Nope! We say it with two syllables—roughly [dɪˈtrɔɪt] (or "dih-TROIT"). The last syllable has a diphthong—the vowel sounds merge together rather than be pronounced separately.

"Whenever I hear something as simple as a piece of correspondence from 100+ years ago it always strikes my ear as being so much more poetic, densely structured, and precise in its expression."

Chomskian?

It's a pretty common sound change: sj > ʃ (that is, the "sy" to the "sh" sound), so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's going on. Happens quite frequently.

Romanian is another language often cited when talking about languages that are very open to borrowings. It's just drenched in Slavic.

And Ontarians like to claim there's no difference between the way they talk and the way Michiganders talk... I used to work retail, and Canadians would always be so surprised that we could tell they were Canadian before they told us.

You know what sucks about the NCVS, though, is when you take linguistics classes, and nobody bothers to tell you that by the way, you have a vowel shift, and then you're permanently confused about the low vowels in the IPA because all the words that books claim have such-and-such a vowel, they don't have that vowel…

Please, please, and also please.

Eh. None of those are particularly unusual, though. Most varieties of spoken English do have an unusually large vowel inventory (the variety of British English considered by WALS is claimed to have thirteen!), but it's not the only language with a large vowel inventory, and of course English doesn't have a length…

Eh. None of those are particularly unusual, though. Most varieties of spoken English do have an unusually large vowel inventory (the variety of British English considered by WALS is claimed to have thirteen!), but it's not the only language with a large vowel inventory, and of course English doesn't have a length…

Well, Poe was a bit of a character anyway. :)

I could barely finish the movie. It was a pretty movie, it had nice music, the actors were great—but that story. The whole "HACKING THE VIRUS!!!1!" thing with the Tube tunnels, I was thiiis close to turning it off.

Tyrion/Sansa forever.

Is it a spoiler if everyone guessed it already? I dunno.

Especially because it sounds like he and Jaime were supposed to have joint command of the armies.

Does first cousins really count as incest? I'll be the first to say I find it pretty icky, especially considering how close I am to all of my first cousins, and in mainstream American culture it's generally not okay, but that's not the case for all cultures throughout history. Especially historically, lots of first…

Claims about this sort of thing crop up frequently, but none of them have ever been confirmed by outside groups.

...did you read the article? They literally talked about that very problem.

I know it's a very popular meme to think of Australia as a magical place of Australium and everything trying to kill you, but it's just a continent like any other, with animals like any other. Australian animals don't have any magical ability beyond animals from any other continent to handle a sudden influx of an…

Also, I'm pretty sure they got the idea from the first Michael Bay Transformers movie.