The "How do You Pronounce X" Thread

[Salmoneus]

[kɾɑi̯sis], [kɾit̪ik], [st̪ei̯sis], [st̪æt̪ik], [pɾost̪ʰe̞sis], [pɾɔst̪ʰe̞tik], [nʲjeʊ̯ɾɔsis], [nʲjəʊ̯ɾɔt̪ik]

No.
As a general point: -ic and -is always have short /I/, not long /i/. Not distinguishing the qualities of these is one of the most stereotypical "silly foreigner accent" mistakes.
[And it may even lead to a confusion in the case of your 'critic', which you pronounce more like 'critique'. "Critic" should have two short vowels.]
I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]". The first syllable of each should probably be /njU/ or /njU@/, though the confluence of a followign rhotic and lack of stress make it hard to work out in general. If you can't manage /U/, I'd go with /u/.
Also, they 'should' have a /sT/ cluster, but /st/ isn't uncommon even among native speakers so don't worry.

stress shift: analysis-analytic, metastasis, metastatic.

[ænɐlɑi̯sis], [ænɐlit̪ik], [me̞t̪ɑst̪ei̯sis], [me̞t̪ɑst̪æt̪ik]

No.
Again, short /I/ in -ic, and also the penult in -ic words - "analytic" is as though it were written "anna-littick". "Meta" has... ok, maybe you're "[e̞]" isn't wrong, actually, though it's not how I'd usually write that sound. [for clarity: it's lower than /e/ but higher than /E/, and more central than either - it's usually indicated as a variant of the latter, but I guess that's just convention].

The other two places you've gone wrong here are understandable, to be honest. "Analysis" and "metastasis" both have antepenultimate stress, not penultimate as you've gone for. However, "metastasis" with penultimate stress does sound like a word - it sounds like some sort of second-level ('meta-') stasis.

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, and old endings, developed penultimate stress instead
- there can be additional confusion when there are prefixes to independently valid roots, which may destress the prefix even when they 'shouldn't'
- there can also be interference from rules about stress and parts of speech
- in some cases, original vowel length in Latin may be relevent?

It's confusing, and native speakers can easily get mixed up when they come across a word they've not heard spoken before. Some words may have two pronunciations depending on context, while others are just a mess (eg "controversy", where both antepenultimate and penultimate (well, initial with secondary penultimate) stress forms are common, even in the speech of a single speaker.

Of the more-than-two-syllable words here:
- prosthesis and neurosis: penults! I think -osis is pretty much always penultimate, and -thesis may be too, with the really notable exception of the antepenultimate stress in "hypothesis".
- analysis and metastasis: antepenults with short vowels (due to trisyllabic laxing in the first case).
- words in -ic: penults, but with short vowels

And then there's "emesis". I've always pronounced this with long penultimate stress, to rhyme with "tmesis" and "plasmapheresis", but short antepenultimate stress is also conceptually valid.

[linguoboy]

I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]".

FWIW, I would hear these both as /oː/. Extreme fronting of this diphthong is a conspicuous feature of my mother tongue, Bawmerese.

[Vijay]

The South isn't a single unified bloc, but the archetypal South depends on your view of the South: if it's the old-fashioned "Southern gentleman, Southern belle, aristocratic South" then it's probably Virginia/Tennessee; if it's rednecks and twang, it's probably the Deep South: Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi.

I don't see how we lack any of these things.

[Zaarin]

And... seriously, if you drive across the Florida-Georgia border the culture is instantly "very different"? Borders don't have that sort of effect even in Europe, and here they're long-standing borders often dividing entirely different language groups!

*checks* Hmm, this time I really did say that northern and interior Florida are Southern, did I not?

The South isn't a single unified bloc, but the archetypal South depends on your view of the South: if it's the old-fashioned "Southern gentleman, Southern belle, aristocratic South" then it's probably Virginia/Tennessee; if it's rednecks and twang, it's probably the Deep South: Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi.

I don't see how we lack any of these things.

Nor did I say you did...

[Travis B.]

I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]".

FWIW, I would hear these both as /oː/. Extreme fronting of this diphthong is a conspicuous feature of my mother tongue, Bawmerese.

On that note, are there any English varieties where the only back vowel is [ɑ]?

[Salmoneus]

I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]".

FWIW, I would hear these both as /oː/. Extreme fronting of this diphthong is a conspicuous feature of my mother tongue, Bawmerese.

On that note, are there any English varieties where the only back vowel is [ɑ]?

Probably, depending what you mean by 'back'. /U/ isn't fully back, /u/ is usually fronted at least a little bit, and /o/ is usually a diphthong (often somewhat fronted), leaving just /Q/ and /O/, which lots of Americans don't have.
How about "Western US"?

EDIT: yes. Wikipedia gives the only back vowels in western US english as being /A/, /O/ and /oU/, but cot-caught mergers are not uncommon. It gives standard California English as having the merger, so only /oU/ and /A/. And /oU/ fronting is both common in general and specifically a feature of the California Vowel Shift, which leaves /A/ as the only back vowel. I thought I remembered this, because in the past I've played with future Englishes derived from Californian, where that gaping lack of anything back other than /A/ is so tempting for speculation...



Zaarin: what you said was "some parts of northern interior Florida are Southern... Even then, though, it's very different from Deep South as seen in Georgia..." - and, given that 'northern interior Florida' and 'Georgia' are right next to one another, I was questioning how "very different" they really were.

[Vijay]

The South isn't a single unified bloc, but the archetypal South depends on your view of the South: if it's the old-fashioned "Southern gentleman, Southern belle, aristocratic South" then it's probably Virginia/Tennessee; if it's rednecks and twang, it's probably the Deep South: Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi.

I don't see how we lack any of these things.

Nor did I say you did...

Then why is the archetypal South probably either Virginia/Tennessee or the Deep South based on things that are apparently not limited to those areas at all?

I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]".

FWIW, I would hear these both as /oː/. Extreme fronting of this diphthong is a conspicuous feature of my mother tongue, Bawmerese.

On that note, are there any English varieties where the only back vowel is [ɑ]?

I don't know, but I hope there's a variety of Southern English that does this because I'm pretty sure all the other back vowels can be fronted.

[Zaarin]

Zaarin: what you said was "some parts of northern interior Florida are Southern... Even then, though, it's very different from Deep South as seen in Georgia..." - and, given that 'northern interior Florida' and 'Georgia' are right next to one another, I was questioning how "very different" they really were.

A lot of Florida Southerners have an accent much closer to GenAm with a few Southernisms; culturally they're typically more "country" than "redneck" (though of course we do have Florida rednecks, too). This may also be true of South Georgia, as my only experience there is passing through on the highway. Central and North Georgia definitely have more of the traits of the Deep South than North Florida does.

The South isn't a single unified bloc, but the archetypal South depends on your view of the South: if it's the old-fashioned "Southern gentleman, Southern belle, aristocratic South" then it's probably Virginia/Tennessee; if it's rednecks and twang, it's probably the Deep South: Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi.

I don't see how we lack any of these things.

Nor did I say you did...

Then why is the archetypal South probably either Virginia/Tennessee or the Deep South based on things that are apparently not limited to those areas at all?

Sorry, I'm not communicating myself well. For a Southerner, the archetypal South will presumably be whatever part of the South they are from; I am talking about the perspective of a non-Southerner. Most outsider views of the South either involve romanticized Southern gentry with "well-heeled" Upper South accents or rednecks with borderline-unintelligible Deep South accents. Most Texas accents are closer to the Upper South--or closer to a Midwestern or Southwestern accent, depending on location; I've never met a Texan with the drawl characteristic of Deep South accents.

[Vijay]

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks, Zaarin!

[Sumelic]

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, and old endings, developed penultimate stress instead
- there can be additional confusion when there are prefixes to independently valid roots, which may destress the prefix even when they 'shouldn't'
- there can also be interference from rules about stress and parts of speech
- in some cases, original vowel length in Latin may be relevent?

It's confusing, and native speakers can easily get mixed up when they come across a word they've not heard spoken before. Some words may have two pronunciations depending on context, while others are just a mess (eg "controversy", where both antepenultimate and penultimate (well, initial with secondary penultimate) stress forms are common, even in the speech of a single speaker.

I would add, sometimes weight-based rules apply (depending highly on the morphological structure of the word), e.g. adjectives ending in "-al" or "-ive" tend to take penult stress when the penult vowel is followed by a "heavy" consonant cluster like st or kt, or (usually) a "virtual geminate" i.e. a consonant that is written with doubled letters and that is preceded by a "short" stressed vowel, even though it is not pronounced as a phonetic geminate in contemporary English: addictive, objective, digestive, apprehensive, excessive; autumnal, baptismal, noncomittal, colossal (all with penult stress). (There are a few exceptions with antepenult stress like adjective, substantive, pubertal, sagittal—of course, "sagittal" is only irregular in the spelling-pronunciation correspondence, since the pronunciation /ˈsægɪtəl/ would be regular for a word spelled "sagital", and in British English the same applies to "pubertal", whose pronunciation could correspond more regularly to a spelling like "pubatal"). A similar rule used to apply to verbs in "-ate" (giving us pronunciations like conTEMplate, alTERnate) but the predominant current pattern is to use antepenult stress in these words despite the presence of heavy consonant clusters (CONtemplate, ALternate).

- prosthesis and neurosis: penults! I think -osis is pretty much always penultimate, and -thesis may be too, with the really notable exception of the antepenultimate stress in "hypothesis".

The main exception is "metamorphosis", with no real explanation that I know of. In older dictionaries, "apotheosis" is often marked as having stress on the antepenult; I don't know the reasons for this either.

[Vlürch]

As a general point: -ic and -is always have short /I/, not long /i/. Not distinguishing the qualities of these is one of the most stereotypical "silly foreigner accent" mistakes.

But [iblah] is short. Words like "meet" have a long [iː], and "meat" is a homophone or [miɪ̯t̪] if I really wanted to distinguish the two. Having a "silly foreigner accent" is fine, although of course I'd like to sound native... but only if it came naturally, like I managed to somehow trick my brain into pronouncing things the way native speakers do. Forcing it just doesn't work, and not having any opportunities to interact with people using English in person makes it hard to practice. Then again, that's one of my big problems with every language.

Annoying how this forum wants to make <i> in brackets italicise everything that comes after it... so I added a "blah" in the smallest font size to prevent that. How often has this italicising <i> in brackets caused problems here? A linguistic forum that hates phonetic [iblah], and and as well if there's bold or underlines anywhere in the post.

[And it may even lead to a confusion in the case of your 'critic', which you pronounce more like 'critique'. "Critic" should have two short vowels.]

I pronounce "critique" [kɾit̪iːk], so they're not homophones. Is it still confusing?

I'm not sure what you've got going on in your 'neurosis/neurotic', with "[eʊ̯]" vs "[əʊ̯]". The first syllable of each should probably be /njU/ or /njU@/, though the confluence of a followign rhotic and lack of stress make it hard to work out in general. If you can't manage /U/, I'd go with /u/.

Honestly, I don't know if that's how I pronounce them. I tried to say them over and over again and concluded that those were the closest, but it could be anything like [e̞ʏ̯~əʉ̯~ɘʉ̯~œʉ̯~œʏ̯~øʏ̯~eʉ̯~ɪʊ̯~ɪʉ̯~ɵʊ̯~ɵʉ̯~ɵː~ʉː~ʉ̟ː] for either of them... there's some difference between them, but I can't really tell what it is because of the [j] messing shit up to the point where I'm not even sure what either one of them is, lol.

Also, they 'should' have a /sT/ cluster, but /st/ isn't uncommon even among native speakers so don't worry.

Is /T/ the same as /tʰ/? Because there's probably some aspiration in every [t̪], I just don't think of it because English is weird. There's definitely more in [t̪ʰ], which is how I tend to pronounce /θ/ unless I try really hard to make the latter sound or it just randomly comes naturally. Of course, I don't spend all day talking to myself in English, so it's really a matter of chance which comes out, same with /ð/ being either [ð] or [d̪~d].

Yeah, it's one of the genuine pitfalls of English. Essentially the problem is that there are multiple contradictory rules.

...

It's confusing, and native speakers can easily get mixed up when they come across a word they've not heard spoken before. Some words may have two pronunciations depending on context, while others are just a mess (eg "controversy", where both antepenultimate and penultimate (well, initial with secondary penultimate) stress forms are common, even in the speech of a single speaker.

Well then, I'll just keep doing what I do and hopefully the rules will stick one day...

And then there's "emesis". I've always pronounced this with long penultimate stress, to rhyme with "tmesis" and "plasmapheresis", but short antepenultimate stress is also conceptually valid.

I'd never heard either of those two words before, but I'd really struggle with the former because word-initial consonant clusters are what nightmares are made of... at least some of them.

The main exception is "metamorphosis", with no real explanation that I know of. In older dictionaries, "apotheosis" is often marked as having stress on the antepenult; I don't know the reasons for this either.

Either [me̞t̪ɑmo̞ːfo̞sis~me̞t̪ɑmɔɹ̠fo̞sis] and [ɑpo̞θɪo̯sis~ɑpo̞t̪ʰe̞ɔ̯sis]. If the latter doesn't have a diphthong, I'd say [ɑpo̞θe̞o̞sis~ɑpo̞t̪ʰe̞o̞sis], but in that the /o/ sounds stressed even to my stress-immune ears, so... with the diphthong, though, it definitely is the syllable that starts with /θ/ that's stressed, so if it's just a phonetic diphthong rather than a phonemic one, that'd make it antepenultimate like you said it used to be. Wiktionary says UK /əˌpɒθ.iːˈəʊ.sɪs/ and US /əˌpɑː.θiˈoʊ.sɪs/, though, so apparently the /o/ is supposed to be stressed. Why did it change, and when?

[Vijay]

As a general point: -ic and -is always have short /I/, not long /i/. Not distinguishing the qualities of these is one of the most stereotypical "silly foreigner accent" mistakes.

But [iblah] is short. Words like "meet" have a long [iː]

/i/ and [iblah] are not the same thing.

[pɾost̪ʰe̞sis]

The second vowel should be /i/, which I guess in your pronunciation would be phonetically realized as [iː].

[nʲjeʊ̯ɾɔsis]

Second vowel should be /o/.

[ænɐlɑi̯sis]

Second vowel should be the same as the first [æ], and third vowel should be /I/ just like the last vowel.

[me̞t̪ɑst̪ei̯sis]

Third vowel should be schwa.

I pronounce "critique" [kɾit̪iːk], so they're not homophones. Is it still confusing?

Nah.

Is /T/ the same as /tʰ/?

No.

Because there's probably some aspiration in every [t̪], I just don't think of it because English is weird.

wat

[Pole, the]

Annoying how this forum wants to make <i> in brackets italicise everything that comes after it... so I added a "blah" in the smallest font size to prevent that. How often has this italicising <i> in brackets caused problems here? A linguistic forum that hates phonetic [iblah], and and as well if there's bold or underlines anywhere in the post. :-D

I see no issue with that:

[Vijay]

Annoying how this forum wants to make <i> in brackets italicise everything that comes after it... so I added a "blah" in the smallest font size to prevent that. How often has this italicising <i> in brackets caused problems here? A linguistic forum that hates phonetic [iblah], and and as well if there's bold or underlines anywhere in the post.

I see no issue with that:

Maybe the issue is that you can't use and italics in the same post or something?

[Salmoneus]

As a general point: -ic and -is always have short /I/, not long /i/. Not distinguishing the qualities of these is one of the most stereotypical "silly foreigner accent" mistakes.

But [iblah] is short.

English distinguishes two high front phonemes: /i:/ and /I/ (in sampa). Since length is entirely predictable from quality, and the difference in quality is marked, the former is often just called /i/ (the length difference may also be minimal in some dialects, particularly depending on context: I strongly suspect there are people for whom the vowel in "bin" is actually longer than that in "beaten".

Non-native speaker who pronounce /I/ as /i/ are liable to be misunderstood (though it usually becomes clear when they've said enough to make clear how they're making the distinction) - this sounds at first like a 'shit/sheet merger'. Even when these accents are understood, they're strongly marked as non-native. Which, fair enough, but since this is a thread on pronunciation...

Words like "meet" have a long [iː], and "meat" is a homophone or [miɪ̯t̪] if I really wanted to distinguish the two.

Allegedly this distinction is still made in some dying rural accents in England. However, for essentially all purposes, you can treat these as homophones. If I had to disambiguate "meet" and "meat", I would not be able to, and saying "mee-at" or the like would result in incomprehension. [I'd say "em-ee-ay-tee" instead]

[And it may even lead to a confusion in the case of your 'critic', which you pronounce more like 'critique'. "Critic" should have two short vowels.]

I pronounce "critique" [kɾit̪iːk], so they're not homophones. Is it still confusing?[/quote]
It depends. If you make the length distinction really clear, and move the stress appropriately, then no, that's fine. But I struggle to hear vowel length distinctions (because they're not really phonemic in English), and certainly if you stressed both words on the first syllable I'd have difficulty. Of course, it also depends on context, and on whether you're saying the two words in isolation or next to one another.

Honestly, I don't know if that's how I pronounce them. I tried to say them over and over again and concluded that those were the closest, but it could be anything like [e̞ʏ̯~əʉ̯~ɘʉ̯~œʉ̯~œʏ̯~øʏ̯~eʉ̯~ɪʊ̯~ɪʉ̯~ɵʊ̯~ɵʉ̯~ɵː~ʉː~ʉ̟ː] for either of them... there's some difference between them, but I can't really tell what it is because of the [j] messing shit up to the point where I'm not even sure what either one of them is, lol.

There is a hard-to-pin-down difference in this sound between stressed and unstressed forms (although, to reiterate, in 'neurosis' and 'neurotic', both are stressed on the second syllable). However, if I could give some advice: the nucleus here should at least be rounded, and ideally back. Some of these I would probably hear as /o/ or /3/. ('oh' and 'er').

Also, they 'should' have a /sT/ cluster, but /st/ isn't uncommon even among native speakers so don't worry.

Is /T/ the same as /tʰ/?

No, it's sampa for IPA /θ/

And then there's "emesis". I've always pronounced this with long penultimate stress, to rhyme with "tmesis" and "plasmapheresis", but short antepenultimate stress is also conceptually valid.

I'd never heard either of those two words before, but I'd really struggle with the former because word-initial consonant clusters are what nightmares are made of... at least some of them.

To be fair, "tmesis" also violates normal English phonotactics, and most non-academic speakers will struggle with it, probably inserting an unstressed schwa into the cluster (or ignoring the /t/ altogether). Clusters like this basically only happen in rare words of Greek origin.

The main exception is "metamorphosis", with no real explanation that I know of. In older dictionaries, "apotheosis" is often marked as having stress on the antepenult; I don't know the reasons for this either.

Either [me̞t̪ɑmo̞ːfo̞sis~me̞t̪ɑmɔɹ̠fo̞sis] and [ɑpo̞θɪo̯sis~ɑpo̞t̪ʰe̞ɔ̯sis]. If the latter doesn't have a diphthong, I'd say [ɑpo̞θe̞o̞sis~ɑpo̞t̪ʰe̞o̞sis], but in that the /o/ sounds stressed even to my stress-immune ears, so... with the diphthong, though, it definitely is the syllable that starts with /θ/ that's stressed, so if it's just a phonetic diphthong rather than a phonemic one, that'd make it antepenultimate like you said it used to be. Wiktionary says UK /əˌpɒθ.iːˈəʊ.sɪs/ and US /əˌpɑː.θiˈoʊ.sɪs/, though, so apparently the /o/ is supposed to be stressed. Why did it change, and when?

I've only ever heard it with penultimate stress.
I don't know why/when it changed. However, regarding the 'why', I suspect that it had an antepenultimate stress when it was a technical religious word, but that it was later shifted by analogy with other -osis words when it became mainstream. [of course, then the question is why the -osis words, other than (thanks Sumelic!) 'metamorphosis' (which actually I have heard with the 'wrong' stress, and which I suspect with soon regularise entirely) have ended up with penultimate stress. It may just be that there were a lot of them and it reflects a general trend toward trochaic feet in common words, subsequently analogised to the whole class?]

[Zaarin]

I strongly suspect there are people for whom the vowel in "bin" is actually longer than that in "beaten".

Confirmed: /t/ before /n/ becomes a glottal stop in my dialect, and preglottal vowels are quite clipped for me; meanwhile I will tend to lengthen a prenasal lax vowel to heighten contrast with a syllabic resonant. Hence [bɪːn] vs. [bĭʔn̩].

[Travis B.]

I strongly suspect there are people for whom the vowel in "bin" is actually longer than that in "beaten".

Confirmed: /t/ before /n/ becomes a glottal stop in my dialect, and preglottal vowels are quite clipped for me; meanwhile I will tend to lengthen a prenasal lax vowel to heighten contrast with a syllabic resonant. Hence [bɪːn] vs. [bĭʔn̩].

For me it is more generalized than that. Basically all vowels are by default long, but if there is an obstruent between a vowel and either the next vowel or the end of the utterance, and the obstruent most closely following the vowel is fortis, the vowel is short instead. This is not simply about glottalization, because this shortening occurs before fortis fricatives as well.

[Io]

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

Yeah, it would be interesting to hear it but since Travis doesn't know his way with computers we never will.

[Zaarin]

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

Yeah, it would be interesting to hear it but since Travis doesn't know his way with computers we never will.

I'm pretty certain the sound Travis transcribes as [ʁ] is the same sound I transcribe [ɹ̠ˁ]--i.e., the American "bunched R." It's really not that weird. Well, it's weird in the sense that no one else seems to have it, but it's not weird in the sense that many Americans do--if you've heard enough Americans talk, chances are you've heard a bunched R. (What's really weird, though, is that neither of my parents have the bunched R...)

[Travis B.]

I don't post more sound samples just because my cheap-ass microphone is a pain to use, and because I find it hard not to speak carefully when I am being recorded (or on the phone or like).

[Travis B.]

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

Yeah, it would be interesting to hear it but since Travis doesn't know his way with computers we never will.

I'm pretty certain the sound Travis transcribes as [ʁ] is the same sound I transcribe [ɹ̠ˁ]--i.e., the American "bunched R." It's really not that weird. Well, it's weird in the sense that no one else seems to have it, but it's not weird in the sense that many Americans do--if you've heard enough Americans talk, chances are you've heard a bunched R. (What's really weird, though, is that neither of my parents have the bunched R...)

The difference between the sound I have and the sound you have is that I normally do not pronounce it with the coronal region of my tongue at all except if it is after another coronal. What I have is essentially what you have if you tried to pronounce it only with the back of the tongue. (Note that I do still labialize my /r/ at the starts of words.)

[linguoboy]

Now I'm curious as to how y'all pronounce the names of other Indian languages. Or do I not want to know? (RRR-doo! Canada! Cnawda! TeLOOgoo! Mrothy! My-zo!)

I think we've done "Urdu" pretty recently and I can't imagine there's much variation for "Hindi". But that still leaves, what, 20 more official languages? Here's the list from Wikipedia with my phonemicisations:

Assamese /ˌasam'iyz/
Bengali /ben'gahliy/
Bodo /bowdow/
Dogri /dohgri/
Gujarati /ˌguwjə'rahtiy/
Kannada /'kanədə/ [i.e. exactly like Canada]
Kashmiri /kahš'mir.iy/
Konkani /'kohnkniy/ [as of an hour ago]
Maithili /'maytiliy/ [ooh! contrasts with mightily because of the lack of raising due to different segmentation]
Malayalam /'mahlə'yahləm/
Marathi /mə'rahtiy/
Meitei (Manipuri) /ˌmani'puriy/
Nepali /ni'pahliy/
Odia /'oriyə/
Punjabi /pən'jahbiy/
Sanskrit /'sanskrit/
Santali /san'tahliy/
Sindhi /'sindiy/ [i.e. as if Cindy]
Tamil /'tahmil/
Telugu /'teləguw/

[Vijay]

I should make at least one audio file of myself pronouncing these words (and maybe some more).

[Zaarin]

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

Yeah, it would be interesting to hear it but since Travis doesn't know his way with computers we never will.

I'm pretty certain the sound Travis transcribes as [ʁ] is the same sound I transcribe [ɹ̠ˁ]--i.e., the American "bunched R." It's really not that weird. Well, it's weird in the sense that no one else seems to have it, but it's not weird in the sense that many Americans do--if you've heard enough Americans talk, chances are you've heard a bunched R. (What's really weird, though, is that neither of my parents have the bunched R...)

The difference between the sound I have and the sound you have is that I normally do not pronounce it with the coronal region of my tongue at all except if it is after another coronal. What I have is essentially what you have if you tried to pronounce it only with the back of the tongue. (Note that I do still labialize my /r/ at the starts of words.)

Ah, that is different then. Mine is definitely further back than alveolar but not as far back as velar/uvular (prevelar is the correct term, I think?)--there's definitely coronal contact. I also retain labialization word-initially (and in other places), but I don't tend to be conscious of it so it doesn't show up in my transcriptions.

[jal]

"processes" and "review" (just listening to a native speaker in a tech video who's using a lot of these, and apparently I've been pronouncing them wrong...)


JAL