"Big league" vs. "bigly": a coda
« previous post | next post »
After I posted "The history of Trumpian 'big league' (now even bigger league!)" on Sunday, there was a flurry of media coverage on the hotly contested question of whether Donald Trump says big league or bigly. A sampling:
- "So, Which Is It: Bigly Or Big-League? Linguists Take On A Common Trumpism" (NPR, 10/23/16)
- "Yes, Trump Really Is Saying 'Big League,' Not 'Bigly,' Linguists Say" (New York Times, 10/24/16)
- "Linguists: Trump Is Saying 'Big League,' Not 'Bigly,' Still Stupid Either Way" (Wonkette, 10/24/16)
- "Why You Hear Trump's 'Big League' As 'Bigly'" (New York Magazine, Science of Us, 10/24/16)
But if spectrographic analysis and extensive historical documentation aren't enough to convince people that Trump is actually saying big league, we now have confirmation straight from the horse's mouth. As Sopan Deb of CBS News reported on Twitter, Trump was asked about this burning issue in an interview by EWTN Global Catholic Network.
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/791833935173025792
To quote Gerald Ford, our long national nightmare is over. Let's all try to move on with our lives now.
David L said,
October 28, 2016 @ 10:42 am
C'mon, I'm supposed to believe what that guy says?
Acilius said,
October 28, 2016 @ 10:44 am
The mouth isn't the part of the horse's anatomy one usually associates with Donald Trump. A refreshing change of pace.
Guy said,
October 28, 2016 @ 12:26 pm
A large number of people who say they're hearing "bigly" and don't see how it could possibly be "big league" cite the quality of the second vowel. I'm guessing these are people who have a HAPPY vowel that is more lax than their FLEECE vowel (otherwise the argument makes no sense to me). I think it would be interesting to see the average formant values for Trump's typical HAPPY and FLEECE vowels, as well as his typical BIG LEAGE vowel, and see how these usually compare to other people's FLEECE vowels.
Tony said,
October 28, 2016 @ 1:18 pm
I'm pretty sure he has been saying both at different times.
RW said,
October 28, 2016 @ 1:44 pm
When he says "Now let me ask you: are you talking about for me?", what on earth does that even mean? It seems that he doesn't understand the question he was asked, somehow, and I certainly don't understand his response to that.
Guy said,
October 28, 2016 @ 3:18 pm
@Tony
Do you have a link to the audio that sounds most like a "bigly" to you?
Jerry Friedman said,
October 28, 2016 @ 3:30 pm
RW: When he says "Now let me ask you: are you talking about for me?", what on earth does that even mean? It seems that he doesn't understand the question he was asked, somehow, and I certainly don't understand his response to that.
I understand it as "Are you talking about what I say? Are you talking about [a phrase that's typical] for me?" As opposed, maybe, to what's typical or correct for others. If that's right, then Trump indeed didn't quite understand the question, unless he was just stalling to look for traps or something.
Cervantes said,
October 28, 2016 @ 4:01 pm
Says more about the nature of "media coverage" than it does about anything else, frankly.
John Swindle said,
October 28, 2016 @ 5:29 pm
@Cervantes: Or frank league, as the case may be.
Michael Watts said,
October 28, 2016 @ 8:36 pm
The first example (leading in to the question) is an odd choice, since the /g/ of league is plainly audible. It does suggest where confusion might be coming from, though, since Trump coordinated "big league" with "strongly".
The other examples, as presented here, don't have an audible /g/ in league/ly. Am I really alone in thinking the first one is unambiguous?
Neal Goldfarb said,
October 29, 2016 @ 2:26 am
@John Swindle
And honest league.
Just in time for the World Series, believe meague.
PLA said,
October 29, 2016 @ 3:58 am
Surely "…for me?" was in answer to: There's money riding on this.
Andrew Usher said,
October 29, 2016 @ 8:01 am
Michael –
The reason your hear some of his examples without an audible /g/ is that they don't have one! Trump frequently weakens it to a fricative /ɣ/ or [ʝ], which is different. Linguists refuse to acknowledge the existence of the back fricatives in English, but they are phonetically, and may even predominate in some words like 'technique' [tɛçˈnik].
Trump's own affirmation shows that he is not simply omitting the /g/; no matter how it's realized, it is there for him.
Lazar said,
October 29, 2016 @ 8:42 am
Well, I've never heard "technique" pronounced with anything like the German ich-laut. I think the softened allophones of English /g/ and /k/ that you have in mind are more likely to be voiced and voiceless velar approximants, respectively.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 29, 2016 @ 9:19 am
PLA: Surely "…for me?" was in answer to: There's money riding on this.
Now I think you're right.
Rodger C said,
October 29, 2016 @ 10:37 am
Linguists refuse to acknowledge the existence of the back fricatives in English, but they are [there?] phonetically
Reminds me of the time in my first semester of teaching when I dictated a prompt containing the word "argue" and some of my students heard "are you," with confusing results.
RW said,
October 29, 2016 @ 11:32 am
PLA: Surely "…for me?" was in answer to: There's money riding on this.
Ah, could be. That would make some sense. Although very odd if, at the end of a cringeworthy interview with Christians in which he pretended to find the matter of prayer too private to discuss, and to have thought about whether or not he had a favourite saint, he would think they were offering him money for something.
Guy said,
October 29, 2016 @ 3:46 pm
"Linguists refuse to acknowledge the existence of the back fricatives in English, but they are phonetically, and may even predominate in some words like 'technique' [tɛçˈnik]."
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, linguists refuse to acknowledge that [ⱱɣ] is an allophone of /g/? Or are you saying that there exists an English /ɣ/ phoneme that linguists don't acknowledge? In any event, I think it's odd to describe a phoneme as inaudible simply because its realization would happen to be something outside the full IPA specification for the symbol that was chosen to represent it. In an American accent, /t/ is iften realized as [ɾ], but it would be very odd to say that the /t/ in "city" is "inaudible" simply because IPA happens to lack a symbol for coronals that isn't specified as to the stop/flap contrast.
Andrew Usher said,
October 29, 2016 @ 4:54 pm
Guy:
"I'm not sure I understand what you mean, linguists refuse to acknowledge that [ⱱɣ] is an allophone of /g/? Or are you saying that there exists an English /ɣ/ phoneme that linguists don't acknowledge?"
The former, but what do you mean by allophone? It's obviously not predictable, even for the same speaker. Does your meaning of 'allophone' include that? Of course English doesn't have a /ɣ/ phoneme (nor /x/ in native words).
"In any event, I think it's odd to describe a phoneme as inaudible …"
I didn't. I said it wasn't audible as a /g/ (plosive). Precisely because /ɣ/ is not an English phoneme, many people won't hear it, or interpret it as a /j/ offglide of the vowel. It may be relevant here that NE '-ly' developed exactly from loss of a back fricative, obviously through this mishearing. See also the examples and my comments on the Geoff Lindsey post http://englishspeechservices.com/words-of-the-week/bigly/ (and his passing over the distinction).
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
Michael Watts said,
October 29, 2016 @ 5:52 pm
Andrew Usher,
my question was why the first example, which does have an audible /g/ in league, was used to introduce the "controversy" over whether he's saying "big league" or "bigly". That example would appear to be pretty conclusive, making it a weird choice for the segment regardless of what the people putting the segment together believe.
The subquestion is whether other people agree that the /g/ is plainly present in the first example.
Guy said,
October 29, 2016 @ 6:54 pm
@Andrew Usher
I've never understood "allophone" to only include variation that is predictable. But to say that something isn't a [g] is different from saying that it isn't a /g/. To say that it isn't a [g] is to say that the realization doesn't meet the IPA specifications for the symbol "g" (angle brackets cause issues here so I won't try to hazard getting them to show up correctly), but to say that it isn't a /g/ is to say that it isn't a realization of the English phoneme that is conventionally expressed as /g/ (and it's conventionally written that way because [g] is a good IPA representation of its most archetypical realizations). But it is a token of that phoneme. If you say it isn't "an audible /g/" then that means either it isn't a /g/ or it isn't audible, but it's both of those things. I mean, it's true that some people won't perceive it, but that's not inherently because it passed over a point in the continuum of possible articulations that calls for a different IPA transcription.
Andrew Usher said,
October 30, 2016 @ 8:52 am
It seems that I and Michael agree on the meaning of 'audible /g/', and that the first example in the TV clip has one and the others don't. I suspect whoever put together the clips simply wasn't thinking about the phonetic difference.
Phonemes simply don't have objective existence; they are constructs of perception. If people don't hear it as a /g/, even after repeated careful listening, then it's reasonable to question whether it should be represented as /g/. Now if you use IPA simply as a funny-looking respelling system, as do dictionaries, then it would be OK to transcribe /g/ across the board. But if you want it to show anything about what it actually sounds like, it's at the very least debatable. IPA transcription should not be used to cut off discussion about actual phonetics as I see far too often done – not, I think, consciously, but because the users have developed 'IPA fetishism'. So your last sentence is really getting it backwards; the fact that people aren't perceiving it is the reason that it (in my opinion) calls for a different transcription, in this case /ɣ/ seems appropriate but the exact symbol isn't the point.
If a reader still can't see it: we have no problem transcribing non-rhotic and partially rhotic speakers with the r sounds actually heard, with no need to ask the speaker whether he really 'meant' to utter the r's, or even consider the question. The above is the same thing.
J. Goard said,
October 30, 2016 @ 11:30 am
Phonological factors aside, do any of you use "big league" in this sort of adverbial way? First of all, I don't think the construction [to V big league] is in my grammar at all. Secondly, for me, [a big league N] (in its metaphorical extension beyond sports/games, of course) feels almost exclusively disparaging; N is gonna be "asshole" or "cheater" or "loser", definitely not "friend" or "hottie" or "cook".
Lazar said,
October 30, 2016 @ 1:45 pm
@J. Goard: The usage isn't native to me either, though it doesn't ring tremendously ungrammatical either. I'd hardly pay any attention to it as a one-off; I think what's most notable isn't its existence, but rather the extremely high frequency with which Trump uses it.
Within the realm of political myth, Trump's "big league" seems to be eerily presaged by a Bush-Cheney gaffe from 2000: "There's Adam Clymer, major league asshole from The New York Times." "Oh yeah, he is. Big time."
Guy said,
October 30, 2016 @ 3:55 pm
@Andrew Usher
In honesty, I felt the IPA fetishism was coming from the other direction, that the fact IPA . If Trump sometimes produces a /g/ as [ɣ], then the presence of that realization is a presence of the /g/ phoneme on the production end, Whether other people perceive it as /g/ on the perception end is a different matter. Isn the case of the word "can't", the realization of /t/ simply as [t] is probably more likely to make people hear "can" than the way "can't" is usually pronounced. But the fact that some people pronounce a phoneme in a way that causes other people to hear something different from what the speaker intended doesn't seem to me to indicate that there exists another phoneme.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 30, 2016 @ 5:52 pm
J. Goard: If you look at the second and third comments on the previous "big-league" thread, you'll see that there are a few non-Trump (plain-suit?) uses of adverbial "big-league", but they're hard to find. At least, Ben said they're hard to find, and he knows how to find phrases big-league. In the fourth comment, Chris Alterio says it's common in the NYC metro area, though he doesn't specify whether the adverbial use is common.
Richard Sproat said,
October 30, 2016 @ 6:43 pm
@Cervantes
Agreed.
Indeed it's so nice to see that the media rushes to produce flurries of coverage of the really important issues related to language. Indeed I have a hard time deciding which is more important: this, or the interminable string of articles about emoji that we have seen over the past year or so.
Andrew Usher said,
October 31, 2016 @ 8:18 pm
Guy:
(Your first sentence is garbled.) The difficulty seems to be your use of 'phoneme', which I consider unreasonable. Again speech doesn't consist of phonemes, but of sounds, which are only reconstructed into phonemes by a listener or transcriber. When you say, Trump produces a /g/, that can only mean that Trump is uttering something for which his mental representation contains a /g/ (as does everyone's in this case). That fact does not make _the sound_ a /g/.
I am saying that when discussing the _phonology_ of English, our transcriptions must not be limited to the _phonemes_ of English, and that the use of IPA encourages this misleading approach by its sharp division between // and [], where actually there's a continuum. There is no reason that, if a sound does not seem to fit into any of the established phonemes of English, we should not use a new symbol for it; as with the glottal stop, which is certainly not a phoneme.
Michael Watts said,
November 1, 2016 @ 7:53 pm
// marks phonemes. No sound can ever be a /g/, because phonemes are conceptual categories and sounds are tangible phenomena. Sounds are marked with []. Regardless, I don't see any problem with describing a sound as a /g/ to indicate either that it represents a /g/ (speaker's intent) or is perceived as a /g/ (listener's perception).
However, I really struggle to interpret the claim that there's a "continuum" between phonemes and sounds. What would be an example of something partway along the continuum, such that it is partially a physical waveform and partially an abstract concept? It seems much like the claim that "there is a continuum between states of matter (solid/liquid/…) and materials (mud/sand/iron/…)". But that is conceptual nonsense; something might exist on a continuum between solid and liquid, like mud, or on a continuum between copper and tin, like bronze (sort of), but there is no continuum between copper and liquid.
Andrew Usher said,
November 1, 2016 @ 9:12 pm
Michael, I completely agree with you on phonemes and sounds. As to my second claim, I thought context would make it clear: I did not mean // and [] applied to single symbols – phonemes and phones – where I clearly distinguish myself*; but // and [] as applied to whole transcriptions. There is not of course any continuum between phonemes and sounds, but there IS between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions. And most practical ones are and should be somewhere in between; neither purely phonemic as a dictionary, nor purely phonetic, ignoring meaning and structure.
This is where amateurs get confused, and rightly so, they want to write WHAT THEY HEAR, which is neither completely one nor the other, and they should be allowed to do so without being 'corrected' by linguists for their 'ignorance'. This is a legitimate purpose, even if the IPA doesn't like it.
* Yes, I did write '/ɣ/ or [ʝ]', but that wasn't carelessness but an attempt to indicate that while the actual sound is likely palatal, the velar/palatal distinction doesn't matter in English.
Michael Watts said,
November 2, 2016 @ 5:02 pm
Thanks for clarifying; that makes sense.