Language Log

One of the earliest and best photographers in China was called John Zumbrun, but I have also seen his surname spelled various different ways, including Zumbrum.  Some of his pictures may be seen here (this site is run by Thomas H. Hahn, digital archivist of old photographs).

As soon as I saw his surname, I suspected that it might be a variant of the Zumbrunnen among my own maternal relatives who were of Swiss German extraction.  When I mentioned to my sister Heidi (who does intense genealogical research on our family) that I thought Zumbrun might be a variant of Zumbrunnen, she replied, "Oh man, the variant spellings of Zumbrunnen are driving me batty.  I have even seen Zum Pwunnen.  Have you heard of the soundex?  It is a way to index names & deal with all of the variant spellings."

This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work.  One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

Having just returned from a month of living and teaching (in Chinese) on the Mainland (in other words, receiving an intensive dose of Putonghua), I was struck by how different Taiwan Guoyu *sounds* in this video.  It's about a subject that is dear to my heart:  the medieval caves at the Central Asian site of Dunhuang with their magnificent wall-paintings and multitudinous medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Taiwan Guoyu (National Language, i.e., Mandarin) is still basically the same language as Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) on the mainland, but the sounds and a lot of the words and typical expressions are somewhat different (judging not merely from this one short video, but from other samples, both written and spoken, as well).  And, of course, the script has radically diverged.

From Kathleen Parker in today's Washington Post:

Scene: An elevator in New York Presbyterian Hospital where several others and I were temporary hostages of a filthy-mouthed woman who was profanely berating her male companion. It wasn’t possible to discern whether he was her mate or her son, but his attire (baggy drawers) and insolent disposition seemed to suggest the latter.

Every other word out of the woman’s mouth was mother——, presumably a coincidental reference to any familial relationship. Finally, she shared with us bystanders her belief that said mother—— would not be welcome in her house (Hark! Good news at last!) and that he could very well seek shelter at his mother—-ing father’s house. Aha, family ties established.

The race and class of the woman and her companion weren't specified, but readers might have been able to divine those attributes from the particular word Parker chose to report (or was that the only vulgarity the woman used?), helped along by the setting at Broadway and 168th Street and the mentions of the separated father and in particular of the young man's "baggy drawers," which presumably were intended to convey some relevant information. (If it had been an upper-middle-class white woman screaming "motherfucker" at a phat-pantsed white preppie, communicative cooperativeness would have obliged Parker to mention that fact lest the reader draw the wrong conclusions.)

I've always found those nudge-nudge allusions to race and ethnicity immeasurably more vulgar than an explicit mention would be, in a sense of "vulgar" that's ought to be a lot more ethically troubling than the one that Parker is focused on — you think of the way people intimate someone's Jewishness by saying they're "very New York." But that's not the kicker…

The word protesters has for obvious reasons jumped into abnormally high-rotation on the news radio dial, and to my surprise, many of the members of the media (on NPR and the BBC) that I've heard use the word are pronouncing it protésters [pʰɹəˈtʰɛstɚz] rather than the way I would pronounce it, prótesters [ˈpʰɹoʊˌtʰɛstɚz]. (Please ignore the r-coloring I've indicated on the last vowel, which reflects my r-ful pronunciation; it's the difference in stress that I'm interested in.) I think I've pinpointed both the justification for pronouncing what I'll arbitrarily call "the media's way" and why I pronounce it my way; read on below the fold if you're interested, and let us know what you think in the comments.

A correspondent who had better remain nameless tells me that while dining among mostly strangers at the birthday dinner of an old friend he encountered a young woman who had an accent that he absolutely could not place anywhere on the globe. It seemed almost British, and yet not really. Eventually he just asked. She was from Northern California, but had been born in the Midwest, and she acknowledged, "Everyone always assumes I'm British or something just because I'm more careful to pronounce words properly. It only sounds unusual because everyone simply ignores how words are spelled anymore." Everyone else at the table simply nodded as though that made all the sense in the world.

In the month of Poe's death (in October 1849), and of course the month of Hallowe'en, BBC television showed a program called "Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women". As I watched it, and listened to the speaker of standard American English that they used for the readings from his poetry (as so many radio and TV programs have done before), reminded me that I have always thought the dialect Poe had in mind when he wrote The Raven couldn't possibly have been one of the rhotic ones. It has to be one of the non-rhotic New England accents. That is, I don't think anybody who pronounces nevermore with an r sound at the end is reading The Raven correctly.

The sound made by ravens and crows is not [kɔɹ], like a typical Midwesterner saying core; it is much more like [kɔ:], reminiscent of a speaker with an Oxford accent saying the word (rhyming it with the educated Southern British pronunciation of law). The repeated nevermore has to sound like that, or the poem makes no sense as far as I can see. The raven's invariant repetition of "Nevermore!" at the end of each stanza has to sound like a raven cawing. Ravens don't have postvocalic r.

In the July 12 & 19 issue of The New Yorker, there’s a nice little piece by Ben McGrath called “Spy vs. Spy: Say What?” that starts out, “Count linguists and phonologists among those bewildered by last week’s Russian spying scandal, in which the F.B.I. arrested a network of presumed Muscovite spooks who appeared to be living ordinary American lives, gardening and Facebooking and selling real estate under assumed identities.” (Never mind the problematic presupposition signaled by the conjunction ‘linguists and phonologists’.) Only an abstract of the article is in the accessible online issue, here. For the full article you need hard copy or a subscription to the digital online version.

The linguistic issue is that one of the spies explained her accent by saying she was Belgian, and another by declaring herself to be Québécois. Maria Gouskova, a UMass Ph.D. now an assistant professor at NYU and a specialist in Russian phonology, gets extensively quoted and does the profession proud, including showing that linguists and phonologists can have a sense of humor; and Ben McGrath seems to have done a fine job of writing it up, also with good quotes from Stephanie Harves and Joshua Fishman.

In a meeting the other day I heard a colleague say something that was either the first of these or the second:

A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it an aim.
A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it a name.

The Economist had some letters in the last couple of weeks from people ruminating on terrible experiences of bookstore ignorance they had encountered: someone who asked for Dickens's A Christmas Carol and was sent over to the DVDs; someone who asked for Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was told "If it's a book, it'll be over there"; and so on. I have encountered unhelpful bookstore assistants too, but I wasn't too ready to pile on with further stories, because I once (briefly) worked as a bookstore assistant. It was my first regular paying job, before I became a rock musician. And I still remember the day a middle-aged woman customer demanded to know if we had "Kreissoppa Tebberley" in stock.

Because of the awful disaster in Haiti, that country's name has been in the news, and this prompted reader RH to wonder about its English pronunciation.

I am currently watching the CNN coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and without exception the name of the country is pronounced "hatey". Surely "Hayiti", or even "Ayiti" would be better, and just as easy for the reporters to learn?