Zompist Bboard Again

I'm a bit confused about how written English handles quotes within quotes. In German , it's pretty simple - the outer quotes are marked by quotation marks, and the inner quotes are marked by apostrophes: "Und dann sagte er: 'Das kann ich nicht machen!'" But in English, I'm pretty sure I r...

Why did you highlight "just a bit plain weird" too? There's nothing off with that, is there? The form I'm used to is "just a plain bit weird" myself. And I feel like the most natural order for me might be "a bit just plain weird"... but I think sounds a little odd to u...

Dravidian has more in common with Australian languages, phonologically, than just fricativelessness. In particular, it's lack of fricatives + a three-way dental/alveolar/retroflex contrast among coronals + nasals at every stop POA + lack of voicing contrast (at least for Proto-Dravidian) + a prepon...

I feel like I read somewhere that there was some Germanic language in which (i-)umlaut only affected the stressed vowel, i.e. the stressed vowel assimilated to a following /i j/ but other vowels didn't. But I haven't been able to find it again. Does anybody have a source? Is there any Germanic lang...

Ser wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2020 12:17 pm Do you pronounce "average" with /ɛ/? And if so, do you have the Mary-marry-merry merger too?

Which syllable are you asking about? “Average” is [ˈævɹɪ̈dʒ]~[ˈævəɹɪ̈dʒ].

and which can be argued to be an allophone of /i/ as it does not contrast with [ i] or [j] as long as syllabification is treated as contrastive: Do you happen to know of discussions of this contrastive syllabification? I recently had an argument with someone who insisted I was making up this analys...

Is Spanish ll generally pronounced as [j] then? It's pronounced the same as syllable-initial <y>, which is generally a bit more constricted than [j]. In some accents, it's something like [ʝ] or [ɟʝ], which might be in free variation with a more lenis [j] pronunciation, and which can be argued to be...

the traditional English pronunciation of Latin sepulc(h)rum should've been /sɪˈpʌlkɹəm/ Yes, and I'm pretty sure that is the traditional English pronunciation of "sepulc(h)rum". The English adjective "sepulchral" also has that stress pattern. It's just the pronunciation of the E...

I just learned that "sepulcher" is stressed on the initial rather than the second syllable. I'd been pronouncing it as /səˈpʌlkər/ rather than the correct /ˈsɛpəlkər/.

For me: "Nearby" is a double-stressed word like "thirteen", etc. (See John Wells's blog post here .) It is accented on the last syllable in isolation and as the last word in a phrase; it can sound like it's accented on the first syllable (I think it could alternatively maybe be c...

I used to think augment was augument (like argument but with au instead of ar) and so on for related words.

I've occasionally heard people use a preposition + which construction (does that have a name?) while also stranding the preposition at the end of the clause: "the store to which I went to", or something like that. But I recently heard someone say "the source from which it was influen...

MWD sez: \ ˈfā-v(ə-)rə-ˌti-zəm, ˈfā-vər- \ AHD sez: (fā′vər-ĭ-tĭz′əm, fāv′rĭ-) It take it you pronounce "favourite" in three syllables as well? Neither of those shows a pronunciation that would regularly correspond to “favortism” with “rt” instead of “rit”. Unless you think that’s what MW...

So Icelandic, Faroese, Greek, Latvian, and Lithuanian are the only modern IE languages to preserve the IE nominative singular -s, right? And the latter three are the only ones to preserve it as /s/? Curious that these are basically on the fringes of Europe (or at least IE-speaking Europe, with the ...

A general principle of English stress is that words don’t start with two fully unstressed syllables in a row. But fully unstressed syllables can pile up at the end—generative has three (at least it can for me—I reduce the a, I can flap the t and I don’t feel like the final syllable has to have an un...

Personally I find the various uses of subject-verb inversion in English (especially old-fashioned modern English) to be the most amusing part of its grammar, including (especially including) the part of inserting "to do" as an auxiliary verb for all non-basic verbs if they don't have an a...

I find it surprising that Estav says height would be respected aside from happy cases where spelling patterns are similar, like a "short" vowel before doubled <bb>. The length of vowels in German names can often be inferred from the spelling, which mostly follows similar rules to English....

I still think it's a small miracle that John Boehner convinced the world to pronounce his name with /e/ instead of /o/. isn't that just the regular borrowing pattern for German front rounded vowels in the Midwest? what percentage of German immigrants to the US preserved front rounded vowels in the ...

I don't understand why it would be considered objectionable in the first place to use Classical Latin phonology as a starting point. For the purpose of sound changes, it's pretty much correct to take the phonological system of Classical Latin as a direct ancestor of modern Romance phonologies. Class...

Ser wrote: ↑Mon May 11, 2020 2:58 pm If that's so it's a very unusual abbreviation though, because it's a single word and it continues to be in use (almost never with a hyphen, contra zompist).

It’s like other short spellings where letters are pronounced as their names like b4, c u later.