My grandmother taught me to knit once. I decided to knit a scarf. The scarf was maybe 1" long and 4" wide. I never kept up at it and unfortunately she died, and I never learned how to finish the scarf, that is, get it off the needle. I think I still have that sad little scarf somewhere.
@Cerberus My mother doesn't knit either. She used to, so maybe she will take it up again when she retires. But I know some young people who knit, so presumably the tradition won't be totally lost.
No one in my family knits that I can think of, except my great-grandmother and maybe my husband's great-grandmother... although now that I think about it, I think my mother-in-law might be learning.
@Cerberus I'm not sure really. Probably on par with most of the other hobbies for people I know. For example, I don't know many AFOLs personally, but I know OF them. I don't know many people who do kung fu, or food blogging, or prosumer photography, etc etc.
I didn't know how lucky I was. My one great-grandmother was fairly sane for quite a bit of my childhood and lived in a town nearby, so I have many fond memories of visiting with her and going to the store and her letting us have ice cream :)
@FallenAngelEyes Could be? It always depends on what circles you're in. But I believe the average age of first child birth was around 25 even in the 17th century.
@FallenAngelEyes I wouldn't say it's "too young" but rather than "younger than average". But of course, I hang around with people like me, so there's probably a large dose of confirmation bias.
@FallenAngelEyes I think it depends on how the infant deaths are averaged in, too. Like if you look at people that survived past 3 or something, the #s are way different. I can't remember where I read this, so I hope Cerberus knows ;)
I'm an American living in the Netherlands who is learning Dutch. There's an idiom in Dutch that describes performing a needless/futile activity, "water naar de zee dragen," which literally translates to "carrying water to the sea." My Dutch parents-in-law asked me if there was an English equivale...
> "Dark chocolate", also called "plain chocolate" or "black chocolate", is produced by adding fat and sugar to cocoa. It is chocolate with zero or much less milk than milk chocolate.
@MattEllenД It should be a process that takes about a year, where you want stronger and stronger stuff and buy it a few percentage points stronger than the last time every week.
One thing that I have a lot of difficulty with is the really subtle difference between "ie" and "ee." Jochem's mother has lived here for 45+ years now and says she still sometimes has to think about it.
@JSBᾶngs Wowie! But you had such a catching opening drumroll!
And I picked up 22 votes on that same question with my mediocre answer, so I suppose I have you to thank for bringing the question to so many people's attention.
@Cerberus falconfling has a typical American rhotic pronunciation. i'm currently doubting the placement of josephaw on the map, because that is not a normal standard american accent. it sounds like Australian to me, but it could also be Bostonian or one of the other non-rhotic american accents
okay, this is weird. if you click through to josephaw's user page (forvo.com/user/josephaw) and listen to his recordings, it sounds like two different people to me. one uses a typical middle american accent, the other uses an Australian accent
@Cerberus in any case, falconfling is saying something like [klɪr]. there may be a transitional schwa in the movement from [ɪ] to [r], but that's not essential to the vowel
@z7sgѪ it's very likely that i'm misidentifying it. in any case, josephaw is not using a general american pronunciation there
@Cerberus yes, but the contention was that josephaw's pronunciation on that page is not general rhotic american, despite the fact that it's labeled as such
@JSBᾶngs Oh I confused those two: I agree 100 % that Joseph sounds Australian, that immediately struck me as Australian. I thought you were saying that the other guy sounded Australian in some subtle way I couldn't hear.
My bad.
But then I still don't hear the /i:/ in falcon's "clear".
@JSBᾶngs Okay I think I "agree" with you entirely now. The Brits have the schwa because they drop the r; but one could say some weak schwa is also heard in American clear. Dutch meer sounds much like American mere.
@Cerberus I don't know if you can hear as strong a difference between someone from Buffalo and someone from Rochester as compared to Den Haag and Leiden.
britain has a dialectal density comparable to the neederlands, i believe. but no part of america or australia does. the only part of america that comes even close is new england
@FallenAngelEyes Hmm it could be that your cities have less tradition and hence less variation. They say that the variation of sounds in languages increases as one approaches Africa, the source of mankind.
@JSBᾶngs *Nederlands (language) / Nederland (country)
@FallenAngelEyes i'm not sure... there sure is a lot of linguistic diversity in a dense space there, but to compare apples to apples you'd have to compare it against london, and i'm pretty sure that london wins. in any case, NYC is an extreme outlier for the US on the dialectal diversity scale
> Actually, it sounds to me like he says ['li.nəks] with an [i] in the first syllable, but I'd attribute that to his Finnish accent. I've never heard an English speaker use a vowel other than [ɪ] in this word.
Could someone tell me what the difference is between the IPA 'i' and the IPA 'ɪ'?
I tried to follow along with this conversation but once again, the room lives up to its name. Or else I've been fooling myself all along, and I can't actually read.
This room was placed in timeout for 2 minutes; the topic of this room is "aka The Incomprehensible Room" - conversation should be limited to that topic.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…