zompist bboard

I intuitively have trouble keeping track of Standard German /a/ versus /aː/, due to the idea of a vowel quantity difference that is linked to neither vowel quality nor the quality of a following consonant being rather alien to me, as a native speaker of only English. I have tried to distinguish the...

Also, str- . That must be hell. Nah. Icelandic and Swedish dialects have strj-. You're overgeneralizing here. German has /ʃtr/ and /ʃpr/ too, and for speakers of Germanic languages this probably doesn't seem so difficult or unusual. This doesn't mean it's easy for anyone, however. At least in my ex...

In pronunciation, the interdentals are obviously hard, but I'm sure English's complex vowel system and complicated vowel reduction is a pain. I think /r/ is by far the hardest consonant any English learner will have to master. There are so many ways to almost get it, but just miss. I really can't s...

People seem to have a hell of a time getting the usage of the Simple Present and the Present Progressive in active verbs right, using the habitual Simple Present when the Present Progressive should be used. The great complexity of modal forms must certainly be hard, as must be proper use of infinit...

Interestingly, in Galician it's deus , and it's déu in Catalan. Then again, isn't Catalan supposed to be more closely related to French than to Spanish? Catalan is essentially a sister language to Occitan, both being descended from Old Occitan, if not essentially a group of Occitan dialects that ar...

LOL.

True, true, but in my experience it was even simple things like: I come there this morning. I drink it always when in Czech. Etc. What that almost sounds like is that they are having trouble with English tense and aspect, which actually are quite formidable for many learners of English (being, for ...

A lot of Russians have trouble with the use of articles in English and will either leave out "the" when it is necessary, or insert it when it is not needed. Czechs do this too. They do it all the freaking time haha. They also forget to use contractions and mix up strong verb forms in my experience....

Actually the case of cows/cattle/whatever is different than for the other animals, because we have a bit of a lexical gap. Specifically there's no gender-neutral way to refer to a single member of the species. "Cattle" is plural-only, *one cattle is simply ungrammatical. Can you say "one head of ca...

Soap wrote:Still the idea of having a length distinction between long and short syllabic [r] seems difficult for me to accept.[r].

Dialects of English that have replaced historical phonemic vowel length with (often at least partly frozen) allophonic vowel length have that...

I'd say it's phonemic in my speech - I have idle [ɜ̠e̯ɾo] and idol [ae̯ɾo]. On that note, those are homophones, both having Canadian Raising, for me. It seems that Canadian Raising for historical /aɪ̯/ is phonemic except in dialects that purely condition it on the basis of the fortisness/lenisness ...

I have fairly typical raising on /ai/ (nothing on /{u/). The one notable thing is that stress on the immediately following syllable seems to make raising not happen: thus "titan" /"t@it.n/ but "titanic" /tai"t{nIk/. "tyke" /t@ik/, but "tycoon" /tai"kun/. This pattern is broken, however, by words co...

I always avoided it because it's so much work to type. I have to get Character Map and individually paste each character into the post. X-SAMPA allows me to indicate any phoneme without having to paste obscure characters or even use alt-codes (though I have no difficulty with those). And as others ...

if one goes overboard with diacritics, though, it's just horrific to try to parse. IPA is just as horrible to parse with loads of diacritics IMO. See TravisB's preference for narrow transcription. This is why, recently, I have adopted using larger text for more complicated transcriptions, as Taylor...

It is somewhat unfortunate, in some ways, that I no longer live in Milwaukee, as it was far easier to find informants (knowing or not*) for Inland North dialects, and not just those of Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, there; I did not realize that the starting point of historical /aɪ̯/ being fr...

I think [AU] is the original form while the fronter forms are more recent. Which would make this simply a case of innovation versus conservatism with regard to nucleus backness and openess for historical /aʊ̯/. Likewise, from that viewpoint, this would clearly fit into into the overall pattern of p...

The same website I mentioned in the /oU/ thread marks the "bite-bout line", which describes this feature. Wisconsin is clearly in the area where PRICE is to the front of MOUTH. (The website in question is http://www.aschmann.net/AmEng/ ) There is a lot of information on there, even though the prese...

Is it me, or does it seem that my dialect has completely reversed the overall starting points of historical /aɪ̯/ and /aʊ̯/, both with and without Canadian Raising, compared to most other North American English dialects? It seems that most North American English dialects have a clearly fronted and o...

For the sake of comparison, as this has been an English pronunciation thread from the beginning:

spite: [ˈs̻pə̆ĕ̯̯ʔ]
cite: [ˈsə̆ĕ̯ʔ]
spied: [ˈs̻pae̯d̥]
sighed: [ˈsae̯d̥]

Nortaneous wrote:Who the fuck is Meijer?

There is a grocery store chain by the name of Meijer's, with Meijer being a Dutch surname.

I use IPA, with plenty of diacritics to boot, for all my posts. Of course, then, I think the likes of X-SAMPA typically looks really ugly and is far too lengthy for anything of the complexity of what I normally post here. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the board software you cannot put Un...

I use IPA, with plenty of diacritics to boot, for all my posts. Of course, then, I think the likes of X-SAMPA typically looks really ugly and is far too lengthy for anything of the complexity of what I normally post here. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the board software you cannot put Uni...

Conversely, can we say that the supposed distinction between a North American English [oʊ̯] and an English English [əʊ̯] for historical /oʊ̯/ does not hold as true as it once may have? I don't think it ever did. I thought it was well-known that there were parts of the US with a fronted (and unround...

Likewise spider and cider might be mentally reanalyzed as "spiter" and "citer" and therefore gain the raising given to other words with flapped /t/ even though the sound is still voiced, whereas tiger wouldnt be raised because there is no tendency to voice intervocalic /k/ into [g]. That certainly ...

I've heard /oʊ/ as [ɜʊ] or even [ɛʊ] in Midland, Southern, and Californian American English speakers. for example, Katy Perry in her new song says "nothin' comes close to the Golden Coast" with what I swear is [ɛʊ] in "close", "golden" and "coast". Given that /ɑʊ/ has become [æʊ] in many speakers I...