By Consonants, Numbers

this is my argument about not being able to pull apart dipthongs and make statements about their componentsbecause of that, I find it hard to make the claim that <w> is really part of <aw><aw> is its own unit of sound, and just because it's represented using the letter...

And I don't agree with you again. I have a friend who is Japaneese and my sister is learning Japaneese too. This language has so crazy rules in grammar! For example: when you're counting some things you use different numbers for things which are flat and different for big mammals.This two...

So then you think the rule should say to double the final consonant except when the final consonant is a "w"?CJ

You've got it backwards. The grammarians who apply the rules are trying to make sense of something that develops organically. The terms that are applied to the phenomenon of language are far more concrete than the rules that are created by observation of its use. The reason this...

I say the yootopian and the yoosual (the "e" pronounced as "uh", just as before a consonant). The first sound of those words is nothing like eee for me. I also say thee evening, thee even numbers etc. Maybe there's the faintest sense that the "ee" is not so much...

Hi Kooyeen, I grew up in New England, where they used to say the "Boston" accent was the purest, but now that I'm in California, Boston really sounds dumb. If I understand T-tapping, I'd answer, "no." I was taught to say "arithmetic" with a full...

Studies of languages have shown that any given language will compensate for complexity in one area with simplicity in another and that if you compare any two languages that they have roughly the same number of complex and simple areas. Consider the following: Imagine a language with only two...

CalifJim wrote:I read somewhere that Mario Pei, the linguist, tried to learn a different language every year. He supposedly claimed that Vietnamese was the most difficult. CJ I disagree with the linguist Mario Pei not because I am a Vietnamese. It is because I have seen, in my...

Thanks, anon. Without your post, I would have missed this thread. Goodman wrote:Hi CJ, What an impressive thread you have posted. You have slowly made me a fan of yours. Yep! CalifJim wrote: In any case, the struggle for the learner is always making the conversion from 'computing'...

Anonymous wrote: ...Concerning the maximum number of successive consonants in one word is only THREE consonants... What do you say then of words like menstruation? It has four successive consonants.