By Numbers, Vowels

Just as you could assign numbers from one to five to represent the loudness, or accent of the syllables in a sentence, you could represent the pitch level (Hertz) at which you speak/sing the vowel tones by a scale of one to five. Sometimes the pitch rises or falls on the vowel sound of a given...

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...

Native speaker here, asking for perceptions of other native speakers, especially those who have a basic knowledge of linguistics.Of course, I know the rule about pronouncing 'the' as 'thee' before vowel sounds: thee afternoon, thee apple, thee orange, thee hour. However, how...

Another opinion... From the Gregg Reference Manual: When words taken from other parts of speech are used as nouns, they are usually pluralized by the addition of s or es. Ifs, ands, or buts Dos and don’ts Yeses and nos Ins and outs Ups and downs Yeas and nays Pros and...

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...

According to John Wells at University College London: "I do not understand the proposed distinction between Mainstream RP and Contemporary RP (unless the writer thinks, wrongly, that ‘contemporary’ means ‘young’)." You can read more of what he says about it at:...

It's easy, count the number of vowels in a word (but pronunciation is what counts, not writing!) and that's the number of its syllables.

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'...

Saska wrote: Guest wrote:Why many foreign speakers have such problems with the English language? I mean, I came to the U.S. about two years ago, and in the beginning I've had problems with the language (probably just like eveybody else), but what makes English such a difficult language to...