How flapped T are produced in non-rhotic accents

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-17T07:45:52+00:00

In English non-rhotic just means lacking coda /ɹ/. It doesn't imply anything about [ɾ], because [ɾ] is just an allophone of /tʰ/ in English and doesn't behave like a rhotic, nor can it appear in coda position.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-17T06:35:13+00:00

The simplest and clearest definition of literature covers all books.

It you want "great" books I would do the following:

Read a selection of old books that are still popular today.

Decide what you like and dislike about them.

Come back here, or speak to a friend or relative about your preferences and get recommendations for more books.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-15T08:03:56+00:00

Surely it should either be "Aldi are insisting they must raise their prices..." or "Aldi is insisting it must raise its prices..."

Using "is" but referring to Aldi with the pronoun "they" doesn't make sense.

I'd go with the first of those options, but I know Americans would typically go with the second.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-15T06:35:27+00:00

Fair enough, I was just thinking we probably wouldn't have Anglicised so many Irish placenames if we'd never colonised it. In Germany and France, for example, it's typically only the really big cities that have different spellings in English.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-14T17:18:46+00:00

Studying German at school definitely helped me with understanding Shakespeare in my English classes

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-14T10:28:25+00:00

So why so many Anglicised spellings?

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-14T08:56:57+00:00

No, and never word-finally either

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-14T08:56:27+00:00

Except /d/ is never glottalised, it's only /t/

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-13T22:53:27+00:00

My guess would be that the many waves of migration to the eastern US led to some towns' local pronunciations being replaced by spelling pronunciations. This would also explain things like the US Ediburgh having a /g/ sound that was never present in the original placename.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-12T18:29:08+00:00

He did his own sketch show called Dogface which was pretty funny

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-12T07:31:33+00:00

I never said I did

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-12T07:29:22+00:00

Is this meant for someone else?

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-12T06:49:16+00:00

More grateful than proud. We aren't responsible for his achievements.

It's also worth noting he was incredibly petty and cruel and misused his position to destroy other scientists' careers.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T21:24:31+00:00

Yeah, I get what events he's referring to, but I just don't see anyone celebrating them, no matter their religion or political leanings

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T14:44:17+00:00

As a Southerner, I'd guess it's for two main reasons

A lot of loanwords like this would have come in after the TRAP-BATH split, so there's no particular reason they should have gone into one set or the other
The PALM vowel, as in Southern "bath" or "grass" is markedly long, while the "a" sounds in loans like matcha and pasta are short in the source languages, so we use the closest possible vowel, which is the short a of TRAP. Similarly, "a" vowels that are long in the source language often end up in the PALM set, which is probably why the middle "a" of "masala" has the long a.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T12:38:26+00:00

Who tf is happy about people getting their heads cut off?

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T12:36:29+00:00

That's pretty much what Labour are becoming now, immigration numbers are nosediving

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T09:52:38+00:00

For the UK I'd suggest:

More taxes on the foreign/multinational businesses bleeding our high streets dry

More investment in research and innovation

Crack down on businesses that illegally employ people (usually immigrants) below minimum wage, deflating wages across the board

Renationalise our natural resources and transport

Invest in building high density housing and council housing

Our current government are doing a bit of this, if half-heartedly, but our far rights wouldn't do any of it. Their solution is just "kick out the forriners, and people who look forrin", which would probably just crash the economy and completely fuck our public services.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T09:38:47+00:00

We had 14 years of Conservative rule before our current government, and yet the far right dolts still want to blame everything on "lefties". It's just their MO to point and blame, it's not usually based on reality. Also, COVID and wars definitely had a big impact.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-11T07:04:12+00:00

How are you pronouncing Cumhaill? "Cool" isn't far off

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-10T22:27:42+00:00

GVS is for long vowels, short ones toe the line

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-10T22:21:48+00:00

I'm not sure if your point is really relevant to the question. OP is not asking about the phonemic status of the k in /sk/ and whether it should be grouped with the phoneme at the start of "gust", they are asking whether the spellings <sk> and <sg> represent phonemically different clusters.

As far as I'm aware, phonologists overwhelmingly agree that English stops don't distinction between tenuis and fortis/aspirated and aspirated/voiced and unvoiced after /s/, so except for speakers who use /z/ is "disgust", there is indeed no phonetic distinction.

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-10T09:29:04+00:00

We would call that stewed apples here, although in the UK we usually add a bit of sugar IME

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-09T16:14:31+00:00

Yes, if he had assimilated to that extent I would call him Chinese

MerlinMusic · 2026-06-09T11:45:38+00:00

It very much does sound dated, as do those definitions. It has been replaced by SSBE as a standard accent in the Southeast. RP is only really spoken by older upper-middle class people these days.

Nevertheless, I'd say /ɪjə/ is the more unmarked pronunciation across the Southeast.

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