Language Log

The BBC has reported on a linguistic study that claims to have settled the issue of whether Neil Armstrong said "a man" as part of the first utterance from the moon: he didn't. He did intend the contrast (a small step for one individual man versus a giant leap for mankind as a species), but his speech rhythms show that he didn't pronounce the indefinite article in the first noun phrase. That's the claim. Click here for the BBC link.

Hat tip to Sam Tucker.

… in Sotomayor, blogged about by Mr. Verb, Language Hat, and Motivated Grammar.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

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.

Craig Russell, one of the commenters on my post "What sounds like a clearing of the throat", asked a question that deserves an answer:

Even though the consonantal *sound* in the middle is singular, is it really a sin (or even a mistake) to use the word "consonant" to refer to certain letters of the alphabet?

Craig went on to suggest that by implying people should use the term "consonant" for a sound type rather than a letter type I was just being a prescriptive pedant of the type I normally condemn.

Well, the short answer to his question is yes, it's a real mistake. But I'll give a longer one.

I'm reading (I don't know why) an article in The New Yorker about golf course renovation in the Outer Hebrides, and I come to this (April 20, 2009, p.38):

On South Uist, linksland is called machair, a Gaelic word. It's pronounced "mocker," more or less, but with the two central consonants represented by what sounds like a clearing of the throat.

That's one consonant in the middle there, of course — evidently a voiceless velar fricative. And I dream, Language Loggers, of a day when anyone who completed high school will be able to write "It's pronounced [ˈmaxər]," and all New Yorker readers will understand. A day when analytical knowledge about human languages is not still mired in the state it was in long before the American Civil War. Is learning the largely quite intuitive symbols of the International Phonetic Association's universal alphabet, and thus gaining an ability to represent pronunciations accurately for all the languages of the earth, so far beyond the intellectual reach of a teenager who already knows the Roman alphabet? Do we have to live forever with "what sounds like a clearing of the throat" and similar impressionistic descriptions? (It's a hopelessly wrong impression, incidentally: clearing the throat is a bronchial and laryngeal matter, not a light frication produced between the back of the tongue and the soft palate.)

A few weeks ago, I posted on some work-in-progress on speaking rate ("How fast do people talk in court?", 3/21/2009).  Since then, I've added coverage in the same style of a few thousand telephone conversations from the Switchboard Corpus.

The main motivation of this work (done jointly with Jiahong Yuan and Linda Drake) is a simple and practical one: to establish a better-grounded set of expectations about the distribution of speaking rates in various sorts of material. Beyond that, it's obvious that the the ebb and flow of conversational interaction is visible to some extent in a graphical presentation of who said how much when, entirely independent of the content.  Here's a graph of the  local speaking rate on the A and B sides of a two-person conversation, calculated in a moving 30-second window that's stepped along five seconds at a time:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

[ A dispatch from the Youth and Popular Culture Desk here at Language Log Plaza, where things have been kinda slow lately. Hat-tip to Jim Wilson. ]

It's been just over two days since Comedy Central aired the Fishsticks episode of South Park. (See the full episode here.) The basic premise: the fact that "fish sticks" kinda sounds like "fish dicks", and the assertion that this is "quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived".

A: Do you like fishsticks?
B: Yes.
A: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?
B: Yes.
A: What are you, a gay fish?

Geoff Pullum gave us a really neat lesson on Finnish short vowels a few months ago, pointing out things that nobody but native speakers have ever known — that Finns produce a subtle duration of short /Ih/ vowels that the rest of us don’t even hear. But hey, The Finnish vowel duration distinction doesn’t come close to what’s going on in a remote part of Tanzania.

A really, really short /Ih/ has been discovered by phonetic scientists who study vowel duration. Phoneticians in East Africa recently have stumbled upon the shortest vowel ever known to humankind. They discovered that the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean.

This morning, let's take a break from the analysis of headlines, and look at some phonetics research. Recently, Jiahong Yuan and I have begun working with a woman who aims to revise and improve tests that are used to certify court reporters. (For some background about the techniques and devices that the court reporters must learn to use, see here or here.)  The (preliminary) results of our (pilot) experiment may be interesting to some of you; I think that they also point to a broader opportunity for linguistic research of other kinds.

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:).

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.

Tim Footman in the Guardian offers us a routine of standard-issue over-the-top retching about pronunciations other than his own. He pretends to get so overwrought on hearing someone saying mis-chiev-i-ous on BBC Radio 4 that he shouts at the radio (while temporarily so deranged that he is unable to tell that he was the person shouting), and needs a cup of orange verbena tea to calm him down. He purports to go to the toilet and retch into the bowl when he hears someone say schedule with initial [sk-]. It's interesting that he is so linguistically unsophisticated that he doesn't know the difference between what is standard American (as opposed to British) and what is non-standard. It's the same with his commenters. It applies both to pronunciations (like schedule with [sk-]) and spellings (a commenter objects to program). The mis-chiev-i-ous pronunciation is non-standard (see the Merriam-Webster dictionary). So is somethink for "something", which he also objects to. But that is not the case with schedule (or the spelling program). Tim Footman would have us believe that he experiences actual nausea when listening to someone who does not have shed as the first syllable of the word schedule. He doesn't seem to realize that it's not just an idiosyncrasy of a class of people who don't talk right (which I suppose you could say about mis-chiev-i-ous, if you are feeling uppity and intolerant). The [sk-] is standard for American pronunciations of schedule, and common among Canadians; it's only British speakers who mostly favour the shed version of that first syllable. The [sk-] speakers must number in the hundreds of millions. Tim Footman is going to spend a lot of time on the floor of the bathroom talking to Ralph on the big white phone.