Yesterday, my girlfriend showed me this video: Boliviano Fashions featuring two Bolivian male characters in their early 20s, with a boastful upper-class attitude: one from La Paz, one from Santa Cruz; making slightly exaggerated accents. The La Paz one (known as a "jailón"; or a guido if we presume he's a wannabe) has a liquid R, roughly ɻ, for " ( Read more... )

Are you ever tempted to pronounce "street" as "shtreet"? When I pronounce "Mercer Street", it almost sounds like "mersher shtreet" or "mersher shchreet" (regarding the palatalization in "Mercer", I'm not sure if the "r" or the "s" in "street" is responsible, or both ( Read more... )

My housemate's friends from Montreal pronounce "un an" roughly as one would say "urnan", with the standard American rhotic "r". I have no time to do this IPA, but feel free to try.

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Here's a linguistic/pragmatic phenomenon: how often one refers to unknown & absent friends by their name. e.g. "One time, my friend Julia ... " vs "One time, my friend from school ( Read more... )

The word "both" has two distinct meanings that I'm aware of:

(a) if you want to express "P(A) and P(B)" for some predicate P, one says "both A and B P" (if A,B are subjects) or "P both A and B" (if A,B are objects).
e.g.<< On the third day, both groups successfully recalled the link between the shock and the spider. >>
(b) A ~ B, where ~ is an ( Read more... )

The politics of language acquisition: language learning as social modeling in the northwest Amazon

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(1a) SP: "as folhas secas são colocadas na cesta para serem trituradas."
("the dry leaves are put in the basket to be ground")

I believe that prescriptive, mainstream Portuguese (MPT) says:
(1b) "as folhas secas são colocadas na cesta para ser trituradas."

But even SP speakers probably say "elas foram lá para fazer um serviço." rather than "para ( Read more... )

Uílame [uílãmi] is Recife's counterpart to Butt-head, with a little Kenny McCormick thrown in. He's a metal-head guitar hack and speaks too much slang. He's obsessed with the obscure Blood Avenger and is known for his annoying, self-satisfied rants, and his inconsiderateness. On the recordings, he is described as "mala", which in Recife is short ( Read more... )

Today I went to an introductory Esperanto lesson. I learned some German words too, as expected ( Read more... )

unter-sagt = inter-dit ( Read more... )