Zompist Bboard Again

Is ‘phonemic vowel length’ a well-defined term? One definition might be that long v. short is a pervasive contrast. Another seems to be that it distinguish at least one pair. My, British, English seems to be in the latter category, with the low yield contrast of bed and baird amongst morphemes. Eve...

I don't use it or hear it. I first encountered the combination in the name of the medical drama TV series Nip/Tuck (2003-2010): presumably, its title was meant to be a play on words. I wonder whether "nip and tuck" was ever used as slang for "plastic surgery" before that: it seem...

French question - how is French liaison typically analyzed? Is it generally posited that the final consonants are in the underlying forms of words that have them, and are elided except before another vowel, or is it generally posited that word-final morphemes have two allomorphs, which are selected...

I don't get the point of this discussion! Isn't lice just the plural of louse ? But I am not a native speaker of English and may have missed something ;) The proposal in the original post is that, despite being etymologically plural, the form "lice" might be reinterpreted as a grammatical...

From what can a nominative case suffix or marker develop? Esp. if there were no nominative markers so far and there's few cases to begin with. Maybe a demonstrative or an intensifier? Japanese ga (currently used as a nominative/subject marker, although there's a distinct topic marker wa ) seems to ...

Here’s a really interesting English sentence I was presented with recently: 1. If I hadn’t’ve had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. I don't know exactly how acceptable I would judge it, but I can imagine hearing it. As far as syntax goes, I remember reading that some linguists have proposed that ...

Before I begin, I don't know if there's a correct term for the phenomenon I'm going to describe here, so I went with migration . Is it me, or is there currently a on-going change in the position of "not" in English sentences? In standard English grammar we all know that "I would not ...

I'm aware of Lass's paper and am, as I said, "sympathetic to [the] belief" that West Saxon initial fricatives were voiced, though I think the evidence is insufficient to make a definitive judgement. This is why I talk about the "mainstream belief" that initial fricatives weren't...

It has been argued that there was variation between dialects of Old English in the voicing of word-initial fricatives. I am personally sympathetic to this belief, but the mainstream view is that initial fricative voicing in the dialects of Southern England and the the south-western Midlands only oc...

As far as I know, Gothic shows no signs of voicing Proto-Germanic *s *ɸ *θ *x *xʷ. Instead, in Gothic [β ð ɣ] functioned as allophones of /b d g/, and Proto-Germanic *z was maintained as a distinct phoneme from *s (setting aside neutralization in word-final position or before an obstruent). So I'm c...

/ð v b/ elision [...] cannot apply to new words I'm saying I somewhat doubt that this is true, but obviously I can't be certain of that. Of course, you have a better chance of accurately describing your own accent than I do, but I think it's possible that you might not have perfect awareness of eve...

I have observed that at least in the English here there are complications with regard to the traditional NAE vowel distinctions. For instance, many of the distinctions merged in the Mary - merry - marry merger have been resurrected in a marginal fashion through consonant elisions and resulting vowe...

It is normally taken as a given that /t/ before /n/ or /ən/~/ɪn/ in most NAE varieties is realized as [ʔ]. However, I just found a major exception - the present participle* of get , getting , which is commonly /ˈɡɛtən/, which I find is normally realize as [ˈɡ̥ɜɾɘ̃(ː)n] or [ɡ̥ɜnː] in the English I a...

Reading over Hyman's universals paper, he says that he "can see no principled way to rule out" theoretical phoneme inventories like #1 #2 pʰ tʰ kʰ p t k p t k f s x Because Rotokas has /p t k b d g/ (or /p t k β ɾ g/, same thing). But that got me thinking, is it true that all languages ha...

It's not just acc-. Here are some words in French with /ks/ or /gʒ/. (Sorry, the wordlist I grabbed had no accents.) acceder accelerer accent accepter acces accident occident succeder succes succinct vaccin suggerer These are likely all reborrowings, but that doesn't really explain anything... why ...

[*] Missouri is commonly [mɪzˈuːrɪ], but sometimes [mɪsˈuːrɪ]; the vowel may also be [ʊ] instead of [uː] — i think the only time i've heard it with [uː] is in depeche mode's cover of "route 66", where it sticks out like a sore thumb Interesting, I'd never thought about the pronunciation b...

Why can’t we just say “English disprefers lax vowels in final open syllables”? It seems to me that if it’s word-internal and open that it doesn’t really care. You can say that. It's just not obvious that it is correct to analyze words like sitting as starting with an open syllable. The problem isn'...

I think the merger of CURE into FUR /ə˞~ɜ˞/ might not have been complete for my parents or grandparents, but it is for me. "CURE" is a bad lexical set to me because it treats /ʊr/ and /jʊr/ as the same when in fact they behave differently for me, and to my knowledge, for many North Americ...

The /il/ > /Il/ change (e.g. "I fill bad about pilling the skin off electric ills") has gone from redneck coding to almost completely universal in North American English. I can't remember the last American I've met who doesn't do this, and so far not one of them has been aware that they d...

miracle /'mirəkəl/ ['miˑɚ̯ɹ ʋ ɘkɫ̩] illustrate /'ɪləstret/ ['ɪˑɫɘstɹ̥ ʋ ei̯t] irritate /'irətet/ ['iˑɚ̯ɹ ʋ ɘtʰei̯t] South Africa /'sau̯'θæfrəkʌ/ [saʊ̯'θafɹ ʋ ɘkə~saʊ'θafɹ ʋ ɘkʌ] (not homophonous with *"Sow Thafrica" because I pronounce South Africa as one word, with pre-voiceless clipping-...