Institute of Semantic Restructuring

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Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.


2004:13:07

981 - Blackbird's Nest of White Bread

Early in my reading on the subject I encountered, "A linguist is someone who takes seriously the question:

What is the difference between

This becomes a little less non-sensical when you toss in a hyphen to alternately prepend "black" to "bird's" or "bird's" to "nest":

The above by way of context for today's quote from Language Log:

"White bred" for "white bread" is an excellent example of the subspecies where the sounds are not just familiar, but identical, and where the misinterpretation makes at least as much sense as the original."

I simply don't hapeen to agree, on no other basis than my own experience as a native speaker, at a not-entirely-trivial skill-level, of English. The difference in sounds between "white-bread" and "White bred" are perhaps subtle, but not entirely missing. Am double-checking whether this qualifies as a "phone" or no. To my ear, in addition to simple differences in stress, similar to the blackbird example, there is an intonation difference; the food-stuff reference would get a spike-and-drop intonation; the genetic reference would get a double-flat intonation:

I have no idea of where to find a web-friendly orthography for such notation.

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