Episode: 4002
Title: HPR4002: Today I learnt - 2023-11-24
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4002/hpr4002.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:28:02

---

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,000 and 2 for Tuesday the 5th of December 2023.
Today's show is entitled Today on Learn 2023-1124.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, some odds and ends I learned today.
Hello everyone, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Dave Morris.
Today I've got a show which I've entitled Today I Learned by the date which is 24th of November.
So what's it about?
I'm saying in the notes here that I enjoy finding out about things and now that I'm retired
and have been for 14 years, seems shorter actually, but anyway I do have some time to
research things so I find something that interests me than I go hunting, lose loads of time during
the day in Wikipedia or whatever, but that's one I enjoy.
This show is being put together because HBR, the project, is going through a phase where
the queue can get very low.
It's not too bad just now, I think we've got at least a week ahead of us with shows,
but it has got very very low and we've had to resort to the reserve queue from time to
time.
So I thought if I put together some short shows that I could throw together quickly, then
I could contribute more easily to this problem, not contribute it to the problem, but against
the problem.
Maybe if this is of interest, it's an idea that's of interest other people can contribute
and we can make a series of it or something.
So the plan is to keep details to a minimum, provide a few links so if you want to dig
deep, you can, but unlike many of my shows where I cannot stop digging, I end up spending
weeks preparing something that doesn't last very long.
It's probably not all that interesting, but it's just a sort of mania that I suffer from.
So I've got three things that I want to mention, three things I have learned.
First one is, is the word learnt, L-E-A-R-N-T, or learned, L-E-A-R-N-E-D, well both are
acceptable, both of the past tense and past participle of the verb to learn, I'm not going
to go into the grammar of this, you can dig deeper if you wish.
So learnt, ending with a T, and T is an older form which is still quite common in British
English.
It's the one I tend to go for because I'm old, learned is more common in US English, but
it's becoming popular in the UK.
It's been acceptable for a long, long time.
It's not the one that my brain goes to, a couple of links, grammarist, it's a good
source, and there's a BBC question and answer thing that I found as I was searching.
I'm sure there's tons more, but I'll leave that up to you.
The fact that I called this today I learnt is okay, even though I might look a little
bit weird here.
It's also spelt, S-P-E-L-T, which means past tense to spell, it's also type of flour,
anyway, you know, for making bread and stuff.
Second T-I-L is the French word for piggy bank.
Why did I come across this today?
Well I want to YouTube channel from a Canadian woodworker who produces English and French versions
of his episodes.
The latest one is about making a wooden piggy bank.
I don't watch the French ones, but I do read the titles.
The French for piggy bank is T-I-L-I-L-T-I-L-I-L.
I learnt French at school, I wasn't much good at it, but I've never come across the word,
not too surprisingly.
So my questions were, where's it come from and how do you say it?
I found a witchnery page, which I've linked to, and it's a word, because it's a weird
word.
It's on a matter-peak, you know, a word that's meant to sound a bit like the sound that
it's describing, like crash or bang or splash, maybe, yeah, and it represents the rattling
of coins.
Now there's audio on the witchnery page, witchner is a great source of information, by the way.
There's audio on the page showing how to say it, demonstrating this.
There's also an IPA version of the pronunciation, where IPA is the international phonetic alphabet.
So that's my, that's a Q for my third T-I-L, and it's about pronouncing IPA coded words.
So there's all this stuff that you might have stumbled upon, which is strange symbols
that show how to pronounce stuff.
I've seen it many times, and I've tried to decode it, and you really have to dig fairly
deeply to find how you say each word, each letter I mean.
So the IPA form of T-I-L has got, I can't read you the symbols, because it's got characters
from various Latin alphabets, there's an upside down R for the French, and it's often
written in square brackets or in enclosed in slashes.
I've used the slashes here just to follow witchnery.
If you're interested in this, then you can find out about the IPA, and there's a link
to the international phonetic alphabet, and also the group that manage it.
That's all beside the point, and it's one of those sort of rabbit holes that I could run
off down for ages, but anyway, I was doing this a few months ago, and wondered how, how
do I actually find an IPA code thingy, and get a good idea of how to say the word?
And I was hunting around, and I came across a site, which is called IPA Reader, I found
various things where you could feed them paragraphs of English, and other languages, actually,
which would then generate the IPA for them.
This is for teaching English as a second language, in many cases, but the majority of them
seem to cost money, but I didn't see many free ones that seem to be useful, but that
doesn't get you to the point pronunciation.
IPA Reader does go to the site, which I've linked to, obviously, and paste the IPA codes
without the limiters into the form, then select a reader voice, and click read.
And I found that some of the voices is a little bit strange, there's one that seems to
be running too fast.
I'd like Brian, the one called Brian, who speaks British English, but then I probably
would, wouldn't I?
But it seems fine.
So have a look at this, because I've got this bookmark now, so I go there whenever I
come across a bit of IPA that I can't work out and find it to be an extremely good resource.
It probably doesn't cover everything, but it seems to be pretty effective.
So that's the end of my today, I learned list, and maybe I'll come up with another one
you know, I'll make it too, I don't know, probably never do another one after this.
Hope you found it interesting, and bye bye.
You have been listening to Hecker Public Radio, and Hecker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself, if you ever thought of recording
a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
and our Sync.net.
On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.
