Zompist Bboard Again

My instinctive pronounciation for "mkdir" would be ["mejkd3:] (combination of bringing out the underlying "make" and spelling-pronouncing the "-ir"), but it's not a word I've ever used or heard in speech. I would normally pronounce a stressed schwa in the names of ...

x > k is a common change in borrowings to languages without /k/, so it could plausibly happen due to imperfect learning during a language shift.

Yeah, "near", "kneel", "fire" and "pile" are bisyllabic for me, although when a vowel follows the liquid in the same morpheme, as in "Kieran", "pirate" or "pylon", I have monosyllabic long /i/ [i:] or /aj/ [a:e]. When I was younge...

My Lancashire dialect can be seen as basically a five-vowel system, due to the merger of the FOOT and STRUT lexical sets. There are only five monophthongs which are always pronounced short and are permitted to occur in stressed syllables. However there are a number of complications: - Schwa can only...