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Cake day: December 13th, 2023

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  • Family story time: my family is full of academically minded people (three of my grandparents worked as Latin teachers), with varying levels of snobbery and reasonableness. One of the first times my dad went to my maternal grandparents house for dinner, someone said “margarine,” pronouncing it with a hard g. My father asked why, and my grandfather explained that there’s no soft g followed by an a in English.

    My father accepted this, and looking to change the subject, asked if my grandparents could offer any help analyzing “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”








  • It sounds like they’re talking exclusively from the front of the mouth. I used to talk like that when I was trying to conceal a tongue ring. I wonder why that is?

    Linguistics nerd stuff below: American English is spoken from the front of the mouth compared to lots of other languages (not this far forward, but still). I wonder if AI voices speaking Arabic would move Arabic forward by the same amount, all the way to the front, or further back (no human anatomy restrictions on AI voices).

    Basically, I wonder if this is a consistent artifact of AI voices or whether AI is just exaggerating unique features of a language.

    Edit: I found this, which sounds natural enough that I wouldn’t have thought anything of it (aside from the cuts and the actual things said), had I not been watching out for front of the mouth talk