Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 3:58 pm

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 3:18 am I had electronic classes in high school. As it happens 'bit' sound just like the French word for 'dick'. You can imagine just how that went with teenagers.

Hold on... do you mean that Fr. bite sounds like English bit, with laxed [ɪ]? Or like French bit, with [i]?

(I would have expected the latter, since so far as I know French has no [ɪ] sound.)

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 4:52 pm In German, there's a weird norm under which some acronyms taken from English are always or almost always pronounced as if they were German acronyms (CD, DVD, PC, USA, NASA*), while others are always or almost always pronounced the English way (CIA, FBI, NSA), with no apparent rule about when to do what. (OK, wait, apparently, if it's a US or UK intelligence agency, it's pronounced the English way, while if it isn't, it's probably pronounced as if it were a German acronym.)

*"NASA" isn't treated as an acronym at all for pronunciation purposes.

alice wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:12 am This reminds me of the time Celtic Football Club were interested in a player called Rafael Scheidt, and the saga of his signing stretched out for several days, requiring the BBC Scotland news team to refer frequently to "Brazilian player Rafael". This prompted a late-night phone-in football radio programme called Eat My Goal to run a nightly competition for the best headline about the whole silly business. "Scheidt hits fan" was a frequent favourtite.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 5:39 pm Hmm, maybe Raphael should worry... depending on whether he's talking to Brits or Americans.

Cardinal ʌ is just unrounded ɔ... but of course that doesn't tell us much about actual English [ʌ].

My impression is that American [ʌ] is rather high, and this is confirmed by quite a few diagrams in Labov. Very often [ʌ] is not at all far from [ u], and higher than [e]. This is very unlikely to be confused with [a].

But a number of Googled diagrams, e.g. the ones here, suggest that in British English, [ʌ] is quite low, lower than cardinal [ɔ], and it's also rather centralized. That seems closer to German [a]. Brits, is that correct?

xxx wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 10:45 am

doctor shark wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:26 pm I had a coworker in Luxembourg from India whose name, in French, means "pussy" (in both senses). And you don't expect someone to change their name because of an unfortunate coincidence with their name

and yet, many official name changes are due to this kind of coincidence...

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 4:36 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 4:17 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 3:58 pm

Hold on... do you mean that Fr. bite sounds like English bit, with laxed [ɪ]? Or like French bit, with [i]?

(I would have expected the latter, since so far as I know French has no [ɪ] sound.)

But do French-speakers render English bit loaned into French with [ɪ] or with [i]?

That's what I meant by French bit, which my dictionary has as [bit]. People don't usually borrow phonemes, and usually feel weird about pronouncing borrowings exactly as in the source language.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Dec 07, 2021 6:45 pm That is like how native English-speakers often have a hard time telling apart StG [iː] and [eː]. (I can tell them apart when Till Lindemann sings them, but there have been other German-speakers for whom I can't make heads or tails of them.)

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Tue Dec 07, 2021 6:11 pm
Anyway, it's a bit silly for French to just loan 'bit' because what do you then with 'byte'? A homophonous superordinate?

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 2:08 pm What, French computer scientists didn't go with "bouchée"? (OK, I should stop being silly. After all, it's not called "Bissen" in German, either.)