Zompist Bboard Again

Even worse, there's an australian politican called Palaszczuk who calls herself /pæləʃeɪ̯/. Wut? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annastacia_Palaszczuk This article says it's because her father was a teacher and the original pronunciation of his name was deemed to hard for the children in his school t...

Completely different question: what is the usual English term for a sub-national boundary line between jurisdictions or administrative divisions, such as states, counties, provinces, or municipalities? Is that called a "border"? And if not, what is it called then? Both "boundary"...

I just realized I pronounce /ɔɪ/ as [ɔʏ̯] in English - my rounding does not change throughout the whole diphthong. I for the longest time wondered how StG /ɔʏ/ differed from English /ɔɪ/ because I could not perceive a difference... Whereas I, though my brain interprets them as essentially the same ...

I've noticed that in my English there's three different types of postalveolars, but I don't know how to describe their articulation or what symbols to use to represent them. The terminology used for sibilants is pretty complicated (what is "domed"? "palato-alveolar" and "al...

Maybe it's not Travis, but I remember there's someone who enters every one of those "how do you pronounce..." threads with some nonsensical formula for a pharyngeal implosive or a sound that can only be made underwater. I just assume they're lying. If you're alluding to my rhotic, there's...

OK - I apologize for the misunderstandings. Indeed, the phonation types of the stops are currently one of the hottest topics in IE comparative linguistics; just about everybody admits that the standard model is so for mainly historical reasons and relies more on Sanskrit than it ought to, and that ...

I remember having my mind blown years ago by a phonetician casually mentioning that medial [ɾ] can be deleted basically everywhere that it appears in NAE. My instinct was to say that that couldn't be true, because how would I never have noticed it myself? But I tested it by listening carefully to m...

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:38 am I just heard the word "niche" pronounced in an English-language video for the first time. What, the vowel is short when the word is used in English? I would never have guessed that.

There's a UK/US difference here. I have /niːʃ/.

As others have said (d) feels off. So, for me, does (b), but that's just because "Northern Wales" on its own is a bit off; it's always "North Wales". On the other hand (c) is OK, at least if we're talking about a northern accent of Welsh as opposed to a North Wales accent of Engl...

How common is phonemic /d͡z/ without phonemic /z/? Proto-Semitic is usually reconstructed like that these days, with a /ts dz tsʼ/ series (parallel to /k g kʼ/ and /θ ð θʼ/) and a single /s/ sibilant. The more traditional reconstruction had /s z sʼ/ and /ʃ/ instead. I'm not familiar with the litera...

What about bedroom ? It's common at least in BrE to have affrication there in spite of the obvious morpheme boundary; in his syllabification article Wells says "although bedroom tends to be pronounced as if morphologically solid". He gives /ˈbedr.ʊm/ (yes, with the syllable boundary after...

What about bedroom ? It's common at least in BrE to have affrication there in spite of the obvious morpheme boundary; in his syllabification article Wells says "although bedroom tends to be pronounced as if morphologically solid". He gives /ˈbedr.ʊm/ (yes, with the syllable boundary after ...

Do we have a date for the fir-fur merger? I've been trying to find one. According to John C. Wells, in Accents of English : The merging of these various Middle English vowels seems to have started in northern and eastern dialects of English in the fifteenth century; by the sixteenth it had spread t...

I feel "in half" is the normal way of saying it for me, but my brain interpreted "by half" as a variant of that and not of "by a half", which would be what I'd use if I were actually talking about dividing by the number 1/2.

I would give both alternatives. Indeed, it's quite possible that both may have happened in different parts of the country.

On the /h/-loss section, this is a very messy sound change with some unpredictable outcomes, but: - I think I would separate the simplification of /hl/, /hn/ and /hr/, mainly because the rest of what went on is so messy and it's a rather different environment. Also, there's no variation that I'm awa...

Is there any reason Middle English /iː uː/ are listed as having become [ei ou]? I thought the conventional understanding was that the shift was [iː uː] > [əɪ əu] > [aɪ aʊ] (for me and some others > [ɑɪ æʊ]). The Wikipedia article on the Great Vowel Shift mentions both the [əi]/[əu] and [ei]/[ou] de...

Do you have a special name for the day after Christmas? And does it vary depending on whether this is a legal/bank holiday or not? "Boxing Day", also aware of "St. Stephen's Day". In the UK, if the 26th is a Saturday or Sunday there is a replacement Bank Holiday on the 27th or 2...

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 6:03 pm From the English Questions thread, "melodramatic". I think mine's something like [mɛ.lɵʊ.d(ʒ)ɹʷə'mæ.dɨk̚].

Same, other than predictable differences between our accents.

Does anyone think that velar plosives in English are undergoing a kind of lenition in similar environments to coronal ones? Sometimes I hear words like "bigger" or "significant," and it sounds like the velar plosive has been softened to ɰ, or at least voiced where it would other...