Zompist Bboard Again

Given that that's a train in Aachen itself how confident are you the English-language announcement was for the benefit of native English speakers and not (for example) speakers of another language who have expectations about the small quantity of English they do understand? Wikipedia says the name ...

Prompted a bit by the Luhansk/Lugansk thread, how do you pronounce "Kyiv"/"Kiev" (or whatever your languages' name for the city is)?

Sorry to say this, Moose-tache, but exonyms aren't inherently evil, unlike what some have come to believe. idk, Travis B. The RAE's eternal campaign to call Aachen "Aquisgrán" in Spanish when everyone on the ground, in Spain or otherwise, calls it "Aachen" seems pretty evil to m...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 11:47 am How do you guys pronounce mutual, and in particular, do you pronounce it trisyllabically or bisyllabically?

Bisyllabically: /ˈmjuːtʃəl/.

I would routinely pronounce it that way in words and names from German, e.g. schadenfreude . I would almost certainly mispronounce the Wisconsin and Missouri German-origin names Travis and Linguoboy refer to on first sight. Are they pronounced that way because that was how they were pronounced in t...

Actually, another example that comes to mind, now that I think of it, is in vice as in vice versa , which can be either /ˈvaɪsəˌvɜrsə/ or /ˈvaɪsˌvɜrsə/. Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that one. Also "genre". I would routinely pronounce it that way in words and names from German, e.g. schadenfreud...

Raholeun wrote: ↑Mon Sep 26, 2022 2:46 pm What about "Meuse" (the river). Interested in non-English responses too.

[mœːz], rhyming with non-rhotic "furs"

I had always thought affricates were coarticulations (is that the right word?) involving a stop followed by a fricative. I always understood coarticulations as phones with multiple simultaneous articulations at different POA, such as the [kp] and [gb] found in many Niger-Congo languages. This is my...

/ˈkʌmftərbəl/ ... where /r/ may be realised as zero or as a slight modification (pharyngealisation?) of the vowel, but I'm confident it's phonemically present in this word. Also, /mf/ in post-stress position (as here) tends to have an intrusive [p], but I don't think I'd analyse there being a /p/ t...

Both the normative UK pronunciation of "Azores" (/əˈzɔːz/) and the normative US pronunciation (/ˈeɪzɔːɹz/) sound terrible to me. I'm going to keep giving it a pseudo-Portuguese pronunciation (/əˈzɔːɹiz/) and to hell if people think that sounds "pretentious". It actually seems a ...

How do you pronounce "comfortable"? /ˈkʌmftərbəl/ ... where /r/ may be realised as zero or as a slight modification (pharyngealisation?) of the vowel, but I'm confident it's phonemically present in this word. Also, /mf/ in post-stress position (as here) tends to have an intrusive [p], but...

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 2:43 am I have [tɔ:rk] for "talk" it rhymes with "stork" and "stalk"

What accent is that, roughly?

Something I have wondered about is exactly what percentage of Americans have the cot-caught merger. Old surveys said 40%, but they were done more than 20 years ago. I would think it is closer to 50% now. Even if that were the case, if you were writing a dictionary, would it not make sense to oversp...

Having either LOT (e.g. in wasp ) or CLOTH (e.g. as in wash ) after /w/ for orthographic <wa> is simply Standard English to my knowledge. (It may seem NAE-specific though due to the general loss of CLOTH in much of EngE.) I'm not aware of any evidence that such a change was ever fully accepted into...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 8:24 pm Do any of you have two different forms for or varying by stress?

Yes, and I'd be a bit surprised if anyone didn't. There are a handful of words with weak and strong forms where I've more or less lost the strong form (but is usually /bət/ for me, even stressed) but or isn't one of them.

In New York, of course, the traditional dialect had a distinct and non-rhotic realisation of NURSE, the [ɜɪ] diphthong with a tendency to merge with CHOICE. (Is that completely extinct?) It's not surprising given the general rhotic environment that as that distinctive realisation faded away it was r...

I'm kinda curious how that pronunciation came about now, though. /ˈfɑvrə/ is a bit of a mouthful for the average NAE-speaker. Sure, but there are several other options. In many LA French varieties (he's from Gulfport, MS, which is right next door) this would be simplified to /ˈfɑv/, which is easy e...

About [ɹ bunched ], well... the thing is that the only case where my /r/ has any coronal articulation is after another coronal, where then it has postalveolar coarticulation. Beyond that, I've actually found pronouncing coronal approximant rhotics quite difficult, and have only recently trained mys...

-/rər/ is not exactly stable in my dialect; I have the mirror - mere merger, where I reduce it to [ʁˤ], but only in the word mirror . The regular outcome is [ʁˤʁ̩ˤ], where [ʁ̩ˤ] is slightly more open than [ʁˤ] and is timed as having its own syllable. However, in this case I have an in-between reali...

I also had no idea till now the [f]-form (which I have) was a reading pronunciation, and hadn't heard the one with [v] at all. I think I've occasionally heard the /v/ form from older RP speakers (it's probably the "U" pronunciation), but AFAICT the /f/ form has pretty much taken over ever...