then various Turkic scripts based on the Arabic alphabet were adopted for those languages more than a thousand years ago, in pretty much no case did they just take the arabic alphabet and make no changes. And again this will be the same with any alphabet adopted for a language. Libluini posted:For that matter, my own name is the bane of all foreigners (disclaimer: maybe not French), as it's one of these weird Ur-German names that look utterly foreign if you're not extremely familiar with the German language. So a lot of people dealing with my name are suddenly entering a nightmare realm of spelling and frustration. Bonus points because there are a ton of slightly differently spelled German names that are pronounced almost exactly like mine. And it's not just foreigners, if more than one of us ends up in the same place, I swear you can see the frustration build up if one of us is called up and suddenly, three guys stand up, followed by a slapstick-routine as we're trying to determine which one of us was meant. German names are easy street. I've never met a single foreigner who managed to pronounce my Norwegian name, even after hearing it said, and written out they just give up, it's not really hard, but the "Ø" and dipthong. It's not really difficult, it just seems people don't know where to start and give up on the "Ø" (which is like "u" in urge). Randarkman fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 03:45
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Randarkman posted:I mean that's the case for pretty much any language using the latin alphabet as well. They use the same letters but they are pronounced differently to suit the language, some languages, like Polish, take this much further than others, but it's the case all around and is basically the normal way a writing system is adopted to any language. But the thing is, far as I know, arabic is like hebrew in that you only write consonant letters. Vowels are additions to the letters that you only bother with for students or for literally the Torah or Quran. In the kazakh arabic script, it's gently caress that, every symbol incorporates vowel marks that don't necessarily correspond- for example that whole third row is the arabic letter vav with different markings. Vav isn't even usually a vowel in arabic, in kazakh it's typically a vowel and also a v sound sometimes. quote:The Arabic letter waw is pronounced w like in the English word 'wild'. None of its kazakh pronunciations are even near that. That's what I mean, that kazakh completely abandons the semitic style of writing in arabic script. I'm just an enthusiastic idiot though. I'm sure someone reading this is an actual linguist and/or arabic or kazakh speaker who knows better.
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Dec 28, 2022 04:17
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Libluini posted:a German aggressivly misspelling his name is either caused by extreme braindamage or extreme xenophobia, I'm not sure which in this case.
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Dec 28, 2022 04:25
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My surname is one of those old-timey Elizabethan-Early Stuart spellings that gets hosed up constantly, even in my hometown where an ancestor of mine was one of the founders. Even old New England genealogical books have a section on orthography for it.
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Dec 28, 2022 05:15
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make a new thread for your interesting names
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Dec 28, 2022 06:54
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