2158: Pronunciation of 'Woman' Nov 11, 2020
The spelling of ‘woman’ is sometimes controversial due to its assumed relation to the word ‘man’, but even just for how it represents pronunciation it should ring a few bells. For the singular, this is fairly straightforward insofar as the ‘-man’ pronunciation is consistent with other unstressed forms of this like in ‘foreman’, as /mən/. In the first vowel of the singular (woman), this actually began as /i/ (as in ‘wee’) due to the origin with the word ‘wif’ (woman; wife). This got gradually rounded, referring to the posture of the lips and pronounced further back, referring to the posture of the tongue: wʊmən. Regarding the plural form furthermore (women), while it is spelt like the plural of ‘men’, it is not the latter vowel that changes, but that the first vowel becomes [ɪ] (as in ‘in’): thus wɪmən. A nonstandard variant of this, particularly in parts of America does actually change the latter vowel: wʊmiːn; this distinction may however actually be less clear due to the stress of the word.
1219: Accents in Sign Languages Apr 11, 2018
Just about every feature of spoken languages is present in sign-languages, with the obvious exception of vocalization. Sign-languages have morphology (with one wild exception), and there is still syntax, as one would probably assume. However, less intuitive but nevertheless true is that sign-languages also have accents. For instance, sometimes the words that are used in a certain region that has a standardized version (such as American Sign-Language) will not follow the conventional guidelines. At other times, such as with New York signing, it tends to be done faster than that in the Midwest or the South of the United States. Moreover, there are even stylistic differences, such as with US Southerners who are more likely to touch their chests and jaws as they sign. All of these together make up some of the different ways accents reveal themselves in sign languages: here, it was only American Sign Language, but the ideas can be applied broadly.