Zompist Bboard Again

Why not /ar/ START vs /or/ NORTH? Or is /ar/ used for one of MARRY MARY MERRY (which are all the same to me)? Well, in this scheme /a/ is TRAP, i.e. [æ], and /o/ is PALM/LOT/THOUGHT, i.e. [ɑ]: we probably want START to have the same symbol as PALM, as it's the same vowel (or at least very similar)....

Fudge, one of my Mandelbrot videos received a copyright claim for the music I used... even though I was careful to take a public domain recording. Apparently it's not actually in the public domain. Or is it? Given how sh**y the Youtube system is, who knows? My videos aren't monetized, so I don't thi...

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 9:36 am You don't even need /ah oh/ if you speak a dialect where LOT, PALM and THOUGHT are merged into one vowel, due to co-occurring father-bother and cot-caught mergers, as in Canada and much of the western and central US.

True. But then how do you note the difference between START and NORTH?

I reckon /i e a ə o u/ are for KIT DRESS TRAP STRUT LOT FOOT, and other vowels are treated as vowel + semivowel? Probably /ij ej aj oj aw ow uw/ for FLEECE FACE PRICE CHOICE MOUTH GOAT GOOSE, and I guess /ah oh/ for PALM, THOUGHT?

Here is a survey for non-native French speakers:
https://www.psytoolkit.org/c/3.3.2/survey?s=9Zjqr
If you speak French at a good level, above B1 (but it's not your native language), I invite you to take it.

jal wrote: ↑Thu May 13, 2021 10:27 am I think "roi" comes close though, as far as rounding the r goes .

[ʁwɛ] is easy, but that's /rw-/, not /wr-/.

Some examples where a generic word in language X was borrowed for "thing in the style of country X". EN chicken → FR chicken "chicken nugget" (colloquial only; the correct form is "nuggets de poulet". I blame McDonald's.) EN gospel → FR gospel "black gospel music, ...

"[M]orphology (word‐building) and syntax (word‐arranging) [...] manage the Escheresque trick of getting simpler and simpler until they end up just as complicated as ever."
Justin B. Rye

For a long time, I didn't know or notice that Americans drop the yod after dental consonants. So, I didn't realize that Looney Tunes was a pun with Toons . Or that noob was just the beginning of newbie . Not exactly something I had to unlearn (I use a British accent so I still don't do yod-dropping)...

Meanwhile, 48% apparently agree with the old reactionary farts. I saw somewhere (sorry, I don't remember where, I'll post the link if I can find it) that this figure is incredibly misleading. First, it comes from a very small survey. Second, most people in this survey didn't know what the manifesto...

As usual, the computers I use at work are locked for security reasons, so some operations can only be done by an admin. This means that you need an admin password to update your programs, or to scan the disks with an antivirus. The result is that most programs are out of date, and antivirus scans ha...

I tend to enunciate more clearly on the phone, e.g. using fewer contractions, which can overlap with a higher register. Otherwise I don't think my speech varies much. As is expected, I use a lower register when speaking to friends or family, and a higher register if I'm speaking in a professional se...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Apr 25, 2021 3:47 pmThere was a fun thread on Twitter a few months back trying to find alternatives to OK boomer. My favourite was Fort bien, l'ancien.

Interestingly, all the French alternatives rhyme, even though the original didn't.

i think he's on to something. adding animal products to american beer can't make it worse A few years ago, at a college cafeteria, we were offered a choice between "normal rice" and "vegetarian rice". Wait, how is regular rice not vegetarian?? It turned out that "vegetarian...

How about using the word for ""?

English→butterfly
French→papillon
Italian→farfalla
Spanish→mariposa
Portuguese→borboleta
German→Schmetterling
Dutch→vlinder
Russian→бабочка
Polish→motyl
Greek→πεταλούδα
Hungarian→pillangó

An interesting meme has been circulating in French social media: la question, elle est vite répondue . It comes from the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VSFjyF3B5E Why is this sentence interesting? On the surface, the sentence seems straightforward, and translates to "the ques...

Speaking of video games, I've just successfully "modded" an old NA SNES to play Japanese games. Hey, I did the same a few years ago. I modded a PAL SNES to play Japanese games and to run at 60Hz (by default, European models run at 50Hz, so the games are slower). I did the same with a Mega...

Nah. Steam only manages your collection and installs: the games still have to run on your actual OS. Some games are available on Linux, but they're a minority.

I use Linux Mint on this laptop. I used to have Ubuntu, but changed after they switched to Unity (apparently they're back to Gnome?).

On my desktop I have a dual boot Linux Mint and Windows: the latter is mostly for gaming.

I would not wish this illness on anyone, and I never want it again. The problem is: viruses don't spread - people spread them! And, despite the UK being locked down again, people really do not take this seriously enough. Here, one of the reasons people don't respect the rules is that some of the ru...