the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

I have a lot of appreciation for fluffy dragons. 💚

why do books always have a page with a bunch of numbers on it

it has the copyright info and stuff but also there's always the line "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1"

Despite being an international alphabet, the IPA is based on the Latin alphabet with a few Greek letters thrown in, and the majority of the Latin alphabet is pronounced in the same way it is in Romance languages. Many of its other letters are rotated versions of other Latin letters, which was a choice made to minimize the amount of additional type that would need to be made for printing presses, as you can print a ɯ by turning an m upside-down, for instance.

There's a certain logic to the choice of symbols; the aforementioned sound /ɯ/ for example (IPA transcriptions--that is, written things meant to represent sound as opposed to writing, a distinction important to linguists) is similar to /u/, and as such the symbol ⟨ɯ⟩ (angle brackets, properly ⟨⟩ but commonly <>, are used to refer to the symbol itself, as opposed to the sound it represents) is similar to ⟨u⟩.

Newly invented letters are rare, and usually represent sounds that are utterly unfamiliar to European languages, like /!/ and /ʘ/, which are almost exclusively found in the Khoisan and Bantu language families of sub-Saharan Africa.

The IPA has no uppercase letters. A few sounds, such as /ʙ/, are represented with small capitals, but ordinary capital letters are reserved for other uses; for instance, C is commonly used to mean "any consonant", V for "any vowel", N for "any nasal consonant", and so on.

For the two people who answered "What's IPA?": IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, an alphabet designed to accurately represent the pronunciation of any spoken word in any language. It's used extensively by linguists, and is quite useful for the general public as well as it lets you learn exactly how something is pronounced without having to actually hear it.

More dictionaries should include IPA pronunciations for their entries, I think.

(by "read" here I don't mean "fluently", just "can work out what it means given time"; IPA is not meant to be something you can fluently read)

Can you read IPA?

konami used to make really good video games, it's a shame the entire company just vanished into the aether without a trace

"golem":

*rotates the concept of gender by 30°*

*considers udon*

likewise, the study of the stars that a star-eater eats would be gastroastronomy

Would a study of intergalactic food be astrogastronomy?

technically, black pepper is a fruit too

watching gdq recordings and woah, that final fantasy 6 run this year is ridiculous and i have no idea what just happened

you aren't all cute, but i can assure you that every one of you who wants to be cute is

cute people here

ō

people are talking about the year of the rat, but what about the rat of the year?

good morng