Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 January 6

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January 6

Japanese preference for purintā over purinta, etc

In Japanese, monita (for computer monitor) is common, but monitā (ditto) is also common. My impression is that when an English word is Japanesized, it's more normal for an unstressed final schwa of English to become bimoraic in Japanese than for it to be monomoraic. And ditto for word-final vowels other than schwa. This has long puzzled me. Sometimes it can perhaps be explained by the Japanese preference for four-morae words, but this doesn't work for five-mora purintā (for English "printer"), for example.

I looked for an explanation in the article gairaigo. Nothing there, but I did encounter this:

Another example of the Japanese transformation of English pronunciation is takushi (タクシー), in which the two-syllable word taxi becomes three syllables because consonants don't occur consecutively in traditional Japanese, and in which the sound /si/ ("see") is pronounced /ʃi/ ("she") because there is no /si/ in katakana.

As you'll have gathered, I'm no phonologist; but (so) this struck me as horribly confused. (Example: whether or not something exists in katakana is merely by the way; /si/ certainly does exist in Japanese phonology but the /s/ here happens not to be realized as [s].) Amazingly, the writer(s) do(es)n't even seem to have noticed that the Japanese word is not takushi but takushī. Here's my rewrite:

Another example of the Japanese transformation of English pronunciation is takushī (タクシー), in which the two-syllable word taxi becomes three syllables (and four morae, thanks to long ī) because consonants don't occur consecutively in traditional Japanese, and in which the sound [si] ("see") of English is pronounced [ɕi] (which to monoglot English speakers will sound like "she") because /si/ in Japanese is so realized.

I hope I haven't screwed that up. Anyway, it still doesn't answer the question: why/whence the extra mora? (Why takushī and not takushi?) -- Hoary (talk) 01:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Because in Japanese the 'i' in 'shi' is very often almost silent, especially at the end of a word or before a voiceless consonant. In English, it isn't. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 02:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Loanword phonology does some weird things that aren't always explained by a language's phonology. For example, Huave kàwíy comes from Spanish caballo. The consonantal differences are understandable (Huave doesn't have [β] or [ʝ]) but the vowel changes don't make much sense, considering that Huave has all of the vowels of Spanish (and more). Another example is Mele Kalikimaka, which comes from Merry Christmas. It all makes sense when we consider Hawai'ian's different phonology, except the second e in mele. Why isn't it i?

It may have to do with how common a particular sequence is in the language in question. Even if word-final -ta is a possible sequence in Japanese, it may much less common than -tā. The sequence -ta could also resemble a particular morpheme that speakers are trying to avoid. It's also possible that certain sounds or sound combinations are associated with classes of words. If Japanese speakers perceive a word as being foreign, they may apply certain rules to it that they don't apply to others. But this is kind of guesswork. A native speaker can probably fill us in on any of this. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 03:06, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

There are indeed many oddities in the assimilation of foreign (in recent years mostly English) words within Japanese. Some of it looks like the influence of spelling. ¶ Word-final /ta/ is pretty common in Japanese. (It's particularly common in surnames and personal names.) By contrast, if we put aside obvious loanwords, we needn't limit ourselves to word endings or /t/ onset to see that /aa/ (ā) is very rare. It appears in a number of interjections (mā, sā, etc) that are similar or at least comparable to the English "well" of "Well, I'm not sure". It appears in okāsan and obāsan ("mother" and "grandmother" respectively) and their variants (kāsan, okāsama, etc). And that's all I can think of. It is of course common in loanwords, in derivatives of loanwords, and in Japanese combinations of loan morphemes. (A favorite is byūrā, aka airasshukārā.) But my uneducated guess is that you could be on to something; that there's an unconscious idea: "/purinta(a)/ is a foreign word. As such, it is fitting that it should sound foreign (just as we can ensure that it looks foreign by writing it in katakana). Tā sounds more foreign than ta; therefore let it be /purintaa/." But again, this is mere speculation. -- Hoary (talk) 05:38, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Hope this helps. ja:長音符#長音符の省略. Without chōonpu, you cannot tell the difference between Silva and Silver. Oda Mari (talk) 09:16, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure that Japanese commonly distinguishes between original [ɜːr]/[ɜː] vs. [ɑːr]/[ɑː] in loans from English, so lumping original [ər]/[ə] with [ɜːr]/[ɜː] might not be too large a step. By the way, Silva and silver are pronounced the same in non-rhotic dialects of English (with the exception of possible "linking r")... AnonMoos (talk) 09:38, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

In my dialect, both are pronounced exactly the same, and both would have a linking r before a following vowel, even though the 'r' in 'silver' is not otherwise pronounced, and there isn't even one in 'silva'. We had a similar discussion over Christmas about this. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 18:08, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, in my dialect too. -- Hoary (talk) 00:48, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Mari, but all that says is that these words come with or without the final "ー", not why the final "ー" is very common. ¶ Incidentally, I've just thought of a Japanese name with ā: アラーキー ("Arākī"), a name used (I think rather jokingly) by Nobuyoshi Araki. But I think that the joke depends on its deliberate resemblance to the loanword アナーキー ("anākī", i.e. "anarchy"), and if so then it's a kind of honorary loanword. -- Hoary (talk) 14:37, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

There's also the word ā (of the kō/sō/ā triple), but that may be the only other one. Also supporting the long-a-looks-foreign theory is the fact that mājan and rāmen, despite being on readings of Chinese characters, are often written in katakana or with ー instead of あ, presumably because they look like they should be. -- BenRG (talk) 21:34, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Good catches. I'd forgotten about all three. (As for rāmen, I'd long thought that it was merely Japanese pseudo-Chinese, akin to the English pseudo-Chinese of "lapsang souchong". Er, hang on: WP tells me that the latter is from real-world Cantonese. OK, I know nothing about etymology.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:48, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Ramen comes from Mandarin 'lamien'. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 10:06, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps that puzzling final e in Mele Kalikimaka comes from an English dialect that allows final /ɪ/. (As a child I was puzzled on finding that – written ‘ĭ’ – in dictionaries, but I've since heard it in some British speech.) —Tamfang (talk) 10:59, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes,I was wondering if this might be the difference between a borrowing from British and American English. μηδείς (talk) 21:04, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

What are examples of 轉注 reciprocation meaning on Chinese character systems

I am not sure which other Chinese characters are derivation cognitive besides 考 and 老. Is there any other examples besides 考 and 老 or only those two. That is what the article said, they didn't present any others. How many characters fit in that category, more than two?--107.202.105.233 (talk) 02:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

What do you mean by "derivation cognitive", and which article is it that you are referring to? -- Hoary (talk) 05:34, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Probably "derivative cognate", see Chinese_character_classification#Derivative_cognates or Doublet_(linguistics)#Chinese. ---Sluzzelin talk 11:05, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

As the section points out it's not used in modern classification. According to Baidu, one can perfectly explain the whole system without this concept. I don't know if I understood it correctly, but I'll try to explain the gist of that Baidu article: Writing was not created by one person in the same place at the same time. Character A can look different from character B, but has the same etymological root and a similar pronunciation. Both started out as variant characters. They basically depicted the same thing. However, at some point they were seperated and because of the prominent use of both characters, none could be eliminated. So both became standard. In this example 老 kept the meaning "old", while 考 has changed over time. However, the tone of that article is strange. It describes as if this process unnecessarily complicated everybody's life. (I thought it's normal that language changes.) Another source claims that 辟 has evolved into more characters like 避 and 僻. But then it would mean that derivative cognates are the same as phono-semantic compound characters, just only a different approach? --2.245.65.151 (talk) 02:48, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Letter C in German

In most of East European languages (except for Romanian) the letter ‹c› has the value of /ts/, it is believed this came from the German tradition, which in turn had come from the Carolingian France where Old French ‹c› before front vowels had such a pronunciation. But in modern German nearly all Latinate words are written with ‹z› instead of ‹c›. I suppose it has been a result of some deliberate spelling reform, but when did it occur and by whom was it done?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

See Middle High German. You will see there that the 'z' had a small tail on it from both Old High German to Middle High German, which represented the sound in question. It was standardised as a 'normal' z, in the beginning of the New High German period. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 12:36, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I know this but it has nothing to do with my question. And "tailed ‹z›" became simple ‹s› in the modern language by the way.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:34, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

By the way, in his first New Testament of 1522 Luther often used ‹tz› for /ts/ even in the beginning of words (for example, Mt. 1:1: »tzur tzeyt«; scan). But in 1546 he writes (or prints) consistently with ‹z› (»zur zeit«).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:53, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

It was a result of the German Orthographic Conference of 1901. Although the reforms did not abolish the use of ‹c› in words like "Centrum", "Accent" etc., the conference decided that new forms like "Zentrum" and "Akzent" were now also acceptable (source: German version of the article). If you look at Google Ngram (Accent vs Akzent Centrum vs Zentrum), you can see that the new forms became popular and had replaced the old forms by 1920 (the first spelling reform after 1901 occurred only in 1996). -Lindert (talk) 12:55, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! It turned out to be quite recently.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:34, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

• You mentioned Romanian as an exception because Romanian is a Romance language. The "East European langues" you probably refer to are Slavonic. You have to consider that the change from Z to C is not that recent. It's entirely wrong to write "Accent" and "Centrum" according to current orthography. --2.245.65.151 (talk) 22:14, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
  • I mentioned Romanian just because it has had the shift Lat. /k/ > Vulg. Lat. /tʃ/ before front vowels (shared with Italian) rather then the Western Romance shift /k/ > /ts/ (like in Old French and Spanish), and also because when Romanians accepted Latin alphabet they deliberately followed the Italian spelling (which was quite reasonable). East European are not only Slavic but Baltic, Albanian and non-IE Hungarian as well, they all follows the German (i.e. originally Carolingian Old French) tradition of the Latin pronunciation.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:22, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

As here the letter Z has been mentioned, it's interestind to trace its values throughout history. Being initially rendered in Old Latin like S or SS it later was adopted for dz-like sounds. With various shifts in Vulgar Latin (namely tj > ts, j > dz~dʒ) it began to be used in Latin words. All Romance languages followed suit. But only Italian keeps the original affricate value more or less, while the shifts occurred: in Spanish ts > θ, dz > ts > θ, and in French ts, dz > z. Exactly from French we have the stereotypical value /z/ of the IPA. German as expected follows Old French, but all other East Europe follow Mediaeval/Modern French (or English).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:41, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Letter Y in German

The very close question to above. In the medieval orthographies of East European languages ‹y› was used as an alternative for ‹i›. In Old Czech, Old Polish and Old Hungarian ‹y› was used as a "softener" for preceding consonants, this method is still in use in Hungarian and usually in transliteration of Cyrillic. In Slavics it has also been long used as a symbol for the vowel /ɨ/ (which has disappeared in Czech and Slovak but still exists in Polish). But in German, which had to have a great influence on the written tradition of "Latinate" East Europe, this letter means /y/ like in Ancient Greek. Obviously, it looks like an artificial restoration. When and by whom?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:33, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Your suspicion seems to be correct. According to the footnote on p. 28 of this text, the /y/ pronunciation was a product of classical philologists active in the German new humanism movement in the late 18th century. According to the same source, Johann Heinrich Voss was one of its chief protagonists. Incidentally, the /i/ pronunciation still seems to be current in Switzerland. Marco polo (talk) 18:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I am slightly confused, given my Americanism. Are we using /y/ here to represent the IPA [ü] or the IPA [j]? μηδείς (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

In the German context [y] is meant here, the close front rounded vowel. "Zyklus" is pronounced the way "Züklus" would be pronounced (if it were a word). Marco polo is correct that Swiss German spelling often uses "y" for a long close front unrounded vowel ([i]). For example "Fyrabig" or even "Fyyrabig" (the end of a workday, "Feierabend" in Standard German), and it is also preserved in Alemannic surnames (Huwyler, Wyss, ...), or place names (Pfyn, Kyburg, ...), but "Zyklus" would still always be pronounced with a close front rounded vowel in Swiss German, as would all Greek loanwords using the letter "y", just like they are in Standard German. For a confusing example: The mountain Gross Mythe is pronounced with a long [i], while the plural "Mythe" (as in myths) is pronounced with a [y]. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:01, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Medeis -- In official IPA, [j] always indicates the semivowel, [y] always indicates the high front rounded vowel, and [ü] doesn't exist except as the application of a little used centralization diacritic to basic [u]. The Africa Alphabet was defined as quasi-IPA with English values for "j" and "y" symbols.. AnonMoos (talk) 23:29, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I should either have used or said "in the IPA version of the German u-umlaut." Odd one would think I was unaware of the Americanist tension between /y/ and /j/ given that was my exact fickende question. Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte, aber ich dachte dass die Frage klar waere. μηδείς (talk) 03:30, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Interesting. I remember seeing 'Y' used in 18th- or 19th-century German documents where modern orthography would have 'I' or 'J', but only in the context of diphthongs ('seyn' for 'sein') or between vowel ('Meyer' for 'Meier'). Did the use of 'Y' persist in some cases? הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 05:41, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you! I am not sure if it's only me, but I cannot read the text on GoogleBooks with your link, so I changed your link with Archive.org if you don't mind.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:01, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

One thing still puzzles me. All around continental Europe ‹y› has had supposed to be equal to /i/ or something close to it (/j, iː, ɨ/). But in Old English and Scandinavia it meant /y/. Why did they use it in that way? If I'm not mistaken the notion that Greek ‹υ› must mean /y/ came during the Renaissance.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:21, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Greek Υ started out writing a [u] sound in early classical Greek, shifted to a front rounded vowel in later ancient Greek, and then became [i] in medieval Greek...

As for Germanic orthographies, when Old English was being written with the Latin alphabet, there were absolutely no established conventions for writing phonemic front rounded or umlaut vowels with the Latin alphabet, so those who were developing the Old English orthographic system were starting completely from scratch in that respect. In some early manuscripts, the front rounded vowels were written "ui" and "oi" ("ui" for the high front rounded vowel had some precedent in Anglo-Saxon runes), but during most of Old English, they were written "y" and "œ" as long as they remained distinct ("œ" merged fairly early with "e" in some dialects, including early West Saxon, the most "classic" Old English dialect). Presumably "y" and "œ" were chosen to make use of various existing letters and ligatures of the Latin alphabet to write Old English sounds (the same reason why the low front vowel of Old English was written "æ"). Old Norse orthography in its beginnings was partially influenced by Old English orthography (since Old English was written with the Latin alphabet earlier). AnonMoos (talk) 21:41, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

So indeed. I was too overused to the IPA symbolism, that I forgot that ‹æ› and ‹œ› were meant originally to represent Latin diphthongs. So Anglo-Saxons chose the ligatures just because they had little choice. As a heritage we have now the IPA /æ/ and /œ/ from their more or less accidental choice. For /y/ they were left only with ‹y›. It seems it was just a coincidence that Anglo-Saxon ‹y› had Ancient Greek sound. And when no spare Latin letters were left they picked out Runic symbols.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:56, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

One little thought. Anglo-Saxons seemed to be under an influence of the more advanced Irish, could it be that the Irish monks preserved the Classical Latin pronunciation? They still pronounce every ‹c› as /k/ after all, they could potentially preserve ‹y› as /y/.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:02, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

I don't think any of the choices were "accidental" as such. Rather, they were somewhat appropriate choices made from among the available Latin letters and ligatures. The letter "y" was not pronounced as a front rounded vowel in the pronunciation of Latin commonly available to Old English speakers ca. 650-700 A.D., but it's not impossible that a few highly-educated monks might have known something about its former pronunciation. Certainly the author of the First Grammatical Treatise had some information about Greek. Also, when trying to give the letter "y" a distinct name in medieval times, it was sometimes resolved into "ui" (which explains why the letter "y" has the name [waɪ] in modern English), and this "ui" could have been connected with the Anglo-Saxon front-rounded vowel rune made of an [i]-vowel rune inside an [u]-vowel rune and/or the earliest Old English digraph "ui", even if the earlier Latin/Greek pronunciation was not known...

P.S. The earliest Old English Latin-alphabet manuscripts did not use runes. The th-rune and w-rune were introduced into Old English spelling later on. Since there was almost never any systematic differentiation made between "ð" and "þ", it's not entirely clear why it was necessary to borrow "þ"... AnonMoos (talk) 09:54, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

"Accidental" was not a precise word but I couldnae remember a more appropriate synonym. I meant they were like looking to the ISO 8859-1 code page and picking out letters from the available set: "What should we use from what we have here? Oh, this one, this one, and that one will do". If they knew the ancient pronunciation of the Latin letters then they had to know that ‹æ› and ‹œ› was diphthongs and not IPA /æ/ and /œ/ so they deliberately deviated from the original pronunciation. Yes, their choice was quite reasonable: for the sound between /a/ and /e/ to use ‹æ›, for the sound between /o/ and /e/ to use ‹œ›. But if I knew nothing about Old English but knew Latin (say, I am a French scribe from Carolingian France) I would think that these ligatures from an English manuscript I was reading meant diphthongs /aɪ/ and /ɔɪ/ (or /ae̯/ and /oe̯/).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:25, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Shame on me, but in spite of my big interest in Mediaeval paleography, I've never paid much attention to England and thought about it as paleographic not-too-interesting periphery. I still do not know what is the oldest English manuscript written in Old English. But I think they chose "thorn" because they had no spare Latin letters left, and they did not think about ‹th› for that.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:39, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

two thousand fifteen

Beginning in 2010 people started saying "twenty ten" instead of "two thousand ten." Frankly, I'm surprised a lot of people are still saying "two thousand fifteen." Is there any way to tell which way it will go in the end? Are there any surveys which have tracked the trend up to now? --Halcatalyst (talk) 12:58, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Obviously the trend is towards the shorter form, and "twenty fifteen" will gradually take over, as "nineteen fifteen" did a hundred years ago, but some of us will continue to say "two thousand and fifteen" until about "twenty-twenty" if my guess is correct. Google ngrams isn't helpful because the words are seldom printed out in full. A very small survey in 2013 (for that year) found that nearly four times as many people used the shorter form as used the longer. Dbfirs 14:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Other variants of English have the added benefit of "twenty ten" removing the "and" used in compound numbers such as "two thousand and ten". The 2012 Olympic Games in the UK were known only as "twenty twelve". I do not know anyone outside formal circumstances here (England) who says "two thousand and …" when quoting a date. Bazza (talk) 14:30, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm also in England, and hear "two thousand and …" a lot. For example, I was recently listening to the Reith Lectures, where the speaker was consistently introduced (by Sue Lawley) as "the two thousand and fourteen Reith lecturer" (OK, I suppose you might call that "formal circumstances") . I take comfort from the fact that I've never heard anyone say that the Battle of Hastings happened in one thousand and sixty-six. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:42, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, your reference is an example of what I meant by "formal". My observation concerned everyday speech — so my calendar is filling up with "twenty-fifteen meeting schedules", and reviews are being done of events in "twenty-fourteen". Bazza (talk) 16:01, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

• The obvious difference here is that this is a "round" century in terms of millennia. One thousand nine hundred ninety-eight is something you wouldn't normally hear in English unless you were translating mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-huit. Two thousand XX is a lot shorter in morae than Twenty-hundred XX. But I agree with the above comment that according to precedent the shorter twenty-XX eventually win out. This is of course a request for prediction. μηδείς (talk) 22:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
  • It's fairly easy to observe anecdotally. Charles Osgood was saying "twenty-oh..." as early as 2001. It seems like society is catching up to him. It seems to have become much more common once 2010 hit, as the OP noted. It might be a matter of number of syllables: "two-thou-sand-fif-teen" (5) vs. "twen-ty-fif-teen" (4). Compare with "two-thou-san-one" vs. "twen-ty-oh-one" (both 4). I googled [how to pronounce year 2015] and got a lot of different speculations. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:51, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

If it's "two thou-san one" it would also be "twe-ny fif-teen" in casual speech. The internal t of 20 would be dropped, and the phrase one mora shorter. μηδείς (talk) 22:56, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

When I was a kid, my brother asked me what I thought I would be doing in 'the year two thousand' - it was always 'the year two thousand' and never just 'two thousand' or even twenty-oh-oh. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 02:09, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

From this 1940s cartoon (sped-up, but still understandable) starting at about 1:00 - "...when you hear the sound of the gong, it will be exactly two thousand A.D." [1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:28, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

From this 1990's comedy show, the existence of a mysterious race of NYC residents will be revealed... In the Year 2000. μηδείς (talk) 03:24, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Question about sexual interest

This has been bothering me for several years now. I don't know how to say it in English or in my native Finnish. What is a term for a man's interest towards a woman, or the other way around, specifically as a potential dating/sexual partner, that doesn't imply the speaker is only interested in immediate physical sexual intercourse with the addressed? I mean stronger interest than pure friendship, but not for pursuit of physical sexual intercourse alone. For homosexual/lesbian people, replace the above with "a man's interest towards another man" or "a woman's interest towards another woman". JIP | Talk 20:55, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

What's wrong with attraction? Attraction need not be purely or urgently sexual. Marco polo (talk) 21:10, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The difference between homosexual and heterosexual won't matter in English. You seem to be looking for Platonic relationship. μηδείς (talk) 22:30, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, the sense may have shifted somewhat since Plato's day, but any use of "Platonic" nowadays would actively exclude a sexual element[2]. The OP was asking about the interest of one person in another that is "not for pursuit of physical sexual intercourse alone" (my emphasis). Valiantis (talk) 22:54, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Okay, then "affection". But we probably need some examples from JIP. μηδείς (talk) 22:59, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The kind of interest that makes you want to hold hands, kiss, hug, etc. Things you wouldn't do to just a friend. As stated earlier, this includes actual sexual intercourse, but is not limited to it, not by far. JIP | Talk 19:00, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

"Romantic interest" or "interest in being more than a friend" would be two ways. You could also say that he sees her as a potential life long partner, as a potential mate, or as girlfriend material (adjusting as necessary for the actual genders involved).--Wikimedes (talk) 11:50, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Maybe "to have the hots for". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:40, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

I'd go with "romantically attracted". That could mean either interested in love or sex or both. Just "attracted" could mean those, too, but could also mean "attracted as friends", as in "the kids were attracted to each other by their mutual love of soccer". StuRat (talk) 20:05, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Including "falling in love"? Being in love with someone would certainly bring all that? Akseli9 (talk) 13:21, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Infatuation constitutes a fairly general term. Although, a more-specific (if informal) term for an innocent, childish fascination with somebody would be crush. Pine (talk) 04:17, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Comprehensive source on stress in America English for learners

I have a friend taking a college course in English who needs a good source for rules on stress in American English. (I.e., labORatry won't do.) I see tones of useless or very elementary websites, and our articles on English and English stress are very poorly organized, incomprehensive, and lacking in examples. As a native speaker I have never even considered looking for a source, as one gets it by assimilation.

Can anyone suggest a book with an online-text or more a comprehensive website that will help? Due to the student's circumstances, I will have to cut and past or attach the relevant information as an email. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Would plain old Webster's work? In the past, at least, I think they tended to favor American pronunciations, and then might give the alternate (such as your example) as "chiefly British" or whatever. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:37, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

What's needed is a set of rules with examples to prepare for a test, not a source to look up new words at convenience. One big problem is that English has primary and secondary stress, and vowel reduction to schwa or schwi on vowels with no stress in multisyllabic words. (the student's language does not have secondary stress, and this is a source of confusion.) I need to provide a set of rules with examples on the order of a handful of pages long. μηδείς (talk) 22:51, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Seems to me the old Webster's had general pronunciation guides up front, or at least the unabridged versions did - providing general rules. Whether suitable for you client, I dunno. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:55, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I remember the very confusing vowel guides, I'll looknsee if an old edition had a stress guide as well. μηδείς (talk) 22:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

For those learning English as a second language, they can find it quite stressful. StuRat (talk)

• This looks pretty useful. It doesn't cover every possibility, but does have some general guidelines for how to place the stress within words. --Jayron32 23:52, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Jayron, that's along the lines of what I am looking for, although I've already sent three separate sources very similar that carry the -ic- and -tion- information, for example--covering everything that link covers. I think I'll have to get myself a scribd membership at this point. Or maybe I'm just overestimating the difficulty of the issue.My hope was that there was someone with ESL experience who could point to a more bookish than bloggish source. I suspect the student will do just fine, but I'd still like to give something both comprehensive and tradition bound. μηδείς (talk) 00:01, 8 January 2015 (UTC)