#also don't mind my ipa symbols

[rayclubs]

Hi! Saw your post about Americans and culture. Please, if you don't mind my asking~~

You mentioned in the tags that your name has a hard Sh. Would this be like tsh as in "catch" or "chocolate"? Is it between the two? Do you know the ipa symbol for it? I looked for a pronunciation guide online and I only managed to find a softer Sh than I hear in Am. English.

Also I think one can change the color of text within an ask??? Wild.

Hi, thanks for asking, youtube pronunciation guide is garbage so here's an audio, sorry about rambling, I haven't slept for two days.

Y'all should ask me more about phonetics. If ya want.

[thatoneluckybee]

cause me for a second about to screech incoherently to the void

OKAY so going back over I found the guides I like for Old English pronunciations because I'm not good at it and can never remember how to pronounce things. So on the poll I was gushing in tags about where the word orange came from. In Old English we just used yellow-red or red-yellow, or technically the word was "geoluread." In today's English there's a few ways it could be read. "Geo" would likely use a "j" soundish like "geology." "Lu" and "luh" are fairly similar in modern and old English so just "uh" like "put." "Read" could be "red" or "reed."

SO I'm probably butchering how I say things (like I said still practicing) and explaining but this ramble is for fun so 'tis fine. I think the "eo" would be considered a front vowel so the "g" is said similarly to our "y" sound is "yes." "Eo" is better explained by this specific area of the website I'm on right now (lots I'll just between but this one has examples) as "like the 'e' in bed gliding to the 'o' in 'cough'" so "eh-aw" almost? Or the "aw" and "ough" in "awesome" and "cough" are identical in my accent (Texan accents do that fairly often.) Then of course the "luh" sound, and then "ea" is described as "ai" in fail. I saw fail differently from the speaker but from other descriptions and guides it seems similar to "ey-ah." Not exactly but I suck st describing things.

Y'all. "Geoluread" put together ("g" "eo" "lu" "read"). The best I can visualize it is "yeh-oh" "luh" "rey-ahd"

When we say yellow or at least the way I've grown up talking there's the slightest hint of an "o" between "eh" and "l." Just from how your move your mouth (same reason what did you becomes didja and what you becomes whatcha." Voicing the "o" in "eol" snf NOT voicing it has your mouth move almost the exact same way.

Geoluread is spelled so strangely to me but it's LITERALLY JUST YELLOW RED. IT'S THE SAME THING AS IT WAS IN THE 11TH CENTURY LMAO

And this also is cool to me (I am bored in class with nothing to do have been typing for well over ten minutes about a fruit word) is English has evolved a LOT but spelling and lexicon seem to have changed a lot more than pronunciation from Old English. This word is hard for me to pronounce because (and true for a lot of Old English words) the vowels have you holding your tongue a lot further back than speaking Modern English. That's a fun quirk I like about today's English—compared to a lot of similar languages (I.e. Spanish and French I believe? Been a bit since I've looked into this) we have a tongues naturally resting a lot higher (on roof of mouth vs bottom). And Modern English seems to pronounce sounds with the tongue closer to or touching the teeth than Old English does. I know of the Great Vowel Shift so I'm wondering if that whole 15-16th century language drama was the cause? I have done research on it but I don't have IPA Symbols memorized yet so it's hard to tell what the shift was responsible for and what is just the passage of time changing things.

So this is what I do if I get bored enough at school apparently. Lose my mind over pronunciations of words centuries ago because I saw one (1) poll about whether orange the color or orange the fruit came first (it was the fruit. Wasn't until Margaret Tudor around a century later I think that it was recorded to describe a color.)

[nightstim]

I've come to the realization that a lot of bloggers might assume I'm fine with nsfɯ interaction when I'm not... I just tbh never thought to actually specify it? I just figured ddʟg peeps wouldn't want to follow a blog whose theme is aggressively not cute anyways, and tbqh I've never actually seen interaction from nsfɯ blogs on here. But of course I'm also not very good at keeping track of this blog; most of the time I just leave it be because tbh this is the sideblog I have the least focus on. The irony is that it's easily my most popular one.

Anyways, this is a heads up that I'm going to limit interaction from nsfɯ/kınk blogs from now on, since I guess I've got a big enough following that I have to worry about it.

[reverbee]

Worldbuilding Part One: Tips On Making Your Fictional Language

So, this is part 1 of a maybe 2-part series of worldbuilding. The next one will talk about different cultures, but for now, I'll talk about fictional languages:

-First, come up with different sounds and consonants and vowels. This is your basis of creating words, you can stick with the regular IPA (international phonetic alphabet) or you can remove letters and sounds!

-name everything and WRITE IT DOWN. Now that you have your alphabet, name everything you walk past during the day. Everything that comes to mind. Give it its sounds, and I swear please if you're like me and have shit memory then Right It Down. Keep a personal dictionary around with you

-Once you have a bunch of words, then you can move on to grammar and morphology! These words scared me when I first saw them, but it's much simpler than it sounds! Just think of how you would change a word (making it a plural, an adjective) e.g. paint-painter, dog-dogs

-research different terms. Such as different types of nouns and verbs, come up with different words for pronouns, and maybe different pronouns entirely!

-(My favorite part) create words that don't have an exact translation! Words that express something personal to you, a feeling or action, and create a beautiful word for it. For example, in my language of Zejozulian, the word 'sereverenio' doesn't have an exact translation. It means, "to be emotionally whole or complete," or "A peaceful darkness in which one is complete" it's really fun to do, and helps your language have more life.

-you can even create a whole new alphabet! I did this with random geometric shapes, but you can literally do whatever you want. You can replace letters with symbols and translate from there, it's also one of the fun parts.

-curse words (this is strangely also one of my favorites) you can model after traditional curse words, or come up with your own fancy insults.

-Now, you don't have to follow ALL of the above steps. It depends on how engaged your language is with your story. If it's vaguely mentioned, you barely have to do anything. If it's somewhat mentioned along with some specific words, you'll have to do a little bit. But if you're like me, and what to have a complete language complete with it's own myths and culture, you're in the right place.

-(CHEATS) now, I personally didn't use these, but if you don't want to spend a lot of time coming up with your own words vulgar.com generates everything from grammar to a mini dictionary for you. You just have to study it.

Annnd this is all I've got for fictional languages, be on the watch for part 2 about creating a fictional culture to accompany your language!

[theboombutton]

Please say more about aspirated medial stops, I was talking with my brother in law the other day about how we (Californians) don't say t's in the middle of words and I'm really curious about why that is and if this is a universal thing in all accents of English now

Disclaimer: I do have a Bachelor's in linguistics, but I got it more than a decade ago so it is possible that some of the information in this post will be misremembered or out of date.

tl;dr

Knowing how to pronounce t in different locations in different dialects is a nightmare. Old-fashioned British Received Pronunciation pronounced t in the middle of words, but there's a UK language drift called T-glottalization in which ts except at the start of words are often being replaced with glottal stops? It's really obvious in lower-status dialects but it's been creeping into RP as well.

American English usually does a weird muscle flex called a "flap" or a "tap" that's something like a really short d, or a single roll of a rolled r. I think there are some UK dialects that use this tap as well.

I belieeeeeve that Indian English usually pronounces word-medial ts, but I haven't run an actual analysis on the applicable coworkers' speech because that'd be kind of creepy?

No idea about Australia or New Zealand.

As far as I know, there's no special reason why these particular drifts are happening. Linguistic drift and accent shifts are just something that happens with living languages. If anything, we have immensely slowed the natural process of language change through the invention and widespread teaching of standardized writing.

Glossary

Sorry, I tried doing this without a glossary but I kept having to do weird info cul-de-sacs to explain myself. I've ordered them according to approximately when they'll come up?

lol I failed so hard at this, about halfway through the post I started using words without putting them in the glossary first and man idk I've been working on this post for 4 hours now and I don't want to go back through and put definitions for some of this shit, sorry

Phoneme - A single language sound, as it is stored in your brain. Represented with slashes around it, e.g. /t/.

Phone - A language sound as it actually comes out of your mouth. Represented with square brackets around it, e.g. [t].

Phonology - The study of speech sounds, from internal representation to external expression, but not including the study of how they are physically created in the mouth (that's phonetics). Not to be confused with phrenology, the racist pseudoscience of head shape.

Word - Can have a few different meanings in a linguistic context. In this post, will usually refer to either a lexeme or a phonological word. You should be able to tell from the context.

Phonological Word - What you probably think of when you think of a "word." A unit of speech that you could naturally pause on either side of, but could not naturally pause inside.

Lexeme/Semantic Word - A single phonological word and its attached meaning; or, phrase of multiple phonological words, which holds a meaning which is different than the sum of its parts. For example, "Carry the bucket" is not a single lexeme; but "Kick the bucket" is.

Voiced/Voiceless - A sound is voiced if you use your vocal cords to make it, and voiceless if you don't.

Stop - Also called a plosive. A stop is a kind of consonant you make by stopping all air flow. The stops English uses are p, b, t, d, k, g, and the glottal stop.

Aspiration - A puff of air following a sound, usually a voiceless stop. In phonetic notation, it is indicated by a superscript h following the consonant, like [pʰ].

IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet. A standard set of symbols based on the Roman alphabet and used to refer to roughly the same sounds regardless of language.

Glottal stop - A stop which is performed not by your tongue, as in most stops, but by your vocal cords. Think of the word "Uh-oh" - the way you completely stop airflow after the "Uh" instead of just letting it flow into the "oh." That's a glottal stop.

Praat - An audio analysis program tailored specifically for viewing waveforms of speech sounds.

INFODUMP TIME

So the thing about saying words is that the ideas of sounds that you have in your head ("phonemes") don't translate one-to-one to the sounds that come out of your mouth ("phones"); and the ways that these sounds get modified vary between different dialects.

Please keep in mind that when you try to speak slowly or clearly, the sounds that you make change. Linguists are primarily interested in natural speech patterns, not what we do when we're trying to enunciate.

Tater-Tot

Let's take the lexeme tater-tot, because it's the first word I can think of that has all 3 of the major weird things that /t/ does that vary by dialect.

Let's start with the word-initial t. Phonologically there are actually two word-initial t's in tater-tot, the one at the beginning of 'tater,' and the one at the beginning of 'tot.' This is because "tater-tot" is two phonological words despite being one semantic word.

In American and British English, we aspirate our word-initial voiceless stops if they're immediately followed by a vowel, which means we pronounce /p/, /t/, and /k/ as [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] respectively if they're the first sound in a word (and immediately followed by a vowel). This means we add in a little puff of air following the consonant if it's the first sound in the word. In Indian English, they don't do this - a word-initial /t/ is pronounced [t], without the extra puff of air. To American & British English speakers it can almost sound like they're saying [d], because we're not used to hearing a word-initial /t/ without aspiration.

Next we've got a word-medial t, the second t of "tater." Here, Indian and British RP English speakers pronounce it as a plain [t], with no aspiration. American English speakers pronounce it as what's called a tap or a flap, which is sort of like a half-formed [d] but is actually more like a single roll of a rolled r - and so its IPA symbol is [ɾ]. And many less prestigious British dialects, including Cockney and I believe Scouse, replace it with a glottal stop, with IPA symbol [ʔ].

And our final t is the word-final t of tot. This is a tricky one to peel apart. English generally doesn't release word-final stops - that is, you put your tongue in the correct place to stop airflow to create the stop, but you never actually move your tongue out of the way to "release" the airflow you stopped. So the easy read on the word-final t's pronunciation is that it's [t̚], an unreleased t. However, in many dialects and situations /t/ is replaced with or co-articulated with a glottal stop - for example, after an [n] or an [m], /t/ is almost always pronounced as [ʔ] in English. But unreleased stops after an oral vowel are difficult to tell apart, and if the tongue is in t position while the glottis cuts off airflow - I genuinely don't know.

Tuck/Stuck

These are good for a comparison between an aspirated [tʰ] and an unaspirated [t]. In American English, tuck is [tʰʌk] and stuck is [stʌk].

Truck

American English does weird things with syllable-initial /tr/.

I want to introduce you to the "sh" symbol, ʃ. ʃ is a voiceless postalveolar fricative, which means it's created by air rushing through a narrow space when your tongue is behind the alveolar ridge. Incidentally, when you move your tongue from [t] position to [ɹ̠] position (ɹ̠ being the symbol for the version of non-rolled r that most English dialects use), it will naturally create the ʃ sound as it moves.

We have a special letter combination to the phonemic /tʃ/ in English. It's "ch". As in "change."

You almost certainly pronounce "truck" as [tʃɹ̠ʌk] "chruck" and just don't notice.

So what's going on with Martin?

So first off, Jonny is probably wrong about how the Archivist says "Martin." Complete deletion of the r in that position is standard in RP. I haven't fed The Magnus Archives into Praat or anything, so it's possible he's letting a hint of a rhotic accent bleed in to the Archivist's RP - but I really doubt it.

This isn't unusual! It's very common for people's internal concept of what sounds they mean to make, to get in the way of them accurately identifying what sounds they're actually making. No one thinks they've ever said "chruck" until you point it out to them.

I would probably transcribe the Archivist saying "Martin" as [mɑ:tɪn].

Jonny's attempt at saying "Martin" in an American accent was something more like [mɑ˞ɹ̠tʰɪn]. He did a good job of rhoticizing the vowel, but in his focus on the r completely messed up the second syllable.

I'd transcribe my own pronunciation of "Martin" as something like [mɑ˞ɹ̠ʔn]. It's been my observation that t-glottalization in American English is especially common when adjacent to nasals - and if there's one thing American English likes, it's syllabifying liquids in word-final syllables.

OK I've run out of steam now

This was fun. Sorry about the declining quality of explanation. Please feel free to ask more if you dare to reignite the flames of infodump