We had a speaker yesterday from NZ who was talking about how he has to change the way he pronounces Auckland for speech recognition engines, and it made me realize that running through the pronunciations of Oakland-Auckland(NZ)-Auckland(Am) might be a good way to demonstrate the [o]-[ɔ]-[ɒ] triad.

I present, the lenition hypercube

To wit.

My lab group will be participating in this interesting little conference up in Edmonton this weekend: matips.org/matips2025/d...

Fan wearing a "Dump Here" jersey with 61 caught Cal's HR 🔥 Immediately changes into an identical 62 jersey

I've recently gotten to know someone who universally uses "there is" for both singular and plural nouns. So, rather than saying "there are books in the library" or perhaps "there's books in the library", they say "there is books in the library". Is this the start of a trend?

Overheard in my lab today: "I think L*+H is my favorite pitch accent."

Apple's new AirPods now do live translation of a foreign language. Hmm. www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Fun fact: the road signs on U.S. 93 between Missoula and Kalispell are written in {Salish or Kootenai} and English.

Some nice examples of Canadians pronouncing the stressed vowel in "Nirvana" as [æ] here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9u5...

We are hiring! If anybody you know does experimental syntax, feel free to send them our way! careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1609537...

I have students record production exercises for my intro phonetics class, and one of them came to me today with a novel problem: for forms that were [ejective]-[vowel] or [click]-[vowel], her PC was simply not recording the ejective or click, apparently filtering it like it was background noise.

Hey, look, it's the Midlands dialect region.

When you drive through eastern Montana, the landscape eventually empties out to the point where the road signs start directing you to specific people's homes, rather than to cities or towns. What I didn't realize until this past week is that Google maps effectively does the same thing.

Can you accurately pronounce these Minnesota place names? Wayzata Shakopee Vadnais Heights Mahtomedi Montevideo Bemidji Le Sueur Waseca Ely Beltrami

Oof.

I am currently laying over in the Regina airport and wondering whether this is the worst blend ever.