Language Log

[This is a guest post by Steven Pinker of Harvard University. —GKP]

I agree with Geoff Nunberg that the nucular pronunciation is not the result of a phonetic process that applies across the board in these dialects. It's a lexical phenomenon, though one with a phonetic motivation, and I didn't distinguish the two in my Times Op-Ed piece. In this regard I think it's related to Febuary, jewlery, iurn, purty, and Kirsten (from Christine). I also agree that there is an analogical attraction to words like binoculars, particular, circular, vascular, and muscular, but it is one that may have prevailed because the weak perception of the order of the adjacent sonorants in nuclear failed to resist the tug.

But I don't agree with other aspects of the analysis.

For a peek at what makes language — and Language Log — possible, consider this. Suppose that you stand up in front of a class of kindergarten or first-grade kids, who haven't learned to read and write yet, and tell them "Today we're going to play a game. I'll tell you a story — and any time I say 'school', the first kid that raises a hand gets a dollar."

If you tell a good story, and manage the interaction right, there'll be many occasions of group glee. (A Jon-Stewart-style hammed-up doubletake, when they miss a keyword instance, should be quite effective.)

But in general, as long as you speak clearly, most of the arguments are going to be about whose hand went up first, not about whether what you said was actually school or something else.

Now, for a peek at what makes the study of intonation difficult, imagine trying the game a different way. Instead of offering a bounty for instances of a word, ask them to raise their hands for instances of a pitch contour.

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.

Mark Liberman's post on a recent xkcd strip unleashed a flurry of comments about jokes that follow the template, "X-er? I hardly know 'er!" (The strip used "supercollider" in the template, an apparent homage to "Futurama.") Commenters were also reminded of a somewhat similar bit of musty British humo(u)r:

A: My wife's gone to the West Indies!
B: Jamaica?
A: No, she went of her own accord!

The success of the joke, such as it is, requires being able to interpret [dʒə ˈmeɪkə] as a clipped form of "Did you make her?" As I discuss in the post "Pinker's almer mater," Led Zeppelin alluded to this joke by titling a reggae-influenced song, "D'yer Mak'er" (recorded in 1972, released the following year). This non-rhotic pronunciation spelling is utterly lost on most (rhotic) American fans, who would likely be puzzled by the original joke anyway.

In my post "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008, I tried to comfort an American parent who was worried about a daughter's use of rising pitch accents on statements. As part of the recommended cognitive therapy, I observed that there are regional varieties of English, known as "Urban North British", in which rising pitch accents on statements are more common than not.

But Bob Ladd, who ought to know, commented that "It's important not to confuse the rises in Belfast, Glasgow, etc. with uptalk. They're phonetically and functionally very different."

I responded that "There's no question at all that they're *functionally* different. In terms of sound, though, I think that the issue is less clear." I asked Bob whether he thinks that the pitch contours are systematically different, and in particular whether he could "tell the difference, on short phrases whose F0 and amplitude contour was used to modulate a non-speech oscillator, in the mode of the example e.g. here?"

Bob answered: "If you make some examples, we can do the experiment, but the short answer is that I think I could as long as there is a "tail", i.e. unstressed syllables after the nucleus (last main stress) – in the sound example I posted, there are two postnuclear syllables, -mond and mine. The main phonetic difference between classic North American / Antipodean uptalk and the "Urban North British" statement rises is that the latter rise at the nuclear syllable and then level out or trail off, whereas in uptalk the pitch just keeps on rising."

We're not ready to do the experiment yet, but I can offer some evidence-based suggestions about how it's likely to turn out.

John Wells has been posting a lot of nice stuff recently on his daily phonetics blog. The current page (no permalinks yet, alas) discusses epenthesis in toponyms and similar forms — why are graduates of Harrow "Harrovians" while people from Congo are "Congolese"? And what about "Kittitian" from St. Kitts, and "Torontonian", and "tobacconist", and so on? (Some relevant socio-historical information can be found in "Who let the 'n' in?", 1/22/2006; and "Chinian, not Chinese?", 1/26/2006. You may also be interested in the theological implications of such sound-pattern irregularities.)

Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: "I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that." (Audio and discussion here.) Tonight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann interviewed Gary Miller, National Disaster Relief Operations Director for the American Red Cross, about the current situation with Gustav. Miller said:

And by people adheeding [əd'hidɪŋ] the warning and paying attention to the officials and leaving town and getting to safe areas, this makes all the difference in the world.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. He had warned that such a move might be necessary on Thursday night, at a press conference with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. A clip of Nagin speaking at the press conference was played in a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday. I've isolated some of the audio here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is, this is serious business, and
we would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation
unless we thought there was a serious threat
and I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that.

Though he clearly said [æd'hid], NPR transcribed it rather differently in its online article:

"This is serious business. We would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation unless we thought there was a serious threat," Nagin said. "And I think most people will pay heed to that."

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].

A quick follow-up on this part of Bill Poser's post on the pronunciation of Beijing (and building on Ran Ari-Gur's comment, as I discovered while composing this post):

The article mistakenly asserts that the sound [ʒ] does not occur in English. It is indeed found in English, not only in measure but in such words as azure, pleasure, leisure, and treasure. What is true is that all of the words in which it occurs are loans from French, so the sound apparently has an exotic flavor even though it has existed in English for centuries.

Some readers may be a little puzzled by this. Many if not most English speakers, I think it's fair to say, don't know that the words in question are borrowings from French, and in any event (as Bill points out), these have been English words for a very, very long time. So how is it that [ʒ] retains this 'exotic flavor' to English speakers? I don't have the definitive answer to this question, but I do know one thing that undoubtedly plays a part in that answer.

There isn't much connection between the Olympics and linguistics, but I feel compelled to point out that something that has been in the news would not be news to anyone who had studied acoustic phonetics. I refer to reports of a study showing that sprinters closer to the starting gun get off sooner than those farther away, giving them an advantage in the race.

BBC News Online's Magazine recently asked their (British) readers to call in with their best American accents, and all I can say is that I have new respect for British actors like Hugh Laurie of House who can convincingly sound American. (In a recent survey on BBC's Radio Times, voters named Laurie's American accent the best trans-Atlantic imitation on television, with Michelle Ryan of Bionic Woman the worst. However, Laurie was also voted as the fourth-worst accent, which might simply indicate the paucity of British actors on American TV who are prominent enough for people to have an opinion about.)

The article is accompanied by audio selections of Magazine readers trying to pull off American accents, as well as a clip of British voiceover artist Stuart Smith giving some dialectal approximations of the sentence, "Lucky Lily liked to live in Louisiana." You can listen and form your own judgments, but what struck me about both the amateur and professional efforts was a pervasive hyper-rhoticity, or over-/r/-fulness.

This is a nice illustration of the phenomenon I talked about in a previous post.