firespeaker.org

(15:54:50) spectie: is that real dutch

(15:54:52) spectie: or joke dutch ?

(15:55:06) spectie: sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference ... :|

(00:09:00) [anon]: spreche kann nicht deitch

(00:09:03) [anon]: deuitch

(00:09:07) [anon]: deutcsch

(00:09:09) [anon]: deutsch

(00:09:10) [anon]: or something

(00:09:13) [me]: those are all dialects

(04:31:14) kesuari: i could've sworn that on the heirarchy of cool letters, ø was way higher than ö

(19:23:46) [me]: stressed and unstressed clitics are used that way

(19:23:53) [me]: at least in AmE

(19:24:11) kesuari: well yeah, they're used like that here too --- but they shouldn't be

...

(19:24:29) [me]: now you're just being a perscriptivist

(19:24:50) kesuari: of course i am: i'm advocating spelling reform

(14:54:07) Michaela: in english school can refer to either a university or an elementary school--as long as it's an educational institution

(14:55:12) [me]: no, in American English

(14:55:29) Michaela: true

(14:55:39) Michaela: but really, i mean, we know who's running the show these days

(14:55:44) Michaela: i'm not ethnocentric, but come on

(22:36:56) Rianna: well...i mean, look at our orthography...it's weird but we know what to say

(17:04:21) kesuari: (and also, not even irregularity is regular, so there's going to be some regularity somewhere)

(17:01:15) kesuari: nothing's regular in english, not even irregularity

(03:42:49) kesuari: nothing backs up like chiselling a great big stone

(03:43:57) kesuari: i sometimes reckon i should do that: go carving runes somewhere in the bush

(03:44:55) kesuari: not runes per se; i mean some form of phonetic alphabet that looks like runes and is similar enough to the latin alphabet or germanic runes to be decryptable

(03:45:17) kesuari: or maybe i'll do it a bit less phonetic just to give the future linguists a bit of fun

(03:45:43) kesuari: can't be too trivial or else i'll be the Orrm of the 21st century

(03:26:05) kesuari: in a thousand years, when english has divided into many languages and tehy've all had spelling reforms, they'll divise a "standardised spelling" for classical english

(03:26:52) kesuari: because the current spelling will been seen as "irregular" and "hard to read", "a poor guide to pronunciation" &c. they will probably also add diacritics so we can tell which vowels are long and which are short, which e's are silent and which are pronounced etc.

(03:27:09) kesuari: much like we do to old english

(03:27:33) kesuari: only, for a non-linguist of the 20th/21st centuries, it'll be hard to read because we don't expect it

(03:29:08) kesuari: and because no-one can seriously expect any of our recordings to last until then and because linguistics texts will largely have been lost to time as they weren't reproduced enough, people will have debates about quite how various aspects were pronounced

(03:30:10) kesuari: they'll reconstruct a language that includes the "bath/trap" split, f'instance

(03:30:24) kesuari: and have trouble reconciling it with the other germanic languagse

(03:32:45) kesuari: but, of course, english retained *þ and *w so it's obviously conservative: it must've been that german and even icelandic lost the original æ/ɑ distinction

(23:53:48) Derek: That's a really well preserved blade

(23:53:53) Derek: for how old it is

(23:56:13) [me]: it's metal.

(23:57:07) Derek: "it's metal" doesn't cut it

(23:57:12) Derek: because iron rusts

(23:57:18) Derek: and steel rusts really fast

(23:57:27) Derek: ha - doesn't cut it

(23:57:29) Derek: I made a funny

me: "Yeah, it's Low Germanic, but not Northern."

Derek: "Huh? Is it a language named after some city or something?"

me: "Nope, it's named after a continent."

Derek: "A continent?!"

me: "Yep. Go back to your room, continue grading, and in 30 seconds you'll figure it out and be like ‘Dammit!’"

(16:51:22) Derek: LOL

(16:51:24) Derek: you bastard

(16:52:04) [me]: told you :-P

(16:52:22) Derek: *shaking fist*

15:28:38 qatharsis: Züritüütsch is not so common in the music business. Bärndütsch lends itself better to singing. It's more vowelly.

03:47:04 [Tristan]: i thought yiddish was ei > ai, ii > ei

03:47:16 [me]: that's possible. what's your source?

03:47:28 [Tristan]: my possibly faulty brain

03:47:37 [me]: well, where'd you get it before that

03:47:41 [me]: cause that sounds basically right

03:47:59 [Tristan]: my possibly faulty brain is getting a DNS resolution failure on that.

(18:35:14) [me]: well, I am going to go play DDR in an hour and a half...

(18:36:11) Qatharsis: Putting on bland brown pullovers and pronouncing /a o u/ as /Q 9 u-/? ;-)

(18:36:56) Qatharsis: Can't help but parse that as East Germany.

(06:02:06) Kesuari: (there is, i think, a certain amount of regular voicing and devoicing of stops and /tS/~/dZ/ (which might better be called /c/ and /J\/ even if that isn't their phonetic rendition) IMD. I have heard that it's not uncommon in AuE for voiced stops to be totally unvoiced and unvoiced aspirated, though i'm not sure if that's true for me.)

(06:02:44) [me]: that's like Werner's law

(06:03:03) Kesuari: or the second sound shift of german.

(06:03:19) Kesuari: which is like Werner's

(06:03:40) Kesuari: also fits into this neck of the woods better e.g. chinese and many other asian langs

(06:05:30) [me]: English:PIE::Australian English:Proto Germanic

(06:05:33) [me]: or at least in 2000 years

(06:06:02) [me]: lord help us if Middle English becomes proto-World

(03:32:19) [me]: heh. Norwegian is a funny language

(03:32:28) Оберон: lol, yes.

(03:32:33) Оберон: thanks for pointing that out

(03:32:35) Оберон: or something

(03:33:16) [me]: ack, too much Norwegian. Need Silly Wizard

(03:33:45) Оберон: lol

(03:34:44) [me]: mmm, Macedonian

(03:34:52) Оберон: lol

(03:35:23) Оберон: at first, "(03:34) [jonathan]: mmm, Macedonian" looks like a random quote

(03:35:28) Оберон: but with some creative editing we have:

(03:35:42) Оберон:

(03:33) [jonathan]: I like the taste of European flesh

(03:34) [jonathan]: mmm, Macedonian