zompist bboard

jaguar /ˈdʒægwɚ/. I also used to (and maybe still do occasionally) have a variant with /aɪ.ɚ/ at the end. koala /koˈɑlə/ pronounced [kʰoʊ̯ˈɑɫə], more or less. I don't think the transition between the "o" and "a" is as constrictive as a phonemic /w/; at least, the start of the word seems to be disti...

There are lots of kinds of metathesis. I don't know about the likelihood of vowel-consonant metathesis creating new consonant clusters in a language that previously had few, but there are many examples of languages that underwent consonant-consonant methathesis. E.g. in European languages that I am ...

Silesia: this one's relatively easy because it's Latinized. I'd say /sɪ'liːʒə/; however, minor variations seem possible like /sɪ'liːʒiə/, /sɪ'liːziə/, /sɪ'liːʃə/. Polish: definitely /ˈpoʊlɪʃ/ (which I pronounce with a smoothed/broken diphthong as [ˈpo̞ɫɪʃ~ˈpo̞ə̯ɫɪʃ] or thereabouts, due to the velari...

Hmm. Apparently, <solenoid> is /ˈsoʊ.lə.nɔɪd/, not /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/. Is /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/ the pronunciation you would expect based on some spelling pattern, or do you not know why you expected it? I'm pretty sure it's by analogy with "solid". I forget, what type of accent do you have and which vowel does ...

Hmm. Apparently, <solenoid> is /ˈsoʊ.lə.nɔɪd/, not /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/. Is /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/ the pronunciation you would expect based on some spelling pattern, or do you not know why you expected it? I forget, what type of accent do you have and which vowel does /ɔ/ mean to you (I'd guess THOUGHT, but I know...

Are there any dialects or registers of British English having t and/or d flapping? I ask because there are Anne-Marie and Ed Sheeran among a few singers I listen to and they sometimes flap these stops; they may also have acquired it from their friends from other English speaking regions. John Wells...

only : /ˈonli/; [oˑʊnli]* in broad phonetic transcription; I don't know enough to give a narrow one. Probably the preceding vowel is nasalized, since phonetic descriptions of English that I have read say this is usual, but I have difficulty hearing nasalization on diphthongs. According to Jack Wind...

For me, [ɛ] for written "a" always occurs in "any" and "many" [ɛ] for written "a" almost always occurs in "catch" and "marshmallow" [ɛ] for written "a" seems possible for "than", "am", "shall", but I think it's more common for these to just have a reduced vowel [ə] (or syllabic resonants). The pronu...

In English it's pronounced "doyle", and that seems more or less how it's pronounced on teanglann, and possibly on forvo, although the forvo versions are a bit harder to make out (partly because of the worse sound quality). Are you saying there shouldn't be an off-glide? My "Doyle" is bisyllabic and...

I was watching some show and there were two Texan women, one of them said "yeller" and the other (her sister) corrected her several times saying emphatically "yellow", I've heard some Southerners also say "lellow" for "yellow", just how common are these deviations?! I've never heard "lellow", or he...

Wiktionary has a fair amount of pages. There might be some inaccuracies, inconsistencies or non-mainstream stuff, since it's publicly edited, but that shouldn't really matter I would think for conlanging purposes. The format is a bit awkward though, since apparently each entry is titled according to...

I say /ˈɜrdu/, but that's mainly because I don't naturally have /ʊr~ur/ in my phonemic inventory (e.g. my "poor" is /por/ and my "pure" is /pjɜr]). Phonetically, I dunno: something like [ɝdʉ] or [ɝɾʉ].

I just found out "stative" is not [stætɪv], but apparently [steɪtɪv]. Which makes sense, since state [steɪt], but somehow I read short vowels when there's no orthographical <e> (I also used to have [rɒtɪk] instead of [rəʊtɪk] for rhotic). JAL For what it's worth, "rhotic" is somewhat irregular, bec...

Ask Many say this word like "axe," but in fact, the "S" sound should come before the "K." I wonder if the /æks/ variant could be continued from OE āxian It seems quite possible, although I believe other words can exhibit similar metathesis in some accents of AAVE, so it could also be a coincidence ...

Uh...I have never heard almond pronounced with a silent l , not even on snobby cooking shows. I'm pretty certain they're wrong about that one. You think this pronunciation doesn't exist, or that it should be considered non-standard? I pronounce it without an /l/. It's like "palm", "alms", "psalm", ...

Lol. "there is a correct way to say every word in the English language"... the most generous interpretation I can make for this is to read "a" as "at least one" rather than the more likely "only one", and even then it seems somewhat debateable... it seems to me that there are very likely some words ...

For example, in recordings of the Bible in languages of the Pacific Northwest, I have heard more schwas than were written in the accompanying text. Are those recordings made by native speakers of those languages? Another thing--is the presence of literal "schwa" vowels established by phonetic analy...

Short question about the NEAR vowel. Most reflexes of it in Jamaican have /ie/, which would seem to coincide nicely, except that /ie/ comes from /eː/, and NEAR is /ɪə/ or /ɪɚ/. So the question is whether the historical pronunciation of NEAR has a lower starting point (i.e. /e/), if not in RP than i...

linguoboy wrote:my /e(ː)/ has always been lower than cardinal [e] (something I first discovered in Germany)

I've noticed a number of English speakers tend to (mis)hear German [eː] as /iː/, though that's probably partly attributable to the lack of dipthongization as well as the vowel height.

thetha wrote:['sɪz.hɛt] I've always had a habit of pronouncing cis with a z at the end. I don't know how I came up with it but I can't train myself to pronounce it a different way.

Hmm, maybe analogy with "trans(-)"?

diaspora . Apparently /di'æ.spə.rə/, not the /daɪə'spo.rə/ I've been thinking, and probably pronouncing, for all of my life. Hari Kondabolu on "Diaspora": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtng_zRjSQY Antepenultimate stress is more regular, since the Greek is διασπορά, with a short vowel in the penul...

I just learned that "spendthift" refers to someone who spends money too freely. Before now, I thought it meant the exact opposite ("frugal"), because I assumed it must mean something similar to "thrifty".

I know I've seen people reconstructing *e and *o as [ə] and [a] (or [ä, ɑ]; e.g., it's argued for in The Indo-European Vowel System and the Qualitative Ablaut by E. G. Pulleyblank (1965). The one thing that seems to kind of be explained better by *e [ə] would be the origin of ablaut-alternations wit...

Hmm, yeah, I guess "real" is actually pretty much restricted to modifying adjectives, like "very".

An English adverb that is identical in form to an adjective, rather than an adjective + the "ly" suffix, can be called a "flat" adverb. As others have mentioned, flat adverbs are common in speech, especially colloquial speech, in many areas and my understanding is that they've had some use continuou...