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I've discovered it's alive and well in the northeast of England, which is another datapoint in my "Northumberland is really just southern Scotland" thesis.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 20

Oh, that's frustrating. Good luck!

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 20

I think they technically still exist - you can ask for one from the bank - but I haven't personally seen cheques in practical use for at least 15 years.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 19

Some (translations of) the "problematic" tweets can be seen here:
www.bic.org/news/grave-m...

A grave miscarriage of justice: Qatar jails distinguished Baha’i citizen for five years in act of religious discrimination and denial of free expression

The Baha'i International Community (BIC) strongly condemns the unjust verdict of a court in Doha, Qatar, finding a distinguished Qatari Baha’i, Remy Rowhani, guilty of crimes he did not commit. Mr. Ro...

www.bic.org

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 19

Tweeting "happy Eid" and "there is no God but God" is apparently "undermining Islam" and deserves a five year prison sentence in Qatar, if you are a Baha'i.
www.hrw.org/news/2025/08...

Qatar: Five-Year Sentence for Baha’i Dignitary on Abusive Charges

A Doha court sentenced the chair of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is in Qatar to five years in prison on August 13, 2025, based solely on exercising his rights to freedom of speech and r...

www.hrw.org

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Reposted by Rory Turnbull

tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · Aug 19

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 7

In Scottish English, yes. Minimal pairs like lock~loch, peck~pech, nicked~nicht. As well as in native Germanic words the /x/ often shows up in Greek loans like epoch and arachnid.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 7

Took me a moment to realise that this was about the vowels and not about the /k/~/x/ contrast 😅

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 1

Yeah I'd expect /k/ for those words with "ch". Thanks for sharing, I don't recognize most of these words!

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Aug 1

Okay I have to know what these 7 minimal pairs for HH vs NG are!

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

Yes, absolutely there's an interaction. In the experiment we tried to avoid influences by having everything be auditory - the participants never saw any of the words we were testing, they only heard them. But of course there is likely still something affecting it.

Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

In phonetics we're usually interested in the pronunciation of a word, not how that pronunciation is represented in writing, so the spelling is less important. People are able to hear and perceive new words even if they don't know how they're spelt, and illiterate people can still speak.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

Thanks, this is an interesting trail. It looks like a minority of people also call it "Southern Standard British English", just to keep us on our toes.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

But yeah there's a lot to unpack here, both in terms of how the sounds are actually pronounced and in terms of how language users conceive of them.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

The silent 'e' shouldn't account for much because, well, it's silent. Some consonants are, in theory, quite different - compare peel/pile: the English /l/ sound is much more vowelly than the French one; or in seat/site the /t/ is often glottalized in English.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

I thought it predated his work but I could be wrong, I haven't read everything he's written!

Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

Yeah, fish/fiche was more similar than seat/site. But niece/Nice was rated even more similar than either of those two, so it's not just the vowels - likely the consonants are involved too.

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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · Jun 16

Does anyone have a sense of the origins of the term "Standard Southern British English" (SSBE)? It seems to have developed as an alternative to "RP" but I'm not sure who popularised it (if anyone).

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Reposted by Rory Turnbull

Matthew Hunt @coneslayer.org · Jun 13

Keep your cats indoors and switch to Linux.

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