train of thought

rambling

As I write this blog post, I am on a train up to Seattle for Thanksgiving. I’ve never been fantastic at using time on trains or planes for getting work done—I think I ever did a homework assignment, sure, but mostly I end up sitting around, maybe listening to a podcast, maybe reading a paper or web serial I downloaded to my phone as a PDF.

I have no particular topic in mind, but I figured that one (1) blog post where I literally just ramble about whatever comes to mind until I run out of train to blog from wouldn’t be too unreasonable as a change of pace. Maybe on December 1st you can get a sequel. “Stream of consciousness” would be a somewhat better description of this sort of post than “train of thought” is—I think a train is more straight and controlled, like it’s going along a prelain road built of rails, while a stream can be more chaotic and haphazard and untrained, branching and merging and so on. Although I suppose train tracks can also branch and merge. But they do it more orderlily. It’s also, like, “stream of consciousness” is a more standard literary term or something. Also I think a train of thought could be picked up later, while a stream of consciousness would be weirder to do that with. But it’s a pun, I can’t not do the pun. I’m going to go check if the cafeteria line is finally short enough that I can get a burger.

There was a sign in the cafeteria that said “Per FDA regulations, we cannot heat or store non-Amtrak food, beverages, or medications.” It is reassuring to know that I can get my medications heated, so long as they are Amtrak medications. The payment-processing device was very poorly behaved, but I did finally manage to get my cheeseburger, which was Amtrak food and therefore eligible for heating. I did not request that they heat my Amtrak diet coke.

After today, I’ll have five more blog posts to write. I don’t imagine that “gratitude journal a bunch on Thursday” is an especially original idea, but it seems worth doing anyways. I might do a redux of yesterday’s post, but about Super Mario 63—I don’t think very many people are especially interested in that game, but that speedrun was indeed a big part of my life for a while as a kid and certainly I can spare one post for it. Probably Sunday should be some sort of reflection post on how the month has gone—or I could, perhaps, do that on Monday instead. I’m curious if I overall hit the NaNoWriMo word count goal—500 per day wouldn’t be enough for that, but I think very few posts were very close to 500, and many of them exceeded it by a very comfortable margin.

Some pretty-loosely–held speculation: I think my coda /l/ might be something like a [ʕ]—a pharyngeal approximant, one of the pronunciations of ע—a lot of the time. There’s often some apical articulation after certain vowels, but that’s somehow not the important part of the sound. It seems to me that most of what’s going on is further back than velar, though I don’t really fully trust my ability to distinguish uvular and pharyngeal sounds or whatever. One hiccough: [ʕ] is supposed to be the semivowel equivalent of [ɑ] (just as [j] and [i] and [w] and [u] form pairs), but saying something like [fiɑ̯] doesn’t sound that much like <feel>, as you would expect if I pronounced <feel> as [fiʕ]. In fact, something like [fiɔ̯] seems closer. Here’s my best guess at what’s going on there: I think my /ɑ/ is more like an [a]—or maybe I should be saying [ä]—than an actual [ɑ], and my /ɔ/ can be more like [ɒ]. I think my /a~ɑ/ is pretty close to the vowel that starts my /aj/ diphthong. This sort of analysis makes sense of a lot of things, especially how it feels like the positioning of my mouth changes very little between the vowel and consonant in the word <all>. If I’m saying something like [ɒʕʷ] then you wouldn’t expect very much movement. Claude claims this analysis is plausible and correctly guessed where I grew up based on my claim that I talk like that—or maybe that was just it having memory? ChatGPT gave something more New Englandish.

Okay maybe it would have helped if I had simply read the Wikipedia page for General American more recently. Good to see I’m maybe on the right track. Also, wow, I sure do hate the sentence

/i, u, eɪ, oʊ, ɑ, ɔ/ are considered to compose a natural class of tense pure vowels (monophthongs) in General American.

That was more deconfusion than I expected to manage on a train. I’m much more satisfied with my understanding of my vowels now.

I also kinda think I say <the> and <put> both with something close to a [ɘ~ɵ]. Sometimes I wonder if I should be merging schwa with /ʊ/ instead of /ʌ/ (as in <strut>. I say it more like [ɐ~ɜ] than an actual [ʌ].) But like, the reduced form of the article <a> is much closer to [ɐ] than [ɵ]—so maybe when my dialect lost schwa, it split some of them into /ʌ/ and some of them into /ʊ/? I’ve never come up with a great answer to this.

Okay I’m at Seattle now. It’s time to say