zompist bboard

A lot of singers turn the HAPPY vowel into something like [e] or even [E] and pronouncing it as [ i ] seems weird to me, like if the person's singing is not amazing, that will make it sound worse. How did this start? Could it be related to the lack of happy tensing in Southern American English? I c...

Vocalisation to [ɪ̯] is a change in progress in some Swiss varieties, but those of course lack [ç]. Well I was born in Munich, but we moved away from there before I could even speak. Neither my elder brother nor my parents picked up any Bavarian speech habits, as far as I'm aware. Vocalization of L...

I don't think I ever heard of [l] vanishing in environments like that in any variety of German. What region are you from? Region Hannover. My father is also from that area, my mother is from southern Lower Saxony. According to wikipedia, vocalization of [l] before [ç] is common in colloquial speech...

The [k] is unusual. I hear [ˈa͡ɪŋ.lɪç] all the time and say it myself. I could imagine the [t] shifting backwords after the [ŋ], though I would also expect a [k] to shift to the front because of the [ɪ]. So all in all I'd expect a [c], perhaps with a letteral release because of the [l]. Now that I ...

I recently noticed I have at least three possible pronunciations for the German word "eigentlich":
[ˈa͡ɪ.gənt.lɪç]
[ˈa͡ɪŋ.kɪç]
[äɪ̃ç]
Those last two contractions are pretty unusual, I'd say

It is interesting that you often affricate /t/ before /ər/ even when no syncope takes place, especially since, IIRC, you are a non-native speaker of English, and to my knowledge no standard variety of English has this. It is interesting that you often affricate /t/ before /ər/ even when no syncope ...

turn [tʰɛɹn ~ tʰɚn] tune [tʰʊ͜un] twenty [ˈtʰwɛ.ni] two [tʰʊ͜u] between [bəˈtʰwiːn] restaurant [ɹɛs.t͡ɕɹɑˑn] factory [ˈfæˑk.t͡ɕɹi ~ ˈfæˑk.tʰᵊɹi] mystery [ˈmɪs.t͡ɕɹi ~ ˈmɪs.k.tʰᵊɹi] yesterday [ˈjɛs.tə.dɛ͡i ~ ˈjɛs.t͡ɕɚ.dɛ͡i] sister [ˈsɪs.tə ~ ˈsɪs.t͡ɕɚ] mister [ˈmɪs.tə ~ ˈmɪs.t͡ɕɚ] Oh man, my pronunc...

Does this sound kind of natively or do I have to speak to my friends less understandably? You really seem to enjoy making complex phonetic notations with the IPA. This becomes difficult to realize or imagine for the average user of this board, or so I believe. This type of question is more easily a...

An acquaintance of mine, native speaker of Kurdish and Arabic, recently used the term "Weißarbeit" ("white labor") as an antonym to "Schwarzarbeit" ("black labor"), referring to a job that is official, including a contract, regulation by law, income tax et cetera. I thought that was very creative

<patio> baffles me every time I hear it spoken aloud as [ˈpæ.ɾi.o͜ʊ]. I always read the word as [ˈpe͜ɪ.ʃo͜ʊ] in my head.

Sumelic wrote: [fẽ̞ə̯̃n vẽ̞ə̯̃n]

Are those supposed to be creaky voice markers? I can't imagine a True Scotsman nasalizing everything he says.

Soap wrote:I remembered this one while i was in the shower this morning.

Comedy Gold.

Speaking of annoying pronunciations, another common feature of Parisian French is to add a voiceless fricative [ç] when a sentence ends with a high front vowel, e.g. merci becomes [mɛχsiç]. I recently realized, to my horror, that I do it all the time. I'm currently trying to stop doing it. Well, Fr...

I'm on a short skiing holiday in Austria, and I had to go to a location called "Fronebenalm". So I asked where "fro-neben-alm" was and was met with huge question marks on the person's face. Then I showed the written word, and they said "ah, fron-eben". I mean really, how hard could it be to underst...

linguoboy wrote:"Chance"

linguoboy wrote:

Duden wrote:Lautschrift: [ˈʃãːs(ə)], auch: [ˈʃaŋsə]

Astonishing. I'm used to hearing and pronouncing it either as [ʃãːs] or as [ʃɔŋs].

I have a little question: Do you think that Duolingo is a good place for learning new languages? I've learned a bit of German and Esperanto there, and I'd like to know whether is learning there effective. Also, do you think it's fine to learn multiple languages at once? Feedback would be appreciate...

I would guess its pronunciation might have been influenced by German, since it was popularized by Freud, right? Oddly, it looks like German "Libido" is often stressed on the antepenult (although with a long vowel): does anyone know if that is regular for German loans from Latin? I was a bit taken a...

I find it very difficult to figure ou the right pronunciation for <i> in many English words, especially loans from Romance languages. For example, I had [dəˈsɪ.zɪv] instead of [diˈsa͜ɪ.sɪv] for the longest time. Or at least that's how I read out <decisive> in my head. Same thing with <disciple> [ˈdɪ...

KathTheDragon wrote:Uh, what? Check the page history! Unless Qxentio was planning this 11 years in advance, you're plain wrong.

I have, in fact, waited 11 years for the perfect time to strike.
I am sort of surprised that linguoboy is informed about my current location though.

As a German student of linguistics, I have only recently started finding out about all the variation that got lost in the last 300 years, especially in the last century. It frustrated me and made me sad to see that dozens if not hundreds of dialects were levelled and virtually died out for the sake ...

I just recently learned that Hochzeit (wedding) is not pronounced as hoch + Zeit but has a short "o" I hate to break this to you, but there's two of them. Hochzeit with a short o meaning wedding, and Hochzeit with a long o meaning heyday or zenith. I wish more languages used Macrons and they were a...

I stumbled upon a song title which didn't have any meaning, or at least none I could find out. So I thought I'd put the word into my conlang and later on, I gave it the meaning of "world". It only later occured to me that this could be the name of the whole setting. Then I thought I might get sued i...

Does anyone else consistently drop the /t/ in that'd , that'll , it'd , and it'll ? I have [tɛːt tɛːɤ̯ ɘːt ɘːɯ̯] respectively, and should note that that and it are, in contrast, [tɛʔ ɘʔ]. I really must hear a recording of you speaking sometime. I can't even imagine understanding what you're saying....

It often baffles me that so many people have problems putting together the sounds they know into affricates. I most often hear the name Cthulhu pronounced as /kəˈθuː.lu/ by English native speakers, whereas I would pronounce it as /k͡θuːlu/. 1) You would pronounce it as [k͡θuːlu]. Note the square br...

Can anyone with a knowledge of Chinese help me satisfy a curiosity? Every single Chinese student I have ever taught French has the same accent feature. I can't really describe it much and I can't share audio files from my students but it involves the letter combination <tr> which in French is /tR/ ...