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Interesting that - so this is almost like a nonce phonemic distinction here, it seems. It kinda is. I could't think of anything to rhyme with 'on.' My bet is it's what Nort said, but I'm not sure about /u/ as the start of the diphthong. Here's the recording. So you can clear up what the hell I'm sa...

well, [EU] In parts. North Carolina, definitely. The nucleus is a bit more central in other places, but still more fronted than, say in British English. Um, British English has quite a lot of variation in this vowel, perhaps even more than American English, since among other things we have fronted ...

Nortaneous wrote:well, [EU]

In parts. North Carolina, definitely.

The nucleus is a bit more central in other places, but still more fronted than, say in British English.

Im lower middle class and living in a house like that right now. Come to rural New England where housing is cheap because people dont wanna live in the countryside and deal with the six months of snow. Also there are places with housing much cheaper than here. My aunt and uncle in Minnesota got a p...

A1: (guest) bedroom A2: laundry room (a "mudroom" would be similar, but likely with a utility sink and maybe a concrete floor, plus a door to the outside) A3: kitchen A4: living room ("great room" is a term only used by realtors) A5: dining room or dining area (could be "formal dining room" if it we...

Are you sure she just didn't have a head cold ;) Japanese does the /g/-to-/N/-in-some-phonological-environments thing. A number of languages have prenasalized voiced plosives (see especially Bantu languages in Africa). Neither of these things are particularly remarkable. That she has them in Spanish...

One thing I've been wondering: Voltaire and those old guys write étois for étais etc., was that just an old spelling convention, or was it actually pronounced /etwa/? It was pronounced /etwE/. My understanding is that there was a phonological split at some point and they respelled the /E/ version o...

I think you see this more when there is a long-short contrast. For example, OE /a:/ went to modern /e(I)/, bypassing short /E/. Ancient Greek /E:/, /e:/ went to modern /i/, bypassing short /e/. Northern Cities AmE /{/ goes to /I@/, bypassing both /E/ and /I/ (which actually move in the other directi...

The magic of back-formation. The original word: Archaic (AmE /arke(j)Ik/) (Note that the last vowel could be interpreted as /@/, realized as [1].) The "correct" formations: Archaism (AmE /arke(j)Ism/) *Archaize (AmE /arke(j)aIz/) Because of the odd hiatuses, it may be easier for some speakers to tak...

Glanced through the section on grammar, and a couple of interesting things popped out: <ā/ai/ay> was allegedly distinct from <ē/ei/ea> was distinct from <ee/ea>, with <ea> being able to make either sound. <au> was an open back vowel, with both long and short <o> being more close The formal present t...

It seems that the nasal in the negating prefix follows the POA of the next consonant - not always, but as a tendency. And it seems that when it is /m/, the vowel is always /i/, but when it's /n/, it's usually /u/. So I promote "uncivil" as the more logical. As for when the nasal is /ŋ/, I can think...

I imagine an example can probably be found in the Indo-European plosive system somewhere, especially if we look all the way to modern reflexes. For example, PIE /p b b_h/ > Latin /p b f/ but Gothic /f p b/. And there you go: PIE /t/, /d/ > Proto-Germanic /T/~/D/, /t/ > Low West Germanic /d/, /t/, b...

I very much doubt the vocabulary would have been available in authentic Middle Japanese, but the syntax is without a doubt classical. I'm not sure how this could be rendered in a fashion that is "clearly" old-fashioned. A translation into modern English goes like this: Alchemy is the science of com...

Problem is, people often don't understand KJV-style language as well as they think they do: You get gotchas like the common misparsing of "wherefore" as "where", as well as the syntax of the word "nor", as shown in this fragment from a hymn ... Ah, but note that we're choosing this particular mode ...

I'd go with KJV-esque Early Modern English rendering, because what you're trying to get across seems to be the "feel" rather than some sort of absolute historic context. If it's in the context of a story where the characters are supposed to have some difficulty reading or understanding it, I would g...

Bedelato wrote:By certain accounts, Proto-Indo-European had a (marginal?) contrast between *kw and *kʷ.

Isn't it actually between *ḱw and *kʷ?

In which case, you're talking about two different stops, one of which could coarticulate phonemically and one of which could not.

Regarding the innovation of new 2P pronouns in English: There are two "stages" if you will. In the first, a substitute like "you guys" is brought in, but only used for clarification - i.e. when using "you" would be ambiguous, or when emphasizing that s/he is talking to a whole group, and the usage m...

Regarding Worcester, MA: it's /wUst@r/, realized [wUst@] in local dialect. Somebody needs to teach the idiots at Wikipedia the difference between phonemes and phones. Regarding Coeur d'Alene, ID, many Americans don't distinguish between /Or/ and /ur/. I don't except in careful speech. So you could p...

In Japanese, /i u/ have voiceless allophones when in low-pitch syllables and when not adjacent to a voiced consonant. (And frankly, you can just say the word as if the voiceless vowel isn't there: [de̞ɕta] isn't much different from [de̞ɕi̥ta]) If you say the normal vowel, you'll just sound funny. (...

I view English spelling as a little like Hanzi with better phonetic cues. It doesn't need significant spelling reform, and pursuing reform would effectively fragment the language.

I think you could make an argument for the following: "my and my sister's car" Those might be the rules for formal English, but natural spoken English doesn't follow the last rule anymore. As was mentioned in another thread, it seems that the distinction between I/me is not so much one of case but ...

I think it would be grammatically correct to say My sister and I's car , since -'s is only a clitic, and and modifies the whole phrase. (Compare Adam and Jamie's car ). Except that the "correct" rule for pronoun agreement in conjunctions is whatever case the phrase is in. What is the appropriate ca...

I should add another possibility here, for a similar language but with old Latin "-que"-style conjunction: 1PS.GEN-CONJ 1PS.GEN sister-GEN-CONJ car-NOM "my-and my sister's-and car" Or combining both nominal+adjectival declension and this approach: 1PS.GEN-N.NOM-CONJ 1PS.GEN[-F.GEN] sister-F.GEN-N.NO...

"Bilen min og søstra mis" bil-en min og søstr-a mi-s car-DEF my.MASC and sister-DEF my.FEM-POSS "The car my and my sister's" I don't speak Icelandic, but Björk's Medúlla album has a very pretty song called "Vökuró" which uses this same construction a couple of times: "bærinn minn og þinn" (my farm ...

The most daunting realization I had during that lecture was that this is only one single lexical field, but these kind of distinctions exist for every possible thing you can think of. Not calquing your native language to some extent is more or less impossible, or else you'll never get your language...