zompist bboard

I should point out that I used to think the stress in Awadhi was supposed to be on the penultimate syllable, too.

μυῖα would have been pronounced [myĵ.ja(:)] (no idea about the length of α).

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 Lanka› and /u/ in ‹Buddha› and derivatives, so I've shifted to using /ə/ and /ʊ/ respectively.

I misread the word ‹sylph› as ‹slyph› and pronounced it as such until someone corrected me a few years ago.

/ˈkæviɒt ˈɛmptɔr/ still looks kind of incorrect to me. Mostly, it's the /ɒ/ (I would expect /æ/ or /ɑ/). The next part is really just my own preference, not really a matter of "correctness", but I prefer /eɪ/ in the first syllable to /æ/, as it's more regular in English for "a" to be pronounced "long" when it comes before a single consonant letter followed by "e.a" in haitus (compare "Mediterranean", "Azalea", "crustacean", "habeas corpus").

I've seen "slyph" used in fantasy and pseudo-mythical works before. For some reason it doesn't bother me the way "rouge" for "rogue" does--perhaps because "slyph" isn't actually a word. :p

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Never seen <slyph> before, but mythical creatures have been a minefield for me since I was young. I learned many of them from role-playing games (particularly D&D) where there were no pronunciation guides. Some of the more classical monsters (like <Chimaera> and <Ouroboros>) had entries in the dictionary, but those taken from other traditions generally did not. So for instance I thought <Athach> was /ˈæθæʧ/ until I read one of Katherine Briggs' books.

When I first encountered the word "scarify" (and "scarification"), I read it as /ˈskɑrɪfaɪ/ (/ˌskɑrɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/) by association with the word "scar".

...Is it not? Wiktionary says it is, at any rate.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Oh, I didn't check Wiktionary. Every other dictionary I've checked only gives the "marry" vowel for this word, or less commonly, the "Mary" vowel. It isn't actually derived from "scar", so the use of /ɑ/ seems to be a kind of eggcorn (if that term can be applied to pronuciation-only variants?).

Edit: Hmm, while I don't put much weight on a random anonymous Wiktionary editor, the "scar" pronunciation does seem somewhat widespread judging from the Youglish examples of "scarification".

Interesting, thanks. I didnt know that. I actually pronounced this one right, but I imagine I must have simply heard it somewhere ,probably in college, and never thought about it. It never occurred to me to question the etymology, but if asked for my best guess I'd probably have said that scar was indeed cognate, and that both were taken directly from Latin.

I'm still not convinced theyre unrelated ... the Wikimedia etymology for scarification lists it as being a *Late* Latin word, which means it's likely not native, and could have been borrowed from the same original word that scar itself was ... which is apparently Greek, according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scar . There is an aspiration difference, but that could easily have been lost in the common speech, and the missing e- could have been analogized away as proto-Romance was gaining an e- in that same environment anyway.

Although it does also say that scar actually has 2 etymologies, so we could both be right ... it could have both a Germanic etymology (though via Old Norse) and a Latin one that is cognate to scarification.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

I don't know if they're ultimately related, all I'm saying is it wasn't derived within English from the English word "scar" the way a word like "uglify" was derived from the English word "ugly".

I've never heard "scarify" with BATH. BATH here is usually triggered only before coda rhotics, not intervocalic ones - hence "carry" and "car" have different vowels. In additional, stressed antepenults in neoclassical words are usually short, aren't they?

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Yes, but words formed on non-Latinate bases usually don't show these kind of vowel quality changes upon suffixation. I can't find a good actual example ending in -ify, but e.g. "starry" is pronounced with /ɑ/, like "star", and "barrable" is pronounced with /ɑ/, like "bar" (and presumably, "barrability" would also be pronounced like this, if anyone used it). Presumably a form "jarify" derived from the English word "jar" would likewise be pronounced with /ɑ/.



This is a common pattern, and it does hold in general for verbs ending in -fy, but analogy has established "long vowel" pronunciations in a few verbs with this ending. "Notify" apparently has a long vowel for all speakers (by analogy with "note" and similar words; compare also notable and notary). I think the same is true for "nitrify" (by analogy with nitre/niter; compare also nitric, nitrogen), and although I don't distinguish between long and short "o" before "r", my understanding is that "glorify" is also pronounced with a long vowel by all or almost all present-day speakers with that distinction (by analogy with "glory"). The word "codify", related to "code", is pronounced both ways. The OED also indicates that "rarefy" is pronounced with a long vowel in the first syllable, due to the influence of "rare", but that it was formerly pronounced with short a (compare "rarity"; some old orthoepy guides like Walker 1791 prescribed using a long vowel in this noun when it referred to "rareness", and a short vowel when it referred to the opposite of density).

Since there is no related word with a "long a" that I know of for "scarify" (in this sense--there is a homograph based off of the verb "scare", which I suppose might have had some influence?), I assume that dictionaries that give the "Mary" vowel (e.g. Collins) are either influenced by marry-Mary merged dialects, or just show that the "trisyllabic laxing" rule doesn't seem to be internalized very much by many English speakers.

I always knew that Spanish had dental consonants where English has alveolar, but I never thought it mattered until the other day when my professor said "you sound like a gringo, you need to move up the pronunciation of your alveolar consonants to the dental POA". Now whenever I speak Spanish I'm really conscious of where my tongues touching whenever I articulate /t d s n l/

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Proto Vauqun-Adzovъd

Mark^ski

Pitch accent in Japanese can be fun. It's vaguely analogous to stress in English; but that's mostly because stress in English usually correlates with a higher pitch on the stressed syllable.

Anyway, very early on I'd mis-learned Japanese pitch as being stress, and had also mis-learned some of the patterns. Just the other day I realized I'd been mispronouncing a collection of words by using the so-called heiban pitch pattern, where the first mora is low and the rest higher -- when the correct pattern is atama-daka, where the first mora is high and then there's a downstep and the rest are low.

* 以外 (/íꜜgàì/): "without, outside of"
* 以内 (/íꜜnàì/): "within, inside of"
* 以上 (/íꜜd͡ʑòː/): "above, over; that is all"
* 以下 (/íꜜkà/): "below, under"
* 以後 (/íꜜgò/): "after, following"
* 以前 (/íꜜzèɴ/): "before, preceding"

Etc. Thankfully, not many other words have the same mora structure and context, so folks had little trouble understanding me.

In some cases, using the wrong pitch results in a completely different word:

* 箸 (/háꜜɕì/): "chopsticks"
* 端 (/hàɕí/): "edge"
* 橋 (/hàɕíꜜ/): "bridge"

The word-final downstep can be a tricky one, as this only clearly manifests when followed by another pitch-neutral term, generally a particle. As with many things, context clears up a lot of potential ambiguity. But when it comes to sounding like a native (and thereby avoiding a lot of confusion when talking on the phone), nailing the pitch accents is key.

like 以外 iꜜgai and 意外 igai!

Also, don't forget 以降 ikō, this is a fairly common and useful one.

Oh, I have it even worse than that. When speaking in English, I have to be careful of my /s/ and /z/ consonants; they should be alveolar instead of dental. Ditto when I'm singing. But I sing more often in English than in French. And now, whenever I'm singing, I'm self-conscious of my /s/ and /z/ sounds even when I'm singing in French.

I don't think I can even hear the difference. (For the sibilants, that is. I definitely can for the stops because Malayalam has a phonemic contrast between /t̪t̪/ and /tt/ (and /ʈʈ/) as well as between /n̪n̪/ and /nn/ (and /ɳɳ/)).

I wouldn't worry about it too much. The stops are quite an indicator of a French accent, but I think the fricatives are pretty variable anyway. My /s/ and /z/ are dental, if not interdental.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Same.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

For me, the stops are indicative of a French accent only in that the voiceless ones are unaspirated.

You have a lisp like Jamie?


JAL

...well that got personal quickly. Also, fuck you.
[and I have no idea who 'Jamie' is in this instance. Perhaps me more specific with your insults in future.]


EDIT: since apparently the basics have to be explained...

- since I was saying to him that dental sibilants were not a big thing to worry about, clearly I don't think I have a noticeable lisp
- so saying that dental sibilants are a lisp is also saying, in a very mocking fashion, that I'm wrong about my language, which you are not a native speaker of
- if I did have a lisp, it would be extremely rude for you to say so in this way
- you have never heard me speak, and are not even a native speaker of my language. You are not in a position to say whether I have a speech impediment or not
- more generally, classifying one articulation as a lisp or a speech impediment and another as a mere idiosyncracy or a dialectical difference is not a scientific distinction, but simply a way to denigrate people with unfashionable accents; it belongs in the 19th century, not the 21st*. In particular, the moral and sexual connotations of 'lisping' are no longer believed to be valid science.

*disregarding what might be called physical speech impediments, like a tied tongue or a cleft palate and so forth, where certain sound are actually much more difficult to produce. But again, to assume that any deviation from received pronunciation is the result of a physical or mental deficiency is simply ignorant in the modern world.


To answer your question, although I have dental sibilants, I don't believe I have a 'lisp' - I am not to my knowledge generally mocked for my accent (at least not for that reason). There was a period in adolescence where I perhaps did 'lisp', but I believe I've since compensated for that appropriately, and that my sibilants now fall within broadly socially acceptible parameters, and are not immediately noticeable. [the main 'symptom' is that I have a harder time with some rapid tongue-twisters than many people]

However, I'll admit that I do 'lisp' in the other common sense - that is, like many people my age in my part of the country, I have a primarily labiodental rhotic (in most contexts, though not in some clusters). Fortunately, as I say, this is an increasingly common dialect feature; however, it can still provoke hostility in dealing with people from other age-groups, regions or socioeconomic groups.


But I don't really see why any of this is relevent to the topic, which in my view would be better kept to the objective business of pronunciation, rather than subjective personal characterisations like 'lisping'.

Although, thank you, I suppose you've shown me why Ryu may be so desparate to avoid dental sibilants! Fortunately, I honestly think most people in the UK at least are more advanced that that in their attitudes now, and that most people would not notice dental sibilants, or, if they noticed them, would not necessarily regard them as despicable or worthy of mockery.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

One of my favorite machine translation goofs was of a phrase: 違和感ないか (iwakan nai ka, "isn't there something odd / incongruent / unharmonious [about the current subject of discussion]?").

The proper pitch is roughly /ìwáꜜkàɴ náꜜì kà/.

However, if one were to parse the sounds differently and apply a different pitch accent: /ìwáꜜkàɴ nà ìká/

... you wind up with a very different phrase: 違和感な烏賊 (iwakan-na ika, "an unharmonious squid"). I read something review years ago about a machine translation system producing just such a clunker.

But hey, "The Unharmonious Squid" almost sounds like a fun name for a pub catering to language geeks.

Or maybe "The Incongruent Cuttlefish"? Or "A Squid Out of Place"...

Or, you know, since jal isn't a native speaker, maybe he just didn't realize that the word "lisp" was considered offensive...


I'm self-conscious about everything that marks me as a non-native speaker, from unidiomatic grammar to intonation to vowel sounds to dental consonants. I'm even self-conscious about sounding too posh in English. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to think about everything at once; and it's harder to do a non-standard variety than a posh one (Travis and I talked about it here).

Besides, I think I might have a very slight "lisp" in French, because my upper front teeth are a bit weird. If French tends to have high-frequency sibilants, mine tend to be even higher-frequency than most people. In English, this tends to have some... connotations. Thankfully, in French, it mostly goes unnoticed: there are no dental consonants /θ ð/, so no contrast is threatened.

In French, the prototypical speech impediment is zézayer, which means replacing the palato-alveolar fricatives /ʃ ʒ/ by the dentals /s z/. It's mostly associated with young children.