zompist bboard

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

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.

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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".

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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?”

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:

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Blog:

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!

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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Mark

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 (): "without, outside of"
* 以内 (): "within, inside of"
* 以上 (): "above, over; that is all"
* 以下 (): "below, under"
* 以後 (): "after, following"
* 以前 (): "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 (): "chopsticks"
* 端 (): "edge"
* 橋 (): "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.

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/)).

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Blog:

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!

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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.

_________________
Blog:

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!