TIL, from Wikipedia: many AmE speakers vocalize /l/ to [ɤ̯] before /l, f, s, z/. I'm pretty sure I'm one of them; there's no actual [l] sound in words like valve or halls. (This is distinct from the lexicalised loss of /l/ in words like half.)

Argh, it may be more complicated than that. I think there is an [l] in shells and shelf, at least for me. Maybe this has something to do with dark /l/? Now my head hurts. Grr.

Semi-related, there's a youngish native speaker of English on youtube who rhymes gull with wool and pull. He mostly has a Pacific Coast accent though. I've only heard that happen in speakers from the north of Britain who use the put vowel in words like gun as well.

@alphabet Try with wolf, golf, hulf, calm, palm.

@tchrist Hulf isn't a word, but I think the others don't have [l] sounds either. I don't think they have a dark /l/ either; it's not like the /l/ in help.

So why is shelf different? Because it's after a front vowel?

Oh what had I meant to type there!?

gulf

pall mall

@alphabet Try selves vs solves.

I haven't found any words in English with [ilf] or [ilv] yet.

And so I wonder why.

Gulf has...I give up. Mall doesn't have an [l], unless if precedes a vowel like in "Mall of America." But it isn't a homophone of "maw" either.

Selves has /l/, solves doesn't.

I have the same problem describing calm and palm.

Am I the only one with this pattern? This makes my head hurt.

No, you're not.

Somehow palm and calm have the same vowel as fall but I can't even convince myself I always say any sort of L there. L vocalization for the win.

That's all OED found for a y or an i before an l followed by an f or a v.

Not stable.

Ok. I've noticed that AAVE speakers vocalize /l/ in places where I don't, in words like self or hold.

Yep.

OK, this is starting to bother me. Is "calm" a homophone of "com," as in "dot com"? I don't think so.

Of course, it depends on the following word; in "fall on," I have a proper /l/, but not in "fall weather."

For me calm and com are calmpletely different. :)

OK, maybe "calm" and "com" are homophones.

calm is open o, the THOUGHT vowel.

com has the FATHER vowel because I have the father–bother merger but not the cot–caught merger.

The thing is, that's not REALLY the vowel it has!!

It is not the same as in THOUGHT. Not quite. There's something more there. I think it's leftover L.

I have the cot-caught merger in some words but not others; there are some words that I seem to pronounce in either way depending on context. My pronunciation of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are closer to [ä] and [ɒ], though.

call me a taxi and kalmia taxi are homophones for me.

For me, tot and taught are homophones, but taut is different from either of them.

I have no explanation.

Oh yes, you've been merged. For me, taught and taut are the homophones.

But not tot.

And teeter-totter does not rhyme with teacher-daughter.

I know I have at least a few words where I have to say [ɒ] not canonical [ɔ] as is normal in American English, but I can never remember which ones those are when I want to.

I seem to have a fairly sharp distinction in some pairs (don/dawn, hock/hawk, body/bawdy) but none in others (cot/caught, chock/chalk, wok/walk).

Did you grow up in the Boston area? If so, there are complex situations there, possibly due to a few left-over non-rhotic speakers of old.

Yes, exactly!

Also: my parents are both Ohioans without the merger.

Oh then you'll probably have pre-R tense–lax neutralization like for marry–merry–Mary and many more besides, like those with [o] before the R.

Ohio would. New England might not.

I actually have the special Northeast pattern: for me Mary and marry are homophones, but merry is different.

Is your story and sorry vowel the one from saw or the one from sew?

@alphabet by vocalize do you mean 'make a vowel out of' or 'drop' or what?

Vocalize means vowelificate in Latin.

@tchrist Story and sorry have different vowels, no?

@alphabet Not for me. I would have to feign another accent for that to happen.

@alphabet I ask because it sounds to me like they drop the 'l' entirely rather than make a vowel or diphthongize the preceding vowel

I suspect that I picked up the "rule" that the "w" in words like "hawk" or "bawdy" indicated where I was supposed to round the vowel, making me less likely to merge the vowels in words spelled that way. Still doesn't explain why "taut" and "taught" aren't homophones.

sorry is sew + ry and soar + y for me.

I never saw anything to make that word. :)

And sari is a different word algother. That's not sarong is it? :)

@tchrist Huh. I think for me "story" is [o̞ɹ] and "sorry" is [äɹ]

@alphabet That's the sari one with the FATHER vowel.

@tchrist Yeah, I have the "father" vowel in "sorry."

@tchrist Actually: I think "story" is more like [ɔɹ]. Argh, vowels before /r/ are annoying.

Sawry sounds too pawsh compared with Sorey; Sari doesn't sound posh but I'm not sure that it sounds rough either.

For me sari and sorry are homophones.

I've heard that accent. Sounds Joisey, like.

I have the same vowel in sorry as I have in so.

Except less dippy thonged.

@tchrist Huh. I can't imagine pronouncing sorry that way. It always sounds vaguely Canadian to me.

@alphabet Yes, vowels before R are awnnoying.

@alphabet I was reared 30 minutes from the coast of one of the Great Lakes.

Praps that Canadizes me.

> Error in electronic signalling system blamed for deadliest crash in decades as families search for missing loved ones.

Something interesting I've noticed in myself (and some other people around here): for me, t-glottalization is nearly obligatory when it's after a vowel and before a pause. If you told me to say the word "bet," with no further context, I would say [bɛʔ]

(Recent train crash)

@alphabet Brits think we have weird accents in Minnesota and Wisconsin because of our monophthongs.

Do you have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift?

But they don't find the Ohio and Indiana vowels weird. So that means ours are different from theirs.

@alphabet Goodness no. I'm old.

@tchrist Ah. Apparently phoneticians find it very innovative and exciting.

@alphabet I know. That said, I'm not sure it would jump out at me as weird.

It's not really just that I'm old. It's that I always talked more to older people than to younger people, and because I didn't socialize very much in the first place. So my grandparents' accent was transmitted to me more directly than it would have been for others of my age.

@tchrist Fair enough. It annoys me that the "Boston accent" is not how most Bostonians talk nowadays.

Quite.

Though you do still occasionally get the so-called "pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd" types.

When you grow up straddling the border between fields and forests on one side and the city-limit line of the county's ranging metropolis of maybe 3800 people, you don't pick up much city slicker phonetics. :)

Things change far more slowly when there aren't so many people yacking all the time.

For you, do story and historic have the same vowel before the /r/?

Yes.

The one from so.

With almost no glide if any.

I also have the same vowel in both, but it isn't the same as the one in so.

As Wiki notes, there are a few odd words ("sorrow, sorry, borrow, tomorrow") where most AmE speakers (like myself) have a vowel different from the one in "story."

Just [oɹ] never [ɔɹ] or even [owɹ].

See the "Distribution of /ɒr/ and prevocalic /ɔːr/ by dialect" table there.

@alphabet Sorrow and borrow don't rhyme for me. That's because the first is a learned word and the latter I assimilated naturally.

Wiki claims that only Canadians have the same vowel in all of sorry, story, and historic.

I absolutely do so.

Proof you're secretly Canadian over there!

As does everyone in both sides of my family several generations back.

To be fair, in Canada sorry is, I believe, among the first words children acquire.

Ce sot rit !

Those all rhyme with Tory.

And with Laurie.

And with hoary.

Do you have the mirror-nearer merger?

Yes.

And bury–Mary.

Are you pronouncing sorry and sari the same way?

Huh. For me, I'm pretty sure bury and berry aren't homophones; they belong in the marry and merry classes, respectively.

Wiktionary seems to think they should both be in the merry class, if you don't have that merger.

Curiously, for me part of the difference between marry and merry is the allophone of /r/; for me, marry always has the "bunched/molar" /r/, whereas merry usually has the postalveolar version.

@jlliagre No. Sorry has /o/ and sari has /ɑ/.

Say the word "so" then add "ree".

@jlliagre For me, "sorry" and "sari" are homophones, but this varies between speakers.

Sorry is just /ˈsoɹi/, while sari is /ˈsɑɹi/. For me.

The bunched/molar R vs. postalveolar R thing also appears to be rather confusing for phoneticians. I think it's only recently been decided that we should transcribe the molar R as [ɹ̈].

And I can't have a lax vowel before R.

Well, I was avoiding typing /ˈsoɻʷi/.

But only becuase it's not phonemic. :)

Ah, you have the retroflex version. I don't.

I do.

It's all scrunched up. The Chinese would be proud.

Do you have the bunched/molar R? I do in some words (like "rain" and "oar")--it's basically the "r" made by pulling your tongue backwards, instead of pushing it up.

Yes.

Don't most Americans?

I think there's some variability in how often it's used. It's nearly indistinguishable acoustically from the retroflex or postalveolar /r/, so it usually isn't transcribed differently unless you have an MRI scanner.

Praat is already hard enough and then some. I don't need a scan.

I have a theory that there's some relationship between the Mary-marry merger and æ-raising. For me the diphthong in both Mary and marry isn't too different from the one in man, except that in man the nasalization starts partway through the diphthong, as tends to happen in pre-nasal vowels.

(Of course, "the diphthong in marry" is probably a statement that makes no sense to many speakers.)

I just have /e/ there. No diphthong.

You can explain these as corresponding to met–mat–mate = merry–marry–Mary.

But you can't convey dialectal diphthongs that way.

Anyway, mine are all the one from mate, which has nearly no diphthong for me before R.

Probably none at all. Haven't Praated it.

But in main there's a lot more glide. Pre-nasal breaking, perhaps, like pre-L breaking.

I need to get Praat so that I can unconfuse myself. I believe that for me Mary and marry are [ɛəɹ], whereas merry is [ɛɹ].

So met is merry, but neither mat nor mate correspond to marry or Mary.

Try for trillabic faërie, if you dare. :)

Trying to add an "r" to the sound in "mat" sounds vaguely British to me.

Kind of like using that sound in "man."

Listen to recordings of Larry King saying his own name. He did that.

Hey, Praat has a Linux version!

@jlliagre ^^^^^

@Robusto ^^^^^

Does Praat just have a "listen to me talk and show me the formants" button?

@alphabet Actively causing a problem like that would just be a fast track to being removed as a moderator (with someone — perhaps a CM — reversing all the closings), which is ultimately a much weaker position to be in. It also harms the community, and even the angriest of striking moderators right now still want a community to return to.

@alphabet The events of 2019 barely touched Stack Overflow, where most of the questions (and money for SE!) are. It was brutal for other sites, such as Writing, which had no mods during that period, and still hasn't bounced back. The difference is that I think over half of SO mods are going on strike now.

@alphabet As I understand, that's similar to what Codidact did for Writing and Outdoors (but the scores were apparently not imported). I haven't really paid much attention to what they're doing tho

Codidact also has extremely low activity. They have a single community for "Languages & Linguistics" which has a scope so broad it is covered by dozens of SE sites, but it (across all the years it has existed) has gotten less than half the questions that ELL got last month, or slightly more than half what ELU got last month.

@Laurel I looked at it a year or so back, but was disappointed in the content. They really aren't competitive with SE at all. Not even with Quora or Reddit either.

Yeah... it's sad.

If SE implodes on itself, I'm not really sure where I'd go :( All my stuff is here

As far as I've seen on Reddit, very few subs even resemble what we have here, since there's just a lot of jokes and chit chat even on subs that look like they might be for serious discourse (e.g. r/etymology). r/AskHistorians is the only sub I've ever seen that looks anything like SE (they remove anything that's not a referenced answer, a lot like Skeptics SE).

Discord is more hardcore.

And Quora I just don't understand because they've designed their site to be difficult to navigate on purpose. Answers there are hit or miss, and I generally just take any information I find there and go back to Google to see if I can substantiate it with a real source

@user85795 I do use Discord, but it's really not comparable to SE. I'm in one server where people can ask programming questions, but it really doesn't work. A lot of people post links to SO instead of asking directly there.

It has a lot wider scope of interests.

Elsewhere I was saying that if the value of SE tanks enough, someone (or a group) from the community could buy it. I then told ChatGPT to write up an offer letter for a four figure purchase value :p

I would definitely prefer Reddit over Discord for Q&A lol

Considering it will happen that people trust some site then no longer trust it, in the future I believe we should all host our own stuff, and have forms/api that connect it to a string of other contents from other people using the same form.

We all have cloud storage. Is it only good for images and backups?

Cloud bbs.

Time to go back to phpBB, like in the good old days!

I found the data! "14/24 active SO mods are going on strike6 (there are 27, but 3 are inactive for unrelated personal reasons), accounting for at least 80% of the work performed on SO."

@alphabet I program mainly in PHP and I think that sounds like a bad idea :p

There are various FOSS self-hosted Q&A platforms though. But it'd take work to attract an audience without outside help.

@s.H.a.R.p.R.i.F.t Maybe we each have a blog, and are constantly reblogging each other? :p

@alphabet Yeah, and not only that, ELU in particular has a lot of good SEO. (My personal theory is that a lot of ELL questions are from people who got redirected from ELU.)

Ideally, if we wanted to gain traffic, we'd partner with some outside organization. (Maybe ask The Free Dictionary if we can replace their shitty Q&A forum?)

Well, I was thinking Etymonline because I've talked with Doug personally before

Or get Language Log to plug us

I do suspect that SE is likely to back down on this. I would point out that the research (pointing to bias against non-native speakers) is very preliminary, has not been reproduced, and may suffer from serious methodological issues.

As the proud(ish) owner of a diamond on three sites that are entirely or mostly about English I laughed really hard when they said we were being biased against answers by non-native English speakers. Until I realized this all was serious

I mean the alleged biases in publicly-available GPT detectors.

We're not even really sure what they measured exactly. It seems like they're struggling to point to even one example of a bad suspension

IMHO, the answer is: moderators should detect and remove AI-generated content, but they should remove it for the issues it contains, rather than removing it purely for the reason that it's AI-generated.

That requires having knowledge of every single aspect of the subject your site covers, which is impossible on many sites

Definitely impossible on Stack Overflow

I won't say I'm an expert at all of English either

What I mean is: run your GPT detector against new answers. Then investigate the detected answers very thoroughly and remove them for any issues detected. Essentially use GPT detection as a sign that other issues should be looked for.

Obviously SE has no way of knowing that a GPT detector helped to initiate the investigative process, and you wouldn't actually be breaking the rule against removing posts for being AI-generated; you'd be removing them for other reasons, with the GPT detector merely indicating that such reasons are likely to exist

I mean yeah. I have my own method that I use to check if an answer is AI, and it's not just plugging it into a detector. I am sure my method is extremely unlikely to produce false positives, and I even tried to get some data for that

Likewise: use your usual method to detect AI. Then investigate any answers that apparently come from AI very closely and get rid of them for the other issues that will likely be found during such an investigation.

I don't mean "come up with an unrelated excuse to ban them"; I just mean "treat potential usage of an AI by new-ish users as a reason to scrutinize them much more carefully."

I'm being purposefully vague in public about what I'm doing so it can't be abused, but SE could have always asked how we were detecting answers. And they should have before running what we all think is a useless analysis. Or at least before dropping the ban hammer on us like they did. Like I would have loved for them to actually get data on how people are actually detecting things

I can't see their analysis so I can't comment on it. (I don't know if the mods have access.)

We don't have their analysis either. I'm struggling to remember the exact details of what's been revealed publicly vs not, but I'm pretty sure we don't have anything particularly useful.

Here's a question: is it actually a concern if someone with 500 reputation got them illegitimately, by using AI? Or does this only become a problem when someone starts accruing substantial privileges or other benefits?

500 rep unlocks a lot of things that can do damage, like review queues. You can not only vote for moderator at that rep, you could also run for moderator on most sites (though you probably wouldn't be elected)

I haven't even really thought about rep. It's about integrity for me

Well, the one time I did think about rep was when I saw a spammer with 46 or so rep posting ChatGPT answers. That was really scary since comments are extremely hard to moderate and they were a single vote away

Most of their answers didn't even have spam links in them

But they were clearly only an expert at spamming

But AI generated content which doesn't attribute is antithetical to the CC license. It even infringes on the licence if it uses CC content without attribution. That annoys me greatly.

If it uses CC content to state something false, it's one extra layer of unbecoming.

It's also plagiarism — even if you've plagiarized something in the public domain, you're still doing something unethical

I agree. And ethics does matter.

That said, all you're getting is Internet Points. It's not like you're illegitimately winning money or cheating on a test.

As for copyright, it's extremely rare that content is DMCA removed from our sites (or at least the sites I mod on) since that requires the copyright holder to issue a takedown notice

@alphabet I don't think ELU points are that valuable but SO points are. You can get yourself job offers with that stuff

Of course, to get in trouble for breaking copyright law, the copyright owner would have to prove it was AI-generated

@Laurel Aren't there all sorts of ways you can cheat your way to getting things that would improve your chances of getting a job offer? Any company hiring people based on easily faked data points kind of deserves whatever's coming to them.

I'm not even sure that a copyright owner could enforce their copyright, unless the person asked ChatGPT to generate the first chapter of Harry Potter or something

@alphabet You could cheat at school or even go to a diploma mill, I suppose

@Laurel Yeah. AI-generating answers on SO seems like a fairly inefficient and ineffective way of getting a job, and any company that uses that in their hiring decisions (without considering the possibility of cheating) is incredibly dumb.

The other thing that worries me about ChatGPT on SO in particular is that I know someone is going to copy bad code from a ChatGPT answer into something important, and I'm going to be hearing that my data or whatever was stolen

Honestly, there's lots of bad code on SO already. Lots of people spend their whole careers writing bad code. I don't think that AI generation of code on SO is going to increase the total amount of bad code by more than 1%.

Those AI literally make stuff up: lapresse.ca/affaires/techno/2023-06-02/…

@alphabet You'd probably think that a lot of companies are dumb then. It could easily be paired with some GitHub project written by ChatGPT for completeness

Training their beast on the bulk of the internet sewers is a total fail.

@Laurel Exactly--so it's on employers to be aware that employees could be faking credentials using AI.

But then how do you determine if someone is good at coding?

They could also be using AI to write their resumes and cover letters, generate their school assignments, et cetera.

@Laurel That's a big problem. But I don't see how changing SO moderation would do much to help fix it.

@s.H.a.R.p.R.i.F.t I heard about this, and it makes me cringe every time. I've seen so much time wasted chasing imaginary sources from ChatGPT already

@alphabet We could at least keep them off SO as much as possible!

By not declawing the moderation team

Considering the quantity of content AI will produce, I don't think there will be enough people to validate its accuracy. I would argue that any CGPT content is either partially or totally inaccurate or false until proven otherwise.

@Laurel Indeed. I just think there's a risk of overstating the potential damage here.

If it's not seen as inaccurate I speculate it's because expertise is lacking.

Quite the contrary @alphabet, AI poisons the well imho.

Time will tell.

@s.H.a.R.p.R.i.F.t Quickly posting an essay every minute is a pretty clear hallmark of ChatGPT users tho, but apparently not clear enough for SE

@alphabet It's an unprecedented shift into dictating what moderators can do, and it flies in the face of what the communities here want

It also pairs pretty sourly with the actions taken by SE in 2019, which remind us that the great ban hammer in the sky (or ban sword of Damocles?) is never that far away