zompist bboard

These States Have Had the Most Violent Tornadoes Since 1950 (TWC)

I initially parsed this as "the most tornadoes which are violent", but then I realised "the tornadoes which are most violent" is also a possibility.

I'm just astonished people still name their poor child "Ralph." It's like naming your daughter "Gertrude" or "Beatrice." :p I mean, that's the connotation in the USA (where the name is as good as dead ), but "Ralph" has a different history in other countries. "Beatrice" has actually made a slight c...

From The Economist print edition: "The biggest sensation was...that one of his three legal clients was Sean Hannity."

I first took this as a subtle implication that Cohen might have other, illegal clients.

Soap wrote:Is /reIf/ still standard in the U.K.? I knew someone with that name, but he spelled it Rafe and I didn't think of it as a variant of Ralph at the time.

You people using capital I for IPA ɪ when transcribing diphthongs are going to make me have a conniption.

My older brother planned to give his son the middle name "Xiq", pronounced /ˈziːk/.

So today we had a "secure spaces" walkthrough of the building. The idea is to acquaint all full-time staff with the various nooks and crannies of the place in case we get another "shelter in place" order due to a suspected "active violence event" on campus. It was worth doing--there are so many odd ...

Travis B. wrote:

Šọ̈́gala wrote:There's also X as /ɨgz/ in "Xavier", at least in my midwestern U.S. accent.

Yeah, I hear that here as well.

+1. Plus I've heard this with an unvoiced cluster.

[Seriously, though, that sounds like a pretty awful situation. What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards? Just the belief that they weren't needed anymore? Seems like a valuable source of information even beyond the government. (there's tons of useful genealogical and demographic info ...

Hmm? It'd be /le.ke/ in Italian because <ch> is always /k/, while the <c> in words such as ciao is always /ʧ/. Another example is Chievo /ki.e.vo/. The average English-speaker doesn't know those rules. The Italian-American entertainer Dominic Amici respelled his surname "Ameche" in order to get USA...

Dulce de leche ? As Sal points out, a surprising number of people mistake this for Italian and pronounce it with /ʧ/. Mostaccioli is a staple at weddings in St Louis (at least within a certain social stratum), but the local pronunciation is with /ˈməsk/ rather than /ˈmɔst/. It wouldn't have occurre...

L2 Learners of English: Please read this entire atrociously-written paragraph and point out all my errors. Also L2 Learners of English: I know you just told me that no native speakers say this, but I'm going to argue that not only is it not wrong to say this but also this is superior to what you sa...

L2 Learners of English: Please read this entire atrociously-written paragraph and point out all my errors. Also L2 Learners of English: I know you just told me that no native speakers say this, but I'm going to argue that not only is it not wrong to say this but also this is superior to what you sai...

I've generally heard it /ɛsˈbɑɹoː/ from most Americans, but I suppose my pronunciation would be similar linguoboy's if I were called upon to pronounce it. (I'm a bit of a foodie, so it's not where I'd choose to get my pizza. :p ) For a while, we had one in the food court next door, so it was conven...

I think I vary between [ʹzbaro] and [ʹz̥b̥aːɾoʊ] depending on who I'm talking to. It's such an unabashedly Italian name that I aim for something close to the Italian pronunciation but I don't always nail it.

Vijay wrote:So forgive me if I'm not entirely sure she isn't just using a cheap emotional trick to try and stifle discussion.

I'm not entirely sure either. But you know what? There are some things I'm willing to take the chance of being wrong about and some things I'm not.

I just discovered the word is spelled enmity , not emnity . Which makes sense etymologically, but sounds totally wrong. Like no matter how many times I say /ˈɛnmɪtiː/ to myself, I can't get it to sound acceptable. I don't think there's a word in my active vocabulary with an /nm/ sequence like that t...

I told her she needs to see a psychiatrist because I really don't know what else I can tell her and I can't believe I caused her to feel suicidal all by myself. She's been treating me pretty badly over the past few months, so I have trouble feeling sympathetic. Whatever enmity I feel toward a perso...

Traditionally it is pronounced /krApi/ [citation needed] I've never heard any other pronunciation of crappie except the one with /æ/--and it's a pretty common thing to fish for in the Upper Midwest. All dictionaries I've looked in give /krɑpi/ as the pronunciation of "crappie". I've never seen a di...

Fooge wrote:Traditionally it is pronounced /krApi/

[citation needed]

I've never heard any other pronunciation of crappie except the one with /æ/--and it's a pretty common thing to fish for in the Upper Midwest.

What do you call this sort of container?

We're not talking about how I pronounce "Gouda" in Dutch but how I pronounce it in English. Well, you said "[she] taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/." I assumed she taught you the right pronunciation. But I now understand she taught you some basterdized version to match American English pronunciation :)...

There was a Dutch-American girl in our programme who taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/. Then she either taught you wrong or you misremembered. It's actually /ˈxɑuda/ or /ˈxʌuda/ :). Though depending on her accent, it might've come across as /ˈxɐuda/ (but the final vowel is /a/, definitely not /ə/). Dud...

Pfff... when I was young, we only had two Dutch tv channels, and iirc three German ones. That was it. Cable happened only years later. We didn't get cable until I was a tween. Still, I grew up with six channels (the Big Three plus PBS and two UHF channels that mostly ran old movies) and there was a...

I did, too, but probably much, much less than you (only on Saturday nights, because it apparently wasn't available on the local version of PBS at other times) Oh definitely. There was a period when we were only allowed to watch PBS because our parents were concerned we were watching too much televi...

I used to pronounce Thames [θeɪ̭mz], too. Maybe I did when I was really young, but I grew up watching UK television on PBS so I was exposed to this pronunciation early. Now that I mention it, though, it's bringing up vague memories of [tʰeɪ̭mz]. So maybe I went through a stage of knowing the <h> wa...