Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Ryusenshi]

Is in "capitalist", in the English language, someone who politically supports capitalism, or someone who practices capitalism by running a business?

Either, or both, depending on which axe you have to grind. You can also equivocate between the two, if you need a bad argument.

[Linguoboy]

Modern Osage has a series of phonemic aspirates which are realised as /Cx/ before back vowels and /Cš/ before front vowels. I woke up this morning and realised I couldn't think of a single Osage word beginning with px. So I cracked open my Osage dictionary and learned that there is only one attested Modern Osage word beginning with px and it is pxáðaži "demented, confused". I guess it makes a certain sense that /px/ would be less common than /tx/ or /kx/ but still it seems like an odd gap.

[Raphael]

Does anyone know what babies were usually called in the German language before the English loanword Baby became the norm? I'm German, and I don't know that, which is pretty embarrassing. Sure, there's Säugling, but I simply find it hard to imagine that that was ever a common colloquial term - it sounds so "medical" these days.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else have a centralized rounded unstressed realization [ɵ] corresponding to stressed [o] or [oʊ̯] for /oʊ/ distinct from /ə/? For instance I notice I generally pronounce tomato as [tʰə̃ːˈmeɾɵ(ː)], showing the contrast between [ɵ] and [ə]. (I also have a more careful pronunciation of tomato as [tʰɵ̃ːˈmeɾɵ(ː)].)

[Travis B.]

Modern Osage has a series of phonemic aspirates which are realised as /Cx/ before back vowels and /Cš/ before front vowels. I woke up this morning and realised I couldn't think of a single Osage word beginning with px. So I cracked open my Osage dictionary and learned that there is only one attested Modern Osage word beginning with px and it is pxáðaži "demented, confused". I guess it makes a certain sense that /px/ would be less common than /tx/ or /kx/ but still it seems like an odd gap.

Pxáðaži almost seems as if it is onomatopoeia of sorts.

[zompist]

The pronunciation of oregano I am familiar with is /ɔːˈrɛɡənoʊ/ or /əˈrɛɡənoʊ/, with the stress on the second syllable.

Even this sounds slightly affected to me, to the point where I'm surprised to see it as the only US pronunciation listed in Wiktionary. Everyone I know has /eː/ there.

Apparently we don't discuss condiments enough. /ɛ/ for me.

Well, I was able to test this with linguoboy in person. Results: to my ear, his "oregano" sounds just like mine, but he hears it as /e/ and I hear it as /ɛ/.

He also mentioned that for him "Leggo my Eggo" doesn't rhyme. FWIW I can hear the difference when he says it: /lɛgo maj ego/.

[Ryusenshi]

He also mentioned that for him "Leggo my Eggo" doesn't rhyme. FWIW I can hear the difference when he says it: /lɛgo maj ego/.

Why would Eggo be pronounced with FACE? Is that a case of "foreign E is FACE", as with most Spanish loanwords in the US? Or is it because Linguoboy's accent merges DRESS and FACE before /g/, but not in leggo because it's transparently let go? (similar to how some people with the pen/pin merger still keep /ɛ/ in lemme)

[Travis B.]

In some NAE dialects and idiolects DRESS has shifted to FACE before /g/ in certain words, such as egg. Note that it is not surprising one bit that "leggo" would not participate in this, since it diachronically derives from /ˌlɛtˈɡoʊ/, as you mention. (I personally have [ˌʟ̞ɜʔk̚ˈko(ː)]~[ˌɰɜʔk̚ˈko(ː)].)

[Zaarin]

Does anyone else have a centralized rounded unstressed realization [ɵ] corresponding to stressed [o] or [oʊ̯] for /oʊ/ distinct from /ə/? For instance I notice I generally pronounce tomato as [tʰə̃ːˈmeɾɵ(ː)], showing the contrast between [ɵ] and [ə]. (I also have a more careful pronunciation of tomato as [tʰɵ̃ːˈmeɾɵ(ː)].)

Yes, but not word finally. So i have tomato [tʰəˈmɛɪ̯ɾəʊ̯] but Cleopatra [kʰɫiɵˈpʰætɹ̠ˁə]. Why the first O in tomato is [ə] not [ɵ] is anyone's guess, given its position is more or less identical to the [ɵ] in Cleopatra. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Travis B.]

I have it in Cleopatra too, i.e. [ˌkʰɰiːɵˈpʰɛtʃɻ͡ʁə(ː)].

[Nortaneous]

tomato /təmejtəw/
Cleopatra /klijəpætrə/

[Salmoneus]

What the hell is "Leggo my Eggo" meant to mean!?

But yes, raising of /E\/ before velars is a common shift in the US; as well as the inland north it's also associated with the northwest, but I think it's one of those things that crops up in many areas. /I/ is sometimes raised as well.

[Vijay]

What the hell is "Leggo my Eggo" meant to mean!?

The slogan for a brand of frozen waffles from an American TV advertisement from the 90s (Eggo is the brand, so "leggo my Eggo!" = let go of my Eggo waffles!)

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvZgAEiQXgk (actually it's raised in this example, too, isn't it?)

[Travis B.]

Personally "Leggo my Eggo" is not exactly grammatical for me - as written it implies /ˈlɛɡoʊ maɪ ˈɛɡoʊ/, which to me isn't exactly grammatical English; it has to be /ˌlɛtˈɡoʊ ə(v) maɪ ˈɛɡoʊ/ to be grammatical for me, which is not what is indicated by how the phrase is spelled in the advertisements.

[Nortaneous]

yes there is a missing "of"

calculated ungrammaticality is common in advertising, because advertising is of satan

[Pabappa]

Sometimes poetry bends the rules, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/1dlR1Yy.png ... I think "leggo"is actually aphesis for "let go of", since it's either used in isolation or directly followed by the noun phrase.

[zompist]

This might be the first commercial using the phrase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Yq1I8gIA0

Warning: kind of soul-destroying. It's only 30 seconds long but it feels like 120.

Anyway, point being, it's a kid and his father talking, so it's supposed to be cute kid-talk.

[Travis B.]

This might be the first commercial using the phrase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Yq1I8gIA0

Warning: kind of soul-destroying. It's only 30 seconds long but it feels like 120.

Anyway, point being, it's a kid and his father talking, so it's supposed to be cute kid-talk.

That kid is old enough that you'd expect him to be sufficiently fluent in English to say "let go of my Eggo" - my daughter is probably not that much older that him and the only such things she has left are a few forms like /ˈʌdər/ for other.

[Pabappa]

But it *is* English, going back at least to 1949: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/leggo

Honey, how long until you're ready?

"Go ahead & start the car." 𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑔𝑜 𝑎ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑑 & 𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑎 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑟

"Just need to pick out shoes!" 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ 𝐺𝑜𝑇

"How cold is it going to be?" 𝐶𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑏𝑟𝑢ℎ

[Linguoboy]

Even this sounds slightly affected to me, to the point where I'm surprised to see it as the only US pronunciation listed in Wiktionary. Everyone I know has /eː/ there.

Apparently we don't discuss condiments enough. /ɛ/ for me.

Well, I was able to test this with linguoboy in person. Results: to my ear, his "oregano" sounds just like mine, but he hears it as /e/ and I hear it as /ɛ/.

He also mentioned that for him "Leggo my Eggo" doesn't rhyme. FWIW I can hear the difference when he says it: /lɛgo maj ego/.

I explained to Zomp that, from doing spectrogrammes in phonetics class, I learned that the first element of my /ey/ diphthong has a relatively low F1. This has messed with my perceptions for years, making (for instance) German /eː/ sound almost indistiguishable from /iː/ to me, at least from some speakers. (The dialect where I lived was notorious for having [ɛː] for /eː/ so I was complimented more than once on my "good dialect" when attempting to speak normatively.)

As for "egg", I found eye-dialect spellings like "aig" baffling for years because how else would you say this? [ɛg] sounded totally New Yawk to me, I didn't think it belonged to GA. Leg and egg don't rhyme with smeg IMD.