Lady @Lady@cat.family

this isn’t a poll because i don’t care what the answer is

i have my ways and that’s good enough for me

do you have to climb on top of your girlfriend and strip out of your daytime clothes before you can put on pyjamas or is there another way?

maybe someday washington can be redeemed now that it is no longer owned by daniel snyder but it is still way too fucking soon for that

today i had to explain to my girlfriend that even though the eagles and the giants might have a fierce rivalry, as someone living philadelphia-adjacent i’d still rather the giants win than either of the other two teams in the division

and same goes for anyone who isn’t a racist

hey quick question as i don’t follow baseball; why do the Yankees have fans?

(this is because replacing flawed systems requires working with and talking to people, which is incompatible with the image of programmer-as-egoistic-man that the modern discipline is founded upon)

software people love to be like “i wonder how much of a computer i could build from scratch” and then direct approximately 0% of that competency into replacing the flawed systems we all use everyday

@wallhackio this probably doesn’t count but i’m reccing it anyway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBcveX82KAk

@alyssa (so, no i don’t know of any cases, but moreover i don’t know HOW we would know)

@alyssa i think this is a difficult question to answer because frequently we only know about these things because someone considered it distinctive enough to remark upon, which is usually not the case for ordinary allophones

much of our knowledge about historical phonology comes from things like poetry, but oftentimes poetic rhyming conflates various allophones (and if it doesn’t, that’s an argument in favour of the sounds being distinctive)

so “people used to say this a few different ways, but that variety vanished without consequence once the conditioning environment shifted” is something there is likely to be zero historical record of (except in the past maybe hundred years where people have started getting really rigorous about recording dialect and phonological systems exactly)

@alyssa corollary here is that oftentimes it is the fact that there are distinct allophones which ALLOWS the bit of surrounding context to be safely discarded, because the allophones are now conveying whatever information the (usually more verbose) preceding thing was doing

@alyssa generally, because auditory communication is lossy, and the more information you can convey to help disambiguate the better

the more sounds you have, the fewer words have each sound, and the easier it is to select which word you’re hearing

this comes at a cost, which is why mergers also happen, but oftentimes the distinction is useful or even necessary, so it sticks around

(it would be a big problem if “like” and “lick” became homophones in English just because we no longer say the final E, as an extreme example)