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Unanswered Questions

63 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
2 votes
0 answers
141 views

What is the distribution of the French uvular trill vs uvular fricative?

In French, the most common realizations of the phoneme /r/ are [ʀ] (uvular trill) and [ʁ] (voiced uvular fricative). I am able to consistently distinguish them and produce either, and I'm interested ...
2 votes
0 answers
120 views

How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?

How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift? Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available. How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago? Have ...
2 votes
0 answers
83 views

Are there any more optimal tactile alphabets than Braille?

Sorry if this is the wrong stackexchange to ask this. Consider how QWERTY was the first keyboard layout, but isn't nearly optimal (e.g. Dvorak is much better and used overwhelmingly by top speed-...
2 votes
0 answers
108 views

Does aspiration propagate to the following vowel?

My native language is Korean, which is notorious for its three-way distinction (plain vs. tense vs. aspirated) of (non-nasal) stops. As such, I tried to analyze my own pronunciation. Then I found that ...
2 votes
0 answers
85 views

What is the origin of the pronunciation difference between 'replicate' (noun) and 'replicate' (verb)?

In English, the noun 'replicate' is pronounced with a schwa (ə) at the end while the verb is pronounced with the diphthong 'eɪ'. The same is true for the word 'duplicate'. Is there a more general ...
2 votes
0 answers
58 views

How much of a difference does vowel mergers make to perception of fluency?

Listening to some example French conversations between an experienced, fluent speaker and an inexperienced learner, I noticed by chance that the experienced speaker differentiates between similar ...
2 votes
0 answers
130 views

Apico-alveolar consonants in Romagnol Italian and certain accents of Chinese: is that a thing?

Once upon a time were me and my brother, spending time at my grandma's in Romagna. We discovered she pronounced /ʃ/ almost like /s/, and even made fun of that by having her say «Schubert, Schumann e ...
2 votes
0 answers
103 views

graphical representation that exemplifies the different between stressed-timed and syllable-timed languages

A student asked why English and French have different rhythms. luckily, I had an answer on hand: English is a stressed-timed language - rhythmic beats align with stressed syllables French is a ...
2 votes
0 answers
103 views

Does a good pronunciation improve one's ability to learn a language?

My father is a native Spanish speaker. He struggles with English pronunciation, and even though he has studied many English courses, he seems to be stuck. Once I talked with a phonetics teacher, with ...
2 votes
0 answers
77 views

French Auxiliary Selection. Theoretical explanations?

I've heard that Generative Approaches trying to explain Auxiliary Selection are mostly focused in Italian, because its a language which intransitive verbs respond pretty well to unaccusativity ...
2 votes
0 answers
70 views

As of July 2016, is there any new improved research on predicting French grammatical gender?

Please advise me if there are better research methods; I only searched for Related Articles on Google Scholar to the only 2 recent papers that I know: Cited Articles of French gender assignment ...
2 votes
0 answers
683 views

Thai pronunciation symbols and rules on IPA

Where can I find a set of IPA symbols for Thai language pronunciation and its rules? I know IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) was mainly created to represent the differences in sounds of words ...
2 votes
0 answers
804 views

Uvular Fricative Trill vs Uvular Fricative vs Preuvular Fricative

I'm having trouble differentiating the uvular trill, uvular, and preuvular fricatives. While I understand that the preuvular variant is more fronted, it sounds to me like many acclaimed uvular ...
2 votes
0 answers
783 views

How do you articulate the uvular trill, when you can already articulate the uvular fricative?

Key Assumptions: 1. My uncle speaks only General American English (so he cannot resort to other languages' phonetic inventories). Whenever he tries to phonate the uvular trill [ʀ], he fails and ...
2 votes
0 answers
1k views

'penance' vs 'penitence'

penance (n.) [←] late 13c., "religious discipline or self-mortification as a token of repentance and as atonement for some sin," from Anglo-French penaunce, Old French peneance (12c.), from ...

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