Darin Flynn

That was fun, thanks. His monophthongized /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ made me think he was latino, as many suggested, but I was thrown off by his “different to,” which suggests a British influence. Minnesota/Wisconsin makes sense for these features, but only after the fact ;)

YouTube video by Evan Edinger The Strange Rules of America's Most Confusing Accent

“The strange rules of America’s most confusing accent” by Evan Edinger (Feb. ’26) www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec0-...

Gricean maxxing

The highlighted example suggests freedom vs. un+freedom, but grammatically, the latter must be unfree+dom. It’s interesting, because phonologically I also prefer the compound-like un+freedom, as opposed to suffixing -dom to the compound-like unfree

If Wells is right that <aer> causes speakers to go for a long vowel, I imagine there are speakers out there who disyllabify it: /ˈmeɪ̯.əɹsk/. The final unstressed rhyme -əɹsk is still pretty crazy for English! (Cf. Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk, which I imagine was /sɪmˈbɜɹsk/ or /ˈsɪmˌbɜɹsk/ in English?)

Maersk is /mɛɹsk/ for me, which has a crazy enough rhyme, but Wells (2008) claims that the vowel is also long (as in Mary): /mɛəɹsk/ (Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd edn.)

Also via dan-sk: Maersk’s a Danish company. I mean, c’mon: [mɛəɹ̠sks]

“Quantitative evidence of complex metrical prosody in Chugach Alutiiq” by McKinley Alden and Anja Arnhold (Feb. ’26) doi.org/10.1016/j.wo...

New info on the cool tonogenesis that’s underway among young Seoulites: “The effect of contrast-specific minimal pair competitor in hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 phonetic cues in Korean initial stops in tonogenetic sound change” by Cheonkam Jeong and Andrew Wedel (Feb. ’26) doi.org/10.1016/j.wo...

“Crossing the boundaries: perception of voice onset time in word-initial stops by multilingual learners” by Zuzanna Cal (Feb. ’26) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

“Palatalization is a lexically triggered phonological process operating at multiple levels” by Anna Poĺomská (Jan. ’26) www.researchgate.net/publication/...

“Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe” by Ilina Bhaya-Grossman, Matthew K. Leonard, Yizhen Zhang, Laura Gwilliams, Keith Johnson, Junfeng Lu and Edward F. Chang (Jan. ’26) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Btw, rhotic dialects have more of these exceptional antepenultimate cases, e.g. ‘allergen’ /(ˈæ.lǝɹʤn)/ → /(ˈæ.lǝɹ).ʤn/. Incidentally the serial approach feels especially abstract to me with final [i], e.g., ‘cavalry’ /(ˈkævǝlɹj)/ → /(ˈkævǝl)ɹi/—but it works at explaining ə-final stems; cf. *CAvalra

In rhotic areas like mine, it’s about ə-final words, which is why serialists do stuff like “regular penultimate” /(ˈkæ.ləndɹ̠)/ → “irregular surface antepenultimate” /(ˈkæ.lən).dɹ̠/; cf. */ˈkæləndə/. That strong intuition of mine is probably unlearnable and therefore untenable in non-rhotic varieties

Cool! Thanks

I'm from the US midwest, with some southern traits; for me, these are syllabic L:

[pʰɫ̩z], [pʰɫ̩s]
[ʃɫ̩ts], [ʃɫ̩z]
[ˈbɫ̩zˌwɫ̩], [ˈbɫ̩bɫ̩]
[pʰɫ̩pɪʔ], [pʰɫ̩pɪŋ]
[ˈbɫ̩ˌhɛɾ], [ˈbɫ̩ˌkɛɾ]
[ˈbɫ̩jɪ̈n], [ˈbɫ̩d͡ʒɪŋ]
[ˈbɫ̩mɪ̈n], [ˈbɫ̩bɪ̈s]

“Gesture and information structure: a case study on gestural topic markers in southern Italo-Romance” by Valentina Colasanti and Chiara Marchetiello (Feb. ’26) www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/app/uploads/...

Verb ellipsis klaxon:
[characters discuss marriage]
'Ever been?'
'Married? No.'
#linguistics

Love it. Far more natural than the crass “would” meme

Open access source: “Redefining the Epiclassic Period in Mesoamerica: Proceedings of the Copenhagen Roundtable” ed. by Claudia I. Alvarado León and Christophe Helmke (Feb. ’26) www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress...

“Grosso modo” map of the hypothesized distribution of language families and isolates in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (c. ad 1–550) from “The linguistic panorama of the epiclassic: placing Nahuan among the languages of western Mesoamerica” by @magnuspharao.bsky.social Hansen (Feb. ’26)

“My” dictionary, too, only reports (completely ungrammatical) /ˈjɑɹməlkə/, as opposed to actual /ˈjɑməkə/

‘yarmulke’ is /ˈjɑ(ɹ)mʊlkə/ or /ˈjɑ(ɹ)məlkə/ in several dictionaries, but the initial stress here is quite ungrammatical in English phonology unless the /l/ is dropped. English could potentially manage a pseudocompound like /ˈjɑɹˌmʊlkə/ or /ˈjɑɹˌmʌlkə/, but no dictionary reports such pronunciations

Nice! Would you be comfortable sharing the general region of your accent?

Another quandary? The antecedent lies outside the clause with the reflexive, so non-reflexive ‘him’ might be better, unless ‘looking’ is weirdly high-adjoined, but the man joined his own search party, so he’s semantically tauto-clausal with ‘himself,’ but ‘search party’ would weirdly favour ‘itself’

Does you variety have the BULL–HULL merger? If so, please humour me and try these near-minimal pairs:

pulls vs. pulse
Schul(t)z vs. Shull’s (US physicist)
bullswool vs. bulbal
pulpit vs. pulping
bullhead vs. bulkhead
bullion vs. bulging
Bul(l)man vs. bulbous

Second-greatest repeat Columbo villain Patrick McGoohan’s sublime rendering here is second only to pronouncing the game as 麻雀兒 /mo²² t͡ɕiã⁵³/ = “sparrow” + nasalized erhua diminutive in the 上海吳语 Shanghainese Wu of the Yangtze Delta where the game originated.

Whoa

Ha, the speaker is in/from Toronto, so it’s possible. Btw: