July 17, 2004

Yiteraw Minded

After a period of guest-blogging on Glen Whitman's Agoraphilia, Neal Whitman has started his own weblog Literal Minded.

I especially like the series of posts on his 3-year-old son's developing mastery of English pronunciation. For example, he describes (and explains) how Doug pronounced /l/ sometimes as [j] and sometimes [w]. (That's IPA [j], as in yet, not English "j" as in jet.) Example: "yawipop" for lollipop. That would be ['jawiˌpap] in IPA.

(Well, I guess technically the "a" vowels should probably be [ɐ] "turned a". Leave it to the IPA to reserve the usual print glyph for "a" for a cardinal vowel sound that is hardly ever used in any language. But that's a rant for another day.)

Posted by Mark Liberman at July 17, 2004 02:54 PM