Wenn ihr das "Spiel" testen wollt, von dessen Entwicklung ich im #Tuwort-#Podcast erzählt habe, dann bitte hier entlang:

https://scharloth.com/games/vowel_flow/

Die aktuelle Folge hier:

https://www.tuwort.com/index.php/2026/03/09/tuwort-31/

#phonetics #game #linguistics #daf

Any linguists who teach the role of prosody and intonation in conveying meaning, you might find this a useful demonstration. I think the use of contrastive focus at about 0:48 particularly striking.

#linguistics #phonetics #prosody #academicChatter

https://youtube.com/shorts/okV-IlqMOMM?si=DNZbcwC4oZpy-hoY

Is there an app where I can paste in some Irish text and have it phoneticised for anglophones? This is to help non-Irish people learn to pronounce the words of a song. (I know that Myles na gCopaleen satirised the practice by doing the reverse.)

Briseann an dúchas trí shúilibh an cháit -->
Brish-an on dookh-as tree hool-iv an khat

#mastodaoine #irish #english #language #FoclóirGaeilgeBéarla #pronunciation #phonetics #phonemes #gaelige

Today in "the wild and wondrous world of metaphors in #speech and #language science": weaponized French.
"Lloyd James (1940, p25) argued that English, Arabic and Persian have a 'Morse code rhythm', while French and Telugu have 'machine-gun rhythm'."

(From: The Cambridge Handbook of #Phonetics, 2021, chapter 12: Measuring Speech Rhythm, A. Arvaniti)

#linguistics

Ijit, idjit, eejit, idiot

After reading a lot of Stephen King in my teens and early 20s, I went about 15 years not reading him at all. Then I came across Dolores Claiborne in a local bookshop and immediately bumped it to the upper reaches of my book mountain. I’ve long admired the film adaptation, so I was more than a little curious to visit the source.

Set on an island off the coast of Maine, New England, it’s a memorable story told very well as a continuous narrative in Dolores’s dialectal speech. It has one lexical feature that I want to mention here. No spoilers follow:

…the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened

I don’t remember seeing the word ijit in print before. Obviously it’s a regional form of idiot – like idjit, another variant – and means more or less the same thing (see eejit, below), but it’s interesting how its pronunciation /’ɪdʒət/ ‘idget’ differs from the standard /’ɪdiət/ ‘iddy-uht’. I suppose this is related to the tendency for /dj/ to shift to /dʒ/ in words like due and during.

Ijit has only one hit in COCA; idjit has three, including the amusing line ‘an optimist […] is just a crossword puzzle way of saying idjit’. Browsing Google Books, though, I see that they’re not so rare, ijit occurring for instance in a story by Jacques Futrelle, who lived not far from Maine in Scituate, Massachusetts.

I expect they occur here and there around the English-speaking world. Wordnik aggregates several colloquial examples of both forms. Rooting around some more, I see that ijit is also an old African American word, mentioned in Hubert Anthony Shands’s Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi (1893):

Eejit is the Irish English equivalent, and is common in fictional and vernacular dialogue. It doesn’t connote intellectual difficulty – idiot can – instead signalling foolish behaviour, be it chronic or occasional. Eejit is softer than idiot, and is not generally used hurtfully but to gently criticise someone the speaker knows and may well hold in affection. I imagine this is also true of ijit and idjit, but I’m open to correction.

Eejit can, of course, be used in self-criticism, as in this example from Jennifer Johnston’s novel Shadows on Our Skin:

And he hadn’t done his homework, let alone his extra homework. Eejit. Eejit.

T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers a few literary examples of eejit and a note on pronunciation: that it approximates the Irish rendering of d and i. Take for example the Irish words Dia (God) /’dʲi:æ/ and idir (between) /’ɪdʲər/. [Edit: See the comments for more on this.]

‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used to say snappishly. (William Trevor, Fools of Fortune)

Common modifiers of eejit include big, awful, feckin’, fuckin’, and oul’ (also ould, aul’, auld). Its jocular flavour made it a frequent favourite in the TV comedy Father Ted, and might help explain why the word was found to be not unparliamentary when it was used in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Irish English as Represented in Film by Shane Walshe presents some uses of the word in films, but you’ll have to turn your head sideways to read them. Like an eejit.

#books #dialects #DoloresClaiborne #HibernoEnglish #insults #IrishEnglish #language #phonetics #pronunciation #slang #speech #spelling #StephenKing #usage #words

I've learned an ultra-low, rumbly style of speech, made by vibrating my epiglottis instead of using my vocal folds. It gives me nice gender feelings, and it might be nice for others too. I made a podcast episode about it, the anatomy and tips on how to make it, and connections to other alaryngeal speech. The first three minutes of the episode are spoken entirely in my epiglottal voice, as well as some later snippets: https://isaacg1.github.io/2026/01/31/sggo-18

If anyone's interested in learning this kind of speech, please let me know and I'd be happy to help out! Boosts appreciated.

#gender #transgender #voice #phonetics #linguistics

The weird history of Spoonerisms: English's silliest slips-of-the-tongue

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/history-of-the-spoonerism

#OutOfContextScience just for fun! Today: unicorns against education. 🦄🚫🎓

#phonetics #LanguageScience #language #linguistics