Make Shitposts Light-hearted Again

Can you find a recording (not necessarily of someone saying “das kind”, but of any two words, the first ending and the second beginning with a consonant) where you can hear this glottal stop put in between? It should come from flowing speech, not the boundary of a clause or sentence where the speaker might insert an extra pause, of course. If you want to record yourself demonstrating it, that would be perfect but I appreciate you may not want to.

Ideally also a recording of as much of the same sequence of sounds without it, for comparison, but that’s less important :)

edit: realised I could give you an example myself. Here’s a recording from Wiktionary, a native speaker saying “aus Kindern werden Leute”. There is no glottal stop between any of the words.

And while finding that I realised there is a point from the other direction: in precise speech, there is a glottal stop in German compounds where the second part starts with a vowel sound. So Spiegelei is listed in the Duden as having a glottal stop before the “Ei”.

Paradoxically, non-native speakers tend to be better at analysing this kind of thing ;) German for sure does not have a glottal stop between most words. “Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

I’m not sure if I’ve misunderstood you and this isn’t what you’re saying happens…

coz in the half of the day that I’m awake, I can do entertaining things I can’t do at home?

I’ve never known a hotel that does breakfast beyond 10AM, and that usually at the weekend.

This is the same in English between “sleeping” and “bag”. The pronunciation of “ing ba” in “sleeping bag” is exactly the same as the pronunciation of “ingba” in “dingbat”.

In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

I think people are surprised to hear this, so one explanation for what you wrote is that you genuinely believe in speech there is generally a tiny pause between words, that you don’t find within words. It’s difficult to find a good citation for this because it’s a fairly basic fact in linguistics, in spite of how surprising it may be; the best I came up with was this Duolingo post

But you may already be aware of that and be getting at something else: in German, “Schlafsack” is a word that will be understood by anyone if you say it in the normal way. To get someone to understand that you’re saying the two words “Schlaf Sack” next to one another without understanding “Schlafsack”, you need to do something to make it clear, otherwise they’ll understand the normal word. And one way to do that would be to insert a tiny gap. This is different though: in English if you wanted someone to understand “sleeping bag” not as the thing you use while camping but, perhaps, an anthropomorphic bag that is having a nap, you need to employ something similar. So this is not a difference between the languages.

I understand that’s the point you wanted to make, and to an extent I agree with it. But it’s not really about the point I was trying to make…

How do you know that that’s generational rather than, “it takes some time to accumulate wealth, to rise to the position of CEO, or to build a political career enough to become a senator”?

Oh I guess that covers all of 'em then.

The UK has very little smoking in public.

Germany had a shit-ton, though it has decreased quite a bit.

That’s fair enough. I think though we are probably talking about slightly different things - while I also agree that anti-immigrant protesters have the right to protest, what I’m getting at is that I nevertheless would rather they weren’t protesting about something I don’t agree with. There are lots of things people have the right to do that I don’t want them to actually do. But with overseas protests, I only know that people have that right to protest; I don’t know whether I support them exercising it in that particular situation.

Seems I’m just old-fashioned:

It’s a tuff habit to break, especially if it’s all they know.

But of course it’s not all they know. I’m not saying they only nibble at wet food out of my backside - I’m saying it because that’s what they did when I give them wet food - as kittens.

I have asked vets several times about diet, none had any concerns about them being fed dry food, or even only dry food. They can’t free feed though because one is a fat bastard.

If I were to feed them wet food I’d have to feed them tiny quantities 10 times a day for them to not starve. Every so often I feed them an offcut of meat or fish from human food, and most of the time they flop it out of the bowl onto the floor, push it around, lick it, and then abandon it.

In case anyone is interested now this “helpful” character has departed:

The conventional explanation for “bad big wolf” sounding “wrong” is that “big bad” is an example of ablaut reduplication, which has a fixed sequence of vowels.

This is a weak explanation for two reasons: a good example of ablaut reduplication is for example “bish bash bosh” where only the vowel changes. This is a weaker example, and so ablaut reduplication is a weaker predictor of the pattern, because the final consonant is not the same between “big” and “bad”. Secondly, “big bad wolf” is a phrase from a folk tale and hence deeply embedded in the language in its own right. It’s hard to disentangle whether “bad big wolf” sounds strange to native ears because it’s a violation of the pattern of ablaut reduplication, or because it’s a violation of the specific example, “big bad wolf,” that all native speakers heard many times as children.

Remember, this is all a tangent from whether English has a rigid adjective order. A stronger example to consider is A1: “big beautiful house” versus A2: “beautiful big house”, and B1: “little beautiful house” versus B2: “beautiful little house”. As a native speaker, I strongly prefer A1 but B2. The adjective order adherents say it should be A2 and B2.

So, I don’t think the supposed rule of adjective order really exists.

I think if the helper were still around, they would say that actually this just proves their point. Even though they complained about the “rule” of adjective order, actually the fact that there is no rule is even worse! (how convenient, if true), and you just have to learn each example - B2 not B1, A1 not A2 - one by one, and their real point is that English is particularly bad because of this.

Unfortunately, because they are apparently not any kind of linguist, they never presented any comparative examples. Tagalog has a strong preference for adjective order, for example. Languages with flexible word order in general, such as Finnish, nevertheless have a preferred default word order and if you don’t learn it you will sound weird. Languages which use prepositions pair certain verbs with certain prepositions (so in English you sit in your seat, watch the performance in English, and in the end the good guys win) but this pairing is arbitrary and if you pick the wrong one you’ll generally be understood but sound wrong (in German you sit im Sitz, watch auf Deutsch, and am Ende the good guys win).

Languages - all languages - abound with aspects that mark out non-native speakers. That’s because they’re complex things that incorporate huge aspects of culture, not merely a means of communication. That’s not something that anyone needs to “defend” and it’s not something that makes a language cease to be “real”. Is it the same degree in all languages? I’m sure it isn’t, but that’s not the point either.

lmao.

What exactly are you trying to “help” me with?

I’m talking about orthography because the thread is about how language (German originally) is written - i.e. orthography. You didn’t mention anything about grammar until this latest comment; your previous comment mentioned orthography and vocabulary. All I did was continue talking about what I was already talking about.

The rules are so convoluted and nonsensical (the adjective order is a great example)

The adjective order is an old, overblown meme. The meme came with a ready-made exception (“big bad wolf”) which is no less of an exception for the fact that it came with ready-made excuse (“ablaut reduplication”).

Did you notice that “old, overblown meme” violates the order (opinion follows age)? That’s because it’s overblown.

Did you know that other languages have adjective orders of various specificity and rigidity?

Yes, it’s a fascinating topic, and yes, there are many markers of non-native English speaking which are impractical to teach. But it sounds like you’re trying to steer the conversation somewhere I don’t want to go, and I’m not going down there. As soon as you start categorising languages as “real” or “not real” you’re on your own. Your misunderstanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, likewise.

delightful?

The idea that English’s orthography is crazy because it came into written use late doesn’t really hold water. The ancestors of Modern English have all been written down for many centuries, even though post-1066 no-one was using it for a good while at court.

It’s more that English as a whole is split between a Germanic and Romance ancestry, with the orthography of both sources being represented, while standardisation took place right around the time of a huge shift in pronunciation - the great vowel shift - fossilising an orthography that represented a bygone pronunciation.

In fact I think more can be blamed on English writing being standardised early than late, and then not keeping up with changes in pronunciation: the infamous <gh> cluster used to represent a pronounced /x/ sound - compare English night with German Nacht, or knight with Knecht, or freight with Fracht. All these spellings were standardised from a language that pronounced this consonant! If English really standardised late, then the likelihood would be that these words would not have a (written) consonant where the pronunciation doesn’t have one.

I tried to find how much of a premium traceable gold carries but wasn’t able to. Got a good surface for how much?

Well the rest of the rules around written English are arbitrary, why would this one be different?!

I think I’d write fish bowl separately though.