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kelkyag August 28 2014, 18:17:09 UTC
I'm not sure why talking items aren't more often written up as major annoyances.

ETA: and I had forgotten about *that* magic sword story. I was thinking of the one where the dying Empress was stuffed into a sword to hand down to her not-yet-experienced-enough heir. (I think that's how it went -- haven't dug it back up to check.)

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Waitaminnit… thnidu August 28 2014, 19:07:00 UTC
Liezhta is pronounced LEEJ-tuh.

You're using "zh" in Reiassan for the sound of English "j", [ʤ]? I've been pronouncing it as [ʒ], like the "s" in "pleasure". That's the only way I've ever seen it used in English: transcribing foreign words that have that sound. The only other use I know for it is Chinese, the pinyin representation of the unaspirated retroflex affricate [ʈ͡ʂ], as in Zhōngguó "China" (中国).

AFAIK, /ʒ/ is the newest phoneme in English, having come in from /z/ + /y/, mostly from French borrowings like "leisure" and "casual". This, I think, is why it has no spelling of its own in English- no letter or combination of letters that is used in ordinary spelling mostly or only for this sound- and we can't refer to it in non-specialist writing without an example word.

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Re: Waitaminnit… aldersprig August 28 2014, 19:09:24 UTC
...those are the same sound for me.

And I'm probably transcribing it wrong. It's closest to a French g, like Gigi.

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Re: Waitaminnit… thnidu August 28 2014, 19:41:43 UTC
Then it's not the same as English "j". Our "j" sound, like our "ch", is an *affricate*: It begins by stopping the airflow entirely for a moment, then releases it through a narrow space that makes a hissing or buzzing sound. The "zh" sound never stops it at all. Compare the sounds in the middle of "leiSure" (zh, ʒ) and "leDGer" (j, ʤ ( ... )

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Re: Waitaminnit… aldersprig August 28 2014, 19:43:19 UTC
okay, I think the more helpful thing here is...

"How do I write this so people understand what I'm trying to say?"

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