Zompist Bboard Again

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 11, 2025 8:33 am The thing is that final /æ ɑ/ outside of monosyllables (and then mostly interjections) or possibly some learnèd French loans are forbidden in the English here.

The only two words that end with /{/ that I can think of are BAA (the sound a sheep makes) and YEAH. Are there any others?

I mapped my English diphthongs: https://i.ibb.co/F4qhGRf5/diphthongs.png You can see the difference in quality between the /aj/ in BITE and BIDE. BIDE dips down to [A], but BITE stays around [V]. But what is going on with my /aw/? It starts lower than my /{/, and goes only as high and back as [Q]. I...

* I normally raise the lax front vowels /{ E I/ before /g N/, but they are still phonetically and phonemically different from /e i/. I'm not sure of the exact qualities that they're raised too. I should look at them on Praat some day. I fulfill my promise: https://i.ibb.co/0Rj99rfF/lax-front-vowels...

Overall, the economic cost of these policies has been estimated at $64 billion , with one major analyst firm revising their forecast from a 5% increase in tourism to a 9% drop. If it really is true that what it takes to change opinion is to hit people in the pocketbook, one can only hope that the s...

Another thought about Greek mythology: Like any modern pop culture fantasy world, it's full of reboots (alternate versions of stories about characters that people already know and love), and narrative complexity that eventually creates contradictions in the timeline: - https://youtu.be/iiFmRLc4FdQ?s...

(some stuff) What about spoken traditions? I read the Ancient Greek "Argonautica" recently, and the protagonist Jason convinces many other men who are heroes in their own right with their own stories (such as Hercules and Theseus) to join his adventure to find the golden fleece. It's basi...

That assumes that Trump doesn't simply scapegoat some minority ...which would require El Presidento* Trump be able to remember his thoughts for more than ten seconds at a time. Look at how the Irish went from "I love them, they're my favorite people" to "They're destroying America&qu...

What would have been an equivalent in (for example) Roman imperial times, the Middle Ages, Elizabethan London, or Georgian London when consumerism had started to become common among the middle classes? I imagine one Roman one might have X = "follow, support" and Y and Z = two of the chari...

Time to throw away my Webster's dictionary and replace it with an Oxford one... - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-suggests-us-could-join-british-commonwealth-2048679 - https://nypost.com/2025/03/21/us-news/trump-suggests-us-could-be-associate-member-of-british-commonwealth-i-love-king-charles/...

Question: What vowel does everybody have in the words HANG, ANGLE, PINK, BAG, BEG, BIG, VAGUE, and CRAIG? and do you normally raise lax front vowels before /g/ and /N/ (voiced velars)? How far do you raise them? Do you raise them enough to merge with another phoneme? My answer: HANG = /e/ = [eI] ANG...

I suppose the goal is to end all that distribution of money. It's a nice example of an own goal: in general, redistributive programs send extra money to poor states... which mostly means Republican states. E.g. here's the amount of the education budget paid by the feds in several states: But will a...

This is Fascism 2.0, streamlined for an era where no one feels like marching in the streets. If only there was some kind of organization that could unify ordinary working-class people, teach them why this is bad, and activate them to protest this... https://s.marketwatch.com/public/resources/images...

We USAmericans love to think of ourselves as freedom fighters. What we don't love to do is actually fight for our freedom. When Trump announced his gutting of higher education, I remember thinking, "If this happened in France, the same day or the next, central Paris would be occupied by tens o...

The power grab continues, as Trump declares that all of Biden's pardons are "void", because he used an autopen: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Wf3JQNjEU - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-bidens-pardons-jan-6-committee-are-void-used-autopen-rcna196670 - https:/...

Some pretty horrible news today. I got pulled over for speeding and now I face significant (for someone in my precarious position anyway) legal and financial trouble. The cop claimed I was driving 80 MPH (~130 KPH) in a 45 MPH (~70 KPH) zone which makes this a serious misdemeanor. Not only will thi...

Also the Democrats are just as culpable for this turmoil as the voters. For decades they've been out of touch and riddled with deluded geriatric elites, the same as the republicans. They have no teeth and no spines, too afraid to go actually left (though they posture like they are). They continuall...

First he was going to do tariffs, then he wasn't, then he was, then he wasn't, then he was?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMSeiEMvxIo I've heard that he was spooked by the drop in the stock market, and by calls from US auto manufacturers. But who knows. Chaos has always been his primary strategy...

First he was going to do tariffs, then he wasn't, then he was, then he wasn't, then he was?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMSeiEMvxIo

Don't relapse into doomscrolling, malloc. Of course, what Trump does is horrific; you need not know every detail about it. Like I have ceased watching TV documentaries about the Nazis years ago - I know enough about them, and they trigger bad feelings, including fantasies about snowstorms in July d...

Too bad Trump isn't just the president of the people who could have voted and didn't vote for Harris; they certainly deserve Trump, every last one of them. And yes, that is you, the people who voted for Trump because you thought eggs were too expensive at the grocery store. You deserve this. Being ...