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Ace Linguist
Personal blog · acelinguist.comculturescience
Ace Linguist is a personal blog at acelinguist.com about culture and science. Since 2019, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Dialect Dissection: Indie Voice/Cursive Singing – The Definitive Post (2021)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for linguistics posts on regional accents and dialects, including the pin-pen merger, how accents are heard, and cursive singing. Commenters cite these posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
At the crossroads of linguistics and pop culture.
Most-linked posts?
- Dialect Dissection: Indie Voice/Cursive Singing – The Definitive Post (2021)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-21
- The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-13
What Hacker News says?
Generally, the difference between regional dialects is almost all in vowels (sample: 0). This is why SOUNDEX [1] eliminated vowels. 0 - https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
Comment linking /2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html
on “Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs”Submitted The Pin-Pen Merger (2020) as a story · 54 points
HN discussionI'm also deaf, and I took 14 years of speech therapy. I grew up in Alabama. The only way you would know I'm from the South is because of the pin-pen merger[1]. Otherwise, you'd think I grew up in the American Midwest, due to how my speech therapy went. Almost nobody picks up on it, unless they are linguists that already knew about the pin-pen merger. [1] https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html
Comment linking /2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html
on “How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters”Submitted Dialect Dissection: Indie Voice/Cursive Singing – The Definitive Post (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe description is used in English as well, particularly for musical vocals. Here's a Vice article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyqkv/cursive-singing-tikto... . And here's a linguist explaining it more precisely: https://www.acelinguist.com/2021/05/dialect-dissection-indie... . The term to search for would be "cursive singing".
Comment linking /2021/05/dialect-dissection-indie-voicecursive.html
on “Gen Z never learned to read cursive”Submitted Dialect Dissection: Taylor Swift and Genre Hopping as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dialect Dissection: Indie Girl Voice as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is "Indie Voice"? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted It's Gonna Be May: A Historay as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
