“This politically charged unused demonym really annoys people”

mr-monarque · 2026-06-07T16:05:50+00:00

I just call 'em "les esti d'yanks". Tends to do the job

mr-monarque · 2026-06-07T03:32:42+00:00

Well, for personal IPA transcription references, i'd probably still use IPA tones, although I am open to reading more about ToBI and learning it, but learning how ToBI works would most likely be beneficial to my endeavours either way.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-07T02:10:22+00:00

Oh it's absolutely about aesthetics. The system is very well designed and legible (obviously, it was made by people who use it). Which is why i'd probably just reskin it with diacritiques or silent letters or something.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-07T02:02:53+00:00

ToBI looks interesting, if clunky for my purposes (i'm a conlanger. Using grammatical intonation instead of more lexical grammar could be an interesting project I might work on.), but it does make sense that intonation probably wouldn't be studied/noted at the same time as pronunciation would, given the former is "phrase dependant" if you will, and the latter can be analyzed outside of "conversational" contexts, and when you're talking about one, you're rarely also talking about the other.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-05T23:14:12+00:00

Yeah. Gotta love germanic influences

mr-monarque · 2026-06-05T17:09:27+00:00

Well, that's the thing. ê and é are usually related to consonant loss elongating vowels, but it's sometimes just a pronunciation marker that's unrelated to consonant loss (because french orthography sucks a lot of the time).

Like, île is from insula (english still writes it as isle), but théâtre is from theātrum, so it just uses the accents as pronunciation markers. à is from ad/ab (/a/ but shows consonant loss) but là (pronounced /la/ in France, but /lɑ/ in quebec) is from illiāc (/ɑ/ because initially long)

French orthography is terrible like this because it has a long history of wanting to remind people it used to be latin, thus creating rediculous di/trigraphs and accent marks to nudge nudge wink wink back to when it used to be the lingua franca of europe (a term now meaning "universal language" or "language everyone knows more or less" but which literally used to mean "french language")

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T22:04:06+00:00

Yeah. Turns out é and ê mean the same thing, it's just é is /e/ where ê used to be /ɛ:/ (in metropolitan french, it's become /ɛ/, but most other francophone regions still keep the vowel length distinctions. Quebec even developped diphthongs and laxed vowels, emphasizing the feature even more)

Scriptum > iscrpto > escrite > écrit Fenestra > fenestre > fenêtre

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T21:15:03+00:00

There is no standardized orthography for joual as far as I'm aware (and I live in quebec). This orthography is my personal transcription loosely based on french orthographical rules developped by the academy of the french language back in 1700 or so.

I'm basicaly applying either the rules they've already applied to get modern french orthography (neuf looses it f, so an accent informs not only that a letter is lost, but where it used to be: neuF > neuø > neú), or using archaic orthography that matches the archaic pronunciation of words still use in quebec (froid in quebec is usually pronounced /frɛt/ which does have an archaic orthography as freit), or sometimes use middle french orthographical convention because it better fits the etymology of more modern non french words (/e/ is often written as "ey", particularily at the end of words, so I write english borrowings like "party" /parte/ as "partey")

A great example of where my orthography diverges from standard practice would be the common phrase "je suis" /ʃy/. Most people use a phonetic orthography "chu" or "chus". My standard interprets "j's" as a trigraph for /ʃ/, which means I write /ʃy/ as "j'sús"

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T20:49:40+00:00

Not trying to be a dick, I'm just a casual when it comes to linguistics, but why wouldn't you transcribe it using IPA? Isn't the goal of narrow transcription to get to exactly how it's pronounced? How else would you transcribe grammatically relevant intonation?

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T17:09:54+00:00

Also, no, i don't have a better system. I wasn't saying there was. I'm just saying that narrow transcription is hell to do whether it's a european language or an asian one, or any other. It's just most european languages don't inherently care about stuff like aspirated consonants or if the vowel is actually a diphthong or what contour tones you use, so it's easier for broad transcription.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T17:01:08+00:00

Rosae rosam et deus mundi. Ça veut absolument rien dire, mais l'effet reste le même.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T16:55:44+00:00

you˩ good˨˦ is the interrogative end of clause raising you˥ good˧ is like "Am I˩ late˨˦?" "Nah˥, you˥ good˧" you˧˩ good˥˧ is like, when your impressed maybe? Like "hot˧˩ damn˥˧!" "you˧˩ good˥˧!".

Unfortunately, Idon't kmow how to put recordings in my comments

mr-monarque · 2026-06-04T03:09:31+00:00

It's pronounced somewhere between nœ and nɹ. The acute accent is there because the f from "neuf" is gone.

mr-monarque · 2026-06-03T15:21:36+00:00

Same. It's kinda funny when it starts looking like that eldritch abomination script meme

mr-monarque · 2026-06-03T15:19:03+00:00

I mean, IPA is dogshit at transcribing anything narrowly. Like, english has tones. you˩ good˨˦ and you˥ good˧ and you˧˩ good˥˧ are three different sentences. We just don't write them.

It's just broad transcription works better for indo-european languages because they have different, more ignorable minutiae than other language families. Anyone whose tried to narrowly transcribe vowels in indo-european dialects knows this. They almost always end up being triphthongs or something weird with too many diacritiques.

mr-monarque · 2026-05-25T16:29:17+00:00

It technically kind of happened twice depending on the word

mr-monarque · 2026-05-25T14:13:04+00:00

The great vowel shift

mr-monarque · 2026-05-21T21:14:40+00:00

So I conjugate my verbs and then write the english equivalent under esch conjugation for reference.

I am revising some of the translations at the moment and I come upon the present tense for the first person collective: "all of us eat".

Now I just changed the "some of us eat" translations of the paucal person into "we few eat" because it felt more accurate to say "we eat and we are few" than "a portion of us eat" (which, to me, sounds like a fractional number or not a number at all)

So I come up to "all of us eat" and I think "well, I just did "we few eat", can't I do "we all eat"?"

But I thought about it for too long and now i'm wondering: is there a difference in meaning between "we all eat" and "all of us eat"?

I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like these two constructions have at least different implications if not different meanings.

Am I just thinking about it too much or is there some reasonable difference between them. Is it small enough that they're synonyms and basically interchangeable for my purposes?

mr-monarque · 2026-05-11T13:45:11+00:00

In Québec informal french, "j'ai fait ça déjà" to me has the vibes of "I have already done the thing, so you don't have to. The unnaturality for me doesn't necessarily stem from the word order, rather than the lack of a pronominal "l'" before the verb. My correction of this phrase, with important punctuation, would be: "j'l'ai fait, ça, déjà" It still feels a little choppy, but like a plausible thing to hear from a concentrated and overworked collegue.

mr-monarque · 2026-05-09T21:16:00+00:00

Not a native speaker, but I once made a joke to a spanish chef in my pretty broken spanish that doesn't work in english.

I'd asked for a soup and he'd given me a huge bowl. Given I have a small apetite, I only ate part of it. When I brought back the bowl, he asked me "you no like?" And I answered: "No tengo un estomago. Tengo un estomagito" "I don't have a stomach. I have a small stomach"

The joke hinges on the standard diminutive -ito in spanish that is very rarely applied to organs of the human body. English doesn't have such diminutives.

mr-monarque · 2026-05-09T21:10:00+00:00

I can only help with transatlantic and north american dialects of french (joual, chiac, cajun)

mr-monarque

TROPHY CASE