Language Overflow

Anonymous

5:00 PM

It's easier to come up with a complete list of phonemes, but since phonemes are a matter of theory rather than physical reality, people tend to disagree on the exact list.

Anonymous

But there should be around 24 consonant phonemes we all agree on.

tchrist

/xa!/

Sorry, that was me laffing. :)

And then choking at the end.

Nihilist_Frost

2

Q: Most common consonant sound (token frequency)

If the schwa is the most common sound (and vowel sound) in English, it makes me wonder for ages: what is the most common consonant sound in English, in regards to everyday use?

phonology

tchrist

Do you think we would all agree on /ʍ/?

Nihilist_Frost

@tchrist not completely

tchrist

5:02 PM

@Nihilist_Frost /ʍai/ ? :)

j/k

CopperKettle

@Jasper It would also be hard for the pilots to request landing permissions. "Calling USS Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, request lan.. oh shucks, I've already flown past it"

Nihilist_Frost

@CopperKettle This is why we abbreviate things.

when we need to say something quicker, we do that.

CopperKettle

(0:

Anonymous

@Nihilist_Frost That's a difficult question!

Anonymous

See, different people have counted over the years, and it turns out /t/ /r/ and /n/ are all really close together in frequency.

Damkerng T.

5:07 PM

My guess: ʔ

:D

Anonymous

See, someone posted an answer saying /n/.

Anonymous

But in several other studies, /t/ was found to be the most common, sometimes by a very narrow margin.

Damkerng T.

I remember that in spelling, e is the most frequently used one, then t.

Anonymous

So really, it could reasonably be any of those three that's most common.

Anonymous

There isn't a clear-cut leader like there is in the vowel class.

Anonymous

5:10 PM

@tchrist What's the argument for including /ʍ/ as a phoneme rather than considering it a realization of the phonemic string /hw/?

Anonymous

I'm having trouble coming up with an argument for one over the other. Transcribing it /hw/ reduces the size of the inventory, of course.

Anonymous

But you could reduce the size of the phonemic inventory in lots of undesirable ways and still come up with workable transcriptions. It's not always a good thing.

Anonymous

At any rate, I don't think I have a contrastive /ʍ/ in my own speech.

tchrist

@snailboat I can live with /hw/. I think it's because it's a complex sound.

Anonymous

I think my mother does.

Anonymous

5:17 PM

Though I think that may have been a result of explicit instruction.

tchrist

It was for me.

Jasper

@CopperKettle LOL!

Anonymous

Oh, a post by John Wells on lip rounding in initial /r/: phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/04/wringing-changes.html

2

Anonymous

Not what I was looking for, but interesting :-)

Anonymous

Anyone ever have the experience that you find out lots of interesting things when you're trying to find out something else, and you just happen across information on other topics?

CopperKettle

5:29 PM

@snailboat You've just named the most common experience on (in?) the interwebs. (0:

Anonymous

Oh! Good for me :-)

tchrist

Merely the Britannica Effect come again.

Anonymous

It happens a lot with reference books, too.

Anonymous

A-ha! It has a name!

tchrist

Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩

The pronunciation of the digraph ⟨wh⟩ in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial ⟨w⟩, although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland and Ireland, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [ʍ], a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical /hw/ has become /w/ in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction. Before rounded vowels, a different reduction process took...

Anonymous

5:32 PM

Wikipedia uses U+27E8 and U+27E9

Damkerng T.

@CopperKettle It actually happens all the time for me on ELL. :D

CopperKettle

(0:

Anonymous

After our conversation a while back I settled on writing ‹wh› :-)

Anonymous

We didn't have Encyclopædia Britannica when I was little, but one of my friends a few houses down did.

Anonymous

(Side question: What do you suppose the grammar of one of my friends a few houses down might be?)

CopperKettle

5:35 PM

@snailboat Adverbial of.. place or position or whatever?

or post-positional adjectival phrase (but I'm not sure)

a reduction of "one of my friends living a few houses down the street"

Anonymous

We might have to define those terms to figure out if they work or not.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Ellipsis, I think.

Anonymous

Oh, you both like ellipsis for that one :-)

Damkerng T.

Hehe!

Anonymous

Note to self: It's been twenty years since you decided to break the habit of using too many smileys online :-)

Damkerng T.

5:38 PM

(-: Reverse smiley.

Anonymous

I'm an inveterate smiler.

CopperKettle

@snailboat I'd like an ellipsis, please. Oh.. make it two!

(0:

Anonymous

@CopperKettle . . . …

Anonymous

Please, take your pick!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I did reverse smileys when I was a teenager. They looked like this ( :

Damkerng T.

5:39 PM

: )

It looks a bit like Kermit the Frog.

Anonymous

It's because I had a friend who typed ( : and I thought it was cute, so I copied it.

Damkerng T.

It is cute!

Anonymous

でしょ？＾＾

Damkerng T.

nods -- ＾＾ is cute too!

Anonymous

I like Copper Kettle's smileys (smilies?) with the round nose.

Anonymous

5:42 PM

I guess smileys is better.

Anonymous

I always want to type smilies, though.

CopperKettle

@snailboat Thanks, Snails!

Anonymous

4

Q: Misleading question titles

Occasaionaly I ask a question which I think is about one thing and it turns out to be about something totally different. For example I just asked "Use of ただ after a plain/continuative form verb" and it turned out to be about use of ただ before counters. I think the question title should reflect ...

discussion

Anonymous

This is a meta post on Japanese.SE, but I don't think this class of problem is specific to that site

Anonymous

Have people on other sites already discussed this and come up with guidelines of some sort?

Damkerng T.

5:46 PM

@snailboat nods -- It's a little different on ELL, though.

S.R.I

I thought it was mostly a Japanese thing with smileys like ^_^?

Probably, from their overexposure to anime?

Anonymous

Well, I usually only use them when I'm actually typing in Japanese.

CopperKettle

anime poisoning

Anonymous

Wow, Urban Dictionary is mean

CopperKettle

(0:

Damkerng T.

5:53 PM

Actually, I think I remember that "Please die" is a line from an anime!

Oh, it was translated differently in English version. I remember that it seemed to mean "Please die" when I watched it: youtube.com/watch?v=u6mMuUnJWRQ.

Anonymous

I don't know anything about that

Damkerng T.

Ah, I forgot to mark the time in the video. The line is at 2:25, but right after the line is a gruesome scene.

Anonymous

Oh, that's okay, I don't need to watch it . . .

Damkerng T.

6:47 PM

Thank you for all the comments. To give you a better idea, I've written in full sentences: We welcome the media and the press to conduct an interview with our CEO at the venue. We welcome key delegates worldwide to partake in this mega event of the year. — Themacdaddynyc 9 hours ago

Oh, so we have a real sentence.

Anonymous

Always a good thing to have! :-)

Damkerng T.

nods

Nihilist_Frost

7:23 PM

How do you pronounce "environment"?

the -iron- like /aɪrən/?

Damkerng T.

7:35 PM

I do it like /aɪrən/.

Anonymous

Not me!

Damkerng T.

Oh!

Anonymous

I mean, maybe I do in careful speech.

Anonymous

But how often do I talk carefully, really? :-)

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

Not me either.

Damkerng T.

7:38 PM

Personally, I think /aɪərn/ requires more effort.

Anonymous

That schwa probably gets compressed most of the time, leaving a syllablic r, something like [ɚ]

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

@DamkerngT. I realize I sometimes eat the /n/.

Ahh. This is interesting.

So you see, in reciting Quran, we have a 'rule' named یرملون.

[Yar-Ma-loon]

Damkerng T.

And you pronounce the name of the rule differently?

Anonymous

I dunno, maybe something like [n̩ˈvaɪɚ̃mə̃nʔt̚]?

Nihilist_Frost

@snailboat The Iron treatment

Damkerng T.

7:41 PM

@snailboat Lotsa ~ and special characters!

Anonymous

The ~ means the vowel is nasalized.

Anonymous

In English, nasal allophones of each vowel are used before a following nasal consonant.

Nihilist_Frost

what about pronouncing "irony"?

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

Which states that when /n/ is pronounced before consonants /j/, /r/, /m/, /l/, /v/ and /n/, it will not be pronounced and instead, we'll pronounce the next consonant more strongly.

Anonymous

> Vowels are nasalized in syllables closed by a nasal consonant. (Rules for English Allophones, A Course in Phonetics, p.101)

Damkerng T.

7:44 PM

I think I usually mispronounce "irony" because of "iron".

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

No, I don't pronounce those two the same.

Anonymous

@Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ. I think reducing /nm/ to [m] is optional in English

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

@snailboat Well, it's not a rule rule in Arabic either. It just makes the words flow better.

Anonymous

It's a natural simplification, though.

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

And Arabic is based on making stuff flow better.

Anonymous

7:46 PM

I didn't write a [n] in my transcription of environment a few minutes ago.

Anonymous

I did show that the vowel before /n/ was nasalized, which indicates the presence of a nasal coda.

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

@snailboat Yeah, kinda.

Anonymous

But really, in rapid speech /n/ assimilates to the following /m/.

Anonymous

@Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ. Why kinda?

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

I think there's some kinda /r/ in the way I pronounce it.

Hence, I don't pronounce it.

Anonymous

7:48 PM

I put an /r/ in. I wrote it ɚ̃

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

You did? Looking back

Mhm.

> 16090

Anonymous

That's an r-colored schwa (or "schwar"), in other words a short rhotic vowel with unspecified but possibly somewhat central quality, nasalized due to the following /n/

Anonymous

That's how many units of time until the hats begin?

Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ.

@snailboat Minutes.

Anonymous

That's a unit of time :-)

Anonymous

7:51 PM

Last year we got the let tag as a result of hats.

Anonymous

I'm not convinced that tag is a good idea because there are several unrelated lets in English.

Anonymous

There's causative (permissive) let, hortative/imperative let, and lexical let ('lease')

Anonymous

Did I miss any?

Anonymous

Ooh, the suffix -let :-)

tchrist

9:37 PM

> let /lɛt/, v.2 arch.
Forms: 1 lettan, 2–5 letten, 3 lætten, laten, 3–5 lat(te, 3–6 lette, 4 leitt, 4–5 lete, 4–7 lett, 5 late, (leit), lettyn, 7 Sc. lat, 3– let. Pa. t. 3 lettede, 4 let, lettide, Sc. lettit, -yt, letyt, 4–7 letted, 5 lettid, -yd. Pa. pple. 3 ilet, ilette, 4 lated, y-lat, Sc. lettit, 4–5 lettid, 4–5, 7 y-let, 4–6 lett(e, 4–9 letted, 5 y-lettyd, 5–6 lettyd, (8 letten), 4– let.

Etymology: OE. lȩttan = OFris. letta, OS. lettian (Dutch letten), OHG. lezzan, lezzen (MHG. lezzen, letȥen), ONor. letja to hinder, Goth. latjan intr. to delay, f. OTeut. *lato- late a.

> let /lɛt/, sb.1
Forms: 2–6 lette, pl. letten, 4 leet, leit, 4–5 late, lete, 4–6 lat, 4–9 lett, 5 lytt, 6 leatte, 4– let.

Etymology: f. let v.2

Hindrance, stoppage, obstruction; also, something that hinders, an impediment. Now arch.: most common in phrase let or hindrance. (Cf. ME. lite.)

In ME. verse the phr. without(en let (Sc. but let) is frequent, often as a mere expletive.
A. 1175 Cott. Hom. 239 ― Oðer hit wrð ȝewasse iþer pine of þe deaðe þe he her þaleð oðer efter mid eðelice lette.
C. 1275 Lay. 4572 ― He þohte habbe Delgan cwene of Denemarche ac him com mochel lette [c 1205 lætt…

Anonymous

10:02 PM

That's a lot of lets!

Anonymous

(Those are a lot of lets!)

Nihilist_Frost

10:34 PM

macmillandictionary.com/pronunciation/british/environment

The IPA and voice file don't sound synced

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