English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:40 AM

@Tonepoet Three phonemic diphthongs. There are many other phonetic ones but those don’t count.

If you reread my long posting, I’ve incorporated some stuff on the three phonemic diphthongs at the bottom of it under the heading "Comments".

For phonetic diphthongs, this is merely the tip of the iceberg, and the rhotic ones don’t even count in America:

There are lots and lots more than that.

But they don’t matter.

Only the three respectively seen in cow, boy, buy are phonemic ones.

So just because I myself happen to say endure as IPA [ɛnˈdʲuu̯ɹ], there’s no way I’m going to be talking about that to anyone less than a serious expert, of which we have perhaps a half-dozen on our site. For everybody else that’s just plain /ɛnˈdjur/, or in Americanist phonemic notation with /y/ for /j/, just /ɛnˈdyur/. Phonemics are all almost anyone ever cares about because only they change which word you heard.

Meanwhile the British will go fantasizing about phantom tetraphthongs in my [juu̯ɹ] example. Ignore that. :)

Cerberus

1:13 AM

@tchrist Hmm that is a great many.

Could it also be a matter of definition?

tchrist

Well, different accents do have different phonetic allophones for phonemic diphthongs.

I’d SKIM the article at the link.

Remember that this is also taking in account the rising diphthongs not just the falling ones.

Plus the triphthongs, which most of us never have to deal with in our own languages.

Except for that we don’t count as triphthongs things like those in English because of rhyming.

Of course an Iberian word with a stressed triphthong like averiguáis, averigüéis (ind+subj vosotros forms of "verify") would likely rhyme in their poetry differently than in ours.

It would probably only need to rhyme with /a/ and /e/ respectively, not worrying so much about the glides to either side. I’d have to hunt to see if they rhyme /ai/ with /a/, /ei/ with /e/.

But in English we can use rhyme to show the rising diphthongs are not thought of as different vowels than a version without the on-glide.

So quick can rhyme with sick. We don’t care about the /w/ on-gline.

I’m less certain of cute and shoot rhyming, but quite possibly.

In which case, the /ju/ diphthong doesn’t count for rhyming, just the /u/ part does.

In English.

Portuguese preterite averiguei is spelled averigüé in Spanish, and there is no /j/ off-glide there.

Portuguese lost their diaereses because they thought you should be able to know whether the u is silent to make the g hard or whether it should be a /w/ sound. Spanish thinks that's dumb to make people guess so always writes things consistently and predictably based on sound alone. Hence lingüística, which is how the Portuguese spelled it until recently as well.

If you saw the word guisa you would not know whether that were /gwisa/ or /gisa/ if it were Portuguese, but Spanish guarantees that it must be only /gisa/ because /gwisa/ would have to be written güisa.

And yes, guisa means the same obvious thing in all three of Italian and Spanish and Portuguese.

The Italians don't use it much though.

Cerberus

1:32 AM

Ah, I see.

tchrist

And a güisquería is a whiskey distillery or bar. :)

@Cerberus Which thing?

Cerberus

If you count initial glides as part of the diphthong, and if you count slightly different vowels from various dialects and accents, then I imagine you could get to 38...

tchrist

Yes, that's why.

Cerberus

@tchrist That they use gu for two different sounds.

tchrist

Since any other sound can have a leading /j/ or /w/.

Yes, it’s annoying.

Cerberus

1:34 AM

I don't think leading consonantal sounds are ever counted for rhyme?

tchrist

Well, these aren't really consonants.

Cerberus

But they're consonantal.

tchrist

They’re glides, which are held to be semi-consonants fore and semi-vowels aft.

I guess we can pretend the semi- part is not there, but it becomes complicated when you add a syllable.

cow /kaw/; cows /kawz/; cowers /ˈkawərz/; cowabunga /kawəˈbəŋgə/

I think it’s better to write diphthongs with /w/ and /j/ (or /y/ if you prefer) always as the consonant forms. A cow that cowers just has "ers" added to its /kaw/, but the original ending sound does not change so why respell it to change it from a vowel to a consonant at that point? Just leave it alone, it's the same thing.

Cerberus

@tchrist But initial glides work only at onset of the syllable, not in the nucleus nor coda.

tchrist

If we spell cow /kaw/ and wow /waw/, this makes more sense to me.

Cerberus

1:39 AM

And the onset doesn't matter for rhyming, does it?

tchrist

No, it does not.

Cerberus

@tchrist Sure, why not?

tchrist

This is interesting (here using /y/ for IPA /j/): high /hay/; higher /ˈhayər/; hire /hayr/

If you use the consonant for the diphthongs you can always tell its a diphthong not two monophthongs in hiatus.

Unlike the way people "normally" write those.

With /hai/ and such.

/haj/ works just as well. /hai/, not so much.

I don't think I should write high with a vowel /hai/ when I'm about to write higher /hajər/ with a consonant.

That’s my reasoning. Perhaps it is flawed, but it is convenient in my eyes to write glides only as consonants not as vowels.

Consider the actual word coëval.

That’s /koivəl/ not /kojvəl/. I supposed you can solve it with a written stress mark in the worst case, so /ko'ivəl/.

Cerberus

@tchrist I'm confused. Y is a vowel.

tchrist

Sigh.

Cerberus

1:48 AM

But you meant j?

tchrist

As it were.

Cerberus

But you used y instead?

tchrist

That's correct.

I did.

Cerberus

But why?

tchrist

Because that's what Kenyon and Knott do. Americanist IPA has always done this for English words.

We need no /y/ sound in English.

And no English word uses the "j" to mean the /j/ sound.

The solution is obvious even if it pisses the hell out of the Germans, ja.

And that's /xa/ for Spanish.

Cerberus

1:49 AM

Umm.

I have never heard of that notation.

Very confusing.

tchrist

Oh!

Sorry.

Cerberus

And you later used /j/ for actual /j/ as well, didn't you?

tchrist

It's actually clarifying for the people it’s targeting.

Yes, I did because I could tell I was freaking you out. :)

Cerberus

Hah.

I was actually away.

But with // I expect IPA and not some other, local system.

tchrist

Do you think it’s ok for me to handle my own flag, or should I let another mod contact the user? :)

Cerberus

1:52 AM

The system is flagging you because you've made too many edits?

tchrist

Yeah. :)

Although I would write "so many" not "too many".

> Yur rayt ðæt “sɪks” ən “sɪt” hæv ɛvər so slaytli dɪfrɪnt fənɛtɪks, bət ðoz ɔl tæli tə ðə sem əndərlayiŋ fonim /ɪ/ ɪn ðə maynz əv əs netəv spɪkərz. Yor tʃælənʒ ɪz tə lərn tə θiŋk ðæt sem we æz wi du.

That’s an example of the Americanist system.

Cerberus

@tchrist Or /ko'wiːvəl/.

tchrist

@Cerberus That’s better maybe.

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

Cerberus

Hiatus means a glottal stop to me, when you're talking phonetics.

And I think that is rare, except in fairly recent compounds.

tchrist

That’s interesting.

English almost never has a glottal stop. It likes glides between vowels.

Cerberus

1:54 AM

For otherwise, what would hiatus indicate?

tchrist

An exception is in the eels.

Cerberus

Exactly.

tchrist

Hiatus means separate syllables.

Like in hiatus.

That’s hi-a-tus due to hiatus.

Or well, the glide pivots. It’s hard to talk about.

Cerberus

I think your definition is not a definition.

tchrist

With letters.

Oh, I think it is, actually.

Cerberus

1:56 AM

Hello. That's two separate syllables. So it must be hiatus.

tchrist

coëval gets the diacritic to show hiatus.

Cerberus

@tchrist I would call that diaeresis.

tchrist

Hyatuss.

Cerberus

In phonetics.

Hiatus is on a higher level to me.

tchrist

hayetəs in that other system

Cerberus

1:57 AM

And it is also often something that happens before the actual sounds are formed.

tchrist

Ahem:

> (linguistics)
A syllable break between two vowels, without an intervening consonant. (Compare diphthong.)

No glottal stop required.

Cerberus

But not in phonetics.

tchrist

Unlike with your hovercraft’s denizens.

Hm.

Cerberus

In poetry, maybe.

At least I would not use it in phonetics.

tchrist

Coëval co-weevils co-habitate inchoately.

Well, no that's right. You never use a diaeresis diacritic to mean hiatus in phonetics.

It means centralization.

There.

Cerberus

2:00 AM

/hajejtəs/ or /hajeitəs/, I would say.

There is a consonantal sound in between the syllables for me.

tchrist

My favorite spelling is diæ̈resis because nobody can type it. :)

@Cerberus For me too. I don’t know that it is always marked.

> IPA(key): /haɪˈeɪtəs/

This is part of my problem with standard IPA notation. It hides the glides.

Cerberus

So it would not fit your definition.

tchrist

hiatus

Noun: hiatus (plural hiatus or hiatuses)

A gap in a series, making it incomplete.
An interruption, break or pause.
An unexpected break from work.
The band took a hiatus for three months.
(geology) A gap in geological strata.

(16 more not shown…)

Well /hajetəs/ is how I say it. I have monophthong /e/ and /o/ in my language.

It's a feature of the Upper Midwest. But so do Scots and Californians so we can't blame the Scandihoovians, although that's been suggested.

Words like "say" do come out [seʲ] but that’s a mere phonetic off-glide and not part of the phoneme /e/, just something that happens to it in that environment.

So ray has it but rare lacks it.

Unlike with high and hire. Because that is one of the three phonemic diphthongs.

Sometimes I think the people who put English spelling together weren't as dumb as people think they were.

(in re ray versus rare)

Cerberus

2:18 AM

I'm sure they were many!

tchrist

I've snarked Community on his flag. That'll show 'im!

Cerberus

Fire him.

tchrist

Well, I could suspend him.

In that he would be marked suspended.

It would change nothing, of course.

Cerberus

Cool.

tchrist

These experiments have been done for science.

An unnamed moderator whose self-discovery exploits are well-documented in TL did this, for science.

It's a feature of the diamond not of the user id.

That mod suspended himself. Didn't make any difference.

And of course, he then unsuspended himself as I recall.

tchrist

2:38 AM

The Spanish write María with an accent but Mario without because the girl has no diphthong so you have to separate out the /i/. But in the boy there is a diphthong and so a two-syllable word with penultimate stress ending in a vowel needs no written accent.

That’s why they write estoy with a consonant. If they had written that with a vowel at the end, they’d’ve needed a written accent mark.

Portuguese has different rules from these. Its estou version is still stressed at the end.

On the /o/.

Cerberus

3:11 AM

Right.

Cerberus

3:41 AM

That makes sense.

Færd

11:14 AM

I had a dream that I was at a poetry conference, standing behind the lectern reading out my poem that was about children that are dying from disease or because of poverty or war. It was a sort of contest and my poem had won first prize.

I don't remember exactly, but I think it was especially about Pakistani and Indian children. I'm not sure why; maybe because I'd been thinking for a while about those two troubled, nuclear-armed states that are (or I thought were) at the brink of a grim territorial conflict.

Oh, and the poem was in English! It was nice, but I don't remember any of it.

englishstudent

12:35 PM

@Færd That is a very nice dream. You are right, here in India we have lots of poverty, it is sad. By the grace of Annapoorna devi and Gautama Buddha I'm doing good, but when I was very young I used to go to bed starving at nights sometimes. Those were awful nights, I remember :/

M.A.R.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Færd

1:26 PM

@englishstudent You have my sympathy. And (I'm not sure who you're ascribing it to, but) I'm glad you're doing relatively better.

SmokeDetector

2:06 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] One-character link in answer, pattern-matching website in answer, repeating characters in answer: How to formally say that I am a handyman (in resume)? by ehsan shabani on english.SE

SmokeDetector

2:43 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Username similar to website in answer: Nature of object in this sentence-- Relative pronoun or adjective clause or something else? by Topget on english.SE

Færd

4:28 PM

Now I'm thinking that that dream was just a reflection of the nature of my concern for others' misfortune: indulging my social or intellectual desires and satisfying my emotional needs and, in short, get my kick out of the situation.

Everyone and everything is selfish, each in its own way. Where does worth and merit lie then? What is this ingrained tendency to assign value to selflessness?

Færd

4:48 PM

There should be something that we, behind and beyond all of our aspirations, unconsciously aspire to. And that thing should be worth and value and meaning in itself. This is the only answer, if there, indeed, is an answer.

M.A.R.

So that's what happens when a physicist gets philosophical

Færd

I'm sorry, are you talking to me? :)

I don't think this is philosophy. Or rather, this is not me thinking philosophically. This was a morality-driven train of thought.

As a philosopher, as it were, I would start from selves, not values; reality, not perception.

Is that even possible? Well, it is, but I'm not going to dive into it right now.

Cheerio.

M.A.R.

5:10 PM

@Færd Sure, peasants just refer to everything that sounds morally heavy as philosophical

tchrist

6:05 PM

@sumelic It doesn't much matter, but I wonder whether the Modern Greek fricative [ð] gets realized as a dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, or post-alveolar one, and whether it’s ever an approximant in some phonological contexts. I’ve just spent 15 minutes looking, and I haven’t found anything definitive, nor sound samples for me so I could judge for myself. Maybe @terdon would know.

This says that the [t] for example “varies between laminal denti-alveolar, laminal alveolar, and apical alveolar”. But I know nothing of Greek phonology.

> Medial fricative deletion. Some dialects of the Aegean Islands, especially in the Dodecanese, have a tendency of deleting intervocalic voiced fricatives /v/, /ð/, /ɣ/ (e.g. [meˈalo] vs. standard [meˈɣalo] 'big').[49]

Hm.

I'm just curious about mainstream use, though.

tchrist

6:52 PM

I will never get over how angry and dismissive other people than us who use the Latin alphabet get at Anglophones all because we didn’t change our spelling as a result of the Great Vowel Shift.

M.A.R.

7:05 PM

0

Q: "She was supposed to phone ...", What is the active voice?

Is the following sentence in the passive voice? if yes, What is the active voice of it? She was supposed to phone Jack last night.

@TCh I know you like stuff like that. ^

tchrist

7:15 PM

@M.A.R. That's cuz yer sposta.

englishstudent

@tchrist what are short forms like "sposta" and "yer" called in English? Is that a 'dialect', or just a short form?

tchrist

Perhaps....

Pronunciation respelling

A pronunciation respelling is a regular phonetic respelling of a word that does have a standard spelling, so as to indicate the pronunciation. Pronunciation respellings are sometimes seen in dictionaries. This should not be confused with pronunciation spelling, which is an ad hoc spelling of a word that has no standard spelling. Most of these are nonce coinages, but some have become standardized, e.g. gonna to represent the pronunciation of going to, as in I'm gonna catch you. == Respelling == Pronunciation spellings may be used informally to indicate the pronunciation of foreign words or those...

englishstudent

ok. thank you.

tchrist

shoulda coulda woulda gonna hafta didja

I coudlna known it without some searchin.

Tonepoet

63

Q: “kinda”, “sorta”, “coulda”, “shoulda”, “lotta”, “oughta”, “betcha”, "tseasy" etc. What are these?

In linguistics, is there a term describing this phenomenon, i.e., when the syllables of two words are slurred together in the spoken language? They are not contractions. While contractions are acceptable in any register, this combination of words is very informal and hardly ever found in formal ...

terminology speech linguistics eye-dialect

M.A.R.

7:32 PM

@tchrist I wanna add one more

tchrist

@M.A.R. Hwɪtʃ wən wʊd ðæt bi?

M.A.R.

I propose we change 'be' to 'bi'. The latter looks much cooler, study says.

englishstudent

@Tonepoet Oh ok it's that same "Yod Coalescence" that mitch talked about the other day. "Sposta" and "yer" seemed a bit different to me though.

Also "relaxed pronunciation" according to that answer.

Thanks!

tchrist

@M.A.R. prali cəz ɪt simz tə sədʒɛst səmθən wɪkɪd ɪn ðer cəltʃər.

M.A.R.

I'm biased 'cause I'm a chemist-ling

tchrist

7:37 PM

ambivalency?

M.A.R.

@tchrist About the 'bi' thing?

I used to see it in cyclic nomenclature. I despised the names

tchrist

@M.A.R. y

M.A.R.

So I kinda twitch when seeing 'bi', except when it's not a chemistry context

tchrist

binary stars

Tonepoet

7:57 PM

@englishstudent I mostly linked to the question because I figured the discussion taking place here might be relevant to make into an answer. It's probably worth note that the act of cutting off a syllable in speech is often referred to as elision.

More recently elision has also been used to refer to the omission of words from sentences, although I consider that usage inappropriate, especially since that concept has its own distinct word which is ellipsis.

M.A.R.

ellipsision

Tonepoet

@M.A.R. I'd only use one l to make it clearer that it's not just "verbing" the noun ellipsis and appending with the -ion suffix to make it a noun again. =P

englishstudent

@Tonepoet ok thank you. By the way, there is quite a difference in the definitions of 'Elision' in Websters dictionary 1828 that you posted and the usual Merriam Webster on the internet.

I was just comparing the definitions. :)

skill patrol

Comparing definitions is fun :-)

englishstudent

webstersdictionary1828.com seems like a neato site. I will start using that too.

Tonepoet

8:13 PM

@englishstudent Before you start doing that, I'm not really sure which online version of Noah Webster's The American Dictionary of the English Language is the best one to cross reference. Most of them seem incomplete in one aspect or another.

englishstudent

oh okay.

Tonepoet

I've noticed that the more important entries for the word "rank" is omitted from most for instance.

englishstudent

Merriam Webster is more common.

merriam-webster.com

Tonepoet

@englishstudent Yeah, I realize that. Merriam-Webster's lineage of dictionaries are derived from The American Dictionary of the English Language. Notice that on the top of every webpage on Merriam-Webster's website, you'll see "Since 1828". That's why.

englishstudent

@Tonepoet So are the good entries for "rank" in paper versions only?

@Tonepoet Yep, I notice "since 1828".

Plus lots of ads lel.

@Tonepoet I have a paper version at home too, I will check that in the morning. It is the Collegiate Edition.

It is pretty heavy lel.

Tonepoet

8:23 PM

@englishstudent There are scanned versions of the paper dictionary on the internet archive. Also the E.D.L. lexicon has a slightly later edition of The American Dictionary of the English Language with the entries intact.

M.A.R.

Typography question -- What should come after "question 1"? I've usually seen a hyphen, but that doesn't sound right. @TCh @Tone

englishstudent

@Tonepoet Thanks for the link.

Tonepoet

@M.A.R. I'd expect a colon if it was a question on a test.

M.A.R.

@Tonepoet I was thinking either of hyphen, em- or endashes

Tonepoet

Hyphens are typically reserved for compound words and en-dashes are usually reserved for ranges. Em-dashes serve a variety of functions, sometimes including replacing a colon so it's the most probable option, but I would need to check a reference to really be certain if it's appropriate.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…