Interesting language stuff

[Jonathon]

"Speaking American, Speaking Utahn"

This was a segment on a local public radio station yesterday featuring one of my professors and my editor at Visual Thesaurus. They talk about dialects in general and Utah English in particular, including how they change and how we perceive them.

[rivka]

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/624-here-s-the-first-mention-of-an-adjunct-professor-in-the-new-york-times

[Jonathon]

Can you guess where people are from based on their accents?

I got 7 out of 12.

[rivka]

8 of 12. And at least once or twice the right answer made me :facepalm:.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(Like the UK one, which is a Scotland accent. And I was trying to decide which of the other countries is likely to have an accent close to Scotland. For UK, I expected plummy Brit. Shame on me.)

[BlackBlade]

I have heard a lot of accents but there were enough questions where I couldn't say I had heard that accent before (Senegal, Afghanistan) that I just gave up without completing it.

Discerning between Netherlands and Germany proved tricky for me.

[Ela]

I got 11 out of 12.

[Tante Shvester]

I work with people from all over the world, but most of their accents weren't represented (Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon,  Cuba, Mexico, Italy, among others).  I only got 7 right.

[Annie Subjunctive]

I got 8 of 12, but I also think it's a little bit the luck of the draw (since I noticed there was an option to load more accents and try again.) I got Japan, China and Spain right away, but I have a lot of experience with people with those accents.

I was rather proud of myself on the one I had to work for though: I had to differentiate between Croatia and Russia and the speaker wasn't having a problem with the English voiceless dental fricative (one of the th sounds) and I remembered from some papers I read that most Russians render that as /d/. So I picked the Croatian and I was right.

[Ela]

The one I got wrong was Italy. I can't remember now what the other choices were, but I think I was expecting a stronger Italian accent.

I have experience with people with lots of different accents, in part through my work, in part through my volunteer work.

[Tante Shvester]

Is "six spoons of fresh snow peas" a normal thing to say?  Is spoons a unit of measurement somewhere in the English language that I'm unaware of?

[Tante Shvester]

I wonder if I can write it out in an accent?

Please cawl Stella. Ask huh to bring dhese tings with huh from the staw: Six spoowuns of fresh snow peas, five tick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for huh brothuh Bob. We also need a smawull plastic snake and a big toy frawg for the kids. She can scoop dhese tings into tree red bayugs, and we will go meet huh Wenzday at the train station.

Spoiler: Could you guess the accent? (click to show/hide)

Jewish Bronx

[rivka]

That paragraph gets used a lot with demonstrating accents. Presumably it has examples of the various major phonemes or something?

Edit: Aha!

We constructed an elicitation paragraph to be read by each subject. The paragraph is written in English, and uses common English words, but contains a variety of difficult English sounds and sound sequences. The paragraph contains practically all of the sounds of English.

[Brinestone]

10/12. I always seem to miss the first question on quizzes like this, and I'm not paying full attention yet. The other one I missed was Senegal.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Check this out: a video project to produce animations narrated in Mexico's indigenous languages. They're really beautiful. The videos are subtitled, but only in Spanish, but they're cool anyway even if you don't understand just to listen to the huge variety of languages and they have some very lovely animations. The Maya one is my favorite so far.

[Nighthawk]

AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize "internet" and "web" anymore

Associated Press editors announced a new stylebook change Saturday ahead of a session at the annual American Copy Editors Society's conference — the 2016 stylebook will lowercase the words "internet" and "web."

[Jonathon]

I'm actually at the conference where they announced that (though I missed that session), so it's all over my Twitter feed right now. Everyone's reaction: "Welcome to the 21st century, AP Stylebook."

[Annie Subjunctive]

Yeah, whenever I read someone writing about the Internet, I can't help but assume that the writer is Jen from The IT Crowd.

[Ela]

I'm actually at the conference where they announced that (though I missed that session), so it's all over my Twitter feed right now. Everyone's reaction: "Welcome to the 21st century, AP Stylebook."

+1

Does this mean my phone will stop auto-correcting those words to the capitalized version?

[Jonathon]

Sadly, no. The AP Stylebook is just one popular style manual. Others might start following suit, but it might take a while before all the dictionaries reflect the changing style.

[Tante Shvester]

I've already stopped hyphenating New-York and, but I'm still keeping the gue in analogue.

[Ela]

Sadly, no. The AP Stylebook is just one popular style manual. Others might start following suit, but it might take a while before all the dictionaries reflect the changing style.

Yeah, I knew that.

It's one of my pet peeves that auto-correct keeps trying to change internet to Internet.

[Jonathon]

Time travelling to the mother tongue

A team of linguists and statisticians have put together a bunch of sound clips illustrating how modern forms of words evolved from Proto-Indo-European. For instance, here's one morphing into the PIE form *oins.

More clips are found here.

[Jonathon]

A complaint about how kids these days are ruining Middle English:



More here.

[Tante Shvester]

I mamish know people who speak Ynglyssh.  I'm surprised he didn't stick a "u" in "honorable".

[Jonathon]

A video on the Inuktitut syllabic alphabet (or, if you're a real linguistics nerd, abugida).