Things you were shockingly old when you learned

ha ha

2+ tamales, 1 tamal.

"lousy" from louse/lice

just now, duh

traceable in the usage meaning "infested" i.e. "that place is just LOUSY with cops!"

well I guess you'd expect the s in a descriptive form of a given word to be soft. Maybe if it was pronounced more like loussy you'd get it clearer. Does adding a y to the end of a word tend to harden the letter before it, pronunciationwise?

I think it varies? Most people don’t say greasy to rhyme with easy eg

except in yeats

(xp) Not sure about that tbh.

Or to be more specific changing a word from noun to adjective does it harden an end syllable's soft letter.
Language pronunciation tends to change to what flows naturally off the tongue over time. & it can obscure etymological evolution, innit?

a good example of where changing a word from noun to adjective fails to harden the end syllable's soft letter is louse and lousy, which goes in exactly the opposite direction (except no doubt in the dialects where this doesn't happen)

id use both words either way tbh, tryin to think why/when and it may be depending on following consonant or somesuch

I might use a z sound for louse if I’m saying “louse up the joint”. Maybe. I’ve never said that I don’t think

I would very much see a soft s as in louse as not being a hard s which is more like zee in lousy.

what you're saying would be the noun would be louz and the adjective would be loussee. I haven't heard anybody talk like that.

So I'm wondering why you're making what appears to be a contrarian statement.

bcz to me the z sound is evidently a "soft s" and the SSSS sound is a hard s?

i mean this is a formulation you've more or less invented so you can define it how you like i guess

Prett sure there's no such thing as soft or hard 's' sound.

... there is however definitely a y at the end of prett.

well lol actually i was unfair to stevolende, as there *are* other ppl out in the world (including language teachers) (bad ones) who insisting on terming them soft and hard s in exactly this confusing way

linguists favour voiced (zzz) vs voiceless (sss): the difference being the sound made in the back of yr throat is the voicing of the zzz

Liza Minnelli to thread

Sean Connery and Ally McCoisht to thread.

ztfu everyone

There are no special IPA symbols for /s/ and /z/ - they are just /s/ and /z/ - dunno why we need to talk about 'soft' and 'hard' as it is always confusing.

is it or isnt it

Apologies for introducing the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative into the discussion for cheap laughs.

his work really fell off after live flesh

lol

blouse/blousy

I thought that US English changed a lot of what is represented by the letter s in English spelling to z precisely because of that differentiation.

& would have thought of the more liquid s sound as soft and the more curt z sound as hard but that could just be synaesthetic association.
& think there are several other letters that voiced/unvoiced differentiation is true of depending on what letters it is juxtaposed with.

An interesting one is "abuse", where the "s" becomes voiced when it goes from noun to verb, with no change in spelling.

blouse/blousy

blowze/blowzy

(early 17th century: from obsolete blowze ‘beggar's female companion’, of unknown origin.)

floss / floozy

thought 1: if you mean ise vs ize, the z form was not introduced by american spelling and is not present by reason of american usage (OED favours "ize" where relevant). it's there because the early root form of the relevant word is classical greek, and it began to be swapped out (in the UK) by printers tending followed the subsequent french versions of the root (which tended to convert the z to an s).

thought 2: it's possibly simply by association with soft c -- viz "soft c" is sss hence s pron.sss must be the "soft s")

thought 3: someone else can pick this one up

"Blousy" can also mean "like a blouse" but now that I'm slightly more awake, I think I do use a voiced consonant in "blouse" anyway, although my parents don't. This may change again after I drink coffee.

Thought 3: the grave iirc

as with grammar it's a bit of a clown's errand anyway trying to pin down reliable eng lang rules of pronunciation

such as there arertend to arrive in the form "i before e except after c, when the sound is eeee, or when sounded as *guido voice* "EEEY!" except in february alone each leap year, when the moon is in the second house, plus also there's when *dies*"

it is an irregular language with a great deal of valuably unruly regional variation

Ha, was "except after c" there just because of "ceiling"? I haven't had coffee yet but I can't recall what other "cei" words a 7yo might have occasion to use.

receive and just possibly receipt i guess

Ah

Someone get sund4r a coffee already

in hackney we call it soffee

That the Zing icon means ilx could be mistaken for a MAGA forum

That MAGA is just a ripoff of Thatcher's "Make Great Britain Great Again", without a play on words or faded empire.

There are no special IPA symbols for /s/ and /z/ - they are just /s/ and /z/ - dunno why we need to talk about 'soft' and 'hard' as it is always confusing.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Sunday, August 25, 2019 11:41 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Looking up that IPA symbols list it looks like it breaks down along the same lines I would have thought of as soft and hard. /s/ covers what has been called soft c as well as the more fluid/liquid/whatever s sound, presumably the default s sound
whereas /z/ covers the other s sound as in desert, -ised and whatever alongside things normally spelt with the letter z.

I would have broken that down to soft and hard since I'd say it follows the pattern delineating the difference between hard and soft c or g and other letters I would have thought of as hard and soft sounding.

"soft" and "hard" are not linguistic terms and they are not esp useful for describing sounds/phonemes

IPA is the best reliable way to describe the sounds that human mouths produce as well as suprasegmental features like intonation, stress, etc

i did not just learn that -- i am responding to the above discussion about lousiness

I think what they are getting at is the difference between voiced and unvoiced sounds, maybe? "soft" meaning unvoiced? But it is still a poor way to refer to it, there's an underlying assumption that orthography represents pronunciation in some deliberate way, there is just a /s/ and a /z/ and they can be represented in a load of different ways.

Yeah, no one calls the "g" in "guitar" a "hard 'c'" or says that the "v" in "velvet" is a hard "f" so "voiced" vs "voiceless" would be a better way of describing the distinction (if you're not going to use IPA). However, it was completely clear to me (and I'm guessing most here) what Stevolende meant by "hard and soft 's'" so I didn't think it necessary to pick that nit.

Voicing is part of IPA! Aspiration too. It covers everything that is why it’s the best. Long/short/hard/soft are the layman’s terms that help elementary school students learn to read; they are useful terms for that purpose but not universally understood the way IPA terms/notation are for describing linguistic features. I swear I’ve been yammering on Ilx about this for nearly 15 years.

However, it was completely clear to me (and I'm guessing most here) what Stevolende meant by "hard and soft 's'" so I didn't think it necessary to pick that nit.

No, I was totally confused as I would've put them the other way around, I'd associate the /s/ sound in louse with being "hard", it just... seems that it is to me, on a sonic/connotation-based level rather than a scholarly linguistic one. Voiced and voiceless are so much easier for me (though tbf I have qualifications that mean I know my way around IPA pretty well, so not vouching for their ease for other people, I guess).

Actually, I think I associate all voiceless consonants with being "harder" sounding than voiced ones. They're proper full stops whereas voiced consonants flow.

Shameful confession: I have an English degree, in the course of which I studied linguistics with considerable enthusiasm, thirtymumble years ago. All too often, IPA just looks like gibberish (or denotes a type of beer) to me.