Zompist Bboard Again

Getting the vowels wrong can even affect perception of the consonants . I think I've posted before about not being able to understand perceiving a German friend's final consonants as devoiced when, on closer listening, they clearly weren't and finally determining that what gave that impression was l...

The matter with GA is that most NAE varieties have features in common with it, but most varieties have differences as well. Probably the closest NAE variety to GA is Western American English, whose primary differences are the cot-caught merger and fronting of /uː/. That said, though, some subvariet...

Does anyone else have /wʌnt/ for went?

I think this might be related to my pin-pen merger, but it's hard to say because I can't think of any other words where I have /ɛ/ > [ʌ].

Today I heard "YouTube" as a count noun meaning "video available on YouTube". (E.g. "There's a YouTube you can watch.")

Most of my happy things these days seem to be related to crises averted. Case in point: I was glad to hear yesterday that wildfire seems to be receding from my in-laws' homes in Oregon. My brother- and sister-in-law live on a rural route with their children and grandchildren and there's a huge blaze...

Thank you. Still less extreme than Sal's 83/14 ratio though. Perhaps he got his numbers from a more current source, which already shows the effects of the recent crisis? Looks like it's from a survey of voting intentions that predates it. See: https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Poll-Only-13-percent-of-...

Oh come on Hunt! You failed a test so simple that no one even thought it would be a test. Bloody hell that was a fuck-up and a half, but hey at least it's an actual slip of the tongue in a way, not a bare-faced lie like all the times he claimed the government was investing in and cared about the NH...

ANYWAY: on the OP, this must surely have happened somewhere in Italy? I can't think of any examples from Italy proper, but you reminded me that Sursilvan Romansh has umlaut in some masculine nouns and adjectives which, when combined with palatalisation, leads to some alternations like: tgiern "...

Interesting to see that English "the world over" has an exact parallel in Swedish världen över.

akamchinjir wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 2:33 pm Wouldn't that be the "e" triggering palatalisation to its left?

No, because /e/ didn't generally trigger palatalisation of /t/ in Romance. Cf. VL partem > Sp parte.

Moreover, the palatalisation is observed even before back vowels, e.g. VL dictu(m) > Sp dicho.

(Am I right to think that it's relatively rare for something to trigger palatalisation to its right?) Isn't this essentially what happened with Latin /ct/ in Spanish, Occitan, and Romansh? E.g. VL noctem > Sp noche . I believe progressive palatalisation is also found in the history of Slavic, as we...

alice wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 9:46 amAre there any instances of palatalised and nonpalatalised consonants alternating in initial position within the inflection of a word?

Irish has at least one example:
bean /bʲan/ "woman" nom.s
ban /ban/ "woman" gen.pl

It might help to think of big-ass as just another way of saying huge . But his point is that it isn't for all people. IMD, "Look what a big-ass avocado this is!" sounds more commonplace. It allows predicative use of adjectives intensified with -ass , but that is still marked as innovative...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/stul.12062 Ich danke dir! I found this an odd sentence: "Some government officials wonder whether anyone organised the protests—possibly fuel smugglers, political rivals or powerful families that benefit from the subsidies." Using "any...

Is irgendjemand auf eine Unterscheidung zwischen "tote" und "ausgestorbene" Sprachen gestossen?
Has anyone encountred a distinction between "dead" and "extinct" languages?

cedh wrote: ↑Wed Jul 18, 2018 4:29 amThe merger is most common in the north, but I've recently come across a study that reports striking variation in the southwest too

Link?

I know that many traditional dialects in B-W have a contrast here, but my recollection from my time in Freiburg is that the city dialect has merged them.

Then there are things such as the merger of than and then as /ðɛn/ in much of NAE Technically not a merger since etymologically they are the same word and, IIRC, lexicalisation of the two variant forms only takes place with the standardisation of the language in the 1700s. It would probably be more...

For quick questions, minor observations, and anything else language-related that's too trivial to merit its own thread. Today a friend said "Bahai" and he had to repeat it twice before I could parse it. The /ə/ in the initial syllable was so fleeting it just sounded like "pie" to...

Basics Username: Linguoboy Name: Da Other nicknames: Big Cat Birthplace: Baldimer, Marilyn, USA Place of residence: Chicawguh, Illinoy, USA Any particular reason you live there now? Came up for college and stayed. Occupation: Librarian. Pets: ブーちゃん (a.k.a. "Boobers"), an eleven year-old A...