Zompist Bboard Again

I had never heard of A&W's and had still not understood what 'root beer' referred to so I looked up both. It appears that A&w's is an American fast food chain that not only sells root beer, but also an ice cream-covered variant . And they manage to claim it's world-renowned. And I can't tel...

But there are some things we don't realize are American. The stereotype for Americans who go to Europe is that they can never find peanut butter. Peanut butter has started to spread to Europe, but I had a hard time finding beef jerky in Germany. Root beer. Also Dr. Pepper. You can find Americans wh...

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Aug 23, 2019 3:07 pm Hebrew never had /tʰ/, and Hebrew did have at one point non-sibilant coronal fricatives

There's good reason to believe the non-emphatic unvoiced plosives in Phoenician and Akkadian were aspirated; I wouldn't be surprised the same was true in Biblical Hebrew.

I did it, and: it confused me a bit because a good few of these pairs were ones that very few native English-speakers would either split or merge, or were otherwise highly dialectal (e.g. fir versus fur ). Likewise. Also: dolly versus Dalí may not have been the best choice as most educated English ...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sun Aug 18, 2019 2:56 pm yac xwi ddihmun yyaw hloeycae dduesae hlichoeli na
imagine going outside in the summer, lol

Lū kū bi-Peloridot.
not here in-Florida
Not here in Florida.

Max1461 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 7:31 am How plausible is debaucalization of voiceless coda stops to [ʔ] only in post-vocalic position? So [pot] > [poʔ] but [post] > [post].

Many dialects of English, my own for instance, do exactly that. (Well, with the caveat that /t/ is usually debuccalized after a resonant, too.)

Space60 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 4:42 pm I say "weapon" as /wEp@n/, Michael Dorn says /hwEp@n/.

It could be the tooth prosthetics. I'm pretty certain I've heard him use [w] in weapon in non-Worf roles.

To me, these are different things. What I think of as a "lounge chair", Wikipedia calls a sunlounger . A chaise is something altogether more sofa-like This. I did not know that the two had separate terms. I have occasionally heard a lounge chair called a "chaise," but usually I'...

I once saw someone wonder whether the presence of the Afro-Asiatic languages Berber, Punic and Coptic in North Africa might have been an influence in the widespread acquisition of Arabic after the early medieval Muslim conquests, in as much as there was a large proportion of the people that might h...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2019 3:23 pm

Vijay wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2019 1:59 pmI thought those were usually called lounge chairs.

To me, these are different things. What I think of as a "lounge chair", Wikipedia calls a sunlounger. A chaise is something altogether more sofa-like

This.

...Wait, what? Chaise is not a homophone of chase ? In American English it's usually pronounced like chase ; I usually prefer the French pronunciation personally. Is it? IME, most people say /ʃeɪz/. Both the AHD and the MW agree. (I generally say /ʃɛz/.) That's interesting. I've always heard people...

StrangerCoug wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2019 11:54 pm ...Wait, what? Chaise is not a homophone of chase?

In American English it's usually pronounced like chase; I usually prefer the French pronunciation personally.

Still has Canadian raising for me, even unstressed, so I'd never confuse those two. e.g. "nearsighted" has /ʌi/, but "blindsided" has /ai/ (my best guess for both vowels). Same. "Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. No...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2019 11:08 ama three-way contrast between /kʷ/, /kɯ/, and /kʷɯ/ is almost certainly found somewhere in the world.

Disregarding the choice of vowel, Mohawk distinguishes /kʷ kʷo ko kʷũ kũ/, bearing in mind that both /ʷ/ and /ũ/ are rather flat in Mohawk (cf. Japanese).

Space60 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2019 10:06 am "Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

Okay, while not wrong per se, that does sound very awkward to me, like something a non-native speaker might say.

Space60 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 24, 2019 5:51 pm Do you ever use "anymore" in a sentence without a negative word? To me, "anymore" sounds strange without a negative word. "Who goes there anymore?" is not a sentence I would use.

"Who goes there anymore?" sounds completely normal to me.

As an aside, I reeeeeeeally doubt that PIE-era babies were crawling around going /mex mex/ or whatever the original sound value of h₂ actually was. Sometimes people are too aggressive at getting the etymologies to fit common patterns, I think. Marianne Mithun discusses some of the languages of the ...

Question for American English speakers : does anybody have, or has anybody heard, /or~ɔr/ in flourish ? I thought I heard this, but I might have been mishearing /ˈflʊrɪʃ/, a variant Wiktionary lists as a "hypercorrection" (I think it might be more of a spelling pronunciation). (Historical...

Was the "China" meaning more common before the Xinhai Revolution? I feel that it's always been "The world as far as the speaker/writer is concerned" or just "The (known) world". As the ancient Chinese rarely concern themselves with matters beyond the border, it can be ...

Generally, Jian = a weapon with blades on both sides, Dao = a weapon or tool with blade on only one side. Indeed, I'm quite familiar with traditional Chinese weaponry. I was just questioning the translation as "machete." Tianxia as "world" is more common than "China" i...