Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

Okay, I don't know how I got it in my head that he was Australian - lol. Maybe the "Ozzy" part.

I find it quite difficult to imagine confusing an Aussie accent with a Birmingham accent. (Though I suppose songs are always a bit tricky.)

Considering that I have no idea in my head of what a Birmingham accent sounds like...

Well, to be honest, I don’t really know either. But it certainly sounds nothing like an Australian one!

[jal]

I think the only US accents I can recognize are AAVE and white Southern drawls. Everything else sounds just like GA to me.

This.

Key clues to telling apart NAE varieties other than Southern or AAVE ones is (...)

But that needs a specialist's ear. Many British accents can be told apart by the way they sound, even if you can't really make out what's being said. Same with AAVE and Southern, they just sound different. Whether certain vowels are rounded or unrounded, or certain vowels merged etc., doesn't really affect the way the speech sounds, hence my inability to distinguish them.


JAL

[vlad]

Kurwa is a song containing phrases in a bunch of different languages. Most of them are well-known phrases from widely-spoken languages. A couple of less-known ones are kil monda (Tatar) and oyboy (Kazakh). Rakamakafo is a garbled version of rock the microphone from "Freestyler".

Does anyone know what ge genamudo kata ta kataketakata is? Is it gibberish? Is it a meme like rakamakafo?

[Man in Space]

Thanks to Threads, I noticed something. Quoting is more economical than summary:

me: "my ex was a japanese minor"
coworker: "pause..."
me: "i mean my ex minored in japanese"

i am never gonna live this one down

I was initially a little puzzled, but then I realized that the reading I had defaulted to—the academic sense—was incorrect. It made me realize the prosody is different for me:

Japanése minor ‘student pursuing a minor program in the Japanese language’
Japanese mínor ‘child from Japan’

[bradrn]

Japanése minor ‘student pursuing a minor program in the Japanese language’
Japanese mínor ‘child from Japan’

Agreed. I think this one works best in text (and lacking context for the conversation).

[Travis B.]

Thing is, I would normally interpret "Japanese minor" in the academic sense, as the legal sense of "minor" is quite formal and, in this particular construction, probably less common than the academic sense.

[fusijui]

Aside from the academic confusion, I immediately thought of this YT short too: https://youtube.com/shorts/FUXjbXo9cqE? ... PLnPdz4L-o

[keenir]

Thanks to Threads, I noticed something. Quoting is more economical than summary:

me: "my ex was a japanese minor"
coworker: "pause..."
me: "i mean my ex minored in japanese"

i am never gonna live this one down

I was initially a little puzzled, but then I realized that the reading I had defaulted to—the academic sense—was incorrect. It made me realize the prosody is different for me:

Japanése minor ‘student pursuing a minor program in the Japanese language’
Japanese mínor ‘child from Japan’

on one hand, I understood that "was a Japanese minor" to mean in the educational sense of minoring and majoring...though more often, I've heard "was a ___ major" and "minored in ____".

[Creyeditor]

This looks like a promising step. Maybe we will get something like the World Phonotactics Database back: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/ ... 0094_s_002