The meaning of Feh

[Stephen the Great]

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

Anyway, my point still stands. Hell, if she'd said her name was spelled Pbzidyn she's still be right.

If her name was spelled Pbzidyn, it would be pronounced "pb-zih-din". 

I know an argument that kills my own argument: it's a fantasy situation - the character and the author dictate pronunciation. 

[bottlegnomes]

9 minutes ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

If her name was spelled Pbzidyn, it would be pronounced "pb-zih-din". 

I know an argument that kills my own argument: it's a fantasy situation - the character and the author dictate pronunciation. 

Actually! It's Pbz-ihd-ehn!

I guess my general point with this whole argument, and really where my peeve comes from, is the bolded. It's not just in fantasy where that's the case. It's just that in real life, the author, so to speak, is a society. I mean, really, why is colonel spelled how it is? Basically, because we decided it was.

Sorry if I'm being an ass at this point.

Edited November 20, 2017 by bottlegnomes

[Stephen the Great]

3 minutes ago, bottlegnomes said:

Actually! It's Pbz-ihd-ehn!

That's what I meant.

What if her name was Brzyskorzystewko, Paratowch, or - worse still -  Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch?

[bottlegnomes]

1 minute ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

That's what I meant.

What if her name was Brzyskorzystewko, Paratowch, or - worse still -  Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch?

I feel like that last one is a real word and Welsh based on how many letters with tails there are in it.

Edit: Just googled it, and of course it is.

Edited November 20, 2017 by bottlegnomes

[Stephen the Great]

@bottlegnomes What about the first one?

[bottlegnomes]

2 minutes ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

@bottlegnomes What about the first one?

Guessing Russian, and second one I'm not real sure on, but if I really had to guess, Russian as well. But that's probably based on me being tired and the really shoddy logic of it starting with a p.

For the record, Welsh is, in my opinion, the single greatest language in the world and more than just about anything I'd love to become fluent in it.

Edited November 20, 2017 by bottlegnomes

[Stephen the Great]

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

Guessing Russian, and second one I'm not real sure on, but if I really had to guess, Russian as well. But that's probably based on me being tired and the really shoddy logic of it starting with a p.

For the record, Welsh is, in my opinion, the single greatest language in the world and more than just about anything I'd love to become fluent in it.

For the first one, you're close. It's a Slavic name. But for the second one, I'm afraid you're a bit off.

I agree with you on Welsh.

[bottlegnomes]

@Sigismund of Luxemburg Gave up and googled the second one, and you weren't kidding. Rereading it, the towch I feel like should've given it away. It's a very Welsh sounding syllable. For the first, one, as you said, it's Eastern European, based on the number of hard consonants, but I do not know that part of the world well enough to be able to say with much certainty. I feel like it's not Czech, though. I have no idea what exactly, but something in the spelling just shouts not-Czech.

[Stephen the Great]

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

I have no idea what exactly, but something in the spelling just shouts not-Czech.

You're right in that. Examples of Czech place names:

Náchovířov, Šumberec, etc.

[Astellius]

12 hours ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

What do you make of this?

It's obviously 100% irrelevant. As others have pointed out, it's clearly just an acronym turned into a proper name, which has nothing to do with the word. Would you think the other meanings of the word 'bow' were significant if I said something about a "bow and arrow"? Should be clear from the context that I'm not talking about a part of a ship or a thing you slap on top of a present. So, yes, much ado about nothing.

5 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

To be fair, eh can be pronounced "aye," so feh could be faye.

'Aye' is a word with the same pronunciation as 'eye' and 'I.' If we're going to have a conversation about language, why not be pedantic about it!

[bottlegnomes]

1 hour ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

You're right in that. Examples of Czech place names:

Náchovířov, Šumberec, etc.

Well that would certainly explain that. Looking at a map of Eastern Europe, I'm leaning toward the northern section, so Poland, Ukraine, and up. It's not Russia, and all I know about any of the countries included in there that I haven't mentioned is that I went to school with someone who was Lithuanian and had what at the time I thought was a more normal spelling of the name Alex and a last name that gave a lot of people trouble. Don't really want to post it because even if I haven't in any way interacted with him in 11 years, I don't really want to infringe on his privacy.

Anyway, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia would be my three most likely candidates, and Russia's out, so Poland or Ukraine.

11 minutes ago, Astellius said:

'Aye' is a word with the same pronunciation as 'eye' and 'I.' If we're going to have a conversation about language, why not be pedantic about it!

Does that mean Faye is really Fie? 

Anyway, yeah, in retrospect, we—or at least I since I don't know if anyone else actually did—probably should've been using "ay" a la hay instead of aye.

This is might sound insane, but I feel like my computer just decided em dashes were now en dashes.

Edited November 20, 2017 by bottlegnomes

[Astellius]

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

Does that mean Faye is really Fie? 

Anyway, yeah, in retrospect, we probably should've been using "ay" a la hay instead of aye.

That's correct, Faye is pronounced "Fie"!

[Stephen the Great]

7 minutes ago, bottlegnomes said:

Well that would certainly explain that. Looking at a map of Eastern Europe, I'm leaning toward the northern section, so Poland, Ukraine, and up. It's not Russia, and all I know about any of the countries included in there that I haven't mentioned is that I went to school with someone who was Lithuanian and had what at the time I thought was a more normal spelling of the name Alex and a last name that gave a lot of people trouble. Don't really want to post it because even if I haven't in any way interacted with him in 11 years, I don't really want to infringe on his privacy.

Anyway, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia would be my three most likely candidates, and Russia's out, so Poland or Ukraine.

I'll give you examples.

Ukraine: Khmelnytskyi, Kryvyi Rih

Lithuania: Mažeikiai, Palanga

Poland: Bydgoszcz, Łódź
Latvia: Jūrmala, Sēbruciems

(Estonia doesn't use a Slavonic language, so I can assure you it is not the country you're looking for.)

Edited November 20, 2017 by Sigismund of Luxemburg

[Vaximillian]

6 minutes ago, Astellius said:

That's correct, Faye is pronounced "Fie"!

Say’ri predicted this all the way back in 2012!

Edited November 20, 2017 by Vaximillian

[bottlegnomes]

4 minutes ago, Astellius said:

That's correct, Faye is pronounced "Fie"!

Well, I clearly need to go to sleep since I can't for the life of me tell if you're joking or not.

1 minute ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

I'll give you examples.

Ukraine:

Lithuania:

Poland:
Latvia:

(Estonia doesn't use a Slavonic language, so I can assure you it is not the country you're looking for.)

Did something fail to post and/or my computer freak? I can't see the examples :(

Just now, Vaximillian said:

Say’ri predicted this all the way back in 2012!

This reminded me of a dumb freaking joke a friend of mine and I had that Lon'qu was actually pronounced Lonk.

[Stephen the Great]

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

Did something fail to post and/or my computer freak? I can't see the examples :(

I've got the examples up now. My  computer freaked.

1 minute ago, bottlegnomes said:

That's correct, Faye is pronounced "Fie"!

Fie! For shame!

[Vaximillian]

10 minutes ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

(Estonia doesn't use a Slavonic language, so I can assure you it is not the country you're looking for.)

But Lithuania and Latvia don’t either.

[Stephen the Great]

1 minute ago, Vaximillian said:

But Lithuania and Latvia don’t either.

 

Oh yes, I forgot. I thought Rzeczpospolita and assumed they were all Slavic. That's my fault there. 

 

[Astellius]

18 minutes ago, Vaximillian said:

Say’ri predicted this all the way back in 2012!

Say'ri is most wise! Most wise indeed!

15 minutes ago, bottlegnomes said:

Well, I clearly need to go to sleep since I can't for the life of me tell if you're joking or not.

Did something fail to post and/or my computer freak? I can't see the examples :(

This reminded me of a dumb freaking joke a friend of mine and I had that Lon'qu was actually pronounced Lonk.

Lol, I'm joking. And "lonk" is how Link is pronounced!

[Stephen the Great]

9 minutes ago, Astellius said:

Lol, I'm joking. And "lonk" is how Link is pronounced!

I purposefully turn all the Ls (such as in Link, Lon'qu) into Polish Ł, so Łink and Łon'qu ("wink" and "wonqu").

[Ice Dragon]

3 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

Hell, if she'd said her name was spelled Pbzidyn she's still be right.

That's a problem with English and not spelling or pronunciation as a whole. Pronunciation in English, unlike in many (if not most) other languages, is not deterministic.

Your examples in subsequent posts are not English. They are languages that happen to share the same character set as English, and those words are subject to the pronunciation rules of the origin language and not to the rules of English.

[Stephen the Great]

6 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Your examples in subsequent posts are not English. They are languages that happen to share the same character set as English, and those words are subject to the pronunciation rules of the origin language and not to the rules of English.

At this point, Mr. Editor, we're just joking.

[bottlegnomes]

12 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

That's a problem with English and not spelling or pronunciation as a whole. Pronunciation in English, unlike in many (if not most) other languages, is not deterministic.

Your examples in subsequent posts are not English. They are languages that happen to share the same character set as English, and those words are subject to the pronunciation rules of the origin language and not to the rules of English.

That's, at least for European languages, not true. I don't know about non-European languages enough to say, but I would hazard a guess that they evolved in similar ways. 

Rules of pronunciation are no more hard rules than are the other rules we've been discussing. Look as far as the letter h. At one point—and still in some dialects—it was silent, hundred pronounced as undred, hence an hundred, but now—again, in some dialects—it's pronounced, hundred as hundred, hence a hundred.

I will stand by Sigismund's examples as perfectly valid as they highlight this point especially well. It's a shared alphabet, but the different societies assigned different corresponding sounds to the symbols based on what essentially amounted to "because we said so." My example with the name and Mike Birbiglia's joke are a smaller scale version of the same concept. The person who makes the name is the source of truth and it essentially amounts to "because I said so." Sure, you can say they're spelling their name wrong based on currently existing guidelines, but then you're a pretentious, condescending jerk (even if they are probably too for spelling their name in a counterintuitive way), and it's still how they spell and pronounce their name.

Language is, in large, descriptive, not prescriptive, as it's generally an attempting to catalogue and organize how people speak as a reference. Otherwise, it'd be largely stable, only introducing new words for when new things are invented, not constantly evolving as it is. It's not pronunciation specifically—still an aspect of language—but using your watakushi example from the first page, if the youth of Japan decided to start using it outside of its current usages, say men who weren't butlers, and it came into regular usage, then my guess would be that that rule would no longer be valid and would be altered to be more valid, e.g. only maids don't use it. Or reverse, if women stopped using it so only butlers did, then the rule would probably be altered, either officially or just as a rule of thumb, to that it doesn't have the possibility of indicating women. Granted, as I said, I'm not particularly familiar with non-European, or even Eastern European languages, so I may be totally off the mark, but I would still be willing to put money, even if not a ton, on it, and if Japanese or other languages change less, then that's more due to a cultural agreement to abide by the rules more closely than the rules being hard and fast. I know that's the case for German. They're better about sticking to guidelines (eu is "oy"/"oi," ie is "ee," ei is "aye"), and therefore their language is more intuitive in some ways, but the language has evolved since the time of Charlemagne and continues to do so because it has had to react to shifts in speech.

What I'm getting at, and where the peeve comes from, is that, essentially, language is like science. It's a set of guidelines created off observation of trends that are used as references. If something in the trends change, then the rules change to accommodate it. Again, as I said, this is primarily for English and slightly less so Western European languages that Im basing this off of. I would guess similar for others, but I'm not familiar enough.

But yeah, also, we're really just horsing around at this point.

 

14 hours ago, Astellius said:

Lol, I'm joking. And "lonk" is how Link is pronounced!

I feel like I should've realized that 

Wait, does that mean Lon'qu is the hero of time? Both use swords, are terrible with women, and don't talk a whole lot. Plus you never see them in the same place. Seems suspicious.

 

14 hours ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

I purposefully turn all the Ls (such as in Link, Lon'qu) into Polish Ł, so Łink and Łon'qu ("wink" and "wonqu").

I am totally doing that from now on!

Also, based largely off the first Polish example, I'm definitely going to have to go with that one. On a side note, Ukranian is a much softer language than I'd anticipated, at least based off those two examples. Much more sound from the front of the mouth than the throat/back of the mouth that I'd thought. Or I'm butchering the pronunciations.

Edited November 20, 2017 by bottlegnomes

[Ice Dragon]

2 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

That's, at least for European languages, not true.

With the obvious exception of proper nouns from other languages, Spanish and German have deterministic rules for pronunciation.

Dialects exist, but deviate consistently rather than at random, and are therefore still prescriptive within the scope of the dialect.

In languages where such rules exist and are followed to such an extent, description and prescription form a loop where changes to pronunciation are accompanied by changes to spelling. Therefore, the language evolves, but remains consistent as it does so.

Heck, even English bothers to do this occasionally, with the first example I can think of off the top of my head being "gaol", which means "jail" and is (most recently) pronounced like "jail" and eventually got its spelling replaced by "jail".

 

2 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

It's a shared alphabet, but the different societies assigned different corresponding sounds to the symbols based on what essentially amounted to "because we said so."

That has no relevance to the argument.

What the Germans did with the Latin alphabet means nothing when discussing pronunciation in Spanish because words in Spanish use the Spanish pronunciation of its letters and not the German pronunciation of its letters.

You should treat characters from different languages as distinct characters that happen to share the same shape because that's what they actually are.

An English "a" is not the same as a Spanish "a" or a German "a" or a Polish "a" even though they look the same in the same way that an English "H" is by no means the same as a Russian "Н" (which is even a separate Unicode character in the Cyrillic character set).

When languages with a strong prescriptive element borrow words (that aren't names) from other languages that share the same character set, they change the spelling to match their own language's orthography instead of keeping the original appearance ("spelling" in quotes) from the source language or use the same spelling and change the pronunciation to match their standard pronunciation. (Best examples off the top of my head are Spanish "bistec" (or "bisté" or "biftec") from English "beefsteak" and "básquetbol" from "basketball".)

This is made dead obvious with languages that borrow words from languages using a different character set, but is still the exact same process. English is just a lazy language where we don't bother because we don't have rigid rules in the first place.

 

2 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

Again, as I said, this is primarily for English and slightly less so Western European languages that Im basing this off of.

Exactly. Your generalized argument falls flat as you creep outside of English because other languages have a prescriptive element to them that English lacks.

The fact that English is far more descriptive than it is prescriptive is not representative of language as a whole, and you are making generalized statements about language as a whole. Languages have a descriptive element and a prescriptive element, and how much effect they have relative to each other varies by language. Saying that "language is largely descriptive" is incorrect. Saying that "English is largely descriptive" is more accurate.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Ice Dragon

[bottlegnomes]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

changes to pronunciation are accompanied by changes to spelling

This essentially is the basis of statement. The way things are pronounced and societal agreement are the source of truth for a language, not hard and constant rules; changes to pronunciation are generally accompanied by changes to spelling, not as often vice versa. Sometimes changes in pronunciation without a corresponding change in spelling result in a change in the rules of pronunciation for the language, re: my hundred example.

I think I see where our point of disagreement is coming from, and I do think it's my fault, so my apologies for not being very clear in my argument. I think we're essentially arguing two essentially different points, but sort of related points, which is where I think the confusion comes from.

You're saying the rules of pronunciation for certain languages are more stable than in other languages, which I 100% agree with. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

My point was that words and their spelling are in the grand scheme of things arbitrary and are only standardized as a result of concerted efforts of societies, France, Japan, Russia, England, etc. In the case of a person's name, the person is the source of truth on how their name is spelled and pronounced. The name can catch on, but the spelling can be difficult or counterintuitive and so the spelling can change and the original spelling can fall out of usage with the replacement becoming the "correct" one, though that's still essentially because the society "said so."

For example:

1. I invent the name that's pronounced Bill, but spell it Byll.
2. Someone likes the sound of my name, but doesn't like the spelling—they think it suggests the sound akin to "bile"—and changes it to Bill.
3. The Bill spelling catches on and the Byll spelling falls out of usage. Bill becomes the "correct" way of spelling Bill.

Vice versa (using Mike Birbiglia's joke in a simplified version of what probably happened in actual history):

1. Mike had the name Birbiglia pronounced Ber-beel-ee-ah.
2. He found it counterintuitive pronounce it as such based on the rules of his dialect and changed how he said it to Bur-big-lee-ah.
3. Society likes his choice so it catches on, but the original society keeps its pronunciation so now that name has both as applicable pronunciations.

In the first example I'm still not spelling my name wrong with the Byll spelling and in the second Mike's not pronouncing his name wrong with the Bur-big-lee-ah pronunciation, even if it immediately fell out of usage after him. I mean, you could say I was or Mike is, but then you're kind of a jerk.

That was the gist of my nonsensical spelling of Fay/Faye/Feh. If she (really the developers, or rather localizers, but let's pretend the bird actually has agency) says her name is pronounced "fay" and spelled however it was I spelled it, then that's that. It's her name and she gets to decided that. Society might not agree and that spelling might fall out of usage, but she's still not wrong in how her name is spelled. Same thing with meanings of words, rules of grammar, spelling, etc; the powers that be decide how things are spelled, pronounced, etc. It's just that with names the powers that be are the possessor of the name, while with general language the powers that be are the society and mutual agreement. However, as you said and something I agree with 100%, some societies are better about sticking to the rules they've decided and are therefore more deterministic in how things are spelled/pronounced/constructed.

Note: When I say arbitrary, I don't mean I decide cat is now spelled goz and that's the new English spelling or that k is now pronounced like s; I don't make that decision. I mean more like why did English decide cat was the word for what it denotes and why did Spanish decide to use gato for the same? I mean, there's whole big etymologies and such, but it's essentially, because they said so.

Edited November 21, 2017 by bottlegnomes