Damn good. And damn right too. /nod

@Robusto I never really thought about the etymological origins of the words. It's interesting, but I'm not so sure that's a consistent guide to pronunciation. I usually object to it based upon the spelling and pronunciation of gift, which is the word I suppose most people would use as a guide in trying to determine how to pronounce the acronym. It's also worth noting that the peanutbutter that inspired the name unambiguously uses a j, rather than a g, in its name.

@Tonepoet Perhaps this will help clear things up: thefreedictionary.com/joke

@Robusto Are you calling me a butt? =P

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer: Usage of "homework," "schoolwork," and "assignment" in AmEng for schoolwork given to students to do at home by baptiset on english.SE

@MattE.Эллен It's not uniform. Supposedly, it's about keeping noon at the time when the sun is directly overhead at some given point on the earth. If a leap second is required, we're told it's announced 6 months in advance.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer: What is a "clout"? by mike on english.SE

@Lawrence Most clock-faces don't even have a method to adjust the seconds hand on them, so the concept of a leap second strikes me as strange.

@Tonepoet Leap seconds aren’t for Big Ben’s benefit.

Hi guys!

Is there any good word that could replace 'My best creations'

@Tonepoet I'd expect that most clocks with traditional analog clock faces have less precision than 1h per 1000 years. :)

ɪŋlɪʃ raydɪŋ wəz orɪdʃənli ɪntɛndəd tə bi fənimɪk: ælfəbɛts ar nɛvər fənɛdɪk rɛprɪzɛnteʃənz, onli fənimɪk wənz. ɪt wɪl nɛvər bi pasəbl tə rayt ɪŋlɪʃ fənɛdɪkli ɪn ə we θæt pipl awtsayd θæt dayəlɛkt wɪl bi ebl tə mek ɛni sɛns awt əv, sɪns fənɛdɪks veriz so gretli. ɪts also ə hyudʃ baðər gɛdɪŋ ɔl ðə lɪdl sɪmbəlz rayt. bət raydiŋ ɪŋlɪʃ fənimɪkli ɪz rili kwayt izi wəns yu gɛt yustə ɪt, æz bay naw yu kən si hir ɪn θɪs ʃort ɛgzæmpl.

Gee, it's Greek to me

Sounds like my undocumented language scripts

I rather disbelieve you of all people cannot read that.

I can read it

Just not as easily as I would normal English

Sure, me too.

However, if all books were written that way, this too would pass.

And quickly!

@tchrist Actually, by the time I was in the last sentence, I almost read it quickly

Believe it or else that's actually exactly what I was expecting to happen, which is why added it at the end.

But 'example' without a silent 'e' in the end feels really incomplete :P

Silent phonemics are oxymorons.

I could have written all the syllabic L's with a schwa before them, I guess.

I was trying to match Lawler's exampl.

Screams

It would be so cool if that were what the children used on their fonz.

@tchrist lolrofl i dun wut dis ʃɪt ɪz

ɪt wʊd bi rili kul layk so.

æftər ðə tʃayniz tekovər wi wɪl dawtləs si awr on pɪnyɪn rɛvəluʃən hir ɪn əmerɪkə.

day hard ði old hæbəts ðe du.

ay also faynd ɪt kyuriəs hwɪtʃ wərdz ar əntʃenʒd.

əv kors ðiz ar may on fonimz, hwɪtʃ me nat bi yorz.

ænd ɪf only wi rot layk ðɪs, wi wʊd hir itʃ əðrz æksəns.

may brɪlyənt noʃən fər təde ɪz tə yuz ðɪs kaynli form əv raydiŋ tə hɛlp lərnerz hu ʃo əp hir lʊkiŋ fər hɛlp ɪn awr tʃætrum. du yu θiŋk ðe wɪl bi plizd? :)

I can understand why you might say there is no appreciable difference to a speaker of English @tchrist, but when you say that some languages have oral-nasal contrast and others don't, I can't help but imagine that the I.P.A. should still differ somehow because it is supposed to be a largely language independent method of transcribing pronunciations, that's supposed to be an aid in learning all languages.

With the I.P.A. being the same for both pronunciations, it seems as if I.P.A. would be a deficient tool for learning Portuguese .

@Tonepoet How do you transcribe orange phonetically then? What about phonemically?

You may misunderstand my post. It's a phonemic system for English, not a phonetic system for all the world.

@Tonepoet That’s how you represent Portuguese monophthongs in IPA. You have to add a tilde for the nasal versions.

Each of those is a different phoneme in (European) Portuguese.

Minimal pairs exist for all the oral–nasal pairings.

Wanna know the scary part?

@tchrist Hmm, I don't usually like horror stories but sure.

That’s 14 different vowel phonemes in European Portuguese. American English also has 14 different vowel phonemes.

The thing is, the PT version is monophthongs alone, but the EN version also includes diphthongs.

So, we haven't discussed the PT diphthongs, which also have oral and nasal variants. And then there are the triphthongs.

I forget the count but there are 25–30 distinct vocalic phonemes in Portuguese when you count all the thongs.

However, some of them are hm. Rare? Common? The nasal version of the [ui] diphthong occurs in only one single word alone, but that word is muito, one of the most common words in the language, meaning both "more" and "many", and inflecting for number and gender as an adjective (but not as an adverb)

So it occurs in "just one word". Does that make it rare? No, you hear it constantly in speech.

I don't know what to call that. It's like a hapax phonemenon.

Or is that hapax phenomenon? :)

Sigh, I miss @Cerberus.

Wait, I am completely wrong.

Portuguese has THIRTY-EIGHT oral and nasal mono-, di-, and tri-phthongs

And IPA can't even handle them all.

> European Portuguese possesses a near-close near-back unrounded vowel. It occurs in unstressed syllables such as in pegar [pɯ̽ˈɣaɾ] ('to grip').[5] There is no standard symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this sound. The IPA Handbook transcribes it as /ɯ/, but in Portuguese studies /ɨ/ or /ə/ is traditionally used.

> There are very few minimal pairs for this sound: some examples include pregar [pɾɯ̽ˈɣaɾ] ('to nail') vs. pregar [pɾɛˈɣaɾ] ('to preach'; the latter stemming from earlier preegar < Latin praedicāre),[42] sê [ˈse] ('be!') vs. sé [ˈsɛ] ('see/cathedral') vs. se [sɯ̽] ('if'), and pêlo [ˈpelu] ('hair') vs. pélo [ˈpɛlu] ('I peel off') vs. pelo [pɯ̽lu] ('for the'),[43] after orthographic changes, all these three words are now spelled pelo.

I can see why the [ɯ̽] vowel is usually written /ə/.

It's a very good thing I do not have to be learning Portuguese anytime soon.

Do you know how many vowels Spanish has?

Exactly five: A E I O U

Which by some astronomically improbable coincidence, precisely correspond to the five vowels of the Latin alphabet. Go figger.

Like Old English, Classical Latin had a phonemic distinction between long and short versions of each of its vowels, but that was eventually lost.

Old English actually had 7 vowels to Latin’s 5: A Æ E I Y O U

And each both a long and a short version.

But as with Latin to Spanish, Old English replaced phonemic length with phonemic stress.

Latin also was much sparser in diphthongs than most if its descendants. Old English ditto.

Both had them, but only a few.

Then again, contemporary American English has only three phonemic diphthongs, albeit innumerable phonetic ones that vary broadly.

Those three are the ones in boy, in buy, and in the bow that rhymes with cow.

Five-vowel systems are the exception not the rule in Latin’s daughters. By far more common are seven-vowel systems, where E and O each have a long/short or close/open version, depending on your terminological orientation.