User talk:Cassowary

R·e·s·p·o·n·d·i·n·g: I will respond here. My responses will probably be dated, but won’t necessarily be named; this is, after all, where I live. Depending on the length of my message, I will either copy the reply to your user-page or just tell you about it. I might do that after every response, or only after the first couple.

Stuff that used to be on User talk:Kesuari

I used to be User:Kesuari till I lost the password and email address accompanying it. At one stage, I used an older computer and discovered it new my username and password, so I was able to take them back, but I was quite happy with my new shell, so I kept it. This stuff was originally there; now it’s here.

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them;

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

snoyes 00:00, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Just adding IPA to the description of Australian English and I couldn't figure out what SAMPA [o:] was supposed to be in your comments about gone. After rereading it I decided I didn't know what you were getting at here at all. Care to elucidate? Moilleadóir 05:31, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(Random self-test — Felix the Cassowary 02:43, 5 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

"Gone"

The Australian English page seems to be suggesting that AusE has a phoneme which is only used in one word, gone. Is this right (with gone rhyming with neither don nor dawn) and do you know anything about the origin of this? --JHJ 20:34, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, 'gone' doesn't rhyme with either 'don' or 'dawn', or any other word in English. I'd describe the vowel as being [ɔː] to don's [ɔ] and dawn's [oː]. This distinctiveness has been confirmed annecdotally (without prompting) by people in both Melbourne and Adelaide, but I've never seen anything written about the sound in any published work, in spite of much looking. [i know now this means it probably shouldn't be included as WP:NOR.] I know nothing about it's origins; it might be vaguely related to the bad-lad split, though. (Length is quite distinctive in Australian vowels, with pairs /ɪ/–[ɪː]=/ɪə/, /e/–/eː/, /æ/–/æː/, /ɐ/–/ɐː/, /ʊ/–[ʊː]=/ʉː+l, ʊə+r/.) — Felix the Cassowary 01:38, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I presume you're aware that gone is one of the words which had /ɔː/ in very old-fashioned RP (like off and cloth) and hence rhymed with dawn. I thought that might be related, but these other words generally get short [ɔ] in AusE, don't they?

Length is quite distinctive in many British accents too, though it varies a lot from region to region. The merry/Mary distinction is essentially one of length for me (though I think Mary is slightly more open), in spite of British dictionaries' liking for transcribing the Mary vowel as a diphthong, and I think you can argue that length is actually the main difference between pairs like cot/caught and cam/calm, at least in some areas. (For southerners, replace cam with come, as in AusE.)--JHJ 18:25, 25 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, I wasn't aware that gone was one of the lengthened words. The lengthened form was [o:] in AuE when it existed, though, rhyming with 'dawn', but aside from a few people from the bush ("country"), they get the short [ɔ] nowadays (along with some words that would've rhymed, like caustic, Austria, Australia when stressed on the first syllable, hence Aussie). How 'gone' would've managed to get a different vowel, and keep it, is beyond me though.

That bit about British accents is interesting, but not surprising I spose, when you consider that British accents and the Australian one are quite closely related. Australian dictionaries are still habitually denoting some of the old centring diphthongs as ... centring diphthongs, but research since the 1960s has shown that length is the primary and increasingly the only cue in both production and perception. (How about sirius vs serious.)

— Felix the Cassowary 00:52, 26 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sirius/serious: not really. Although I don't feel much of a glide in serious, the vowel qualities feel too different to call it a length contrast. Maybe my /ɪ/ is really [ɘ]. (It may be relevant that I don't hear anything odd in the New Zealand kit vowel, though there are lots of ather odd things in theer eccint.)--JHJ 19:49, 28 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to Phonology

To me, Missouri and misery are much closer of a minimal pair for stress than desert and dessert. At least in my dialect, the phonemes are Missouri /mɪˈzɚi/ misery /ˈmɪzɚi/. The pronunciation /mɪˈzuːɹi/ is not an accepted pronunciation. In some very conservative dialects you might get /mɪˈzʊɹi/ with /ʊɹ/ distinct from /ɚ/, but for most Americans, there is no such distinction. And even for those who have a distinction, /ʊɹ/ and /ɚ/ are a lot closer than /ə/ and /ɛ/ which form a major non-stress distinction in desert and dessert. Nohat 12:15, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, sorry. I have reverted the change. (FTR, it is actually pronounced [m@zu:ɹi] in AusE, but that [u:] is probably the infinitely rare /u@/ i.e. /ʊɹ/.) — Felix the Cassowary 12:25, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

05:10, 29 August 2005 Cassowary m (rv: Hertz was a person, but you don't abbreviate personal names. SI unit names are not capitalised, regardless of derivation.)

Hi not sure if I should address this to you as you reverted it, but SI units where the discovery is made by a person is reflected by capitalisation. N = Newtons, F = Farards, H = Henries, C = Celsius and so on. The convention, as far as I have been taught, is to refer to proper noun even when written in prose. --Machtzu 21:15, 30 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No. If that's what you were taught, then I'm afraid you were taught wrong. The symbols (i.e. abbreviations) are capitalised if they're from a proper name e.g. N, J, K; the symbol for 'litre' is optionally also capitalised because l and 1 often look too similar.

But with the names of the units, they always use lowercase e.g. newton, joule, kelvin. So you get joules and kilojoules, otherwise you'd have to do something odd like kilo-Joule. Take a look at other wikip. articles, too, like SI, where it says:

Symbols are written in lower case, except for symbols derived from the name of a person. For example, the unit of pressure is named after Blaise Pascal, so its symbol is written "Pa" whereas the unit itself is written "pascal".

The exception is the 'degree Celsius', on which the Wikipedia article says:

The degree Celsius is the only SI unit whose full unit name ("degree Celsius", not "Celsius") in English includes an upper case letter. That is a quirk of English, because it is a proper adjective rather than a noun ... SI prefixes are applied normally, so you can have, for example, a measurement of « 12 m℃ ».

which is in full 'millidegree Celsius', so it causes no problems.

— Felix the Cassowary 23:10, 30 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok well if thats the consensus then I have no problem with it, I suppose in the grand scheme of things my even having an issue with it is fairly redundant ;) --Machtzu 23:15, 30 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Out of respect for the United States of Mexico...

I just wanted to say thanks! Your comment at Talk:American and British English differences made me laugh ("Why should America usurp 'US' to refer only to themselves?") and injected some humor into what is ordinarily a tedious and irritable debate. -Aranel (Sarah) 18:48, 31 August 2005 (UTC) (KC)[reply]

I have to say thanks for your thanks, and disclaim that I'm quite sure I didn't come up with it, even if I don't know who did! 23:25, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Thankyou

Belated thanks for emailing those PDF papers on Australian English vowels to me. – AxSkov (☏) 04:24, 1 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Not a problem at all. (04:45, 1 September 2005 (UTC))

Customising keyboard

Sentence from Talk:Australian English:

(The easiest way to put in IPA symbols is to copy and paste them from somewhere else—I’ve customised my keyboard layout though, so that when Scroll Lock’s on, I can enter some characters a bit like in X-SAMPA.)

Does this customising work for all aps such as Word, WordPad, Notepad and the editor in Wikipedia? – AxSkov (☏) 07:37, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I use GNU/Linux, on which it works for every GUI app that supports Unicode (which is almost everything I use, and certainly everything I’d want to put IPA in). It’s also heavily geared towards Dvorak keyboard layout, so while it might be useful, it won’t have the same mnemonic power. If you’re looking to convert to a Free operating system, I could give you the files I use; otherwise, I probably can’t help you. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 13:45, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My RFA

Hi, thanks for voting for me in my RFA. I was really touched at how many people voted for me! --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 22:47, 10 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you

Thank you for your attention to matters concerning my RfA, which I have formally withdrawn. The full text of my withdrawal and statement of appreciation is on the RfA page. Sincerely, Leonard G. 04:00, 15 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

template in signature

Hi - I noticed you use a template in your signature. Can you consider changing this so that no template is invoked? Using a template on a signature causes an extra database fetch every time a page including the template is changed (to fetch the template contents). Since signatures are used on talk pages, which are edited a lot, this can actually add up. You can expand the template manually and include its contents (i.e. the issue isn't what results from the template). Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:13, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, I'm a little reluctant to—the expansion’s practically a paragraph in itself, and that looks a bit ugly when editing. Most of the pages I post on have the IPA template on them already, I would think—is it the number of times it’s used per page that’s the problem, or is one use on a page the same as one hundred million uses? Is the problem it causes generally considered to be worse than the problem of having a massively large sig? Thanks! (02:05, 20 September 2005 (UTC))

I'm not sure if the number of times a template appears on a page is a factor (see Jamesday's description of how a page is built at Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates#How a page is built and cached), but I think not - meaning I think 5 references results in one database fetch. The servers are often overloaded, so I suspect Jamesday would say "definitely the performance problem is worse than having a massively large sig". The note on Special:Preferences says not to do this, which I suspect came from Jamesday. Another alternative might be to use a simpler sig :). I can't (and won't try to) tell you what to do - it's just something I thought you might want to consider. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:34, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think I’ll do this, which isn’t exactly the best of both worlds (as it still won’t work for most IE users), but meh. At least they can see what it's meant to say. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:21, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

NZ vowels etc.

I'm replying here rather than on Talk:Vowel shift because this doesn't really have a lot to do with improving the article on vowel shifts.

Wait, you are the same JHJ who said ‘Personally … I distinguish higher and hire, and would consider the former to be two syllables and the latter to be one…’? You speak non-rhotic English but distinguish them? How do they sound? Or do you have accent that is sometimes non-rhotic?

Complicated. The accents of the area I'm from are generally non-rhotic, but I have rhotic influences too, and so I'm not consistently either rhotic or non-rhotic. However, I don't think this is relevant to the higher/hire issue; I seem to pronounce them differently regardless of rhoticity. As to what the difference is, I think higher gets much closer to [i] between what I feel are the two syllable nuclei, whereas hire probably has something like [aɛə], so it doesn't actually go up and then down again. Alternatively maybe higher stays in the [i] area for longer. Do you have two syllables for both?

It just occurred to me that I also use the triphthong (if that's what it is) in a "two-syllable" pronunciation of diamond, which I certainly pronounce non-rhotically.--JHJ 07:47, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I make the disyllabic [hɑejə] for both ‘higher’ and ‘hire’, though it's usually transcribed phonemically as /hɑeə/ or /haiə/. As for ‘diamond’, the only pronunciation I’ve used, and I feel fairly sure the only pronunciation I've heard at least by an Aussie, is /dɑemənd/. I spose you pronounce the A in the usual course of things? (13:52, 30 September 2005 (UTC))

I think the pronunciation I use most naturally is the one I mentioned above, which feels like two syllables: /daɪə.mənd/. However, the only pronunciation in my copy of Chambers Dictionary is three syllables, /daɪ.ə.mənd/ (translating their system into IPA), and I think I might use that if speaking carefully. It strikes me as being a bit like the way that the NEAR vowel /ɪə/ (or /ɪː/, if you prefer) crops up in places which were never just before an /r/, like in theatre, idea and vehicle (all two syllables for me, although Chambers shows them all with three, and doesn't actually have a way of showing an /ɪə/ that isn't before historic /r/).--JHJ 12:30, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, I know I've heard British accents that appear to have a frontish roundedish vowel in NURSE, but I've normally attributed this to mishearing something. I noticed that until today, I thought my Uncle had the same vowel as I do, but no—he seems to have an almost perfect [əː] (or at least as perfect to that as an Aussie gets).

NURSE varies quite a bit in (non-Scottish) BrE. I've certainly seen descriptions of front rounded vowels (e.g. for Welsh English). Some accents (like Scouse, which has something like [weːx] for work) have a front unrounded vowel, which is often merged with SQUARE. Anyway, I think mine can range between an RP-like [ɜː] and something like [œː], as I said before. Then the main difference between fur [fœː(ɹ)] and fair (which I think is close to [fæː(ɹ)]) can be rounding (though there's a height difference too).

Yeah, with [feː] and [fɵ̟ː] or [fø̠ː] for me, rounding is probably the most salient distinguishing factor. (13:52, 30 September 2005 (UTC))

I understand the NZ NURSE vowel is maybe marginally higher than AusE; not nearly the same as the diff b/n our respective DRESSes. Of course, this makes sense if it's a front vowel (all Kiwi front monophthongs are higher) and rounded (it needs to be careful not to clash with /ʉː/) or unrounded and short (… /ɪ ~ e/). I don't really notice a huge difference tho, as I said. But I've never noticed any shortening in NZE vowels (which doesn't, of course mean anything; because if there is a merger I'll probably unwravel it without noticing it unless it gets in the way of communication). Notice that a shortened broad A in NZE would be homophonous with NZE STRUT: Between these vowels, the difference is length, same as on this side of the Tasman.

Of course I'm just reporting my impressions of the relatively small number of NZ accents I've heard (mostly cricket players and pundits). So all I can really say is that some Kiwis I've heard sound to me as if they're using a fairly short [a] (like my TRAP/BATH vowel) in BATH/START/PALM, and similarly a fairly short [ʏ] in NURSE, at least shorter than the vowels I use in PALM and NURSE respectively, and that I haven't noticed this from Aussies.--JHJ 17:50, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re:Chance

Fair enough, I'll take your word for that. I'm just going from the people I know from around Aus - I must simply know the "posher' Victorians :).

BTW, at the risk of telling a joke that might be taken as anti-Australian (and certainly no offence intended), I've heard it said that you can tell where an Aussie is from by how they pronounce the name of the national anthem: If they say Edvents Ostrilia Fear, they're from Sydney. If they say Edveens Ustraalia Far, they're from Brisbane. If they say Hadvaance Austraalir Faa, they're from Melbourne. If they say Odvawns Ostroilia Fair, they're from Adelaide. If they say God Defend New Zealand, they're from Bondi... and if they just grunt, they're from Canberra. :) Grutness...wha? 09:39, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]