Zompist Bboard Again

What are some potential phonological processes by which a language with a small syllabe inventory (like Hawaiian or Japanese) could gain more syllabes? the most obvious thing that comes to mind is losing some vowels, causing new consonant clusters and coda consonants to form. or losing consonants, ...

I have a funny thing where i find farenheit more intuitive above ~60°F/15°C, and celsius more intuitive below. This is because i grew up in California, where colder temperatures were relatively rare, but when i went to college, i started making an effort to personally metricize, and spending the win...

"The specific details of what need to be done are something I have not fully fledged out yet"

presumably a conflation of "fleshed out" and "fully fledged"

What strikes me about it is that the only people mentioned by name in the headline are the ones I'd say are least relevant to the headline itself. Also the apostrophe is in the wrong place in "Reynold's".

I am also not familiar with this object, but the first word that came to my mind was ‘slate’

Thank you. So it's a TV thing? I was wondering if I'm metaphorically crossing a picket line if I read something on one of those websites that pay their writers. It mostly affects TV (and streaming), since films have a longer development schedule. Journalists have their own unions, so if you're read...

As a species, we're monkey-adjacent. Cladistically, we are monkeys or monkey isn't a clade. That doesn't mean "monkey" couldn't have its own meaning in common usage, but I'd say all apes are tailless monkeys and that includes us. Humans are monkeys in the way that humans are reptiles. (I ...

A simple question: Is there any subtle differences between 1.1 "that is" and 1.2 "that means"? Thank you. My mother has got six children. 1.1 That is, I have three sisters and two brothers. 1.2 That means I have three sisters and two brothers. "that is" is more of a cl...

My /uː/ is [ɨː], and my /oʊ/ is something like [əɰ]. I think my /ʊ/ is basically [ʊ] but with very little, if any, rounding. What rounded vowels do you have? /uː/ and /ʊ/ are maybe slightly rounded after labials, and the [ɰ] in my /oʊ/ might be slightly rounded as well. My /w/ is fully rounded, I t...

My /uː/ is [ɨː], and my /oʊ/ is something like [əɰ]. I think my /ʊ/ is basically [ʊ] but with very little, if any, rounding.

For me, a shuttle can also be any of the following A bus replacing (part of) a rail line during a service disruption ("The MBTA is running shuttles between Alewife and Harvard this weekend") A short subway line which primarily exists to connect to other lines; particularly the three New Yo...

I'm currently working on (re-)writing an SCA https://github.com/zyxw59/rssc and I came across some edge cases while thinking about how to implement replacements. I'm curious what other people would expect in the given scenarios: a > e / n_n ("replace 'a' with 'e' when preceded and followed by '...

The complication here is with Unicode canonical equivalence. The example here is as follows: A sequence of n copies of U+07F3 is canonically equivalent to a sequence of n copies of U+07F1 followed by n copies of U+07F2. Thus, with the requirement that the set of strings recognized is closed under ca...

Zju wrote: ↑Mon Dec 27, 2021 9:18 am ʎd > ʎɟ

A sound change which also makes sense upside-down

UK man accused of running over his wife to stand trial in France ( The Guardian online, 8 December 2021) Child vaccines to be approved this week I don't get it - what's supposed to be confusing in these? Two possible parsings for the first one: UK man accused of (running over his wife to stand tria...

You can be sure we'd have an amazing network of trains

Interesting convo today about a special subclass of "spelling pronunciations", specifically the ones you never speak aloud but only subvocalise in order to remember the proper spelling of a word. For instance, saying "Wednesday" in three syllables or pronouncing "parliament...

Why have Brits suddenly started pronouncing the name Anthony with a [θ]? This certainly isn't the usual or traditional pronunciation, but it's gaining ground quickly. I'm not going mad, am I? Huh, as an American, it never even occurred to me that it would have anything other than /θ/. Is there perh...