« first day (4802 days earlier)      last day (415 days later) » 

00:22
@alphabet You see, the proportion is 83.8%, but that still means the complement is 16.2%, about ⅙. Though AFAIK, those 16.2% mostly consists of elder people. My prof, aged 65, is one of them.
And I actually oppose eating dogs. They're supposed to be predators, not preys.
@alphabet There's only a single answer with no votes. It has been accepted, however, but by a low-rep (infinitesimal-rep?) user, which is a hazard of the system.
Daily Octordle #709
8️⃣🔟
🕚9️⃣
🕛6️⃣
5️⃣4️⃣
Score: 65
00:42
00:59
Deaths. Hospitalizations.
01:34
Daily Sequence Octordle #709
4️⃣5️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 66
Daily Octordle #709
3️⃣🟥
🕐5️⃣
🕛7️⃣
8️⃣🕚
Score: 73
@jlliagre I'm having a tough time with Blossom today. I keep wandering away from it and going back.
Daily Sequence Octordle #709
5️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕐
Score: 69
01:57
@Robusto Just started it. Not easy indeed.
02:15
Blossom Puzzle, January 3
Letters: C H I E P R T
My score: 226 points
My longest word: 8 letters
🌹 🌸 💮 🏵 🌷 🌺 🌻 🌼
I don't know if this is a good score or not lol since this is the first one I tried
Apparently I only made words that were 6, 7, or 8 long too
02:28
The Lewis and Clark expedition in the United States ate dogs.
02:44
Blossom Puzzle, January 3
Letters: C H I E P R T
My score: 267 points
My longest word: 8 letters
🌸 🌹 🌷 💐 🌻 🌺 🌼 🏵
wBlossom Puzzle, January 3
Letters: C H I E P R T
My score: 232 points
My longest word: 7 letters
💐 🏵 💮 🌸 🌷 🌹 🌻
@jlliagre Nice job!
I've been slipping on my last two games. Had a great 300+ streak going.
Yes, the first game I win but I'm yet to reach 300.
03:14
I would like to brag about how many Internet points I got last year
Dunno how my year reputation is higher than my total reputation
Anyway, I now plan to start using my powers for evil
7
A: In the annual rep league, why isn't the difference between rep earned this year and total rep always the same?

LaurelThe reputation league numbers ignore losses from "private reputation events" such as deleted posts and the -1 from downvotes you cast, the same stuff that is not shown publicly in your profile. Your total reputation obviously doesn't ignore this. Thus, it looks like your numbers are off. In 2017...

@alphabet I had to remind some of my friends that you can make New Year's resolutions to do evil
@alphabet I am resting on my, er, laurels. Present company excepted.
From now on, all of my posts will contain subtle messages supporting Monsanto, Big Pharma, and/or Mohammed bin Salman.
03:45
@alphabet don't forget everyday evils like leaving a grocery cart in the middle of a parking space or stopping at a 4 way stop and 'letting' others go first
@Mitch You see, I don't have a car, so I avoid those evils. Which is why I should be allowed to do other evil things to compensate.
04:03
@alphabet The greater evil would be obtaining a car just for that purpose…
04:38
Как я съел собаку
@jlliagre Pure evil. Hope they all get rabies.
 
2 hours later…
06:37
Word of the day (night?): spiel. I recently learned that some people pronounce it with /sp/ instead of /ʃp/. The same doesn't happen to similar loanwords like shtick; I suspect it's because the spelling of spiel doesn't make the unusual consonant cluster obvious.
07:20
> Spoil his salvation for a fierce Miss Kread
 
6 hours later…
13:33
Wordle 929 2/6

🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
13:52
Wordle 929 5/6

⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
@alphabet Gigots de chiens flanqués de ratons, mmm, sound delicious!
 
1 hour later…
15:16
Wordle 929 3/6

⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟨⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Daily Octordle #710
🔟4️⃣
🕚2️⃣
5️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣6️⃣
Score: 55
15:48
Daily Sequence Octordle #710
4️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 67
16:20
Daily Octordle #710
8️⃣5️⃣
🕚6️⃣
🔟7️⃣
9️⃣3️⃣
Score: 59
Daily Sequence Octordle #710
4️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 65
16:50
I remember a sign in a poolroom (billiard parlor) I used to hang out in when I was 16 or so, which said "No Massa Shots!" I wondered if this was some kind of throwback to antebellum days in the Old South (which would have been odd, considering I lived in the North). Only later did I learn they had misspelled massé, which is a kind of billiard shot that puts a lot of spin on the cue ball, enabling it to curve. Curious way to pronounce massa, IMO.
@Robusto early unicode fallback? :D
@MetaEd They didn't have Unicode in the Magic Marker app.
@Robusto this shows that comic sans is actually better than the alternative
Comic Sans gets a bad rap. It's not just for elementary school anymore!
@Robusto Comic Sans isn´t really the problem. The problem is Comic Sans users.
17:01
Jun 28, 2012 at 14:45, by Robusto
I'm getting to the point where Arial Rounded Bold looks like Comic Sans to me.
Blossom Puzzle, January 4
Letters: A E M T N S U
My score: 278 points
My longest word: 9 letters
💐 🌷 🌻 🌸 💮 🏵 🌹 🌺 🌼
Another low-scoring day.
17:47
@alphabet That could be regional -- I learned it with the sh-sound, but I grew up in a region where German was still spoken pretty often -- Iowa. Might be the same, say, in Pennsylvania. Just a hypothesis, I have no facts to back this up.
18:25
@alphabet I was surprised when I heard that English speakers pronounce Einstein with a /st/ instead of the expected /ʃt/.
18:38
@jlliagre Me too when I heard people pronounce Washington without the expected "r".
@jlliagre My grandmother, who spoke Yiddish as her first language, put the Germanic initial /s/ on all kinds of words, so much so that it "shpilled" over onto other words: "Don't throw shtones or you'll get a good shmack!"
/ʃt/ is usually final in English...
@Lambie maybe I should try to say it at the moment of my death
that should convince people that it's final
@jlliagre Curiously, people usually pronounce Wittgenstein with an initial /v/ and a /ʃt/ sound. I suspect it's because the name Wittgenstein is mostly known to the sorts of academics concerned with pronouncing things "correctly."
@alphabet yeah, when do you ever hear that name outside of a classroom
18:52
@Lambie Indeed. Loanwords that violate normal phonotactic constraints often get modified to be easier for native speakers to pronounce; presumably that's why some speakers have changed spiel to start with /sp/.
why don't they substitute shtpt, that's easier
Compare how many people pronounce tsar as /sɑɹ/ (or /zɑɹ/) rather than /t͡sɑɹ/, since English doesn't allow words to start with /ts/.
I think people actually have no problem with inital "ts", they pronounce tse-tse fly properly
I've heard people pronounce tse-tse without the initial /t/.
Likewise people often pronounce Dmitri with an extra syllable (/dɪˈmi.tɹi/) since English doesn't allow words to start with /dm/.
I thought most people said: teatsee. Initial t seems like a sine qua non....
18:58
@alphabet It's not a question of permission but of practice.
But Dmitri in Russian or Greek is pronounced as dim-ee-tree. It is just written as Dm as if it weren't.
@Robusto It really is a matter of permission, in that there are specific rules governing which consonant clusters can start and end syllables in native English words; those rules typically get applied to loanwords, though not always.
I've definitely heard people drop the initial vowel in "... 't's all right by me."
Which means the first word starts with /ts/.
tsunami?
@MetaEd Another good one.
19:00
@Lambie Listen to the recording in Russian here
It's only 2 syllables in Russian. /ˈdmʲitrʲɪj]/
I grew up saying tsuris for "aggravation" because my grandma used the word.
@MetaEd Indeed. And another one where many people say it without the initial /t/.
I mean, I can imagine people having trouble saying tzatziki tzautze
Or put "Дмитрий" into Google Translate and listen to both; the English version of Dmitri has an extra syllable there.
@alphabet there's hardly even a D in that pronunciation
19:11
@MetaEd I suspect Russian speakers find the /d/ much more obvious.
I think I'll just stick with Ми́тька
If the D were not there, it would be mitry, which it isn't. Come on now.
I don't know, I think Mitry is pretty Demetrius.
19:25
@alphabet Russians find many things more obvious. For example, they have a "soft" L and a "hard" L. I can't even hear the difference.
is that a soft-palate L vs a hard-palate L?
@Robusto The L in kilt is hard, the L in Billy is soft
@CowperKettle Yeah, I don't hear a difference. My ear isn't attuned to that.
If you stop just shot of pronouncing the y in Billy, you'll get an ending soft L
Like in the Russian word стиль
стиль = style; is read as stil'
Russian is another one that uses the "sh" sound for some initial 's' sounds. Like стиль.
I wonder if that is universal in Eastern Europe.
@CowperKettle Don't you say "shtil" instead of stil?
19:35
штиль means calm weather, no wind at all (esp. at sea)
in стиль, the first sound is "s", not "sh"
OK, how do you pronounce "chair" in Russian? With /s/ or /sh/?
You mean кресло? With /s/
No, I mean стул.
With /s/
c = /s/
ш = /sh/
OK, I was taught to to pronounce it shtul.
I want that year of Russian tuition back.
19:38
шоппинг = /shoppin/
LOL
@CowperKettle Yeah, I know the Russian alphabet.
@CowperKettle - yeah at least the way I pronounce them, that's soft-palate (back) vs hard-palate (front)
Of course, I may be misremembering after all these decades. Shtill ...
Фредерик Шопен, Friedrich Chopin
You guys are all pretending that sibilants are the same between languages. They very much are not so.
19:41
Ш is so easier to write than sh, you шould really borrow it.
Oops, looks too much like "w"
We don't pronounce Хрущёв the way Russians do. More like Kruss-chef.
@Robusto growing up we pronounced it kroos-choff
@MetaEd That's closer to the original, but no cigar.
🌝
and I mean it to sting
19:55
Emojis are in the eye of the beholder.
@MetaEd It'll convince them that it's an omen of death
See final sentence:
@Robusto Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick
> Spanish has an alveolar sibilant (Martínez Celdrán, Fernández
Planas & Carrera-Sabaté 2003) with a number of possible realizations
(e.g. Salcedo 2010; Zampaulo 2013). The two most important pronunciations
for the purpose of this study are: the lamino-alveolar sibilant (ese
predorsal in Spanish) [s̻ ] and the apicoalveolar sibilant [s̺]
(ese castellana). The former is produced with the tongue blade making
light contact with the alveolar ridge. A groove is formed along the
surface of the tongue through which air passes producing noisy sibilance
> and may even be auditorily confused with /ʃ/ by non-native speakers of Spanish
Shhhh...
19:57
No, [s̺] [s̺] [s̺] [s̺] [s̺].
Not the same thing. That's an /s/.
Not a /ʃ/.
My browser renders all those identically
FYB
Next up, Chinese sibilants.
Now we're talking
To make things more on topic though, Chinese donuts...
I mean there's no accounting for taste...
but the stuff they put inside them...
let's just say I never expect that.
That's my polite wave-away way of saying I don't like them
or more what I want to say, they're disgusting
I mean that in the best way possible
The outside of the donut is just fine.
but inside it's bean paste, on the order of very very thick refried beans, if that's what you know.
There should be signs on them saying "If you like bean paste, you'll love these donuts."
Which is a sign to me to stay away.
What's the difference between a yeast donut and a cake donut? I mean I get kinda the baking difference. What are some examples of each. I feel like I'm behind on my natural history of donuts.
Look man I just like eating them...it don't mean I know anything about them.
@tchrist No, you can't do this otherwise you'll confuse any cats in chat who will think you're hissing at them :p
20:13
or shnakesh
@Mitch or Shhhean Connery
20:43
Or Donald Duck
21:36
@Mitch or about Shufferin' Shuccotash
@Mitch Sometimes I wonder.
22:19
0
Q: Rising Pitch as the only minimal pair differentiator? The "cot" - "caw" [split? semi-merge? something else?]

Quack E. DuckCanonically, English is not a tonal language, and there are a number of posts on this site discussing why the use of rising tone in asking a question does not qualify (the reason being that it doesn't actually change the definitions of words). This question is about something different. There is ...

I can't help but think this is squarely on topic
@Laurel Agreed, voted to reopen.
He's pretty confused, about many things. It will take some time for us to disabuse him of these, or him us.
And who knows what's left once that all shakes out.
Q&A sites are how we unconfuse people.
Most everything he says is wrong.
@tchrist Who?
22:26
Or wrong except for his ideolect.
The poster of that question?
Yes.
Yeah I agree with you that ... that that's not the way I think I speak or think most other people think.
But that would be a reasonable answer.
Also, the question isn't just 'Is there a name for this?', it's 'is this a thing?'
Firs of all I don think mos people canno say a final .
and it certainly could be a thing.
@tchrist That was what I thought too, trying it and nearly choking
22:29
It would probably be helpful for someone to ask OP to get some examples from Youglish or something
Secon of autum I don thin key mean dipthong when he said i.
What accent do we think OP has anyway
No idea.
Sounds like Cockney if he drops (or swallows) the terminal /t/.
I've seen a paper that discussed the origin of tones in a nontonal language (like Punjabi or ... is Swedish tonal?). It's basically one option out of many to distinguish vowels... rather a tone can arise out of a (non-tonal vowel difference) like if the articulation merges but the distinction is still needed so the difference evolves into a tone.
Or something like that
22:31
For some reason I can only imagine like a caricature of a southern accent in my head rn with this question :/
And who makes a diphthong out of ma and pa or the crows?
You don't know what you're gonna get out of a southener
Hee Haw!
Sometimes you reduce a diphthong to a monphthong
sometimes you extend a monophthong into a tetraphthong
I bet he can't say salt.
22:33
i'm just gonna come up with excuses to use words with 'phth' in them
@tchrist Dare him
ol'
li'l
(et)'lanna
hm
@Mitch Have you been struck by diphtheria?
maybe there's something to it
@Laurel I have an awful phthysis coming on
probably contracted autochthonally
@Mitch You can't make napalm without naphtha.
from my cousin Lloyd
Feel free to use that one.
22:35
I bet he has the porcine version of the salt–sow merger. Must be a Hoosier.
add as you please, it's a community creation
@tchrist Is that like a bacon merger?
@Laurel Sooooooooouuuuueeeeeeyyyy!
Soy?????
also
1) it's "phthisis" (my mistake, no 'y'), and
2) TIL that's an awful disease, it's tuberculosis
@Laurel To be accurate 'sui'
as in 'sui generis'
22:38
Well at least he didn't mean it was soy bacon
He's the only pig of his kind
@Laurel That is positively baconic.
Knowledge is Power
and France is Bacon
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Power.
Such dystopia
22:41
Mar 9, 2011 at 12:57, by Robusto
Bacon is SO pre-breakfast. I'm into dragon-slaying now.
@Robusto Your concision is very apophthegmatic
Blossom Puzzle, January 4
Letters: A E M T N S U
My score: 289 points
My longest word: 8 letters
🌺 🏵 💐 🌸 🌼 🌹 💮 🌻
Your low scores are my highers!
I struggled a lot to reach a better score :-) A time consuming activity compared to the -rdle games.
@Mitch Your concern is noted. Thank you.
@Robusto You should see an ophthalmologist about your condition
I think 'diphtheria' is the last one, and there's already been enough medical visits
Which brings up the very practical question, is it possible to make incendiary explosives from moth balls?
@jlliagre Yeah. Lately I've been slacking off. I should probably make tentative lists with all the multiple letter combos before I start blooming actual blossoms.
22:44
you now with some other household substances
Wait bringing up this whole "phth" thing wasn't an attempt to cheat at one of these word games was it?
@Laurel 🌝
so sue me
Wherever salt sounds like [sɛ̝ɪɒəɤ̆]. Somewhere in Mitch's old haunts.
@Laurel You're questioning instead of playing the game. Surely Russian has some good 'only fricative' consonant clusters.
'fifths'
@tchrist It sounds like you just gargled some
without water
I was in SC not too long ago and man could they draw out a word to as many syllables as they felt like
I'm pretty sure I wrote it down
searches all my 'stuff'
1) I realize it was longer ago than I just thought
2) which means that it is probably in a file system that I currently do not have access to
for you young whippersnappers
hold on
my back
I didn't think it was suppoed to make sounds
OK now I'm OK
so you younger people (those under... say... to be generous...
struggles to choose a good number of decades
anyway, do you have video recordings of yourselves made by your parents when you were under ten years old?
@Mitch Like on Windows XP???
@Mitch I don't think I do, only photos
22:54
Like last century you had super8 movie cameras that old as shit people used to take movies of their kids in a baby pool. and you had to have them 'developed', probably at a little Kodak kiosk in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. You picked up the developed film (in a tiny flat canister) a week later. and then you all watched once right then, then 20 years later after fixing the ancient projector.
My parents had a film camera for photos that they've never let me use. I'll probably never get to use it. They got to use my digital cameras tho, for some reason
Question: what is the point of buying a vest?
@Laurel the OS is not the problem, it's that it is on a different inaccessible system, either a laptop 2 laptops ago or an online system with an institution that I am no longer a member of or can remember the password for
They cover all the parts of your body that are the least likely to get cold.
Who purchases vests?
Other than traffic cops
@Laurel Now with phone cameras every body has thousands of photos that you never look at, but maybe share one with friends, but then it's gone.
@alphabet You should ask that on ELU
22:58
@alphabet If you just take them from the store without buying, that's a good way to get hunted down by someone wearing a vest and not of the traffic variety
Too bad there isn't a fashion stack exchange.
@alphabet There's the lead of the band who are the main competitors to the high school band in School of Rock. His entire existence for the movie was as the vector for the visual/spoken joke - instead of wearing a leather jacket with no arms, we wore leather arms with no jacket. And then he seduced the school's headmaster.
@alphabet I think I know why
@Mitch But Stack Exchange has so many fashion experts!
@alphabet THey're hiding it pretty well
23:13
Incidentally, if you spend too much time looking for raccoon webcomics, you find the gay furry one.
The internet is a strange place.
I bet the user has the cat–cough merger.
They seem to think FATHER has a rounded vowel.
And that you don't pronounce T's.
So cats must sound like crows coughing.
Probably one of those weird accents from some sealocked isle on the Atlantic seaboard, unvisited by visitors for centuries.
Matinicus Isle. Tangier Island. St Croix Island.
Probably not Mackinac Island.
They sound normal. Those other places, not so much.
Isles Dernières.
@alphabet You can find those even without looking for any type of animal webcomic
23:32
How come you can have newly arrived visitors but not arrived visitors?
Because only news can arrive visitors. They can't do it on their own.
I don't think our axer is a native speaker, so all bets are off.
So maybe where she comes from, crows talk funny.
That would explain many things.

« first day (4802 days earlier)      last day (415 days later) »