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Jetboy wrote:I have memorize the first 20 or so lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales for school

I don't understand why some schools make their students do this. It seems like a waste of time.

There is no way to transcribe bunched r in IPA. There are two reasons for this, in my view: 1) IPA is intended to be able to transcribe phonologically relevant distinctions only. 2) There are several different articulatory strategies that have much the same acoustic consequences; does it really matt...

Aside from that, a lot of the time I honestly cannot be bothered to make recordings, much the less good ones, at a drop of the hat, because it is much more work than it sounds to do well , much the less in a way that is representative of my everyday speech with people I know, and a lot of the time ...

I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking why these sounds are not likely to be found in natural languages?

There are Anglic dialects that do have a true diphthong phoneme /i̯u/ or /iu̯/ from Middle English /iu̯/ and /ɛu̯/ and Old Norman, Old French, and Middle French /y/, before which they actually do use an (to the best of my knowledge). Mind you that in these dialects, there are still words with /juː/...

One should remember that quite a few English varieties do normally have monophthongs for historical /eɪ̯/ and/or /oʊ̯/, which consequently are often marked as simply /e/ and /o/ respectively. Also, at least in General American (aside from more progressive varieties thereof that have lost historical...

About [ju], it is basically [iw] with stress on the second component instead of the first. Another possible transcription could be [ĭu]. I don't see how your explanation is better than just assuming that [ju] is two segments. In fact, your explanation seems more complicated. You'd need to explain "...

About [ju], it is basically [iw] with stress on the second component instead of the first. Another possible transcription could be [ĭu]. I don't see how your explanation is better than just assuming that [ju] is two segments. In fact, your explanation seems more complicated. You'd need to explain "...

For instance, what logic is behind transcribing my [əw] as /o:/? Good question! Thankfully no-one claims that English has /o:/. i u ɪ ʊ e: ə o: ɛ ʌ ɔ æ ɑ: Diphthongs: aɪ aʊ ɔɪ ju Okay, usually what you've called "e:" and "o:" are transcribed as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. Also, /ɑ/ is not long. Also also, stand...

Here's a secret that may help solve this puzzle. Phoneticians don't want the public to know this, but the truth must out!

There is no [p]

Yeah, they're possible, but difficult, and I'd be surprised if any of the world's languages used them. (Referring to lateral trills and bilabials here - linguolabials are well established as existing in several languages.) Good rule of thumb: Just because you can make a sound doesn't mean that IPA h...

Danish high and mid high vowels sound higher than the Cardinal vowels to most english speakers I think. They did to Rory any way. There are also some tongue root action going on to make them sound higher I think. They did to me, yes, and apparently they also do to Wells, so I feel validated in my p...

"POA"? Place of articulation. Aaahhh good, so all consonants can be laterlized then or? The "lateral release" only really applies to plosives, as other sounds don't really have a "release". Approximants can be lateral, fricatives can be lateral. (Lateral fricatives often arise, actually, from devoi...

Yes, it's called a lateral fricative, X-SAMPA [K], they appear in Welsh and several languages of the Pacific Northwest. They're usually alveolar, however they have been attested at other POAs. Sometimes children acquiring English use them instead of [s].

This isn't a "what do you think" question, it's an empirical question. We can find out. However, there are a couple of things to consider. First of all, we need to establish a way to measure how phonemic an orthography is. We could use a binary system, and say that for every word that has a 1-to-1 c...

I hear it as a lateral, but having spent time with a bunch of Danes this summer, I'm happier saying that it's an interdental approximant. It is more open than Spanish /ð/, however, which itself is more open than English /ð/.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroneme : Estonian and Sami also have a three-way [length] distinction in consonants, e.g. lina "bed sheet", linna (half-long 'n') "of the city", linna (over-long 'n') "to the city". Estonian, in which the phonemic opposition is the strongest, uses tonal contour a...

There are millions of animal species on this planet. And cue the flawed analogy to biodiversity. Now, don't get me wrong - I just spent some weeks in a Mexican village, with no hot water or telephones, documenting a moribund language. I am a strong believer in the importance of documenting language...

If you like inferential models, check out Gregory Stump's Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure ( this article is also pretty good) and Joan Bybee's Morphology: a Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form . Also, I believe the second edition of Understanding Morphology (which ...

Yes! Morphology is awesome! Morphological theories look like this: incremental ^ | | lexical <-------+-------> inferential | | \/ realizational Lexical theories are concerned with "arrangement" and "concatenation", like traditional structuralist morphology. Inferential theories are based on "process...

And, forgive me if this is an ignorant question but how do you communicate with the Otomí? Do you know the language enough to converse, or do they speak English, or are there interpreters, or do they know Spanish...? They're all bilingual in Spanish. There are no monolinguals in Acazulco Otomi; it'...

Latest reports indicate that rising tone is not correlated with vowel glottalization. I'm not actually sure what's going on with the glottalization, it's very odd. Something Radagast didn't mention is that as well as all the crazy stop and tone contrasts, there is also an unusual stress system, whic...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I see both options as involving equal amounts of work - in both cases, you have to explain how X became Y. Only, one of the options allows one to *choose* a suitable X, while the other does not look feasible at all, at first glance :) But in both cases we need to exp...

A lot of these "issues" are just quirky ways the language works. A lot of it I took from real-world languages - for example, the ordering of "and" in nominal coordination ("horse cart and") was calqued from Sanskrit. No, my "issues" are not meant to question the plausibility of the features themsel...