I'm just going to pretend this post was in response to this comment, which I just got to. Yes, that's right. I broke one of my own quirky posting rules: don't post without catching up on comments first. Such a rebel!
2: A lot of his stuff is silly fluff. Not bad, but I wish he'd do more with the the post-its. He's got a knack for explaining shit quickly.
He's got a knack for explaining shit quickly.
Yeah. It's an important skill, and not a very common one.
Also, he mentioned the band Noah and the Whale in one of his vlogs about recording an album, and I seriously spent about five minutes searching various iterations of "Knower and the Whale" before I was like, "Wait, I have a song from that band!" This one.
I know we've discussed that language thing before, so I thought it would be appreciated.
I like his videos about Twilight so far.
5: Heh. Oh, those wacky non-rhotic types.
Looking at some more of the videos, I see what you mean about the fluff.
7: Yeah, the realization came when I took a mental step back and thought, "What would plausibly be with the whale—oh, fucking duh, Noah. I'm slow."
mmm, not so into his summary of lost. I mean, accurate from a certain point of view, but the things he talks about take up about 4% of the total running time of the show. I'm in the "liked the Lost finale" camp, and in general loved the show. his drawing of hurley was funny, though.
Can linguists comment on how British speakers seem to add an "r" along a word boundary when there are vowels on each side? I haven't listened to the link as I'm at work, but "Noah and" sounding like "Knower and" is exactly the kind of thing that results. What I hear is not the non-rhotic version of "r", by the way.
It's only found in some English accents, and is sometimes described as 'r' insertion. I think of it as a southern english thing. Scots don't do it. Americans probably don't do it because your vowels often have a consonantal flavour anyway, with the rhotacised vowel phonemes. I imagine it's done because it avoids having to stop the vowel sound either using a glottal stop or devoicing or whatever.
Some Boston and other New England speakers will add the r in some circumstances. Wikipedia says that the "intrusive r" between vowels is different from the "hypercorrected r" that will show up even when not between two vowels, which I didn't know.
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I need to get a serious thank-you gift for a relative. She likes wine, but I don't know her specific preferences, nor do I know much at all about wine generally. Can anyone recommend something, maybe in the $50 range, that can be shipped to California? Or failing that, a good online merchant?
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Having a fine New York wine shipped to California as a gift could be a good idea.
what's the deal with the upper-class british thing where extraneous "w"s start proliferating? there was a guy who did briefings in iraq war I who pronounced "jaguar" as "jaguwaw".
Most British English speakers would pronounce it with something approximating the /w/ in between the final two vowels. That is, there'd be rounding on the /u:/ which could sound like an inserted /w/. /jagju:(w)ar/
The US pronunciation /jɛgwar/ or /jɛgwɝ/ sort to thing sounds odd to us [i.e. to me].
The failure to pronounce the /r/ on the end, and pronouncing it as /w/ is a fairly common upper-class thing.
I expect Teo to come along and correct my dodgy GenAm phonemic transcription.
The inserted r that always gets me (in the US) is "Warshington". Where the heck did that come from?
Gah, shite.
Those should be /ʤagju:ar/ and /ʤagju:(w)ar/ for British English, and /ʤɛgwar/ and /ʤɛgwɝ/ for Wronglandian.
13/14: Certain kinds of NY accents do this, too. Once my father was naming brands of vermouth to me and I was writing them down (Maybe I was having a party or something? Dunno.). I burst out laughing when I got to the liquor store, because, while I had written down "Tribuner," the name of the vermouth was "Tribuno."
Can anyone recommend something, maybe in the $50 range, that can be shipped to California?
Here's a white, a red, and a Champagne.
22:"Warshington".
Around here, the correct pronunciation is "Warshinton" - don't forget to drop the "g".
There are many fine Warshington wines.
The recommendations in 25/26 are making me nostalgic for the days when I regularly drank, or at least tasted, that kind of stuff.
I don't really get 13. Noah and Knower sound the same to me (whatever a knower is) but neither of 'Noah and' or 'knower and' sound like noah-rand which is what I'm understanding 13 is getting at. Still, ttaM seems to understand, so maybe it's just me being from dahn sahf.
I heard a joke when Alan Sugar was on Jonathan Ross the other day which has amused me since then - how much does a Cockney sell shampoo for? Pantene.
Here's the clip that prompted my Noah/Knower confusion.
re: 31
Try something like 'vodka and tonic', a lot of people [mostly suvners] pronounce that 'vodkerancoke', with an 'r' in between the two "a" vowels.
"Dywanna vodkerancoke? orrasmirnovice?"
Noah and knower sound completely different in my accent, of course. Both in terms of the vowel sounds, and the pronounced 'r' at the end of knower.
neither of 'Noah and' or 'knower and' sound like noah-rand
The second does for me. I don't get the Pantene joke.
re: 35
Yes.
Street markets all over southern England ring out with the sound of "getyonicenannas. Pahnabowl. Strawbrees, getyostrawbrees, pahnabowl" etc.
Ah. See, I don't even really understand how you pronounce d-o-l-l-a-r as "pound". It's like y'all don't know Jesus at all.
re: 37
It's like you're not even Catholic!
36: I thought it was, "Who will buy my sweet red roses, two blooms for a penny?" (alto) and "Ripe strawberries! Ripe!" (soprano) and "Knives! Knives to grind!" (basso).
Oud's must be so high I swear she could fly.
40: Whereas in Dublin, it's just "Cockles! And Mussels! Alive, Alive, Oh!"
So, this Alex Day guy's accent is typical of Southern England then? (I have an ongoing life project to stop conflating all English, Kiwi, and Aussie accents; if I can get this granular, that'd be great.)
41: Oh, I forgot one -- "Any milk today, Mistress? Any milk?" And I think that one is alto and the roses is mezzo, but I can't remember? Also, who can forget:
She was from the country, but now she's up a gumtree
She let a fellow beat her, and lead her along
What's the use of cryin', she made her bed to lie in
She's glad to bring a coin in, and join in this song
YIKES.
Yes, he has a mild Estuary-ish accent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary_English
His accent isn't 'posh' or very working class sounding, but other than it's fairly hard to place. Generic sahff-east, basically.
Yes, you squashed cabbage-leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language! I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba
There was a brief discussion of the regional/class variation of "intrusive r" in the comments to this recent Language Log post.
Incidentally, when people talk about southern English accents, they can mean very different things. They can mean a home counties accent, ie RP, or they can mean estuary. Or conceivably west country, but that's unlikely. There are commonalities between RP and estuary that distinguish them from northern accents, though - most famously the vowel sound in "bath".
Wat arrh ye talkin' about, matey. We West Country lads don't harve no extrey arrrhs!
They can mean a home counties accent, ie RP, or they can mean estuary.
Or something else entirely, like the unique Oxford town (non-university) accent, where "ow" is pronounced something like "ay".
No, West Country lads have extra 'l's
13: If I haven't forgotten everything since I was bits and pieces of a linguist, this is called "epenthesis" and the r is epenthetic. Someone will politely stomp on me if I am wrong. The only analog that springs to mind for American English* is the n in "an."
*well ok other than Boston where there's some sort of epenthetic r.
54: Ancient Greek has an "intervocalic nu" -- like our "an" -- that it pops in to prevent hiatus between vowels.
Hey Nikita, get those missiles out of Cuber
As in 'an hotel'? Because that's nails on a blackboard to me.
Intrusive r is typical of some but not all non-rhotic dialects. The Wikipedia page on it is pretty good, although it seems to make a distinction between "linking" and "intrusive" r that is not at all clear to me. Basically what happens is that non-rhotic dialects no longer pronounce r in phrase-final position or when it's followed by a consonant, but they do still pronounce it when it's followed by a vowel. So words ending in r followed by words beginning with vowels keep the r. Otherwise the distinction between final r and final vowel is lost, though, and the etymological final r that is still pronounced before a following vowel gets reanalyzed as an epenthetic consonant to separate the two vowels, even in words that don't have an etymological r.
No, West Country lads have extra 'l's
Most famously in Bristow.
I expect Teo to come along and correct my dodgy GenAm phonemic transcription.
You're pretty close, but "jaguar" should be /ʤægwar/.
56: LL on Kennedy's intrusive 'r'.
57. Not necessarily. "An intrusive consonant" would be a better example, or "another". Greek provides words like "anaemic" (bloodless) from "haimia" (blood), with a nu between the alpha (meaning "not") and the "haimia" to make it sayable.
Gawd, is it even possible to have a thread around here that doesn't devolve into phonology and sociolinguistics?
65: I posted something about race and gender and religion to make up for it.
I think you made the distinction between intrusive and linking pretty clear, teo.
and the etymological final r that is still pronounced before a following vowel gets reanalyzed as an epenthetic consonant to separate the two vowels
This is linking r...
even in words that don't have an etymological r.
...and this is intrusive r.
That makes sense, but it's not what the Wikipedia article seems to say. It's hard to tell what the article is trying to say, though.
68: That's because of the funny accent.
68: In the Wikipedia article, the first is with "words historically ending in /r/" and the second is with "any word that ends in the non-high vowels... even when no final /r/ was historically present." Same thing, surely.
70: On re-reading, you are correct. I'm not sure what was confusing me about it before.
I hated the "Lost" finale. Absolutely hated it. In fact, I thought much of season 6 was an unprovoked insult to the intelligence of the viewer.
And I was once a big fan of the show...way back with season 1. In retrospect, I do think it went downhill after the first season. Which decline I noticed gradually, as I was watching it, but it took me too long to admit just how bad it had become: I was committed to the series, and it's hard to tell when all your love's in vain.
I'm going to miss Hurley, though.
You will then love this, Mary Catherine.
My missus (Hong Kong Chinese) once, in a bar in HK, when she asked for a drink, told the barman she wanted a 'ketchup' (or it could just have been a 'catsup').
Astonished,I thought she had asked for a glass of tomato sauce.
Turned out that in Cantonese 'fanke' = tomato and 'chaap' is juice, abbreviated to 'ke-chaap'
Until then I had never realised the origin of the word.....