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The funny thing about "moot point" is that so many people used it incorrectly that dictionaries added the second definition.
Moot point originally meant the point is arguable and open for debate. People thought it meant the point has "no bearing" on the argument. And this later usage came to be popular.
I'm not a native english speaker. I google lot's of words all the time which often brings up a pronunciation guide, like /ˈnādiv/, /ˌikˈsepSH(ə)n(ə)l/ or /prəˌnənsēˈāSH(ə)n/.
But google is a bit wonky and has a weird format, so I use wiktionary a lot, which often has an audio and where the same words in IPA look like this: /ˈneɪtɪv/, /ɪkˈsɛpʃənəl/ or /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/.
Other dictionaries use similar systems, often with slight differences. Point is, learn to read them a bit. You don't need to understand all of it for it to be useful, eg find the stressed syllable or whether something is a long or short vowel etc. I figured out most of what's important just from reading them everytime I lookt up a word. So for example, on google you'll see the long vowels marked with a macron, a bar over the vowel: ā. That "long vowel" is actually a diphthong (a two-tone), so in IPA on wiki it's written as /eɪ/.
Some IPA examples; If you can make sense of this you're basically good to go:
- put /pʊt/
- but /bʌt/
- peel /piːl/
- pale /peɪl/
- pile /paɪl/
- pole /poʊl/
- puke /pjuːk/
- vision /ˈvɪ.ʒ(ə)n/
- mission /ˈmɪʃən/
- just /d͡ʒʌst/
- check /t͡ʃɛk/
- conscience /kɒnʃəns/
- diaphanous /daɪˈæf.ən.əs/
- circumlocution /ˌsɝɹkəmˌləˈkjuʃən/ - note the stress: ˌ------ˌ--ˈ------
Note: ə is a generic, unstressed vowel, called the schwa. Don't read too much into it.
Yes, that would be the correct pronunciation of хорошо!
Most materials for learning Russian will have the stress marked on each word. Each word has exactly one stress to it (there are a few exceptions that have two stresses, but they are very, very rare). If a word has a ё in it, that is the syllable that is stressed and will not have another stress mark.
Regular Russian material will not have stress marks or the diacritics above ё.
It is a mixture of memorizing the stress and for getting a feel for the language. There are rules - or maybe "tendencies" would be a better word here - but there are so many exceptions that they're difficult to lay out. Russian is a lot like English in the inconsistency of stress. But once you start getting used to the way words are put together, you'll see patterns in certain prefixes/suffixes and what tends to be stressed and what not.
It also helps to listen to the Russian language as much as you possibly can. Listening + reading the same thing at the same time is the most helpful, but even just casual listening can give you a feel for the cadence of the language.
P. S. If you ever run into the word in the wild and are uncertain of stress, you can look it up in a dictionary which should also have stress marked. I'd recommend Wiktionary primarily because it often has a soundbyte of a speaker pronouncing the word as well.
Wiktionary is good because, not only does it give the gender of the nouns, but it also has full declension tables for nouns and adjectives. The latter of which can be useful sometimes!
Oh, yes, Wordreference is great!
I also like to use the Larousse in parallel, and sometimes Reverso
I also recommend the Wiktionary in both French and English. It gives many definitions, even some that are archaïc or hardly ever used, so that's like my last resort if I can't find the definition of an English (or even French) word. It is also great for phonetics since almost every word have at least one (and sometimes several, typically France and Canada) IPA transcription.
I would suggest finding a resource which would allow you to build up Japanese names and words from their etymological roots. I would recommend Wiktionary. The Online Etymology Dictionary is another great resource.
Lolth reminds me of the name Lilith, which is a mythological demon figure of Jewish folklore. I did some digging, and apparently 'Ririsu' is the Japanese translation of Lilith. You might be able to use it as the consort's name.
As for the archipelago that you are naming, I would just play around with various etymological pieces until you get a name that sounds appropriate. Japan in the Japanese language translates as Nippon, which in turn translates as 'sun's origin'. You could take 'balance land' or something similar and build the word up from there, perhaps even given the region an English translation for the players.
Wiktionary is less specialized, but also great for learning about words. You can get etymological information, pronunciations, the usual dictionary and thesaurus entries, support for many languages (as opposed to just having English words in an English interface), translations, relevant links (including to the entries for etyma), anagrams, and more.
I tend to use folkets lexikon which is generally pretty good. If you go to 'inställningar' and tick the box 'Expandera uppslagningsresultaten direkt' then it will show the grammatical forms, synonyms some example sentences when you search a word. The app is good as well and works offline, which can be useful. Ocassionaly for less common words it won't have any grammatical information, but wiktionary generally still will. Bab.la is also quite good - it doesn't have grammatical forms but it does have example sentences.
Hope this helps :)
Wiktionary is actually a great resource. You can paste in Chinese characters and it will tell you pronunciations in various dialects as well as descended languages including Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese (here's an example for 文).
I'm not a linguist by any measure but AFAIK, Middle Chinese pronunciations are reconstructions based on rime dictionaries, which functioned by placing characters with similar pronunciations next to each other ("Middle Chinese" as we call it is based off a Sui Dynasty dictionary from the year 601). Combine that knowledge of modern dialects, some of which tend to have closer pronunciations to older Chinese like Cantonese, and knowledge of descended pronunciations in Japanese, etc. and you can get a somewhat accurate reconstruction (but it still is a reconstruction for sure).
TBH I'm not very dogmatic about sticking to a certain pronunciation... as a fantasy writer my ultimate goal is to make sure the words sound cool in modern English haha (sometimes I will even make up a word beforehand and figure out the hanzi for it afterwards, especially for proper nouns)
You can try this Wikipedia article. Also Wiktionary is a great source. To get the most out of these resources, and to pronounce words correctly, I would recommend that you learn the script first. It's much more phonetic than English, so it shouldn't be too hard.
I did this with Hindi/Urdu and had success. I think you'll be surprised at how quickly the grammar comes back, much quicker than learning a whole new language. Good luck!
You could use Wiktionary, type in the French word, go to the French section and there’s a phonetic transcription.
Edit: remember to put the language of the website in English. It’s better there.
Well, if you're objective is to try and understand what Joyce wrote, yes Campbell's Skeleton Key will help but as you know this isn't a novel that you can sit down and digest like a normal book. What got me hooked is listening to it. There are a few versions out there, including a section read by Joyce himself that is worth a listen but my personal favorite is Patrick Healy's version.
http://ubu.com/sound/joyce_fw.html
I would take a puff or 2 from my favorite "cigarette", just enough so could really focus on the words, and then go into a dark room and lay down and listen to it. Some parts will make sense, others won't. Don't worry about it, just enjoy it. Then if there are parts you liked go back and read the text. Its then you can go to a site like https://www.wiktionary.org and start looking up what words could mean. Joyce wrote this book using dozens of different languages. So you'll find words that mean similar things in different languages and things like that. You'll start to get a real idea for how much time and effort it took just to put this book together. You'll never understand it but you will gain an appreciation for it.
The simple present is the base from which every other French verb is formed. So, you really should just try to look at it as you go and memorize the forms. I love wiktionary because no cookies, easy, fast, literally any French verb with translation, pronunciation, audio, and etymology.
But, I can introduce you to some basic paradigms. I'll order it by ending type plus the conjugations in the form: ending: je, tu, il, vous, nous, ils
>parl*er: *-e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent**
>
>man*ger: *-ge, -ges, -ge, -geons, -gez, -gent**
>
>pla*cer: *-ce, -ces, -ce, -çons, -cez, -cent**
>
>rend*re: *-s, -s, -, -ons, -ez, -ent**
>
>accompl*ir: *-is, -is, -it, -issions, -issiez, -issent**
>
>nett*oyer: *-oie, -oies, -oie, -oyons, -oyez, -oient**
>
>effr*ayer: *-aie, -aies, -aie, -ayons, -ayez, -aient**
>
>cr*aindre: *-ains, -ains, -aint, -aignons, -aignez, -aignent**
>
>v*oir**: *-ois, -ois, -oit, -ons, -ez, -ent**
>
>préf*érer: *-ère, -ères, -ère, -érons, -érez, -èrent**
**There is a pattern in verbs that have -oir- in their infinitive. But frankly, it's so complicated with so many exceptions and such, that you might as well just look it up to be sure. Common verbs in this paradigm group include pouvoir, vouloir, prévoir, &c. Like, even here, the nous conjugation o*f vo*ir i*s voyo*ns but fo*r voulo*ir it'*s voulo*ns.
Someone else recommended the online dictionary http://hjp.znanje.hr for future use, here are two others which are helpful:
Stretno sa studijem, gospodine ili gospođo
Latin student here! Here are some of my favourite resources for vocabulary:
Gasesti traduceri bune si in latin daca ai putin cap si stii cum sa surfalezi netul.
Cel mai mult m-a ajutat Wiktionary. Este super site-ul! Sunt site-uri care-ti traduc din context.
The problem with that kind of English phonetic transcription is that those sounds are pronounced differently depending on where you're from, and you're trying to describe a single Latin sound.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, I recommend learning some of the international phonetic alphabet (IPA). Looking at all the different symbols is intimidating, but only a handful are used for Latin and they're very easy. Then you can find phonetic transcription of most Latin words on Wiktionary.
To use your example, Wiktionary gives /ˈnoː.biːs/ for nōbīs. We know /i/ in IPA is always the English "ee" sound, because "ih" like in "win" is /ɪ/. Then ' before a syllable is stress, . divides syllables, and ː marks a long vowel.
Here is one such set of rules for syllable stress specifically. You've noticed an important problem, which is that you sometimes need to know whether a vowel is inherently long. Long vowels and most combinations of consecutive consonants cause the stress to shift from the third-to-last syllable to the second-to-last. Unfortunately there's no way to tell vowel length just by looking at the word as it would be written in the context of plant names. When you learn latin as a foreign language, long vowels are often marked with a macron, like this: caespitōsum (the link I posted uses a circumflex instead). If you pop a Latin word into wiktionary.org, it will show you a dictionary entry with the long vowels marked.
Keep in mind that not all taxonomic names are pure latin. Some are greek, or latin and greek, or latinized greek, or latinized english...you get the idea. So it might be hard to predict the pronunciation in those cases.
One last thing - the "correct" pronunciation of Latin in terms of articulating the vowels and consonants is not necessarily "correct" when it comes to scientific and medical terminology. Using either of the two most popular systems, the classical and ecclesiastical pronunciations, would sound strange and turn heads. You do want to follow latin's rules for syllable stress, but otherwise basically pronounce it like English (assuming you work in an English-speaking country).
Honestly, I'm not too sure, as it's my native language. I would recommend using WordReference and Wiktionary for word lookup, but that's about as much as I can think of.
There's a chart in the sidebar.
I first learned about IPA through helping a friend with linguistics homework. The chart and accompanying pages in her textbook seemed incomprehensible to me. It wasn't until I joined Reddit that I really figured any of it out.
I used the sidebar and these Wikipedia articles, which I first found by googling 'ipa help'. I also looked at the IPA of various words and listening to pronunciation on Wiktionary.
I don't have any special keyboard for IPA symbols, so I just copy and paste IPA from whatever source I happen to have open at the time (my lexicon, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, random r/conlangs post, etc)
This is going to seem overly complicated, but as a French major it was a game changer. I took a class called Romance Linguistics in which we learned the International Phonetic Alphabet. Using Wiktionary, you can find the IPA for a word and have a more accurate method for pronunciation.
I decided to write up my words in a similar format to iktionary. Effectively one word per page, but removing any accents from those words. That does combine a bunch of word together, but I have a lot of overlap in my language since accents are used for gender inflection and intensity.
I have most of my current WIP up at GitHub because it is easier to look it up in various places. For example, my latest word for Lexember is here.
The reason I went with this format is because I can write a program that parses the Markdown and converts it into a dictionary-style PDF or output. I'm pretty good at manipulation (plus I'm writing a Markdown parser) so it will give me a pretty condense format when I want one and then the larger ones I can fill in as I go.
The main reason I went with the leading syllable for a directory name is because I expect to mess with this language for at least another couple years and a 1,000+ files in a single directory is difficult.
The English version of Wiktionary is very useful for exploring Chinese characters and the relationship between words in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The pages for characters have a section covering the origin and stroke order of the character itself, followed by pronunciations, definitions, and examples of use (including awesome lists of compound words it appears in) for each language. It's smart about linking between the traditional, simplified, and shinjitai versions of the same characters, so it's Taiwan-friendly and you can use it to build your vocabulary by cross-walking things you know in Japanese to their Chinese equivalents. A lot of words for modern concepts were created in Japan around the turn of the last century as wasei kango and then later adopted into Chinese and Korean with using the Chinese and Sino-Korean readings of those characters, so you will likely meet many words as well as characters that are familiar to you.
Best of luck!
> I find it historically fascinating how late educated Europeans realized that Persians and Indians are their brothers, both linguistically and genetically, because of how culturally foreign they are. Culture is a hell of a drug. I’m curious as to whether this feeling was mutual; did learned people in Persia and northern India have any clue, until recently, that Europeans share a common origin with them?
I have a remote coworker who knows Hindi, Punjabi, and Gujarati -- on top of English. I explained to him how PIE branched out into various languages. I explained cognates. And, I showed him: https://www.wiktionary.org/
He was completely baffled by it. For every single day of the past 5 weeks, he has shared a handful of cognates with me. It really is marvelous. He was also able to draw up some cultural similarities.
You see, most people just learn languages instinctively, on autopilot. They don't draw connections between different languages directly either.
Moreover, with India, from what I understand, the colonial baggage and racial pseudoscience from that era has left a bad impression of all this.
Though, I did tell him that the PIEs were technically the people who migrated into both Europe and Southern Asia -- so, a certain chuck of everyone's ancestory hails from them.
Today, I assume that at least 50% of the world can speak some decent amount of a PIE-based language which is insane if you think about it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
There's a page in wiktionary that has the meanings of Latin/greek/general anatomy prefix meanings like chrono = time, or -saur = Lizard etc.
But I don't know if that page covers English name prefixes though.
Though since this is a poetry workshop, if you want to improve vocab, here's one practical process. Every time you encounter a new word, look it up on wiktionary (or dictionary of choice). Also, you can look up the etymology, which in part breaks down words' components (called morphemes). For example, apologize has morphemes 'apo-' (prefix meaning 'from') + 'log' (root morpheme, a derivative of 'logos' meaning 'speech') + '-ize' (suffix that converts to verb), adding together to mean "an account"/"story". Then it becomes easier to learn words with morphemes already recognized, and you may create new morpheme combinations into words.
personally I would recommend wiktionary (main page for searching words) for online word definition search. also made by the group who made wikipedia
Here is a tip if you see a word you don't recognize/understand and can't find it in a cursory google search, look it up on Wikipedia's online dictionary called wiktionary.com, since they have a lot of words and phrases that you might not see in other online dictionaries or on google.
For example they have the definition of the word "skin" as a verb right here. As you can see there are several definitions, but I believe the one that the post is referring to is the second one that you see on the webpage, as it's one of the most commonly used definitions for the word.
If you have questions, please let me know
You can read more about Vietnamese Phonology here, you can listen to natives pronounce words here, and you can look up IPA for words here
I don't get it. most of their projects seem just a way of expanding wikipedia and are overall useful. e.g. what's wrong with https://www.wiktionary.org/ ?
I don't get the weird hatred reddit has against wikipedia.
Well, music and fruit are actual English, because they are in the English language... but semantics aside, you probably meant they’re loanwords?
You’d be correct.
> fruit
From Middle English frute, fruit, fruct, fruyt, frut (“fruits and vegetables”), from Old French fruit (“produce, fruits and vegetables”), from Latin fructus (“enjoyment, proceeds, profits, produce, income”) and frūx (“crop, produce, fruit”) (compare Latin fruor (“have the benefit of, to use, to enjoy”)), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰruHg- (“to make use of, to have enjoyment of”).
> music
From Middle English musik, musike, borrowed from Anglo-Norman musik, musike, Old French musique, and their source Latin mūsica, from Ancient Greek μουσική (mousikḗ)
As far as I know this is not hidden history or anything?
Also, if you are searching for any information about French, or any other language for that matter, I recommend using Wiktionary instead of just typing what you are searching for into Google.
It’s very complete and can help you find the etymology of a word, its meaning, all of its existing inflections and its equivalent in other languages. Sometimes, audio samples are even available to listen to the pronunciation of a word.
A feline is called Felis in Latin:
https://www.wiktionary.org/wiki/felis#Latin
Cattus is a slang term for feline in Latin:
https://www.wiktionary.org/wiki/cattus#Latin
It came from German, which got it from either Africa or Asia if the etymology on there is to be believed.
Take a table with cyrillic letters and their transliterated sounds. Start to read cyrillic words and write it down with the letters that best match the sounds in your alphabet (or use the transliteration). Check if you are reading the word correctly in some site with text to speech. I like this one https://www.wiktionary.org/, but you also can use Google translator for instance. That is how it worked for me. Удачи ;)
etymonline and wiktionary are good etymology sources.
For a word like "judgment", the root is "judge" and the two suffixes are "-ment" and "-al".
I think you're misusing the word objectively. Which is funny because you made such a bold statement based around the word objective.
Here's a link to some online dictionaries:
https://www.wiktionary.org/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja?hl=en Dictionary.com
On the front page of Wikipedia there's an entire list of them at the bottom. There's also others that I don't know are associated with Wikipedia or not. Like Wiktionary.
sorry if this seems annoying, but learning ipa (international phonetic alphabet), at least for french could help a lot, as it allows much more subtle pronounciation than badly anglicized pronounciation. of course, you could also look up some french dictionaries with sound, wiktionary and [wordreference](www.wordreference.com) are my goto dictionaries for pronounciation and general usage.
夜 is composed of 夕 (semantic) and 亦 (phonetic). However since 夕 and 月 are related as well, you are correct on 夜.
I'll also quote myself from a previous post:
>攵 means to strike/to hit. It has 4 strokes. 攴 is the standalone form, and it contains 又, a hand.
>夊 means walk slowly. It has 3 strokes, and the third stroke crosses the first. You can't tell really that well, but it's an upside-down 止, a foot. There are 4 orientations for 止, namely the two in 步 pointing upwards, and the two on the right side of 降, pointing downwards. 舞 uses the same two foot symbols as 降.
>The 夂 in 冬 was originally two knots and the ends of a string, with the same meaning as 終, or ends. It has 3 strokes, but the third stroke only touches the first, and does not cross it. Two dots 冫signifying ice were added to specify winter (i.e. ends of a year), compare 冷 and 凍.
I would suggest looking up characters in Wiktionary as well as Chinese Etymology. Although they are not perfect, they are quite accessible.
| Kanji | Component |
|---|---|
| 夜 | 夕 |
| 客 | 夊 |
| 後 | 夊 |
| 度 | 又 |
| 愛 | 夊 |