Zompist Bboard Again

long vowels can have weird spellings in German sometimes, especially in names Examples? I can't think of any instance of a long vowel before ck , even in names. According to the slide show " Variation of vowel length in German ", by Stefan Tröster-Mutz (June 18, 2011), the second syllable...

I've heard a number of pronunciations for <oe> in German-derived names here in the States: /ɚ/ (Goethe, Goebbels), /ei/ (Boehner), /ɛ/ (a friend whose surname is Boecke, which she pronounces homophonous with Becky ), and a spelling pronunciation of /ou/. I would guess that the vowel in Boecke is di...

As far as I know, there is no common style of English that uses "an" before words written with a vowel but pronounced with /j/. I have heard scattered reports of this usage, but I don't know of any style or usage guides that countenance it. Likewise, as a British person, this is not somet...

I meant the first u. "Oovular", I only saw it because it was written "an uvular stop". Probably he got the second u still correct. Are you sure the person wasn't British? British style uses "an" before /h/ and words written with a vowel but pronounced with /j/. As far ...

I was under the impression that babble < Babel was a folk etymology. Either way, I pronounced both with /æ/ and have never heard either with /ei/ personally. In the strict sense of the term, /e:/ > /æ/ in Babel would be folk etymology, since it represents an alteration in the phonetic development o...

Is /ç/ [ɕ] typical of some German dialects? I was listening to some of the "voice mails" left by backers in the game Thimbleweed Park , and quite a few of them were in German--but many had [ɕ] for /ç/. (At first I wondered if I just couldn't distinguish the two sounds, but then some of th...

My Mom for some reason has a habit of pronouncing the "M" in "MB" (as in, short for "megabyte") the French way. How is that different from the way you'd expect her to pronounce it? I thought the name of M was pronounced /ɛm/ in all of French, English and German (I'm no...

For whatever reason, I mentally pronounced elixir as /ɪˈlɛksər/ for a while. Maybe it's similar to the phenomenon of pronouncing Semitic as /sɪˈmɛtɪk/, which is something else I have had trouble with (when I'm consciously choosing which pronunciation to use, I say /sɪˈmɪtɪk/). And I used to pronounc...

How do you pronounce "lawn mower"? For me it has three syllables, but I've heard people use two "lawn more". I think of it as having three syllables, but it wouldn't be too surprising to me if I learned that I used a "compressed" two-syllable pronunciation as a "f...

How do you pronounce "nightingale"? For me it phonemically has /n/ because I use a glottal stop rather than a flap for the "t" [naI?INge@5]. If I had /N/ phonemically it would be *[naI4iNge@5]. I agree about the impossibility of flapping the "t" (I can't do that in the...

pampas -- I don't know/use this word, so I don't think I've ever pronounced it pompous -- [ˈpʰɑmpʰəs] /pɑmpəs/ (I am also cot-caught merged, but my merged vowel is [ɑ], except maybe before /l/, so I'd write it as /ɑ/ not as /ɔ/) pampers -- [ˈpʰeəmpʰɚz̥] /pæmpərz/ (based on what I've read about phon...

ぱったり Is that an ideophone? I thought the use of /p/ in those was considered a somewhat "regular" exception to the usual rules for the distribution of /p/ in Japanese vocabulary. I don't speak or study Japanese, so I probably shouldn't speculate like this, but I'm tempted to guess that the...

The wikipedia article on vowel length says that ancient Greek had the word ἀάατος meaning "inviolable". Why doesn't the privative ἀ- prefix have the <ν> that normally occurs before vowels? In other words, why wasn't the word ἀνάατος instead? The privative alpha may take the form a- rather...