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Southern American English rice-rise distinction and IPA

On the talk page for Checked and free vowels, Angr wrote,

I've never seen any vowel of American English transcribed as /ɐː/, and only very rarely have I seen /ɐ/ used to transcribe the vowel of STRUT. /ɑ/ is the usual transcription for the vowel of father and bother in American accents where the two words rhyme. It's true that coastal Southern accents don't monophthongize the PRICE vowel before voiceless sounds, but considering Texas is the second-largest state in the union, it's probably fair to say the majority of people with Southern accents do say [hwaːt raːs] rather than [hwəɪt rəɪs] for white rice. But I still don't think anyone merges PRICE with TRAP even before voiced sounds; rad and ride are distinct in both quality and duration, as are span and spine. (However, the Southern breaking of the TRAP vowel plays a role in avoiding homophony; bad and bide are distinct at least in part because bad is /bæɪ(ə)d/.) The Southern monophthongized PRICE vowel is very much like the Bostonian START vowel; I knew a Bostonian named Mark who had to make phone calls to people all around the country in his job, and he complained how many people got his name wrong, because his pronunciation /maːk/ sounded just like a (non-coastal) Southerner's pronunciation of Mike. Angr (talk) 18:59, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Because this interesting conversation goes far beyond the topic of that talk page (which of course is the article itself, not the subject matter of the article), I'm taking the liberty of moving it over to the present page, which I hope Angr will not mind. (I'm also referring to Angr in the third person, rather than addressing him or her directly, just in case this conversation includes more than the two of us.)

• Coastal Southern accents: I'd say the distinction in vowels between RICE and RISE extends well beyond the Southern coast, no?

• Texas: Texas may be the second-largest State in the Union, but I would beware of extrapolating too much linguistically from that fact. Much, probably most, of Texas's population growth in recent decades (i.e. the growth that has made it the second-largest State) has come from immigration, not from native increase, and seems unlikely to involve a significant increase in the number of speakers of traditional Texan. See these maps of Texas population change 2000-2010 and Texas population 2010.

At least two of Texas's major cities, Houston and Austin, exhibit the RICE - RISE distinction, as does the large cotton-planting region of east Texas. See this informative map. (I spent several days in Austin a few years ago, and I was hard put to find a Southern accent, let alone a Texan. Not a soul greeted me with "Howdy", and I found nobody who would have said /hwæːt ɹæːs/--or /hwaːt ɹaːs/, or whatever the correct IPA is.)

• rad/ride, span/spine, etc.: I agree that these pairs differ in both quality and duration. Our disagreement seems to be over how the respective vowels should be represented in IPA, and I readily confess uncertainty about that. I think we agree on /ɹæd/ and /spæn/ for Gen. Am. The question is, how the monophthong spelt "i" in RIDE and SPINE should be represented in IPA? I originally asserted that there is no satisfactory IPA symbol for that phoneme, as it is pronounced in most of the South, because IPA can't distinguish between South-Carolinian PA (/pæ:/, see below) and PIE; but I'm not confident of that, and would like to hear what others think.

The point about breaking of the TRAP vowel is well taken for some Southern accents, but not entirely for mine, I think. I grew up saying, /træp/, not /træəp/. I do, however, break the vowel before a voiced consonant, as in CAB, /kæəb/. I don't remember whether that comes from my eastern-Virginia upbringing or my parents' South-Carolinian. South-Carolinian, in any event, does (or did) have a long, unbroken /æ/ sound in open syllables, which I've never encountered elsewhere in the U.S. My father's Charlestonian grandmother was called /ˈɡræmˌmæː/, and my mother's father called his parents /mæ:/ and /pæ:/. The vowel in all these words is that in Gen. Am. PAT, not in SAE PIE or Gen. Am. PA or Gen. Am. PAW.

• Bostonian /maːk/: In my experience, it doesn't take much to start a Bostonian complaining, so I would hesitate to draw broad conclusions from this anecdote. ;0) Kidding aside, our interpretations of what we hear are subjective, and we often think we're hearing a familiar sound or word when a speaker utters an unfamiliar one. A cousin of mine was raised on army bases and speaks Gen. Am., but his mother speaks South Carolina Piedmontese. I remember as a boy hearing him talk about "/pai-pai/" the Sailor because he couldn't distinguish between the vowels of POP and EYE in his mother's speech. I think it's quite likely that random Americans will be more accustomed to hearing the RISE monophthong in MIKE than they are the non-rhotic New England pronunciation of MARK, and will naturally mistake the latter for the former, even if the respective vowels are not objectively identical.

Sorry to reply at such length to Angr's concise paragraph! Feel free, but not obliged, to respond in kind. J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 18:50, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

It's a really great anecdote, though. Someone needs to use it in a mistaken-identity movie.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:19, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

TGB

[1]It is a node in Eska (2010) and cited in Glottolog. — kwami (talk) 19:48, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, it hardly seems to have garnered enough acceptance for us to be putting it in infoboxes. Angr (talk) 18:56, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

May 2014

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Request for comment

Hello there, a proposal regarding pre-adminship review has been raised at Village pump by Anna Frodesiak. Your comments here is very much appreciated. Many thanks. Jim Carter through MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:46, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Template:Profanity

Hello there. Way back in 2006 you closed an TfD for Template:Profanity as delete. I'd like to recreate it looking something like this:

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Category:Profanity

Documentation[create] [purge]

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Would that be okay? Best wishes, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:00, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and sorry for the above massmessaging post. I had nothing to do with that. The user just decided on his own to send it out to 1,000 admins on my behalf. I was not pleased. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:02, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Sure, that's fine. Your proposed template is eminently encyclopedic and has nothing at all to do with the original content. Angr (talk) 22:01, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Yay! Many thanks. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 03:09, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Stanford

Thank you for your contributions. I have repaired the damage. Tim riley talk 17:22, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Parable

Hey, I stumbled onto your page by looking at Irish phonology's old FAC, since I was (and have now nominated thus) working on the Czech language article for GAN, the first article on a language to seek such a status AFAIK in several years. Naturally, I wanted to know what kinds of things might come up down the road. Anyway, your parable is very clever and, since I'm a vegetarian (leaning towards vegan, with varying success) myself, I was able to empathize acutely with its message. I will say that while I too think Wikipedia's stance on fair use images is inconsistent, I advocate being more liberal rather than restrictive with them, largely because I work mainly on video game-related pages, a subset of the encyclopedia I know you're not a fan of. Anyway, just wanted to drop by to mention the essay (though if you have any tips for language articles, that's great too). Tezero (talk) 02:53, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Burmese Alphabet

Sanskrit: 'मृण्माक्षरः'

The Burmese script (mranma akkha.ra) belongs to the Brahmic family. The term 'mranma akkha.ra' itself derives from मृण्माक्षरः in Sanskrit which means 'the letters of the land'. You may need to refer to the grammar of Sanskrit language, the word formation in Sanskrit, and its impact on Burmese as well; so for being able to appreciate the direct and indirect evidences.

Karyakarta (talk) 05:30, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Right, but where are you getting this Sanskrit word? The Monier-Williams dictionary doesn't list any such word as मृण्माक्षरः. The closest thing it has to that is मृण्मय, which it calls a wrong reading for मृन्मय 'made of earth or clay, earthen'. At best that sounds like a folk etymology for the Burmese မြန်မာ, which is of unclear etymology (see Names of Burma#"Mranma") but is far more likely to be either a native Tibeto-Burman word or a Mon loanword than a Sanskrit word. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 06:29, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Lang-en-US

Template:Lang-en-US has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. George Ho (talk) 07:21, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Lang-en-GB

Template:Lang-en-GB has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. George Ho (talk) 17:24, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

A pint for you!

Thanks for your revision and repair on KCON (music festival) - "restore original lead that is both more informative and more NPOV" - I wanted to do so, but have contributed to the page & didn't want to parse with others. Good call Angr! User:Bonnielou2013 August 27, 2014 Bonnielou2013 (talk) 21:31, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Stephen Hopkins (Mayflower passenger)

I wonder if you would check back with this talk page. The objections you had regarding author Caleb Johnson have been answered and several examples have been given. Would like to hear if your opinion has changed so we know how to proceed. Thankyou. Mugginsx (talk) 12:11, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm still not thrilled with using self-published sources, but it seems everyone else is content with recognizing Johnson as an expert, so I'm not going argue about it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:04, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I think this is the only author I have ever used that is both self-published and published by other sources and I do agree with you in principle on authors that are only self-published. Mugginsx (talk) 17:41, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Wait...

You're an administrator here as well?

Are you some overman or something?! How in the world can you manage so many things at once? Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 22:08, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

General American

Could you check that the recent changes to that article are correct? I don't do IPA and none of it seems sourced. Rmhermen (talk) 03:45, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Of course sources would be best, but the changes themselves look OK to me. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:24, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Invitation

Hello. I invite you to this discussion about changes to Help:IPA for Dutch and Afrikaans. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 12:02, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

List of closed pairs of English rhyming words

I have started the article "List of closed pairs of English rhyming words", based largely on the discussion archived at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 February 13#Words with exactly one rhyme.
—Wavelength (talk) 21:48, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day

Happy First Edit Day, Mahagaja, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Lizzie Harrison 20:47, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Wow, hard to believe I've stuck around here for 10 years! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:48, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

January 2015

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• forms found in Sanskrit and a large number of grammatical forms that are not found in Marathi. (Examples of this are found in many works like ''[[Dnyaneshwari]]'', and ''Leela Charitra''.<ref
• * Exodus ( between 1312–1327 when General [[Malik Kafur]] of the [[Delhi Sultanate|Delhi Sultans]], [[
• the middle and modern Indo-Aryan languages including Konkani. Consider the Sanskrit word "स्नुषा" (daughter-in law. Here, the ष is dropped,and स्नु alone is utilised, स्नु-->स/नु and you get the word सुन (metathesis of ''ukar'').<ref name=meta>{{cite book|last=Pandarinath|
• ] script in their writings while the Goan Catholics use the Roman script (called [[Romi Konkani]])]]. The Saraswats of [[Karnataka]] use the Devanagari script in the North Kanara district, but those
• Thakri (Spoken by the Adivasi and katkari community found in Raigad district.

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Language-population update project

Hi. The 18th edition of Ethnologue just came out, and if we divide up our language articles among us, it won't take long to update them. I would appreciate it if you could help out, even if it's just a few articles (5,000 articles is a lot for just me), but I won't be insulted if you delete this request.

A largely complete list of articles to be updated is at Category:Language articles citing Ethnologue 17. The priority articles are in Category:Language articles with old Ethnologue 17 speaker data. These are the 10% that have population figures at least 25 years old.

Probably 90% of the time, Ethnologue has not changed their figures between the 17th and 18th editions, so all we need to do is change "e17" to "e18" in the reference (ref) field of the language info box. That will change the citation for the artcle to the current edition. Please put the data in the proper fields, or the info box will flag it as needing editorial review. The other relevant fields are "speakers" (the number of native speakers in all countries), "date" (the date of the reference or census that Ethnologue uses, not the date of Ethnologue!), and sometimes "speakers2". Our convention has been to enter e.g. "1990 census" when a census is used, as other data can be much older than the publication date. Sometimes a citation elsewhere in the article depends on the e17 entry, in which case you will need to change "name=e17" to "name=e18" in the reference tag (assuming the 18th edition still supports the cited claim).

Remember, we want the *total* number of native speakers, which is often not the first figure given by Ethnologue. Sometimes the data is too incompatible to add together (e.g. a figure from the 1950s for one country, and a figure from 2006 for another), in which case it should be presented that way. That's one use for the "speakers2" field. If you're not sure, just ask, or skip that article.

Data should not be displayed with more than two, or at most three, significant figures. Sometimes it should be rounded off to just one significant figure, e.g. when some of the component data used by Ethnologue has been approximated with one figure (200,000, 3 million, etc.) and the other data has greater precision. For example, a figure of 200,000 for one country and 4,230 for another is really just 200,000 in total, as the 4,230 is within the margin of rounding off in the 200,000. If you want to retain the spurious precision of the number in Ethnologue, you might want to use the {{sigfig}} template. (First parameter in this template is for the data, second is for the number of figures to round it off to.)

Dates will often need to be a range of all the country data in the Ethnologue article. When entering the date range, I often ignore dates from countries that have only a few percent of the population, as often 10% or so of the population isn't even separately listed by Ethnologue and so is undated anyway.

If Ethnologue does not provide a date for the bulk of the population, just enter "no date" in the date field. But if the population figure is undated, and hasn't changed between the 17th & 18th editions of Ethnologue, please leave the ref field set to "e17", and maybe add a comment to keep it so that other editors don't change it. In cases like this, the edition of Ethnologue that the data first appeared in may be our only indication of how old it is. We still cite the 14th edition in a couple dozen articles, so our readers can see that the data is getting old.

The articles in the categories linked above are over 90% of the job. There are probably also articles that do not currently cite Ethnologue, but which we might want to update with the 18th edition. I'll need to generate another category to capture those, probably after most of the Ethnologue 17 citations are taken care of.

Jump in at the WP:LANG talk page if you have any comments or concerns. Thanks for any help you can give!

— kwami (talk) 02:46, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

br/?

Hi Angr. Sorry, I should have done this in the first place, rather than reverting you, and I certainly should have looked more closely - I hadn't seen the disam link you added.

What I did see was that you've added a / to a br in the Faking It infobox. I've not seen that before in br's on WP and was wondering what difference it makes - certainly, it doesn't seem to affect the display? Bromley86 (talk) 21:46, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

No, it doesn't make a difference to display, but it's "cleaner" code to close every HTML element with a slash (either <xyz>...</xyz> if the element needs to surround something else or <xyz/> if it doesn't). It's just a good habit to get into. I notice because I use the Syntax highlighter (available on the Gadgets tab of Special:Preferences), and if <br> is used rather than <br/> then the whole rest of the page turns pink (which indicates an unclosed tag). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 22:39, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks and, again, apologies. Bromley86 (talk) 22:53, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Pundling listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Pundling. Since you had some involvement with the Pundling redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. --Stfg (talk) 10:29, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Angie Waller

Hello. You deleted a page by the above title on 11 November 2009. A new article with the same title is available at Draft:Angie_Waller. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 00:12, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Bit of a long shot maybe...

... but since your username is in Old Norse, maybe you could help out here: Talk:Einherjar#Pronunciation? --Shirt58 (talk) 02:42, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

The fact that my username is also an Old Norse word is pure coincidence. I did take a class in Old Norse at college, but we used modern Icelandic pronunciation for it, and that was over 25 years ago anyway, so I really don't feel qualified to add pronunciation info. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:19, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

That still makes you over 9,000 percent better qualified than me! It was a question asked at here. Thanks for replying, most appreciated.--Shirt58 (talk) 08:49, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

A bowl of strawberries for you!

:D Lucahh (talk) 21:12, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! They were delicious! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:24, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Notice of No Original Research Noticeboard discussion

Hello, Angr. This message is being sent to inform you that a discussion is taking place at Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Is it OK for pronunciation symbols to be Original Research?. Thank you. ----mach 🙈🙉🙊 13:56, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Wikipedia:DEUTSCH listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:DEUTSCH. Since you had some involvement with the Wikipedia:DEUTSCH redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. —Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 23:59, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day

Happy First Edit Day, Mahagaja, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Happy Squirrel (talk) 20:29, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Bugeilio'r gwenith gwyn

I've left you the following message at Welsh Wikisource:

Hi, I have been working on Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn and hope that you can help.

1. In 2008 you created a Wikisource page for the words of s:cy:Bugeilio'r gwenith gwyn, but you did not give a source for the words. Please add the source if you still have it.
2. Please see Talk:Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn#Different versions of Welsh words. Can you comment on the differences between the versions and on which version we should use? Have you anything to add to the other points I have raised on the talk page?

Thanks, Verbcatcher (talk) 19:05, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Answered at Talk:Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn#Different versions of Welsh words. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 22:13, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

RM discussion

You previously contributed to discussion on the naming of the article currently at Ring, Co. Waterford. There is currently a Requested Move discussion on that page, which you may wish to contribite to. Regards, Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 12:25, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Cross-project name collision?

Saw "Hackers turn to angr for automated exploit discovery and patching" and this and thought of you, and the problem of people misreading the 'meaning' of your name. The software includes:

• "A GUI for some features of angr: angr-management."

If you ended up writing an article about this software, would that be WP:COI?   ;-)  

Best wishes to you and yours! Shenme (talk) 14:15, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh dear. I wonder if it's too late to change my username. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:19, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Irish language

Do you have any familiarity with the Irish language? I'm trying to figure out why the language's name for itself, Gaeilge, is transcribed in IPA as [ˈɡeːlʲɟə], when I hear an inserted phone (perhaps a labial consonant or rounded vowel) very clearly in most of the pronunciations found here. The first syllable fairly consistently seems to sound like what in English might be spelled "gwell." To me, the first syllable as transcribed in IPA would be pronounced something like the English word "gale." Wolfdog (talk) 20:18, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Nonnative speakers (native English speakers who have learned Irish in school) do often say [ɡʷeːlɟə], but for native speakers there's usually no rounding at all. What there is is an unrounded velar offglide that may strike English-speaking ears as sounding like /w/. A narrower transcription could thus be [ˈɡɰeːlʲɟə]. Since English doesn't contrast velarized and palatalized consonants, our /ɡ/ in "gale" is actually a little palatalized, so it's further forward in the mouth than the Irish unpalatalized /ɡ/. When I first learned Irish, my teacher got me to say caoin /kiːn/ correctly by telling me to say "queen" without rounding my lips. That's quite different from saying "keen". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:19, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm... Interesting stuff. Thanks for the explanation! Wolfdog (talk)