ELF test? "Geoffrey the subtle salmon"
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Adam Kilgarriff, writing at the Macmillan Dictionary Blog:
An idea that has been provoking widespread interest in applied linguistics circles in the last few years is ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, ELF for short. There are now many circumstances where non-native speakers of English, of different language backgrounds, all accomplished English speakers, work together or do business in English. There are often no native speakers present, and even if there are, it is not clear that their perspective on the language has any special status. Communication can successfully be achieved, in English, without reference to the native speaker, and the ELF research agenda is to explore ELF and see if it has linguistic characteristics that set it apart as a distinct variety of English.
He suggests a three-part shibboleth:
When I was thirteen, I went to a chess championship in Southend-on-Sea. It was grey and windswept, and I was a little lonely and homesick, and as far as I remember I lost all my games. I remember just one spark of colour in this otherwise cheerless scene: my partner in one game, delighted with his ingenuity at a particular move, declared it ‘subtle with a capital B’. (Subtle has a subtle spelling: the b is silent, so it’s all the more subtle if the b is a capital.) […]
At a conference in the Netherlands last month I was at dinner with colleagues from many countries, all speaking English, as did all the waiters. Several of us ordered saLmon. I say ’saLmon’ because waiters and diners alike pronounced the l, whereas in my native speaker standard pronunciation the l is silent. There were no communication problems (though there may have been had I interjected with my l-less variant; I held my tongue). […]
A central figure in the organisation of the conference was Geoffrey. The conference and associated committees were, like the restaurant, ELF environments: lots of people with different mother tongues communicating fluently and effectively in English. Throughout the conference, without exception, Geoffrey was GeOffrey. (Standard native-speaker pronunciation makes Geoffrey a variant, with the same pronunciation as, Jeffrey.) It seems to me that we have a good test of ELF. A speaker of the ELF variety of English will say “GeOffrey is a suBtle saLmon”.
I suspect that we need to change that "will say" to "might say", though I may be prejudiced by knowing several Geoffreys whom I often encounter in ELFish settings.
I thought of taking a look at the TED (Transnational English Database) corpus, which
… contains recordings of speeches made at the Eurospeech-93 conference in Berlin. The name of the corpus — and its nickname, "The Terrible English Database" — reflects the fact that a high percentage of the presentations at Eurospeech-93 were given in English by non-native speakers of English.
However, I suspect that the three proposed test words will turn out to be absent from these presentations. We might generalize Adam's idea to the hypothesis that spelling pronunciations in general will be commoner among non-native speakers of English, who are likely to have acquired a larger percentage of their vocabulary through reading. My unscientific impression is that this is probably true, but not usually as consistent as his saLmon and GeOffrey examples suggest.
[Update — I should note that ELF is a more appropriate term than Jean-Paul Nerrière's "Globish". Why? See "Another day, another reprinted press release", 4/24/2005; and "It's back… or is it?", 5/11/2010.]
rootlesscosmo said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:03 am
Years ago I encountered the simile "as subtle as the b in subtle;" a French-speaking friend invented (so far as I know) a simile of contrary sense, "subtle as the b in subtil."
John Cowan said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:07 am
How about "as subtle as the b in dette and doute", then?
Mark P said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:08 am
I read a book in middle school (maybe) in which a schoolboy in Britain (Ireland? I'm foggy on it; it was a long time ago.) was made fun of in class because of his pronunciation of a word that he had encountered only in reading. As I recall, he was a bright boy from a poor family, where the spoken vocabulary was relatively limited, but he read widely. I've had similar experiences.
Dunx said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:09 am
I'm not sure that those shibboleths are valid for anything except identifying British English speakers like myself, since here in Oregon I have encountered native English speakers who say saLmon and GeOffrey (and I was very surprised about the latter since it was the name of the speaker's husband).
Mr Punch said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:16 am
How many L-sounds in "salmonella"?
Ned Danison said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:31 am
My PhD adviser has an interesting idea: ELF speakers have less trouble understanding one another than they have trying to understand native speakers. They tend to use "semantically transparent language" and avoid formulas favored by native speakers. (The copy of the paper in my possession doesn't have publication info on it, so I can't cite it). The key, by the way, in successful native to non-native communication seems to be an awareness on the part of the native speaker of what is idiomatic and formulaic and what is "semantically transparent".
Ray Girvan said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:47 am
Ned Danison: They … avoid formulas favored by native speakers
… and not necessarily just through their own unfamiliarity with the language. See Very extreme adjectives, concerning a rule taught in ESL courses that in many cases mistakenly bans constructs (such as "very ancient") that are perfectly normal to native speakers.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:48 am
@ N Danison: They tend to use "semantically transparent language" and avoid formulas favored by native speakers.
The not-so-suBtle question is, do they really consciously "avoid" those kinds of things? The alternative explanation is that they do not have them in their repertoires to start with. And does this make communication "better", "more effective", "more innovative" (choose your adjective)?
Some people actually seem to think that using "semantically transparent language" etc., and resorting to all kinds of avoidance techniques, sometimes even based on idiomatic expressions in one's own L1, is a manifestation of admirable linguistic creativeness which adds to the language. While I agree with the creativeness bit, most of the creativity is used on a one-off basis, being limited in space and time to the immediate circle of interlocutors.
But this is off-topic, no? :)
oren said,
August 3, 2010 @ 11:19 am
"you silly english KNiGhet" as in monty python's holy grail.
Btw, we just had a somewhat similar discussion in my blog. Hebrew though.
dw said,
August 3, 2010 @ 11:37 am
spelling pronunciations in general will be commoner among non-native speakers of English
No doubt true in general. However, the example of "salmon" given here reminds me of words like "palm" or "calm". Most Americans of my own age or younger (I'm in my 30s) seem to pronounce an /l/ in such words, which presumably must be a spelling pronunciation (though not necessarily a first-generation spelling pronunciation).
Smilarly, Wells says in Accents of English that the inclusion of /w/ in words such as "quote", "swore" and "swollen" was a spelling pronunciation dating back to the nineteenth century.
marie-lucie said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:10 pm
Wells says in Accents of English that the inclusion of /w/ in words such as "quote", "swore" and "swollen" was a spelling pronunciation dating back to the nineteenth century.
Why those words and not "sword" and "answer"?
Neal Goldfarb said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:13 pm
I checked out Kilgarifff's post and from there went to the Macmillan Dictionary's home page, where I found two things that I thought were interesting.
One was just an example of serendipity. They have an item on the homepage that lists where they feature words that they have newly added to the dictionary. The two they're featuring now are mondegreen and scare quotes. Very meta.
The other thing is what they call the Open Dictionary:
They explain further here:
(Apparently they do check for evidence that the word is in common use.)
This is apt to give heartburn to the that's-not-a-real-word-because-it's-not-in-the-dictionary crowd.
Ben Zimmer said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
Neal: The Macmillan Open Dictionary sounds suspiciously like Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary, which has been going for a few years now.
Andrew Garrett said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:22 pm
@Marie-Lucie: In swore and swollen, I think the reinsertion of (or failure to lose) /w/ reflects influence from forms like swear and swell, since /w/ was lost only before round vowels; sword had no related forms (and answer no round vowel). As for quote, I suppose it must have something to do with the learned or Latinate status of the word (cf. also quota).
Shoe said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:23 pm
Here in Germany every time the national team plays England we get to hear about Joff Hurst and that Wembley goal.
Acilius said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:24 pm
@Dunx: May I ask how well you know the Oregonian woman who pronounces her husband Geoffrey's name with an emphatically sounded O? I wonder if she might be making fun of him for using a spelling that many Americans regard as preposterous.
Chris Travers said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:38 pm
Smilarly, Wells says in Accents of English that the inclusion of /w/ in words such as "quote", "swore" and "swollen" was a spelling pronunciation dating back to the nineteenth century.
I am not a linguist but that seems wrong to me. Qu in Modern English seems to be generally from French versions of the Kw Indo-European phoneme, while Old English words descended from roots which have that phoneme tend to become Wh instead (where, what, etc) with some exceptions (quell, for example).
In some languages, like Irish Gaelic, the Qu phoneme dropped out, replaced by the K phoneme, so the primative Irish Maqui ("son of") becomes eventually Mac.
Hmm… Looking up "quote" it does look like Old French lost the Qu phoneme there, suggesting that this could be the case. Swore comes from an Old English strong verb, so I don't buy that the w wasn't pronounced there. Same with swollen.
I might thus buy Wells argument as applied to Old French roots exclusively, but of those examples, only one of them actually derives from an Old French root (quote), and so that may be an anomily. Quote may also be a bit of an anomily because of the possibility that it was a confusion between O. Fr. cotere and O. E. cwethan (-> quoth).
Josh said,
August 3, 2010 @ 12:38 pm
@Acilius, I was wondering the same thing. We had a friend back in high school who spelled his name "Geoff". We always called him Jee-Off, with two clearly articulated syllables. It became a nickname of sorts.
TLO said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
@Chris Travers-I don't think that Wells is saying the w's (and u's) were never pronounced; only that their pronunciation was reintroduced (based on the etymological spelling) after having been lost. Are you disputing that /w/ was ever lost in these words?
marie-lucie said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:25 pm
Andrew Garrett, thank you, that makes sense.
Chris Travers, by the time that Old French words were borrowed in English, the qu in words of Latin origin was no longer pronounced /kw/ but /k/.
Old Irish qu replaced by c: this is true for the spelling, but in phonetic terms, /kw/ was delabialized (lost its w), so only the /k/ was left (same thing that happened between Latin and Old French). If /kw/ had been totally "lost", there would have been nothing to 'replace' it.
DawnOfMinstrel said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:45 pm
Bah, it's not like we're pronouncing it wrong – it's just you guys insist on that ridiculous spelling system of yours.
Come on! The Roman Empire is long dead! Add some diacritical marks! You know you want to. ;)
Ellen K. said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
I think there are plenty of Americans who, like me, didn't or don't realize that Geoffrey is pronounced the same as Jeffrey, and who have seen the name and assumed the o is pronounced, and I can see one (or two I guess) of these people using it as a name for their child.
Which then, of course, further adds to the general confusion. :)
Faldone said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:51 pm
I wonder how much quote might have been influenced by OE cweþan, 'to say, speak'. Do we know how far into Middle, or even Modern English cweþan might have made it?
Zizoz said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:54 pm
"The not-so-suBtle question is, do they really consciously "avoid" those kinds of things? The alternative explanation is that they do not have them in their repertoires to start with. And does this make communication "better", "more effective", "more innovative" (choose your adjective)?"
I suspect they do avoid them, even when they have them in their repertoires. I imagine their reaction, upon being told of some unusual idiom, is "No way they really say that; you must be kidding."
David Crosbie said,
August 3, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
Quoth.
Lou Hevly said,
August 3, 2010 @ 3:05 pm
A problem I see for ELF being taken seriously is that the imperfections in its pronunciation and syntax (i.e., those features that distinguish it from native speaker English) are at least in part determined by the user's native language, and thus are different for everybody. What's more, these characteristics are in a constant state of flux as non-native speakers improve their grasp of English and make fewer and fewer errors (progressing thus from lower to middle to advanced ELF?). Finally, among its users, ELF is understood as being a means of last resort; one's ultimate objective is *not* to use it.
Laurent said,
August 3, 2010 @ 3:35 pm
One of the disadvantages of working for big international companies that I experienced is that English is often the official language, even here in the Netherlands, and that you have to listen to excruciatingly bad pronounced English (to the extent that I can't understand it) of some fellow Dutchmen.
George said,
August 3, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
@Ned Danison: "ELF speakers have less trouble understanding one another than they have trying to understand native speakers."
I was at a dinner party years ago in which several English L2 speakers made this observation. The consensus was that they could understand each other better than native English speakers. There could be some common simplifications and avoidance of marked features going on. I would be interested in the paper you mention if you come up with the citation.
@Lou Hevly: "A problem I see for ELF being taken seriously is that the imperfections in its pronunciation and syntax . . ."
It may be a problem, but it must be taken seriously. It is the state of world. The reasons for this are more historical, political and social than grammatical. Speakers around the world don't select English because of its felicitous grammar.
Amelia Eve said,
August 3, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
Here in New York City, I have noticed a rise in native speakers pronouncing the L in 'saLmon.' I don't recall ever hearing it when I was growing up in California, though.
I think that non-native speakers of any language may shy away from certain highly idiomatic forms; I know that I do when I am speaking in my second language. But my experience working in an international environment suggests that speakers from different parts of the world speak ELF with their own accents. The most obvious is the difference between those who learned US-style English (basically in the Americas) and those who learned UK-style English (most everybody else). But subtler differences can be attributed to the speaker's native language. Northern Europeans tend to be much more comfortable with the many compound verbs in English, because they follow a typically Germanic structure, but speakers of Romance languages can spend years working on the distinctions between 'turn up,' 'turn down,' 'turn on,' 'turn off,' 'turn over,' 'turn out,' etc. You can tell a lot about the speaker's native grammar if you listen closely to their elisions as well as their mistakes.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
August 3, 2010 @ 3:51 pm
@Lou Hevly: Well, isn't that the question? What you describe is what you would normally expect, and I think it's what you get in a situation where learners of a language are primarily interested in communicating with native speakers of that language; but as I understand it, the suggestion being made here is that some non-native English speakers are not specifically trying to emulate native speakers, because they're using English as a lingua franca (ELF), and their goal is communication with other non-native speakers. If that's true, then none of what you say is true of those speakers. (Sorry if you already understood that; your comment gives me the impression that you didn't.)
Jim said,
August 3, 2010 @ 4:03 pm
"and that you have to listen to excruciatingly bad pronounced English (to the extent that I can't understand it) of some fellow Dutchmen."
A Dutch acccnt is one of the cutest accents going, especially on men. I envy you.
"I don't recall ever hearing it when I was growing up in California, though."
Absolutely not. In the 60s during the height of the migration from the Midwest a slip like that could get you and your whole family deported back to Wisconsin.
Mr Fnortner said,
August 3, 2010 @ 4:12 pm
Huw, the Welsh boy in How Green Was My Valley, is reprimanded in class for saying "mizzled" for misled. His sad but assertive reply was something like "I shouldn't be blamed for having read more words of the King's English than I've ever heard spoken." Seems Richard Llewellyn was aware of the phenomenon as well.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
@Ran Ari-Gur: the suggestion being made here is that some non-native English speakers are not specifically trying to emulate native speakers, because they're using English as a lingua franca (ELF), and their goal is communication with other non-native speakers
Well, that's what some people would like to happen — i.e. remove the "native speaker" from the equation. For example, there's a group of advocates of a "Lingua Franca Core" for ELF pronunciation (with Jennifer Jenkins probably the most widely known researcher in the circle), which they claim removes those features of "native speaker" pronunciation which are not needed in an ELF context (e.g. th sounds etc.).
However, at the moment, it's not clear if learners consciously shun "native-speaker" models. And even if they do, there isn't a widely accepted alternative model that they could aspire to, despite the efforts of the Lingua Franca Core people.
For the time being, in linguistic terms, what is termed ELF seems to be good old L2 English, with most of the differences between ELF and "native-speaker" English being due to good old "interference", "transfer", etc. (pick your favourite term) from the learner's L1.
The defining features of ELF are non-linguistic (or para-linguistic, if you like): (a) ELF speakers, by definition, may indeed mostly function in environments where native speakers are few and far between, which (b) obviates the need to aspire to native-speaker models (at least to some extent) because negative attitudes to L2 accents/forms are less prevalent in such environments.
But less prevalent is, of course, relative. For example, on the pronunciation front, you could expect that e.g. Russian ELF speakers will find German accents not exactly appealing, and vice versa… And ELF texts written by, say, Francophone learners may not necessarily be immediately comprehensible to Polish readers. Etc., etc. The main point is that, once the "native speaker" is removed, no-one can claim to have any more right to "correct" English than anyone else.
Naturally, this is all just the tip of the iceberg.
BTW, note that "spelling pronunciations" of the suBtle saLmon type are L1-dependent, too.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
August 3, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
@Jarek Weckwerth: Thanks. So is Kilgarriff's blog-post wishful thinking, or am I misunderstanding it, or …?
Mark P said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:19 pm
Mr Fnortner, that must be what I was trying to remember in my comment.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:28 pm
@Ran Ari-Gur: No, I wouldn't say his post is wishful thinking. It's a(n arguably truthful) description of the situation that obtains in EFL contexts.
What I think is wishful thinking is expecting "the ELF research agenda" to actually find that ELF "has linguistic characteristics that set it apart as a distinct variety of English". As I said, at least at the moment, it seems that you need to talk of ELF Englishes, such as L1 German ELF, L1 French ELF, etc. And these will each have characteristics that set them apart, even though they are much more variable internally than your stereotypical "native speaker" varieties. But, in the linguistic sense, there isn't one ELF to talk about. After all, one of the more obvious (and widely accepted) findings of second language acquisition research is that learner populations differ in their acquisition of an L2 as a function of L1.
For example, with respect to the specific "shibboleths" he mentions, well… I wouldn't expect to hear them in the same form e.g. in East Asia, where speakers of L1 Japanese or Korean etc. find consonant clusters problematic. The /-bt-/ or /-lm-/ would probably end up with "epenthetic" vowels between the consonants. So, even if the pronunciation was based more closely on the spelling, the actual outcomes would be different. Does that count as one ELF?
Bloix said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:30 pm
"ELF speakers have less trouble understanding one another than they have trying to understand native speakers."
I'm sure this is true, because ELF speakers use relatively formal syntax and vocabulary and don't use jargon. When I talk to non-native speakers that I work with, I make sure that instructions are explicit (please do this, not let's do, or we should), that I avoid jargon, and I'm careful with pronouns and antecedents, which I find are a ready source of confusion.
For example, to a native speaker I might say; "This is in good shape, have Harry flyspeck it before we finalize it, okay?"
But to a non-native speaker, I would say: "The document is almost ready. Please ask Harry to review it carefully for errors. Then we can format it and print it."
Lou Hevly said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
@George: By "taken seriously" I meant "made the object of study". I may well be mistaken, but I don't yet see the point of spending time on ELF. Its definition is simply "somewhat defective English that works in many cases". People, because it's the best they can do, use infinitely varied versions of it. But how can you study something so nebulous? What's the point? If what is intended is a simplified version of English, whose simplification are you going to use?
@Ran Ari-Gur: My experience as an English teacher here in Catalonia for 20 years has been that no one wants to speak ELF (defective English). People use it as a means of last resort, but they certainly wouldn't want me teaching it to them.There may be people whose goal is learning ELF, but so far I haven't met any.
A brief anecdote: In the late 80's and esrly 90's, Mr Johan Cruyff was the coach of Football Club Barcelona. He was extremely successful and very well respected as a coach, but his ELF-style Spanish, though perfectly understandable, brought smiles. When prospective students told me they were fed up with grammar and would be happy simply to be able to communicate somewhat effectively in English, I asked them if they would be content to speak English as Cruyff spoke Spanish. More smiles, but no one answered yes.
Mr. Fnortner said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
Wouldn't the collision of English with other languages via ELF-style coping result in the invention of English once again? By that I mean that whereas English is a product of speakers of other languages confronting Anglo-Saxon and reducing both their own language and Anglo-Saxon to an accessible middle ground, modern English may turn into "super-English" as it accommodates the needs of a few billion non-native speakers.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
@Bloix: "ELF speakers have less trouble understanding one another than they have trying to understand native speakers." I'm sure this is true, because ELF speakers use relatively formal syntax and vocabulary and don't use jargon.
This may be true in syntactic and lexical terms, but it's far less obvious in terms of pronunciation. Scholar-google interlanguage speech intelligibility effect and you'll see that research is, well, inconclusive at the moment. With L2 listeners, you don't always find a benefit in spoken English intelligibility even when the speakers share their L1, not to mention situations where they don't. Of course this depends on the exact pairing of the L1s, the listeners' and speakers' proficiency, etc. But still.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 5:58 pm
@Lou Hevly: @Ran Ari-Gur: My experience as an English teacher here in Catalonia for 20 years has been that no one wants to speak ELF (defective English). People use it as a means of last resort, but they certainly wouldn't want me teaching it to them.There may be people whose goal is learning ELF, but so far I haven't met any.
Exactly.
But the Cruyff situation is different — it was a plain L2 setting. He wasn't speaking Spanish to Thai people at a meeting in Yemen, was he? So giving that example was somewhat uncharitable to the ELF approach; your students listened to Cruyff as "native" or at least very proficient speakers of Spanish. We don't know what those Yemenis would think of his Spanish.
What ELF advocates would like to do is precisely to remove this kind of thinking. Or at least to engender a situation where ELF accents/forms are accepted more, for example like some, previosuly (more) stigmatised accents in the UK which are now heard on TV…
Xmun said,
August 3, 2010 @ 6:06 pm
Spelling pronunciations. Oh dear, I still remember my humiliation in class many years ago when I pronounced "awry" to rhyme with "Tory". We were reading Antony and Cleopatra in class and I had to say Charmian's lines with "Your crown's awry".
Sometimes people just give up insisting on the proper way to pronounce their own names. Catriona McLeod, a newsreader in New Zealand, used to pronounce her first name as Robert Louis Stevenson did — [kat'rina] — but these days makes it four syllables with the stress on the o.
Xmun said,
August 3, 2010 @ 6:45 pm
One of my late mother-in-law's funny stories was of a young couple who emigrated to NZ in the same boat as she did. She would hear them saying to their small son "Eat up, Warwick", pronouncing the two syllables of their son's name as a combination of "war" and "wick". Native English speakers, too. Presumably they had found the name in a book.
Ellen K said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:03 pm
So, what's the normal pronunciation of Warwick? I can't think how else it would be pronounced besides war + wick.
Ellen K said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:08 pm
Nevermind… looked it up and I see some dictionaries do give pronunciations for names. So, silent w, like in Smithwick's. Except for the city in Rhode Island, where the w is apparently pronounced in the city name.
Mfahie said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:14 pm
Wow, misled got me as a kid, too! But I pronounced it MIZE-eld. Like something a nasty miser would do? As a result, I thought you could misle someone.
Lou Hevly said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:17 pm
@Jarek Weckwerth: "So giving that example was somewhat uncharitable to the ELF approach; your students listened to Cruyff as "native" or at least very proficient speakers of Spanish. We don't know what those Yemenis would think of his Spanish."
Indeed. But my point was, in answering Ran Ari-Gur, who said:
"… but as I understand it, the suggestion being made here is that some non-native English speakers are not specifically trying to emulate native speakers, because they're using English as a lingua franca (ELF), and their goal is communication with other non-native speakers"
… that my *impression* is –and I admit, I may be wrong on this– that there are very few non-native English speakers whose goal is "using English as a lingua franca (ELF)". In other words, defective English is not their goal, though it may be useful in the meantime.
I think the vast majority of English learners *are* trying to emulate native speakers, and that therefore ELF is a dead end. But as I said, I can only speak from my own experience; "trying to emulate native speakers" may be a Catalan characteristic (I've never taught English anywhere else) and other cultures may have different goals.
@Jarek Weckwerth: "What ELF advocates would like to do is precisely to remove this kind of thinking. Or at least to engender a situation where ELF accents/forms are accepted more, for example like some, previosuly (more) stigmatised accents in the UK which are now heard on TV…"
Well, I *think* we're talking here about something completely different. "ELF accents/forms", unlike so-called stigmatized accents, might well include pronouncing the "l" in "walk" or omitting the '-s form' for the third person present singular. Do ELFers advocate that these be "accepted more"?
Bloix said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:19 pm
I know an American McKay who insists on "M'-kye."
Miles B said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:19 pm
In Britain, the town of Warwick is pronounced WOR-ick
Chris Travers said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:40 pm
Chris Travers, by the time that Old French words were borrowed in English, the qu in words of Latin origin was no longer pronounced /kw/ but /k/.
That's why I was saying I could buy it for Old French roots. But none of the examples quoted fit the pattern very well.
There's a second major problem with historical pronunciation studies, however, in that you inevitably end up asking "who was pronouncing it and who wasn't?" I can't think of any language ever which was so homogeneous that this question wouldn't be worth asking and certainly English with it's rich set of regional dialects would be no exception. Dialect shifts could occur and so "wasn't pronounced" might be dialect-specific.
Ned Danison said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:47 pm
To George at 8/3 3:48 pm: Here's a link to a pdf (looks unedited):
http://www.albany.edu/~ik692/files/Kecskespaper.pdf
And here's where it has been published:
Kecskes, I. (2010). Formulaic language in English Lingua Franca. In Patrick Hanks and Rachel Giora (eds.) “Metaphor and Figurative Language: Critical Concepts in Linguistics”. Oxford/New York: Routledge.
Ellen K said,
August 3, 2010 @ 7:56 pm
@Lou Hevly: "that there are very few non-native English speakers whose goal is "using English as a lingua franca (ELF)". In other words, defective English is not their goal, though it may be useful in the meantime."
Seems to me that, while they are using it as a lingua franca, that doing so is exactly their goal, even if it was not the reason for first learning English.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 3, 2010 @ 8:17 pm
@Lou Hevly: … that my *impression* is –and I admit, I may be wrong on this– that there are very few non-native English speakers whose goal is "using English as a lingua franca (ELF)". In other words, defective English is not their goal, though it may be useful in the meantime.
I would rephrase this as "it's not their only goal". When you look at surveys, you do find quite a lot of students saying they want to use English for "international communication", without specifying if this is to include "native speakers" or not. (And in places such as Europe, it's pretty evident that communication in English between "non-natives" is, erm, rampant ;)
I think you could say that Jenkins (excuse my vocab) bemoans this, and one of the aims of ELF advocates* seems to be making this (learning English as ELF-only) a legitimate goal. Plus, of course, getting people to stop calling it "defective English". Fair enough.
Also, "goal" is a rather fuzzy term. You would probably want to differentiate at least between models and targets. Some people claim it's OK to have "native" English as your model without necessarily having totally native-like pronunciation as your target. Makes perfect sense, I think :)
And a pretty good argument from the anti-ELF camp is that most learners will not reach a native-like target anyway, resulting in your standard situation of people speaking a foreign language with, well, a "foreign accent". (If you call it ELF or not depends on extralinguistic factors, as I said above.) So, as long as you get more acceptance for those accents, there's no need to develop any new models.
Well, I *think* we're talking here about something completely different. "ELF accents/forms", unlike so-called stigmatized accents, might well include pronouncing the "l" in "walk" or omitting the '-s form' for the third person present singular. Do ELFers advocate that these be "accepted more"?
Well, we've had quite a few examples above of "native speakers" pronouncing the /l/ in calm or palm, so why not in walk? And plenty of "native" English dialects lose the -s. The nature of those things in ELF isn't particularly different from what you get in "native" accents, apart from different probabilities (e.g. more spelling pronunciations) and much more intra-speaker variability…
Now, whether ELF advocates advocate these specific forms is in fact a very good question. They've been pretty sketchy in terms of details. But I would guess that yes, they would like to see more acceptance for these kinds of things. The line of thinking is, "a 'native' is allowed to have a /l/ in calm, even though it's a minority pronunciation, by virtue of him/her being a 'native speaker'; why not be equally sympathetic towards a 'non-native' speaker?". I don't think there's anything wrong with this reasoning in general, just that it's hugely and naively optimistic. There's still a lot of prejudice towards "native" non-standard forms, and it's not going to disappear any time soon; I can't see why it should be any different for the pesky foreigners… (Even though there's also research showing that "native speakers" are in fact more sympathetic to them than other foreigners.)
OK, enough for tonight. I've almost monopolised the thread anyway.
* BTW, people who study ELF are not necessarily its advocates. And vice versa ;)
In other disclaimers: I don't necessarily sympathise with the ELF "movement", but I think they do have a couple of good points. And my main field is sociophonetics, so most of my comments should be read as referring to pronunciation.
George said,
August 3, 2010 @ 8:24 pm
@Lou Hevly: I have never seen ELF defined as "somewhat defective English." My understanding is that ELF is English used for communication between groups who have no other language in common.
@Ned: Thanks, I'll check these out.
Tyler P said,
August 3, 2010 @ 10:56 pm
I often record American English speakers reading the IEEE "Harvard" Sentences for use in perceptual experiments. One of these is "A rod is used to catch pink salmon." I was at first surprised how frequently people would read it as "saLmon." By unambiguously native speakers even! It has happened often enough to make it worth pointing out the 'correct' pronunciation of that word before recording anyone.
I can't say I've ever noticed it pronounced that way in spontaneous conversation, though.
Global lingua franca I hadn’t heard of before « Entitled to an Opinion said,
August 3, 2010 @ 11:03 pm
[…] A comment at Gene Expression has introduced me to a new term: "Globish". UPDATE: A relevant Language Log post. […]
Ben Hemmens said,
August 4, 2010 @ 4:17 am
As a translator from German to English (specialty being technical and scientific marketing texts) based in central Europe, ELF is the great majority of what I have to produce. It's essential to write English that is readable and has a good feel for native speakers but is not too idiomatic for non-native speakers. It's a good example of writing for a heterogeneous audience, something that Shakespeare and Obama, among others, are good at.
The goal of ELF is simply to make the target group / audience of a piece of communication do something, understand something or to convey an image/impression/emotion to them. That's the only measure of success, and I put a great deal of effort into encouraging my clients to form explicit ideas about what the goals of their communication are and what demands that puts on a text: this kind of analysis can go quite a long way without any specialist language expertise, and it's important because only a small fraction of their English production can be supported by outside service providers and they need to make informed decisions about which jobs to engage a translator /editor for, and why.
Where my German speakers often fall short despite producing texts that are without fault on the lexical, grammatical and syntactical levels is in understanding English pragmatic habits, not even so much on a sentence level but in the construction of paragraphs and the organization of whole texts. Many ideas are bandied around as to how to describe the differences, but in my biased way I tend to think that a couple of features of English stylistic traditions are objectively more conducive to good communication. Since at least Chaucer we have had a very fluid relationship between the vernacular and high language, the former playing a large role in our prose. We have the modern "plain words" tradition. It also has a much higher status for academics to write popular, accessible books (e.g the likes of Richard Dawkins, or in history, Norman Davies); in German, popular science etc. tends to be written by journalists. And in general, English texts my be more reader-focused than thing-focused ("Mind your step" instead of "Vorsicht Stufe!" being the classic; but also, for example, beginning a text about a drug with the indication rather than with the chemical description of the substance).
The test of these features would be whether they could be transplanted into German writing with benefit, and indeed, I think they quite often could.
I'd say pronunciation is less critical, because it will always vary depending on the phonetic habits and abilities (and interferences and overcorrections) people have from their native languages, and because failure to understand what someone says based on pronunciation can usually be fixed on the spot – by definition, this is oral communication and the listeners can ask questions.
Jongseong Park said,
August 4, 2010 @ 6:17 am
@Jarek Weckwerth: I wouldn't expect to hear them in the same form e.g. in East Asia, where speakers of L1 Japanese or Korean etc. find consonant clusters problematic. The /-bt-/ or /-lm-/ would probably end up with "epenthetic" vowels between the consonants.
Not for Korean, where /bt/ [pt] and /lm/ are perfectly well-formed medial clusters, e.g. geobtal, ilmol. It is initial or final clusters that we have trouble with, or those with three or more consonants. As a native speaker of Korean, I think I used the same mispronunciation for 'subtle' as everyone else before I actually heard it pronounced in English.
Ben Hemmens said,
August 4, 2010 @ 6:31 am
I'm uneasy about ELF having "advocates" and being a "movement". It's just a fact. Most people learning and using English in the world are neither native speakers nor are they doing most of their communication with native speakers. Get used to it.
The language may be global, but the "goal" always depends on the specific context. In general, it might make sense to orient things to a roughly native-like standard, but if you're, for example, an Austrian company selling solar collectors in Malaysia, then you may notice that your customers name things differently and if you want to communicate effectively with them, you'd better accommodate their English.
So just as there is no single good translation (quality can only be measured with reference to the specific purpose of the translation) there can also not be a single standard for ELT, without reference to the specific communicative situation.
Engineers and businesspeople with no formal language training whatsoever are managing these issues every day, all over the world, without any help from academics. If it didn't work, we all wouldn't have keyboards and screens in front of us, at least, not at the prices we are used to.
Hamish said,
August 4, 2010 @ 6:57 am
A complete digression, but:
Chris Travers said,
"In some languages, like Irish Gaelic, the Qu phoneme dropped out, replaced by the K phoneme, so the primative Irish Maqui ("son of") becomes eventually Mac."
Actually, mac in Irish and Scottish Gaelic just means son. The 'of' comes when the genitive is used in the following word to indicate possession.
Ben Hemmens said,
August 4, 2010 @ 7:03 am
Lu Hevly:
"When prospective students told me they were fed up with grammar and would be happy simply to be able to communicate somewhat effectively in English, I asked them if they would be content to speak English as Cruyff spoke Spanish. More smiles, but no one answered yes."
What about the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English? You can't say he's been unsuccessful. And for most of his career, communication in English has been a central part of his job. In his way, he's an extremely successful communicator, even to native speakers.
I do find it interesting that he is a Republican, although his actual policy decisions could probably mostly fit inside the spectrum of the Democratic party. Because Republicans have a considerably less heterogeneous voter base, or at least their voters respond to much simpler messages. And in the department of staying on message and hammering out the same key "values" (anti tax, anti establishment politics, antio socialism, "freedom" etc.) with just enough variation to be entertaining, Schwarzenegger is very, very good – a campaign manager's dream.
On a purely communicative level, though, I suggest he could never have succeeded as a Democratic presidential candidate, because he doesn't do messages people can understand on many different levels. If you have to somehow cover all the bases of pro-choice and pro-life, metropolitan and country, north and south, rich and poor, and various ethnicities, I suggest you usually need a very talented native speaker, such as the current POTUS.
Just one illustration of how "somewhat defective" English can be fine for one communicative job but not for another.
Ben Hemmens said,
August 4, 2010 @ 7:14 am
George:
"I was at a dinner party years ago in which several English L2 speakers made this observation. The consensus was that they could understand each other better than native English speakers."
The main objective characteristic of their language will simply be a reduction of native idioms.
But they probably feel they get along better simply because they are a) all very aware that the others may have some trouble understanding them and b) are more relaxed about each other's mistakes and errors when no native speaker is present, and therefore do a better job of avoiding and correcting misunderstandings.
I certainly remember the election, a few years ago, of the first native English speaker to an international committee. After the vote, the chairman welcomed him but also regretted that the status of "broken english" as the official language of the committee was bound to change …
[links] Link salad heads east | jlake.com said,
August 4, 2010 @ 7:42 am
[…] ELF test? "Geoffrey the subtle salmon" — English as a Lingua Franca. […]
Jongseong Park said,
August 4, 2010 @ 7:47 am
@Jarek Weckwerth: I wouldn't expect to hear them in the same form e.g. in East Asia, where speakers of L1 Japanese or Korean etc. find consonant clusters problematic. The /-bt-/ or /-lm-/ would probably end up with "epenthetic" vowels between the consonants.
Not for Korean, where /bt/ [pt] and /lm/ are perfectly well-formed medial clusters, occuring not infrequently in native words, e.g. jibteo, ilmol. It is initial or final clusters that we have trouble with, or those with three or more consonants. As a native speaker of Korean, I think I used the same mispronunciation for 'subtle' as everyone else before I actually heard it pronounced in English.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 4, 2010 @ 10:00 am
@Ben Hemmens: I'm uneasy about ELF having "advocates" and being a "movement". It's just a fact. Most people learning and using English in the world are neither native speakers nor are they doing most of their communication with native speakers. Get used to it.
OK, I may have got carried away with those word choices. But, firstly, “advocate” is in fact used even by Jenkins and other prominent ELF researchers. And, secondly, if you think e.g. of the rather famous quote from Widdowson – “How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers […]. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgment. They are irrelevant.” – using the term “advocate” may not be such a stretch. I think there’s a difference between accepting that ELF is a fact of life (and studying it) and rather forcefully arguing that “native speakers” should keep quiet. The sad thing is that the tone of the discussion is often quite militant; but that's what you'd expect from ideologically-loaded discussions, no?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 4, 2010 @ 10:08 am
@Jongseong Park: Not for Korean, where /bt/ [pt] and /lm/ are perfectly well-formed and not infrequent medial clusters
Oops, sorry, hadn't done my research ;) One must check one's facts before posting a comment on LL. How about Mandarin as the second example?
George said,
August 4, 2010 @ 10:48 am
@Ben: Good points.
Jongseong Park said,
August 4, 2010 @ 12:22 pm
@Jarek Weckwerth: I've heard L1 Japanese speakers inserting epenthetic vowels to break up the consonant clusters when speaking English or Korean, although this is noticeable only for a few of them.
I don't remember a similar phenomenon from L1 Mandarin speakers, though. Many L1 Chinese speakers I've heard speaking English already probably speak or are familiar with a non-Mandarin variety of Chinese having similar consonant clusters.
Ben Hemmens said,
August 4, 2010 @ 12:39 pm
Jarek:
OK, I'm not an academic linguist, so I didn't know your Widdowson quote (whoever that may be; not sure I've been missing much). But I agree: that's offensive.
But it seems to result from a mixup between a native-like standard just being the most practical thing to refer to and it being some kind of imperialist project that assumes superiority of culture or ethnicity (which it certainly was – partly – in the past, but equally surely isn't any more).
And then again it may have resulted from irritation with specific native speakers unaware of the need (and perhaps unwilling) to tone down their English when communicating with non-native speakers.
But it's not very surprising: language identity has played a large role in the modern nationalism which one could say has been the mainspring of most European politics, including the wars, for the last couple of centuries. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam – a country without a language is a country without a soul, said the Irish nationalists; and equivalent sayings probably can be found in every European country. It's something we have a lot of practice in being emotional (and sticking sharp objects into people) about.
And though a roughly native-like standard is the only practical one for teaching, there are a lot of language schools that could drop the Union Jack and allusions to Oxbridge from their corporate images. And my wife (who is a real professional in the field) says they could also ease off on making furriners try to pronounce "th" like natives and bashing grammar into them just because it's "proper", and start teaching them better about the communicative function of the grammar they're learning. She wishes language teachers would stop talking about grammar and communication as though they were alternatives.
Karen said,
August 4, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
I went to college (35 years ago) with a woman who had a horse named "Calm King" (which is a great name, imo); she pronounced it "Com King" and it was months before I realized what the spelling was. Com King is just weird – and as a result I never did tell her how cool I thought the name was.
As for Geoffrey = Joffrey (a spelling certainly out there), my hypothesis is that people who've only seen it make an analogy with "George", which certainly isn't "Jerj", after all.
John Cowan said,
August 4, 2010 @ 9:29 pm
Faldone: The last recorded use of queath in OED3 is about 1450. As a synonym for bequeath (same root), and in the fixed phrase quick and queathing 'alive and well', it lasted another century.
Quoth represents the old past tense (1sg and 3sg), but is now used only with a direct quotation following, and is archaic/jocular; in the latter sense it has spawned a new regular verb quoth 'to say (archaically or pretentiously)'.
bloix said,
August 4, 2010 @ 11:01 pm
Karen – Calm with a silent L is standard British pronunciation. The OED gives only a silent L pronunciation. Also bam. In the US, I think of these as being New England (as in "the water's flat cahm today") but perhaps they're prevalent elsewhere.
I used to work with a serious golfer who called the game "goff." She was a mid-Westerner, but she had played in Scotland, and I often wondered if it was an affectation.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 5, 2010 @ 11:01 am
The pronunciation with a silent L is the only one in the American Heritage Dictionary and the first one in Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com unabridged (which notes that using an /l/ is a spelling pronunciation).
Dan T. said,
August 5, 2010 @ 11:30 am
I was just at a Mensa conference in Prague, which was full of non-native English speakers speaking mostly in English, with a handful of Americans including myself, and a few British people, but mostly people from other countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. I can't recall any specific quirky usages or pronunciations, and there was mostly pretty good fluency. Some people had to correct others' pronunciations of their names; somebody named Karin was generally referred to as "Karen" by others, and she gave her correct pronunciation as something more like "kurEEN". At least I could read that name; some Czech names look like complete gibberish to me, full of accent marks on consonants as well as vowels, and I have no clue how to pronounce them.
Julie said,
August 11, 2010 @ 3:22 am
It seems pretty common for parents to give children names they don't know how to spell or pronounce properly. So some people have "Micheal" on their birth certificates. I know one man named "Stephen" who pronounces it "Steffen," presumably because his parents didn't know to pronounce it "Steven." I would expect the Geoffrey mentioned above to be in the same category.
I find the idea of Oregonians not being able to pronounce "salmon" incredible. But I suppose it's quite possible that it's a spelling error. If you think the fish is spelled "sammin," then what's that other word?
As for "calm," "balm" etc, those may well be spelling pronunciations, but they're the only ones you hear in California…we must be on at least the third or fourth generation to pronounce the "l." Any dictionary which does not list that variant is at least a hundred years out of date. Without the "l," I'd hear them as "com" and "bomb." (Hmm…..is pronouncing the l more desirable if the low vowels are merged?)
As for Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, he communicates just fine. He also keeps the amateur comedians, and a few of the pros, supplied with material. Mockery is a popular sport, and he's a favorite target.
Rodger C said,
August 13, 2010 @ 4:46 pm
People who name their children "Micheal" are of course correct if they pronounce it "Meehaul."