Zompist Bboard Again

[*] column is frequently pronounced [ˈkɑljəm] in "illiterate speech" I've never heard of that, but I've seen kind of a reverse phenomenon of people using spellings like "vacumn" and "volumn". [*] almond is normally [ˈɑːmnd] but in popular speech is "not infrequent...

When is it acceptable to use a plural verb after an interrogative who ? Who are they? Who make these toys? (as in "Who are the people that make these toys?") Who bring their own food? Who have been to the island? As a rule, "who" as an interrogative pronoun triggers singular agr...

Next to English, the language I know best is French. I agree with hwhatting that there is a salient gap between inherited French vocabulary and learned Latinate words--I'm not sure that these layers of the vocabulary feel any closer than the equivalents in English, actually. E.g. the concept of a &q...

"I don't care what you or anyone else say" or "I don't care what you or anyone else says"? I don't think my grammar actually has a specific solution for these kinds of situations. As a conscious decision, I would go with agreement with the nearer element ("what you or anyon...

I came across the following striking comment in Haspelmath’s (in my opinion excellent) paper The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax ( https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002 , highlighting not in original): […] can we define the morphosyntactic word as a ‘maxim...

I know it's easier, but I really would prefer it personally if non-Americans did not assume or act as if standard American English were cot - caught merged. Dictionaries of "American English" which have said merger are a personal pet peeve of mine, as of course you can trivially derive sa...

The oft-repeated Neogrammarian saw is that sound laws suffer no exceptions. But sound change often starts in a restricted pool of words, if I remember correctly, and only then diffuse out to the general lexicon. How do these get reconciled? (This is something I should know already but my college da...

As I understand it, "aspiration" is not a phonetic binary: stops can be more or less aspirated. (Wikipedia refers to " degrees " of aspiration). So I'm skeptical that statements that English did not have stops that were as strongly aspirated as the aspirated series of Chinese or ...

his description of vowel length here is phonemic. i will admit i may have put a length symbol or two into a [ u] transcription just to avoid having to do tedious workarounds so it wouldn't turb into a bbcode underline tag, and of course i'm summarizing his reporting in these posts rather than direc...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 12:47 amidempotent

/ˈaɪdəmˌpoʊtənt/ [ˈaɪɾəmˌpʰoʊʔn̩ˀt]

That's interesting to me considering that OVS isn't terribly unusual for German. ?? German is typically analyzed as SOV in "underlying" order, V2 in "surface" order; fronting is also possible, which in combination with the V2 rule leads to surface OVS order in clauses where the ...

My dialect does not merge "pin" and "pen", but some common words have raised their vowel from [E] to [ I ] anyways. Even in careful speech I pronounce them with [ I ]. How common is this very partial raising ? Words affected: get Yes, I have /ɪ/ in get, which I think is common, ...

I've noticed that in my English there's three different types of postalveolars, but I don't know how to describe their articulation or what symbols to use to represent them. The terminology used for sibilants is pretty complicated (what is "domed"? "palato-alveolar" and "al...

I'm currently working on a blog post where I plan to talk about a number of US politicians and briefly mention their demographic groups, so I'd like to know whether "African American" or "Black" would step on fewer toes. "Black" (capitalized) is fine as an adjective. H...

I don't have affrication in either front room or restroom ; the latter isn't really used in my dialect anyway. One other curious example where I do have affrication is the brand name Land Rover ; indeed I recall being slightly surprised the first time I noticed it was actually written as two words....

Apparently "wardrobe" etymologically decomposes into ward + robe (although the compounding happened in French). That never occurred to me as I don't syllabify it accordingly: I always mentally pronounce it as "war-drobe".

In Japonic there have been a few instances of mid or midhigh vowels raising in various environments. In some cases they merged with their high counterparts and in others they caused the original high vowels in those same environments to be dropped or otherwise change. At least that's what I've read...

In NAE in the hospital has precisely the meaning you give for in hospital , which NAE-speakers typically regard as a Britticism, and for the meaning you give for in the hospital NAE-speakers would typically use at the hospital . For NAE, does the style rule apply that it is better to omit the artic...

Some other data and another question: the Google Ngram viewer in fact shows no usage of "cake by half", while it does show results for "cake in half" and "divide the cake in half". I'm curious whether "by half" as a synonym of "in half" is also found...

I don't dispute that usages can become idiomatic by common usage: I already gave the example of "could care less" as a clearly established idiom where it's the compositional breakdown is irrelevant. I'm not saying that it's impossible for "divide by half" to mean "divide in ...