Dominic Watt

Thrilled that The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice, published barely a month ago, has won its first award: Curtin University's "Publication of the Year"! 🏆 (Co-editor Sender Dovchin works at Curtin.) 🎉 Get yours here 😉: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

That's right, of course, depending on what you mean by 'too fast'.

But I'm sure you'd agree that the real threat to the safety, health and convenience of all road users isn't cyclists, even if some of them - us - do ride like idiots.

It's lucky that car owners aren't at all interested in trying to outdo each other in spec or speed, or the streets could get quite dangerous.

Lycra is a very practical thing to wear if you have a longer commute. Perhaps these lucky Danes don't have to go far to get where they're going. (What's wrong with Lycra anyway? And dropped handlebars?).

That's true.

I think in the present case it's important to be clear that a cluster that is being portrayed as somehow 'difficult' or 'unfamiliar' because it occurs in an 'exotic' name is neither difficult nor unfamiliar to English speakers. Why is "Mamdani" hard but, say, "dumb Donnie" isn't? 😉

If all /md/ sequences have a morpheme or word boundary in the middle, then none should be harder than any other. And since the tongue isn't used for /m/, the articulatory naturalness of [nd] vs. [md] is moot. English contrasts pairs like 'scanned'~'scammed', so /md/ is clearly perceptually OK too.

Monosyllabic words that end with /md/ are common in English, so I don't think it's true to say that English speakers aren't accustomed to producing the sequence, even if they might say they find it 'hard'. Are seemed, slimmed, claimed, stemmed, jammed, armed, bombed, roamed, or zoomed 'hard' words?

I don't suppose anyone who claims it's hard to say /md/ in the name 'Mamdani' would say that the same sequence in, for example, 'someday' or 'Camden' is difficult, but I take the point.

(You don't use your tongue to make an /m/ sound, for what it's worth, but again I take the point).

This is a screenshot of the volume cover. The Oxford Handbook of Language & Prejudice, edited by Jane Setter, Sender Dovchin, & Vijay A. Ramjattan The cover art shows a green balloon with "kein mensch ist illegal" written on it.

The Oxford Handbook of Language & Prejudice, edited by Jane Setter, Sender Dovchin, and yours truly, rearticulates and expands upon the connections between language and prejudice.

It is available for pre-order, so please ask your university or local library to order a copy:

shorturl.at/gDhJA

English Accents and Dialects | An Introduction to Social and Regional English Accents and Dialects is an essential guide to contemporary social and regional varieties of English spoken in the British Isles today. Together with

It's not the most recent source out there, but you might find the recordings that accompany this book of some use.

www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

There's plenty of material in the IDEA archive:

www.dialectsarchive.com

Accent bias as a barrier to social mobility | ABI

I gave a keynote on accent bias and social mobility at the ABI (Assoc. of British Insurers) last week. Alongside my keynote, they invited me to write a blog post on our work which you can now read below:

www.abi.org.uk/news/blog-ar...

Allowing, of course, for the normative effects of the conventions of written English, decisions made by editors, and so on. Jones was principally interested in the trends in the phonetics of spoken English, and statistical tendencies in published texts don't always map very directly onto those.

787. h is occasionally dropped in initial unstressed syllables of longer words, such as horizon, historical, hotel. Thus it would be quite usual to pronounce on the horizon, from the historical point of view as ɔn ði əˈraizn, frəm ði isˈtɔrikl pɔint ə(v) vjuː. Those who pronounce the h in hotel when said by itself would often drop it in a good hotel ə ˈgud ouˈtel.

As suggested by the extract from Daniel Jones' "Outline of English Phonetics" that I posted earlier, until recently it could well have been 'an horizontal line' for some speakers who'd normally avoid /h/-dropping. Goes to show how arbitrary (= silly) many rules of 'proper pronunciation' are.

Probably just as well it's so uncommon these days, then!

Can you say why?

787. h is occasionally dropped in initial unstressed syllables of longer words, such as horizon, historical, hotel. Thus it would be quite usual to pronounce on the horizon, from the historical point of view as ɔn ði əˈraizn, frəm ði isˈtɔrikl pɔint ə(v) vjuː. Those who pronounce the h in hotel when said by itself would often drop it in a good hotel ə ˈgud ouˈtel.

Jones says this, on p. 203 of the 1969 edition of his 'Outline of English Phonetics'. 'An historic(al)' hangs on among English English speakers who avoid /h/-dropping, but 'an hotel' is archaic. For habitual /h/-droppers, it's a different story: 'an' would be the expected form.

🙏

In Scotland, 'rare' also means 'exceptionally good'. If you say 'I had a rare holiday' you're not saying that you don't often take holidays.

I've just been down there and it's looking great - many thanks for all your hard work, as ever! 🙏

As you'll know, L&M - which I used in my teaching for 25 years or so - covers h (they don't use bracketing) in the Vowels chapter. So there's obviously something unusual about this fricative.

I'm sure subscribers other than myself must be curious to know which languages have /h/, but no [h].

So there are languages where the pronunciation of /h/ depends on its phonological environment, OK. In some contexts it's [h], elsewhere it's a vowel, or silence.

But you say that 'most languages with /h/' don't have a consonantal allophone. Can you give examples? Why posit /h/ is present at all?

Phonemic contrasts depend on phonetic contrasts. Otherwise, how are children acquiring a language going to know that phoneme X is different from phoneme Y? Why would they suppose that /h/ functions as a 'consonant' if there's nothing consonantal about it in the phonetic domain?

You don't specify what makes the sound perceptible as an [h] (or some other consonant), though. If it isn't an [h] because there's no constriction to the airflow, why would anyone perceive it as such?

You say "[h] is a voiceless glottal fricative, made by constricting the flow of air through the glottis" but then "In most languages, [h] technically doesn't involve any constriction of airflow, so it isn't *phonetically* a consonant."

In what sense do these languages have [h], then?

The picture accompanying this article is of Scotland, as it happens, rather than Yorkshire.

British 999 caller's voice cloned by Russian network using AI A BBC Verify investigation has revealed that the identities of British public sector workers have been cloned using AI by a Russian-linked disinformation campaign.

bbc.com/news/videos/...

Why do the British pronounce “herb” with an /h/? Why don’t Americans pronounce herb with an /h/?

linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/herb/

Scottish Wildcat (Felis silvestris) - Woodland Trusticon/search

Would you find it more exciting to see a wild cat in the wild than a feral cat in town? The two can interbreed and look more or less the same. The distinction is really down to whether they live among us gum chewers or not.

Wild cat? Wow. Feral cat? Meh.

www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-...

Rather than parrot what the RSPB has to say about the 'true, wild' rock dove/feral pigeon distinction, I'll just post the link:

www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wi...