Language Log

This is something I've been waiting for for decades:

"Onomatopoeia Odyssey:  How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025)

Something for everyone

In a comment on "Yair" (2/14/2025), Philip Taylor asserted that he routinely pronounces the orthographic "r" in the typical British filled-pause spelling "er":

« some Americans adopt a mistaken spelling pronunciation, rendering "er" with a final [r] » — well, speaking as a Briton, my "er" pauses, if prolonged, also end with an phoneme, although where exactly in the mouth I produce it I cannot be sure. Certainly it is totally unlike the trilled/r/ with which I might say "Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run run run", but I think that it might be fairly close to the phoneme in my Maigret or Rien de rien.

If Philip actually trills the /r/'s in "Run, rabbit, run", and he's not from Scotland, this is a big dialectological surprise. And it's equally unexpected if he produces something like a French uvular /r/ at the end of his filled pauses. More likely, this is an extreme example of why sociolinguists are skeptical of how people think they talk.

Still, it's worth a bit of time to confirm the OED's r-less assertion (audio) about British filled-pause pronunciation. This would be a big task, overall,  given the wide range of British speech across geographical, social, ethnic, and temporal variables, so I thought I'd start with the Royal family. (And I'll also end there, unless Philip's peculiar perceptions return in another form…)

In response to the initiative for the U,S.  to buy (or otherwise acquire) Greenland from Denmark, some Danes have started a petition to buy California from the U.S.

Have you ever looked at a map and thought, "You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates." Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality.

Let’s buy California from Donald Trump!

Yes, you heard that right.

California could be ours, and we need your help to make it happen.

Heaven forbid!

"When Greece Was About to Swap the Greek Alphabet for Latin", Philip Chrysopoulos, Greek Reporter (1/17/25)

It seems unthinkable.

In the mid 1970s when Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis proposed changing the Greek alphabet to Latin and making the Greek language phonetic, the minister of culture and a Parliament member threatened to resign.

I don't know why anyone would say the Greek alphabet is not phonetic.  In general, its letters correspond to consistent sounds, making pronunciation of its words relatively predictable.  Both in Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, most letters of the alphabet have a stable symbol-to-sound relationship.

The unusual idea of the conservative PM came as a shock to those who learned of his proposal. It was quite unexpected coming from him.

AntC wrote:

In my latest (of many) posts on that redoubtable sinograph, biáng ("Annals of Biang, Vienna edition" [1/3/25]), I posed this question:  "How do we know that this character is to be pronounced in the second tone?"

Chris Button sensibly queried in reply:  "So, something aside from the syllable being a phonotactic violation?"

Later, he elaborated,  "Even if biang (regardless of tone) were allowed in 'standard' Mandarin, the second tone would not be allowed in any case. So we have a double violation of sorts: one on the phonemic level, and one on the tonemic level."  This too is sensibly spoken.

The Xi'an topolect does have the tripthong -iang. (source)

The tones of Xi'an topolect, though four in number, are conspicuously different from those of MSM. (source)

New book in the Cambridge University Press Elements (in Phonetics) series:  The Phonetics of Taiwanese, by Janice Fon and Hui-lu Khoo  (12/11/24):

Grammatically, that is a choice question:  "is it city[-like] (or not)?"  In other words, is whatever is at question sophisticated / modern?  This phrase, which has been chosen by Sixth Tone* (12/17/24) as one of the top ten Chinese buzzwords of 2024 (I will list the other nine in the Appendix) is composed of two identical English loanwords and the most common negative particle in Mandarin.

Before explaining this viral phenomenon further, I will show a video featuring "city不city" to demonstrate that it is real:

The comments on "Hypertonal conlang" (12/8/2024) include a lengthy back-and-forth about where the syllable break should be located in English words like "Cheryl". I was surprised to see that no one brought up the concept of ambisyllabicity, which has been a standard and well-accepted idea in phonology and phonetics for more than 50 years. It continues to be widely referenced in the scholarly literature — Google Scholar lists about 2,170 papers citing the term, and 260  since 2020.

The most influential source is Dan Kahn's 1976 MIT thesis, “Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology”.  There's more to say about the 1970s' introduction into formal phonology of structures beyond phoneme strings (or distinctive feature matrices), but that's a topic for another time.

The PRC uses hànyǔ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ("Sinitic spelling") for phonetic annotation, Taiwan uses zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 ("phonetic symbols") for the same purpose.  Since we are well acquainted with pīnyīn, but not very familiar with zhùyīn fúhào, I will focus on the latter in this post:

Mark Swofford, "If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English", Pinyin News (5/7/23):

Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.

Juliana Kim and Miguel Macias, "Satellite images show the devastation from Spain's deadly floods", NPR 11/2/2024 [emphasis added]:

Satellite images show a devastating transformation of eastern Spain, where catastrophic flash floods have killed more than 200 people and upended entire towns.

NASA Earth Observatory captured the image from its Landsat 8 satellite a day after the historic downpour. It showed parts of the eastern province of Valencia submerged in floodwaters. Meanwhile, the channel of the Turia river and the L'Albufera coastal wetlands were filled with the sentiment-laden deluge.