zompist bboard

Here's something inspired by something I read in The Complete Plain Words of 1976. Assuming you speak English, is it typically British or American English? (Or something else?) And do you interpret: "It is important that we have a good supply of bombs" as 1. "We do not have a good supply of bombs, ...

Formicinae vertebrate vertebrae /ˌforməˈsaɪni/ [fo̞˞ːmɪˈsaɪːni] ( To clarify, this word isn't in my current vocabulary: this is how I think I would say it. I'm putting stress on the penult based on my understanding of the Latin etymology after Googling it, but antepenult stress would also be possib...

It definitely took me a while to realize that the first word of /ˈkæviɒt ˈɛmptɔr/ and ‹caveat› were the same word – I assumed the latter was pronounced /kəˈvit/. I'm dating someone who's Sri Lankan (her parents grew up in Sri Lanka, but she grew up in the US), and she gets annoyed at /a/ in ‹Sri La...

French «in un an on» aren't pronounced with nasal offglides, if I remember correctly: they're nasalized monophthongs. True in Standard French. Not true in Southern French, which does have nasal offglides which assimilate in POA with the following consonant. Hmm, are we using "offglide" in the same ...

Where it becomes a problem is actually for /n/ and /m/ at the end of words in English, as the Japanese coda-/n/ (ん) is underspecified for POA and actually sounds like [ɴ] or [ŋ] a lot of the time. Isn't it common to pronounce /Vɴ/ as vowels with nasal offglides, not unlike French «in un an on» or P...

English "were" is traditionally called the "past subjunctive" or just "subjunctive". This terminology can be somewhat unclear, because "be" in sentences like "It is important that you be punctual" is also traditionally called the subjunctive. While "be" and "were" can be distinguished as the "presen...

One of my coworkers has a name spelled Weijun. Now, the standard Mandarin pronunciation of this name is obvious, as are a number of approximations or guesses that English speakers might use, but for some reason everyone who works here pronounces his name [waI.ju:n]. I have no idea how they would ha...

It's not a spelling pronunciation. It's also not quite as simple as "thinking there's a /g/ because there's a [g]". Most people do not, for instance, believe there to be /b/ in "debt", or /s/ in "island". The problem arises in this particular case because people know that there's not just an /n/ in...

It's just the "positive anymore" ≅ "nowadays", right? http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/positive-anymore, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore

Buck ( A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages ) has τρῡπημα for Ancient Greek and τρῦπα for modern-- also (in his text notes) Byzantine. It's still possible he's capturing something simple lookups do not, as he was a Greek scholar and should know what he was talk...

Can you explain that last post a bit more? You're saying the idea that "τρῦπα" is a modern Greek word for Ancient "τρῡπημα" shows up in something by Carl Darling Buck? Or is it just that the word is not listed, and because of its absence you assumed it didn't exist yet in Ancient Greek? I'm interest...

most of us live in places where spiders arent just crawling around in everyone's yards, inside their cars, etc to such an extent that avoiding a spider would be an obstacle to daily life. So I'd say the argument over whether trypophobia is a real fear or not has its place but doesnt mean that peopl...

Oh, is "trypa" not a valid Ancient Greek noun? It seems to be listed in LSJ , although I don't know what the exact time boundaries are for that dictionary. It seems odd to me that a longer word based on the root would exist in Ancient Greek, but the shorter word that seems to lack the affix only cam...

Two candidates come to mind: Czech ř and the paperclip sj in Swedish. Any others? What does "paperclip" mean in "the paperclip sj"? Is it a description of the shape of the IPA symbol <ɧ>? My impression was that this phoneme gets a dedicated IPA symbol more because there is no consensus on the corre...

Questions like "is X a word" aren't well-defined. You make reference to dictionaries, but dictionaries are just documents made by some people. Do dictionary-makers alone have the power to create words? There are tons of "-phobia"-type neologisms. They're kind of like "collective nouns"/"terms of ven...

Fooge wrote:How do you pronounce "Halloween"? I pronounce it like "Hallow ween", but I've heard some people pronounce the word as if it were "Holloween".

There was a separate thread on this a while back:H/æ/lloween versus H/ɑ/lloween

I tihnk one theory is that it's derived from "yo" when it followed the verb, but I forget how well supported it is Edit: here is a Wordreference thread that mentions that theory, but doesn't give it much support: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/spanish-origin-of-y-in-some-irregular-1st-perso...

Here's something I found on Google Books that says that secondary stress in Italian is optional, and cannot occur adjacent to the primary-stressed syllable: https://books.google.com/books?id=jaIVDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=Bertinetto+%26+Loporcaro+(2005)++secondary+stress+italian&source=bl&ots=uF...

I never formally studied Italian and just have shitty native speaker intuition, so I can't give a definite answer to the first question. But thinking about it real quick, I can think of: 1. Greek loans that retain unexpected stress, 2. words where final syllables have been lost in Italian (like cit...

Most recent word I got wrong was apoptosis . I assumed antepenultimate stress by analogy with words like apocalypse , apostrophe , and apocryphal when the correct models are medical terms like thrombosis and acidosis . When I first read the word I assumed penultimate but then I realised antepenulti...

Hmm, for some reason I unconsciously discarded that as an option ... it certainly seems to explain end and angô. With "and", is the explanation something like as a function word, it lost stress? Or is it supposed to be partly derived from forms of the word with stress placed further to the right?

Um, what? Grassman's law wasn't a feature of PIE, it operated independently in Greek and Indo-Aryan. On the other hand, Germanic, which keeps all three series distinct, shows *bind-, with the reflexes of two voiced aspirates. Not to disagree with your overall point, but doesn't PG sometimes have vo...

Sorry, I have no idea about stress Yeah, it's one of the genuine pitfalls of English. Essentially the problem is that there are multiple contradictory rules. Someone may have a better idea than me, but I think in general: - classical loans tend to have antepenultimate stress - but some old loans, a...

:o I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin. Austin really is not part of the South, though. Why not? It's in one of the southernmost states (it's less than four hours away from Mexico and was formerly owned by Mexico), it was part of the Confede...

Isn't "oval" pronounced with [oʊ̯]? That's why I thought "ovoid" would have [oʊ̯]. In this context, /oʊ̯/ and /oː/ are different ways of writing the same phoneme. The level of dipthongization is allophonic and varies based on things like the speaker and the phonetic environent. I usually use /oʊ/ o...