User talk:Cassowary

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

• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Naming conventions
• Manual of Style

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))

"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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)