What's the demonym* for people who use StackExchange and its subsidaries?
There's isn't a documented asnwer anywhere, so I'd like to know the general consensus. Suggestions and ideas too are welcome.†
Give one answer per site:
Stack Exchange
Stack Overflow
Super User
Server Fault
and any o...
Italian language uses the apostrophe to indicate the elision of one o more letters at the and of a word. In the case of *de'* the apostrophe is used as "apocope postvocalica".
I have noticed that "apocope" is an English word too ("the loss of a sound or sounds at the end of a word, e.g., in the derivation of *curio* in *curiosity*" - OED), and "postvocalica" literally means "after vowel".
In Italian language is not common truncate *dei* to write *de'*, but in Florentine dialcet is.
I just couldn’t figure out any way that "degli Medici" made sense. The scoffers disbelieved me because they seem to believe that Wikipedia must always be right (nota bene: only the English WP had this, not the Italian WP), and because I am not an expert on medieval Italian.
I tried to find info on local dialects, but it was hard to come by for this sort of thing.
It verged upon the abusive. Utterly unreasonable.
@Carlo I very much appreciate being exonerated. Thank you.
@Carlo_R. Right, the Florentine thing makes sense!
@tchrist I did not disbelieve you because "Wikipedia is always right"; I too thought perhaps Wikipedia might be wrong, but I offered a suggestion how it could possibly be right. The principle of charity. You just didn't give me much information about the exact dialect in which this variant of the name was coined, so you could not remove my doubt, especially not with modern rules.
Italian sometimes skips a final vowel. I don’t know cases where they use apostrophes for missing consonants, or abbreviate degli as de’. De’ is an abbreviation of dei, not of degli.
The reasons for saying dello studente and degli studenti have to do with which forms go with which starting sound. To posit a degli medici, you would have to have a phonologic context where that would be a sensible construct. It’s like imagining English might have once enforced an pineapple instead of a pineapple. That makes no sense, not now, not ever, because there is no phonological justification for it.
I was just syaing that, for someone uninformed about Renaissance Italian dialects, it is not possible to say with 100 % certainty that it could not have been degli Medici. Now that you have told us abbreviating dei as de' is typically Florentine, I think we can be confident enough that Wiki isn't basing it on some obscure source, but that it is just an error that's hould be corrected.
@tchrist Perhaps an pineapple was used in some Manchester dialect of the 1400s, who knows...
What's the demonym* for people who use StackExchange and its subsidaries?
There's isn't a documented asnwer anywhere, so I'd like to know the general consensus. Suggestions and ideas too are welcome.†
Give one answer per site:
Stack Exchange
Stack Overflow
Super User
Server Fault
and any o...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…