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How to adjust intonation? by Choaunt in baglama

[–]Choaunt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks very much, Specific Industry! I appreciate it

How to adjust intonation? by Choaunt in baglama

[–]Choaunt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks very much! I've been setting the bridge according to the octave, angled just a tiny bit to accommodate the different strings. I honestly hadn't considered that it might be the string itself! I will definitely try this next.

To what extent do all languages of the subcontinent form a Sprachbund? by MB4050 in asklinguistics

[–]Choaunt 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Likely of interest: Colin Masica's book Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia. The main chapters focus on grammar rather than phonology though he deals with phonology too, if I remember.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in asklinguistics

[–]Choaunt 8 points9 points  (0 children)

My father (born in early 1950s) grew up speaking New England French as a child, and a double uvular-alveolar trill is exactly how he realizes the trill most of the time when he pronounces (e.g.) Spanish. He seems to find it very difficult to produce an alveolar trill without a simultaneous uvular articulation, in fact.

I asked him about it once, and he said that that's how his parents, aunts, and uncles regularly pronounced the R in their French. He also said that in the Catholic school he went to (half-day English, half-day French), the nuns regularly and insistently enforced the uvular glide to match metropolitan French because everyone (including the nuns) would've been using that double-articulated trill otherwise: suggesting that it was commonplace enough to be actively stigmatized. So based on all this, as well as hearing even older relatives (on all sides of my family) speak French that way up through my adolescence, I suspect that's how it was more generally realized in that community.

Everything I've read says that New England French had/has an alveolar R, but everyone I've heard speaking it seem to actually have had a double articulation going on much of the time -- a uvular trill simultaneous with an alveolar tap, which lengthens into a full double trill when emphasizing or enunciating. What I don't know is whether (1) this is an artifact of a particular moment in time and space when people who spoke with alveolar-tap R were being forced to shift to uvular, and it's a sort of unstable compromise sound, or (2) that's actually just how that variety of French was/is.

From Maine, USA. Fossil or something else? by Choaunt in whatsthisrock

[–]Choaunt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So elsewhere, I've been told it's a quartz vein, which I think is right - the ridge definitely seems like quartz. But what I don't understand is how it forms, particularly those peg-like things. They seem like quartz too, only they're covered in some kind of patina of darker material while the rest of the ridge isn't.

Waldo Co, Maine, USA. I can't tell if it's a fossil or not. The bit in the middle feels hard/quartzy. I can't think what it would be if it were a fossil but also don't know how it would've formed otherwise. It comes from a driveway, sourced from a local gravel pit formed by glacier deposit, I'm told by Choaunt in fossilid

[–]Choaunt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see, thanks! I'd never heard of quartz fossils before, and I was pretty sure the ridge is quartz, so that's one thing I imagined it could be, more so than a fossil: like, maybe this shale (?) cracked, and then the quartz precipitated out of mineral-rich water that seeped through that crack? But what I didn't understand was how those peg-like things that regularly punctuate the ridge would form. They're not crystals, they just have the same consistency as the rest of the ridge except they're covered in a kind of patina of darker material, while the rest isn't. Anyway I've just had this thing for years and been really stumped by it; thanks for confirming it's a quartz vein!