Darin Flynn
@phono-logical
assoc. prof. linguistics @ucalgary.bsky.social
For some reason ‘python’ is an exception to /aɪ/-raising for many Canadians, including my kids. It’s not due to secondary stress after the diphthong. ‘Pisces’ has /aɪ/-raising with the same stress, and OTOH, some Canadians also lack raising in ‘pythoness’, where there no stress after /aɪ/
My son got ChatGPT to answer his messages automatically this morning. I didn’t know this was possible and the timing of responses was convincing but I could tell right away it was AI
Word-blend intent (‘fantasy’ + ‘city’) vs. antepenultimate stress imperative of -ity
Albanian has some interesting clusters by Indo-European standards. This is /ʃc/, I think?
Second, when fireworks were announced at the end, the crowd spontaneously cheered “FI! ER! WORKS!” repeatedly. I found it interesting that no one seemed to hesitate, as if they were unclear about whether ‘fireworks’ is disyllabic or trisyllabic
A couple of phonological tidbits at a Canadians ball game in Vancouver. First, the crowd cheered “NAY! DEE! UHNZ!” repeatedly. ’Nadians is not an established abbreviation, I don’t think, so I found it interesting that they chanted the last two unstressed syllables but dropped the initial one (“kuh”)
“Phonemic correspondences between Bahasa Indonesia and Sinama” by Roxanne Marie Flores (June ’26) ejournal.iainpalopo.ac.id/index.php/id... Several cool correspondences:
“Phonetic correlates of prefixedness in four varieties of English” by Sarah Hawkins, Jen Hay, Rachel Smith, Jennifer Stuart-Smith and Robert Fromont (Mar. ’26) www.journal-labphon.org/article/id/1...
“Phonology” by Maria Mendes Cantoni and Magnun Rochel Madruga (June ’26) academic.oup.com/edited-volum...
A good example of rhyme over reason is the predilection of voters to favour politicians whose names rhyme and/or alliterate, e.g. Mark Carney /ˌmɑɹk ˈkɑɹni/ and Pierre Poilievre /piˌɛɹ ˈpɒliˌɛv/ in Canada
“Macau” by Roberval Teixeira E. Silva and Maria Célia Lima-Hernandes (June ’26) academic.oup.com/edited-volum...
“Angola” by Manuel da Silva Domingos, Daniel Peres Sassuco and Gladis Massini-Cagliari (June ’26) doi.org/10.1093/9780...
“Linking prominence, and other cues, to the processing of focus across languages” by Sasha Calhoun (June ’26) www.journal-labphon.org/article/id/1...
“The dynamics of disordered speech: Navigating acoustic and perceptual variability across talker demographics and listener experience” by Malachi Henry (June ’26) www.proquest.com/openview/ed3...
Very kind of them to cite me arts-pulleyblank-2024.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2025/0...
“Always adding additional alliteration: an ERP exploration of word form prediction” by Emily Robles (June ’26) www.proquest.com/openview/79c...
“Prominence and grouping in Papuan Malay prosody perception” by Constantijn Kaland (June ’26) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
A tad tricky to read, but cool landmark for academia: “’O’odham Ñeo’okĭ ’E-Da:mcuda: O’odham reduplicative morphology” by Jeremy Blayne Johns (May ’26) www.proquest.com/openview/9e5...