Language Log

You shouldn't be reading this if you didn't read My illiterate search for the Sicilian animals (1): if you're starting here, don't. Follow this link and read that first. Then come back. Because all I am doing in this brief follow-up post is giving Language Log readers a clue concerning the crucial feature of the awful English spelling system that I had temporarily forgotten. I had forgotten (how?) about the emperors of Rome, and the most southeasterly of that city's hills, and bypassing the birth canal, and the radioactive soft metal isotope used in atomic clocks, and the opening part of the large intestine. That's your clue. (What do you mean that's not enough? I'm the quizmaster here. I'm the one who says what's enough.)

My parents tell me that I could read well before my 4th birthday. As a result, I have virtually no experience of what it would be like to be illiterate. It would be easier for me to imagine blindness than complete inability to read. I did have a glimpse of it when I first spent some time in Japan, and was surrounded by an advanced culture using an utterly alien writing system in which I couldn't even read out the names off the signs (as I can in any of the alphabets of Europe). But I had another glimpse this morning when I heard a word on the radio that I couldn't guess how to spell, not even vaguely. Tracking it down was a terrible job. My dictionary was no help, precisely because dictionaries are organized in such a way as to be helpful only to the literate. The great naturalist Sir David Attenborough, on Radio 4, mentioned a curious-sounding class of animals that he appeared to be calling Sicilians. (Not a class in the technical terminology; technically they are actually a whole separate order of animals.) I listened carefully; it definitely sounded like "Sicilians". But what was this word? These creatures (he made it clear) did not live in Sicily.

You'd think it was the end of the world. Apparently, the Nuance Communications-powered text-to-speech system on the new Amazon Kindle mispronounces Barack Obama's name, saying something like "buh-RACK oh-BAM-uh" instead of "buh-ROCK oh-BAH-muh". Why is this little tidbit worth a piece in the business/media section of The New York Times? The answer is, it's not. It could have been an OK lead-in to a technology piece about how text-to-speech systems work, and how they can fail — often spectacularly — on unknown words, especially names. Granted, adding the (pronunciation of the) name of a political figure such as Barack Obama to the system's dictionary is a simple enough thing to do (which is how Nuance will in fact fix the problem, if it hasn't already), and it was clearly an oversight worth pointing out to the company. But then again, the version of Firefox I'm using right now (3.0.4 for the Mac) has been underlining both of the President's names in what I have been typing thus far, incorrectly guessing that I'm misspelling something, and I'll bet you won't see some NYT reporter wasting their time on such a triviality.

Apple previewed iPhone OS 3.0 earlier this week, and they conveniently posted a video of the event on their website. I was grateful to be able to watch the video, mostly because I wanted to hear how the folks at Apple pronounce the name of the iPhone-centric game designing firm ngmoco:).

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part because of the proper name problem: a reasonably restrictive spellchecker dictionary can never encompass all the proper names that might appear in a given text, particularly unusual foreign names. Consider the old Obama/Osama tangle: after 9/11, Osama was added to Microsoft's spellchecker dictionary, but at the time no one could have predicted that Obama would also be an important name to include. Thus they had to scramble to add Obama when he rose to prominence and spellcheckers were giving Osama as the first suggestion.

Now, as if on cue, the District of Columbia Republican Committee kindly illustrates my point in a new press release.

Spiegel Online, Germany's biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections. (See my primer on OUPblog as well as our ongoing coverage on both the old and new Language Log.) I was interviewed for the piece, which was written by Konrad Lischka for his column on everyday things that do not work (Fehlfunktion, or 'malfunction'). Though I don't read German, the article looks pretty solid. I especially like the German Cupertinos that are provided, based on spellchecker suggestions in German Mac Word 2008. For instance, Barack Obama prompts the suggestion Barock Obama (barock means 'baroque'), while Stinger-Rakete ('Stinger missile') prompts Stinker-Rakte ('stinker missile'). Looks like a job for the intrepid Microsoft Office Natural Language Team, Teutonic division.

My wife Karen and I just spent a long weekend with her family in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. As I've mentioned before, there are some noteworthy (though not necessarily unique) properties of the local Louisville accent. One of these is a property shared among many Southern dialects of American English in some form or another: the lack of a (clear) distinction between [ɪ] and [ɛ] before [n] (and sometimes other nasal consonants as well), such that e.g. pin and pen are (nearly) homophonous. To my ear, the result of this merger for natives of Louisville sounds closer to the [ɪ] vowel that I myself produce in pin, but I have not done any serious analysis to confirm or disconfirm this impression.

Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage:

The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it suits him. The snobbish pronunciation of his name may sound like a British synonym for derrière, but it helps him finagle his way into the gala opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. On the other hand, he makes sure to Americanize the R in “Ayres” and go native when crashing a movie-business party.

There's really no way to figure out what Maslin means here without consulting the book itself, and even then things are a bit murky.

Quotation marks (typically the single ones ‘ ’) that are used to mark the use of a word as not necessarily one that the present writer would endorse (The so-called ‘universal grammar ’ that linguists talk about) are standardly known as scare quotes. Those used (illiterately, it is often thought) simply to emphasize or call attention to a word (‘FRESH’ TOMATOES!) are sometimes, less standardly, called greengrocer's quotes. I think we need a third and separate name for the increasingly common journalistic use seen in this national science news story taken from a British newspaper today (I quote it in full, so nothing is being suppressed):

Hormone ‘makes women unfaithful’
WOMEN with high levels of one sex hormone are more likely to have affairs — and are considered more attractive by themselves and others. Those with the most oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, are less satisfied with their lovers and more likely to have a roving eye, a study suggests today. ‘Attractive women may not only have more alternatives but also high standards that are difficult to satisfy,’ said US psychologist Dr Katrina Durante, whose study is published by the Royal Society. ‘They may have fewer reasons to be committed to any partner if higher-quality potential mates are available.’

I am not commenting on the fact that the report says not a single word about the hormone causing infidelity. This is Language Log, not Endocrinology Log. What I'm pointing to is that the quoted words are not a quote: they never appear in the article at all.

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports:

The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google.

"Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe," she wrote on Google's official blog.

I checked back on the Google Blog and what Mayer wrote was:

Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone's interest around the globe.

So the BBC editors, besides changing 10 to ten and removing the comma before while, apparently also changed comprised to compromised. A fascinating miscorrection (or incorrection, if you prefer).

Pretty much every time I post a Zippy cartoon (most recently, here), someone writes to ask about Bill Griffith's spelling of the definite article the as th', as in

I know th' human being and th' fish can coexist peacefully!

The question was asked in the comments on my posting "Are we snowcloning yet?" back in June and was answered by other commenters there. The purpose of today's posting is to record the answer, with some commentary, so that I can refer future queries here.

The short answer is that Griffith is just representing the ordinary, reduced, pronunciation of the. The spelling th' is an instance of "eye dialect" (in a narrow sense), spellings (like wimmin for women) that represent ordinary pronunciations.

While we're on the subject of English spelling: the 25 August New Yorker has a cartoon by Ariel Molvig on the subject:

And here's a related Rhymes With Orange cartoon from a while back:

Around the virtual water cooler at Language Log Plaza this morning, I asked Victor Mair about how Beijingers actually say the name of their city. I was curious, because I know from earlier experience that people from that part of China often weaken consonants in the middle of two-syllable words. For example, once in an introductory phonetics class where the topic was phonetic transcription and spectrogram reading, we worked on a phrase from a Mandarin news broadcast that included the word 比较 bi3jiao4 "rather" (as in "rather hot"). In that case, the medial 'j' was pronounced as a glide, as if the word had been written as bi3yao4. So I wondered whether the 'j' in Beijing might also sometimes be pronounced as an IPA [j].