English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

18:08

Sometimes we "say a T" in words that have none written there, such as in rich which rhymes with ditch not with dish.

We say many, many possible sounds for the phoneme /t/. These include [t], [tʰ], [d], (or the dental series [t̪], [t̪ʰ], [d̪] instead), or [ɾ] or [h] or [ʔ].

Many of those you as a Hindi speaker would never imagine as a /t/. But we do.

Here's what those hieroglyphics mean:

/t/ as [t]:
 t      voiceless alveolar plosive              U+0074  LATIN SMALL LETTER T

/t/ as [tʰ]:
 tʰ     voiceless alveolar plosive              U+0074  LATIN SMALL LETTER T
        aspirated                               U+02B0  MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H

/t/ as [d]:
 d      voiced alveolar plosive                 U+0064  LATIN SMALL LETTER D

/t/ as [t̪]:
 t̪      voiceless alveolar plosive              U+0074  LATIN SMALL LETTER T
        dental                                  U+032A  COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW

And also how how you would input them.

@Vikas Now that you know all that, just which "Hindi T" are you talking about? I could find no phonetics-bearing references for the three words you listed.

Vikas

Let me try to understand the novella you just wrote 😅

2

tchrist

When we say "stop" and "top" both have a "T", we're lying to you. The one in the first word is the same as a D.

That's a big difference to a Hindi speaker, but a mere "allophone" to us, one that can trigger no change in meaning because both represent the same underlying mental "phoneme".

Vikas

@tchrist I just tried it, yeah I can understand the difference.

tchrist

So the /t/ in stop is really [d], and the /t/ in top is really [tʰ].

So there is a change both in aspiration and in voicing. We cannot begin a word with an unaspirated [t]. If we did, it would be heard as a [d].

Yet after the s-, it's all different.

Unlike English, Hindi can begin words with unaspirated voiceless stops, and this makes them different words to you.

I don't know whether Hindi ever has a purely alveolar "T" like we do.

Your mention of the teeth suggests you may not.

It can be especially hard for learners to pick up the subtle differences between the mouse peed, the mouse speed, and the mouse bead.

They're all phonological things that are poorly represented in our writing.

Vikas

18:29

Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

I mean the sound like this consonant. If you further click that hyperlink, there are examples. There's no audio available for Hindi examples. But when I played Armenian example, it sounded very similar to Hindi. That's what I'm concerned about.

tchrist

Ah, that's the dental T. English has it only in Irish dialects, and even there it must be aspirated. That's like French tous or Italian tacito or Spanish toro, at least in most speakers. No untrained Germanic speaker can ever manage to come close to that dental sound because they always, always initially mismap it to something alveolar in their own minds. It takes training, practice, exposure, and experience to overcome.

Vikas

tchrist

Yes, we have no dental T in the dominant dialects of English as spoken in North America or the British Isles, at least outside Ireland.

We'll think that you are "th-stopping", which is a thing where the fricative is turned into the stop.

Vikas

@tchrist I suspected same. Could you share audio examples of those Irish dialect words?

tchrist

Yes, just a second while I find some.

Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain has dental T's. Let me find something with him speaking normally.

Vikas

18:38

@tchrist Yes I'm sure at least one of French, Spanish or Italian has that kind of sound. I think I have heard it in movies, the way they speak.

tchrist

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Vikas

Video unavailable.

tchrist

I chose one where he's also speaking Irish Gaelic, not just Irish English, so that you can hear how he doesn't change his T when swapping between them: they're always T.

Oh.

Dara O Briain On Brains and Buzzkills | CROWD TICKLER Best Of | Universal Comedy

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Vikas

There's an Indian cricketer with last name "Tendulkar". English commentators always pronounce it like English word Ten. But it suppsed to be other way, dental. Now I understand why.

tchrist

Dara O'Briain's Guide To The Irish Elections | The Last Leg

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Dara O'Briain teaches Jonathan to speak Gaelic | The Jonathan Ross Show

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[Gaeilge / Irish Language] Dara Ó Briain ar Imeall / Dara O Briain on Imeall

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Vikas

18:46

Is there particular timestamp or he always pronounce it dental?

I'll listen these.

tchrist

Mostly he does, yes.

[ t̪⁼ ] unvoiced unaspirated apical dental stop

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Here, that's someone who is th-stopping the English word thick, making it a dental T.

At timestamp 46 onwards.

youtube.com/shorts/ZPSi5sPPUIU

Those are all dental Ts.

And listen to all these Romance T's, which are all dental ones in those languages:

Spanish vs. Italian vs. French vs. Portuguese | Romance Languages Comparison

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jlliagre

19:16

Daily Quordle 335
5️⃣3️⃣
4️⃣8️⃣
quordle.com

Daily Octordle #335
4️⃣🕛
9️⃣🔟
8️⃣🕚
7️⃣6️⃣
Score: 67

tchrist

19:30

@CowperKettle At Woodstock??! :)

jlliagre

@CowperKettle Possibly through the French paletot

Paletot

A paletot is a type of topcoat. The name is French, but etymologically derived from the Middle English word paltok, meaning a kind of jacket.Historically, it was a semi-fitted to fitted coat, double-breasted or single-breasted, the front sometimes fastened by a fly, with or without pleats, and with or without pockets. A modern paletot is a classic business overcoat, usually double-breasted with a 6×2 button arrangement, the top buttons placed wider apart and not fastened, with peaked lapels, a flat back and no belt. A paletot is often made of flannel or tweed in charcoal or navy blue. ��2...

Goku カカロット

19:50

What's the plural for house?

CowperKettle

20:10

> In his long speech on the Sustainable Livestock Bill, he recited poetry; spoke of the superior quality of Somerset eggs, and mentioned the Empress of Blandings, a fictional pig who won silver at the Shropshire County Show three years in a row, before moving on to talk about the sewerage system and the Battle of Agincourt.

@Gokuカカロット hise

Goku カカロット

@CowperKettle hice*

CowperKettle

Ah! Yes

Vikas

Nice

Plural of home?

CowperKettle

> Hog calling, or pig calling, is the art of making a call to encourage pigs to approach the caller. Competitions in hog calling are held.

Goku カカロット

@Vikas Hame

tchrist

20:24

@Gokuカカロット The non-possessive plural is [ˈhɑwzəz], but the singular possessive is [ˈhɑwsəz]. The plural possessive is the same as the non-possessive plural, so [ˈhɑwzəz] again. Spelling doesn't matter, just pronunciation.

CowperKettle

@jlliagre Most surely through it :)

Goku カカロット

20:39

I didn't understand any of that

tchrist

@Vikas Thanks. That's exactly what I needed for understanding!

Vikas

@tchrist I think differences between two languages are much more than they appear in writen or first understanding.

@Gokuカカロット Heeme

Suppose there is a poem XYZ in a school textbook. Where the poet uses word "you" for the student who is reading it. Now there's an exam and a question related ro that poem is asked:

Q. Who is "you" in the XYZ poem?

Answer: ____________

What would you write? Minimum one word and maximum a sentence.

Cerberus

The reader.

Or possibly the audience.

Vikas

The is necessary?

Cerberus

I would say, idiomatically, yes.

Why?

Goku カカロット

20:53

@Vikas Big Chungus

Vikas

The teacher who gave us this answer also said Reader. Without the though. I am just contemplating that teacher's skills years later 🤣

@Cerberus

The reader sounds better.

tchrist

Looking at the Wikipedia Devanagari page you linked here, I was struck by several things off the top of my head (meaning, first impressions):

1. You have greater diversity in stops/occlusives compared to us.
2. We have greater diversity in fricatives compared to you.
3. You tie the letterform to the phonetics just as Tolkien did for his invented Tengwar script.
4. Like PIE, there's a dedicated series for "little superscript effects", you for the superscript-H aspiration, PIE for the superscript-W labialization (gw, kw, khw, etc).

Cerberus

@Vikas Could be written in 'headline style', abbreviated.

The meaning is clear either way.

tchrist

@Vikas Yours is a more sensible and scientific system than IPA ever produced; the skill of the Sanskrit grammarians who devised yours has been well acknowledged for centuries if not millennia.

IPA used, for the most part, only modified Latin and Greek letterforms, which brings advantages and disadvantages based on familiarity for Western linguists.

They did this because they needed to use existing type punches in metal type. So they would physically turn them, etc. Otherwise it was too hard to use in printed, typeset text back in the late 1800s when this was all devised.

@Mitch Six inches makes you cry? Give it a while, you'll get used to it. :)

tchrist

21:18

His first writing system, Rúmilian and then Sarati, looked much more like Devanagari than what he eventually came up with for his Tengwar. But the science- and logic-based arrangement of the components persisted to the later "alphabets".

Rúmilian numerals, for eample.

Better examples here.

> The earliest of all the Elvish scripts is the Alphabet of Rúmil, which Tolkien invented in 1919 and later attributed to Rúmil, the Noldorin sage of Valinor. The Rúmilian letters or sarati (singular sarat) are usually written vertically, from top to bottom, but they can also be written horizontally, either left to right, right to left, or in boustrophedon fashion (with lines alternating left to right, right to left).

> They are sometimes attached to stems or bars, which may be short and attached to individual letters or may run for the entire length of a line. As in some tengwar modes, vowels are represented by means of diacritical marks. Examples of the Alphabet of Rúmil can be found in Parma Eldalamberon (no. 13 and no. 15).

> Toward the end of his life, Tolkien made use of the New English Alphabet, a phonetic script that combined the logical structural principles of the Angerthas and the Tengwar with letters that looked more like Greek or Latin. The alphabet has not yet been published in full, but examples can be seen in Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator.

Robusto

21:43

A Message From the Skype CEO

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Robusto

22:11

@tchrist Yes, thanks. I spoke with my physician daughter-in-law and she concurs. I am glad we canceled our visit to see them, since I would have needed to isolate from them ...

Today was supposed to be my last non-safe day. Back to Square One. Although she says I should be fine after 5 days.

tchrist

People vary, but yeah, that's the common guess.

Robusto

@tchrist I appreciate the solid advice.

tchrist

Were you given Paxlovid without being told there was a "good" chance of this happening and so not to worry much about it?

Robusto

@tchrist No, they told me about the potential "rebound" effect.

tchrist

You might get symptoms, you might not.

Robusto

22:27

My nose is a teensy bit stuffier, that's all.

@tchrist BTW, you might want to remove Johan as a room owner. He hasn't been here for two years, and it doesn't hurt to keep the number small.

Goku カカロット

Is it funny to troll twitter (users)? Yes it is

Cerberus

23:12

@Mitch Dilation?

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…