(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

[Arayaz]

We have "trxnny" in American English too, and yes, American transgender people find it offensive.

[Speaking as an American trans girl] Some people would find it offensive, but it's also been reclaimed by some, especially online (as seems to happen to most slurs). I wouldn't be offended to be called it unless the person speaking was cis. (But I wouldn't use it myself, unless perhaps if the person I was talking to had expressed, unprompted, that they considered it reclaimed.)

[VaptuantaDoi]

Feel someone should point out that while Australian diminution often produces words that aren't used elsewhere, and sometimes they use diminutive affixes that are old-fashioned abroad, the process itself is hardly unique to Australia, and many of the words Vap mentions are also found in England.

That's basically what I'm saying. I'm not sure why it seems so mysterious to others.

/əj/, -/ɔɥ/ and -/ɜ(z)/

Not about diminutives, but I have to say it seems unnecessarily confusing to insist on Aussie having a totally different phonology from English when you could just use the archiphonemic transcription we're all familiar with (took me a minute to work out what suffix "-igh" was meant to be...). And is there really a phonemic difference between coda /ɥ/ and coda /w/? If not, isn't sending readers off to search the footnotes to the IPA (not even the main chart!) to work out a sound counterproductive when there's a perfectly good, understandable and typable approximation available? It's in slashes, not brackets! Anyway, not trying to get at you, it's just a pet peeve when people use unnecessarily narrow and idiosyncratic transcriptions when the details are irrelevant to what they're actually trying to communicate - since you're explaining Australian English to people, why use a transcription scheme that requires us to already know about the weirdnesses of Australian English?

[bɜˈk̠ˣ̠ɒ̝zˑ ˌɑ̹e̯ ˈwɒ̝nʔ ˌtˢɘ̹̠ˑy̯]

a "chippy" is more often the shop than the human in the shop (though it can be either).

A chippy is a carpenter. Should of mentioned that, sorry.

That sounds like a general definition of a diminutive. Diminutives in many languages CAN be used to derive words for smaller versions of things, but I don't know if that's ever their main purpose, at least in European languages?

I guess I don't want to call it a diminutive since it never has or had any of the classical diminutive senses, it just kinda looks like one. Even in Romance languages, "diminutives" can still be used with a literal sense in some cases. In the same way that I don't like calling the agentive case in split-intransitive languages an ergative, even though that's commonly accepted practice.

[Khemehekis]

We have "trxnny" in American English too, and yes, American transgender people find it offensive.

[Speaking as an American trans girl] Some people would find it offensive, but it's also been reclaimed by some, especially online (as seems to happen to most slurs). I wouldn't be offended to be called it unless the person speaking was cis. (But I wouldn't use it myself, unless perhaps if the person I was talking to had expressed, unprompted, that they considered it reclaimed.)

Reclaimed? Huh. I'm a bisexual, and I've never been fond of the LGBT people saying "fxg" stuff. I know, people always say "N-word privileges", and I even argued once that it was OK for former poster loftyD to make a joke about autism since he'd mentioned earlier that he was autistic himself (after someone else said, "Not cool"), but I just can't see "fxg" or "fxggot" as anything but a term of homophobia.

[Visions1]

[bɜˈk̠ˣ̠ɒ̝zˑ ˌɑ̹e̯ ˈwɒ̝nʔ ˌtˢɘ̹̠ˑy̯]

I love this so much.

[Khemehekis]

Why is a mouse called un ratón in Spanish when a rat is bigger than a mouse?

[Arayaz]

Why is a mouse called un ratón in Spanish when a rat is bigger than a mouse?

Apparently -ón can, rarely, be used as a diminutive. (According to Wiktionary, that is.)

[All4Ɇn]

Why is a mouse called un ratón in Spanish when a rat is bigger than a mouse?

Apparently -ón can, rarely, be used as a diminutive. (According to Wiktionary, that is.)

Something similar happens in French. A baby rat is called a raton, but a raccoon for some reason is called a raton laveur or literally a baby rat that washes itself.