Language Log

In the sentence of Obama’s speech to congress that starts at 40:12 in the NY Times video-with-transcript, he says “Afghanistan and Pakistan”, and what caught my ear was that he pronounces all three a’s in Afghanistan like the a in cat, and both of the a’s in Pakistan like the a in father.  I know there was a lot of discussion of his pronunciation of Pakistan last October (some on the right accused him of elitism or unamericansim over it, and then there was the usual blog-battle, e.g. here), but it’s just interesting that it doesn’t carry over to Afghanistan, and that in each word all the vowels are identical, showing that he doesn't have a single suffix –stan with fixed pronunciation (nor do most Americans, probably). Now I wonder how he will pronounce all the other Stans in the region. (I think in my own dialect I pronounce Kazakhstan with all three a’s as in father, but Afghanistan the way Obama did. But Pakistan that way too. Presumably depends on how old one was, and in what environment, when one learned them.)

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.

The most famous of all Finnish composers is surely Sibelius. His Latin name is that of his originally Swedish-speaking family, though he was born in Finland when it was a Grand Duchy within Russia, and his parents educated him in a Finnish-language school. In Latin (and in Swedish) the name Sibelius would have stress on the second syllable: Si.bé.li.us. But in Finnish there is an invariant rule that all words are stressed on the first syllable. So how on earth do the Finns say the name of this celebrated composer and Finnish nationalist?

I'm back, for the first time since August 2001, in Helsinki, Finland. I love this city, for all sorts of reasons. Intelligent and interesting academic friends; big, beautiful public buildings in brilliant white and yellow; the views across the harbor (hardly any of the sea is frozen today, so the big car ferries are moving with no trouble and the icebreakers are mainly up north); the comfort of the Hotel Arthur; but above all (for yes, this is Language Log, not Baltic Tourism Log) the coolest language in the world. Finnish seems wonderful to me. Delicious. Speaking the little bits of it that I can manage, or even just reading out signs, actually gives me a tingling feeling on the tongue. (Yliopistokirjakauppa: it tastes like iced champagne.) And I learned a tiny bit more about Finnish pronunciation within minutes of arrival. I thanked the taxi driver by saying kiitos ("Thank you") as I got out, carefully making the i twice as long as the o, which is what I thought was correct. But I clearly heard my friend Hanna, who had kindly come to the airport to meet me, say to the driver what sounded to my ear more like kitos. As soon as we got inside the hotel I asked her, what's up? Why was her first-syllable vowel shorter than mine? And like a solid linguist she was able to answer me instantly and authoritatively.

In earlier posts on the final-rising intonation patterns known as "uptalk", I've commented that "there are many conflicting assertions about its phonetic shape as well as its social distribution and its contextual function, but surprisingly few published examples that we can use to evaluate these claims", at least with respect to the North American version. So as I notice notice relevant examples in publications like archived radio shows, I've been documenting them here.

A couple of other examples turned up yesterday, in a "Radio Gift" segment on NPR's Day to Day program: "Dr. Boots Tries A No-Insurance Model", about Elizabeth Crowley, a doctor in New Jersey who decided to stop taking health insurance payments. (There's more background here, and the featured doctor also has a blog that's well worth reading.)

At one point toward the end of my post (here) on the Blagojevich affair, I made a bad linguistic mistake. And on a cute and moderately interesting point. In brief (I have little time this morning), for unknown reasons but in a fairly well studied way, expletive insertion inside words in English works prosodically only when there is a weak stress somewhere before the insertion point and a strong stress immediately after it: I'm not going to KALama-fuckin'-ZOO!. It doesn't work when there is only an unstressed syllable before (so ^?I'm not going to Chi-fuckin'-CAgo is nowhere near as good, because Chi- is too light), and it is hopeless when the stress (say, because it is on the first syllable) has to precede the insertion (*I'm not going to ABi-fuckin'-lene). The remaining details will quite probably be explained here by one of the Language Log phonologists (you could even read quite a bit about the details in a paper by Arnold Zwicky and me, item no. 124 here). Here's my mistake: I don't know Serbian, and I get my news mainly from print. And at the point when I wrote, I thought the name was Blago-JE-vich. It isn't. It's Bla-GO-jevich. The readers who have objected in comments on Ben's latest post are correct: I put the insultingly inserted expletive into his name in the wrong place.

In previous posts on "uptalk" in America, I've noted that there there are many conflicting assertions about its phonetic shape as well as its social distribution and its contextual function, but surprisingly few published examples that we can use to evaluate these claims. So from time to time, I've documented real-world examples on this blog. Such anecdotes are not a substitute for a systematic and demographically balanced study, but they're better than nothing.

However, you could argue that my posts on the subject have been, so to speak, demographically anti-balanced. In order to debunk stereotypes about the distribution of this intonation, I've often chosen strikingly counter-stereotypical uptalkers, like President Bush. So in the interest of equal time for stereotypes, this post documents some examples from the stereotypical sweet spot of the uptalk demographic — prepubescent girls.

A reader from France, SW, wrote to ask some questions about English intonation:

It is with great interest that I discovered your posts on ‘uptalk’ on Language Log, in which you briefly retrace the history of the study of the phenomenon. In several of these posts, you highlight the fact that the association of uptalk with unassertiveness and tentativeness is unfounded, to say the least.

May I ask you if you thereby intend to correct the view propagated by somewhat simplistic newspaper articles, or if you are also disputing the views held by certain linguists?

(I would like to specify that my question is by no means meant to be polemical. I am currently doing research on language change and suprasegmental innovations in Leeds, where young people have recently been observed to use rising tones (UNB rises, not HRTs) at the end of declaratives, and I am trying to obtain information about the history of research on uptalk.)

I also noticed that you had entitled one of your posts ‘uptalk is not HRTs’. Could I ask you what difference you would then make between uptalk and HRTs (I had hitherto assumed that Alan Cruttenden and Robert Ladd established a clear difference between UNB rises on the one hand, and HRTs, *that is, uptalk*, on the other hand).

These questions and their answers are a bit more "inside baseball" than usual for Language Log — but perhaps some readers will be interested, and the rest of you are hereby warned to move along to another post.

Why, for heaven's sake, do journalists simply make stuff up when the science involved in a story is linguistic science? When the photos of those planets orbiting HR 8799 in Pegasus appeared this week, the press reported correctly that the objects in question were gas giants like Jupiter. They didn't say that they were giant balls of feathers. But when writing about the death of the late lamented South African singer Miriam Makeba, The Economist asserted that "she could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language". Bob Ladd has pointed out to me that actually there are two asinine howlers in this. One, which I didn't immediately notice, is that we don't speak about Edith Piaf as being able to sing while making the uvular trills of the French language, because those sounds are part of the French language: they are perfectly ordinary consonants (r-sounds). She sings words that contain them, and if she didn't, she wouldn't be singing the right words. Well, the clicks of Xhosa are (for Xhosa speakers) perfectly ordinary consonants too. But the other thing is more serious: "epiglottal clicks" are a phonetic impossibility. In brief, clicks are produced with a suction action using the middle of the tongue, and the back of the tongue completely seals off the airway during a click. The epiglottis is way down near the larynx. It is literally impossible for there to be a click (i.e., velaric suction stop) articulated at or with the epiglottis. There are epiglottal sounds in some languages, but they are not clicks; and Xhosa doesn't have any epiglottals. The (anonymous) obituarist was simply slinging around phonetic terminology they had come across but did not understand. Shame on you, Economist. Hire a fact-checker. Or look things up on Wikipedia. Or ask Language Log.

For your edification and amusement: An articulator-based, rather than acoustic, speech synthesis device.

The original context, here on Botjunkie, says that the ultimate goal is a voice compression system for cellphones. I'm a bit confused about this — I *think* that the idea is that representing speech articulatorily will be less data-intensive than representing it acoustically, but that seems wildly improbable to me.

Here's the description of the system on the Takanishi Labs page. Amazingly, they even have a rubber set of vocal cords at work! (scroll down to see them in action).

No matter how hard I try to locate the world's most stupid animal communication story, they keep outflanking me. I am always left behind. An even stupider one always comes along. All I can say as of this morning is that I never thought I would see a story as stupid as this in a respected news source, and right now I cannot imagine how it could be surpassed (though within a few weeks I suppose it probably will be). The Economist has published (10/25/08:103) a review of a new book called Alex & Me in which Dr Irene Pepperberg tells the story of her scientific life with Alex the grey parrot (see here and here for a couple of Alex's earlier appearances on Language Log Classic). The Economist has already shown a certain affection for Alex's story: it devoted its obituary of the week to Alex when he died in 2007. The review calls the new book "a memoir of two unusual scientific careers, one of them pursued — not exactly by choice — by a bird." Now, I should make it clear that I do not have the book. If this merited scholarly investigation I would of course obtain it; but given what I know so far, I am deeply reluctant to part with $23.95 to get hold of a trade book for sentimental parrot fanciers (the subtitle is: "How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence — And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process"). So I will simply tell you about the stunningly stupid part of the review, and leave it to you to determine, if you care to, whether the review misrepresents the book on this point. But I warn you, especially if you know a little elementary articulatory phonetics, that this one will boggle your mind. Are you prepared to face the rest of the day with a boggled mind? Then read on.

I really like Mark's "empathetic -in'" in place of "g-dropping," though it may require a public campaign to make the substitution. Just by way of a footnote to that post, I did a "Fresh Air" piece on accent and authenticity last week which ended with some comments on the development of Palin's g-dropping (with video clips) and concluded she has learned over the years to do it in roughly the same sorts of contexts that Obama does. Here's the last part of that piece:

Steve Pinker understates the case when he says that there's a master's thesis in "nucular" studies: I envision dissertations, conferences, endowed chairs, journals, broken marriages…