Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Liza Minnelli to thread

Sean Connery and Ally McCoisht to thread.

ztfu everyone

There are no special IPA symbols for /s/ and /z/ - they are just /s/ and /z/ - dunno why we need to talk about 'soft' and 'hard' as it is always confusing.

is it or isnt it

Apologies for introducing the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative into the discussion for cheap laughs.

his work really fell off after live flesh

lol

blouse/blousy

I thought that US English changed a lot of what is represented by the letter s in English spelling to z precisely because of that differentiation.

& would have thought of the more liquid s sound as soft and the more curt z sound as hard but that could just be synaesthetic association.
& think there are several other letters that voiced/unvoiced differentiation is true of depending on what letters it is juxtaposed with.

An interesting one is "abuse", where the "s" becomes voiced when it goes from noun to verb, with no change in spelling.

blouse/blousy

blowze/blowzy

(early 17th century: from obsolete blowze ‘beggar's female companion’, of unknown origin.)

floss / floozy

thought 1: if you mean ise vs ize, the z form was not introduced by american spelling and is not present by reason of american usage (OED favours "ize" where relevant). it's there because the early root form of the relevant word is classical greek, and it began to be swapped out (in the UK) by printers tending followed the subsequent french versions of the root (which tended to convert the z to an s).

thought 2: it's possibly simply by association with soft c -- viz "soft c" is sss hence s pron.sss must be the "soft s")

thought 3: someone else can pick this one up

"Blousy" can also mean "like a blouse" but now that I'm slightly more awake, I think I do use a voiced consonant in "blouse" anyway, although my parents don't. This may change again after I drink coffee.

Thought 3: the grave iirc

as with grammar it's a bit of a clown's errand anyway trying to pin down reliable eng lang rules of pronunciation

such as there arertend to arrive in the form "i before e except after c, when the sound is eeee, or when sounded as *guido voice* "EEEY!" except in february alone each leap year, when the moon is in the second house, plus also there's when *dies*"

it is an irregular language with a great deal of valuably unruly regional variation

Ha, was "except after c" there just because of "ceiling"? I haven't had coffee yet but I can't recall what other "cei" words a 7yo might have occasion to use.

receive and just possibly receipt i guess

Ah

Someone get sund4r a coffee already

in hackney we call it soffee

That the Zing icon means ilx could be mistaken for a MAGA forum

That MAGA is just a ripoff of Thatcher's "Make Great Britain Great Again", without a play on words or faded empire.

There are no special IPA symbols for /s/ and /z/ - they are just /s/ and /z/ - dunno why we need to talk about 'soft' and 'hard' as it is always confusing.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Sunday, August 25, 2019 11:41 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Looking up that IPA symbols list it looks like it breaks down along the same lines I would have thought of as soft and hard. /s/ covers what has been called soft c as well as the more fluid/liquid/whatever s sound, presumably the default s sound
whereas /z/ covers the other s sound as in desert, -ised and whatever alongside things normally spelt with the letter z.

I would have broken that down to soft and hard since I'd say it follows the pattern delineating the difference between hard and soft c or g and other letters I would have thought of as hard and soft sounding.

"soft" and "hard" are not linguistic terms and they are not esp useful for describing sounds/phonemes

IPA is the best reliable way to describe the sounds that human mouths produce as well as suprasegmental features like intonation, stress, etc

i did not just learn that -- i am responding to the above discussion about lousiness

I think what they are getting at is the difference between voiced and unvoiced sounds, maybe? "soft" meaning unvoiced? But it is still a poor way to refer to it, there's an underlying assumption that orthography represents pronunciation in some deliberate way, there is just a /s/ and a /z/ and they can be represented in a load of different ways.

Yeah, no one calls the "g" in "guitar" a "hard 'c'" or says that the "v" in "velvet" is a hard "f" so "voiced" vs "voiceless" would be a better way of describing the distinction (if you're not going to use IPA). However, it was completely clear to me (and I'm guessing most here) what Stevolende meant by "hard and soft 's'" so I didn't think it necessary to pick that nit.

Voicing is part of IPA! Aspiration too. It covers everything that is why it’s the best. Long/short/hard/soft are the layman’s terms that help elementary school students learn to read; they are useful terms for that purpose but not universally understood the way IPA terms/notation are for describing linguistic features. I swear I’ve been yammering on Ilx about this for nearly 15 years.

However, it was completely clear to me (and I'm guessing most here) what Stevolende meant by "hard and soft 's'" so I didn't think it necessary to pick that nit.

No, I was totally confused as I would've put them the other way around, I'd associate the /s/ sound in louse with being "hard", it just... seems that it is to me, on a sonic/connotation-based level rather than a scholarly linguistic one. Voiced and voiceless are so much easier for me (though tbf I have qualifications that mean I know my way around IPA pretty well, so not vouching for their ease for other people, I guess).

Actually, I think I associate all voiceless consonants with being "harder" sounding than voiced ones. They're proper full stops whereas voiced consonants flow.

Shameful confession: I have an English degree, in the course of which I studied linguistics with considerable enthusiasm, thirtymumble years ago. All too often, IPA just looks like gibberish (or denotes a type of beer) to me.

Michelangelo's David is 17 ft tall:

logistically, i knew michelangelo's david was 17 feet tall. somehow that knowledge does not translate as well as seeing this image: pic.twitter.com/FKS5JAAChn

— 🍂🍁 B I R D J A Y 🍁🍂 (@humdrumvee) August 29, 2019

Same. I would've put him around nine or ten feet.

Ok me too...apparently the reason we think of him as closer to scale is because his head and torso were made disproportionately larger than the rest of his body, in order to mitigate tapering perspective when seen from below....

But also it seems they've got him turned around the wrong way:

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/mcculloch.2/arch/david/David.htm

Do we know that woman's not six inches tall?

absolute unit

Yes David, taking after the architecture of the Disney Parks, employs forced perspective to make him seem bigger than he is. If you get what I'm saying. When I say 'bigger' I mean. I'm talking about his ding dong.

Mine's bigger

And doesn't break off

just cuz it hasn’t yet doesn’t mean it won’t

I thought the Greeks had a thing about small being beautiful when it came to that.

In all these British spy/thriller shows, they are not calling the women in authority 'mom', 'mum' or 'marm'. I found this out last night while watching The Bodyguard with closed captioning on.

yeah there's a very soft d ;-)

I heard ur mum likes very soft

all your moms and dads likes the very soft d.

So soft it's non-existent though?

Well it's normally spelt 30th an apostrophe to show where it was. So progressively soft over time. Until it's more conspicuous by its absence but thats what it was.
French, like.

In all these British spy/thriller shows, they are not calling the women in authority 'mom', 'mum' or 'marm'. I found this out last night while watching The Bodyguard with closed captioning on.

Wait, I'm confused - you have "ma'am" in the US, yeah? So you didn't realise our "ma'am" was the same word?