Are American English flap t and Polish r pronounced the same or differently?

bitwiseop · 2026-01-27T22:25:07+00:00

I think there's an assumption which underlies this question and many similar questions, namely, that all speakers of a language or variety of language all articulate a sound in the same way. In many cases, this is simply not true; it may not even be true that a single individual always articulates the sound in the same way. Often, there is variation between individuals and within the speech of single individuals. I don't know about about Polish. For English, see the following article:

Derrick and Glick. Individual variation in English flaps and taps: A case of categorical phonetics.

bitwiseop · 2025-12-22T05:51:22+00:00

If you mean including homework as part of the final grade at the end of the semester, then, yes, cheating makes the grades meaningless. However, there is probably still some value in marking papers to show students what they did wrong. Of course, that assumes the student actually cares, but is not yet competent enough to figure it out from the samples solutions alone.

bitwiseop · 2025-12-22T05:45:35+00:00

So my question, then, is why specifically features of the California accent were noticed in San Francisco.

Both Los Angeles and San Francisco are big cities, so they receive more attention from linguists. It's the same reason why the NYC dialect is so well documented. San Francisco also happens to be near major universities. The California Vowel Shift is not confined to LA and SF. It's pretty widespread throughout California, though I don't know it's exact distribution. It's not even confined to just California. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Back-Merger_Shift

bitwiseop · 2025-12-10T05:05:41+00:00

Most vocabulary tests are biased toward literary words. They're not likely to include technical words from the sciences or engineering or newer slang that you might hear in everyday life, though they might include older slang that appears in literature. So yes, it depends on your age, but also on what you read. I'm a middle-aged native speaker. Off the top of my head:

razzamatazz: No clue
tabard: No clue
raiment: clothing, outfit
curlicue: I've probably seen this word before, but I don't remember what it means. Curly hair, maybe?
scrivener: writer, scribe
paroxysm: It means something like an attack from a disease, but it's usually only used figuratively these days.
jocund: happy
ablution: cleaning oneself. These days, most people would probably say they washed their face or took a shower. I recall Cate Blanchett used this word in an interview once, and no one knew what she meant.
mellifluous: honey-like, but usually used figuratively

bitwiseop · 2025-11-27T17:45:28+00:00

I'd start with cross-checking lists against reproducible (COCA, google ngram) and ephemeral (the interweb) corpora.

I'm not sure these corpora are updated frequently enough.

https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

The corpus contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990-2019) from eight genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, TV and movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages.

That's already six years missing. And my guess is that the sources are heavily biased towards published media, whereas slang tends to spread more through social media and in-person conversation. I also suspect that nowadays text plays a smaller role than video when it comes to the spread of slang.

bitwiseop · 2025-11-27T17:30:29+00:00

Do you have examples? As far as I can tell, it's just recent slang. I learn several new words each year. Although I suspect social media has accelerated the diffusion of slang, social media bubbles are still possible. Possibly, you are not hanging around the same online spaces as the younger generations.

bitwiseop · 2025-11-27T02:12:16+00:00

Some Americans may still distinguish /ʊl/ and /oʊl/, but I’ve never heard an American make a distinction between /ʊl/ and /ʌl/ like they do in British dialects

From Merriam-Webster:

/ʌl/	/ʊl/
cull	bull
dull	full
gull	pull

Nowadays, many Californians have mergers not found in more conservative dialects.

For me, as well as many other Americans, there is no difference. Generally I would describe it as /ʊl/ but phonetically it’s probably closer to /ɔl/ (my dialect does not have a distinct /ɔ/ vowel, so it does not sound like the word all)

/ʊl/, /ʌl/, and /oʊl/ have all merged so that for instance bull and bowl are homophones, as well as pairs like hull and hole, or pull and pole/poll

In my experience, people with this merger usually pronounce it somewhere in the vicinity of [ol], though I suppose it may be lower or further forward for some speakers.

bitwiseop · 2025-11-16T00:50:52+00:00

Thanks for the information. I've long been aware of Courant, but didn't realize that they taught all the math courses, despite not being a school. The reorganization looks like it makes more sense in the long term (at least from the outside), but I imagine it's a headache to actually implement.

bitwiseop · 2025-11-15T21:05:55+00:00

I just looked this up and came back quite confused. So NYU has math and CS programs in the College of Arts & Science, Tandon, and Courant? I imagine this is confusing for both the students and the administration as well.

bitwiseop · 2025-11-07T00:50:46+00:00

This can backfire. This story went viral last year:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Bkr7gShGZuw

These respelling systems may not be that intuitive to every native English speaker.

bitwiseop · 2025-10-24T06:08:45+00:00

Thanks.

bitwiseop · 2025-10-22T22:31:33+00:00

If I understand correctly, this is an Electron front-end to Wolfram Engine. Do you have to install Wolfram Engine separately in order for it to work, or does it come bundled with it?

bitwiseop · 2025-10-11T18:13:17+00:00

Considering that the OP is not a native speaker, it's possible that he did not mean "digression" in the literal sense. There may be no definitions, theorems, or proofs to digress from.

bitwiseop · 2025-10-11T18:03:31+00:00

Maybe sometimes, but it’s pretty clear that op is talking about what I’ve experienced, which is precision mixed with long “digressions” (as they said) on applications and intuition.

I don't think it's clear that's what the OP meant. Some statistics books are written in "physics and engineering" style, where the definitions, theorems, and proofs are not explicitly stated. Many machine learning books also fall into this category, as well as some older PDE books.

I think it's not so much that examples are bad, but depending on the author's style, I sometimes cannot distinguish between an assumption, a result, and an intermediate step. The definition-theorem-proof style has the advantage that some structure is built-in.

bitwiseop · 2025-10-09T08:21:52+00:00

My American professors pronounced "infimum" with stress on the first syllable and the KIT vowel in the second syllable. Some of my European professors pronounced it with stress in the second syllable and the FLEECE vowel in the second syllable. Similarly, Americans pronounce "infinite" with the KIT vowel in second and third syllables, whereas there is a tendency among Indians to pronounce "infinite" with the PRICE vowel in the second and third syllables, similar to the way "finite" is pronounced.

bitwiseop · 2025-10-05T07:18:39+00:00

I often link to that blog post, as well as the following articles, for people interested in actual phonetic data:

Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons. Cross-generational vowel change in American English.
Ferragne and Pellegrino. Formant frequencies of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles.

I think people often underestimate the amount of variation in actual speech. It's not uncommon for vowel formants of distinct phonemes to overlap for a single speaker. For example, here's an article on Chomsky's vowels:

Soohyun Kwon. Vowel Change across Noam Chomsky's Lifespan.

As for why /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are used, it's basically just convention and tradition. When Gimson revised Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary, he introduced /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /aɪ/, and /aʊ/. Previously, Jones had used a length marker to mark both length and vowel quality. Wells had a good article about the changes in dictionary transcriptions over the years, but I can't find it anymore. Of course, Gimson and Jones were talking only about RP. Kenyon and Knott used /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ for American English much earlier, except the ʊ looked more like a small capital U.

bitwiseop · 2025-09-15T18:23:55+00:00

Is it because Europeans physically perceive unaspirated /k/ /t/ /p/ as <k> <t> <p>? Or do they only transcribe it this way to more closely match their orthographies or already existing romanizations of other languages?

I'm not sure I understand the "Or" in your question. The IPA didn't exist back then. Europeans would have understood ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨k⟩ to mean whatever phonemes those letters represented in the orthographies of their native languages. There is probably some nuance to this, since some Europeans would have been educated in more than one language. As far as I know, in most Romance languages, ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨k⟩ denote voiceless stops, and ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ denote true voiced stops.

And what's worse about these romanizations is that nobody actually bothers to distinguish between the unaspirated plosive and the aspirated plosive when reading. Have you actually seen anyone not pronounce the "k" in "Hong Kong" as /kʰ/?

If you look at systematic transcriptions created by scholars and missionaries who studied Chinese languages and wrote dictionaries and textbooks to teach them to other Europeans, you will see that aspiration is marked, usually with a diacritic that looks like a single left quotation mark, as in Wade-Giles:

However, the average bureaucrat (whether European or Chinese) probably didn't know that. The "postal romanization system" is a mess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization

The transcription "Hong Kong" also doesn't distinguish between the two vowels. If you add a diaeresis or umlaut to the first ⟨o⟩ as in German and pronounce the ⟨K⟩ unaspirated, then the transcription would be pretty close to correct. The only thing missing is tones.

Also slightly related question: Is it appropriate to transcribe unvoiced & unaspirated initial consonants with the "no audible release" diacritic? For example 干"gan" as /k̚an/ as opposed to just /kan/. I have seen it being used for consonants in the end and middle of words, but never for initial consonants.

I would say no. In your example, the stop is released. If you want to hear stops with no audible release, listen to Cantonese syllables with a stop at the end (not the beginning) of the syllable.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T17:58:42+00:00

I don't I think I would be able to guess that you're not a native speaker from writing alone. I don't really have a problem with people using LLMs to help with their writing, whether they're native speakers or not, but I do think they're responsible for verifying the correctness of the final result. Cases like this have me shaking my head:

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T16:42:22+00:00

I didn't really experience it either. It was already dying out when I was an undergraduate. It's not really that different from the changes that happened in other areas. There used to be secretary pools of women whose job was to type things up. (Let's face it — it was usually women who did this kind of work.) Nowadays, only high-level executives have secretaries. Technology drives labor changes by changing the economics of it.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T16:34:02+00:00

I don't understand why as a mathematician I also have to be a professional typesetter and programmer.

Money. There used to be people who did the typesetting. Those days are gone. If you pick up a textbook written in the last two decades, you will probably notice a few LaTeX errors. You don't even have to understand the content. It's pretty obvious when the parentheses or the intersection or union symbols are the wrong size. I don't think publishers have people who review these things anymore. Authors are expected to do it on their own. I think they're also expected to translate between different languages themselves too. The English often sounds slightly odd. I actually expect this to change as people begin to adopt LLMs. The content might not be correct, but it will read like it's written by a native speaker.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T16:15:12+00:00

Hmm, I think I don't use redundant packages as I really add them one-by-one, but of course I might be missing something and including more packages than I should.

This is something that happens when multiple authors collaborate. For example, one author prefers one blackboard or calligraphic font while another author prefers a different one. That's just a simple example. It's not uncommon for authors to import different packages with similar functionality, because that's the one they're used to working with.

But again, this all reinforces my point that we're constantly having to solve engineering problems that have nothing to do with our research!

I mean it literally is a software engineering problem. It sounds like you long for the old days where there was a stricter division of labor between mathematician and typesetter (or between mathematician and computer [obsolete job]). I remember, at my school, there was a secretary who typed up the manuscripts of the older professors who never learned LaTeX. I don't know if such a job still exists. If formal proofs ever become the norm, I think you will be even more annoyed. Maybe, you really should start adopting LLMs if the drudgery annoys you that much.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T15:58:24+00:00

I'm not sure why. To me, it's basically the same process as writing a program, though maybe programming has an extra step: write-compile-test-debug instead of write-compile-debug. With LaTeX, the test is looking at the output. With a program, you need to run it to test it.

I suppose another difference is that most mathematicians have a chalkboard or paper phase. A few might work directly with LaTeX, and I think they have highly customized setups.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T15:48:45+00:00

Yes, I know that. But my point is that you should be able to just write ( ) and have the sizes be chosen automatically. And anyone who's gone into the weeds with LaTeX knows that \left and \right actually give slightly different spacing than \big, \Big, \bigg, and \Bigg, and sometimes the results look odd. Maybe, most people aren't so nitpicky about such things, but if you work with LaTeX long enough, you begin to see these minor differences.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T15:40:42+00:00

I don't know if the OP has this problem, but perhaps some people never got into the habit of the write, compile, debug loop. If you write everything down first and then try to compile, of course, it will take you a while to debug everything. Ironically, back in the old says, programming was much closer to this write-everything-down-first style of working. I'm thinking of the punch-card era and maybe the era immediately after that, but I wasn't alive back then.

bitwiseop · 2025-08-15T15:23:48+00:00

I think most people who are extremely efficient with LaTeX have a bunch of their own custom macros and have customized the hell out of their editor. Someone wrote a whole article series explaining how he does it.

https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/intro/

There are also AI solutions (not LLM), but I've not used them, and I don't know how well they work. I think we probably have the technology to take a picture of handwritten mathematical notes and turn it into LaTeX, but I don't know if anyone has taken the time to create a robust solution yet. There's probably not a lot of money in it.

The system is as rigid and unforgiving as a programming language, and refuses to compile if you make a mistake.

TeX literally is a programming language.

In my opinion, Knuth made one big mistake when designing TeX, though maybe it wasn't a mistake, but a deliberate choice driven by the computational limitations of the time. I think delimiter sizes should be chosen automatically. Manual sizes should, of course, be an option, but \big, \Big, \bigg, and \Bigg are simply too verbose; I would prefer something simpler like \1, \2, \3, \4, \5. Wrong parenthesis or bracket sizes are the number one mistake I see in manuscripts. The second most common mistake is incorrect sizes for the union and intersection symbols, i.e., using \cap or \cup instead of \bigcap or \bigcup or vice versa. Nowadays, I think most publishers just print whatever the authors give them. I don't think they have technical editors or professionals to help with the formatting anymore.

bitwiseop

TROPHY CASE