Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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?

xp- that was normally spelt with an apostrophe until my autocorrect got to it

Throw Maugham into the mix

ma'am like slam. I thought calling women "mum/mom" was a british thing like mami.

and Rob Stark is very heavyhanded with all the "yes, mom" in The Bodyguard.

i was wondering when Kevin Costner would ever say "ma'am" in an English accent

wait til you hear what arse means

I worked at a bar in London for 6 months and whenever anyone would say "you all right" i would do a total paranoid "yes, why, what have you heard, is something wrong?"

I've been in the UK for a year now and it still feels that way tbh.

That Golgotha and Calvary were the same thing. I thought Golgotha consisted of residue from dying bodies on Calvary.
Does somebody in another media use Golgotha asa monster somewhere? Comic or Anne Rice or someone?

Calvary is also about the best track on Happy Trails btw. Nice atmospheric Cippolina meets Morricone greatness.

i've been in the UK for 12 years and i still get a little defensive about 'you all right?' i'm like, why shouldn't i be

that calvary is different from cavalry

one's a bunch of people on horses and the other is either a location in Jerusalem which was where a bunch of people supposedly including the historical Jesus got crucified, or a place that the Winter Olympics were held in Canada at one point.

just slightly too late with that information stevolende

Seems like it came up on another thread right before this one.

or a place that the Winter Olympics were held in Canada at one point.

subs plz chk

i've been in the UK for 12 years and i still get a little defensive about 'you all right?' i'm like, why shouldn't i be

You need to say "yeah not so bad, how's yerself?" and all will be well. If we said "hey how ya doin'?" like Americans do the responses would be all "can't complain / oh, fine, fine, you know? / it's a good life if you don't weaken" etc and it wouldn't work.

once something like that is explained to you, how does it stay an issue for ya tho?