Zompist Bboard Again

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 4:53 am 'Plant based' feels a little annoying too - why not market it as vegetarian or vegan?

Technically petroleum is plant-based...

So, it looks like this person has a true diphthong [ɪ͡ə], going smoothly from [ɪ] to [ə]. Still, that yields a more distinct [ə] than the last person had. Thanks for looking! My impression is that he has [jɪn] while ausg has [jn]. It's pretty clear that he has a longer and more gradual vowel and a ...

As I write this, the forum claims that there are more than six million views for my Could this work as a collaborative project? -thread in Ephemera. That thread is less than a month old, and has 30 replies. What on Earth is going on there? Wow, that's extremely weird. That makes me think the bots a...

I had a listen to this, and couldn’t quite decide what’s happening in it, so I made a spectrogram. Here’s what I eventually came up with (sorry for the large image): Very interesting! I wonder if you could do the same for one of the others, especially the ones I said didn't come close to mine? (E.g...

We both have always known US currency but never understood US coinage. Ooh, don't get me started on your old system... pounds, guineas, farthings, half-farthings, groats, shillings, ha'pennies, mites, coppers, pence, tuppence, thruppence, fuppence, bobs, nobs, florins, crowns, fivers, pieces of eig...

Your news is sadly out-of-date: they’ve now read the whole scroll , with more to come. Not quite, they say they can read 5% of the scroll. But the achievement is amazing. They did CT scans of the carbonized scroll, then went digitally slice by slice, tracing where the papyrus sheets lay; then assem...

Just to broaden things a bit, here's a list of German and French TV shows that most Americans would know: Movies and books would be a longer list, especially for France. Though I'm not sure if any French novelist is known here past Camus. Houellebecq, I guess, though I think he's obscure. Very rarel...

Hey zompist, sorry for keeping nagging you, but which one of these is close enough to your idiolect? Maybe e.g. the one by ausg? And is it just me, or does ynarakit pronounce onion as [ɐnjɛ]? I think ausg is closest to what I'm talking about. bananaman, Matt3799, and Neptunium all come close. The A...

I grasp the concept of [n̩] - but how do you articulate [jn̩] without it being realised as say [j ə n̩] or [j ɪ n̩]? If there's no adjacent vowel, is [j] really a [j] anymore? At the phonetic level, [j] and [ĭ] are really two different notations for the same things. It’s trivial to articulate [jn] ...

fusijui wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 12:00 am Seems like you're going to have a more satisfying argument with the fusijui in your head, so I'll leave you to it.

You do realize you were being a jerk?

Regarding the second syllable of "onion", what seems relevant to me is that whether pronounced slowly or quickly, in isolation or in context, there's a change in articulation between the "schwa-ish" part and "n-ish" part. At some point there's closure of the oral cavit...

Now I wanna hear a recording of 'onion' pronounced with a syllabic [n̩]. ([ˈʌn.jn̩]?.. [ˈʌn.n̩]??) [ˈʌn.jn̩]. "Nation" and "onion" end in the same sound. ([n̩], I mean— the [j] is just in onion.) I got what the transcription would be, but what does it sound like? How acousticall...

[ˈʌn.jn̩]. "Nation" and "onion" end in the same sound. ([n̩], I mean— the [j] is just in onion.) [jn̩] is a weird syllable, sonority-wise. Why is it any odder than "cure"? Or for that matter "strike"? Perhaps this is a stupid question, but how do you know it’...

Zju wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 8:38 am Now I wanna hear a recording of 'onion' pronounced with a syllabic [n̩]. ([ˈʌn.jn̩]?.. [ˈʌn.n̩]??)

[ˈʌn.jn̩]. "Nation" and "onion" end in the same sound. ([n̩], I mean— the [j] is just in onion.)

One of my pet peeves is when people treat the word "schwa" as an alternate name for the STRUT vowel https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/schwa.png I'm not sure I can out-pedant you, but I can sure try. I count five separate vowels in xkcd's text: ə in was, a, of, obs- ʌ in up, Doug, stuck, etc. s...

Incidentally, I feel this example also highlights the weakness of Construction Grammar, which is that it ignores compositionality. ‘A doesn’t X like B’ may has a strong implication, but its basic meaning is predictable purely from its structure as a clause with an adverbial. That’s something which,...

So here's an interesting pair of sentences: "You don't kiss like him." "He doesn't kiss like you." Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latt...

Before you, there were programmers who wrote optimal assembly code for every application and regarded higher level programming as an abdication of the duties of wizards. But quantity beats quality for many applications. Otherwise, JavaScript would never have taken off. This is getting off-topic, bu...

I've looked at a lot of grammars searching for numbers. The absolute worst (I forget what language, it was from the Americas) was an SIL grammar which used tagmemics, the theory invented by SIL's president, Kenneth Pike. It was absolutely baffling-- the terminology was unrecognizable and simply find...

When you side with $100,000 a year programmers like yourself (and their millionaire techbro owners) If we're playing the Oppression Olympics, I was never paid 100k as a software engineer. I had that job in India, the place management sends jobs to lower cost. (Indians were ChatGPT before ChatGPT.) ...