Zompist Bboard Again

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Jun 20, 2021 1:15 pm To be honest, this is the first time I hear that idiom.

Same.

You can add "despite not even knowing what the passive voice is". French teachers are also extremely hostile to any form of repetition. French journalists similarly avoid using the same word twice, which means they often resort to clichés: if you're writing something about the city of Mars...

FR gauche "clumsy" (also "left" as opposed to "right") → EN gauche "socially clumsy, lacking in etiquette" FR boutique "shop" → EN boutique "upmarket, luxury shop" Two connected ones: FR grappe "bunch, cluster" → EN grape "fr...

Comments on this article about Irish accents point to an interesting phenomenon: some Irish children, who normally speak with an Irish accent, switch to an American accent (or an in-between "mid-Atlantic" accent) when playing a character. I was visiting friends in rural Co. Cork and went w...

This site is fantastic!

I've just upgraded Firefox to version 89, under Linux Mint, and I don't have any problem.

(Well, except that the new theme is ugly. I'm getting seriously tired of this "flat" style that you see everywhere nowadays.)

This reminds me of my first year as a teacher. It was a crash course in teenage slang. ------------ Unrelated: I fond it amusing how bloggers, Youtubers and the like started to call themselves "influencers". Originally it's a marketing term for the people who spread new fashions, and so ar...

An interesing one from LGBT slang.

• FR femme "woman" (also "wife") → EN femme "feminine lesbian or queer woman"

The word also lost its irregular pronunciation, from /fam/ to /fɛm/.

From a Vice article: http://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/wx5n4z/what-if-we-just-stopped-calling-the-cops? Singleton wanted someone to investigate the bullet holes. Yet she had to consider the optics . Officers might look at the damage and turn to her son, who just happens to wear his hair in locs. Em...

The normal pronunciation is the pseudo-English [ɑ̃mbœʁgœʁ]. Except for the burger joint Big Fernand: this chain offers hamburgés instead of hamburgers, and changing two letters is enough to change the whole pronunciation to [ɑ̃byʁʒe].

Very little, unfortunately. Most of it is old magazines, ad leaflets, old clothes, or random junk nobody wants. The furniture is old and won't survive being moved. The few useful items (TV, fridge) will be kept for the retirement home.

Honestly, there's a lot to criticise in the atheism movement. I don't think it as a whole should be considered part of the Left or even closely allied with it. Not all conservatives are religious and not all religious or spiritual people are conservative. Well, during the Bush II era, right-wing re...

Good news: my grandmother has finally found a place in a retirement home. She's increasingly unable to take care of herself, so that's a huge relief.

Bad news: now we have to clean her old apartment... and it won't be easy. She's a compulsive hoarder.

The French President has the title Président de la République , and that's how everybody refers to him. We only say Président français when we need to specify (e.g. there's a conference with other Presidents). As a kid, I saw a TV show from the US, with dubbed voices, and one character referred to l...

Yes, definitely. A "beaker" in the modern scientific "piece of laboratory equipment" sense is called a "Reagenzglas". Are you sure? From a cursory look, a "Reagenzglas" looks more like a test tube, not a beaker... In French, a beaker (the laboratory equipment...

SSBE as analysed by Geoff Lindsey is solidly 7-vowel based, crossing /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ɵ ə ʌ/ with [-j -w -ː(ɹ)]. It wouldn't stretch it too much to consider commA /ə/ and STRUT /ʌ/ as one vowel, since they each appear only in unstressed and stressed syllables respectively. Boom, 6 vowel English. This is qu...

jal wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 10:09 am I was under the impression that it's more like [ʁʷ]? Which is close enough to the [ɹʷ] of <wr>. As far as I know, <wr> has never been /wr/.

Well, present-day me knows all of that. You should be saying this to 14-year-old me.

We discuss the possibility of analysing the vowel system of English as having six vowels, plus combinations. [Slip from Pronunciations you had to unlearn.]

Well, this scheme isn't hard to use for an English-type accent: /a/ TRAP /e/ DRESS /ə/ STRUT/commA /i/ KIT /o/ LOT /u/ FOOT /aj/ PRICE /ej/ FACE /ij/ FLEECE /oj/ CHOICE /aw/ MOUTH /ow/ GOAT /uw/ GOOSE /ah/ PALM/START /eh/ SQUARE /əh/ NURSE /ih/ NEAR /oh/ THOUGHT/NORTH/FORCE /uh/ CURE Of course it do...

Israel and Palestine. Just... Israel and Palestine.