English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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CowperKettle

1:18 AM

@RegDwigнt Because of a great cartoon in Russian, I remember it

2 hours later…

Danimal Reks

3:44 AM

I am looking for tchrist. His profile on SE said to ping him here.

2 hours later…

tchrist

5:42 AM

@DanimalReks I am here. But sleeping.

KannE

6:36 AM

What is Winter Bash?

8 hours later…

Mitch

2:26 PM

@KannE Will all things there are 7 ways to describe them.

Winter bash is:

- an event from Dec 10th or so to Jan 1st or so every year on the StackExchange platform.

- a way to earn hats to 'put on' your SE avatar.

- a way to encourage involvement on SE as hats are earned by variations on the usual badges (instead of a bronze badge for 10 upvotes on an answer there might be a hat for 3 upvotes for 3 different answers in a day).

- a cynical marketing ploy by management to engender empty allegiance to an evanescent community of gamefied drones.

- a fun holiday activity to waste more time than usual on SE.

- some other reason

- what else is there?

1 hour later…

KannE

3:49 PM

@Mitch OIC, thanks. I saw the thing about the hats, but I didn't know what that meant.

1 hour later…

Danimal Reks

4:51 PM

@tchrist. Thanks. I see that you protected a topic regarding the pronunciation of azure. Seeing how I do not have the reputation level, I was wondering if it is possible to contribute to the discussion.

tchrist

@DanimalReks Do you have a link to that question so I can look into this?

Danimal Reks

Q: Pronunciation of "Azure" in "Windows Azure"

This is not a techie query. I am just unclear on how to pronounce the word "Azure" which is brand name for Microsoft's cloud service offerings.

Lordology

5:15 PM

AZZ-URE

Danimal Reks

If possible, I would like to cite a source for a pronunciation supporting second syllable emphasis and z rather than zh.

Lordology

cba

tchrist

5:51 PM

@DanimalReks It's protected because it has three deleted answers. Were you wanting to add a new answer, or supply your own suggested edit to an existing answer, or just supply a comment to an existing answer?

Danimal Reks

@tc

sorry...

@tchrist. I would like to offer an alternative answer based on a credible dictionary.

tchrist

Also, out of curiosity, what's the reference that includes /z/ not /ʒ/?

@DanimalReks Okay, then I'll go ahead and unprotect it for you. Note that we strongly prefer International Phonetic Notation here for a bunch of reasons. So what you mention as "zh" would be written "ʒ".

Danimal Reks

That is helpful, thank you.

tchrist

Done. Good luck. We prefer longer answers over shorter ones, and references are especially useful.

The OED has: Brit. /ˈaʒə/, /ˈaʒj(ʊ)ə/, /ˈazjʊə/, /ˈeɪʒə/, /ˈeɪʒj(ʊ)ə/, /ˈeɪzjʊə/, U.S. /ˈæʒər/

Nothing mentions /z/, which I believe I've never heard said personally.

HOWEVER...

Danimal Reks

Just for my enlightenment, how does one achieve the notation? This is new territory for me.

tchrist

5:58 PM

It turns out that the OED has the derived adjective azureous under the /əˈzjʊərɪəs/ pronunciation with the /z/ there as you've mentioned.

@DanimalReks Most of us just copy in IPA notation from elsewhere using the mouse's copy and paste rather than typing the notation in directly. However, here's an IPA keyboard plus a fuller one for subtleties that I find useful for this, and there are guides to using the IPA in English dialects at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Jasper Loy

@DanimalReks In case you didn't know, other than the usual dictionaries, there are two main pronunciation dictionaries: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, and Cambridge English Pronoucing Dictionary, which you may want to check out. However, there is no free online version for these two works.

Danimal Reks

@JasperLoy. Thank you, I will. BTW... What is the general consensus regarding the credibility of dictionary.com?

Jasper Loy

@DanimalReks I do not know anything about dictionary.com to be able to comment. I don't use it myself. =) Neither do I use wiktionary.

@DanimalReks I usually just use en.oxforddictionaries.com or merriam-webster.com or collinsdictionary.com or ahdictionary.com =)

tchrist

Note that /əˈzjʊərɪəs/ is using IPA in that odd British away for some of those, and that would myself likely write it more simply as simply /əˈzjuriəs/ or even /æzˈjuriəs/ perahps.

Danimal Reks

@JasperLoy I am not a of it. I would like to be accurate in my citation however, I am unfamiliar with how to type some characters. Specifically, I need the a with two dots over it and the z with one dot under it.

diaeresis. I will learn this. :)

I have the ä

tchrist

6:10 PM

Remember that /j/ in IPA is the consonant you hear at the beginning of the word yes in English. It’s really a semi-consonant glide. So it's the "j" sound which that letter typically represents in the Germanic languages other than English, not the sound that letter normally represents in English or the Romance languages.

[ä] is a centralized [a] vowel; it's a narrow reading of the phonetics, not a broad reading of the phonemes.

But I don't know what a dot under a z would mean in IPA. I don't see it mentioned as a diacritic here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Danimal Reks

I am citing Webster's unabridged published 1952. Should I use the same type?

tchrist

Or my.

Well, feel free but you'll have to explain the notation.

Meanwhile, let me show you how to type that character.

That character you want is ẓ

I figured it out because I opened up a Mac's "Terminal" application and wrote:

mac(tchrist)% perl -CS -E 'say "z\N{COMBINING DOT BELOW}"'
ẓ

Danimal Reks

Looks like Arabic transliteration... en.wikipedia.org/wikiẒ

tchrist

Then I used my mouse to copy that Terminal command's output.

I only used the Terminal command because I couldn't find the dot-under diacritic in IPA.

Danimal Reks

Exactly.

tchrist

6:19 PM

The same command would also work under Linux.

I've resorted to extra-ordinary measures like these before when trying to faithfully represent the original notation used in older editions of Webster's, usually the Third International but they all share these peculiarities.

Danimal Reks

6:32 PM

Thank you @tchrist for your help. I posted my response and hopefully correctly.

tchrist

@DanimalReks Thanks for your contribution.

Danimal Reks

I found this reference very useful for locating characters. mvdmoosdijk.nl/Misc/Altcodes/Alt-codes_for_characters.htm

tchrist

I think that the dot-under-z in Webster's might mean the /ʒ/ consonant of measure.

I'd have to go pull the tome off the shelves to check.

Robusto

@Cerberus Google Translate renders that as "However Owl art!" More evidence that whatever language is, it's beyond the scope of machines at present.

Still, I think that's a good name for @RegDwigнt. Henceforth I shall call him "However Owl art!" whenever I think of it.

RegDwigнt

7:15 PM

@CowperKettle Oh really? I didn't know there was a cartoon!

@Robusto Google Translating "Robusto yume" into Russian gives me "to cruise around and dream".

CowperKettle

Сепульки из сепулькария и охота на курдля

►

Из дневников Ийона Тихого. Путешествие на Интеропию

►

It was a bit scary

Watching as a kid, with all people suddenly dying and being replaced using sepulkas

RegDwigнt

7:41 PM

@CowperKettle that is... psychedelic.

It's like тайна третьей планеты but on heroin.

RegDwigнt

8:08 PM

WTF is going on at Gatwick. They're sending in the army?

Mitch

@RegDwigнt drones are sneaky

Cerberus

8:30 PM

@Robusto Well, it's not too far off.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive title detected (54): What does 'out of shit' mean? by Дмитрий on english.SE

Cerberus

That was Latin for "but you are an owl".

Robusto

@RegDwigнt Only time I ever had to use Gatwick the flight was cancelled. So there's that.

Heathrow ftw.

Cerberus

Gatwick was on the site of my newspaper this mroin, but not any more.

What else has happened?

I presume green activists all over the world will be inspired...

A cheap and easy way to reduce air pollution.

UPDATE: Drone was seen at 16:00 over #Gatwick, continues to re-appear each time airport tries to reopen runway, currently 633 of 760 flights today have been cancelled, 102,000 passengers affected

Tweeted by danwnews on December 20, 2018 at 6:51 PM

Robusto

9:00 PM

Q: A Cryptic Christmas Puzzle

Whilst researching an answer to Combination Lock, I was reminded of word puzzles such as the visual popularized by newspaper puzzle pages and TV programs such as "Catchphrase". I am aware the modern term for such pictorial usage is rebus** (n.) c. 1600, from Latin rebus "by means of objects...