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#376
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 22:25:39 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote: | My alien has a definite idea of what _he_ means by left, clockwise, | north, etc., or his own similar terms; I'm just saying that without | common reference, you can't convey to him what _you_ mean by them. | Have you ever seen a clock that runs backward? I haven't. I've seen such clocks, although I don't own one. Amazon has a bunch of them for sale. I searched on "backwards clock". -- Char Jackson |
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#377
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 02:05:59 +0000, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
It is important to write so that you can be understood. It is far more important to write so that you cannot be misunderstood. That's what my dad used to say only he said communicate instead of write. Happy new year to all. -- Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2 and built in 5 years; UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/ |
#378
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On 12/21/2014 6:26 PM, Jack Campin wrote:
You don't pronounce the "t" in "tsunami"? I do, and I hear many other people saying it. Actually, I completely failed to understand what Seymore4Head meant by including tsunami, until you, Wolf, and Steve (Steve first) pointed out that apparently S4H mispronounces it... I don't know who that is - are they using the "soonahmee" version, with no discernible "t"? That's common enough that I wouldn't call it a mispronunciation. The way the Japanese (or at least the ones that got on Youtube) say it surprised me, when I heard the word a lot after the 2011 earthquake. Rather like "tyoonahmee", but there is a slight fricativeness going along with the palatalization - not enough to constitute an "s" sound, though. Is there enough "sh" sound in the "ch" of (English) "church" to your ear? It is quite common for people not registering the individual components of an affricate. According to the Wiki article on Japanese phonology, /ts/ is palatalized only before /i/, not before /u/. I can't here any palatalization in these pronunciations of "tsu" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44t6As8ZjLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAHhZK91Gdk -- Tak ----------------------------------------------------------------+----- Tak To x --------------------------------------------------------------------^^ [taode takto ~{LU5B~}] NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr |
#379
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On 12/24/2014 1:24 PM, Oliver Cromm wrote:
* Gene E. Bloch: On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 23:26:01 +0000, Jack Campin wrote: You don't pronounce the "t" in "tsunami"? I do, and I hear many other people saying it. Actually, I completely failed to understand what Seymore4Head meant by including tsunami, until you, Wolf, and Steve (Steve first) pointed out that apparently S4H mispronounces it... I don't know who that is - are they using the "soonahmee" version, with no discernible "t"? That's common enough that I wouldn't call it a mispronunciation. OTOH, I jut apologized to S4H for saying "mispronunciation" :-) I haven't encountered it, though. The way the Japanese (or at least the ones that got on Youtube) say it surprised me, when I heard the word a lot after the 2011 earthquake. Rather like "tyoonahmee", but there is a slight fricativeness going along with the palatalization - not enough to constitute an "s" sound, though. That what we denote by s in this case is indeed only a side-effect produced by Japanese tongues in the combination of t+u. Uh? According to the Wiki article on Japanese phonology{1}, the initial consonant in Japanese つ tsu is indeed the affricate which is commonly denoted by [ts] in IPA{2} and appears in Standard German as "z". {1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology {2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicele...olar_affricate Perhaps you are influenced by the fact that the つ tsu gana is traditionally placed in the same column as た ta, て te and と to? One might say [t] and [ts] are allophones of the same phoneme in Japanese. Similarly, "shi" in Japanese words is just the result of i following s. OTOH, the initial consonant in Japanese すshi is an [s] that is alveolo-palatalized ([ɕ] in IPA){3}. It is neither the "s" nor the "sh" sound in English. Likewise, one might say [s] and [ɕ] are allophones of the same phoneme in Japanese. {3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicele...latal_sibilant Natively, they can't say "tu" (engl. "too") or "si" (engl. "see"). Perhaps it is better to say that the sound combinations of [tu] and [si] do not appear in Japanese. Surely some native Japanese speakers can learn to pronounce these English sounds correctly. -- Tak ----------------------------------------------------------------+----- Tak To x --------------------------------------------------------------------^^ [taode takto ~{LU5B~}] NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr |
#380
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| Have you ever seen a clock that runs backward?
| I haven't. | | I've seen such clocks, although I don't own one. Amazon has a bunch of them | for sale. I searched on "backwards clock". | Oh, well. Then I may be wrong and clockwise may, indeed, be undefinable, along with all other words. It wouldn't be the first time the exception has negated the rule in this thread. |
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 00:25:17 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:
On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 22:25:39 -0500, "Mayayana" wrote: | My alien has a definite idea of what _he_ means by left, clockwise, | north, etc., or his own similar terms; I'm just saying that without | common reference, you can't convey to him what _you_ mean by them. | Have you ever seen a clock that runs backward? I haven't. I've seen such clocks, although I don't own one. Amazon has a bunch of them for sale. I searched on "backwards clock". I owned one a long time ago, and hung it on my living room wall. My son, then 6 years old, was so upset by it that I promptly removed it... The numbers were also backwards: the clock was sold to be mounted on the wall of a bar behind the bar patrons, so they could see it right way round in the bar mirror. -- Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch) |
#382
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
In message , Mayayana
writes: | My alien has a definite idea of what _he_ means by left, clockwise, | north, etc., or his own similar terms; I'm just saying that without | common reference, you can't convey to him what _you_ mean by them. | Have you ever seen a clock that runs backward? I actually own one; although bought as a novelty, IIRR from the left-handers club, it keeps very good time as it happens. I haven't. Nor do I know of any culture that defines left as something other than left. They might have different words, but left is left. Likewise with language. Yes, but the fact remains that you can't convey the concept by verbal means alone without the common frame of reference. But since it is clear that either you see this as a truism - which I certainly didn't the first time someone raised the matter with me, or that you consider discussion of the matter not only as pointless but offensive in some way, can we please drop it? In the US, Canada and England I don't know of any accent that doesn't pronounce the vowels in cat or hearth or bed in a way that differs so much from other accents that the words are unrecognizable. Oh, I have come across such! Even within Britain. And I have heard - though possibly exaggerated for comic effect - some Americans (US) pronounce words like "fat" as two syllables: spelling how I hear them pronounce it in a way another average Englishman would understand, I'd say it was close to "fayut" (with the a as in hay). And the Northern Irish accent rotates some of the vowels in a way that I have to think hard to parse, though I usually can. There are only accent differences. No one pronounces (There are also vocabulary differences, and - though their "wrongness" is agreed by most, with a few [mainly transatlantic] exceptions - grammar differences.) cat like caht or hearth like hair or bed like beed. If But some pronounce cat as ket, or kayut. Hearth I think I _have_ heard as hairth. Bed - no, I agree not beed, though I'd say baird or bayud I have heard. (All of which assume the reader knows what I mean when I write ket, kayut, bairth, beed, baird, and bayud - which is a very dubious assumption. We need the phonetic alphabet, or to start uploading audio clips - neither of which is going to happen here, though both exist in other spheres.) there were fundamental differences then I wouldn't be able to understand British speech or Southern US speech. I sometimes don't understand folk, and I'm not alone. A - possibly apocryphal - tale is of some British author, who on being told by a USAnian something like "oh, you're a writer", with the normal USA pronunciation thereof, replied that he'd never been on a horse in his life. | I am certainly not seeking a god! | Too bad. That might be a worthy pursuit. I'm not going there. | the apparently more abstruse aspects of relative | truth by exploring apparent quirks in the fabric. | | I was simply using it as a parallel for the pronunciation discussion | which we _were_ having. I'd almost say I wish I hadn't, but I _enjoy_ | such discussions; you seem not to (in fact in this thread, you seem not | to have the concept of enjoyment at all, which from your posting in | other threads I know isn't true). I'm just being critical of the tendency here toward intellectual frivolity. The thread has gone One man's frivolity is another's innocent entertainment. into hundreds of posts saying very little. Just lots of bickering about angels on the head of a Apart from between you and I, I don't think bickering is an appropriate word; IMO, most of the discussion has been amicable, and to most involved enjoyable. pin. (Which I think is a perfect analogy, deriving as it does from the problem of mistaking pseudo- technical nitpicking for profound understanding.) I believe the origin of that expression/concept is something religious (to do with some perceived property of angels?); not being so myself, I can't comment on its appropriateness. Debating the accuracy of the word clockwise is just conceptual masturbation. It serves no You do like that word, don't you! purpose and sheds light on nothing. It's not an I brought up the concept as a parallel to the matter of pronunciation. Without some common frame of reference, you can't convey to my alien what you mean by left, north, clockwise, or several similar concepts; without a common frame of reference, you can't actually say that no-one pronounces bed as beed, because you don't know how I pronounce those two sounds. (To give another example, someone earlier in this thread commented that some areas/whatever pronounced marry, merry, and Mary the same - which puzzled others, to whom there _is_ no difference in the sound of those three.) insight to note that the hands of a clock seen from the back are not going in the same direction. I don't think anyone has claimed it is. [] It's true that I don't have to read the thread, but if I see that there are new posts then naturally I'm curious whether someone has posted something Perhaps you could save yourself some bother by killfiling me? I certainly thought of doing so for you, but I've found your posts (here and in XP) genuinely useful (I think I even have some marked keep, i. e. set not to expire [my news client defaults to expiring posts after a number of days I can set]), so I haven't. (I guess I could set up some complex rule just for this thread, but life's too short.) of interest. I think the real problem here is the cross-posting to alt.usage.english for no reason. I would "posit", to use one of your words, that whoever first did so did so because they thought the pronunciation aspects were more relevant there than here, with which I would agree! That seems to be a rather crusty group, mainly involved with one-upping each others' "cleverness". (Which I mean in the British sense: The theatrical appearance of intelligence, with no value placed on intelligence itself.) I can't comment; I left AUE (or it might have been AEU, or both) many years ago, partly because I found some discussions got too heated (people feeling strongly - _not_ just capping each other, as you describe), but mainly because I just couldn't keep up with the traffic level there. I've not been back for the same reasons, though don't know if either is still valid, so I'm glad whoever cross-posted it kept this one here. [Though for the sake of _this_ 'group, perhaps we should start to wind this up ... (-:] 2 -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. -Heard in a neuropsychology classroom |
#383
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:20:03 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. -Heard in a neuropsychology classroom fornicating Or is there another level of humor that makes "mating" the punch line? |
#384
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
* Gene E. Bloch:
On Wed, 24 Dec 2014 14:33:41 -0500, Oliver Cromm wrote: * Gene E. Bloch: Verizon charges for data usage (on the phone network) exceeding a rather small limit. I pay for only 1GB per phone, although there are bigger plans. The saving grace is that the phones are WiFi capable, and they don't charge for that, so judicious use avoids overcharges. I'm sure that's possible with 1 GB, but with 100 MB, I have to set up rather aggressive e-mail filtering or risk hitting the limit just from that. Ouch! Yeah - I have friends who will send e-mails with photos embedded, rather than attached or linked to. I rather quickly learned not to open them on my phone. In fact, often not on my computer, either. Still pictures of folk dancers dancing, mostly pretty much the same at one monthly party after another, do not inspire me :-) Oh, I'm not talking about downloading or opening all messages in full, just about getting the overview. Although my mistake might be using the Yahoo Mail app. Although I only get three or four mails in that account daily, the app downloads thumbnails of pictures and possibly other unnecessary stuff even before I open the mails. Thus it uses more data than the general mail app for 15 messages a day, of which I may open one on mobile data (fifteen is after filtering out about a hundred from mailing lists and similar things). -- If you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 20, you go to an institution for the insane; if you kill 20,000, you get political asylum. -- Reed Brody, special counsel for prosecutions at Human Rights Watch |
#385
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Cable, landline, wireless and satellite
* Tak To:
On 12/24/2014 1:24 PM, Oliver Cromm wrote: * Gene E. Bloch: On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 23:26:01 +0000, Jack Campin wrote: You don't pronounce the "t" in "tsunami"? I do, and I hear many other people saying it. Actually, I completely failed to understand what Seymore4Head meant by including tsunami, until you, Wolf, and Steve (Steve first) pointed out that apparently S4H mispronounces it... I don't know who that is - are they using the "soonahmee" version, with no discernible "t"? That's common enough that I wouldn't call it a mispronunciation. OTOH, I jut apologized to S4H for saying "mispronunciation" :-) I haven't encountered it, though. The way the Japanese (or at least the ones that got on Youtube) say it surprised me, when I heard the word a lot after the 2011 earthquake. Rather like "tyoonahmee", but there is a slight fricativeness going along with the palatalization - not enough to constitute an "s" sound, though. That what we denote by s in this case is indeed only a side-effect produced by Japanese tongues in the combination of t+u. Uh? According to the Wiki article on Japanese phonology{1}, the initial consonant in Japanese つ tsu is indeed the affricate which is commonly denoted by [ts] in IPA{2} and appears in Standard German as "z". {1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology {2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicele...olar_affricate Perhaps you are influenced by the fact that the つ tsu gana is traditionally placed in the same column as た ta, て te and と to? One might say [t] and [ts] are allophones of the same phoneme in Japanese. Similarly, "shi" in Japanese words is just the result of i following s. OTOH, the initial consonant in Japanese すshi is an [s] that is alveolo-palatalized ([ɕ] in IPA){3}. It is neither the "s" nor the "sh" sound in English. Likewise, one might say [s] and [ɕ] are allophones of the same phoneme in Japanese. {3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicele...latal_sibilant Natively, they can't say "tu" (engl. "too") or "si" (engl. "see"). Perhaps it is better to say that the sound combinations of [tu] and [si] do not appear in Japanese. Surely some native Japanese speakers can learn to pronounce these English sounds correctly. I don't feel responsible for how you misinterpret me in this case. Your first sentence, to me, seems pretty much equivalent to what I said, and I don't know how your version is better. As for your second sentence, I try again, picking up your vocabulary: *Natively*, i.e. when they are completely within their native speech system, the result of having the phoneme /u/ follow the phoneme /t/ is that the /t/ is realized as [ts], never as [t]. I call that a side-effect, because they don't consciously produce a different sound from the sound in "ta". In my understanding, that relation is not just in the kana table, it's in their head as well. Of course some, actually most native speakers of any language can learn to produce sounds that they *natively* don't have or know. For example, in my experience, pretty much any native speaker of Japanese is able to learn to produce l and r. What is really hard to learn is to *hear* the difference, so, to use them at the right time requires extra effort (e.g. remembering the spelling). -- If Helen Keller is alone in the forest and falls down, does she make a sound? -- Michael O'Donohue |
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