What sounds like a clearing of the throat
« previous post | next post »
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.)
Craig Russell said,
April 18, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
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?
[Yes, Craig. But the matter is tangled enough to deserve a separate post, which I will write in due course. Keep watching the Language Log front page… —GKP]
Yes, I know that there is a big difference between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that they (imperfectly, sometimes indirectly) represent. But it seems to me that, protests of the academic linguistic world notwithstanding, most people in normal spoken or written English are pretty comfortable using the word "consonant" to refer directly to written letters of the alphabet. The OED entry on 'consonant' affirms that this is the earliest sense in which the word was used, and is still at least as common as the other.
Not that I don't take your larger point–that general knowledge about linguistics is comparatively poor. But the larger question this raises for me (and it has come upon on Language Log many times before, if only in comments) is: does the lofty academic community of specialists in a field have the right to take a word in common use (in this case, 'consonant'), restrict its definition, and then bemoan the ignorance of the public when it's not used only in this restricted sense?
Is saying "technically, this is only one consonant" really any different from the prescriptive cries of "technically, that should be 'whom', not 'who'" or "technically, you can't say she has a *unique* talent for getting to the heart of the matter, since she's not the *one and only* person who has it"?
J. said,
April 18, 2009 @ 12:54 pm
>> Is learning the largely quite intuitive symbols of the International Phonetic Association's universal alphabet … so far beyond the intellectual reach of a teenager … ?
Maybe. If that teenager wants to be an 'Americanist' when s/he grows up.
How about linguists settle on a single standard, then whine about the hoi polloi not picking it up.
jsf said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:01 pm
Don't hold your breath. No one seems to have the slightest problem with making up facts about language and failing to consult with experts. I have to imagine that in making a claim about, say, the universe, The New Yorker would talk with an physicist, or at least consult a book.
While searching for your other appearances on NPR after listening to "A Half-Century Of 'Stupid Grammar Advice'", I ran across this gem of language ignorance: Mayan Language Poses Challenge for Outsiders
Knowing a bit of several Mayan languages, it was news to me that they lacked vowels. And apparently, the Spaniards wrote the Mayan voiceless palato-alveolar fricative (don't get your hopes up; this terminology is not used) with 'x' because they had no letter to express this sound.
As long as respectable sources feel free to bullshit (technical sense) about language, and as long as facts have no place in public discourse, I can't see a change in the educational system in the near future. Why learn a subject when you can just make up facts and give impressionistic descriptions? (Aristotle's impressionistic mechanics worked fine for over a millenium; maybe schools should go back to teaching it.)
Ryan Denzer-King said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:06 pm
They have settled on a single standard: IPA. That's not to say that every linguist uses IPA for transcription in every situation. I (and I think many other linguists) do not believe that there can exist a single transcription method is the most useful and appropriate in every possible language context. However, that's what IPA is for. It's a single agreed-upon standard that we can use to clarify any and all other transcription methods. Not to mention, Americanist is hardly at all different from IPA, and arose before the advent of computers that could easily switch fonts. While my own Salishan research has left me with a soft spot for the Americanist transcription method, there's no reason we can't use IPA instead.
Anonymous said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
The IPA is a standard.
dw said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
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.
Wikipedians are doing their best, although it's a more-or-less constant struggle against an attitude that "these weird symbols are way too confusing and no one understands them". See e.g.this discussion.
Catanea said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
Could we not say, There are two consonants in the middle of the word "machair" which produce the consonant sound /x/ ? Clearly separating conventional English/Latin alphabet orthography from technical pronunciation notation? Might that make it easier for specialists to communicate more widely?
[This is exactly the opposite of the right way to go, as I will argue in a later post. It implies we should think of letters as being divided into consonants and vowels, and as "producing" sounds, rather than (imperfectly) representing sounds. Both are moves in highly confusing directions. —GKP]
Q. Pheevr said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:24 pm
In the meantime, before everyone becomes literate in the IPA, one might simply write that the Scots Gaelic word machair is pronounced approximately like the word macher, a borrowing into English from Yiddish which I expect is familiar to a reasonably large proportion of New Yorker readers.
[Exactly right: "like Yiddish macher" would have caused no confusion and would need no impressionistic nonsense about clearing bronchial or laryngeal mucus. The fact is that The New Yorker does careful fact checking on nearly everything, but not anything about linguistics. The field in which you can just make stuff up. —GKP]
Soroush said,
April 18, 2009 @ 1:55 pm
My last name has a [x] in it, imagine the pain that I'm in every day. People just pronounce it as [k].
Sili said,
April 18, 2009 @ 2:50 pm
Singularly bad advice for those of us who aim for some semblance of RP – The spelling "mocker" made me think it had /ɔ/.
Stephen Jones said,
April 18, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
I have a copy of the phonemic alphabet stuck next to the chalkboard, as well as in a couple of other places in the room. The brighter students have already clicked that the reason for it being where it is is so I can refer to it if I need to write a phonemic spelling on the board.
rpsms said,
April 18, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
It's more like the preliminary sound of hocking a loogie?
[This may be disgusting, rpsms, but it's pretty much correct. And in this context your correctitude must be acknowledged as more important than your disgustitude. —GKP]
Jonathan Badger said,
April 18, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
I'm reading (I don't know why) an article in The New Yorker about golf course renovation in the Outer Hebrides
Sure you do — The New Yorker makes stories about even the most boring topics seem interesting. I remember a few months back there was one about *elevators* for crying out loud. And yet it held my attention.
[I know, I know. I'm not interested in free-solo climbing of skyscrapers either, but the article by Lauren Collins about Alain Robert had me sweating under the arms and clinging white-knuckled to the chair. Riveting. —GKP]
Daniel von Brighoff said,
April 18, 2009 @ 3:47 pm
It's a beautiful dream, but we don't even live in a world where I can post phonetic notation on boards and groups specifically for language enthusiasts without meeting resistance. I've lost track of how many posters are "trying to learn IPA" but in the meantime "just want it spelled phonetically".
So I'd settle for "but with a voiceless velar fricative in the middle" and readers who care can look it up–just as I have to research the names of obscure government agencies or financial instruments if I want to make sense of other sections of the paper.
marie-lucie said,
April 18, 2009 @ 3:55 pm
I'm reading (I don't know why) an article in The New Yorker about golf course renovation in the Outer Hebrides
It's because us "voracious readers" (or perhaps better, "reading addicts") can't bear to see reading matter lying unread when we have time to read it, and even when we don't.
D.O. said,
April 18, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
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.
It's a joke, right? My college freshman and not-so-freshman students have hard time of remembering and distinguishing between Greek letters for god's sake.
[It's not a joke. You could teach the IPA's alphabet to pre-teens, and they would love it. Certainly it is reasonable to think it might be standard for all college students to know it. And the idea that your college students can't remember a few Greek letters? There are 24 in all (Greek letters, that is, not students), many of them reminiscent of Roman, and the writing system is in full-scale use today all over Greece, which is to say the least worth visiting, and it is also crucial for reading anything serious in mathematics or logic or theoretical computer science… If we start accepting the notion that we cannot expect students in a university to become fully conversant with a couple of extra alphabets, we will be letting them down. —GKP]
Words Between the Spaces said,
April 18, 2009 @ 5:16 pm
I had the same reaction–about reading the article itself, not the linguistics aspect. It all sounds too technical for the lay reader. I understood what the writer was trying to say with the pronunciation, but I don't fully understand your point.
[You don't understand my point? I'm saying that without being a civil engineer you know how to say "suspension bridge", and a writer who described a suspension bridge as "a kind of long flat thingy hanging from a couple of massive straight-up poles by a whole lot of huge cable thingies so cars could cross the river by driving on the flat bit" would be taken as a moron, but a writer who is seriously trying to describe the pronunciation of a word gives a much less accurate description than that and he gets published in The New Yorker, and I say this indicates there is something wrong with the culture. Do I make myself clear yet? —GKP]
Philip said,
April 18, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
Language teachers, whether they teach English, Spanish, or French, and at whatever level, from elementary school to college, have degrees in–duh–English, Spanish, or French. Problem is, a degree in English, Spanish, or French means you've studied the history of French literature, Spanish literature, or British and American literature. Teaching a language to non-native speakers (or teaching freshman composition) is something much different.
Here's a simple example: Imagine a French teacher tearing his hair out because his students can't seem to hear, let alone pronounce, the difference in the vowel sound in the French word "lune" and the English word "loon." To the students, they are homophones.
If the same teacher knew a little contrastive phonology, he'd be able to explain: "English has a high front vowel. It's the /iy/ sound in 'beet.' The vowel sound in 'lune' is also high front vowel, but it's rounded. So to pronounce the vowel sound in "lune," make the /iy/ sound in "beet," and then round your lips like you're going to whistle.
Voila.
acilius said,
April 18, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
Why wait until high school to introduce IPA? Surely the sooner the students start learning the alphabet, the better their grasp of it will be at the end of the day.
[I agree with you, Andy. —GKP]
Mark Liberman said,
April 18, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
Jonathan Badger: . I remember a few months back there was one about *elevators* for crying out loud. And yet it held my attention.
I should hope so — elevators are an intrinsically interesting topic, with many fascinating historical, practical, and theoretical aspects.
John Lawler said,
April 18, 2009 @ 7:24 pm
@ acilius:
>Why wait until high school to introduce IPA? Surely the sooner the students start learning the alphabet, the better their grasp of it will be at the end of the day.
Precisely.
So, for those in grades 0-4, here is The English Phonemic Alphabet, which is almost all of IPA that Anglophone students need to learn (until they start another language, and then most of it carries over), with an example text suitable for distributing in primary schools.
Ellen said,
April 18, 2009 @ 7:26 pm
Philip, if the teacher isn't a native speaker, then they too had to learn the sounds at some point. And my impression is most language teachers are not native speakers. I still remember the method by which I was taught to say the Spanish r and rr correctly, and if I were a teacher, I'd use the same method to teach my students.
Simon Cauchi said,
April 18, 2009 @ 7:38 pm
@Mark Liberman
Could you or someone else please tell us more about the Turkish lift industry, discussed in the April issue of Elevator World. What's special, if anything, about a Turkish lift, except that its name is borrowed from the French (asansör)?
Simon Cauchi said,
April 18, 2009 @ 7:44 pm
@John Lawler
Re the phonemic transcription of "Good night cow jumping over the moon"
In which dialect of English is the first vowel of "jumping" a schwa? Not in mine, for sure!
marie-lucie said,
April 18, 2009 @ 7:57 pm
@Simon Cauchi: In which dialect of English is the first vowel of "jumping" a schwa?
Usually the "caret" (inverted v) is used for the stressed central vowel (as in but or jump) and the schwa for the unstressed one, as in about or Laura. But the pseudo-phonetic transcription (found in many schoolbooks) as described by Roger Shuy (mentalist as "men-tuh-list") uses "uh" to represent schwa, with the same letter "u" as for but and jump. This means that there isn't usually much difference between the two.
marie-lucie said,
April 18, 2009 @ 8:24 pm
sounds like a clearing in the throat:
I am not an American but I am surprised that such a description should appear in the New Yorker rather than the National Enquirer. Surely most readers of the New Yorker know the name of Johann Sebastian Bach and have heard it many times pronounced correctly, and they would have no trouble identifying the sound meant by "the ch in Bach" (a commonly used description). Similarly, many of those readers know some Spanish and would be familiar with "the sound of j in Spanish". "Throat-clearing" does not do a service to readers by failing to identify a sound which exists in languages that they can be expected to have some knowledge of. Is the author of the article completely out of touch with the American scene? in that case, what is the editor there for?
dw said,
April 18, 2009 @ 8:31 pm
In which dialect of English is the first vowel of "jumping" a schwa? Not in mine, for sure!
Not in mine, either. I believe that some Scottish, and possibly Canadian, accents have this merger so that, for example, only prosodic factors would distinguish "children" from "chilled run". I don't think this is true of most Americans.
I was interested to see the low back vowel used as the starting point of the "mouth" and "price" diphthongs. For what American accents is this the case?
John Lawler said,
April 18, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
@ Simon Cauchi
As Marie-Lucie pointed out, there is no contrast between the stressed caret [ʌ] of the first syllable of jumping and the unstressed final shwa [ə] of (for example) Jenna. Caret is always stressed, shwa always unstressed in English. In other words, they are allophones of the same phoneme in English and therefore should use the same phonemic symbol. The custom of differentiating the stressed and unstressed allophones of the English shwa phoneme by using two different phonetic (not phonemic) symbols is usually done in a vain attempt to avoid confusing linguistics students. (Personally, I blame Fromkin and Rodman.)
When I composed this piece, I determined to use phonemic symbols exclusively, since it wasn't designed for people who already knew how to read, and possibly even knew phonetics. It was designed to pass out to kindergartners so they could read a poem they already knew, and see how reading works.
My experience is that they pick it up a lot faster than adults if you stay out of their way. It's a lot easier to read, for one thing, if you already know the poem, as most American children do.
Andrew said,
April 18, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
There is also the question of how much of the IPA they need to learn. Before I started grad school, I had only learned what was necessary for English. Then, in a phonetics class, I had to learn quite a lot more, but I somehow imagine that trying to teach all those highschoolers all those vowels, how to pronounce the implosives, ejectives, and a rudimentary idea of clicks might be a bit much. Would they also need to know about various types of co-articulation as well and the symbols for those? They'd probably forget most of it anyway.
But there are definitely a number of occasions where it would be nice if people had a basic understanding of at least the sounds in English and, possibly, language that they are likely to encounter not too infrequently.
Mark said,
April 18, 2009 @ 11:07 pm
"As Marie-Lucie pointed out, there is no contrast between the stressed caret [ʌ] of the first syllable of jumping and the unstressed final shwa [ə] of (for example) Jenna. Caret is always stressed, shwa always unstressed in English."
The only reason to single out caret (that I can see) is that it is the one that happens to be nearest to schwa. Show me an example where [æ] shows up in an unstressed syllable, rather than schwa.
Mark said,
April 18, 2009 @ 11:19 pm
Oh, also I forgot to mention: there is a contrast between schwa and caret in English: the words [dʒʌst] and [dʒəst]. The former includes the meaning of "justice" (as well as "nearly/barely"), while the latter is restricted to the "nearly/barely" meaning only (think of the sentence "just a sec" — that "just").
Notice how it is perfectly possible to say "I just got here!" pronouncing [dʒəst], with focus (and therefore stress) on the word "just", maintaining the schwa. (You can, of course, pronounce the caret version if you so choose.)
Now try to say "The judge's verdict was a just one", using [dʒəst]. It doesn't work! The word here is [dʒʌst] and must have the caret if it is stressed.
marie-lucie said,
April 18, 2009 @ 11:39 pm
@Andrew: I don't think the suggestion is to teach the whole IPA but the symbols necessary for English and, as you say, for afew other common sounds in other languages. There is no need to go into too much detail.
dw said,
April 18, 2009 @ 11:53 pm
In other words, [/ə/ and /ʌ/] are allophones of the same phoneme in English and therefore should use the same phonemic symbol.
When I first saw this, it just seemed ridiculous (I speak roughly RP). But I guess that the reasoning goes as follows:
* The "nurse" vowel can be phonemicized as /ər/ in many North American accents
* In most accents outside North America, "furry" goes with "nurse" and "hurry" goes with "strut". But in most North American accents these are merged.
* So /ə/ is used for the "strut" vowel.
Of course, from the point of view of an RP speaker, or of most speakers without the "furry"/"hurry" merger, one might just as well say that /æ/ is an allophone of /ə/, since they don't contrast either.
mute traveler said,
April 19, 2009 @ 1:03 am
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.
Yes! And then Lonely Planet and ilk can stop publishing phrasebooks and travel guides whose transcriptions attempt to represent speech sounds that don't occur in English using English spelling rules! If they'd just use the IPA one could stand a better chance of approximating the correct pronunciation (if one had just the phrasebook as a guide).
[Absolutely right. Those idiosyncratic pronunciation guide schemes are such a pain. Every single one of them follows different rules. And this is supposed to make it easier for us than learning a few dozen symbols with clear denotations? —GKP]
Tadeusz said,
April 19, 2009 @ 3:28 am
I think that quite a number of issues got oversimplified in this discussion. First, in a monolingual community, whose members do not want to learn other languages, or do not feel any need to do so, there is really no need to learn the phonetic symbols. I take it that lots of Americans are such speakers (some say: most Americans).
Second, the use of phonetic symbols is not as straightforward as it seems. For RP, for example, the symbols do not represent the phonetic reality (for vowels) but are a reflex of the tradition. The use of the term schwa for the stressed vowel can also be a reflex of this tradition: Daniel Jones, the British phonetician. used the same symbol for the stressed and the unstressed vowel, the only difference was the length sign. It made sense to talk about a long schwa and a short schwa. Quite a lot of dictionaries used the Jones notation, and some still use it, because it uses fewer symbols than Gimson's notation. John Wells in his Pronunciation Dictionary has another set of symbols. Therefore the complaint about the lack of a standard is justified.
Nicholas Clayton said,
April 19, 2009 @ 3:56 am
Some other of us dream of the day when people who want to refer to the 'polloi' learn that 'hoi' is the definite article.
Sravana said,
April 19, 2009 @ 3:58 am
Tadeusz: but that's where this whole discussion arose. However monolingual most Americans are, they're going to encounter words in other languages, though proper names at the very least. They may not ever learn to produce these sounds perfectly, but wouldn't it be great if they at least knew what they were?
I grew up in India, and learnt the Devanagari alphabet at a fairly young age. What's great about the alphabet is that it is more or less ordered by phonetic features. Although it is obvious even to someone with no exposure to linguistics that there's an underlying system to the ordering, it's sad is that not one teacher pointed this out. The alphabet could have been completely arbitrary, for all anyone cared.
joseph palmer said,
April 19, 2009 @ 8:28 am
I wish representatives of incestuous-minded academics, from their very numerous respective narrow fields, would have an open fight about the things from their field that ought to be drilled into school kids on top of the current hopeless drilling. I doubt the linguists would win. They unfairly get too much air-time for their jargon anyway in the household dictionary, which they write.
Tadeusz said,
April 19, 2009 @ 8:45 am
@Sravana
The happy monolingual will read the foreign names in his/her own fashion, which is the only natural way anyway. Why should a speaker of English pronounce the final /x/ in Bach if it is against the constraints of the phonological system (of RP and GA at least)? And some languages are far more complex phonetically than German (for a speaker of English).
@Joseph
I do agree. Though I am a lexicographer/linguist :-) You can't learn everything there is to be learnt.
Tadeusz said,
April 19, 2009 @ 9:01 am
GP closed off the comments on his answer to some of the replies above. I do agree with him that the way (meta)linguistic knowledge is regarded is woefully inadequate but one of the answers why it is so is coded in the term metalinguistic knowledge. There is a huge chasm between knowing a language and knowing something about this language. While the former seems natural, the latter seems elitist and arcane. From this it follows that your language is in you, is a part of you, your metalinguistic knowledge is outside you. Any "natural" explanation of a foreign language by a lay person is couched in terms of what the person can do (linguistically and non linguistically) and what the language seems to the person — as seen from within her/his language. For someone skilled in an "objective" way of looking at languages (always as outside objects to be analyzed) that seems stupid. But that way of moving outside your own language and looking at your language and another language as similar objects to be described is something to be learnt. It does not come naturally. Which, I hope, explains a lot.
Words Between the Spaces said,
April 19, 2009 @ 9:03 am
Crystal clear now. Thanks for the explanation. I won't bother you again.
#
I had the same reaction–about reading the article itself, not the linguistics aspect. It all sounds too technical for the lay reader. I understood what the writer was trying to say with the pronunciation, but I don't fully understand your point.
[You don't understand my point? I'm saying that without being a civil engineer you know how to say "suspension bridge", and a writer who described a suspension bridge as "a kind of long flat thingy hanging from a couple of massive straight-up poles by a whole lot of huge cable thingies so cars could cross the river by driving on the flat bit" would be taken as a moron, but a writer who is seriously trying to describe the pronunciation of a word gives a much less accurate description than that and he gets published in The New Yorker, and I say this indicates there is something wrong with the culture. Do I make myself clear yet? —GKP]
#
Mark F. said,
April 19, 2009 @ 9:30 am
Every academic thinks it's a scandal that their own field isn't better understood by the public at large. I'm not sure why knowing the IPA symbol for the ch in Bach is like knowing the name 'suspension bridge', rather than like knowing the particular name for big cables that go between the vertical supports.
Dan T. said,
April 19, 2009 @ 10:14 am
One of the links somebody included above referred to "The Basis of Elevatoring a Building"; that's the first time I've seen "elevator" used as a verb.
Ellen said,
April 19, 2009 @ 10:28 am
I'm surprised by the contention that "sounds like a clearing of the throat" is inaccurate. I guess it depends on how one clears ones throat. It certainly sounds nothing like a cough. But clearing one's throat can sound like that.
Robert Coren said,
April 19, 2009 @ 12:46 pm
I was quite surprised to read that sentence; while I don't expect The New Yorker to be using IPA, I would expect its writers, editors, and readers to be able to deal with something along the lines of "like the ch in loch" (or Bach, or any number of other possible examples).
Mark F. said,
April 19, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
It is very unlikely that Owen was trying to describe what he believed to be a "sequence of sounds" in his description of the ch in 'machair'. Most English speakers think of the ch in 'cheap' as representing a single consonant sound (even if it's really a t followed by a sh), and in words like 'chimera' and (for many speakers) 'Bach', it comes out as a k. So English speakers are already used to thinking of ch as a pair of letters that generate a single consonant sound.
I also don't think it's incoherent to divide the letters of the alphabet into vowels and consonants. It's a kind of metonymy. Furthermore, it's the way people use the language. If you want to tell people when to use 'an' instead of 'a', you have to say it depends on whether the next word begins with a vowel sound. If you just say "begins with a vowel", people won't reliably get it.
Alissa said,
April 19, 2009 @ 5:09 pm
I don't think it's too much for kids to learn the IPA in school, nor is it useless. People have previously brought up things like phrasebooks, but even dictionaries would be easier to use if we all knew one common phonetic alphabet. I was never taught how to use the pronunciation guides in most (American at least) dictionaries and I always felt like that was a gap in my knowledge. Especially for speakers of English, a language where pronunciation isn't always obvious for the spelling, learning the IPA is a very useful skill.
It wouldn't even take that long to learn the symbols for English at least, though there would be the problem of different dialects. You could even do it by giving a lesson on the symbols, then giving the students familiar phrases written in IPA for them to decipher. While students would really only need to know the symbols for English, some common sounds from other languages could be taught, and I imagine that kids in school would have at least as much fun doing that as college students in an intro to linguistics class.
marie-lucie said,
April 19, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
Mark F:
Most English speakers think of the ch in 'cheap' as representing a single consonant sound. I am not so sure. The same sound is also written tch as in witch and watch.
If you want to tell people when to use 'an' instead of 'a', you have to say it depends on whether the next word begins with a vowel sound. If you just say "begins with a vowel", people won't reliably get it.
But some people have no idea of what you are talking about by "a vowel sound" rather than a vowel. A vowel for them means one of the letters a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y that they see written down (and "sometimes y" is not always explained, so good luck with year or yarn according to that definition). Actually the rule is stated backwards: it should be "a word begins with a vowel sound if you would use anrather than a in front of it". Unfortunately that leaves out a number of words, such as verbs and adverbs, which never have an article in front of them.
Ellen said,
April 19, 2009 @ 11:20 pm
Are there really people who can't figure out that "a vowel sound" refers to those sounds spelled with the vowel letters? Seems pretty simple to figure out to me.
kelly said,
April 19, 2009 @ 11:32 pm
"I wish representatives of incestuous-minded academics, from their very numerous respective narrow fields, would have an open fight about the things from their field that ought to be drilled into school kids on top of the current hopeless drilling. I doubt the linguists would win. They unfairly get too much air-time for their jargon anyway in the household dictionary, which they write."
I agree with this statement, as a third-year university student, had I not taken a spontaneous elective class this previous semester, I could have graduated with an English degree and never received even an introduction to the IPA. The university requires students to take classes from a variety of disciplines, yet linguistics still has a long way to go before it becomes one of these requirements.
D.O. said,
April 20, 2009 @ 1:28 am
I have no idea how the early school education works, but it seems to me quite strange to teach young children alphabet with which they will not actually read. I mentioned previously Greek letters and GKP correctly replied that If we start accepting the notion that we cannot expect students in a university to become fully conversant with a couple of extra alphabets, we will be letting them down. Of course we must! And idea of going through a university without knowledge of Greek alphabet is a mockery of education. My point is that there is so much to teach students as we know them that IPA can not be the first priority. Is it possible to introduce IPA with a study of foreign language in school where it might give a lot of good for the study itself and for better understanding of one's own language? And yes, everybody should learn at least one foreign language in the school. I am telling it as a die-hard science type.
Peter Harvey said,
April 20, 2009 @ 6:04 am
Back in the 1960s I was greatly influenced in my development as a teenage linguist by a book called Language Made Plain by Anthony Burgess. He made exactly the same point: that knowledge of language and how to talk and write about it, including the IPA symbols, should be taught in schools.
Nothing has happened, of course.
acilius said,
April 20, 2009 @ 11:12 am
@John Lawler: I like your "Modest Proposal" very much. May I use it in a class? I would give my students the link to your pdf, I wouldn't print it.
wally said,
April 20, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
@Simon Cauchi
What I find interesting about the Turkish lift industry is this:
Everybody in Istanbul lives in a 10 story apartment building.
All the buildings have elevators of course.
But none of the elevators are accessable on the ground floor.
You have to walk up say 8-10 steps to get to the elevator.
So the elevators are useless to folks in a wheel chair or who are otherwise mobility impaired.
marie-lucie said,
April 21, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
Some people talk about using the IPA symbols in schools as if there was an entirely new alphabet to learn, as alien as for instance the Arabic one. But a) most of the symbols required for English are already in the alphabet: among consonants, that means b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y (16 of the 26 usual letters), and b) there is no reason to go beyond the ones necessary for English at the beginning. It would be easier to start with such as simplified alphabet and then gradually introduce the regular spelling than do the opposite, since the simplified spelling would enable children to at least get the concept of reading (associating sounds with characters) faster than most of them do now, thus fostering their self-confidence in both reading and writing. There have been serious proposals to that effect (using symbols slightly different from the IPA, but the principle is the same), and I believe that pilot projects have been successful where they have been tried, but educational authorities tend to be very conservative, when they are not foolishly adopting time-wasting, non-working methods (such as Whole Language) under the recommendation of "experts" who have not really tested them.
Children around the ages of 9-12, who are very confident in speaking their own language (witness the fascination of Pig Latin and similar language games among that age group), usually like to learn things about other languages (and to learn other languages when properly taught), and they have not yet reached the ceiling for accurate acquisition of foreign pronunciations, so that they would probably be very interested in learning how to produce and write new sounds. I started to learn English at the age of 10, and our teacher (an excellent one) taught us the necessary IPA symbols, not by themselves but as a complement to regular spelling, since the latter is not a reliable guide to pronunciation, especially for vowels.
Steve Harris said,
April 22, 2009 @ 2:55 pm
@ Mark:
I am completely fuddled by the distinction between caret and schwa, at least in terms of pronunciation of the word "just". For me, there is only one way to pronounce "just" (except that in hurried usage, it might come out more like the word "gist"). In particular, "Just a minute" and "The vedict was just" have the exact same pronunciation (rhyming with "must")–not only for me, but in any dialect of English I can call to mind. (I am N. American.)
On the other hand, I understand the distinction between "children" and "chilled run". Is that the schwa/caret distinction?
Re: the original article. Can a Scots speaker please explain if "machair" is pronounced with the same consonant as ends German "Bach" (which isn't remotely like a throat-clearing sound)? Or is it something that comes from lower down, that might actually be reasonably described as throat-clearing?
marie-lucie said,
April 22, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
SH: I understand the distinction between "children" and "chilled run". Is that the schwa/caret distinction?
Yes.
Ellen said,
April 23, 2009 @ 10:54 am
Seems to me the main distinction between "children" and "chilled run" is stress, not vowel sound.
Steve Harris said,
April 23, 2009 @ 12:55 pm
"Seems to me the main distinction between "children" and "chilled run" is stress, not vowel sound."
I can pronounce "children" with what I take to be the same vowel as in "chilled run", but unstressed; but that is not my normal pronunciation. Giving it the unstressed /run/ pronunciation strikes me as a British pronunciation, likely to come from a non-rhotic governess, "Children, come here!"
Rather, my natural pronunciation of "children" has the last syllable an extremely colorless vowel, so dominated by the /r/ as to be essentially unseparable from the /r/ in my ears. And that makes me suspect that I'm not appreciating the schwa sound from that word.
If I recall correctly, some sources say there are two vowels which are often called schwa (as represented, for instance, in dictionaries): one which is the unstressed form of the vowel in "pun", the other being the unstressed form of the vowel in "pin". If I were to choose between those, it's the unstressed "pin" vowel I use in "children"; and, in fact, I think I do use that sound sometimes, in alternation with a vowel so unstressed as to be indeterminable.
Asher said,
May 27, 2009 @ 1:28 am
Philip,
Here's a simple example: Imagine a French teacher tearing his hair out because his students can't seem to hear, let alone pronounce, the difference in the vowel sound in the French word "lune" and the English word "loon".
When I imagined a French teacher, I imagined a woman French teacher. Imagining her tear his hair out was far too much for me – so I'm not so sure that's a 'simple example'.
Given that French teachers come in all sorts of genders, perhaps the word you're after is "their"?
Taylor B said,
September 4, 2012 @ 10:40 am
"I should hope so — elevators are an intrinsically interesting topic, with many fascinating historical, practical, and theoretical aspects."
Yes, theoretical elevator physics is a fast growing field these days. Anyways, I ask a lot of educated Japanese people that I met, through the various social and educational stuff that I do, and many, if not most, were taught IPA in highschoool English. Of that many, many forgot or were unwilling in the first place to remember. But the situation in Japan (and elsewhere where people are on the ball) seems to be the way to do things; introduce the IPA as preliminary in a foreign language course. Not just in the advanced FL courses for the seniors, but in the typically mandatory FL freshman courses.
I usually have a high tolerance for language ignorance, but one thing I think is absolutely horrid is people confusing sound with letter. No! That's just what they want you to think!