u/NaNNaN_NaN

Did you ever notice that when you enter the Cracked Flagon, there are double doors on the outside, but then once you're inside it turns into a single door?

It took me many visits to notice it, but once you see it it's an amusing little lapse in continuity 😄

^(Background:) ^(This is a question motivated entirely by curiosity, as someone who's interested in how sounds work (both as a choir member and from reading the kind of discussions on the topic I've seen here and on other online forums). It's not a homework problem, and I also don't have any kind of formal experience in the field (so apologies if the title isn't phrased well or the question misuses any technical terms).)

I noticed that just like how r has two different versions (consonant and vowel) depending on where it occurs within a syllable, it seems like the same thing might be true for l?

If I understand correctly, phonemically /r/ is always considered to be a consonant, but phonetically it could be a consonant [ɹ] or the vowel [ɚ].

Is this also the case for the l in "lint" vs. in "spoonful" or "mulberry"? It seems like there are also two different vowel versions: the one in "spoonful" sounds slightly different than the one in "mulberry." It seems like the same kind of difference as between [ʊ] and [ʌ], but I don't think they actually are the same as those sounds (or any of the other standard vowels from the vowel chart). If they are in fact distinct and separate sounds, I'd expect them to have their own symbols, but I don't know what these are.

Why I believe the l sounds in "spoonful" and "mulberry" are vowels:

- They can be stretched out indefinitely (although this is also true for syllabic consonants like the 'n' in "button")

- They sound the same over their entire duration (which would rule out their being just a combination of a regular vowel followed by consonantal [ɫ])

- They seem to have a higher sonority than other syllabic consonants like [m̩] and [n̩]

I guess the best way of confirming one way or the other would be to plot the sounds on a formant chart and look for the 3 parallel bands which all vowels have, but I'm not sure how to do this and wouldn't necessarily be able to pick them out without any experience.

Here are the recordings for "a spoonful of mulberries" and for just the word "mulberries" with the first syllable stretched way out, to demonstrate the sounds I'm asking about. (Here are the same sound clips in a YouTube video, if you don't want to download files.)

My best attempt to transcribe both (using the syllabic dark l symbol in place of the possible vowels):

[ə ˈspuwn.fɫ̩ əv ˈmɫ̩.beɚ.ijz] and [ˈmɫ̩ːːː.beɚ.ijz]

^((I'm not very confident about the starting vowel in the first syllable of "spoonful"))

EDIT: fixed typo

The Stock stablemaster's travel destinations were acting oddly for me today.

First, the horse started galloping back and forth in random directions and rode over one of the houses' roofs. By the time I started recording it had pretty much settled into going in circles. Then it started spinning faster and faster to the point I was getting dizzy XD

This might be the funniest bug I've personally encountered so far!