l i n g s t u f f

(via @culmaer )

Something I've noticed in my (mostly SSBE) is that some lexical items contains old RP "triphthongs" are more prone to breaking into two syllables than others, to the extent that some are almost exclusively heard with two syllables whilst others are frequently long monophthongs (with occasional breaking to two syllables when subject to sentence-level stress)

As far as I can tell this seems to be a spelling pronunciation thing, with the words that are more frequently bisyllabic having "visually" bisyllabic spellings

As an example, I have a partial split between flour & flower (which are historically a single word even though the different senses have different spellings, and afaik are not pronounced differently in any significant variety) where flour exhibits the usual alternation of mostly long monopthong /æ:/ in rapid speech but sometimes bisyllabic /æʊ̯ə/ when subject to strong stress at the sentence level whilst flower has the exceptional pattern of being bisyllabic /æʊ̯ə/ except in very rapid speech and in especially unstressed position in the sentence

This phenomenon appears to be fairly consistent across the lexicon (and I learnt to read early enough that such systematic spelling pronunciation isn't as surprising as it might normally be thought), but I'm not sure it is here.

"Singlish combines Singapore’s four official languages – English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil – as well as dialects such as Teochew, Hokkien and Cantonese.

The language, which has its own grammatical structure and distinctive pronunciation, does away with most prepositions, verb conjugations and plural forms. For example, “Why are you behaving like this?” is translated to “Why you liddat?” in Singlish.

hard at work making phonetics worse

lets go through the meanings to better

Hither means to here, so come hither means come to here to this place

Hence means from here, from this place (hence its other meaning of from this idea to another)

Whither means to where? what is the place it is going?

Whence means from What or Where? from where something came (go back whence you came)

Thither means to there, to that place (go thither and do your task)

Thence means to That or there, Thither is the place they will go

Yonder means to Yond (Yond is a form of There but for distance) so it means to that place far away

Yons means from that place far away, from Yence it shall go

unfortunately a couple of these have been rendered superfluous by Grammatical shifts and To deletion, but they are useful for writing if you want to sound cool

"Therapy-speak is the imprecise and superficial integration of psychotherapy language into everyday communication, especially by privileged or wealthy people. Despite the advantages of normalizing psychotherapy language, such as resisting epistemic injustice and enhancing awareness of mental health issues, therapy-speak raises important concerns.