Talk:py chiminey

RFD discussion: August 2023–October 2024

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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py chiminey

Do vee vant schpellinz like zees? Also py chiminy Pinch88 (talk) 18:41, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I think we need to consult @PseudoSkull. DonnanZ (talk) 19:35, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it is useful, because I originally couldn't make out what it meant when I was reading a book that had that phrase in it. PseudoSkull (talk) 19:52, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Keep if it passes CFI. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 05:21, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm against including phrases like this, as I've intimated elsewhere, since in the vast majority of cases, these phrases are just eye dialect spellings of existing phrases, with no independent meaning. pasghetti is one of the few exceptions, a phrase that is used by adults to sound cute, and therefore can't be reduced to merely being a child's word for spaghetti. So I ask ... is py chiminey used by people without an accent in order to make fun of German immigrants? Perhaps it once was.

We could flood the site with hundreds more words and phrases like this so long as we can turn up three cites across the whole corpus of English literature for each one. But I'm reluctant to vote delete based on what might happen, so I want time to think some more about this. Whichever way this vote goes, it will help me firm up my opinions on the wider category of eye dialect spellings.

One more comment ... archive.org is impressing me with how powerful its search is in comparison to that of Google Books. py chiminey isnt cited now, and searching Google Books turns up mostly results about chimneys (forget about using plus signs and quote marks, as they dont seem to do much), but the new archive.org text search turns up plenty of hits for this exact phrase, so this would easily pass CFI if kept at RFD. Thanks, —Soap— 11:01, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

@Soap, this is useful to know. What specific search function are you using on archive.org? Searching books in general just returns an error for me. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:32, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

this link goes directly to the search results i was looking at. from the front page, use the main search tool (not the Wayback Machine) with "search text contents" selected and with the phrase in quotes. If that's what you've been doing and it returns an error, I can't help, but I notice the site is slow for me especially with large PDF's, so maybe their server resources arent as powerful as Google's and they sometimes fail to complete a search. —Soap— 18:54, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

A problem with Internet Archive is that older books are often badly OCR'd and the search function won't work there because the scanned text is garbled. That might be the problem Andrew's having. In those cases you often need to view the full scanned text, ctrl+F for plausible strings in the mess, and then plug in what you find to the search function in the main view to get the actual location. I imagine they also won't turn up in full-site searches. Google's OCR is generally better, errors are usually limited to the normal stuff like reading long s as "f" etc. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:00, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Off-topic, but what's going on with the /b/ → /p/ here, it does seem weird (expected in word-final position, final obstruent devoicing). Or is it simulating aspiration, /bʰ/? Jberkel 12:25, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

English stereotypes of how a German accent shifts English sounds often seem perplexingly backwards to me; a similar case is the English use of mid to signal a German pronunciation of the (German!) word mit. It's like a cross between eye dialect and Mockney: changing words to signal "this speaker has an accent" even if that means changing the words in diametrically the opposite way to what the speaker's accent does.- -sche (discuss) 09:29, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

and one of those cites has pisness for "business", so the /b/ > /p/ thing seems like part of a pattern. There are some dialects in the Alps where all stops are devoiced, which could have theoretically provided a sound basis for the stereotype, but I think in some cases writers need to "make it wrong on purpose" because subtleties of speech don't carry over as well in writing. The fact that pisness and mid appear in the same cite suggests accuracy isnt always a priority with writing. Makes me think also of a stereotypical pan-Asian accent where L and R are always switched, meaning the speaker somehow gets them both wrong instead of merging them both into one sound. —Soap— 10:38, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm leaning keep if it's attested (RFV), on the grounds that we keep all kinds of dialectally- / pronunciation- motivated respellings, and these are not predictable (indeed, as Jberkel's and my comments above indicate, it's unexpected). This is on a spectrum, IMO: on one end of the spectrum are things like Winterpeg (changing the spelling to highlight Winnipeg's coldness) that are clearly includable, on the other end is baaaaaaad (changing spelling to mark intensity / drawn-out pronunciation), which we explicitly decided to make redirects. I think this and e.g. dwagon are pretty low-importance, but still includable (and I think py... is slightly more includable than dwagon since dwagon is theowetically a systematic change, weplace all rs with w, wheweas py... doesn't seem to follow a consistent pattern). - -sche (discuss) 09:41, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Just pointing out that baaad exists as an independent page, among many others in Category:English elongated forms. I didn't look into the history behind the category, but I figured they'd be treated as ordinary words, meaning anything with three cites passes, and that because the spelling is flexible it's not required that they all have the exact same number of extra letters. —Soap— 10:45, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: According to Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion § Repetitions, baaaaaaad would be a redirect to baaad (three repeating letters). J3133 (talk) 11:00, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I read the prior discussion just now for more context ... to be honest, that could have been deleted, but I won't poke the dragon ... and I won't worry about the elongated forms getting deleted since it seems we decided that they belong so long as they're cited, just like I'd assumed. I just misinterpreted the comment above to mean that they were supposed to be redirects to the standard spelling. This also gives me more material to add to an essay ... as I implied at the beginning of the discussion, I'm actually against including py chiminey and similar phrases, but I didnt place a vote because my objection is to the policy rather than to this individual entry, and we presumably won't be changing the policy without a long drawn-out vote in which at least two thirds of the community vote for a stricter policy. —Soap— 11:25, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I think it actually is systematic: voicing is switched, so that b>p and f>v, etc. It's just that it's only sprinkled in for effect so it won't obscure the meaning too much, and it's in addition to the changes that the average reader of the period who didn't know German would already be aware of. This convention is used even by writers such as Mark Twain, who had studied German and knew better. In this case, by jiminy is a phrase that has never been used much in real life but was often substituted in written reported speech for tabooed oaths. It's unintelligible to modern readers because it's the intersection of two artificial conventions that are no longer used. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:35, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

While searching for evidence to support the now-failed triste, I came across this strange passage by Walter Scott that supposedly represents the speech of a Highlander: “Put what would his honour pe axing for the peasts pe the head, if she was to tak the park for twa or three days?”[1] Overlordnat1 (talk) 16:04, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I think it is rubbish, but keep per above. It can probably be attested. But I am not convinced that this bizarre ethnic stereotype can be sensibly called a pronunciation spelling. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 19:14, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Delete as it is merely attempting to reproduce the idiosyncratic pronunciation of a specific speaker. — Sgconlaw (talk) 20:05, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Delete. - TheDaveRoss 14:33, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

No consensus for deletion at this time. bd2412 T 18:17, 9 October 2024 (UTC)