I'm always happy when ELL chat turns into Japanese chat :-)

°！

Brrr.

I switched to Celsius years ago. It's 19°C here

And I'm huddled up in a blanket with cold feet :-)

How did you end up with º rather than °, anyway?

I'm just curious.

I wonder if musicians have an easier time with learning vowel and consonant length contrasts

The whole vowel and consonant length thing gets pretty murky if you look at it in detail―I can't remember all the details off the top of my head, but the length of a short vowel does change before a long consonant in Japanese

I think Kawahara found that a short vowel is only 2/3rds as long before a short consonant as it is before a long consonant

So there probably is something to your observations

Sometime when I'm at my other computer I can dig up the citations for all this stuff. I don't have the research on my laptop

@Catija It looks like highway robbery is used literally maybe 5% of the time or less, in corpora

> Authorities in the former Soviet republic of Georgia today said they had arrested a suspect in the killing of U.S. diplomat Fred Woodruff. They said they now believe his murder was a botched attempt at highway robbery. Woodruff died August 8th, after he was struck by a single bullet while riding in the car with the chief body guard for Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. (PBS Newshour, via COCA)

> Two Americans were killed in March in northern Uganda. Armed vehicle carjackings and highway robbery are frequent throughout the country.

So there are some literal uses to be found, but of course they're significantly less frequent

@DamkerngT. What about the glottal stop?

How does the glottal stop come in?

Using a question mark ? is a common way to type it when you can't type IPA

Since it's similar to the IPA ʔ

What about in the middle of an utterance, say, between two other syllables?

Are reduced vowels centralized in Thai?

Ahh, I wasn't sure what you meant by reduced

That's why I was taking a guess :-)

In Japanese―and I think I've mentioned this before―all five vowels become somewhat centralized in rapid, connected speech

They're still distinguished, but not as sharply.

But when speaking clearly, the center of the vowel space is unused in Japanese.

In rapid speech, the centralization fills in the unused space.

So in real recordings you can find vowels all over the chart.

Ah, I see

As you know quite well, there's a lot of variation in English vowels around the globe

I don't know what most of them are without looking them up :-)

I don't really know if I can tell the difference between AuE and BrE, but I nonetheless think I can :-)

There was a time when I worked with Australian coworkers for a while when we bought an Australian company some years back, and that's when I got to be somewhat familiar with AuE accents

@DamkerngT. I've never had that experience! :-)

Do you perhaps mean people from the northeast?

I've had Canadian friends all my life, and I think I can tell the difference to some extent, though to be honest, I don't think the differences are very large

Between AmE and CaE accents

@DamkerngT. It is. It's also the home of Language Log!

Oh! Then you looked it up and thought, "She's Canadian, eh?"

I'm sick, by the way.

Well, I don't remember noticing her sounding Canadian. So maybe I don't have the ability to tell the difference after all. :-)

Well, to be honest, I don't think you can really say that Canada and America have two distinct accents

There's a lot of variation across both countries, and some traits particular to regions on one side of the border or the other

@DamkerngT. お大事に！

That's what people always said to me if I was sick :-)

ありがとう＾＾

You don't have to

The textbook response to ありがとうございます is どういたしまして but people don't say that much

There are other little responses people sometimes use for ありがとう like いえいえ

Right now you probably don't need to respond with anything though :-)

Native speakers do say どういたしまして, which I know because I've heard them say it, but I don't think it's very common anymore

It reminds me of the phrases English learners learn, like "How do you do?"

Everyone understands "How do you do?", but it's rather old-fashioned!

I wonder if I'd be able to figure out how to respond if anyone ever said that to me :-)

The correct response is supposed to be repeating it back, right?

Yeah.

Am I? I mean, I've never heard anyone say it before.

Just on TV.

Oh wow, listen to her vowels here:

I don't think people say it in the UK anymore either, but don't hold me to that