Language Log

In discussing his recent post about aspirated initial /w/ in Japanese pronunciation of English, Victor Mair asked about the historical phonetics of the strange English spelling 'wh':

I've tried repeatedly to pronounce the H part *after* the W and it seems to be virtually impossible to make such a sequence of sounds. What is it about the evolution of these WH- words in English that has led to this peculiar spelling? Weren't they all Q- words in Latin? Are they WH- words throughout Germanic? What would they have been in Proto-Indo-European?

In comments on my post about Tim Pawlenty's recent Iowa performance, various people have raised the question of vowel quality ([i] vs. [ɪ]) as opposed to consonant place ([ŋ] vs. [n]) as a feature of the phenomenon commonly (though misleadingly) known as "g-dropping".

This issue, though part of the folklore of sociolinguists, has not gotten the attention that it deserves, perhaps because it doesn't fit gracefully into the traditional intuitive frameworks of the relevant fields. In particular, it involves three areas where the boundary between symbols and signals gets blurry: vowel reduction, vowel-consonant coarticulation, and consonant-consonant assimilation.

As a result, discussing the topic will take us on a trip through some odd corners of English phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics. So consider yourself warned.

In the Feb. 12 episode of SNL, things go from basilectal some-kind-of-British to complete doubletalk:

[Hat tip: Michael Hoselton]

In a recent LL post, I wrote about Northeast and Northwest Mandarin borrowings from Russian that — in the mouths of those who are not highly literate in characters — seem to have escaped the phonotactic constraints of the sinographic script. In this post, I write about a Beijing street name that began as a sinographically writable expression, but which — again in the mouths of those whose speech is not strongly conditioned by the characters — devolved into a form that cannot readily be written in characters.

We have seen, over and over again, that the rapid spread of English in China causes consternation among language authorities there, most recently leading to the ban of English in the media. Here's one way to deal with this problem, at least in terms of superficial appearance:

[Click to see the rest of the sign.]

In a comment on yesterday's "Mele Kalikimaka" post, Eric asked:

When is a foreign sound so alien to a language that it's "disallowed"? When does a linguist–or just a transcriptionist–decide to throw her hands up and say: "these people will never get this"?

I apologize for misleading Eric by using the word "disallowed", which he seems to have taken to mean that some authorities — linguists or "transcriptionists" — have made a conscious decision to ban certain sound-patterns, or at least to stop trying to get people to say them "correctly".  And I also need to make it clear that this has no necessary connection to what people can or can't "get".

"Mele Kalikimaka" is Hawaiian for "Merry Christmas". Or, more precisely, it's the English phrase "Merry Christmas" as pronounced in Hawaiian. And it was the title of a hit song for Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in 1950:

There's also a (different) 1978 Beach Boys song, originally released as "Kona Coast", which features the same phrase: "Mele Kalikimaka / is Merry Christmas in Hawaii talk-a".

"Wait, what?" you may be asking yourself. "Mele" for "merry", OK — obviously /l/ is the closest thing to /r/ in Hawaiian, we're used to that from stereotypes (and even facts) about Japanese and other varieties of "Engrish".  But where did that kalikimaka come from?

Via The Economist's Johnson blog comes this entertaining video of the young stars of the "Harry Potter" movie franchise trying to sound American.

As pointed out by the Johnson blogger (Lane Greene), Rupert Grint goes overboard with his pronunciation of "mozzarella sticks" as "mozzareller sticks." That's a hyper-rhotic extension of "intrusive /r/," since the inserted /r/ is followed by a consonant rather than a vowel as in "law[r] and order" or "draw[r]ing." This over-/r/-fulness, what Ben Sadock calls "intrusive intrusive /r/," is frequently heard when non-rhotics try to go rhotic. For more on hyper-rhoticity and how it plagues British attempts at imitating American accents, see my Language Log post from 2008, "Botswaner and Louisianer."

Several readers have drawn my attention to this passage in an Op-Ed by Daniel Gilbert, "Magic by Numbers", NYT 10/16/2010:

The hand is not the only part of our anatomy that gives certain numbers their magical powers. The tongue does too. Because of the acoustic properties of our vocal apparatus, some words just sound bigger than others. The back vowels (the “u” in buck) sound bigger than the front vowels (the “i” in sis), and the stops (the “b” in buck) sound bigger than the fricatives (the “s” in sis). As it turns out, in well over 100 languages, the words that denote bigness are made with bigger sounds.

The sound a number makes can influence our decisions about it. In a recent study, one group was shown an ad for an ice-cream scoop that was priced at \$7.66, while another was shown an ad for a \$7.22 scoop. The lower price is the better deal, of course, but the higher price (with its silky s’s) makes a smaller sound than the lower price (with its rattling t’s).

And because small sounds usually name small things, shoppers who were offered the scoop at the higher but whispery price of \$7.66 were more likely to buy it than those offered the noisier price of \$7.22 — but only if they’d been asked to say the price aloud.

Angus Grieve-Smith writes:

I was always taught that the most straightforward way to write American diphthongs is [aj] and [aw], and the "long" mid vowels as [e] and [o]. Recently I've been seeing [ɑɪ ɑʊ ɛɪ] and [ɔʊ] popping up.  This seems to reflect at least three different changes:

(1) A shift from using [j w ɰ] to represent glides, to representing diphthongs as a series of vowel sounds.
(2) A shift to greater detail in these representations.
(3) A shift in the standard from somewhere close to my dialect (Hudson Valley) to … someplace else.

The department that it is my privilege to lead runs a colloquium series that begins this year on Thursday 30 September with a myth-busting talk by our own Professor John Joseph, about what he calls "the least understood book in the entire history of linguistics". I'll be there, and on the edge of my seat. Because I've never seen anyone try to link Indo-European comparative phonological reconstruction to bisexuality before.

Commenting on the fact that the overall speaking rate in JFK's inaugural address was 96.5 words per minute, the second slowest in the past 60 years ("Inaugural Speed", 9/14/2010), Terry Collmann noted that that Kennedy had the reputation of being a fast talker, with his inaugural address specifically cited by one authority:

Certainly his Inauguration Speech was powerful in content but Kennedy also delivered it with a rapid rate of speech.

What's going on here?

It's not very often that an observation about articulatory phonetics goes viral. Josef Fruehwald points out a rare example ("Britney Spears tongue", 8/19/2010):