They really did fall off hard after Watershed though. Listening to TLWAT after Ghost Reveries, it feels like fucking cocomelon nursery rhymes in comparison.
Indimidating, right? Felt a few shivers run down your spine, eh?
(This post will not teach you IPA. There are plenty of resources for that already. All I aim to do here is show you what IPA can do for your pronunciation, and how understanding exactly how pronunciation works in a deep, linguistically accurate way, will greatly improve your pronunciation in your TL.)
The reason you should learn the IPA is not the symbols. The symbols are like 20% of what the IPA can do for you. The important part of this image is in the margins. Terms like front, back, close, open, rounded, unrounded, monophthong, diphthong.
Truly understanding what these terms mean will allow you to cultivate awareness of what your mouth is doing when it produces any given vowel. And this awareness is the magic bullet.
Once you have it, you will understand the symbols automatically. You'll know exactly how they relate to each other, which is the best way to memorise them, and you will have all the tools you need to figure out how to pronounce one yourself, often in no more than five minutes of practice.
Each new vowel you learn will give you greater understanding of how your mouth works, which will help you learn more vowels.
It's not instant, but it is much faster than you might assume. Putting in fifteen minutes a day to study, it should take at most a week to fully acquaint yourself with the basics. Once you have those basics, you'll already know what to do next.
Of course, this should be paired with listening to native speakers pronounce words. For example, the IPA allowed me to understand the Italian distinction between closed and open "e" pretty well.
And, according to the French IPA chart on Wikipedia, French contains the exact same distinction.
However, the vowels are NOT the same in French as they are in Italian. The French /e/ is more closed than the Italian /e/. I realised this listening to French native speakers pronounce words.
Completely relying on IPA symbols would have led me astray. However, not having the IPA? I wouldn't have known what "more closed" even means. Because I do know what that means, I know exactly how to reposition my tongue to pronounce the French /e/ correctly.
Without it, I would have had to rely on imprecise, subjective measures, like "French "é" sounds closer to "i" (as in "ski", not "bite") than Italian "é" does."
What exactly does "i" involve, that French "é" does more of than Italian "é"?
IPA answers this question. The French /e/ is more closed, meaning closer to the roof of the mouth, than Italian /e/, but is not as closed as /i/, where the tongue actually touches the roof of the mouth.
I hope this wasn't too incomprehensible lol.
(TL)
As someone who thinks Blackwater Park is the finest metal record of all time, with Ghost Reveries not far behind, to me, Opeth's "third masterpiece" will always be Watershed, not Still Life. I still think SL is amazing, in most bands' discographies I would consider it a highlight.
The hardest decision was between Heir Apparent and Dirge for November. Having to choose between Blackwater Park and The Baying of the Hounds was also brutal.
Imagine a hypothetical speech community where all members are natively fluent in two languages. This could have arisen from two speech communities mixing and it becoming mandated that all children are taught both languages from an early age.
If this speech community were totally isolated and both languages were equal in prestige, how long would such a situation last? Would one language eventually start gaining over the other, leading to one language dying? Would the languages eventually mix and form a weird kind of creole? Or would this bilingualism continue indefinitely?
Not sure why the racism/xenophobia part comes to play
This is less a conlang and more a conaccent. Most people will never rid themselves of a nonnative accent in English, so my goal was to create one universal nonnative variety that balances ease of learning with comprehensibility for natives. As such, this is a systematisation of the mistakes nonnatives make when pronouncing English.
I took General American as a base, assuming the cot-caught and strut-comma mergers, so /i ɪ eɪ ε æ ə u ʊ oʊ ɑ/.
I merged the close and near close vowels, monophthonised /eɪ/ and /oʊ/, and shifted /æ/ to /a/, giving /i eː ε a ə u oː ɑ/. And the /u/ is really is [u], not the weird half-fronted version typical of English.
The consonantal alterations were thus:
/ɹ/ -> /ɾ/
/θ/ -> /f/ all positions
/ð/ -> /d/ word initially, /v/ elsewhere.
Phonotactics I didn't touch, because making that easier without screwing up comprehensibility would have required actual thought and effort, and this was just something I did because I was bored.
My goal here was to preserve the basic framework that English spelling operates by, but clean it up significantly.
I have assumed the cot-caught merger and the strut-comma merger.
Schwa is the trickiest sound to fit into the framework. I decided the most intuitive solution for those used to traditional English spelling would be to split it between <a> and <u>, depending on stress. For <a>, there is no conflict, as /æ/ does not appear in unstressed syllables. As such, <u> is the only letter that pulls true double duty.
The consonants have been changed little, as they are mostly phonemic in English spelling.
