John Wells’s phonetic blog

phonetic difficulty

2011-12-30T07:55:00.012Z

Another interesting paper at the Łódź conference was given by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak (seen with me in this photograph, taken by Alice Henderson).

He started by showing us some of the appallingly improbable and stilted “English” sentences given in Polish textbooks of elementary English over the course of the twentieth century. For example, can you imagine a husband and wife ever saying this?

—Am I a man?
—Yes, you are a man, and I am a woman.

Equally improbable is that any native speaker, talking to other NSs, would come out with

The house is high.

or even

I am a teacher. I have many students.

More importantly, Sobkowiak demonstrated how many of the “elementary” example sentences in fact contain multiple points of phonetic difficulty for the Polish learners at whom they were aimed.

This is his dog.

In this simple example there are several tricky pronunciation features: the difficult consonant ð; the orthographic irregularity that final -s corresponds to s in this but to z in is and his; and not least the final g in dog (Polish devoices final obstruents).

Any sentence containing preconsonantal the is problematic — not only phonetically, with the non-Polish ð and ə, but also grammatically, since Polish has no articles.

An ideal sentence for absolute beginners, he thought, might be

I like music.

This maps happily onto pseudo-Polish aj lajk mjuzyk.

Sobkowiak has identified some 61 points of phonetic difficulty for Poles in the pronunciation of English words. Using these, he has devised a Phonetic Difficulty Index (PDI) and has analysed the PDI of thousands of vocabulary items presented to Polish learners accordingly.

He reckons that the phonetically most difficult vocabulary items he encountered were authoritarians ɔːˌθɒrɪˈteəriənz, light-coloured ˌlaɪtˈkʌləd, pearl fisheries ˈpɜːl ˌfɪʃəriz, and square-shouldered ˌskweəˈʃəʊldəd. Each of these, he says, scores 11 points of difficulty.

Learners from other language backgrounds would have similar though not identical problems. (For example, English θ is a difficult consonant for speakers of Polish, but not for speakers of Castilian Spanish, Standard Arabic, or Greek.) Phonetically aware language teachers could construct a PDI for any L1-L2 pair.
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And a happy new year to all!

This blog will again be suspended for the whole of the month of January. Next posting: 1 February 2012.

nonstandard assimilation

2011-12-29T08:46:00.007Z

At the Łódź conference John Coleman presented an interesting talk about the spoken component of the British National Corpus. It comprises about ten percent of the entire corpus.

It includes a wide range of authentic spoken material, recorded in 1991-92 by volunteers wearing Walkman devices recording all their conversational interactions over a 24-hour period. As well as all kinds of structured and unstructured talk directed at other people, from sermons to discussions of boyfriends, the files include dog-directed and parrot-directed speech. Who’s a pretty boy, then?

The material has now been digitized by the British Library from the original analogue recordings.

Although comprising only ten percent of the whole corpus, the audio material of the BNC extends to 9 TB (nine terabytes), about 1800 hours’ worth. So you won’t be downloading it all and storing it on your hard disc any time soon.

Although the whole spoken corpus is unmanageably large, a selection of audio files from the BNC is now available online.

The ten most frequently used words in the spoken corpus, Coleman says, occur more than 58,000 times each. At the other extreme, 23% of the words used (12,400 words) occur only once. Many other words that are surely in people’s vocabulary never occur at all.

Coleman presented some observations about assimilation of place of articulation. As well as the familiar dealveolar type (ˈtem ˈmɪnɪts, ˈɡʊɡ ˈɡɜːl), he found various instances of “nonstandard place assimilation of word-final /m/ and /ŋ/”. Delabial examples included siːn in seem to and seɪŋ in same kind of. As well as plenty of cases of aɪŋ(ɡ)ənə etc for I’m going to, he reports “18 tokens per 10 million” of əˈlɑːŋ klɒk for alarm clock. The most frequent item classified as develar was swimming pool pronounced as ˈswɪmɪm puːl — but there of course the underlying form of the -ing ending would be ɪn rather than ɪŋ for some speakers in some styles of speech (as the sociolinguists have documented), so that the assimilation could be dealveolar after all, not develar. The same applies to ˈwedɪm in wedding present.

We await further reports with interest.

Győr

2011-12-28T08:37:00.017Z

Yesterday’s brief mention of Brno triggered interest in its pronunciation. In Czech it is ˈbr̩no, two syllables, the first having a stressed syllabic trill. Mendel, though, being a native speaker of German, would have known it as Brünn brʏn.

Inspired by this thought, Stephen Bryant sent me a picture of the Nový Most (‘new bridge’) in Bratislava, which I show in reduced size alongside. He adds the comment

What I really like about this photo is the green panel on the sign, pointing to Brno, Žilina, Győr and Vienna, four cities in four countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria respectively.

Perhaps the pronunciation of Győr — which I for one struggle with — could be the subject of a future blog entry.

Győr is pronounced ɟ(ʝ)øːr. You can tell the name is Hungarian, since the letter ő, with its double acute accent, is used in the spelling of no other language (or at least, no other European language). The logic behind this unusual diacritic is that Hungarian uses a diaeresis, as in German, to show front rounded vowels (ö, ü), and an acute accent, as in Czech, to show vowel length (á, é, í, ó, ú): so for long front rounded vowels you have an acute diaeresis (ő, ű).

There is some debate as to how the initial consonant, orthographic gy, is best classified. All agree that it is a voiced palatal obstruent. The question is whether it is a plosive, ɟ, or an affricate, ɟʝ. The 1999 IPA Handbook treats it as an affricate, but adds this note.

In formal style /cç, ɟʝ/ are realized mostly as palatal stops, i.e. [c] and [ɟ].

Its predecessor, the 1949 Principles booklet, says simply

c, ɟ cardinal palatals.

Anyhow, the result is similar to the English gj in regular. The vowel is as in German schön; the final consonant is an apical tap, or in my experience may alternatively sometimes be fricative. Listen here.

Győr has a number of names in other languages: as well as nativized forms such as Дьёр in Russian and Đur or Jura in Croatian, it has the apparently unrelated name Raab in German. But as far as I am aware there is no traditional anglicized form of the name.

Virchow

2011-12-27T09:07:00.011Z

I’ve been reading Siddharta Mukherjee’s fascinating book The Emperor of All Maladies. I’d go along with Dacid Rieff’s judgment:

Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things - a noble book.

I had not previously been aware of the importance of the German doctor and biologist Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902), who made several important discoveries to do with leukemia. Coming across his name in the book, I naturally wondered how to pronounce it. Its spelling combines three different uncertainties in German spelling-to-pronunciation rules: the initial letter v (f or v?), ch (ç or x?) and the final w (f or silent?).

Mangold’s Duden Aussprachewörterbuch gives

Virchow ˈfɪrço, auch ˈvɪ…

This is confirmed by the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch.

fˈɪ^ʁçoː od. vˈɪ^ʁ…

Merriam-Webster 11 offers the anglicization

ˈfir-(ˌ)kō, ˈvir-

which translates into BrE as ˈfɪəkəʊ or ˈvɪəkəʊ. So be it.
_ _ _

The rest of this post is a rant about the failure of authors and editors to carry out appropriate fact-checking before publication.

My quibble is this. As I came to the book I knew very little about the aetiology and therapeutics of cancer. I was eager to hear what Mukherjee had to tell me about surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the biology of carcinoma cells. Naturally, I was prepared to accept as authentic what he wrote on these topics. But every now and again, as he introduced some new technical term, he would tell us the purported etymology of the word in question. Now language is something I do know a bit about, and here almost everything Mukherjee says is inaccurate. This reduces my faith in him as an authority on other matters.

Marie Curie called the new element radium, from the Greek word for “light”.

No, radium is not Greek, and it does not mean ‘light’. The word was coined from rad- (in French radioactif) plus the suffix -ium (used to form the names of metallic elements). Rad- is from the Latin word radius, which means ‘rod, spoke, ray’. The Greek for ‘light’ is φῶς phōs (contracted from φάος phaos), stem φωτ- phōt-, which gives us photography, photon etc.

…vinca, the Latin word for “bind”.

No, the Latin word for ‘bind’ (verb) is vincio, vincire, vinxi, vinctum. The related noun is vinculum ‘a bond, fetter’. The form vinca is late Latin and botanical Latin for a genus of plants known in English as ‘periwinkle’. The drug vincristine was derived from a plant formerly included in the genus Vinca (but now placed in Catharanthus).

adjuvant, from the Latin phrase “to help”

No, the Latin origin of this word is adjuvans, with stem adjuvant-. It is not a phrase, but a single word. It means ‘helping’ and is the present participle active of the verb adjuvo. ‘To help’ is adjuvare, its infinitive.

[a propos Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificum Diatriba] …one such morbis…

The intended word is morbus, the nominative singular of the word meaning ‘disease’. The form morbis is the Latin ablative plural, used after the preposition de.

mitosis — Greek for “thread” —

The Greek for ‘thread’ is mitos (μίτος). Mitosis is a modern Latin coinage based on this root.

Not about language, but a matter of general knowledge, is

…the isolated hamlet of Brno, Austria…

Brno, where Mendel carried out his pea experiments at St Thomas’s Abbey, is no “isolated hamlet”, but a large city, the capital of Moravia.

I’m not saying that Mukherjee ought to have known all these things. I’m saying that someone — either the author or the publisher’s editor — ought to have checked the facts, which are readily available.

classic rant

2011-12-23T09:16:00.011Z

I find it really depressing that announcers on our most popular classical music station, Classic FM, have so little idea how to pronounce foreign languages. Surely anyone concerned with classical music needs at least a smidgin of awareness of the phonetics (reading rules) of Italian? And of German, too, I’d have thought.

A currently popular record album bears the title Il progetto Vivaldi 2. The Classic FM presenter called it ˈɪɫ prəˈɡetəʊ vɪˈvældi ˈtuː. I can see that it’s unreasonable to expect an educated Englishman to know the Italian for ‘2’ (due), but can’t everyone see that progetto is the Italian equivalent of the English word project and, like it, has dʒ?

There’s a classical ensemble called Gli Incogniti (‘the unknown people’). How do you think the Classic FM announcer pronounces this difficult name? That’s right, ˈɡliː ɪŋkɒɡˈniːti . Perhaps he thinks gli is related to the English word glee. (It’s actually the form the Italian plural definite article takes before a vowel, and in Italian gl stands for a palatal lateral.) OK, I know we do tend to anglicize incognito with penultimate stress, but in Italian the stress is actually antepenultimate. To the best of my knowledge, the Italian pronunciation of the ensemble’s name is ʎi iŋˈkɔɲɲiti. There's a video of them here.

In other news, a recent contestant on the TV panel game University Challenge referred to Descartes as ˈdeɪkɑː, which is taking the deletion of French final consonants too far. In French, he's dekaʁt(ə).

But I salute our choirmaster’s skill in anglicizing Italian musical terms during a recent practice.

When we come to the ækəˈpeləri bit, I want you all to…

That’s an adjective formed by suffixing -y to a cappella, with word-internal intrusive r.

Rant over. Happy Christmas, everyone. Enjoy the music. Next blog: 27 Dec.

more syllabic consonants

2011-12-22T09:03:00.013Z

Following on from yesterday’s blog…

As I put it to Michael,

there is in each case also an optional variant involving schwa plus a nonsyllabic consonant.

— to which he replied that he didn’t know what I meant.

I’m not sure how to put it more clearly. I mean that although the word hidden, for example, is mostly pronounced ˈhɪdn̩, it can also be said as ˈhɪdən. Most cases of n̩ can be replaced by ən, and vice versa, with no change of meaning. And the same applies to the other syllabic consonants of English. You can say əl instead of l̩ in medal - meddle (though that might sound odd or childish, depending on where you come from). For hesitant you can say ˈhezɪtənt or ˈhezɪtn̩t. For blossom you can say ˈblɒsəm or ˈblɒsm̩. For gathering you can say ˈɡæðərɪŋ or ˈɡæðr̩ɪŋ (= ˈɡæðɚɪŋ), or indeed compressed as ˈɡæðrɪŋ.

In terms of phonology, I would say that syllabic consonants are not phonemes, i.e. not part of our underlying sound system. Rather, they are derived by rule from an underlying string of ə plus a non-syllabic sonorant consonant. I call the rule Syllabic Consonant Formation, and it takes the general form
ə [+son] → [+syll] / …
Two segments are reduced to one, with the sonorant consonant retaining its various attributes (place, nasality/laterality, etc) as it acquires syllabicity.

The conditioning environment of the rule (shown here just as “…”) is pretty complex. It varies according to different accents and different speaking styles, and also depending on which consonant is concerned. For ən after a strong vowel plus d, as in garden, the rule is strongly favoured (though evidently now becoming less so in some BrE). With a preceding fricative, as in lesson, it is still favoured, though perhaps less strongly. With an affricate, as in kitchen, it is disfavoured. In common and lion, i.e. after a nasal or a vowel, it is so strongly disfavoured as to be virtually unknown in RP-style English. Although a syllabic nasal following a nasal is a no-no, a syllabic lateral, on the other hand, is fine: channel ˈtʃænl̩.

Although the AmE NURSE vowel could in principle be analysed as a strong (= stressable) syllabic r̩, this would not fit the above rule, which requires a weak ə as part of the input. So I treat the NURSE vowel in both BrE and AmE as a primitive, ɜː ~ ɝː. The second vowel of AmE father, however, does fit, and I analyse it accordingly: ˈfɑːðər → ˈfɑːðɚ.

This is the reasoning behind the notation I use in LPD, where potential syllabic consonants are shown either as ^əl ^ən ^ər ^əm or as əl ən ər əm, depending on whether a syllabic consonant is more or less likely as the output. The LPD notational convention is that a raised symbol denotes a possible insertion, an italic symbol a possible omission. So ^ən implies a default n̩, as in hidden ˈhɪd ^ən → ˈhɪdn̩, while ən implies a default ən, as in hesitant ˈhez ɪt ənt → ˈhezɪtənt.

* * *

Here by request is a quick-and-dirty video of me saying ˈhɪdn̩ ˈhɪdən ˈmedl̩ ˈmedəl. Sorry about the poor sound quality.

nonfinal syllabic consonants

2011-12-21T08:21:00.012Z

We usually exemplify the syllabic consonants of English with words that end in one, e.g. muddle ˈmʌdl̩, hidden ˈhɪdn̩.

Michael Rodeno asked

Is it possible to find syllabic sounds l, r, n, m in the middle or at the beginning of words?

Actually, if he’d consulted LPD he’d have seen that there I intentionally chose to illustrate the Syllabic Consonants article (p. 799) with the word suddenly ˈsʌd n li, which has a syllabic n̩ in the middle of a word.

There are plenty of other words with medial l̩ or n̩: think sandals, muddled, saddleback, Middleton, battlefield, rattlesnake, vitally; frightened, gardens, woodenly, hadn’t, mightn’t, ardent, woodentop, Attenborough, Hottentot, gluttony, Gordonstoun, as well as the uncompressed versions of rattling, dawdling, Madeleine, Middleham, fattening, gardening, Tottenham, Sydenham etc.

A more useful way of describing the restricted distribution of syllabic consonants is not by reference to their position in the word, but by reference to their relationship to strong (= stressable) syllables: syllabic consonants typically follow them. That explains why syllabic consonants never occur in initial position in words in isolation.

For syllabic consonants in initial position, all I can offer are cases such as had a lot, had another if pronounced with no schwa, i.e. as hædl̩ɒt, hædn̩ʌðə. You readily get this in connected speech: I started early, because I had a lot to do before lunch. So I had another coffee and got cracking.

Is that ɡʊd n̩ʌf?

Syllabic consonants are never categorically required in English. There is always an alternative pronunciation available, with ə and a nonsyllabic consonant.

More on this topic tomorrow.

the Dear Leader's successor

2011-12-20T08:51:00.008Z

The news media tell us that the recently deceased Dear Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, will be succeeded by his third son, Kim Jong-un. On radio and TV I have heard this name pronounced either as kɪm dʒɒŋ ʊn or as kɪm dʒɒŋ ʌn. Which is better?

In hangul it is spelt 김정은. In the Revised Romanization system, now official in South Korea, this transliterates as Gim Jeong-eun, or in the McCune-Reischauer system as Kim Chŏng-ŭn.

So the romanization “Kim Jong-Un” accords with neither system.

Given the Korean spelling 김정은, we expect the pronunciation ɡ̊im d̥ʑ̥̯̯ʌŋ ɯn. The vowels in the last two syllables are back and unrounded. The first, spelt ㅓ and conventionally shown in IPA as ʌ, tends to sound to British ears more like ɒ, despite being unrounded. So pronouncing J(e)ong in English (BrE) as dʒɒŋ (rather than dʒʌŋ) seems a good idea.

The vowel in the last syllable is more problematic. Spelt ㅡ, and represented in IPA as ɯ, this is a vowel quality (close back unrounded) that appears exotic to us and for which we have no equivalent. Pronouncing it as English ʌ is wrong, since that is the sound we use for ㅓ. Using English uː would be inaccurate, since that is the sound we use for Korean ㅜ (as in the last syllable of 반기문 Ban Ki-moon). So I would vote for ʊ as the nearest English equivalent, giving kɪm dʒɒŋ ʊn as the best way of anglicizing this name, at least for BrE.

Here's the Guardian's cartoon.

the Polish way out

2011-12-19T08:24:00.014Z

On arrival in Poland we were kindly met at Warsaw airport by a colleague from Łódź, Przemek Ostalski. Once loaded up into his car, we had to find our way out of the multistorey carpark. This was not a straightforward task. We had to look for the signs saying WYJAZD and helpfully also in English, WAY OUT. (Note to Americans: that’s the BrE for ‘exit’.)

I reflected on the importance in Polish of distinguishing between wyjazd ˈvɨjast and the very similar wjazd vjast, ‘entrance’: one letter difference, one phonetic segment difference, but just the opposite meaning.

Rather more common in public signage, it seems to me, is another pair, equally confusing: wejście ˈvejɕtɕe ‘entrance’ and wyjście ˈvɨjɕtɕe ‘exit’. Many buses have two doors, one marked wejście and the other marked wyjście. These two words differ by just one letter in seven, just one phonetic segment in seven (or six, if you count an affricate as only one segment). Native speakers, of course, take in their stride what looks to outsiders like a stupid design flaw in the language.

It does mean, however, that any speaker of Polish has got to be fully sensitive to the difference between e and ɨ. That includes NNSs trying to get their tongues around the language (blog, 7 July 2010: note that on that occasion the hamfisted respelling supplied to us for omijajcie góry, lasy, doły was ‘o-me-yaiy-che goo-reh laseh doeweh’, ignoring just this contrast).

What is even more interesting in this connection is something I have noticed about Polish /e/. This vowel is often transcribed more narrowly as ɛ, but I am wondering if an even narrower symbol ɛ̈ might be appropriate. It strikes me as often being considerably centralized. I’ve noticed this particularly in the final vowel of the placename Katowice, which tends to sound closer to English ə than to English e or eɪ. I got a helpful informant to pronounce jeszcze dziesięć ‘ten more’ — yes, ˈjɛ̈ʂtʂɛ̈ ˈdʑɛ̈ɕɛ̈ɲtɕ.

However, Jassem’s Polish vowel chart (reproduced here from Wikipedia) shows the vowel as fully peripheral. The Wikipedia article makes no mention of possible centralization. Likewise Biedrzycki, in his Abriß der polnischen Phonetik (1974), plots this vowel as coinciding with cardinal 3 and comments merely (p. 60)

Das polnische Phoneme /ɛ/ wird hauptsächlich durch den vorderen halboffenen ungerundeten Vokal [ɛ] repräsentiert… Dieser Laut erinnert an das deutsche kurze [ɛ] in /bɛt/ Bett. The Polish /ɛ/ phoneme is mainly realized as the front half-open unrounded vowel [ɛ]… this vowel is reminiscent of the German short [ɛ] in Bett.

This centralization, if I am right about it, must make the wyjście — wejście distinction even harder to hear.

the BBC pronunciation unit

2011-12-09T08:43:00.015Z

If you’re employed by the BBC, or work for an independent programme maker producing BBC programmes, then you are entitled to consult the BBC Pronunciation Unit for “professional advice about pronunciations in all languages”.

The staff of the Unit are all multilingual trained phoneticians, and do an excellent job.

Their advice covers anything from what, in a British context, might be called recherché and exotic…...through the not-quite-so-exotic......to names you’d think most educated BrE NSs would be familiar with (though presumably someone had asked). (That should, of course, be Oxford, not Cambridge.)

As you can see, their indications of pronunciation do not include IPA transcriptions, but do offer a choice of two respelling systems.

One, “BBC Modified Spelling”, has been in use for many years. Some of the symbols it uses have diacritics: ī for the vowel of PRICE, ō for the vowel of GOAT, and oo with a breve (not available in Unicode) for the vowel of FOOT; breves are also used on ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ to represent schwa. The voiced dental fricative is shown by underlining, th, and underlining is also used for the digraphs zh (IPA ʒ) and hl (IPA ɬ). Stress is shown by a superscript acute mark.

The other scheme is a newer one. It avoids diacritics, but at the expense of being perhaps less transparent. The letter y is used in two different senses, representing in some cases the PRICE vowel and in others the palatal glide. PRICE can also be written igh. Schwa is written uh or uhr. Stress is shown by capitalization.

Symbols that might be open to interpretation are accompanied by a brief explanation.
Respelling systems based on orthographic conventions have one great advantage over IPA or IPA-style transcription systems. They are less phonetically explicit, more abstract. Instead of worrying about whether GOAT has a diphthong with a rounded first element (oʊ), a diphthong with an unrounded first element (əʊ) or a monophthong (oː), we just agree that ō (or oh) stands for whatever vowel you use in GOAT words.

However, respelling systems for English face particular difficulty in finding satisfactory symbols for
• the PRICE vowel, for which neither y nor igh is unambiguous, while ī has a diacritic
• the MOUTH vowel, for which both ou and ow are ambiguous (cf. soul, show)
• the GOAT vowel, for which oh may wrongly suggest a short vowel and oa, ou, ow are ambiguous (cf. broad, loud, now)
• schwa. If oh represents a long vowel, how can we make it clear that uh represents a short weak one?

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This blog will now be suspended for a week. (I may see some of you in Łódź.) Next posting: 19 December.

ejectives in English

2011-12-08T09:19:00.009Z

Timo Partanen writes from Finland commenting on what he thinks are ejective varieties of English /k/ that he has noticed in the speech of some native speakers. In particular he mentions a snooker player interviewed on YouTube, Judd Trump (listen here).

Mr Trump comes from Bristol, though I must say his accent doesn’t sound stereotypically Bristolian. In this clip he produces several striking, noisy, and somewhat palatalized velar ejectives for k when before a pause. Notice think at about 2:00 and again at about 3:09, and back at 2:50 and more strikingly at 3:20.

Timo asks

Is this phenomenon to be analysed as ejectives, evidently developed from plosive aspiration, or have I made a mistake? Might this be characteristic of British English, perhaps of some of its particular dialects?

Good question. What’s the answer?
• The segments in question do indeed appear to be ejective, i.e. produced with an airstream mechanism that is glottalic rather than the usual pulmonic.
• Rather than having developed directly from aspirated plosives, I would say that kʼ developed from the glottal reinforcement that is frequently found with English voiceless plosives and affricates in this environment. Reinforcement involves making a glottal closure just before the oral closure and overlapping in time with it, ʔp ʔt ʔtʃ ʔk. If the glottal closure is held until after the oral release, it masks the latter, giving Cantonese-style no-audible-release plosives pʔ tʔ tʃʔ kʔ. If it is held throughout the oral articulation, ʔpʔ ʔtʔ ʔtʃʔ ʔkʔ, the further step of raising the glottis to compress the air in the oral cavity is straightforward: pʼ tʼ tʃʼ kʼ.
• Yes, it is characteristic of some British English. I don’t think anyone really knows just who does it and who doesn’t. Cruttenden mentions it several times in his revision of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, claiming (p. 167 in the 7th edition) that it is

rather more common in some dialects (e.g. South-East Lancashire) than in RP.

I discussed this matter briefly in my Accents of English (1982), where I wrote (vol. 1, p. 261)

Preglottalization is not particularly associated with the south of England rather than the north. Indeed, my subjective impression is that in [the prepausal] environment it is at least as common in northern accents as in southern (thus [stɒʔp, kwaɪʔt, lʊʔk]). An emphatic articulation of the glottal component will readily convert this into an ejective, thus [stɒpʼ, kwaɪtʼ, lʊkʼ]; both northerners and southerners may be found who use these forms under appropriate stylistic conditions.

When explaining ejectives in Practical Phonetics (Pitman, 1971), I said (p. 3)

Some people use ejectives in English when words ending in p, t, k, or tʃ … come at the ends of sentences.

The ejective variants do seem to be confined to pre-pausal position: you don’t get them in the middle of a fluent utterance. They are occasional, optional variants of the usual pulmonic stops. Impressionistically, ejectives are more frequent with k than with p, t, or tʃ, but that may just be because the two words think and back are particularly frequent in pre-pausal position.

Graham Pointon wrote on the topic in his blog some years ago. He thinks it’s a rather recent phenomenon. I wonder.

coroners and their courts

2011-12-07T08:51:00.019Z

I had a phone call yesterday from a BBC local radio station, wanting me to comment on the shock-horror news that Camden Council had erected a sign saying “Coroners Court”, with no apostrophe.
I wasn’t terribly keen to accept the invitation. Local radio interviews are time-consuming, have a small audience, and are unpaid. Nevertheless I chatted for a short while with the production assistant. In our conversation I took my usual line (blogs, 17 May 2011 and 3-6 Oct 2008), saying I didn’t really think that missing apostrophes were a matter worth getting hot under the collar about, and that in this case there was anyhow some question about whether it needed an apostrophe, and — if it did — whether it should go before or after the s. It would really be better if we abolished all possessive apostrophes.

The production assistant was dismayed at my reaction. She had me down as a stickler for orthographic accuracy, a defender of supposedly fixed rules. She was hoping that I would forthrightly condemn the Council’s illiteracy. When she realized that I wasn’t going to do so, she brought the conversation to a close and said they would look for someone else to comment on the matter.

That was fine with me. It does, though, demonstrate the point that radio producers often have an agenda. If you’re not going to go along with that agenda, they may not want to interview you after all.

The case of Coroner’s/Coroners’/Coroners Court is not unambiguously clear-cut. We do indeed normally write Coroner’s Court, because each court has just one Coroner. Or do some such courts have two or more coroners? If so, the court in question would be a Coroners’ Court. And what is the plural? With several courts, there are presumably several coroners, which justifies the spelling Coroners’ Courts: is Coroner’s Courts OK too?

In the case of the Coroners’ Courts Support Service (pictured: note the two apostrophes) I suppose you could actually argue for Coroners’ Courts’ Support Service. In the other direction, I note that the webpage of the Coroners’ Society has a link to the Coroners’ Court [sic] Support Service.

It reminds me of the inconsistent naming of London tube stations, where the station after Earl’s Court as you go towards Heathrow is Barons Court (no apostrophe). King’s Cross is supposed to have an apostrophe, but not Colliers Wood or Golders Green.

Even when wielding an editor’s blue pencil, where I do try to ensure correct use of apostrophes, I wouldn’t change Sports Day to Sport’s Day or Sports’ Day — would you? I’m really not sure where to put the apostrophe, if any, in Gardener’s/Gardeners’/Gardeners Question Time. In the same spirit, I can live with Coroners Court, too.

clossal slebs

2011-12-06T09:03:00.015Z

Several times recently I have noticed the newspapers referring to ‘slebs’, by which they mean ‘celebrities’. Duly on guard against the recency illusion that leads us to think things we’ve just noticed must therefore be new phenomena, I checked in the OED. I find that the first citation there is from 1996, so a good fifteen years ago.
Shortening a word in colloquial speech is nothing new. Compare bus, phone, mic, etc., and also street cred (credibility) and now peep(s) (people). But what I want to discuss here is the loss of the schwa from səˈleb(rəti) (= DJ’s sɪˈlebrɪtɪ): the word is shortened not to its bare stressed syllable leb, but to sleb.

Most cases of compression involving schwa loss are found in the phonetic environment of a following liquid plus a WEAK vowel, as in historically hɪˈstɒrɪk(ə)li, camera ˈkæm(ə)rə, factory ˈfækt(ə)ri. Hence we regularly find compression in the adjectives moderate ˈmɒd(ə)rət and separate ˈsep(ə)rət, with their weak-vowelled suffix, but not in the related verbs to moderate ˈmɒdəreɪt and to separate ˈsepəreɪt, where the phonetic environment is a following STRONG vowel.

So what we have in ‘sleb’ is not mainstream compression, because the vowel in -ˈleb- is strong. Comparable examples that spring to mind are the colloquial possible loss of schwa in terrific təˈrɪfɪk ~ ˈtrɪfɪk, colossal kəˈlɒsl̩ ~ ˈklɒsl̩, correct kəˈrekt ~ krekt, and perhaps pəˈhæps ~ præps (OED p’raps dated 1745). I can’t recall seeing any discussion of this in writing anywhere, though it’s something I’ve talked about in practical phonetics classes often enough. (There's probably something in Gillian Brown or Linda Shockey’s books on the phonetics of colloquial English.) In the rough-and-tumble of rapid conversational speech I suspect that this reduction can be found for any word with the initial string obstruent—schwa—liquid. But it is presumably much rarer in words such as career, collide, forensic, giraffe, Goliath, Jurassic, Korean, peruse, salacious than in the everyday words mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Very occasionally the reduction becomes lexicalized, as for those speakers whose citation form for police is pliːs rather than pəˈliːs (or dialectal ˈpoʊliːs etc.). There’s also pram, from perambulator, for which the OED’s first citation is dated 1884. Usually, though, we remain aware of the difference in pronunciation in pairs such as plight – polite, crowed – corrode, Clyde – collide, even if we sometimes pronounce them identically.

velar or uvular?

2011-12-05T09:02:00.011Z

Commenting on my recent posting about Tokyo Sexwale (22 Nov), Roger Lass writes

…You mention the ‘velar fricative’ in Afrikaans. I must say that in over 25 years here in contact with Afrikaans I've rarely heard one except in a few hyper-posh varieties, or occasionally (but rarely) before front vowels in an uncommon version of the German ‘ich/ach rule’. The normal reflex of the early Germanic voiced back fricative, spelled <g>, is virtually always uvular, either a fricative or especially in initial position before a stressed vowel a voiceless uvular trill. This falls in with the voiceless back fricative < IE *k, so uvulars in goed, nag. Very similar if not identical to what is often called /x/ in Dutch but is also uvular in most varieties.

Afrikaans generally does not palatalise this before front vowels, but keeps it uvular, as in my experience do standard Dutch and Yiddish. All are languages that have a uvular not velar fricative (in Yiddish of course only from Germanic and Slavic voiceless back fricatives). It appears that uvulars may not be sensitive to palatal influence because of tongue shape. I've also noticed that many varieties of German, more than not in my experience, have a not very noisy uvular but definitely not velar fricative for <ch>, which does palatalise. As I recall, but am open to correction, there are varieties of Swiss German with a uvular trill for <ch>, and they don't palatalise.

In SA English speakers saying Sexwale (as well as Afrikaans loans with the same segment) have a uvular. The same is true of English speakers, in America, the UK and SA with Yiddish loans having this segment.

Thanks, Roger, for these observations.

I’d like to add two points: one about transcriptional practice, one about the facts.

The 1949 IPA Principles booklet, from which I quoted a few lines in last Wednesday’s blog about a (30 Nov), also has this (p. 12-13):

As with vowels, it is desirable to substitute more familiar consonant letters for less familiar ones, when such substitution can be made without causing ambiguity. … In accordance with [this] principle … the sound χ can generally be represented by the letter x. This cannot, however, be done in such languages as Eskimo or Kabardian, where the velar and uvular sounds occur as separate phonemes.

The 1949 booklet contains transcribed specimens of both Dutch and Afrikaans, both using the symbol x without further qualification.

Fifty years later, in the 1999 IPA Handbook, Carlos Gussenhoven says this about Dutch:

Roughly south of a line Rotterdam-Nijmegen, which is marked by the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Waal, /x, ɣ/ are velar, while to the north the corresponding voiceless fricative is post-velar or uvular.

And let’s not forget that velar—uvular is a continuum rather than an either/or disjunction.

Erg goed!

i2Speak

2011-12-02T09:20:00.012Z

Judging by the correspondence I receive, many people still find it difficult to enter IPA symbols on their computers.

I have recently read favourable reports of a little keyboard programme called i2Speak, “an online Smart IPA Keyboard that lets you quickly type IPA phonetics without the need to memorize any symbol code.”

This is a clever and user-friendly free programme that you do not need to install on your computer: you just call up a web page. You use it to create your text, and then copy-and-paste the text to where you want to have it.

The web page places a virtual keyboard on your screen. You can switch between modes such as ‘Smart IPA’, ‘IPA English’, and ‘SAMPA English’, and also within each access special keyboards for ‘Vowels’, ‘Diphthongs’, ‘Non-pulmo[nic]’, ‘Supra[segmentals]’ and so on, some of them bearing labels with phonetic terminology (‘Plosive’, ‘Nasal’, ‘Trill’ etc.). You can select the font and the font size. When ready, you press ‘Copy’ to transfer the resulting character or text onto the clipboard.

I2speak, although admirable, is not without some strange quirks and faults.
• The characters ɕ and ʑ (alveolopalatal fricatives) can only be brought to the display panel both together, where you must then delete the one you don’t want.
• The tie bar in the labialvelar k͡p is in the wrong place, after the two alphabetic letters instead of straddling between them, giving kp͡.
• Under ‘ejectives’ you can enter p’ k’ s’ directly, but not t’; but there are two separate buttons for inserting just the ejective diacritic ’.
• Among the Diphthongs labelled “England” you will find ɒɪ and ɛə but not the ɔɪ and eə that most of us use. The diphthongs (sic) labelled ‘USA’ include ɛɪɚ, which I cannot offhand ever recall having seen used for mainstream AmE.
• You can choose among a number of different fonts, but for some reason Segoe UI is not one of them. Yet that is the font I prefer for general use, and the font in which this blog appears (providing you have it installed, which will be the case if you are using a recent version of Windows).

You cannot enter connected English phonetic text using the ‘smart IPA’ or the ‘IPA English’ keyboard without also using your mouse, because there is no setting in which a single keyboard setting contains both the phonetic characters that you need (such as ɒ ʊ ə θ ʒ ŋ) and the ordinary alphabetic characters (such as p t k f v s z). For comparison, with Mark Huckvale’s Unicode Phonetic Keyboard I can write a continuous phonetic text such as I published on Monday entirely from the physical alphanumeric keyboard, never needing to switch mode by using the mouse.

Neither i2Speak nor any other available keyboard device would enable you to enter a text with assorted non-IPA characters, such as we had in yesterday’s blog. For that I used good old MS Word, where for an unusual character you just enter the Unicode number, select it, and press Alt-x. I composed the whole of yesterday’s text in Word, then copied everything en bloc and pasted it into blogspot.

fun with symbols

2011-12-01T10:18:00.008Z

Yesterday’s posting called for the small-cap-A symbol. I coded it straightforwardly in HTML as <small>A</small>. But blogspot accepts far fewer HTML tags in comments than it does in postings, so Paul, commenting, successfully entered it as a distinct Unicode entity, U+1D00.

Many, though by no means all, alphabetic small capitals are available in the Unicode range 1D00 to 1D7F. This block is known as Phonetic Extensions, and carries the introductory note

These are non-IPA phonetic extensions, mostly for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA).
The small capitals, superscript, and subscript forms are for phonetic representations where style variations are semantically important.
For general text, use regular Latin, Greek or Cyrillic letters with markup instead.

As well as small caps (ᴀ ᴁ ᴄ), superscripts (ᴬ ᴭ ᵃ) and a few subscripts (ᵢ ᵣ ᵤ), the block contains various other typographically interesting characters. (I have no idea what they are used for in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet — though see here.)

Here among the small caps you will find a ‘reversed N’, ᴎ, a sideways Ø (ᴓ) and a sideways ü (ᴞ). There is a ‘Latin letter voiced laryngeal spirant’ (ᴤ) and a ‘Latin letter ain’ (ᴥ).

Not everything here is from the UPA. There is also a special ligature ᵫ, which I can see appealing to English lexicographers who prefer respelling to proper phonetic symbols, as will ‘Latin small letter th with strikethrough’, ᵺ. There is also something called ‘insular g’, ᵹ, labelled ‘older Irish phonetic notation’.

Although they are not official IPA symbols, users of IPA will be happy to find here the lax high vowel symbols ‘with stroke’, ᵻ ᵼ ᵾ ᵿ: two of these are used in the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation, though the first, ᵻ, bears the Unicode warning ‘used with different meanings by Americanists and Oxford dictionaries’.

A further Unicode block, Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80 to 1DBF) covers various former IPA symbols from which recognition was withdrawn at the Kiel Convention in 1989: those for consonants with velarization ᵬ ᵭ ᵮ ᵯ ᵰ ᵱ ᵲ ᵳ ᵴ ᵵ ᵶ and palatalization ᶀ ᶁ ᶂ ᶃ ᶄ ᶅ ᶆ ᶇ ᶈ ᶉ ᶊ ᶋ ᶌ ᶍ ᶎ, and for both vowels and consonants with retroflexion ᶏ ᶐ ᶑ ᶒ ᶓ ᶔ ᶕ ᶖ ᶗ ᶘ ᶙ ᶚ. So we can now find in Unicode everything we might need in order to digitize the 1949 IPA Principles, Jones’s The Phoneme, and various English-language accounts of Russian phonetics.

what [a] means

2011-11-30T09:46:00.012Z

Commenting on Monday’s blog, Wojciech made the surprising remark

Re the symbol 'a' in IPA: I too find it strange that it's reserved for a phoneme which occurs so rarely in European languages (if it occurs at all). Whereas the common continental (and Northern English, methinks) 'a' has got to be transcribed 'ä'.

I say no it isn’t, and no it doesn’t.

The vowel a occurs extremely commonly in European languages (and of course in non-European languages). The Northern English TRAP vowel, too, is very satisfactorily represented by the symbol a, with no diacritics. The contrary claims reveal a basic misunderstanding of how phonetic symbols are used when we represent the phonemes of a language or language variety. Let’s see why.

The symbol a is one of the set of symbols representing the ‘Cardinal Vowels’ i e ɛ a ɑ ɔ o u defined by Daniel Jones.

No language is actually spoken with cardinal vowels: they are idealized reference points not defined by what happens in any particular language. (They are, however, suspiciously similar to a subset of the vowels of standard French as spoken in Jones’s day — though the quality of French ɔ, at least, was and is considerably different from that of cardinal ɔ. In passing we may note that the articulatory-auditory theory behind Jones’s cardinal vowel scheme is no longer accepted.)

Rather, these symbols are used for vowels in the general area concerned. Like all IPA symbols, they allow some considerable leeway. A typical French e is not identical with a typical Italian e or a typical German e, although all share a general similarity and all can be characterized as unrounded, front, and close-mid (‘half-close’). Compare colour terms, where we happily refer to shades of crimson, scarlet, vermilion and so on all as ‘red’. We are dealing not with discrete entities but with points in a multidimensional continuum.

In those languages it so happens that the close-mid e is distinct from an open-mid (‘half-open’) ɛ. (This claim is subject to qualification: for many French speakers the choice of one or the other can be more or less predicted from the phonetic environment, although others distinguish e.g. les le from lait lɛ; not all Italians make the distinction between venti ‘twenty’ with e and venti ‘winds’ with ɛ; in German the vowel quality distinction is accompanied, in stressed syllables at least, by a length distinction.)

There are many other languages in which there is only one unrounded mid front vowel: they include Greek, Spanish, Serbian, and Japanese. Qualititatively this may lie anywhere between cardinal e and cardinal ɛ. In each case the appropriate symbol, though, is e. In the words of the 1949 IPA Principles booklet (§20),

When a vowel is situated in an area designated by a non-roman letter, it is recommended that the nearest appropriate roman letter be substituted for it in ordinary broad transcriptions if that letter is not needed for any other purpose. For instance, if a language contains an ɛ but no e, it is recommended that the letter e be used to represent it. This is the case, for instance, in Japanese…

Similarly, the symbol a, which as a cardinal vowel symbol denotes an unrounded front open (low) vowel, is also appropriate to denote an unrounded open vowel of any degree of advancement (anywhere from fully ‘front’ to fully ‘back’) if that is the only open vowel in the language. This is the case in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Serbian, German, and Polish, to mention only a handful of European languages. It is also the case in thousands of other languages around the world.

In RP I say ðə kæt sæt ɒn ðə mæt. If I switch into northern (I was bidialectal as a child), I say ðə kat sat ɒnt mat. That’s how I would transcribe it. I’ll leave someone else to measure the formant values of my northern a to determine just how central it might be.

This is a live issue. The Council of the IPA, having previously failed to agree, is again debating the issue of whether to recognize an additional vowel symbol, A, to represent a quality between cardinals a and ɑ. I shall vote against.

elicitation

2011-11-29T09:50:00.008Z

The Guardian has a regular rubric in its Corrections and Clarifications column, Homophone Corner. Yesterday’s read as follows.This led me to wonder what proportion of NSs have illicit (illegal) and elicit (evoke) as categorical homophones. Most of us, for sure. But are there some who make the vowel of elicit tenser than that of illicit? And do they do this variably or categorically?

I ask because this is relevant to the notation appropriate for the Latin prefix e- in English words. As you will be aware, for the third edition of LPD I simplified the notation for the unstressed prefixes be-, de-, pre-, re-, deciding to use the happY vowel i rather than enumerating mainstream ɪ plus variant iː. (In any case we still need the further variant with ə.) I really wasn’t sure whether to include the e- words in this, but eventually decided to.
Even that decision left marginal cases that were difficult to decide, and for which I may with hindsight have made the wrong decision. Elect? Event? Eleven? Of course, the decision for each particular word must depend not on etymology but on whether there appear to be people who use the tenser vowel — hence the inclusion of eleven, which does certainly not contain Latin e-.

It also means that the main pronunciation given for elicit, iˈlɪsɪt, looks different from that for its putative homophone illicit, ɪˈlɪsɪt, which clearly has no tense-vowel variant. (Compare the main prons for descent diˈsent and dissent dɪˈsent, which likewise are homophones for most speakers but I think not all.)

For previous discussion of the general issue, see my blog for 29 Jan 2007.

ɪn ðə pʌb

2011-11-28T08:57:00.021Z

kɪdɪŋ ɔː nɒt, ɪf ə kɒmənteɪtər ɒn fraɪdiz blɒɡ kleɪmz tu əv hæd dɪfɪkl̩ti prəʊsesɪŋ ðə hedlaɪn ðen ɪts haɪ taɪm wi hæd ənʌðər entri rɪtn̩ həʊlli ɪn fənetɪk trænskrɪpʃn̩. (ðə lɑːs sʌtʃ entri ɪn ðɪs blɒɡ wəz ɪn dʒuːn.)

lɑːs naɪt aɪ pleɪd maɪ mələʊdiən ət ə seʃn̩ ɪn ə pʌb ɒn wɪmbl̩dən kɒmən, nɒt veri fɑː frəm weər aɪ lɪv. ðiːz seʃn̩z ə held wʌns ə mʌnθ ən ɔːɡənaɪzd baɪ ə ləʊkl̩ mɒrɪs saɪd.

dʒʌst ʌndə twenti piːpl̩ tɜːnd ʌp fə ðə seʃn̩. ðeɪ ɪŋkluːdɪd θriː ʌðə mələʊdiən pleɪəz. ɪts ɔːlwɪz ɪntrəstɪŋ tə kəmpeə nəʊts. bifɔː wi stɑːtɪd, wʌn əv ðəm kaɪndli əlaʊd mi tə traɪ aʊt hɪz ɪnstrəmənt (mʌtʃ mɔːr ɪkspensɪv ðəm maɪn).

evriwʌn wəz siːtɪd əraʊnd teɪbl̩z ɪn ə smɔːl rʊm ɪn ðə pʌb (ðə snʌɡ). wʌns ðə seʃn̩ prɒpə wəz ʌndə weɪ, ðə fɔːmən (tʃeəmən) kɔːld ɒn iːtʃ pɑːtɪsɪpənt ɪn tɜːn tə liːd ə tjuːn ɔːr ə sɒŋ. ðə prəʊɡræm wəz ə mɪkstʃər əv ɪnstrəmentl̩ stʌf (fɪdl̩z, kɒnsətiːnə, maʊθ ɔːɡən, mələʊdiənz) ənd ʌnəkʌmpənid sɪŋɪŋ. tuː ruːlz əplaɪd, əz ɪz juːʒuəl ɪn pʌb seʃn̩z — nəʊ æmplɪfɪkeɪʃn̩ ən nəʊ pleɪɪŋ ɔː sɪŋɪŋ frəm ə rɪtn̩ skɔː.

ðə sɪŋəz sæŋ veəriəs fəʊk sɒŋz ən fəʊk-staɪl sɒŋz. wiː ɪnstrəmentl̩ɪss pleɪd ɪŋɡlɪʃ (ənd ʌðə) dɑːns tjuːnz. ðiːz ə tɪpɪkli θɜːti tuː bɑː riːlz, dʒɪɡz, hɔːnpaɪps ɔː wɔːltsɪz, wɪð ðə strʌktʃər AABB. ðə kənvenʃn̩ ɪz ðət ju pleɪ iːtʃ tjuːn θriː taɪmz θruː, ɡɪvɪŋ ʌðə pleɪəz taɪm tə pɪk ʌp ðə melədi ən dʒɔɪn ɪn ɪf ðeɪ kæn.

maɪ əʊn fɜːs kɒntrɪbjuːʃn̩ wəz ə raʊdi riːl kɔːld tʃaɪniːz breɪkdaʊn (Chinese Breakdown), wɪtʃ tə maɪ səpraɪz ði ʌðə pleɪəz dɪdn̩t nəʊ — ɪt wəz wʌn əv ðə steɪpl̩z əv ðə bænd aɪ juːs tə pleɪ ɪn fɔːti jɪəz əɡəʊ — fɒləʊb baɪ ðə krʊkɪd stəʊvpaɪp (Crooked Stovepipe). leɪtə, wem maɪ tɜːn keɪm raʊnd əɡen, aɪ pleɪd dʒesiz hɔːnpaɪp (Jessie’s Hornpipe), seɡweɪɪŋ ɪntə səʊldʒəz dʒɔɪ (Soldier’s Joy), wɪtʃ evriwʌn nəʊz.

ðə ˈʔɑːtɪkl̩

2011-11-25T08:14:00.021Z

In the talk on Multicultural London English that I recently gave in Japan, one of the things I mentioned was a tendency to simplify the phonetics of the indefinite and definite articles by reducing their allomorphic variation. My data came from Kerswill et al., ‘Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2, 2011: 151–196.I am well aware that MLE speakers are not the first NSs to fail to observe the rules that we teach EFL students for the pronunciation of the (that is, ðə before a consonant sound, ði in front of a vowel sound, plus the occasional strong form ðiː). Indeed, I make the point in the note I put in the relevant entry in LPD.
What seems to be true is that ðə plus hard attack before a word beginning with a vowel sound is more frequently heard in MLE than in, say, traditional Cockney or RP. But this is only an impression: I don’t think we have much in the way of hard statistical evidence. The sociolinguists may know its percentage incidence in MLE (see table below), but there’s not a lot of information available about other varieties. I don’t think I ever say ðə ˈʔæpl̩ and so on myself. But I could be wrong.

wie spät ist es?

2011-11-24T07:46:00.009Z

At the age of 18, as I was picking up German by staying with a family in northern Germany on a family exchange, I noticed that when wanting to know the time my exchange partner, rather than ask Wie viel Uhr ist es? (‘how many o’clock is it?’), as shown in my tourist’s phrasebook, would usually go for the formula Wie spät ist es? (‘how late is it?’). So I did so too.

Imitating his pronunciation, I pronounced spät as ʃpeːt, using the same vowel sound as in Wie geht’s viː ˈɡeːts ‘how’s it going?’.

As I got to grips with the written as well as the spoken language, I learnt to treat the umlauted letter ä as being pronounced exactly the same as the letter e.

Years later, when I studied phonetics with John Trim at Cambridge, he told me that the German pronunciation I had acquired through total immersion, while commendably native-like in its way, was in some respects regional. If I wanted to speak proper Hochdeutsch, I ought to remember to say Guten Tag! with taːk, not ta(ː)x; the train, der Zug, should be tsuːk, not tsʊx; and for long ä, as in spät, I ought to add a new item to my German vowel system, namely the long ɛː, thus ʃpɛːt.

The standard set out in German dictionaries and textbooks treats orthographic e and ä as having the same value when short, ɛ, but different values when long, namely eː and ɛː respectively.

So fällen ‘to fell’ ˈfɛlən is a perfect rhyme for bellen ‘to bark’ ˈbɛlən (both have the short vowel). But wählen ‘to choose’ should not, in Hochdeutsch, be a perfect rhyme for fehlen ‘to be lacking’ (with the the long vowel): ˈvɛːlən, ˈfeːlən.

This distinction still feels artificial to me, and I don’t make it unless perhaps carefully reading some text aloud or making a phonetic point.

The pronunciation dictionaries tend to hedge their bets on this distinction. Here’s the sixth edition of the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch.

Der Vokal [ɛː] kann auch [eː] gesprochen werden… (p. 21: ‘The vowel [ɛː] can also be pronounced [eː]…’)

And here’s the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch.

Der Unterschied zwischen [eː] und [ɛː] wird in der Aussprache meist nich stark verdeutlicht, so dass häufig ein Vokalklang zwischen [eː] und [ɛː] mit einer Tendenz zu [eː] entsteht. (p. 58: ‘The difference between [eː] and [ɛː] is for the most part not made very clearly in pronunciation, so that frequently a vowel quality between [eː] and [ɛː] arises, with a tendency towards [eː].’)

Wikipedia says, I think quite correctly,

The long open-mid front unrounded vowel [ɛː] is merged with the close-mid front unrounded vowel [eː] in many varieties of Standard German…

I shall continue to speak German with an undifferentiated eː.

twunny

2011-11-23T08:50:00.009Z

One or two of the people commenting on nt-reduction (blog, 18 Nov.) also mentioned the possibility of twenty having the vowel ʌ.

Kensuke Nanjo said

According to my daily observation of American English, I think this variant is worth including in pronouncing dictionaries. Quite a few Americans use it and as you may know, this is the second variant for "twenty" in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

There are indeed plenty (“plunny”?) of Americans who seem to pronounce twenty with a seriously backed and lowered quality as compared with their default DRESS vowel.

However, in deciding whether this is a sporadic irregularity found just in this word (and perhaps in plenty too), we must first establish what is their default DRESS vowel. We need to discount the possible effects of what, following Labov, has come to be known as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
The “northern cities” (of America) in which this sound change flourishes are clustered around the Great Lakes: places such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. The geographical extent of the shift varies depending on which vowel is involved and in which phonetic environment(s); and in any case it is also socially and stylistically variable. But what it can do is to make DRESS words sound as if they have the STRUT vowel — perhaps all of them, perhaps particularly those in which the vowel is followed by a nasal. Note that the STRUT vowel shifts too, so that we do not normally get loss of the distinctions exemplified in get – gut, bed – bud, wren – run etc.

So someone who says ˈtwɛ̈ni, with a thoroughly retracted vowel, is not necessarily saying ˈtwʌni (“twunny”), to rhyme with funny.

Others, though, are. They include rirelan, who mentioned

twenty: /ˈtwʌni/ (along with "plenty" /ˈplʌni/. "plentiful" is still /ˈplɛntəfəl/ though.)

Furthermore, Americans from other, mainly southern or western, parts of the country may merge pen and pin as pɪn (i.e. merge DRESS with KIT before a nasal). For them, twenty may rhyme, if not with funny, then with skinny as well as with many.

Kensuke reckons that a reasonably exhaustive pronunciation dictionary ought to give AmE twenty as ˈtwenti, ˈtwʌnti, ˈtweni, ˈtwʌni. Seems reasonable, though perhaps we ought to add ˈtwɪnti, ˈtwɪni, too.

Sexwale

2011-11-22T08:22:00.010Z

The egregious Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, tried to defuse the impact of his recent inept remarks on tackling racism by getting the newspapers to print a picture of him in the company of Tokyo Sexwale, the black South African politician.

But how do we pronounce Mr Sexwale’s name? Certainly not ˈseksweɪl.

If you search on-line, you find no authoritative answer and several conflicting pieces of advice from amateurs.

An exchange on reddit went

● Spoiler: Tokyo Sexwale is not pronounced the way it's spelled.
● Yup. As my South African-parented girlfriend immediately pointed out, it's "Seh-tongueclick-wah-leh."

and then

● The 'x' in the Sex part is pronounced like a soft 'g' in afrikaans.

Meanwhile the online Telegraph told us firmly

Tokyo Sexwale (pronounced seh-wa-le)…

This is one of the names I decided to add to the most recent edition of LPD, so I actually checked it out a few years ago (blog, 3 July 2007).

My initial expectation was that the letter x in his name would stand for the voiceless lateral click, as it does in Xhosa and Zulu, where xoxa ‘tell’ is pronounced ˈǁɔːǁá (or, if you prefer greater explicitness in click symbolism, ˈk͡ǁɔːk͡ǁá).

However, my further researches seemed to suggest that Mr Sexwale’s ethnicity is not Xhosa or Zulu but Venda (or Venḓa — the diacritic indicates a dental, as opposed to alveolar, place of articulation). And in Tshivenḓa the letter x has its IPA value, representing a voiceless velar fricative. So he’d be seˈxwaːle.

The BBC Pronunciation Unit confirmed this.

Yes, the IPA for our entry [for Sexwale] indicates a velar fricative. The recommendation is based on the advice of colleagues in Focus on Africa, who, according to our history note from 1993, were adamant that the orthographic 'x' is pronounced as a velar fricative.

(That is indeed also how the orthographic g of Afrikaans is pronounced.)

Conclusion: in English we should call him seˈxwɑːleɪ or, failing that, seˈkwɑːleɪ.

more on nt-reduction

2011-11-21T08:31:00.004Z

On Friday I said

Maybe I’ve just not been keeping my eyes open, but I can’t recall reading any surveys of the prevalence or otherwise of what I would like to call nt-reduction.

One resource I overlooked has now been brought to my attention by Kensuke Nanjo, phonetics editor of the Genius English-Japanese Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2006), in a long email which is worth quoting in extenso. He claims that this “G4” is

the only dictionary that distinguishes [nd] (t-voicing) and [n] (t-deletion) for underlying /nt/ in American English. G4 gives [nd] for carpenter, certainty, into, ninety, seventy, Washington as their second variant in American English while it shows variants without /t/ for other /nt/-words like center, dental, Internet, plenty, twenty, winter, etc. with the label "casual AmE".

Kensuke says that the decisions he made were

based on some books and papers that I'd read and personal communications with American phoneticians, perhaps including the late Becky Dauer, but I'm afraid I don't very well remember where I obtained the data. This distinction ([nd] vs. [n] for /nt/), however, is mentioned in the phonetics/phonology chapter I wrote for the book Ando & Sawada (eds.) English Linguistics: An Introduction (2001), so I obtained the data more than a decade ago.

He further comments

You rightly mention that "it does not happen in the environment of a following stressed vowel, as in intend, contain", but both LPD and G4 record /nt/-reduction for Antarctic, perhaps as a sole (?) exception.

— probably because of the transparent morphology which makes ant#arctic seem like a compound comparable to print#out, in which nt-reducers do reduce nt.

He continues

Also, I agree with your comment that "[it doesn't] apply to ntr clusters, as in country. The t can be lost in centre/center but not in central", but G4 gives the variants like "inner"-duce and "inner"-duction for introduce and introduction respectively, with the label "casual AmE". This is based on my own daily observation about American English. Needless to say, this is a case of r-to-schwa metathesis, which triggers /nt/-reduction. In fact, I tried to include as many cases of common metathesis as possible in G4, so it gives the American casual pronunciation "hunnerd" for hundred, a case of both r-to-schwa metathesis and lexically restricted /nd/-reduction (e.g. can'idate, fun'amen'al, kin'a, un'erstand, won'erful).

These nd-reductions of casual speech are very relevant, too. Thanks, Kensuke.

winter and winner

2011-11-18T09:12:00.009Z

Maybe I’ve just not been keeping my eyes open, but I can’t recall reading any surveys of the prevalence or otherwise of what I would like to call nt-reduction.By this I mean the loss of t from the cluster nt in intervocalic contexts. This makes winter a possible homophone of winner,
painting a possible rhyme of straining and dental a potential rhyme of kennel. As far as I know this is not found in any kind of British speech, and we think of it as an American or Australian characteristic.

The possible AmE pronunciation of continental as ˌkɑ̃ːʔn̩ˈẽnl̩ is quite strikingly different from the BrE ˌkɒntɪˈnentl̩.

Several qualifications are needed.
• In the kind of AmE I am referring to, winter may possibly have a nasalized tap, thus ˈwɪɾ̃ɚ, rather than the more deliberate plain nasal of winner ˈwɪnɚ. Trager and Smith (1951) refer to this as a ‘flap-release short nasal’, how accurately I am not sure. In any case, a distinction based solely on ɾ̃ vs. n cannot be very robust. I suspect that in reality for many Americans (and Australians) winter and winner can be, and often are, pronounced identically.
• I have the impression that the incidence of nt-reduction is subject to regional variation in the US. It seems more prevalent in the south and west, less so in the north-east. Is this so? Do Canadians ever do it? It is also probably subject to stylistic variation, with unreduced nt more careful and the reduced variant more casual. Has anyone ever investigated its sociolinguistic characteristics?
• The environments in which nt-reduction operates seem to be the same as those for t-voicing. In particular, it does not happen in the environment of a following stressed vowel, as in intend, contain, nor of a following unstressed but strong vowel as in intake; nor does it apply to ntr clusters, as in country. The t can be lost in centre/center but not in central.
• Some words may be special cases, In particular, I have the impression that ninety in AmE is often ˈnaɪndi rather than the expected ˈnaɪnti or ˈnaɪni. Does the same apply to seventy? Are there other exceptional cases?
• Special cases of a different kind are the handful of words in which a similar reduction is found in BrE, namely in London and some other kinds of popular English. For Brits who do this, the t can be lost from twenty and plenty, and from prevocalic went and want (as in went out, wanted), but not from words such as winter or painting.

This posting was triggered by my hearing an Australian golf commentator on TV referring to ðə ˌsevn̩ˈiːnθ the seventeenth (hole). This violates the constraint barring nt-reduction before a stressed vowel, and I suspect would not be possible in AmE.

Furthermore, I wonder whether Australian English has taken nt-reduction direct from AmE, rather than via some British source? And if so, is it the first instance of such a sound change?

aitches

2011-11-17T08:50:00.003Z

Latin h tended to be dropped even in classical times, particularly in the middle of words. Thus nihil ‘nothing’ has an alternative form nīl, and mihi an alternative mī, while dē- plus habeo yields dēbeo ‘I owe’.

In initial position it was more tenacious, though even here by classical times it was only the educated classes who pronounced h. At Pompeii, destroyed 79 CE, there are inscriptional forms such as ic for hic ‘this (m.)’, and conversely hire for ire ‘to go’. In his poem about Arrius, Catullus pokes fun at hypercorrections such as hinsidias for insidias. Even the educated sometimes got confused: the letter h in the regular spelling of humor, humerus, and humidus is apparently unetymological.

The Romance languages inherited no phonetic h from Latin. The h that we pronounce nowadays in English words of Romance or Latin origin reflects a spelling pronunciation: habit, hesitate, horror and for most speakers humo(u)r, humid. As we all know, in various other Latin-derived words we have not restored h despite the spelling: there is no h in heir, hono(u)r, honest. In herb Brits and Americans agree to differ.

I was thinking about this because I have been noticing people pronouncing adhere, adherent, adhesion, adhesive without h, thus əˈdɪə etc. In LPD I give only forms that include h — əd ˈhɪə etc. In this I follow Daniel Jones’s EPD, though I notice that the Cambridge EPD now includes the h-less forms. Rightly so; on reflection, I think they are widespread enough to warrant inclusion, at least for BrE.

I have long been aware of the corresponding h-less pronunciation of abhor, which both LPD and the current EPD (but not the DJ EPD) include.

I don’t think there is any tendency towards a spelling-inspired restoration of h in words with the prefix ex-, as exhaust, exhibit, exhilarate, exhort, which all have -gˈz-. But exhale is a notable exception, always having -ksˈh-, and so sometimes is exhume.

You sometimes encounter the hypercorrect spelling exhorbitant for exorbitant. I can’t say I’ve ever heard the corresponding hypercorrect pronunciation, but presumably it exists.

GIGO

2011-11-16T08:24:00.012Z

At the EPSJ conference Takahiro Ioroi presented some statistics about the relative frequency of lexical stress patterns in English words. The pedagogical point was to investigate how far L2 English learners are “exposed to attested patterns in the inputs available”.

Ioroi did this by combining data on stress placement from the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary with word frequency data from the British National Corpus and a word list from a collection of EFL textbooks for Japanese schools.

In this way he demonstrated that the most frequent exemplar of an initial-stressed disyllable in the school textbooks was people (at 3606 per million), followed by very, other, many and our (sic), while in the BNC it was other (1336 per million) followed by only, also, people and any.

The methodology was irreproachable. But some of Ioroi’s findings demonstrate the truth of the old adage “garbage in, garbage out”.

Let’s not quibble about our (which NSs usually pronounce as a monosyllable).

What about disyllables with final stress? The most frequent one in the textbook corpus was about, which is fair enough. But the most frequent one in the BNC, and second most frequent in the textbooks, comes out as into.

Into? But into is stressed on the first syllable, ˈɪntu, ˈɪntə. It does not have final stress. CMUPD says it does: IH0 N T UW1, which is how they represent ɪnˈtuː. CMUPD is wrong, wrong, wrong.

(In running speech, which is not under consideration here, into may of course lose all stress.)

A useful generalization about English words is that all polysyllables have a primary or secondary lexical stress on either the first or the second syllable. So revolution, for example, has the main stress on the penultimate but on the initial syllable a secondary stress: ˌrevəˈluːʃən. Having supplied stress patterns for several complete dictionary headword lists, I can say that the only exceptions I am aware of are (for some speakers) the two unusual words peradventure and forasmuch. Although they are written as single words, some speakers pronounce them pərədˈventʃə, fərəzˈmʌtʃ, as if they were prepositional phrases, like for a change fərəˈtʃeɪndʒ. (Alternatively, they can be ˌpɜːrədˈventʃə, ˌfɔːrəzˈmʌtʃ, which fit the rule.)

What do Ioroi’s stats tell us about such polysyllables? The most frequent BNC words with lexical stress on neither of the first two syllables are purportedly insufficient and valuation. Again, I am afraid, CMUPD is to blame for supplying wrong information, having forgotten to show secondary stress on the initial syllable of each. (But CMUPD does get the stress pattern of revolution correct.)

For the textbook corpus the results are even odder, since the most frequent such words come out as various proper names, mostly Japanese: Sugihara, Nakamura, Yamagata, Morimoto, Antonelli, which CMUPD shows as having stress only on the penultimate. The fact is that these, too, have initial secondary stress. The incontrovertible evidence for this is the ‘stress shift’ effect when followed by another accented word: ˌSugihara’s ˈwidow (found in this passage).

Again, CMUPD is wrong. GIGO.

that'd be OK

2011-11-15T08:26:00.007Z

A simple question from a Japanese university student: how is that’d pronounced?

My immediate answer was to tell him that it’s ˈðæt əd. I still think that’s the riɡht short answer, but things are actually a little more complicated.

Some relevant variables:
(i) The that element will have a strong vowel, ðæt, only if it is demonstrative, as in that’d be fun, that’d be OK, I don’t think that’d work. If it is a relative pronoun, as in someone that’d been here before, it will almost always be weak, ðət.
(ii) The ’d element may stand not only for would, as in the examples given, but also possibly for had, as in that’d never worked in the past. This makes no difference to the pronunciation.
(iii) There is also the possibility of pronouncing that’d as a monosyllable, ðæd or maybe ðæt, perhaps with further contextual assimilation: that’d be OK ˈðæbbi əʊˈkeɪ.
(iv) for speakers who use t-voicing (esp. AmE), the intervocalic stop/tap in the disyllabic version will be voiced. Here’s a case in point from YouTube.

I can’t find any dictionary entry for that’d that includes pronunciation. Many dictionaries do not even have entries for that’ll and that’s, but leave their pronunciation to be inferred from entries at that and (if you are lucky) ’ll and ’s. LPD does have entries for these contracted forms, though.
The LPD entry at ’d mentions the comparable it’d but not that’d. But now I wonder if I ought to add the possible monosyllabic versions of both.
More generally, in what varieties and styles is it usual to write contracted that’d rather than the usual full that would, that had? I’m really not sure.

sung rhythm

2011-11-14T09:19:00.011Z

There were several interesting papers given at the EPSJ conference just over a week ago in Kochi, and I plan to discuss a few of them over the next few days.

Two of the speakers touched on the use of songs and nursery rhymes in the classroom as pedagogical devices to improve the teaching of pronunciation to EFL students. Both concluded that although they can be valuable they nevertheless need to be handled with caution. This is because the rhythm used in singing is not necessarily identical to the rhythm used by NSs in ordinary speech. (Neither of the two speakers furnished detailed preprints or handouts, so what follows is my own thoughts inspired by their presentations.)

Take the location of stresses. In singing these take the form of the rhythmical beats imposed by the music. Generally speaking, song lyrics reflect lexical stress well: where there’s a lexical stress you get a beat, where there isn’t you don’t. But the correspondence is by no means 100%.

  ˈJack and ˈJill went ˈup the ˈhill to ˈfetch a ˈpail of ˈwaˈter
  ˈJack fell ˈdown and ˈbroke his ˈcrown and ˈJill came ˈtumbling ˈafˈter.

But in ordinary speech we don’t double-stress water and after. On the other hand we might well stress went and fell.

In particular, rhythmic beats in singing are not a good guide to the deaccentuation of function words. Take this example.

  ˈI’m ˈdreaming of a ˈwhite ˈChristmas
  ˈJust like the ˈones I used to ˈknow

In these lyrics, since there’s no call for contrastive focus on I’m, in ordinary speech we wouldn’t accent it. (Compare ˈI’m ˈdreaming,| but ˈyou’re aˈwake.) So these lyrics would offer a bad model to those EFL learners who tend to accent pronouns inappropriately.

One speaker got into a terrible muddle with the Burns song Comin’ thro’ the Rye.
  Gin a body meet a body
  Comin thro’ the rye,
  Gin a body kiss a body,
  Need a body cry?

For the second body, the music imposes a longer, higher-pitched note on the second syllable than on the first. This led the speaker, if I understood him correctly, to conclude that in the song the word is wrongly stressed, as bɒˈdiː. On the contrary, I would say that it is correctly stressed, and neatly demonstrates the point that in English accent may on occasion be manifested by LOWER pitch than that of a following unstressed syllable, and that in disyllables with a short stressed vowel in the first syllable the second syllable may well be of greater duration than the first.

In any case, the stylized strathspey rhythm of the song is pretty different from the rhythm of ordinary speech. I agree that this song is unsuitable for pedagogical use (except possibly for advanced students), not least because it’s in Scots.

I hope I do not need to add that gin here is pronounced ɡɪn and means ‘if’. Perhaps I ought to add it to LPD.

żurek in Connacht

2011-10-28T09:14:00.019+01:00

Thanks to all commentators for the very useful responses to yesterday’s posting. I shall now with confidence add to the next edition of LPD (when and if there is one) as follows.

uillean, uilleann ˈɪl ən ˈɪl jən — Irish [~~ˈɪ lʲənʲ~~ ˈɪ lʲən]

While on the subject of Irish, I notice that on the American voice association’s email list a lady from Texas is asking about the pronunciation of the name of the western province of the Irish Republic, which she gives as Connaught.

Anybody out there know whether the emphasis in Connaught Province is on the second syllable? Pronunciations online seem to indicate a slight emphasis on the first syllable. My director, who lived in Ireland (but is in no way a vocal coach) seems to insist that the emphasis is on the second syllable.

Straightaway she got a reply from a voice teacher in Maryland.

I have always heard it pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. The first syllable is not 'thrown away', but de-emphasized.

Interesting. See how what appears to be misinformation disseminates. Perhaps it is true that in America you “always” hear this name given second-syllable stress. But that’s not what you hear in Ireland, or indeed in Britain. The only pronunciation I have ever heard is ˈkɒnɔːt, with initial stress.

Wikipedia offers us a range of authentic-sounding possibilities, all with initial stress:

Connacht (pronounced /ˈkɒnəxt/, /ˈkɒnəkt/ or /ˈkɒnɔːt/ —Irish: Connachta / Cúige Chonnacht —pronounced [ˈkɔnəxtə]), formerly anglicised as Connaught.

Indeed, we nowadays spell the name of this province as Connacht. We retain the old spelling in the case of the Duke of Connaught, a dukedom now extinct, and in various placenames and street names. The enquirer was talking about a play, A Lie of the Mind, whose author, Sam Shepard, no doubt uses the old spelling.

I suggest in LPD that for Connacht, though not for Connaught, we can reduce the second vowel to ə, as happens in Irish. Next time I ought to add the Irish-language pronunciation, too.
_ _ _

In the past I have congratulated the Guardian on its newly acquired ability to print letters bearing diacritics, not only for names and other words from French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, relatively familiar languages for us, but also from other languages that use the Latin alphabet (blog, 20 April 2010). Today, though, it slips. Simon Hoggart, in his always entertaining parliamentary sketch, fantasizes about the UK prime minister, excluded from hobnobbing with the big boys of the eurozone, having instead to dine (horror!) with Swedes and Poles, Hungarians and Latvians. (Even the Slovaks and Estonians are in the inner circle, but not us.)
As any fule kno, these should be “żurek” and “blåbärssoppa” respectively. Though why someone might want three kinds of soup at the same time I have no idea.

_ _ _
I shall be away for the next two weeks. Next blog: 14 November.

uilleann pipes

2011-10-27T08:33:00.015+01:00

Let’s try a bit of crowd sourcing. How do we pronounce uillean or uilleann, as in uillean(n) pipes?

Please do NOT respond if you’re not familiar with this word. Tell me what you say ONLY if you have heard other people use it in English, and particularly if you commonly use it yourself in English.

If you are a speaker of Irish please tell me how you pronounce it in Irish, too.

I should explain that Nicholas Jones wrote to me pointing out that LPD

doesn’t have ‘uillean (pipes)’, [a word] that is guaranteed to give English speakers problems. Collins English Dictionary gives only /'u:lɪən/. I may be wrong – I guarantee nothing – but I thought it was more commonly /'i:lɪən/.

In my reply I mentioned that Wikipedia says it’s pronounced ˈɪlən. This is also what is given on an American website for enthusiasts. I have now looked it up in the online OED, too, where I find the pronunciation given only as ˈɪljɪn.

Etymologically, the word appears to be the genitive singular of the Irish word for ‘elbow’, variously given in the nominative singular as uillinn (my Learner’s English-Irish Dictionary, and online here) or uille (Wikipedia, the OED s.v. union pipes, and the image shown alongside). Another source says it is an adjective meaning ‘acute-angled, having a sharp elbow or angle’. However, as the Wikipedia article recounts, it is also possible that it is really a reworking of the English word union.

To hear what uillean pipes sound like, go here and follow the links on the righthand side; or here.

Meanwhile I’ll ask around at the EFDSS and the London Irish Centre.

demurring

2011-10-26T08:50:00.005+01:00

As regular readers will know, I am always on the lookout for English intonation patterns that are not predictable on the basis of the general rules we know about, and which I have attempted to record in my book English Intonation.

Each case that we discover can be seen as demonstrating the inadequacy of the existing rules. This is not something to be upset about. Rather, it helps us work towards a fuller account of the language and of what native speakers implicitly know about it.

Linguists are not content with vague hand-waving in the direction of ‘sprachgefühl’ every time we are faced with something we cannot explain. We seek a fuller, more principled account.

I’ve been thinking about the phrase I don’t know. Apart from its obvious use to say that one doesn’t know some fact or the answer to some question, we also sometimes use it to demur — that is, to show that we disagree slightly with what has just been said.

How do people typically demur? Politely. Politeness being what it is, we also use this phrase, in BrE at least, to show that we disagree strongly (rather than slightly) but don’t wish to enter into an immediate fierce argument.

Here’s LDOCE’s example of this usage (s.v. know 21 c).

‘I couldn’t live there.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It might not be so bad.’

What intonation would be appropriate for I don’t know in this sense?

I think it has to be a rise.

Oh, I ˌdon’t /know.
or
\Oh, | I ˌdon’t /know.

Ah, say followers of Brazil’s theories, that’s because we’re referring (to our lack of knowledge) rather than proclaiming it. To which I reply, but how do you know? Why should demurring be referential, whereas straightforward disagreement is proclamatory? It sounds nice as a post-hoc explanation, but if you were a NNS and needed to use this phrase — say, as an actor in a play — how would you know that a falling tone is inappropriate and that you should use a rise?

incomplete plosion?

2011-10-25T08:51:00.014+01:00

What, if anything, do you understand by the term ‘incomplete plosion’?

It is a term not to be found, as far as I can see, in any work by Gimson, O’Connor, Cruttenden, Roach, Ladefoged, Collins/Mees or in fact any British phonetician later than Daniel Jones (but see below). It’s not in SID. I haven’t checked American sources, but I don’t think they use it either. So I was a little surprised when I found it in the draft of a textbook of English phonetics by a Chinese author that I was asked to read.

When a plosive sound is immediately followed by another plosive sound, only the second plosive is fully exploded, but the closure of the first plosive sound (the 2nd stage of the first plosive) is held for double the usual time. This is known as incomplete plosion.

Examples given include such cases as the k acting ˈæktɪŋ or the ɡ in begged beɡd.

This is what I call ‘no audible release’ or ‘masking’ of a plosive. We also sometimes speak of ‘overlapping plosives’. Because of the supervening second plosive, the release of the first plosive in such sequences cannot be heard, being masked by the hold of the second plosive. Acoustically, what you get in ˈæktɪŋ is the formant transitions of a velar approach, a long silence (the double hold) and the formant transitions of an alveolar release. (The assertion that the first plosive is held for double the usual time is simply wrong.)

I do remember Gordon Arnold, one of my teachers at UCL, when I was studying phonetics as a postgraduate, telling me that the expression ‘incomplete plosion’ was strongly deprecated. The term ‘incomplete plosive’ was not quite so absurd, he said, but I should still prefer ‘plosive with no audible release’. I had the general impression that these were unfortunate Jonesian terms which his successors were trying to eradicate.

Accordingly, in my Practical Phonetics (with Greta Colson, Pitman, 1971, p, 73) I wrote

Another term sometimes encountered, INCOMPLETE PLOSION, is misleading and best avoided.

In a quick search of Jones’s major works, however, I can find no instance of ‘incomplete plosion’, only ‘incomplete plosive (consonants)’, e.g. at §§578-585 in the 1957 edition of An Outline of English Phonetics. Under that heading Jones deals not only with masked release but also with what we might now call gemination, zero release or unreleased plosives, in homorganic plosive sequences such as red deer and eggcup.

A Google search for ‘incomplete plosion’ brings up an old lecture handout on Rachael-Anne Knight’s website, which wrongly defines the IPA diacritic [˺] as denoting ‘incomplete plosion’. (In the current IPA Chart it is defined as ‘no audible release’.) She includes not only acting but also cases such as take five, where ‘narrow release may also apply’ (???).

Apart from this one document from a NS phonetician, Google directs us to a Powerpoint presentation from Xi'an Jiaotong University and some Chinese instructional material on English phonetics.

When a plosive consonant is immediately followed by another plosive, only the second plosive is fully exploded, the first plosive is incomplete. This is known as incomplete plosion, which often takes place at the junction of words.
For example:
actor doctor football black tea sit down a good teacher
1. They collected pennies. 2. She slept badly.

It would appear then that this terminology, obsolete or at least disfavoured among NS phoneticians, lives on in the local tradition of English phonetics in the People’s Republic.

language show

2011-10-24T08:29:00.006+01:00

On Saturday I looked in at the London Language Show: 150 stands and three seminar rooms, exhibitors ranging from language schools to cultural bodies to publishers to travel agencies (they arrange student visits abroad). Over the three days of the show there were ‘taster’ sessions on Arabic, Czech, Chinese, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and British Sign Language, plus intensive classes in a subset of these and a whole range of seminars.

On the CUP stand I was able for the first time to have a look at the new (18th) edition of the Cambridge EPD. Visually, the most striking change is that the coloured type in the body of the dictionary, blue-green (teal?) in the 17th edition, is now light brown (tan?). The contents include six short essays by outside contributors. Transcription-wise, the most important change is that words such as tune, duke now have the tʃ, dʒ form prioritized. This is what my own preference poll reveals to be the most widely preferred BrE form, but I still find it a bit shocking.

I noticed two exhibitors at the show specializing in offering pronunciation tuition. I was attracted to one stand by the large chart of phonetic symbols for English displayed — refreshingly error-free and well presented. The young lady on duty at that stand turned out to hold a master’s in Phonetics from UCL: this was after my retirement, so I had examined her but not taught her.

A difference from previous years was the unusually high profile presented by two particular languages: Polish and Mandarin Chinese.

All the more reason for us to drill our students diligently in the difference between ɕ, ʑ and ʂ, ʐ.
_ _ _

In a week I shall be off to Japan, for a conference in Kochi (here’s the programme). I hope to see some of you there. Afterwards I shall also be giving lectures in Osaka and Kyoto.

Longannet

2011-10-21T09:09:00.007+01:00

Locals know how to pronounce the names of places, because they've often heard other people say them. Outsiders often get them wrong, because they rely on the spelling, which may be ambiguous and misleading.

Yesterday’s parliamentary debate on the collapse of the carbon capture scheme at Longannet was a case in point. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no ɡ in the pronunciation of this name. It is lɒŋˈænɪt (with appropriate possible variation in the exact vowel qualities). I don’t know the etymology, but this suggests that it consists morphologically of long plus Annet. The lack of phonetic g is parallel to its absence in long odds or long overdue. The only people from whom we would expect a velar plosive are those with the local accent of the patch of northwest England in which singer rhymes with finger.

But as I listened to Today in Parliament (BBC R4) yesterday evening I noticed that Chris Huhne and other MPs were calling it lɒŋˈɡænɪt, as if the second element were gannet. Huhne was born in an ‘affluent’ part of London and attended the fee-paying Westminster School. So an RP speaker, then. (It appears that his mother was an actress who supplied the voice for the speaking clock.)

There’s a good television clip here (sorry if it’s not available in your country). On it you hear both the Scottish reporter, several times, and a local manager pronounce Longannet without g, but Chris Huhne pronounce it with.

Another Scottish -ng- trap is Kingussie. It looks as if it ought to be kɪnˈɡʌsi (or kɪŋ-). But it isn’t, it’s kɪŋˈjuːsi. According to Wikipedia, it’s from Gaelic Ceann a' Ghiuthsaich ˈkʲʰaun̴̪ ə ˈʝuːs̪ɪç. (I think that’s a better order for the diacritics on k than the kʰʲ you see in Wikipedia: the palatalization applies to the whole initial plosive, aspiration only to its release.)
_ _ _

Here's Paul Kerswill in today's Sun newspaper. An excellent example of the "impact" our paymasters now want English academics to achieve.

initial clusters

2011-10-20T08:56:00.012+01:00

One of my favourite examples of metathesis is the Modern Greek verb βγάλω vghálo ˈvɣalo ‘I take out’ (aorist form).

To see how it came about we first have to dispose of one or two other sound changes en route from classical to modern. In Ancient Greek this stem took the form ἐκβαλ- ekbal- eɡˈbal-. The voicing assimilation of the consonant in the prefix ἐκ- ek-, making it voiced before a voiced consonant, appears to date from ancient times — see W. Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca (CUP 1987) p. 18.

Ancient short unstressed vowels at the beginning of a word are lost (‘aphesis’) in Modern Greek. So for example the classical word ὄμμα ómma ‘eye’, or rather its diminutive ὀμμάτιον ommátion, stripped of its case ending -ον -on, loses its initial vowel to become Modern Greek μάτι máti ˈmati, still meaning ‘eye’. Classical ἐξερῶ ekserô ‘I will speak out’ (?) yields Modern aphetic ~~ξερώ~~ ξέρω kséro ˈksero ‘I know’.

Classical voiced plosives became fricatives in Modern Greek (‘spirantization’). Loss of the initial vowel in ἐκβαλ- ekbal- eɡˈbal-, the example we started with, left an initial cluster ɡb-. This duly became ɣv-. It was this cluster that then underwent metathesis to give the modern vɣ-. I do not know when the metathesis happened in popular speech. It was resisted in the katharevousa (puristic) form of modern Greek.

No parallel metathesis seems to have happened to γδ- from classical ἐκδ-. Homer’s ἐκδύνω ekdúnō ‘I undress’ (as in modern English zoological ecdysis and fanciful ecdysiast) yields Modern Greek γδύνω ghdhíno ˈɣðino with the same meaning and unmetathesized.

I used to find Modern Greek useful for widening my students’ appreciation of the phonotactic possibilities of language, and there was usually a native speaker conveniently to hand. Clusters such as word-initial vɣ are not difficult, once you have mastered ɣ, but can seem very strange to speakers of other languages — all except those familiar with French, where initial vr vʁ is found in such everyday words as vrai ‘true’. From vʁ you just need to move the uvular articulation forward to the velar position.

Greek has other interesting word-initial clusters involving a fricative + obstruent: φτάνω ftáno ˈftano or φθάνω ftháno ˈfθano ‘I arrive’, βδομάδα vdhomádha vðoˈmaða ‘week’, χτές khtes xtes or χθές khthes xθes ‘yesterday’, χτυπώ khtypó xtiˈpo ‘I knock’, σχολείο skholeío sxoˈlio ‘school’, σγουρός sghourós zɣuˈros ‘curly’.

For really complex consonant clusters, however, you need to go to the Caucasian or Salishan languages. When I was teaching my phonological analysis class we never seemed to have any native speakers of those languages around.

son of RP

2011-10-19T08:26:00.010+01:00

Graciela María Martínez writes

I am a teacher of Phonetics and Phonology at a Teacher's Training College in Argentina and would very much like to ask you a question as regards a conclusion you wrote in the article ‘Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation’. You wrote “EFL teachers working within a British English-oriented environment should continue to use RP (though not necessarily under that name) as their pronunciation model. But this model must be revised and updated from time to time.”

My question is: What should we call that pronunciation model? Is there any new publication with revised and updated data on RP?

At UCL we sometimes referred to it (not altogether seriously) as “son of RP”.

Jack Windsor Lewis tried to popularize the term "General British", but it has not found wide acceptance. In our Practical Phonetics (1971) Greta Colson and I used the name "Southern British Standard". Given that RP is supposedly not localizable within England, this term relies on people’s appreciating that Southern British means ‘of southern Britain’, i.e. ‘of England, not Scotland’. (Technically and historically, North(ern) Britain is Scotland, while South(ern) Britain is England-and-Wales.) But I’m not so sure that everyone is mindful of the difference between Britain and England.

More recently the term "Standard Southern British English" (SSBE) has become popular. I noticed it quite a few times at the Hong Kong ICPhS two months ago.

Nevertheless, the name RP does have some traction among the general public. The OED cites the Independent newspaper in 2000:

The Bristol accent also defeated them. ‘What do you do when the fabric tears?’ asked a young boy, only to be met by total incomprehension until his enquiry was translated into received pronunciation.

There are two principal reasons why the name RP is not altogether satisfactory:
(i) it uses the term ‘received’ in a meaning that is now unusual, namely ‘accepted or considered to be correct by most people’. We do still speak of ‘received opinions’ and the ‘received wisdom’, but that’s about it.
(ii) the social landscape has changed out of all recognition since the term was first used (by Walker in 1774; by Ellis in 1869; by Jones in 1926).

I’ve pointed out elsewhere that there are various sets of criteria by which we might try to define RP: sociolinguistically, by examining the speech of the people at the top of the heap; ideologically, by reference to correctness or what is perceived as correct or desirable; and pedagogically, as a convenient codification of the pronunciation model we teach to BrE-oriented learners of EFL.

In LPD I claim that the model of BrE pronunciation that I record is “a modernized version of … RP”.

In England and Wales, RP is widely regarded as a model for correct pronunciation, particularly for educated formal speech. It is what was traditionally used by BBC news readers — hence the alternative name BBC pronunciation, although now that the BBC admits regional accents among its announcers this name has become less appropriate.

Others have other definitions, or use other terms. I’m sure readers have views on this.

abseiling

2011-10-18T08:17:00.009+01:00

My uncle Gilbert was not only a marathoner but also a climber, and I suppose it is from him that I must have learnt the verb to abseil (OED: “to descend a rock face or other near-vertical surface using a rope fixed at a higher point and coiled round the body or passed through a descendeur, the speed of descent being controlled by the rope's friction. Also with down and in extended use. Cf. rappel.)

He pronounced it ˈæbseɪl; so do I, and so do most of the people I have heard use the term. It stopped being a mountaineers’ technical term and entered general usage when people started abseiling not only down mountains but also down the outside of buildings, for charity, for fun, or in protest.

The etymology of the word is straightforwardly German: the neuter noun Seil means ‘rope’ or ‘cable’, and its derivative abseilen means ‘to lower (something, or oneself) on a rope’, hence ‘to abseil (down)’, and also, figuratively, ‘to skedaddle’. No doubt it was borrowed into English by the early pioneers of mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps.

The German pronunciation is zail, ˈapzailən (though neither of my two German pronunciation dictionaries includes the verb). The German spelling ei regularly corresponds to the sound ai (or however you choose to write this diphthong).

So why, despite this, does our prevailing pronunciation have eɪ? It could easily be accounted for as a spelling pronunciation — compare eight, rein, veil, vein etc. On the other hand in native English words the spelling ei can correspond not only to eɪ but also to aɪ (eider, height, kaleidoscope) and iː (ceiling, deceive, Keith, seize). As we all know, either and neither can go either way.

All other German loanwords with ei, as far as I can see, have English aɪ, as Eiger, eigenvalue, Einstein, Freiburg, Geiger, gneiss, Holbein, Leipzig, Weimar, Zeiss, zeitgeist. What is special about abseil?

I think the explanation must be contamination from sail, even though abseiling has nothing to do with sails.

According to LDOCE, abseil is BrE only, the AmE equivalent being rappel ræˈpel, rə-. The OED, on the other hand, defines the two terms slightly differently, rappelling involving a doubled rope but abseiling just ‘a rope’.

Both my pictures (found on the web) are captioned as abseiling. One has one rope, one has two.

As an afternote: on the melodeon discussion forum there is currently some speculation about the origin of the model name Double Ray for certain Hohner melodeons from the 1930’s onwards. One plausible suggestion is that it is from the German doppelreihig ‘double-rowed’, since these melodeons had two rows of treble buttons at a time when most had only one. This model was commissioned by a Scottish accordion dealer from Hohner, which is a German company. If true, this would be another case of German ei ai being mapped onto English eɪ.

degreasing the galleon

2011-10-17T08:51:00.006+01:00

I refer you to a horror story reported in Alex Rotatori’s blog. The above is part of a page in an English phrasebook published in Italy by a respectable publisher.

It’s not just a question of possible typing errors or misprints such as [intʃ] instead of [ɪntʃ] inch. What we have here is gross ignorance on the part of the author about the ‘phonemic spelling’ of English words.
• Leaving aside the Scots and Ulstermen who have no GOOSE-FOOT contrast, every native speaker of English pronounces foot as fʊt, not fuːt. Indeed, I chose FOOT as my keyword for the lexical set that includes put, push, and good.
• Every NS of English pronounces pint as paɪnt (i.e. with the PRICE vowel), not pɪnt.
• Every NS pronounces gallon with -lən, not -lɪən.
• No NS of English pronounces ounce as oːnts. We all use the MOUTH vowel, which may range depending on our accent from [æə] through the customary [aʊ] and [ɑʊ] to [ɔʊ], but is never oː.
• As far as I know, no NS pronounces Fahrenheit as ˈfɑːnhaɪt. Most of us say ˈfærənhaɪt.
• The citation form of the plural of degree ends in z. OK, there may be some contextual devoicing, but the appropriate entry in a list such as this is -ˈɡriːz.
• Because of the operation of the ‘stress shift’ or rhythm rule, for a NS the stress pattern of eighty-six in the expression 86 degrees is normally TUM-ti-tum rather than the citation tum-ti-TUM given here.

Of the thirty transcribed forms in this tiny fragment of the phrasebook, fifteen are wrong.

The Pons Travel Kit Inglese, according to the cover, comes con Audio Trainer. I do hope they got a native speaker to make the recordings. If they did, and listened to what the NS said, they would have been able to avoid these howlers.

As I say, Pons is a respectable publisher, based in Germany. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

I think teachers of English pronunciation need to give a lot of attention to establishing the correct target for the pronunciation of each word in the student’s English vocabulary. Knowing the spelling is not enough. We’re all aware that the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is less than perfect. But we often don’t realize how insidious the misleading effect of the orthography can be. Wild guesses are not the route to follow.

Presumably the author of the phrasebook knows English fairly well. He or she may even have a degree in the subject. But clearly this relates to the written language rather than the spoken.

It’s not just a matter of learning to make the sounds of English in an acceptable way. It’s also a matter of knowing which sounds ought to be used in which words. And that’s what often gets neglected.

government

2011-10-14T09:13:00.010+01:00

I remember Gimson, probably sometime in the 70s, telling me that Jack Windsor Lewis was trying to convince him that he ought to change the EPD entry for government so as to prioritize the variant in which there is no n before the m. Gim didn’t think much of this idea, and continued to prioritize the pronunciation ˈɡʌvnmənt.

In his CPD (1972) Jack transcribes this word as ɡʌvm̩ənt, and entirely iɡnores the possibility of n before the m. See also his comments in §10 of this review.

the term government … can be heard every day over and over again in countless news bulletins and current affairs programmes. Both EPD15 and LPD list first the variant which contains the /-nm-/ sequence. However, anyone who listens at all attentively to recordings will soon discover that this is not merely not the predominantly heard form of the word, even in situations of the greatest prominence or highlighting, but that it is actually even a relatively unusual form of it.

Now Giovanbattista Fichera writes to take me to task over the same issue, expressing surprise that I have not acted on Jack’s criticism. (In LPD the main entry (BrE) for this word continues to read ˈɡʌv ^ən mənt.) GF continues

In my opinion, it requires a great deal of effort to articulate the <-nm-> sequence without assimilating the n to the m. In Italian, San Mauro is sa'm:auro not san'mauro. It seems to me that mm is not a variant/change in progress, but the rule.

I replied

I think my entry is correct. It unquestionably corresponds to my own slow-careful pronunciation of the word. I certainly don't have to make “a great deal of effort” to pronounce it as shown. (But then my L1 is English, not Italian or Japanese.) The alternatives that follow represent reductions which are also admittedly very common in speech - but they are just that, reductions.

I am in no doubt that for me (at least) ˈɡʌvənmənt accurately represents the succession of articulatory targets presumably stored in my mental lexicon as the phonological specification of this word. As I told GF, it also represents the way I pronounce it when articulating carefully (not overarticulating, but also not applying running-speech reductions).

Some of these reductions may indeed be frequently heard from speakers, in radio or TV news bulletins as elsewhere. That does not make them the mentally stored forms, which are what I think a dictionary ought primarily to record.

As for GF’s comments on San Mauro, he is perfectly correct as far as Italian is concerned. Italian, like Spanish, Japanese and various other languages, does not admit sequences of nasals at different places of articulation. But English does. Even JWL’s CPD shows -nm- at inmate, with no other variant given. (In LPD, on the other hand, I do recognize the possibility of ˈɪmmeɪt, derived automatically by applying the option of dealveolar assimilation.)

well done everyone!

2011-10-13T09:50:00.004+01:00

If I congratulate my friend Thomas by saying

Well done Thomas!

— how would you analyse that grammatically?

In this structure there don’t seem to be any other possibilities for the first slot, well. The only other possibility in second place seems to be played. The third slot can be a proper name or some other NP. It can also be a prepositional phrase with to.
  Well played Tendulkar!
  Well done London!
  Well done me!
  Well done the cast!
  Well done to everyone involved.

Although the syntactic structure appears to be elliptical, it is not clear what has been ellipted. It would be ungrammatical, in modern English at least, to say *You have well done. The only permitted word order is You have done well. Even That was a job well done has an unusual word order.

That problem aside, what is the syntactic role of the final NP here? If it is a personal name, then you might think that it was a vocative.
  Well played!
  Well played, Thomas!

There are two difficulties with calling it a vocative (except in the last example).
1. You can use this structure even if the person designated by the NP is not present. You can comment Well done Thomas even if Thomas is not in earshot. And the me of Well done me! can hardly be a vocative: you can say this while talking (boasting) to someone else.
  He faced them down, so well done Obama, I say.
  He won the vote, so well done the Prime Minister.
  Well done me, don’t you think? (= Don’t you think I’ve done well?!)

2. In intonation, final vocatives are usually not accented.
  ˈWell \played, Thomas!
But more usually in this structure the final NP is accented. (This is also shown by the absence of a comma before the NP in the written versions.)
  ˈWell ˈplayed \Thomas!
  ˈWell ˈdone \London.
  ˈWell ˈdone \me, | ˌdon’t you /think?

In the current issue of the satirical fortnightly Private Eye there’s a spoof of Cameron’s conference speech (blog, 6 October). Each paragraph ends well done me. If you read it aloud, the only plausible intonation is with the nuclear accent on me each time.

low level or low fall?

2011-10-12T09:54:00.015+01:00

The first exercise in my book English Intonation (CUP 2006) asks the reader to observe and imitate the difference between speaking ‘normally’, i.e. with intonation superimposed on the phonetic segments of the utterance, and speaking on a monotone.

E1.1.1 Listen to the following sentences spoken (i) normally and (ii) strictly on a monotone (= the pitch of the voice stays level, not going up and not going down). Repeat them aloud in the same way.

Jacob Chu writes from Hong Kong to claim that when the female speaker says Silly old fool! for the second time she uses not a monotone but a low fall. He asks

Is a low falling nuclear tone considered a monotone?

The answer to that question is of course no.

I have listened again to the sound clip. I still hear not a low fall but a low level pattern, i.e. a monotone. Do you, too?

Anyhow, I then made a spectrogram of all ten utterances: five with intonation, five on monotones of various heights. Here it is. (As usual, click to enlarge. You can access the whole sound clip here.)
As you can see, the tracing for the fundamental frequency for the bit we are interested in (ringed in red) does seem to show two slightly falling tones.

On the face of it this looks like that bugbear of intonation work, a mismatch between what the human ear perceives and what physical measurements of the speech signal tell us.

Then again, Jacob Chu must either be a native speaker of Cantonese or at least very familiar with it. And Cantonese tone 4 is described as “low-mid to low, falling” (the IPA Handbook) or “low falling, very low level” (Wikipedia, see graphic). In Daniel Jones's description (Principles of the IPA, 1949) tone 4 is described as "low falling (with very low level as a common variant)", tone 6 as "low level (...but higher than the variant of [tone 4])".

This would suggest that speakers of Cantonese might well find it difficult to hear the difference between low fall and very low level, since both map onto their tone 4 (as against a not-maximally-low low level, which maps onto tone 6). Could it be that Jacob’s L1 is influencing his perception? Or is it my L1 influencing mine? Or do we just say that different people sometimes hear the same physical reality differently?

Dugher, Creagh, Danczuk

2011-10-11T08:42:00.009+01:00

I estimate that the Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges (also published as part of the Oxford Names Companion) contains about 35,000 surnames with their etymologies or origins. Yet the number of surnames in Britain must be many more than that, judging by names that crop up in the news but are not to be found in the ODS. And that is without considering names of recent arrivals from other countries. If we add in other English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, the number of current surnames is very large indeed.

The current crop of Members of Parliament includes one Michael Dugher. I came across his name in the newspaper and was wondering how it would be pronounced. It looks vaguely Gaelic: compare Irish dúghlas ‘dark green’ and its Scottish Gaelic equivalent, which have given us Douglas. But it is not to be found in the ODS.

Thanks to Jo Kim for pointing me to a short video clip in which Mr Dugher says his own name as he identifies himself. This is part of a series of brief goodwill messages from MPs to British troops serving abroad.

As you can hear, he pronounces his surname with the STRUT vowel, as if it were spelt Dugger. As a dictionary entry we would write ˈdʌɡə. Since he speaks with a noticeable northern accent (born and raised in Doncaster, south Yorkshire), he makes no distinction between the STRUT and FOOT vowels, so that this actually comes out more as ˈdəɡə, ˈdʊ̈ɡə.

The preceding clip on the same website is spoken by Mary Creagh, MP for a neighbouring constituency. She says her name as kreɪ, which is what you would expect. According to the ODS this is a variant of Cray, and is an anglicized form of Irish Ó Craoibhe ‘descendant of the curly-headed/prolific one’.

Another MP with a northern accent (born in Rochdale, Lancs.) is Simon Danczuk. He pronounces his name as ˈdæntʃək. (Is the second vowel his STRUT vowel or his schwa weak vowel? This is perhaps a meaningless question. In any case, on the clip he devoices it completely.) This name is not in ODS. It looks as if it would be a Polish diminutive of Dan(iel).

Such video clips offer a useful type of straight-from-the-horse's-mouth resource that was simply not available to lexicographers until very recently.

the full gamut

2011-10-10T09:31:00.004+01:00

A correspondent writes that his wife

seems to think that the IPA cannot represent the full gamut of human sounds in terms of pronunciation in languages. Not wanting to argue on a point about which I cannot claim to know, I decided to email you.

If it is the case that any language can be represented by the IPA, is there a good book which one can use as a pronunciation reference when looking at IPA? And an unrelated question, can anyone actually really use IPA to speak like a native speaker if they don't have reference sounds (given they could reproduce them if they tried)? I would guess you would need some tutelage in order to properly use IPA...?

I replied along the following lines.

1. There is no universal enumerable list of discrete “sounds”, and therefore there can be no set of symbols in a one-to-one relationship with them. Rather, we are faced with a multi-dimensional continuum of possibilities. Putting it another way, there is no super multilingual phoneme system in the sky, of which the sounds of each particular language are a subset.

In principle, the IPA contains all the symbols needed to represent the pronunciation of any human language so far described — that is, it is adequate to cover the contrastive sounds (phonemes) of any language. Not all finer shades can be represented except by ad hoc symbols. For example the English ʃ sound in sheep is somewhat different from that in sharp and that in short. But it is not necessary to symbolize these finer nuances. The French ʃ (orthographic ch) is not identical with any of these, being usually “darker” than in English ʃ, nor in the other direction is the Japanese ʃ (orthographic し, romanized sh). However the same IPA symbol will serve for all. For languages that do make phonemic contrasts among sounds that we English speakers would regard as varieties of ʃ, the additional symbols ʂ (less palatal) and ɕ (more palatal) are available. As far as is known, these are sufficient to cater for the ʃ-type sounds of all languages.

2. It is of course true that learning a set of symbols does not equip you to pronounce any language perfectly. Phonetic symbols are a reminder of what you should be aiming for when pronouncing a word in a given language. They still need to be interpreted in the light of detailed phonetic information about that language (point 1 above). And even possession of this knowledge does not automatically give you the articulatory motor skills to perform the sounds accurately.

3. Yes, study phonetics! Or at least consult the IPA Handbook (CUP 1999) and a textbook or two.

More generally, it does seem to be the case that for many people practical phonetic skills are best learned through face-to-face tuition given by an expert. Partly, this is to do with the “hearing bias” imposed on us by our native language. We just don’t automatically hear all the details of speech sounds if those details are irrelevant in our L1. A tutor can draw our attention to aspects we may have overlooked, and perhaps offer ear-training to improve our perception of “foreign” sounds and sound contrasts. It ought to be possible for experts to deliver this kind of tuition through distance learning rather than face-to-face, but that’s something we’re still working on (though we made a start at UCL with PhonLine).

For original investigation into the phonetics of a language, there is no substitute for dealing with a live native-speaker “language consultant” (informant).

the Jane and Tim show

2011-10-07T08:58:00.018+01:00

How can we popularize phonetics to a lay audience?

My colleagues Jane Setter and Tim Wharton have just had what can only be called a gig, at an event called Science Showoff, “an open mic night for scientists, science communicators, science teachers, historians and philosophers of science, students, science popularisers and anyone else with something to show off about science.”

Grab yourself 10 minutes to show off absolutely anything about science. Got a demo, sketch, song, video, talk, performance, dance or anything else about science that you’d like to try out in public, or show to a new audience? Bring it to Science Showoff.

Jane and Tim are both tutors on the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics, as well as holding academic posts at Reading and Kingston universities respectively. They are also both talented singers, with plenty of experience as performers.

Their set comprised some elementary phonetic theory illustrated with two songs, In summer in London and Doing intonation. You may recognize the tunes.

I’m afraid there is no video available. There is a (rather poor-quality) sound recording here. You can listen to it while following the script here. Enjoy the audience participation.

Brilliant.

There was one slight performance error. Where Jane was supposed to say (an exaggerated version of)

\really looking ₒforward | to \/science ₒshowoff

she actually produced

\really looking forward | to \/science | \/showoff

…which reflects our uncertainty about the stress pattern of newly coined compound nouns. Ideally I think I would have scripted, and performed,

\really looking forward | to \/Science | \Showoff

From a review on the Science Showoff website:

Highlights for me included ... Jane Setter earworming everyone with songs about phonetics (WHY DID I WAKE UP WITH THE LOCOMOTION IN MY HEAD??!?!) ...

Here's an old picture of Tim and Jane with students at the summer course.

scope disambiguation

2011-10-06T08:43:00.010+01:00

Have a look at this clip.

As the Guardian comments, the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s declaration in support of gay marriage yesterday at the close of the annual conference of the Conservative party

…was revealing, and not only of the oceanic distance that now separates British conservatives from their counterparts in the US, where such a statement is unimaginable from someone in Cameron’s position.

It also supplies us with an excellent example of how intonation disambiguates what would otherwise be a structurally ambiguous assertion.

On paper, the words I don’t support gay marriage might seem to imply that Cameron doesn’t support gay marriage. But if you listen to the clip (and are sensitive to English NS intonation) you will see that he is saying precisely the opposite. He does support gay marriage. He thinks that this support is not opposed to Conservative principles, but follows from them. Like all marriage, gay marriage is a form of commitment, and he’s all in favour of people being committed to one another.

With intonation marked up, his words (0:37-0:45 on the clip) are

So ˈI don’t supˈport gay \/marriage | in \/spite of °being a Con°servative. ||
\/I sup°port gay °marriage | because I \am a Con°servative. ||

In English intonation: an introduction (CUP 2006), p. 32, I wrote

The fall-rise tone has a special function in a negative sentence. Namely, it indicates that the scope of negation includes the word bearing the nucleus, but not the main verb (unless the main verb itself bears the nucleus). A falling tone, on the other hand, does not restrict the scope of the negation in this way.

I can see now that this wording is not quite correct. It does not cover cases like this, where the speaker chooses to divide his assertion into two intonation phrases, which means there are two nuclei. Here, it is the fall-rise on spite that marks its inclusion in the scope of the negation (‘I support gay marriage, but not in spite of being a Conservative’).

To illustrate this point in my book I chose an example which is (I hope) easier to grasp.

(i) She ˈdidn’t do it because she was \/tired. (= She did it, but for some other reason.)
(ii) She ˈdidn’t \/do it | because she was \tired. (= She didn’t do it. Here’s why.)

How many foreign learners, and of what language background, immediately get this intonation distinction? What other languages disambiguate the scope of negatives in this way? What are the implications for mutual intelligibility between NSs and NNSs?

St Martin

2011-10-05T09:37:00.009+01:00

Myra Wandry asked about the pronunciation of “St. Maartens”. She meant the Caribbean island.

This island is divided in two. The southern half is Dutch, the northern half French. (Click on the map to enlarge it.) The border between them is the only land frontier between what is technically the Netherlands and France respectively. The Dutch name of the island is Sint Maarten sɪnt ˈmaːʁtə(n). Its French name is Saint-Martin sɛ̃maʁtɛ̃.

In English it is known as St Martin (BrE) or Saint Martin (AmE), pronounced respectively as sənt ˈmɑːtɪn and seɪnt ˈmɑːrtn̩. The three syllables of this name manage to exemplify four phonological variables.

First, there is the prefix Saint, typically reduced in BrE to the weak form sənt or some further reduction thereof (sn̩t, sn̩ʔ, sn̩, sm̩ʔ, sm̩). Americans generally retain the strong form, seɪnt, perhaps glottalling the final plosive (seɪnʔ).

Next there is the rhoticity variable. Historical r is lost in most accents of England and Wales where nonprevocalic, but retained in most AmE.

The t of Martin is not infrequently realized as glottal in AmE, where it is immediately followed by a nasal consonant. In BrE, where it is usually followed by a vowel (see next point) it is more likely to be alveolar.

Lastly, there is the final syllable of Martin. In most BrE unstressed ɪ does not weaken to schwa before an alveolar obstruent or nasal (thus Harris ˈhærɪs, goblin ˈɡɒblɪn). In AmE, on the other hand, it usually does (so ˈherəs, ˈɡɑːblən). In AmE, accordingly, Martin usually rhymes with Parton, Barton, carton; in BrE, it usually doesn’t.

After t or d, as usual, the schwa coalesces with a following sonorant to give a syllabic sonorant, i.e. ən → n̩. So Latin is pronounced ˈlætn̩ and Martin is pronounced ˈmɑːrtn̩. These in turn yield possible ˈlæʔn̩, ˈmɑːrʔn̩.

Despite having Dutch as the official language, most of the inhabitants of the ~~English~~ Dutch side speak Caribbean English as their L1. Some speak Papiamento. One of the most famous things about the island of St Martin is the way aircraft landing at the airport pass just a few feet over a popular beach.

focus-finality

2011-10-04T08:45:00.016+01:00

I’ve been thinking again about the example I quoted on Friday, I fee[lʲ] ill vs. I may not look ill, but I do fee[ɫ] ill.

The only reasonable hypothesis I can come up with is that the ‘boundary’ that triggers the dark l is the end of a focus domain.

Marked up for intonation, we have
    I ˈmay not \/look ill, | but I ˈdo \/feel ill ||
or perhaps
    I ˈmay not \/look ill, | but I ˈdo \feel ill ||

In pragmatics, focus is the foregrounding of part of the message — typically what is new or contrastive or otherwise important — and the backgrounding of everything else. It is realized in intonation as the presence of accented syllables, i.e. syllables that are not only rhythmically but also intonationally prominent (pitch-prominent). Identifying the beginning of each intonational ‘focus phrase’ or ‘focus domain’ is sometimes tricky, but identifying the end is easy: it ends at the end of the word in which the nuclear accent appears (= the last accented syllable in the intonation phrase).

So in this example the focus domain in the first IP extends from may to look. The focus domain in the second IP is do feel. My hypothesis is that here the l in feel, being focus-final, is made dark even despite its prevocalic environment.

This is not a matter of being ‘prepausal’. In the example given, the phrase feel ill is not interrupted by any pause or intonation boundary.

Of course it would also be possible to place an intonation boundary and possible pause there.
    You ˈmay not be able to \/see anything unusual, | but I ˈdo \/feel | \ill ||

As we know, any lateral that is prepausal is dark. This applies whether or not it is also focus-final.
    You’re \i[ɫ] — (You’re wrong!) I’m /not i[ɫ]

I tried some more examples, and introspecting I think they work.
    This is ˈNell \Anderson. (nelʲ)
    ˈPlease /welcome | ˈJames /Anderson | and his ˈwife \Nell Anderson. (neɫ)

    There’s a ˈsmall \error. (smɔːlʲ)
    ˈNot a \/big error, | but a \small error. (smɔːɫ)

The big question, which I’ve never asked myself before, is this: are there any other instances of allophonic variation triggered by focus-final position? (The idea that this might apply to linking r, floated in the discussion on Friday’s blog, seems to me to be a non-starter.)

Samlesbury

2011-10-03T08:32:00.007+01:00

The British government has announced the creation of three new enterprise zones to help the workers who are losing their jobs at Brough, Warton, and Samlesbury, we read yesterday.

The Brough in question is not Brough under Stainmore in Cumbria but Brough-on-Humber near Hull. Like other English places with this name, both are pronounced brʌf (locally, of course, equating to brʊf). In Scotland things are different.

Warton is of course ˈwɔː(r)tn̩. This village is in Fylde faɪld in Lancashire. Samlesbury, too, is in Lancashire, just outside Preston, not too far from where I grew up. (My picture shows the village church.)

There is some uncertainty about the first vowel sound in this latter place name. I know it as ˈsɑːmzbri, -bəri, though I see that in LPD I deferred to the BBC Pron Dict of British Names and prioritized ˈsæmz-. Either way, its pronunciation does not correspond particularly closely to its spelling. In fact it is pronounced more as if spelt Salmesbury — compare psalm sɑːm and salmon ˈsæmən.

This YouTube video, too, calls it ˈsɑːmz- (or is she saying ˈsɒmz-?).

Wikipedia baldly asserts that the etymology of the first part of this name is the Old English sceamol ‘ledge’. Ekwall’s Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names is more cautious, saying only “Etymology obscure. If the name originally began in Sh-, the first element may be OE sceamol ‘bench’ &c. in some topographical sense such as ‘ledge’”. The earliest spelling recorded (1179) is Samerisberia, with Samelesbure in 1188 and Schamelesbiry in 1246. The English distinction between ɑː and æ is much more recent than that.

what the L?

2011-09-30T08:54:00.009+01:00

Every now and again someone asks why pronunciation dictionaries do not show dark l explicitly. If milk is pronounced mɪɫk, why do we write it as mɪlk?

There are various kinds of answer one can give.

1. The distinction between clear and dark l is not particularly important for EFL. And anyhow there are plenty of native speakers who do not make the distinction.

2. There are no pairs of words in English distinguished by the clear-dark distinction. Writing the clearer variant as lʲ (which exaggerates its palatalization somewhat), we can say that [lʲ] and [ɫ] are allophones of the same phoneme /l/. Their distribution is conditioned by the phonetic context: in RP and similar accents, lʲ is used before a vowel or j, ɫ is used elsewhere (including before a major boundary). As with other allophonic variation, we ignore it in dictionary transcription because it is more economical to state it once rather than mention it on every occasion. The learner needs to learn the general rule rather than memorize the appropriate variant for each word. Dictionary transcription, and EFL transcription in general, is phonemic (or, if you prefer, broad).

3. Every word or stem that ends in the lateral is sometimes pronounced with ɫ, sometimes with lʲ, depending on what follows. Although the citation form of kill is kɪɫ, and killed is always kɪɫd, in killing we have ˈkɪlʲɪŋ. While kill them is ˈkɪɫ ðəm, kill it is ˈkɪlʲ ɪt. And likewise for thousands of other items.

4. Even among NSs who follow the rule given, there is some disagreement in the precise definition of ‘boundary’. Whereas mainstream RP of my generation has lʲ in phrases such as Isle of Man and Middle East, there are other NSs who use ɫ in these phrases. For stylize I say ˈstaɪlʲaɪz, just as in island ˈaɪlʲənd, but there are many others for whom the morpheme boundary triggers pre-l breaking and/or dark l, thus ˈstaɪəlʲaɪz, ˈstaɪ(ə)ɫaɪz.

Whereas my kind of speech applies the rule to syllabic l just as to non-syllabic, there are other speakers who claim to make all syllabic laterals dark. How this works out in cases of potential compression (positional loss of syllabicity), e.g. fiddling ˈfɪdl̩ɪŋ ~ ˈfɪdlɪŋ, I am not sure.

Abercrombie adduced a nice example. In I feel ill he (like me) would use a clear l at the end of feel: aɪ fiːlʲ ˈɪɫ. But in I may not look ill, but I do feel ill it switches to dark: aɪ ˈmeɪ nɒt ˈlʊk ɪɫ | bət aɪ ˈduː ˈfiːɫ ɪɫ. I'd do just the same in not the Far East, but the Midd[ɫ̩] East. Why?

0.083

2011-09-29T09:25:00.005+01:00

Robin Walker has been canvassing opinions.

The citation form of 'twelfth' in all the dictionaries I've checked is /twelfθ/, but the other day I thought I caught myself eliding the /f/. Was that me being 'sloppy' or is this something that we tend to do in colloquial speech?

Given that Robin is the newsletter editor of the IATEFL Pronunciation SIG, one can only assume that the question is somewhat faux-naïf. You’d think he would not just THINK but KNOW whether he ‘caught himself’ performing a common casual-speech reduction. Whether or not one calls such reductions ‘sloppy’ is not a phonetic question but rather a reflection of how far we have shaken off (or otherwise) popular attitudes to language and acquired a degree of scientific objectivity. Anyone interested in English pronunciation must surely know that this reduction IS something we tend to do in colloquial speech. So why ask us?

Nit-picking, I might further object that you can’t elide phonemes. Phonemes are mental representations, and I would prefer to say that it is a not a mental construct /f/ but a physical segment (speech sound) [f] that might or might not be elided.

Anyhow, I just replied

Both.

Jack Windsor Lewis gave a longer answer.

In my opinion anyone who pronounces twelfth in clearly the way dictionaries seem to suggest is normal actually produces something very likely to sound artificial and pedantic. I dou•t that anyone much notices if in naturally fluent speech [twelθ] is used. I'm uncomfortable that dictionaries generally suggest that [twelθ] is a less usual than versions with at least two simultaneous fricatives. Those who aim at saying /twelfθ/ and succeed in not sounding abnormally deliberate in the way they say it probably always have at least some overlap of the two fricatives and may sometimes produce a bilabial voiceless fricative at the same time. A phonetic notation [twelθ͡f] wdnt be far wrong.
I felt happiest recommending in my Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English (Oxford University Press 1972,1979) "twelfθ with f and θ usually made simultaneously".

I surely cannot be the only one whose ordinary slow pronunciation of this word is indeed twelfθ. OK, the labiodental and dental fricatives certainly overlap (though surely the labiodental turbulence starts before the dental). But segment overlap is nothing new or exceptional. The l in this word overlaps with the f, too. The w overlaps with the t. The mental representation underlying my articulation is clearly twelfθ, and that formulation faithfully represents the articulatory targets that my actual articulations may or may not achieve (depending, as usual, on speech rate, formality etc.).

Similarly, I have no hesitation in claiming that my basic pronunciation of sixth is sɪksθ. And that of clothes, kləʊðz.

True, there are speakers for whom reduced forms of various kinds have been lexicalized, so that the unreduced form is in some sense irrecoverable. Most (all?) of us have lexicalized the two-syllable reduction of every (i.e. ˈevri rather than ˈevəri). I’m aware that for victory I personally do not feel at all happy with the dictionary form ˈvɪktəri, since I feel I can naturally say only ˈvɪktri. On the other hand I cannot go along with people who claim that police is pliːs — for me, although I might sometimes reduce it this way in rapid speech, it is basically unquestionably pəˈliːs, i.e. comparable to polite and pollution rather than to pleat and playful.

Similarly, for me twelfth is not a good rhyme for health.

Duke of York sound changes

2011-09-28T09:24:00.006+01:00

You’ll have heard of the grand old Duke of York. As you know, he had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again.

It’s thirty-five years since Geoff Pullum wrote an article entitled ‘The Duke of York gambit’, about derivations of the general form A→B→A, that is derivations in which an underlying representation is mapped on to an intermediate form distinct from it, and then on to a surface representation which is identical with the earlier stage. Whether such derivations can be justified synchronically is an issue on which I express no opinion. But there certainly seem to be historical sound changes that proceed in just this way: something changes to something else, then changes back again.

Take popular London English. If Dickens is to be believed, London working-class speakers in the nineteenth century tended to confuse v and w: bevare of vidders! (beware of widows). They certainly don’t now. Historically, w → v → w.

Another well-known, nay stereotypical, Cockney feature is h-dropping. Remarkably, current London yoof — despite the supposed influence of Jamaican English, which shares this feature — generally don’t drop h. So, in the appropriate lexical contexts, h → Ø → h.

Londoners have diphthong shift, no? That is, the PRICE vowel has shifted in popular London speech from aɪ to something in the area of ɑɪ, ɒɪ? And the FACE vowel has gone from eɪ to ʌɪ, æɪ? Not any more. Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and associates have shown that in inner-London Multicultural London English (blog, 2 July 2010) PRICE has reverted to aɪ and FACE to eɪ (or even eː). So we have aɪ → ɒɪ → aɪ and eɪ → æɪ → eɪ.

If you’ve got the odd twenty minutes to spare, I’d like to recommend this brief talk by Paul Kerswill on just this topic of MLE, given at a TEDxEastEnd event in the wake of the recent rioting.

We like to think of sound changes as typically originating in the working-class speech of big cities, then spreading out socially and geographically. Many of the BrE sound changes of the last 500 years can be explained in this way, with working-class London as the point of departure. But that’s clearly far from the whole story.

details

2011-09-27T08:57:00.005+01:00

At the running club these days I can, alas, do no more than jog a mile or two if neither my arrhythmic heart nor my arthritic hip are playing up. But it’s still a great place to socialize with friends old and new.

One of our coaches is something of a linguistic paradox: a highly educated man, with a degree from one of our oldest universities, established in his chosen profession. But he retains a strong working-class south London accent. As he was giving out the announcements recently, he told us in connection with some forthcoming event that further ˈdɪiʔɛ̈oz were available on the club website.

This pronunciation of details exemplifies, inter alia, intervocalic t-glottalling and l-vocalization, stigmatized features that one would not usually hear from someone with his educational background. Naturally he also has the usual British word-initial stress for this lexical item. (Compare AmE: in Yuko Shitara’s poll, 75% of Americans voted for final stress in detail.)

This set me musing about similarities and differences between the two major sound changes now vying for supremacy in the world of English non-initial t, namely voicing and glottalling. I am thinking above all of cases such as butter and a lot of, where AmE normally has a voiced tap ɾ and BrE may have any of t, ɾ, ʔ.

It is clear that an American-style voiced tap is by no means uncommon in Britain, particularly in high-frequency items such as a lot of. Conversely, a British-style glottal stop seems to be not unknown in north America.

But the two rival developments affecting t do not operate in identical environments. Yes, their environments overlap, as in the cases quoted. But t-voicing is blocked by a non-vowel right-hand environment (as in the two plosives in that’s right!), an environment in which glottalling is clearly more frequent than prevocalically. ˈðæʔs ˈraɪʔ

Furthermore, t-voicing is blocked (somewhat mysteriously, from my point of view) if the following vowel is unreduced and there is no word boundary. You get it in later ˈleɪɾə(r) and my late uncle maɪ ˈleɪɾ ˈʌŋkl̩, but not in latex ˈleɪteks.

For Americans, then, there is no chance of voicing the t in detail. For those who stress the second syllable, the t is like a word-initial t, always voiceless. For the 25% of Americans who prefer initial stress the same constraint as in latex comes into play, and again there is no chance of voicing the t. But for Brits who revel in glottalling — like our running coach — this is just one more candidate item for a glorious glottal stop.

an unexpected assimilation

2011-09-26T09:13:00.013+01:00

I spent last week in Poznań, Poland, where I ɡave some Esperanto-medium lessons on general articulatory phonetics at Adam Mickiewicz University as part of their Interlinguistic Studies programme. The students were enthusiastic, mostly young, and from a variety of different language backgrounds, which makes for lively sessions.

These students had never previously experienced the dictation of nonsense words, so we had good fun working on them as a relief from the hard-core stuff. I find nonsense words a great way to revive the attention of those who are beginning to flag a little in class.

One topic that came up was assimilation in the place of articulation of nasals before various obstruents. We discussed whether the sound corresponding to the first n in dankon ‘thank you’ is, or ought to be, a dental/alveolar n, or whether it can, or should, get allophonically assimilated to the homorɡanic velar ŋ. (As you may know, this type of assimilation happens in many languages, but not — strangely — in Russian.)

When we turned to nasals before various other obstruents, an Italian participant remarked that in his own speech (in Esperanto as in Italian) he pronounces n before s as palatalized, nʲ (older IPA, ᶇ) : so for penso ‘thought’ he says penʲso. This is unexpected, because the following consonant, for him as for everyone else, is a plain common-or-garden s. Is this some kind of assimilation to the preceding vowel rather than to the following consonant? Or some kind of consonantal dissimilation?

We didn’t have time to pursue the matter then in class, but what I ought to have done — I realize now — is to investigate whether he does the same thing when the preceding vowel is back (e.g. monstro ‘monster’).

I have never seen any such phenomenon mentioned in phonetic descriptions of Italian. I wonder how widespread it is. Here is what Mioni says on the subject in the Italian section of Fonematica contrastiva (Bologna, 1973). Before s he reports a straightforward apico-dental n. The “lievemente palatalizzato” (lightly palatalized) nʲ he mentions as found only in the position before tʃ, dʒ, ʃ.
The English Wikipedia article on Italian phonology says baldly

Nasals assimilate to the point of articulation of whatever consonant they precede. For example, /nɡ/ is realized as [ŋɡ].

The Italian Wikipedia mentions a ‘mediopalatale’ variant of /n/, but does not elaborate.

esistono altri allofoni di /n/ come la dentale e la mediopalatale, di solito non riportati nella trascrizione larga. (Other allophones of /n/ are found, for example dental and mediopalatal, usually not reflected in broad transcription.)

Perhaps we’ve discovered something new.
_ _ _

I notice that above I used the expression ‘common or garden’. I’m aware that this is a British expression for which the AmE equivalent is ‘garden-variety’. And that gives me an opportunity to pass on Karen Chung’s recent discovery of an interesting article about Briticisms creeping into American English. Go here to read about run-up, go missing, snog, sort out, laddish etc.
_ _ _

European Day of Languages

Cilybebyll

2011-09-16T08:58:00.008+01:00

At the time of writing we’re still waiting for news of the miners trapped underground in a drift mine in the Swansea Valley. We hope for the best but fear the worst.

The Gleision ˈɡlaɪʃɒn mine is at Cilybebyll ˌkɪləˈbebɪɬ, a village near Pontardawe ˌpɒntəˈdaʊi. I was impressed by the way the Sky News newsreader on TV yesterday evening handled the Welsh place names. He didn’t hesitate or stumble; he didn’t even break his rhythm. His ɬ was exemplary.

Gleision is a straightforward Welsh name, the plural of glas ‘blue, green’, so meaning just ‘blues’ or ‘greens’. The other two names involved are more interesting, because they bear witness to the influence of Latin on Welsh, dating from the time before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, when southern Britain was part of the Roman Empire.

Pontardawe means ‘bridge on the (river) Tawe’. The first element is pont, the Welsh for ‘bridge’, an obvious borrowing from the Latin pons, pont- of the same meaning. This word also gave us French pont and Spanish puente. No doubt the Romans introduced their bridge-building technology into Britain, and with it their word into the British (= Old Welsh) language.

Cilybebyll literally means ‘back of the tents’. The last element, bebyll, is the soft-mutated plural of the word pabell ‘tent, tabernacle’, from the Latin papilio, papilion-. In Latin this word primarily meant ‘butterfly’, but it was also a Roman army slang word for ‘military tent’, “probably from the similarity of shape when the ends of the covering are turned over at the entrance of the tent” (OED). The same word came into English via French as pavilion pəˈvɪliən, -ljən.
_ _ _

I shall be away again next week. Next blog: 26 September.

names, names

2011-09-15T09:16:00.010+01:00

Thanks to Karen Chung for pointing me towards a website called The Name Engine.

The Name Engine® provides the correct name pronunciations of athletes, entertainers, politicians, newsmakers, and more. Even well-known names are often pronounced in different ways, leaving you to wonder what the correct pronunciation is. You'll find the right answer here. Better yet, you'll actually hear the right answer.

Sounds as if the BBC Pronunciation Unit will be put out of business, not to mention pronunciation dictionaries.

All names are painstakingly researched for authenticity. Personal confirmation is the ultimate goal. At a minimum, they are confirmed by individuals with firsthand knowledge of the name in question. These individuals include team play-by-play announcers, public relations representatives, sports information directors, agents, etc.

Pronunciations are given in respelling (no IPA) and as sound clips. This is an American website, and both are strictly in AmE only.

At the moment the database of names included is very limited. It is divided into Sports (twelve subsections) and Miscellaneous (Companies/Brands, Entertainment, Newsmakers, Places, Politics).

Under Places there are just fifty or so geographical names, all of them places in the US except Abbotabad, Kyrgyzstan, Montevideo, and Qatar. (The “correct” pronunciation of the last-mentioned is given as ˈkɑːtɚ, a possibility I don’t countenance in LPD. In Arabic it’s ˈqɑtˁɑɾ.)

I looked in vain under Sports for Sharapova (blog, 1 and 5 July) and under Entertainment for Beyoncé. In the latter section I also learnt that Björk is “correctly” pronounced disyllabically, as biˈjɔːrk. H’m. (In Icelandic, monosyllabic bjœɾ̥k, and in BrE usually bjɔːk.) Under Companies/Brands, Bombardier (blog, 6 July) is given the respelling “bom-BAR-dee-ay”. But the associated sound clip is stressed differently, as bɑːmˌbɑːrdiˈeɪ.

The website looks very professional and clearly has great potential. There is no information given about who sponsors it or runs it. On the face of things, if it lives up to its grandiose claims, it might in time be more reliable than do-it-yourself Forvo (which currently boasts “1,108,951 pronunciations in 279 languages”).

I wonder whether The Name Engine^® will get round to giving Americans guidance on the pronunciation of “difficult” British names such as Leicester.

Rastamouse

2011-09-14T09:44:00.007+01:00

In reaction to David Starkey’s egregious comments about last month’s rioting in London, Hubert Devonish, professor of linguistics at the University of the West Indies in Mona and Coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit, wrote an interesting piece, Of riot and Rastamouse, that appeared first as a blog and then as an article in Jamaica’s leading newspaper, the Gleaner.

Rastamouse is a popular British children’s animated cartoon, featuring a cast of problem-solving mice musicians who play reggae and wear appropriate clothing and talk in an appropriately Jamaican way.

If you’ve never seen Rastamouse (perhaps because you’re not an under-10 in the UK), try this sample.

I say the characters “talk in an appropriately Jamaican way”. This covers not only accent (pronunciation) but also elements of Jamaican Creole grammar, e.g. the use of me as a subject pronoun. To a British ear they certainly sound Jamaican. But there are two interesting points to be made:

They don’t have the Multicultural London English we discussed recently. They sound definitely Caribbean.

Prof. Devonish mentions “the heavy anglicisation of the Jamaican Patois spoken by the characters”. So their language is what has been called “London Jamaican”, characteristically spoken by those of Jamaican birth or heritage who have lived for many years, or all their lives, in London.

And yet… It turns out that none of the principal actors who do the voices in the cartoon were born in Jamaica. They are native Londoners. The lead character is played by the voice actor Reggie Yates, who is actually not of Caribbean but of of Ghanaian descent.

And why not? I think his accent, even if it might not convince Jamaicans, is entirely appropriate for this cartoon mouse.

Donna and Benny

2011-09-13T08:43:00.006+01:00

One of the songs our choir is rehearsing this season is a Donna Summer number called Last Dance. It will be familiar to any of you who were alert to the popular music of thirty-odd years ago (which I was not — the song was new to me).

As often happens in the lyrics of popular music, in this song dance is made to rhyme not only with chance but also with romance. This is something of a problem for speakers of RP and similar accents: we normally pronounce dɑːns and tʃɑːns but rə(ʊ)ˈmæns, which means the rhyme doesn’t work properly.

Our choirmaster has given us clear instructions that in this song we are to sing dæns and tʃæns, as if we were American.

(Well, sort of. Real Americans would be quite likely to do BATH Raising and come up with something like dɛːnts, tʃɛːnts or deənts, tʃeənts.)

Interestingly, the rehearsal tracks supplied to us show a very selective Americanization of this and other same-genre songs. We are expected to do t-voicing but not to add rhoticity. So the title words of another number, Get this party started, come out as ˈɡet ðɪs ˈpɑːdi ˈstɑːdɪd.

The choir is very good at supplying us with rehearsal tracks. For each piece of music we are offered a separate sound file for each of the four voice parts (tenor 1, tenor 2, baritone, bass). So we can listen repeatedly and practise on our own by singing along.

Another piece we are doing is a compilation of Christmas number ones down the years. Among them is Benny Hill’s comedy piece Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West). The soloist on the rehearsal track, doing the Benny Hill narration, adopts what is intended to be an appropriate West-of-England accent — Benny Hill was from Southampton, as is immediately revealed by the way he speaks. To English people from elsewhere the most obvious feature of a west country accent is its rhoticity. So we duly get ˈɝːni and ˈmɪlkkɑːrt. But for fastest, where the real Benny Hill would have said ˈfaːstɪst, the voice on our rehearsal track says ˈfɑːrstɪst, a lovely example of hypercorrection.

When imitating a rhotic accent we non-rhotic speakers find it quite difficult to sort out farther and father, larva and lava. It is hard to change scarf skɑːf, for example, to skɑːrf without at the same time changing half hɑːf to hɑːrf. The phrase fastest milkcart is particularly tricky, with a quick succession of ɑː’s, only one of which should properly be made r-coloured. Thinking of the spelling each time would solve the dilemma, but somehow we can’t do that in the middle of the flow of speech. It makes you admire British actors like Hugh Laurie, with his remarkably authentic-sounding American accent, even more.

tonicity again

2011-09-12T08:30:00.008+01:00

My recent trip to China furnished further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the failure of many NNSs of English to master the part of English intonation that concerns tonicity (focus marking, the location of the nucleus — blog, 15 October 2009).

One of the poster papers at the ICPhS made the tentative claim that the focus in Mandarin Chinese is well marked, with ‘post-focus compression’ of the pitch range identifying it clearly despite all the lexical tone in the utterance; but that in Cantonese Chinese it is not.

This chimes in with the limited experience I have of intonation in Chinese English. Whereas those whose first language is Mandarin seem on the whole to locate the English nucleus correctly, those who are speakers of Cantonese often do not.

In Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, as you might expect in a former British colony, there are many NNSs whose English is really excellent. But there are also many who struggle to a greater or lesser extent. Our tour guide on the afternoon excursion to the sights of Hong Kong island, whose English was very fluent but not very good, drew our attention to “the Jockey Club on your right-hand side | and a cemetery on your left-hand side”, so violating the rule about avoiding placing the nucleus on a repeated item. (He also pronounced number as ˈlɐmbɐ etc., which was very confusing at first.)

As we all know, it’s not just the southern Chinese who have this problem in English intonation. Our flight home was with Air France. The cabin attendant reciting the pre-takeoff drill reminded us that “the safety instructions are in the seat pocket in front of you”.

Does nobody teach French learners of English that they should not accent pronouns except for contrast? All NSs of English would say “…the seat pocket in front of you”.

reverse search

2011-09-09T09:08:00.019+01:00

”What you ought to get your publishers to provide,” said one fan of LPD to me in Hong Kong three weeks ago, “is a way of carrying out a reverse search. Then the user could enter a pronunciation and find what word is pronounced that way.”

He was somewhat nonplussed when I told him that the CD-ROM bundled with the third edition of LPD provides precisely that facility. It’s called Sound Search, and you see the button for it when you fire up the on-screen LPD.

Press the Sound Search button, and up pops this dialogue box. Use the phonetic symbol buttons to enter your search term. Then, if what you have entered corresponds to the pronunciation of an English word, a Find button will appear. Press that, and you’ll get the orthographic version in a Results box.

(It’s a pity about the misspelling DIPHTONGS, and the misaligned diacritics at t̬ and æ̃, but no one’s perfect.)

I think this search facility works pretty well.

It can cope with optional sounds. So any of tʃɑːns, tʃɑːnts, tʃæns, tʃænts will find chance.

There’s an asterisk to give you a wild card. Input tʃɑːn* and you get offered a list of 18 possibilities.

It copes with both RP and GenAm. Input ʃɑːk and you get not only BrE shark but also AmE shock.

It delivers homophones efficiently. Input saɪt and you get cite, -cyte, sight, and site.

Shortcomings? As I say, no one’s perfect. The handling of run-on entries leaves a lot to be desired. Although siː correctly returns C, se, sea, see, si, entering siːz gives you only seise and seize — it fails to identify seas, sees and C’s, Cs, c’s.

~~You can’t even enter the modern BrE ɒʊ variant of əʊ (as in ɒʊld old).~~

If you enter saɪ, you get not only the correct Cy, psi, sigh, xi but also a rogue siamang — because alongside a main pronunciation ˈsiː‿ ə mæŋ this word also has a second pron ˈsaɪ‿ , i.e. ˈsaɪ‿ ə mæŋ, which the software has misinterpreted as a complete form.

iGE

2011-09-08T08:30:00.011+01:00

It’s not actually phonetics, but my colleague Bas Aarts asks me to tell you about iGE, the interactive Grammar of English that the Survey of English Usage at UCL has developed.

It is an app for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. (Since my mobile is an Android phone and I have no Apple products, I haven’t been able to try it out myself.)

As you can see, it offers a “complete” grammar of English, incorporating an extensive glossary, a guided course of instruction, and interactive exercises and puzzles. There’s a cut-down version that is free and a full version that costs a modest £4.99/$6.99/€5.49.

There was a report in Tuesday’s Evening Standard.
So — who’s going to be the first to fill the gap in the market for something similar dealing with English phonetics? Currently there are various monolingual and bilingual dictionaries available for your mobile/cellphone/handy, some with spoken versions of the headwords, but no specialist pronunciation dictionary.

Shigeru Takebayashi, 22 Sept 1926 - 10 March 2011

2011-09-07T08:40:00.013+01:00

I was sorry to hear that Shigeru Takebayashi (竹林滋), the eminent Japanese phonetician and lexicographer, had died earlier this year.

He was the author of a well-regarded Japanese book on English phonetics (1982, second edition with Hiroko Saito 1998). He was also the editor of a number of Japanese-English dictionaries, including the Pocket Kenkyusha Japanese Dictionary and the Kenkyusha Japanese-English Learner’s Dictionary. An autographed copy of the latter sits on the bookshelf next to my desk. It lists the headwords in romanized alphabetical order, which is exactly what I want. It also supplies the accent pattern for each headword, information not otherwise easily found in English.

My own dealings with Prof. Takebayashi date back to 1990. Shortly after the first edition of my LPD had come out, the publishers arranged for me to meet him in Tokyo. The idea was that he would write an introduction-cum-explanation in Japanese for my dictionary, to be bundled with it in a slip case. To do this he needed to ask me some questions about it.

Our meeting was almost like a PhD viva, with me as the candidate and Prof. Takebayashi as the examiner. He asked me a series of searching, nay penetrating, questions about how I had compiled the dictionary, how it was arranged, what was included and how the transcription system worked. I answered to the best of my ability.

The upshot of this interrogation was excellent. The acuity of his questioning and his understanding of the lexicographical and other problems involved gave me great confidence in him, and presumably the quality of my answers gave him confidence in me. His booklet duly appeared accompanying the version of LPD sold in Japan.

Issue 41 of Lexicon, the journal published in Tokyo by the Iwasaki Linguistic Circle, is dedicated to his memory. There is also an article about him in the Japanese Wikipedia.

warming up

2011-09-06T08:26:00.014+01:00

Another September, another season for the choir I sing in, another series of weekly rehearsals.

We have just appointed a new Deputy Musical Director. His first duty was to conduct the warm-up with which we start each session. (I’m not clear why or how warm-ups help you sing better, but actors and singers all seem to believe in them. I can see that at least they fulfil the social function of getting everyone — about 160 people at last night's rehearsal — to start focussing on a joint activity carried out together.)

The DMD surprised us by choosing for the very first exercise a “fully rolled r” (a voiced alveolar trill). “If you can’t roll an r properly, do a lip roll instead.” (That is, ʙ.)He continued to get us to work on non-English sounds or sequences. The next exercise went ŋiː ŋiː ŋiː ŋiː ŋiː.

Then it was an easier mɑː mɑː mɑː mɑː mɑː. Intriguingly, he described ɑː as a ‘bright’ vowel. (I’d have thought it was comparatively dark, but then I’m no synaesthete; and perhaps he was referring to the voice quality he wanted rather than to vowel quality.)

And so it went on, with the tongue twister red ’n’ yellow lorry, red ’n’ yellow lorry, red ’n’ yellow lorry, red ’n’ yellow lorry… and then finally bumblebee, bumblebee, all on increasingly complicated practice riffs up and down a succession of scales.

Fortunately he did not give us too much of the pseudo-anatomical articulatory nonsense we often got from his predecessor. Nevertheless, when calling for hard attack to initial vowels in the lyrics of one song he did mention that he needed a ‘glottal’ (i.e. a glottal plosive, a glottal STOP, ʔ), which he described as being ‘when the vocal cords are coming together very quickly’. H’m.

Checking vocal warmup techniques on the web, I find plenty more of the same sort of thing. Perhaps you are better able than I am to understand what might be meant here (under Tongue Trills) by

The d is what will give you connection from chest to head voice. The d tends to hold your vocal cords together through your bridge….

Does anyone seriously believe that an alveolar plosive could “hold your vocal cords together”? Why do they say such things?

than

2011-09-05T08:35:00.017+01:00

Look at this headline from Saturday’s on-line Liverpool Echo. Can you see anything wrong?
Yes, then ought to be than.

I was quite surprised the first time I came across this misspelling, which was a few years ago. But the explosion of material published on the internet without the attention of a copy editor (and sometimes even with such attention, as presumably here, the Echo being a reputable newspaper) has made me realize how very widespread it is. (Since there is also a perfectly good word then, it would not be trapped by a simple spellchecker.)

There are plenty of other examples to be found on the web.

And yet I don’t think people commonly misspell ran as (w)ren, or tan as ten. In all core native accents of English the words of the TRAP set are consistently distinguished from those of the DRESS set.

So what’s going on?

In speech, the word than is almost always pronounced in its weak form, ðən.

ˈbetə ðən ˈevə
ˈmɔː ðən ju kʊd biˈliːv
ˈmɔː ðən ˈʌðə dʒæbz

It is difficult to envisage a context in which one would want to accent it, thereby triggering the strong form. (I exclude the obvious one of naming the word rather than using it, as in ”How do you spell ‘than’?”.)

The only way to trigger an obligatory strong form in ordinary conversation seems to be by resorting to stranding (blog, 28 May 2008).

A mouse is something that an elephant is bigger than.
The syntax here involves the fronting of a mouse, with the consequence that than is stranded, deprived of the NP it governs. As with prepositions and indeed all other function words, such stranding in English calls for the use of the strong form of the stranded item. The word normally remains unaccented.

I would say
ə ˈmaʊs ɪz sʌmθɪŋ ðət ən ˈelɪfənt ɪz ˈbɪɡə ðæn
I wonder if anyone actually pronounces the strong form as ðen (to rhyme with ten). That is not inconceivable, given the extreme rarity of strong than and therefore the extreme rarity of opportunities for the language-acquiring child to hear how it is pronounced. (After all, the usual ðən might result from the weakening of any of putative ðen, ðæn, ðʌn, ðɑːn, ðɒn — compare the strong and weak forms of them, at, us, are, from.)

You’d think, though, that most children would have been exposed somewhere along the line to such utterances as Who are you bigger than? Who is Mary younger than? Which of your brothers are you older than?

Nine is one fewer ðən ten. Ten is what nine is one fewer ðæn.

vowel colour

2011-09-02T07:59:00.008+01:00

What colour would you say ɛ was? And ɒ?

For many of us those questions may seem pretty fatuous. We’re used to the metaphorical use of the term “vowel colour” as a synonym of “vowel quality”: something to be described in terms of front/back, close/open (or high/low), and rounded/unrounded. But actual hues? Is this vowel pink, that one green? Meaningless questions, surely.

Not for everyone. Some people exhibit a neurological condition known as synaesthesia. For them, numbers or letters or days of the week are characterized by different hues. Read about it here.

(It’s not the same as phonaesthesia, which is to do with sound symbolism. Though I suppose the two are related.)

If there are synaesthetes who think that particular letters have particular colours (and apparently there are), what about speech sounds? Are they coloured, too? That’s the subject of a piece of research currently being carried out by Rob Drummond of Manchester Metropolitan University.

Anyone can take part in this research, even if they have never thought of speech sounds as being coloured. Just go to www.vowelcolours.org or visit the dedicated page on Facebook, and volunteer as a subject to answer an online questionnaire.

…we need as many people as possible to help us by completing a task online. Anyone at all can take part, as long as you are able to hear sounds on the computer you are using. The task itself is extremely straightforward and will take no longer than 10-15 minutes to complete.

Rob asks me to invite all my readers to take part, whether native speakers of English or not. So how about it?

ICPhS

2011-09-01T07:56:00.016+01:00

I greatly enjoyed the ICPhS XVII in Hong Kong last month. There were over seven hundred participants from all over the world. It was good to see so many colleagues again, and to listen to some excellent oral and poster presentations. I enjoyed the conference all the more perhaps in that I hadn’t offered a paper myself and so didn’t have to worry about performing.

There was an unexpectedly interesting opening plenary by Klaus Kohler, demonstrating among other things that German listeners needed no more than the palatalization of a single segment n to hear kann Ihnen rather than just kann, deeply buried in the middle of a rapidly spoken colloquial sentence.

Some assorted nuggets of interest:
• In the Berber language Tashlhiyt many words are vowelless, for example kk ‘cross’. Geminate consonants contrast with single ones even in word-initial (and utterance-initial) position, e.g. ttut ‘forget him’ vs. tut ‘she hit’.
• In Iraqi Arabic the voiceless ‘pharyngeal fricative’ ħ and its voiced counterpart the ‘ayn ʕ can actually be aryepiglottic trills, according to John Esling — who proposes to write them ʜ and ʢ respectively. If I understood him correctly, he also claims that the ‘glottal’ stop is actually epilaryngeal. My knowledge of anatomy is not sufficient to enable me to judge these claims.
• In the Wu Chinese of Qingtian there is a tonal depression feature reminiscent of that of Zulu. The triggering consonants are, however, now voiceless.
• In the Chinese of Qiyang there are complex contour tones that don’t fit the usual tone templates. They are high and low fall-rise-fall tones. On a five-point scale, where 5 is the highest, their pitch patterns are 4232 and 2142.
• The Swedish accent 2 (tone 2) is the marked one: it takes longer to process than does accent 1.
• Everyone now seems to call the intonation nucleus or tonic the focus. Well yes: but as I see it the nuclear syllable actually marks only the word at the end of the whole focus domain. Anyhow, among laboratory phoneticians the trendy term for the low, more or less level, pitch of the tail in intonation is now ‘post-focus compression’.
• In some Australian English el has become æl, making celery a homophone of salary and hell a homophone of Hal.

A keen young researcher reported her rediscovery of the wheel by revealing to us that the Polish affricate spelt cz is somewhat different from the Czech one spelt č, the first being retroflex and the second merely postalveolar. I’ve been teaching this for forty years and more, in the context of the range of ʃ-like sounds we can make and how they vary from one language to another. (Compare both the Polish and Czech sounds with the ch ち of Japanese.) No doubt my predecessors taught it for forty or more years before that. We’ve even covered it in this blog: see the sound file posted in the blog entry for 3 March 2008. Notwithstanding, the researcher portentously declared that in her paper “I revise the affricate inventories of Polish and Czech… This conclusion is supported by the results of an acoustic study of Polish and Czech affricates”. It’s also supported by the ear of any halfway decent practical phonetician.

The next ICPhS, in four years’ time, will be in Glasgow, 10-14 August 2015. You read it here first.

allegedly aged

2011-07-29T09:13:00.017+01:00

How do you pronounce aged?

It depends on where it stands in the sentence. If it is used attributively, before a noun, meaning ‘(very) old’, then it has two syllables, ˈeɪdʒɪd (or, for some, ˈeɪdʒəd). This is what you say in an aged woman or my aged parents. It is also the pronunciation we use in, for example, care of the aged, where you could argue that it is used attributively before a deleted (understood) noun people.

But when it is used predicatively, meaning ‘having a specific age’, then it is pronounced as a monosyllable, eɪdʒd. This is what you say in children aged 5 or over or a man aged between 30 and 35.

There are one or two other -ed words that vary in the same fashion, notably blessed. Attributively, disyllabic: a moment of blessed silence; where’s my blessed notebook? Predicatively, monosyllabic: we’re both blessed with good health; the couple had their marriage blessed (by the vicar). Against this rule, however, in the hymn Our blessed redeemer, ere he breathed | his tender last farewell the word has to be pronounced as a monosyllable despite being attributive.

There’s also accursed, which for me is always əˈkɜːsɪd. But others always say əˈkɜːst. Others again may vary as with aged and blessed. In modern English, though, the word is really only used attributively: we say all this accursed mud, but not ^?all this mud is accursed.

As we all know, there are a few adjectives in -ed in which the ending is irregularly pronounced as a separate syllable, i.e. against the rule that this pronunciation belongs only after stems ending in t or d. Examples are crooked, learned, naked, rugged, wicked, wretched, all disyllabic. (But as verb forms, crooked and learned are monosyllabic: she crooked krʊkt her finger, he learned lɜːnd what had happened.)

Derived forms in -edly and -edness seem mostly to have the syllabic pronunciation. So markedly and markedness have three syllables each, while supposedly and allegedly have four. But there are also those that have a nonsyllabic ed: determinedly, ill-favouredness, good-naturedness. I think shamefacedly can go either way.

I heard Judge Judy on television speaking of someone’s əˈledʒɪd crime. But I think we normally say əˈledʒd, and that her pronunciation (possibly a one-off slip) was a back-formation from allegedly. So when she said your alleged striking of the defendant with trisyllabic alleged she was thinking of the underlying unnominalized you allegedly struck the defendant.
_ _ _

This blog will be suspended for the month of August. During this time I may possibly see some of you face-to-face at the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics in London or at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Hong Kong.

Next posting: 1 September.

Unicode 6.0

2011-07-28T09:48:00.014+01:00

Phonetic-symbol anoraks/nerds/geeks can have hours of fun browsing the Unicode Standard, the repository of all the characters that can be displayed on a modern computer screen (blog, 22 Jan 2007). If you haven’t got the book (which is hefty), browse online.

Now there’s a new version of the Standard, 6.0 (well, it came out last October, actually). Unlike previous versions, it has not been published as a printed book, but is available only online.

So what’s new in version 6.0? In brief: there are 2,088 new characters, including (I quote)
• over 1,000 additional symbols—chief among them the additional emoji symbols, which are especially important for mobile phones
• the new official Indian currency symbol: the Indian Rupee Sign
• 222 additional CJK Unified Ideographs in common use in China, Taiwan, and Japan
• 603 additional characters for African language support, including extensions to the Tifinagh, Ethiopic, and Bamum scripts
• three additional scripts: Mandaic, Batak, and Brahmi

There are also extensive technical changes to do with character properties and format specifications.

Two new Cyrillic characters cater for Azerbaijani. Two new Arabic characters and ten new Devanagari characters cater for Kashmiri. Thirty-two new Ethiopic characters cater for Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, Basketo, and Gumuz. Complete new blocks of letters cater for Mandaic, for Batak, and for Brāhmī.

Is there anything of particular interest to phoneticians and IPA users?

How about a symbol for a voiceless retroflex lateral fricative? A sort of combination of ɬ and ɭ? It’s not (yet) an official IPA symbol, but it’s a logical combination of two. Here it is, U+A78E. (Unicode numbers are given in hexadecimal and prefixed with the identifier U+.)
If you’ve always wanted a COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE BELOW, it’s now available. But unless you’re a Uralic Phonetic Alphabet aficionado, you’ll have managed without. Do you have a use for subscript _{h k l m n p s t}? I doubt it. Even if you do, you’d probably simply use the subscripting tag <sub> </sub>, as I have just done. In Unicode 6.0 they’re ready-made at U+2095 to U+209C.

Students of the minority languages of China may welcome three new Bopomofo characters to cater for Hmu and Ge. (Bopomofo is a phonetic notation system based on Chinese characters.)

It’s one thing to have a symbol recognized in Unicode and assigned a U+ number. It’s something else for the new symbol to become available in an available font. We’ll just have to wait and see if and when these new characters make an appearance in documents on our display screens.

Don’t hold your breath.

our cake

2011-07-27T09:05:00.010+01:00

As we were chatting at a summer party last weekend, someone brought up the possible minimal pair archaic vs our cake. We were trying to think of a context in which there might be a plausible confusion between the two. Finally someone came up with a scenario involving two daughters visiting their elderly mother. They brought with them a cake as a gift, which their mother promptly stored in a tin. But she had numerous cake tins, all looking much the same, and tended to accumulate old cakes or pieces of cake and keep them in the tins for months. When it’s time for tea, one of the daughters looks at all the cake tins, picks one, and asks her mother “Is this one archaic/our cake?”

Non-native speakers may be surprised that this is even considered a minimal pair. Surely aʊə ˈkeɪk is rather different from ɑːˈkeɪɪk. Well, yes, if that’s what you say. But if you are one of the many NSs who pronounce our as ɑː(r) (rather than as aʊə(r)), then the difference is only a matter of the vocalic material between the two velar plosives, keɪk vs keɪɪk, which comes down to a subtle question of timing.

There are two reasons why our might be monophthongal ɑː(r). It might be through the operation of the optional process of smoothing, which deletes the second part of the diphthong aʊ when followed by another vowel [and, I should have added, compression, which makes two syllables one]. This is what gives us RP pɑː power, ˈɡɑː striːt Gower St, etc. (The quality of the resultant monophthong may or may not be identical to that of the ordinary ɑː of START words.)

But it might also be simply that ɑː is the default pronunciation of our. Not everyone has our as a homophone of hour. That is true for me, and for an unknown number of other NSs. The two words make a possible minimal pair, ɑː our vs ˈaʊə hour. And ɑː is not just a weak form: it’s the strong form too. (I ought to do a preference survey for this.)

When I was taught the Lord’s prayer as a child, it began ˈɑː ˈfɑːðə, hu ˈɑːt ɪn ˈhevn̩.

I might ask you “Did your bus come on time? We had to wait for ˈa(ʊ)əz for ˈɑːz.”

I don’t think there are many NNSs who pronounce our, ours as ɑː(r), ɑː(r)z. On the other hand there may well even be a majority of NSs who do. No one knows.

Kenyon & Knott included ɑr as a possibility for AmE as long ago as 1953 (possibly even in 1944 — I haven’t got the first edition to hand). For BrE priority goes, I think, to Jack Windsor Lewis, in whose Concise Pronouncing Dictionary (1972) ɑː is included just as a weak form.

When still edited by Daniel Jones, EPD did not recognize the ɑː variant. It was only when Gimson and Ramsaran took over that it was acknowledged as a possibility. Now the OED, too, has caught up.

hearing plosives

2011-07-26T09:14:00.010+01:00

It’s an old truism of acoustic phonetics that you can’t hear the hold stage of a voiceless plosive (as such).

What you get in the middle of a word such as happy ˈhæpi or lucky ˈlʌki is a short period of silence, as the airstream is for a moment prevented from moving through the vocal tract and out of the body. No air movement means no sound.

How, then, can we identify the place of articulation? How do we know that in the first word we have a bilabial p but in the second a velar k?

We know because of the formant transitions created as the organs of speech move into place for the complete closure (the ‘approach’ phase) and then again as they separate (the ‘release’ phase). You identify the p in happy through its effect on the end of the æ and on the beginning of the i. You identify the k in lucky by what you hear in the course of the ʌ and the i.

In the case of a fully voiced plosive, all you can hear during the hold phase is voicing. Again, you identify the place of articulation through the information contained in the formant transitions before and after, i.e. in the approach and the release. That’s how you know that abbey has a b, ladder a d, and lagging a g.

Let’s get back to the plosive clusters we were discussing on Friday apropos of Gdynia. In an English word such as acting ˈæktɪŋ we normally have the same ‘masking’ phenomenon we observed for the voiced plosives in hugged and Ogden.

In the English kt or gd the plosives typically overlap, in that we make the approach for the second plosive before releasing the first. The sequence of events is velar approach – velar hold – alveolar approach (inaudible, because the velar hold is maintained) – double hold (velar and alveolar) – velar release (inaudible, because the alveolar hold is maintained) – alveolar hold – alveolar release. The only audible phases are the velar approach and the alveolar release. In these the formant transitions supply the clues to the places of articulation.

To identify the place of a plosive it is sufficient to hear either the approach or the release. You do not need both. That is how we can tell that the word is ˈæktɪŋ rather than, say, ˈæptɪŋ or ˈætkɪŋ or ˈættɪŋ.

My impression from my first visit to Poland was, then, that for Polish gd- the two plosives did not overlap in the English way. Rather, the sequence of events was straightforwardly velar approach – velar hold – velar release – dental approach – dental hold – dental release. Rather than taking place during the velar hold, the dental approach was delayed until after the velar release. The tiny transitional nonsyllabic schwa between the plosives is created in the tiny interval of time between the two articulatory gestures, velar and dental.

We can leave the native speakers of Polish to debate whether this non-overlapping is usual, as I supposed, or only found in careful or overenunciated pronunciation, as some seem to claim. My impression is that if we compare English actor with Polish aktor it is typical for the English plosives to overlap but for the Polish ones not to. Similarly with the name Magda.

In strongly Japanese-accented English, on the other hand, a word such as actor tends to have a greater interval between the release of the k and the approach of the t. This space might be identified as a Japanese voiceless ɯ̥ (thus “ アクター”). Typically, it seems to be much longer than the momentary mini-voiceless-schwa of the Polish kt. It reflects the Japanese mora-based timing in which equal time is allotted to each of a, k(u), ta, a.

nuh-nuh (3)

2011-07-25T08:52:00.010+01:00

In response to the postings about the taunting tune there has been no one from China, Japan or Korea who acknowledges it as a tune used by children in those countries in the way it is used in Europe. Bernstein claimed it was universal, found in all cultures; but perhaps he was wrong.

From Japan, Masaki Taniguchi writes

I have been thinking about the teasing melody for a week. I have traced my memory of childhood. Now I clearly remember a teasing melody that my friends and I used to use in the early 1960's, which went |so so mi mi | so mi mi |. I also remember two versions of lyrics to go with this melody…
I have just contacted my childhood friend who used to live in the same town in Nagasaki Prefecture. He says that he vaguely remembers such a melody. He also says that today bullying is considered very inhumane and probably such a song has disappeared.
Nobody else that I have asked knows or remembers such a melody. I have asked a professor of music, and he recommended another who, he said, would be knowledgeable in such matters. I asked her, but she said she knew nothing of the sort, except for /ja:i ja:i/ (pitch: HL HL). This, I am sure, is known to all Japanese. It is certainly used for teasing.
I have also conducted a small survey. In a class with 12 students, I sang the melody you introduced in your blog, using the sounds used there, and told them that it was used among English children. I asked them what kind of impression they perceived and what kind of feeling they thought children would mean to express. Out of the 12, seven said it sounded "lively", four said, "teasing", and one said it sounded like a "lullaby". After that, I showed them your blog and we discussed it.

I think this negative evidence is important, because it tends to show that the claim of universality is false.

Meanwhile, from England, Jill House confirms that the phenomenon is extensively discussed in Mark Liberman’s 1978 dissertation ‘The intonational system of English’ (Indiana University Linguistics Club). She also points out that the tune underlies not only ‘Bye baby bunting’ but also the song for the children’s game ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’. That’s true for the version I sang as a child, but — as Wikipedia reveals — there are or were other variants of the tune which differ.
Anyhow, thanks to all correspondents.

Gdynia unmasked

2011-07-22T09:07:00.010+01:00

I was in my teens when I first became aware of places in Poland called Gdynia and Gdańsk. I remember wondering how they could be pronounced without omitting the initial g. The nearest thing in English seemed to be the ɡəd- sequence in Lady Godiva ɡəˈdaɪvə and Godolphin (nowadays we have another example in Gaddafi), but I knew that wasn’t right. Yet as an initial cluster gd- seemed impossible to pronounce.

Then I realized that English does have the articulatory sequence gd, but in final position. We get it in the past tense of verbs ending in g, thus for example bagged bægd, hugged hʌgd. We get it medially, too, in Ogden ˈɒɡdən. All I needed to do was to transfer this gd to syllable-initial position.

That still seemed very difficult to do. The reason (I know now) is that in English we normally pronounce these plosive sequences as overlapping articulatory gestures. You can’t hear the release of the g in hugged, or for that matter in Ogden, because it is ‘masked’ by the concurrent hold phase of the d. What you hear is a velar approach, a long hold, and an alveolar release (if you’re lucky). And we don’t ever have this sort of thing at the beginning of a syllable.

It wasn’t until I first visited Poland, when I was twenty, that I discovered that in Polish the initial plosives in Gdańsk ɡdaj̃sk and Gdynia ˈɡdɨɲa are not like the English gd in hugged. Rather, when my Polish friends demonstrated the pronunciation to me, they released the velar plosive BEFORE completing the approach for the dental. This inevitably gave rise to a tiny transitional vocoid between the two hold phases, but it was not long enough to count as a separate schwa segment (compare the definite schwa in English Godiva).

If you can play .ogg sound files, Wikipedia has one of Gdynia here.

Despite my A level in Greek, somehow I’d failed to realize that classical Greek has an exactly parallel, but voiceless, cluster in words such as κτείς kteís ‘comb’ and κτίσις ktísis ‘foundation’. (What we did to pronounce those words in the Classical Sixth I can no longer remember.)

The stem of κτείς is κτεν- kten-, and from this is derived the modern zoological Latin name Ctenophora, the phylum of marine animals also known as ‘comb jellies’. In English we abandon any attempt at the initial plosive cluster, and pronounce them simply as tɪˈnɒfərə.

Modern Greek has dissimilated the plosive sequence, making the first element fricative. The modern word for ‘comb’ is χτένι ˈxteni.

So there are two attested escape routes: deletion or dissimilation.

But the Poles succumb to neither of these tempting articulatory simplifications, and persist with a sequence of plosives. Unmasked.

Selous

2011-07-21T09:07:00.006+01:00

Watching the goings-on in the House of Commons yesterday, I was reminded of another unusual British surname with a pronunciation over which you might hesitate if you came across it in writing. Andrew Selous is the MP for Southwest Bedfordshire, and when the Speaker called on him by name we heard it spoken: səˈluː.

Older readers will recall the Selous Scouts, the special forces of the Rhodesian Army. Nowadays there is a Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. Both are named after Frederick Selous (1851-1917), a British explorer and big-game hunter.

The Oxford Names Companion suggests that this surname is English and ‘of uncertain origin, perhaps a habitation name from an unidentified place named with the OE elements s(e)alh willow + hūs house’. I would have thought that a name with that etymology would be more likely to be pronounced ˈseləs (cf. Backus from bǣc ‘bake’ + hūs , Malthus from mealt ‘malt’ + hūs ) — which it isn’t.

But maybe that etymology is not correct. Wikipedia states here that Selous is the Anglicized form of the Dutch name Slous. If that were the case, I would expect it to have been pronounced in Dutch as slɔus, which might give English slaʊs. Wrong again.

Very much more plausibly, Wikipedia tells us in its article on the big game hunter that the name was originally French.

Frederick Courteney Selous was born on 31 December 1851 at Regents Park, London, as one of the five children of an aristocratic family, third generation of French-Huguenot heritage. His father, Frederick Lokes Slous (original spelling) (1802–1892), was notably Chairman of the London Stock Exchange.

As a French name, Slous would be expected to be pronounced slu. Equally, the spelling Selous implies səlu. And French schwa is a very variable entity: cela can be sla or səla. This origin would satisfactorily account for the English pronunciation səˈluː.

a gay accent?

2011-07-20T09:14:00.009+01:00

The current issue of the online Economist has a piece entitled “Gay pitch, vowels… and lisp?”. (Thanks, Jo-Anne Ferreira, for the alert.) It seems to be based wholly on this piece in Dialectblog, which in turn reports on a recent journal article (Podesva, Robert J (2011). The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity. American Speech, 86.1, 32-49.).

The question is, is there such a thing as a “gay accent”? Quite rightly, the author begins with a disclaimer.

…before going further, let me state that I believe gay men speak with as wide an array of voices as heterosexual men. I don’t give credence to the idea of a universal “gay voice.”

I would add from my own experience that not only do most gay men not speak in a way that indicates their sexual orientation, but that some men who do “sound gay” are — as far as one can tell — heterosexual. (We could perhaps agree that a good example of this would be the BBC television performer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.)

Neither article mentions women’s voices. There is the equal question, whether there exists a recognizable “lesbian accent”. If there is, then similar reservations would apply.

It appears that Podesva’s article is based on the speech of a single gay man living in San Francisco. It turns out that the whole Spring 2011 issue of American Speech is devoted to “Sociophonetics and Sexuality”. So one would hope that it contains further relevant research based on the speech of more than one single individual. Unfortunately the UCL Library has discontinued its subscription to the journal, so I have not yet read this issue.

Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. As Podesva’s informant’s speech shifts from the formal to the informal end of the formality scale, it is claimed that his accent becomes more “Californian”. This is supposed to involve a number of related vowel changes. Chatting with friends, the subject

exhibits three markers of California English in this latter situation: the word “bad” is pronounced with a vowel closer to the vowel in “bod,” and the vowels in “boot” and “boat” are both pronounced fronter.

An opener TRAP vowel? Fronted GOOSE and GOAT? Does that remind you of anything? Yes, these are characteristic features of British English as compared to American.

Thirty years ago, in Accents of English (CUP 1982, p. 21-22), I wrote

…it is of interest to ask what speech characteristics are perceived as effeminate or mannish, respectively. I suspect that many of them are prosodic matters — intonation, pitch range, rhythm, tempo. […] Many gay men can certainly switch ‘camp’ voice quality and vocal mannerisms on and off at will.

— to which I would now add “and so can many people who are not gay”.

After further discussion, I continued

…it may frequently happen that a pronunciation which would be entirely usual in one locality may sound effeminate in another. This appears to be the case, for example, with the use of a voiceless intervocalic [t] in words such as better, party — normal in England, but in America widely perceived as unmasculine. The same applies, I suspect, to the use of [ɑː] in BATH words.

To which we evidently may be able to add the qualities of TRAP, GOOSE, and GOAT.

If Americans perceive a British accent as sounding gay, do we Brits perceive an American accent as sounding butch?

On the other hand, what about a northern Ireland accent? Voiced intervocalic /t/, back GOAT, harsh voice quality (all = butch), but even opener (and backer) TRAP and even fronter GOOSE (= camp). How confusing.

I think there’s a lot more to it than this.

Leveson

2011-07-19T09:00:00.011+01:00

Most readers will be aware that the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has appointed Lord Justice Leveson to oversee a public inquiry into phone hacking and media regulation. Sir Brian Henry Leveson QC is also known as Lord Leveson. His surname is one of those tricky British names not necessarily pronounced in the way the spelling would lead you to expect.

According to the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1990), the Christian name (forename) Leveson is ˈluːs(ə)n, and the surname Leveson-Gower, the family name of the Earls of Granville, is ˈluːs(ə)n ˈɡɔː(r).

I suspect that as a forename Leveson is now obsolete, and I don't believe there is any Leveson-Gower now active in British public life, though several members of the family were active in politics in former centuries. Furthermore, Sir H.D.G. Leveson-Gower was a well-known cricketer, captaining the English test side in 1909/10. His brother Frederick was also a county cricketer, and in 1895 played for the Gentlemen of England against Oxford and Cambridge. (Oh, long-lost era of gentleman amateurs!)

At one end stocky Jessop frowned,
The human catapult
Who wrecks the roofs of distant towns
When set in his assault.
His mate was that perplexing man
We know as "Looshun-Gore",
It isn’t spelt at all that way,
We don’t know what it’s for.
But as with Cholmondeley and St. John
The alphabet is mixed,
And Yankees cannot help but ask -
"Why don't you get it fixed?"

EPD/CPD confirms ˈluːs(ə)n in Leveson-Gower, but does not tell us anything about a forename. It does, however, say that the simple surname Leveson is ˈlevɪs(ə)n.

Back to Sir Brian. He does not appear to be related to the Leveson-Gowers. The BBC Pronunciation Unit tell me that some fifteen years ago his office gave the pronunciation of his name as ˈlevəsən, which we can take as a minor variant of ˈlevɪs(ə)n. Jo Kim tells me “I checked this again with the Sentencing Council press office today (Lord Justice Leveson is the Chairman) and they confirmed that ˈlevəsən reflects his own pronunciation“. (Thanks, Jo.)

That didn’t stop the Home Secretary, Theresa May, referring to him as Lord ˈliːvɪsən in the House of Commons yesterday.

nuh-nuh (2)

2011-07-18T09:04:00.012+01:00

Friday’s blog garnered a very welcome wealth of comments. It appears that this defiant/mocking/taunting tune is indeed, if not universal, then at least very widespread. It seems to be found in all European languages (and their worldwide offshoots), though for example no one has yet reported it here for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or any other non-European language.

How did I come to overlook the obviously related tune of Bye baby bunting? (Though the tune given in Wikipedia starts off with a narrower interval than the minor third we were discussing.)

I thought the most thought-provoking comment was one by MKR.

"Research seems to indicate that this exact constellation of two notes [viz., a falling minor third] (and its three-note variant) is the same all over the world, wherever children tease each other, on every continent and in every culture" (Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, lecture 1, "Musical Phonology"; starting at 27:00 in this video). Bernstein returns to the example in lecture 3, "The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity" (at 08:45 in this video), where he attributes the prevalence of the pattern to its tonal ambiguity.

I watched the first hour of the first Bernstein lecture.

It seems to me that Bernstein’s discussion leading up to 27:00 involves some rather amateurish linguistics. The universals m and ɑ are not ‘phonemes’ found in all languages: rather, they are sound-types or phonetic segments that are supposedly universal.

Actually, though, and contrary to Bernstein’s claim, WALS reports thirteen languages with no nasals in their consonant inventory. (Some of these, it is true, may make use of m as a positional variant of some consonant that is otherwise not nasal.)

A total of 13 languages in the sample are listed as having no nasals in their consonant inventories. Some of these languages, such as Quileute (Chimakuan; Washington State), Rotokas (West Bougainville; Papua New Guinea) and Pirahã (Mura; Brazil), make no systematic use of nasality in their sound system at all; the last two have especially small phoneme inventories overall. The majority of these languages, however, do make use of nasality, but it patterns in such a way that simple nasal consonants do not need to be considered contrastive segments.

The Quileute language “is famous for its lack of nasal sounds, such as [m]”.

In Central Rotokas, we read,“nasals are rarely heard except when a native speaker is trying to imitate a foreigner’s attempt to speak Rotokas. In this case the nasals are used in the mimicry whether they were pronounced by the foreign speaker or not”.

In Pirahã, while there are no nasal phonemes, /b/, i.e. the consonant that is distinctively voiced and labial, is realized as [m] after a pause.

So Bernstein seems to be wrong about m, at least for Quileute and Central Rotokas. Likewise I am left wondering what evidence there is that, as he claims, “this exact constellation of two notes [viz., a falling minor third] (and its three-note variant) is the same all over the world, wherever children tease each other, on every continent and in every culture”.

It’s certainly a widespread, but is it a universal?

nuh-nuh

2011-07-15T08:29:00.014+01:00

Children in England have a paralinguistic way of crowing ‘you can’t catch me’ and showing defiance or provocation. It is to sing ˈnɜːˈnɜːnəˈnɜːˈnɜː to this tune. (Midi sound clip here.)

The vowel may also be rather opener, ranging over nʌ or nɑː.

I don’t know of any established way of spelling this interjection, but nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh or na-na-na-na-na would perhaps do.

I have never seen any discussion of this item in the literature of paralanguage (but perhaps a reader knows better).

It was in my active repertoire when I was a child and — as far as I know — children in England still use it today. Is it also to be heard in other parts of the UK? And in north America and elsewhere? Is it international? Do French children and Japanese children do the same thing?

I raise this issue to celebrate my having at last learnt how to produce musical notation at will for the computer screen. (Some of you may have been familiar with this method for ages, but it is new to me.) The ABC system makes it very easy to write down the score you want. My source file for the above read simply

X:1	reference number
L:1/16	unit note length
K:C	key
G3 E2A G3 E3	tune body

Then free software converts it into standard musical notation and generates a sound clip. (I used the convenient facility on the concertina.net website.)

quasi-

2011-07-14T09:19:00.012+01:00

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday about setting up an official inquiry into the phone hacking scandal, the Prime Minister David Cameron mentioned that the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, would have a ‘quasi-judicial’ role in the matter of the attempt by News International, now withdrawn, to purchase the shares of BSkyB that it does not already own.

Downing Street has said the government, with the exception of Mr Hunt who has a quasi-judicial role in the final decision, will back the motion. The prime minister's spokesman said the motion essentially reflected what Mr Cameron had said on Monday.

He pronounced the prefix quasi- as ˈkwɑːzaɪ.

This pronunciation, while by no means unusual, is interesting in that it combines in the same morpheme two different ways of treating Latin words taken into English.

One is to follow the usual English reading rules (spelling-to-sound rules), which treat long vowels as having undergone the Great Vowel Shift. This is what is done for Latin words that are well integrated into English. Thus we have for example creator and major with -eɪ-, and aquarium with -eə- deriving from an earlier -eɪ-. Likewise, we have for example appendicitis and minor with -aɪ-.

The other is to give the long vowels ‘continental’ values, rendering Latin ā as ɑː and ī as iː. This is what we do with words perceived as being less thoroughly integrated. We usually pronounce errata with -ɑː- nowadays, though that was not always the case. Similarly, in vivo usually has -iː-. (But viva meaning ‘oral exam’ is ˈvaɪvə.)

The word quasi ‘as if, as it were’ actually has short vowels in Latin, quăsĭ. Latin stressed short ă is normally mapped onto English æ, eg aquifer, per capita, so this prefix ought to be ˈkwæsi. But English speakers are often pretty cavalier with Latin vowel quantities in English, and even those who have studied Latin (such as Mr Cameron, who must have done it at Eton) often get them wrong. If, as is usual, the vowels in this prefix are treated as long, we should get either GV-shifted ˈkweɪzaɪ or ‘continental’ ˈkwɑːsi(ː). Dave’s ˈkwɑːzaɪ is a combination of the two.

Given the further uncertainty over whether or not to voice the intervocalic s — is it s or z? — we end up with quite a combinatorial explosion of possibilities for this humble prefix.

antipodeans

2011-07-13T08:29:00.009+01:00

Steve Bell seems to be confusing an Australian accent with a New Zealand one.

Here, in yesterday’s Guardian cartoon, the Australian Rupert Murdoch is ordering his tame policeman to arrest the Queen. His accent is caricatured by jocular respelling.

While both Australians and New Zealanders — but particularly the latter — can give the rest of us the impression that they are pronouncing DRESS words with the KIT vowel (Rebekah → Ribikah) and TRAP words with the DRESS vowel (shag → sheg), it is only New Zealanders whose KIT vowel is so centralized as to lead us to perceive it as the STRUT vowel. Australians, on the other hand, make it closer and fronter than in many other accents, nearer to [i].

That is the easy way to tell Aussies and Kiwis apart. Get them to say fish and chips. The ones who seem to say “fush and chups” are the Kiwis.

But in Steve Bell’s cartoon Murdoch is represented as pronouncing the Windsor bitch as “the Wundsor Buttch”. Since Murdoch is an Aussie, it would have been better shown as “the Weendsor Beetch” (though of course that too is an exaggeration).

The last respelling, throne as “thrine”, is an interesting attempt to reflect the characteristic Australian GOAT vowel variant in the region of [æ̈ʏ]. (This is the variant that Paul Kerswill observed in Milton Keynes a few years ago, leading to a flurry of media claims about the supposed influence of Australian soaps on British popular accents.)

distributive expletives

2011-07-12T09:51:00.010+01:00

I was watching Judge Judy on TV the other day when she used the familiar expression expletive deleted. She stressed the first syllable of expletive, as I think Americans usually do: ˈeksplət̬ɪv. But in Britain I think we usually stress the second syllable, ɪkˈspliːtɪv, ek-, ək-.

I have no survey data to back up my impression that this is typically a BrE-AmE difference. Perhaps I ought to include it in my next pronunciation preference survey. Dictionaries tend to imply that both stressings are found on both sides of the Atlantic. Here’s the on-line OED:The only other familiar adjectives ending in -etive seem to be secretive and interpretive, which follow the stressing of the stem, ˈsecret or inˈterpret respectively, i.e. are stressed on the antepenultimate. There’s also suppletive, a term probably known only to grammarians, which I think most people on both sides of the Atlantic pronounce with penultimate stress, səˈpliːtɪv (the OED has an improbable sʌ- for the first syllable). This reflects the stress pattern of supˈpletion. However in LPD I do also give a variant with initial stress, though I really don’t know to what extent, if any, it is in use.

Words ending in -ative are notoriously idiosyncratic. The best I could manage in LPD was this.

In words of three syllables, the first receives the stress, and the suffix vowel is weak (ˈfricative, ˈvocative, ˈlaxative, ˈnarrative; exception creˈative). In longer words, the stress usually falls on the same syllable as in the underlying stem: acˈcusative, conˈsultative, preˈservative; ˈoperative, ˈqualitative, agˈglutinative, ˌarguˈmentative; adˈministrative. There is sometimes a vowel change (deˈrive — deˈrivative), and there are several exceptional cases (comˈbine —ˈcombinative, ˈalternate — alˈternative, inˈterrogate —ˌinterˈrogative, ˈdemonstrate — deˈmonstrative). Where the primary stress is on the last syllable of the stem, the suffix has a reduced vowel (ˌinterˈrogative); but otherwise in these longer words (ˈcumulative, ˈlegislative) the choice between weak-vowelled ət ɪv ǁ ət̬ ɪv and strong-vowelled eɪt ɪv ǁ eɪt̬ ɪv depends partly on social or regional factors, with British English RP tending to prefer ət ɪv, American English eɪt̬ ɪv: see individual entries.

Those in -itive, on the other hand, are straightforward. They are stressed on the antepenultimate, eg comˈpetitive, deˈfinitive, proˈhibitive, ˈsensitive, ˈpositive, inˈtuitive. I am tempted to say the same about those in -utive. We can certainly agree on conˈsecutive, eˈxecutive, diˈminutive. I think most people also say conˈstitutive, though there may be some who go for ˈconstitutive following the model of ˈconstitute. What about attributive, contributive, distributive, retributive? I use antepenultimate stress in these, but then I also stress the -trib- in conˈtribute, disˈtribute. I wonder about those many Brits who prefer initial stress in these two words. How many of them carry that over into ˈcontributive, ˈdistributive?

a rud druss?

2011-07-11T08:57:00.010+01:00

In yesterday’s (London) Sunday Times, on the comment page, Rod Liddle had a short piece about a tape allegedly implicating “cuddly, bearded, man of peace” Gerry Adams as boss of a former IRA death squad. The tape is currently in the custody of (‘in the clutches of’) an unnamed Massachusetts university. According to Liddle, the taped interviews were recorded by students, ‘presumably as part of a degree in one thousand years of “Bruddish upprussion”’.

Forget the politics. What’s going on with this jocular respelling? It’s intended, of course, to convey an American accent to a British readership. We all know that Americans voice intervocalic t, making it sound like d, and that their KIT vowel tends to be rather laxer or opener than the BrE mainstream. So “Bruddish” for British is fair enough.

But what about “upprussion” for oppression?

This is the first time that I remember having seen a jocular respelling relating to AmE DRESS.

There’s a complex set of vowel sound changes currently in progress in part of the United States, known as the Northern Cities Shift. It was first sketched out by Labov over thirty years ago. There’s an account written by Labov here, or a simpler one in Wikipedia.
What is happening in places like Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago is that the TRAP vowel is getting tenser and closer (but that’s happening in other places, too). This encroachment on the territory of the DRESS vowel is compensated by the lowering and backing of DRESS. The LOT(-PALM) vowel moves forward to take over some of the space vacated by TRAP.

The consequence is that NCS LOT may sound like other people’s TRAP, while NCS DRESS may sound like other people’s STRUT. Hence Liddle’s respelling upprussion.

lexical set	example	RP etc	other AmE	NCS
LOT	a bottle of Scotch	ə bɒtl̩ əv skɒtʃ	ə bɑdl̩ əv skɑtʃ	ə badl̩ əv skatʃ
DRESS	a red dress	ə red dres	ə rɛd drɛs	ə rɐd drɐs

Welsh respellings

2011-07-08T09:03:00.009+01:00

Christy MacHale wrote

Your recent article on Latvian spelling, together with the observation that Latvian generally insists on respelling loanwords according to its own conventions, set me thinking about the practice of Welsh in this regard, particularly with reference to geographical names. Being a Hispanist and a lover of Welsh, I remember tuning in a couple of decades ago to a series of BBC Cymru programs, about different aspects of the Hispanic world. It featured such spellings as Mecsico and Portiwgal […]

He (or is it she? sorry...) was also particularly dismayed to find karaoke rendered in Welsh as carioci, despite the fact that word-final e is perfectly at home in Welsh (as in bore ‘morning’) though not in English. But the item that most concerned him/her was the name of the Basque country (Gwlad y Basg), Basque Euskadi, rendered as Ewscadi. Even as a reflection of the Spanish or Basque pronunciation this is not accurate: s/he feels it ought to have -addi, reflecting the Iberian -aði pronunciation.

Christy wanted to know who was responsible.
I said

I suppose if anybody can make rulings on this sort of thing, it must be the Welsh Academy (Yr Academi Gymreig), with whose Dictionary (1995) you may be familiar.

Although Christy deplores the fact, it is very clear that loans in modern Welsh regularly come via English (rather than direct from, say, Japanese or Spanish) and that they are then respelt in accordance with Welsh orthographic conventions. Modern Welsh spelling does not use the letters k, q, v, x or z. The spellings complained of are very normal in Welsh.

In the Academy's Dictionary, under words spelt in English with ka-, you'll find Cabwci, cafftan, cacemono, Calahari, caleidosgop, Calefala, camicasi etc.

On the other hand the same dictionary gives Kafkaésg and kalmia, so evidently personal and Linnaean names are treated differently.

Under English Q- we find cwadrîl, cwaga, cwarts, cwasar, Cetshwa, cworum, cwoca. But Quaker is properly cymricized as Crynwr (crynu ‘tremble’).

Christy would be pleased to find that the dictionary also actually gives caraoce rather than carioci. (As readers will know, the Japanese word karaoke カラオケ is formed from kara ‘empty’ plus oke from English orchestra. It is usually pronounced in English as ˌkæriˈəʊki.)

silent final consonants

2011-07-07T08:42:00.004+01:00

Commenting on bombardier yesterday, djbcjk said

I've always said ˌbɒməˈdɪə. I'd no idea that the second b was pronounced, having never heard it actually said.

This reaction is understandable, given that the second b is silent not only in bomb bɒm || bɑːm but also in bombing and bomber. However I suppose we all agree that bombard is bɒmˈbɑːd || bɑːmˈbɑːrd (or possibly bəm-), and bombardier is formed from that rather than directly from bomb.

Historically and etymologically the relationship is like that of climb – clamber, thumb – thimble, crumb – crumble. In modern English most people do not feel the items in these pairs to have an obvious relationship to one another.

Other words spelt with a final silent b include lamb, comb, dumb, plumb, limb, numb, and (generally) jamb and iamb. Again, the b remains silent in inflected forms such as combing, dumbest. This gives us the interesting pair of homographs written number: the one to do with counting, ˈnʌmbə(r), and the comparative of the adjective numb, ˈnʌmə(r).

Interestingly, the handful of words with final mn, in which the n is silent, all have obviously related forms in which there is a pronounced n. Thus we have damn dæm but damnation dæmˈneɪʃn̩, and similarly autumn – autumnal, solemn – solemnity, column – columnist, condemn – condemnation, hymn – hymnal.

Phonologists in the Chomsky-Halle tradition see these stems as ending in a final /b/ or /n/, obligatorily deleted after /m/ unless a vowel follows across no boundary or just an internal boundary. But they would also see a similar relationship in pairs such as sign – signal, (im)pugn – pugn(acious), (con)dign – dignity. Let’s not go there: in my view it’s orthographic, etymological, and pretty obvious to classicists, but is not part of contemporary English phonetics.

Bombardier

2011-07-06T08:23:00.004+01:00

While other branches of the British army have corporals and lance-corporals among their non-commissioned officers, artillery units have bombardiers and lance-bombardiers. As an NCO rank, bombardier is pronounced ˌbɒmbəˈdɪə.

A company called Bombardier is in the news at the moment. They are “Britain’s last train makers”, but have just failed to win a contract to build new trains for Thameslink.

As those of you in the UK may have noticed, the newsreaders use a different pronunciation for the name of the company. They call it bɒmˈbɑːdieɪ or something similar. They are correct to do so.

The reason is that — despite its supposed Britishness and its manufacturing works in Derby — Bombardier Inc. is actually a Canadian conglomerate, named after its founder Joseph-Armand Bombardier, a Québécois. He was the inventor of the snowmobile. In French his name is pronounced bɔ̃baʁdje, so the English name of the company is an anglicized version of this.

women's tennis

2011-07-05T08:30:00.007+01:00

Two correspondents wrote last week complaining about the way commentators for the Wimbledon tennis tournaments were pronouncing Maria Sharapova’s name. As they pointed out, in Russian her surname bears antepenultimate stress: she is Шарапова ʃəˈrapəvə, so in English we ought to call her ʃəˈræpəvə. But we don’t, we call her ˌʃærəˈpəʊvə with penultimate stress.

Dismayed as purists and my correspondents may be, there’s not much we can do about this. I am told that the tennis player herself is quite content to be given penultimate stress in English and to be known as BrE ˌʃærəˈpəʊvə, AmE ˌʃɑrəˈpoʊvə.

There were two other woman tennis players last week the pronunciation of whose names perhaps deserves comment. One is Sabine Lisicki. She is German, born in Troisdorf, although her name must be of Czech (or some other Slavonic) origin. Neither of my German pronunciation dictionaries ɡives the pronunciation of her name. In Czech it would presumably be ˈlisitski. The English commentators called her lɪˈzɪki, lə-.

The other is the new women’s single champion, Petra Kvitova. She is Czech, and in Czech her name is written Kvitová (with the obligatory unstressed feminine ending -ová borne by all Czech females) and pronounced ˈkvitovaː. Our commentators all had a problem with the cluster kv-, which they solved by inserting an anaptyctic schwa, giving kəˈvɪtəvə.

I am not sure why kv- presents such a problem to English speakers. We seem to manage to produce sv- without anaptyxis in Svengali, svelte, Svalbard and, um, svarabhakti. We manage ʃv- in nazi-era mock-German Schweinhund as well as in Schweitzer and Schwarzwald. And kw- is an everyday cluster for us and not so very different from kv-.

denasalized nasals

2011-07-04T08:53:00.019+01:00

Congratulations to Young Shin Kim, who has just successfully defended her doctoral thesis (dissertation) at UCL. It is entitled “An acoustic, aerodynamic and perceptual investigation of word-initial denasalization in Korean”. Here she is with her supervisor, Michael Ashby.
Young Shin had noticed that when she played a recording of a Korean word beginning with m, English listeners often perceived it as beginning with b. She has gone on to demonstrate, in great detail, that in many cases Korean initial “nasals” are indeed pronounced as plosives.

Here’s an example. Listen to the sound clip of 그런데메밀, which “ought” to be kɯɾʌnde memil, taken from the phrase 그런데메밀꽃 kɯɾʌnde memilkkot meaning ‘then buckwheat flowers’. In the second word, compare the two consonants written m. The first, in me-, is, as you can hear, denasalized. It is a fully voiced b. The second, word-medial, in -mil-, is an ordinary nasal. Compare the two consonants on this spectrogram: nasal formant bars for the second, but not for the first.
For her dissertation, Young Shin recorded word-initial nasals from a relatively large number of Korean informants, and carried out listening tests with English and Korean listeners. She also ran auditory and spectrographic tests demonstrating that they are indeed denasalized, often even having plosive-like release bursts. Nevertheless, they “remain somewhat different from [Korean] voiced plosives in the low and high frequency regions”.

On the face of it, this is an improbable phonetic development in Korean, given that the language already has three sets of contrastive plosives. At the bilabial place, for example, there are an aspirated fortis pʰ, an unaspirated fortis p⁼, and a (relatively) unaspirated lenis p, the latter having a voiced allophone in intervocalic position. Not many languages have three contrasting sets of plosives, fewer still four or five.

Young Shin deserves particular praise for having noticed this development when generations of phoneticians working on Korean had failed to do so. An exception, intriguingly enough, was Daniel Jones, who as long ago as 1924 noticed that there was something funny about Korean initial nasals. In the ‘spesimɛn’ of ‘korɪən’ he published in the m.f. that year (p. 14), jointly written with K. Minn, he analysed the initial nasals as mb, nd, commenting as follows. (The restriction to pre-u position, noted by Jones, has not been maintained.) But in the specimen of Korean he published in the Principles of the IPA there is no mention of this, and no one seems to have followed it up — until now.

rodeo

2011-07-01T08:42:00.009+01:00

I wrote this yesterday, but was unable to post it because of problems at blogspot.com.
_ _ _

The newsreader on BBC R4 this morning mentioned that when the newlyweds William and Kate visit Calgary they will attend a ˈrəʊdiəʊ. (That’s the Calgary Stampede, “the greatest outdoor show on earth”.)

My ears pricked up, because I’m aware that in LPD I prioritized a differently stressed version of this word, rəˈdeɪəʊ.

I know that both stressings are possible in English, but I had the impression that — despite our English tendency to go for initial stress (cf video, Romeo, stereo) — the penultimate stress was more correct and therefore to be expected from BBC newsreaders. The reason it was (I thought) considered correct is its origin as a Spanish word, roˈðeo.

Our pronunciation dictionaries give both possibilities, as you would expect. So does the OED. But they prioritize them differently.

	LPD	EPD	ODP and OED
BrE	-ˈdeɪ-	-ˈdeɪ-	ˈrəʊ-
AmE	-ˈdeɪ-	ˈroʊ-	ˈroʊ-

The OED has an interesting note.

The stress of the Spanish word is on the penultimate syllable. In English, pronunciations closely resembling the Spanish pronunciation are frequent in areas of former Spanish settlement in the western United States, especially in California and the southwest. Alongside these, Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (at cited word) records various naturalized pronunciations which show shift of stress to the first syllable (so especially in Midwestern and eastern states) and/or substitution of /i/ for Spanish /e/ or its naturalized equivalent /eɪ/ in the second syllable.

I notice that Romeo similarly has penultimate stress in Italian, roˈmɛːo. ~~And in Latin the word vidēō (‘I see’) has a penultimate long vowel and therefore penultimate stress.~~ But no one dreams of reproducing this penultimate stress in English. These two are anglicized as ˈrəʊmiəʊ, ˈvɪdiəʊ, with the penultimate vowel weakened as you would expect to i.

Ought I to change my priorities for rodeo?

symbolizing palatalization

2011-06-29T09:39:00.010+01:00

Several languages — in Europe, notably Russian and Irish — make important use of the distinction between palatalized and nonpalatalized consonants.

The palatalized ones are traditionally termed ‘soft’ in Russian, ‘slender’ in Irish, while their non-palatalized counterparts (which may also be labialized and/or velarized) are termed ‘hard’ and ‘broad’ respectively.

Published with the m.f. of a hundred years ago (yesterday’s blog) there was an appendix entitled Court exposé de la prononciation russe, by L. Ščerba. It is noteworthy that as early as 1911 this account makes reference to ‘phonemes’ (or rather the same term in French), which I think must be one of the earliest uses of this term in print.

…les sons qui ont une valeur significative (c’est à dire les phonèmes, suivant la terminologie de M. Baudouin de Courtenay)…

In non-IPA phonetic notation there is a tradition among experts of both Slav(on)ic and Celtic of using a postposed acute accent to show palatalization. The IPA, however, has reserved that symbol for other uses and has, over the years, explored other means of showing palatalization.

Ščerba writes the palatalized consonants with a superposed dot.

Suivant la proposition de M. Passy, les consonnes palatalisées sont indiquées par la lettre surmontée d’un point. (On doit remarquer seulement que le signe le plus familier en linguistique pour ces sons est un trait ou une virgule après la lettre et au-dessus de la ligne, par exemple d´, l´ ou d’, l’.)

This convention was formalized in the 1912 edition of The Principles of the International Phonetic Association. Just as retroflex articulation was indicated by a dot beneath, so palatalization was shown by a dot above.

Accordingly Ščerba’s version of the North Wind and the Sun in Russian looks like this (click to enlarge).
You may also be interested to see the orthographic version, which includes the letter ѣ, abolished in 1917, and many instances of the letter ъ which were dropped in the same post-revolution spelling reform. The word for ‘wind’, вѣтеръ in this text, is now written ветер.
By 1917, when Jones and Trofimov completed the manuscript of their Pronunciation of Russian (CUP, 1923), DJ had decided to go instead for a j-shaped hook to show palatalization.

So the word for ‘stronger’ then appeared as ᶊɪᶅˈᶇei.

In the 1949 edition of the Principles Jones also demonstrates a digraphic solution to the question of notating palatalized consonants. However this required complicated conventions regarding the precise extent palatalization in consonant clusters, and in Jones and Ward The phonetics of Russian (CUP, 1969) we again find monographic representation of the palatalized consonants, using the j-shaped hook. This is also shown as an alternative usage for the first two lines of the specimen in the 1949 Principles.
In the pre-computer and early computer eras both superposed dots and attached hooks presented ~~typological~~ typographical problems. This led the IPA at its Kiel Convention (1989) to abandon these earlier notations and to adopt instead the current convention for palatalization, which is a postposed raised j, thus sʲɪlʲˈnʲei .

AmE, 1911

2011-06-28T08:48:00.011+01:00

Here are two scans from the Maître Phonétique, the IPA’s official journal, of a hundred years ago. They are transcriptions of the North Wind and the Sun story, made by E.H. Tuttle, and were published in the issue of the m.f. dated Sep-Oct 1911.

The phonetician Edwin Hotchkiss Tuttle (1879-?) was one of the founder members of the Linguistic Society of America, and a frequent contributor to the m.f..

What makes each of these scans particularly interesting as historical documents is Daniel Jones’s handwritten note alonɡside.

In both extracts the headline, əmerəkən iŋɡlɪʃ, uses different symbols for the first and second vowels of English. I seem to remember that Tuttle was from New England, and that may have been a peculiarity of his speech. (You can click on the images to enlarge them.)

The first extract represents the speech of Baltimore, MD. The pronunciation is shown as nonrhotic! DJ comments in the margin

T. spent 9 mʌnθs hiə

At the time the IPA used an acute accent to show a particularly tense vowel, a grave accent to show a particularly lax one. So the ɔ́ə of north, warm must imply greater initial tensity than for the ɔː of stronger, along, while the ií of agreed and the uú of blew imply greater tensity in the second part of the vowel.

Compare Wikipedia’s account of current Baltimore speech.

The other scan is of southern New England. DJ’s marginal comment reads

T livd in sauθ sentrəl Connecticut fə 28 jəːz

The subscript dots in ḍɪspjuútɪŋ, ṭeɪk, fə̣ːst indicate retroflexion (= modern ɖ, ʈ, ɚ). In the first two cases they represent progressive assimilation following ɹ — a phonetic detail I do not remember having seen discussed anywhere.

I have not previously seen any reference to the possible elision of w from wəz was. Do we still have this in AmE?

The note about “ðə fɔ́ɹm ʃoʊn” refers to shone, the past tense of shine (nowadays BrE ʃɒn, AmE ʃoʊn). Evidently the New Englanders of the time, perhaps embarrassed by the BrE/AmE difference, simply avoided the form.

honorarium

2011-06-27T08:44:00.005+01:00

I was in a committee meeting over the weekend at which — amongst many other topics — we were discussing how much we ought to pay a visiting speaker. What sort of honorarium should we offer? I noticed with interest and surprise that the person who introduced this topic pronounced the word as ˌhɒnəˈreəriəm, with an initial h-sound.

I’ve always myself said this word as ˌɒnəˈreəriəm , without h, just like its congeners hono(u)r, hono(u)rable, honorary, honest etc, and I assumed that that was what everyone said.

But a quick straw poll when we were having coffee afterwards showed that four out of the ten people present said they preferred the pronunciation with h. This variant is not recorded in any dictionary that I know of.

I suppose we can relate it to the fact that h is silent in heir and heiress but not in the etymologically linked inherit, heredity and heritage. Perhaps some speakers do not ‘feel’ the etymological link between honorarium and the other hono(u)r(-) words, so that there is less pressure to treat them all identically.

Added to that there is the understandable tendency to use a spelling pronunciation for any word that may be relatively unfamiliar, or first encountered in writing rather than in speech.