Endearing English
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Jeph Jacques' Questionable Content "is an internet comic strip about romance and robots". One current romance features Faye Whitaker, described as "Sexy, snarky, and endearingly combative", and Bubbles, a "Big scary combat AI. Actually quite shy." In the past few strips (starting here), Faye works up the courage to introduce Bubbles to her mother, expecting some issues over Bubbles' gender and species.
After the initial shock wears off, the interaction goes well — but Faye is surprised to hear Bubbles accommodating to her mother's dialect.
Here's one example:
And the end of the conversation in the most recent strip:
This reminded me of the use of dialect forms to encode intimacy and distance in Lady Chatterley's Lover, in Elizabeth George's The Punishment She Deserves, and in many other works. See "Linguistic divergence and convergence", 4/7/2018, for some details.
Philip Taylor said,
June 16, 2020 @ 1:33 pm
Well, I have no comment(s), but I have two questions :
4284 : Faye's mother says "partner" but Bubbles says "pardner"; Bubble's use of "pardner" crops up again at the end of the strip cited in the article, which she explains as "attempting to endear myself". So why did she say "pardner" when Faye's mother says "partner", and in what way is that intended to endear herself ?
4285 : Faye's mother says "I have no idea how a human could get together with a robot". How does she know that Bubbles is a robot ? Bubbles is obviously coloured, obviously female, but not at all obviously a robot, and there has been no previous mention of her roboticity.
Jim Drew said,
June 16, 2020 @ 1:51 pm
The line around Bubble's neck is an indicator of being an AI (their heads are removable, after all). Faye's mother would pick that up right away, I'm sure.
Daniel Barkalow said,
June 16, 2020 @ 1:53 pm
My thought on the "partner"/"pardner" thing was that we're getting transcription from Faye's perspective, and she is accustomed to her mom talking in her mom's accent, and transcribes it with standard spelling, but is used to Bubbles speaking in Bubbles' usual accent, and therefore transcribes unusual-for-her speech phonetically.
I assume Bubbles is obviously a robot because her head isn't the same piece as her torso; you can see the seam in between.
Paul Garrett said,
June 16, 2020 @ 1:55 pm
As a long-time reader/fan of that comic, and having some acquaintance with people "code switching" in similar styles:
First, at the very outset, Faye said "A lady. An AI lady…" so her mom knows Bubbles "is a robot".
The exaggeration of "partner" to "pardner" is a sort of going-overboard buy-in of the idiom. Similarly, as a kid in Indiana, I recall my father's banter with rural gas-station attendants, that was almost entirely incomprehensible to me… and in any case greatly surprised me because it was so different from his ordinary speech, even though he was very much an unpretentious "down-home" kind of guy.
Philip Taylor said,
June 16, 2020 @ 2:08 pm
OK, the "AI lady" I missed. But would most mothers have any idea what an "AI lady" is ? Certainly if someone introduced a friend as "an AI friend", I would assume that the friend works in AI (whether that is Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Insemination I might be less certain, depending on whether the friend worked in IT, farming, or something unrelated to either). But the "seam" I just don't see — it still looks like a necklace/neckband/narrow choker to me. The two horizontals I interpret as bone structure.
cliff arroyo said,
June 16, 2020 @ 3:39 pm
"in what way is that intended to endear herself ?"
Maybe it's related to the old cowboy pronunciation
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pardner
David Cameron Staples said,
June 16, 2020 @ 3:58 pm
In the Comic universe, AI people (that is, people who are AIs) are relatively common. It started with Pintsize, who was more or less a joke (he is obsessed with pornography, is a self admitted little pervert, wears a cheap-looking baseline body which is basically only fit to be a companion, but turned out to be full of high end military kit, and no-one knows how or why), but Jeph since developed things like saving for upgraded (usually more naturalistic) bodies, AI crime, punishment, and police, AI dysmorphia, all sorts of things which try to extend the concept of "what if AIs and people lived together" into "no, really, what if?"
There is, in universe, no law against human/AI relationships, but some degree of social opprobrium.
So Faye's mom would be well aware of AIs, and Faye has two reasons to be nervous of her reaction.
And there's another tell: humans have round voice bubbles, AIs have square ones. I interpret that as that AIs have slightly unnatural-sounding voice generators, or at least there's always some quality (dynamic flatness? Flange? envelope compression?) which gives their voice away as of an AI.
Fayes's mom has the same square voice bubble over the phone, so maybe it's the same sort of qualities caused by frequency restriction and limits of speakers for AI voices as for phone call quality.
bks said,
June 16, 2020 @ 6:11 pm
The unbelievable part is that she/it/they know to do the video in landscape.
Andrew Usher said,
June 16, 2020 @ 7:39 pm
When you use fictional worlds substantially different from own own to make a linguistic point, it's going to be distracting, especially since most people won't understand initially.
I see nothing usual about the pronunciation represented by 'pardner', though it is of course dialectal. The word historically lost a vowel after the /t/, producing a normally disallowed cluster, so it's not surprising it is subject to modification.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
June 16, 2020 @ 9:22 pm
Another bit I thought was somewhat linguistics was that Faye's mom broaches the topic by calling Bubbles "a big bucket of water" [bolding as in the original].
Julian said,
June 16, 2020 @ 9:52 pm
David Cameron Staples: So if I'm at a party and I get talking to a stranger who has a tiny red glint in their eye and speaks with square speech bubbles, I know to be careful. Thanks for that. Forewarned is forearmed.
Duncan said,
June 17, 2020 @ 12:21 am
P Taylor: So why did she say "pardner" when Faye's mother says "partner", and in what way is that intended to endear herself ?
As a Questionable Content regular reader[1], that confused me a bit as well, but…
D Barkalow: [W]e're getting transcription from Faye's perspective, and she is accustomed to her mom talking in her mom's accent, and transcribes it with standard spelling, but is used to Bubbles speaking in Bubbles' usual accent, and therefore transcribes unusual-for-her speech phonetically.
That explains it to my satisfaction and may well be "generational literacy" level basic comprehension for the college-age target audience.[2]
PT: How does she know that Bubbles is a robot ?
D Staples: In the Comic universe, AI people (that is, people who are AIs) are relatively common. […] Jeph since developed things like saving for upgraded (usually more naturalistic) bodies, AI crime, punishment, and police, AI dysmorphia, all sorts of things which try to extend the concept of "what if AIs and people lived together" into "no, really, what if?"
Indeed Jeph (the author) has, based on his comments and the strip itself, has spent quite some time devising and no doubt noting for later use quite a dynamic and expansive robot/human social structure, with laws, rights, various what-ifs, etc, reasonably well covered. As an Asimov fan as well I believe I've noted specific "Laws of Robotics" influence in the QC universe (but where Asimov normally took the human angle, often QC/Jeph takes the robot angle) and there are likely other influences as well, so it's not as if he had to come up with it all from scratch, but Jeph has clearly put quite a bit of his own thinking (and probably that of some of his fans from comic-con meetings, etc) into it as well.
DS: There is, in universe, no law against human/AI relationships, but some degree of social opprobrium.
DS: So Faye's mom would be well aware of AIs, and Faye has two reasons to be nervous of her reaction.
I'd argue that this particular story arc should also be read in the current context of the Floyd/BLM protests, which both Jeph and his target audience are arguably (even more) heavily tuned into ATM. IMO his exploration of robot rights and human/robot interactions in the scifi world of QC, much like the human/alien and alien/alien interactions in the Star Trek scifi world, are slightly more comfortable stand-ins for commentary that can't be effectively made directly regarding "race" rights and interactions "in real life".
DS: And there's another tell: humans have round voice bubbles, AIs have square ones. I interpret that as that AIs have slightly unnatural-sounding voice generators, or at least there's always some quality (dynamic flatness? Flange? envelope compression?) which gives their voice away as of an AI.
That I knew, as a regular QC reader…
DS: Fayes's mom has the same square voice bubble over the phone, so maybe it's the same sort of qualities caused by frequency restriction and limits of speakers for AI voices as for phone call quality.
Thanks! That was an element that hadn't caught my attention! Now it has. =:^)
BKS: The unbelievable part is that she/it/they know to do the video in landscape.
Another element I didn't catch, tho in this instance I'd attribute it more to trying to get both Faye and Bubbles in the same frame than to any landscape orientation preference on Faye's part. Indeed, at the beginning of the call in #4282 and 4283, before Faye introduces Bubbles, both Faye and Mom are in portrait mode. In 4284 Faye switches to landscape with Bubbles beside her. We see no more of Mom except thru Faye's phone, but there Mom's landscape so presumably she switched her tablet to landscape as well, to zoom in on the now landscape pair.
JS Girard: Another bit I thought was somewhat linguistics was that Faye's mom broaches the topic by calling Bubbles "a big bucket of water"
That's in 4286 and I found it interesting here as well. I don't /believe/ I've ever heard that reference, yet I immediately understood it contextually as Mom trying to do a less formal remark on Bubbles' size, while I was confused by Bubbles' "pardner" (which I /have/ seen/heard) reference.
I guess the difference is as above, initially not understanding (but not being able to put my finger on it either, noting it only subconsciously while simply being uncomfortable with it in some vague way, consciously) the difference between Mom's lack of quoted accent contrasted with Bubbles' quoted accent, while entirely "getting" what Mom was doing with the "big bucket of water" reference.
I also found the two last panels of 4284 sequence linguistically amusing:
Faye: CAN WE PLEASE DROP THE FUCKIN' PRETENSE AND TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE ADULTS
Mom: FUCKIN' YES PLEASE
That of course is before the "big bucket of water" reference in the last panel of 4286, with 4285 pretty much confirming my IRL race-relations commentary theory, as far as I'm concerned.
And also the "What is the word for bigoted…?" "[A]ssholes" sequence toward the end of 4285. Mom's pretty uncomfortable in that comic, making her over-reaction informalizing with the "big bucket of water" comment in 4286 entirely empathetically understandable to me.
—
[1] I run a KDE-Plasma desktop on Linux. Plasma has a comic-strip plasmoid that has a QC plugin, and I've been following the comic the five days a week it's published for years now.
[2] QC is set in a college town and that seems the assumed "peer" target. Being in my 50s I'm a bit beyond that. But I work with a lot of hs/college age people and material such as QC and LL discussions help, I hope. =:^)
Philip Taylor said,
June 17, 2020 @ 4:11 am
Well, I understand a lot more than I did initially (so my thanks to all who took the trouble to explain) but I am still confused by Mark's statement "Faye is surprised to hear Bubbles accommodating to her mother's dialect". Faye's mother says "business partner", Bubbles says "pardner" — is the latter an accommodation to Faye's mother's dialect or am I missing the point ? Is, perhaps, Mark's point that Bubbles is g-dropping and thus emulating Faye's mother's speech in this way ? Faye herself queries Bubble's use of "pardner", and Bubbles responds "I was tryin' [g-dropping] attempting [self-correction] to endear myself". So "pardner" is involved, as is g-dropping, but I still don't really understand the ramifications of Bubbles' use of "pardner".
David Cameron Staples said,
June 17, 2020 @ 4:31 am
My take is that Faye's mother has a Texas accent, or something in that general region, and what everyone else said is true: when Faye's mother is speaking, it's just an accent. When Bubbles is imitating that accent, it's an affectation, and is marked, if only to draw attention to it.
Terry Hunt said,
June 17, 2020 @ 4:56 am
@ Philip Taylor: it's well established in the comic that Faye and her mother are Texans (though Faye's accent has perhaps become less marked since she's been living in Massachusetts where most of the action is set), so Bubbles is presumably adopting a general Texan accent rather than trying to precisely mimic Faye's mother (who may be deliberately moderating her own accent since she's speaking to a stranger for the first time – something that my elder female relatives routinely did).
And yes, in this comic universe, AI citizens with bodies ("chassis") varying from totally non-human to very humanlike are quite common, but even the most humanlike would never be mistaken for biological humans, and have obvious robot features like the neck joint Bubbles shows here, as well as similar joints elsewhere, and recognisably robot voices. Bubbles is actually unusual in having realistically human skin and hair tones: most otherwise humaniform AIs have obviously non-human skin and hair colours.
Andrew (not the same one) said,
June 17, 2020 @ 10:04 am
Actually I believe Faye is from Georgia.
Chris Button said,
June 17, 2020 @ 11:20 am
Seems like "pardner" might originally have been a Britishism. Makes a nice partner with "gardener"" I suppose.
Philip Taylor said,
June 17, 2020 @ 12:03 pm
Well, that's not what the OED says, Chris —
What leads you to believe that the pronunciation may have emanated from this sceptred isle ?
ohwilleke said,
June 17, 2020 @ 4:32 pm
I made another language related blog post arising from the same discussion noting this lack of a word in English:
http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2020/06/an-advanced-vocabulary-lesson.html
Q: Come to think of it, what is the word for people who're bigoted against robots?
A: We generally call them "assholes".
ohwilleke said,
June 17, 2020 @ 4:53 pm
Another point worth making for context about the choice of dialect for Bubbles is that Bubbles is ex-U.S. military special forces. The specific knowledge that Bubbles acquired in that capacity was memory wiped for national security purposes (the subject of another arc between Faye and Bubbles in the comic).
But, I think that Bubbles may not be imitating Faye's mom's accent as other comments have suggested. Instead, I think that Bubbles may be code switching to what she learned to be a deferential dialect for social conservation with humans in her military service, in which many military officers have Texas influenced Southern dialects as their native dialect of American English that rubs off on other people in the military, rather than mimicking Faye's mom, who, as noted is Georgia Southern, rather than Texan, with pardner being part of the latter but not the former.
Also, for general reference purposes, Faye and Bubbles themselves reside in Western Massachusetts in and around the Amherst region (although the residents have much lighter New England accent than say, Boston, in general) and were, prior to being lovers, business partners who operate a robot repair shop. Faye's mom was aware that Faye was in the robot repair business, although she hadn't previously met the business partner Bubbles or learned of her identity. Faye's mom is likely more taken off guard at Faye's same sex relationship, as Faye previously had a significant other who was a human man, than at the AI component per se, although that adds a twist to it.
Chris Button said,
June 17, 2020 @ 7:32 pm
@ Philip Taylor
Well, apparently it was attested in "vulgar" London speech in the latter half of the 1700s, although it's hard to say whether or not that was the progenitor of the American usage. You should find some hits if you google "James Elphinston" and "pardner".
Philip Taylor said,
June 18, 2020 @ 5:53 am
Interesting, Chris. The online copy of Cockney past and present (William Matthews, 2015) (which infortunately does not allow texual copying) says [p.~112] "Voicing of normally voiceless stop consonants is a feature of vulgar speech. Such spellings as pardner, beedle, eggspect are frequent in literary Cockney and they are symbols for a much more extensive reality: the Cockney tends to "dull" or voice voiceless consonants in many other words, prodestant, samwidge (sandwich), mizzletoe, carpender, 'Obkins, etc." , but my own familiarity with Cockney suggests to me that what was represented at the time by the substitution of "d" for "t" would today be represented by the substition of the glottal stop. Thus today we would transcribe the first two examples as "parʔner and beeʔle" rather than as actually transcribed, and "proʔestant" similarly.
Andrew Usher said,
June 18, 2020 @ 7:53 am
But glottaling was not a traditional Cockney feature, I'm fairly sure, and I can't see how anyone would represent it by writing 'd' instead of 't', not to mention the examples with other obstruents. It was likely not just a simple fortis/lenis neutralisation, surely, but projecting today's glottal stops onto the Cockney of that time is unwarranted also.
Philip Taylor said,
June 18, 2020 @ 11:20 am
I have nothing in my library that describes Cockney speech of that period (tho' a study of Dickens might well reveal some facts of interest) but a quick web search suggests, to me at least, that the glottal stop has been attested in Cockney speech for at least a century :
Daniel Jones, 1922: "'t' at the termination of a syllable is replaced by 'ʔ' in many English dialects. Thus in London dialect mutton, fortnight, butter are commonly pronounced maʔn, 'fo:ʔnuit, 'baʔə" (E&EO — scanned image followed by OCR, corrected as best possible by hand)
Claude Marton Wise, 1932: The glottal stop ( ? ) is often used instead of stop plosive consonants, but by no means so frequently as in Cockney .
Moa said,
June 18, 2020 @ 12:43 pm
I'm not sure imitation is the right word for the concept. For me, imitation makes it seem like a conscious choice, while the people I've known who adapts their accents do it unconsciously. Sometimes they don't even notice that they do it, until someone points it out. Maybe it's different for robots?
Chris Button said,
June 18, 2020 @ 2:10 pm
The glottal stop or the voiced tap for "t" are of course two sides of two sides of the same coin. Both are trying to make it easier to handle voicelessness sandwiched between voicing.
Philip Taylor said,
June 19, 2020 @ 5:15 am
Thank you for your note, Chris, which confirms my suspicions, and also makes me wonder whether those who say /ˈbɒʔ·əl/ are, in fact, more likely to actually say /ˈbɒʔ·əɫ/. Incidentally, my transcription of Daniel Jones' London dialect "fortnight" (/'fo:ʔnuit/) was incorrect — when I zoomed in on the scanned image, I realised that it should have read / 'fo:ʔnait/.
Andrew Usher said,
June 19, 2020 @ 7:39 am
I was only repeating what I thought I had read about the glottal stop: that it did not originate in London, and the 'authentic' Cockney variant was the flap. I'm not sure now that its origin can be attributed to just one place; it may seem strange that glottaling intervocalic /t/ could have evolved independently across England, but nowhere in America – but so did H dropping.
Philip Taylor:
If that symbol is supposed the represent the dark L I think it would be normal for everybody in 'bottle'. They're normally not treated as separate phonemes, a minimal pair not being possible, but I wonder if that's really true for everyone.
Chris Button:
Surely that's right but why does it not occur for the other voiceless obstruents? Is there just not a suitably distinct phoneme for them to evolve into?
Philip Taylor said,
June 19, 2020 @ 7:55 am
Andrew — "If that symbol is supposed the represent the dark L I think it would be normal for everybody in 'bottle'. They're normally not treated as separate phonemes, a minimal pair not being possible, but I wonder if that's really true for everyone".
Yes, it was intended to represent the dark "l" — did I use the wrong symbol ? But I could not agree (indeed, I very strongly disgree) that « it would be normal for everybody in 'bottle' ». Dark-l at the end of a word is (in the UK) highly stigmatised, and anyone who seeks to speak correctly would do their best to ensure that their terminal 'l's were clear. Whether or not two sounds are separate phonemes is probably the very last thing that an educated speaker considers when he or she says something, and furthermore there are most certainly minimal pairs differentiated solely by clear-l/dark-l as the final phoneme : "Hal" (personal name, abbreviation of "Harry", itself the familiar form of "Harold") v. "how", "pal" v. "pow" (comic-speak, normally followed by exclamation mark), "Sal" (abbrev. of "Sally") v. "sow", "Val" (abbrev. of "Valerie") v. "vow" come immediately to mind.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 19, 2020 @ 3:48 pm
@Philip Taylor:
I think you're confusing a dark (i.e velarized) L with a vocalized one.
(It doesn't help that the IPA symbol for the former is very similar to the Polish letter for the latter.)
Chris Button said,
June 19, 2020 @ 4:58 pm
@ Andrew Usher
That's a good question, and actually the voiced tapping and the glottalization are essentially incompatible.
The tapping is really just a continuation of the voicing and is engendered by the coronal articulation I suppose. Meanwhile, the glottalization is part and parcel of the unreleased "t" at the end of a syllable and then completely replaces it. That's why some speakers will also say "bet" with a glottal coda, and it's another reason why a word like "better" should be syllabified as "bett.er" and not "be.t(t)er" as many would erroneously analyze it. As to why the glottalization doesn't ultimately replace something like "p" is presumably down to the place of articulation, but why "k" remains untouched is perplexing. In Burmese for example, earlier unreleased (hence glottalized) p, t, k all merged as a glottal stop in pronunciation but are noted as distinct in the orthography.
Chris Button said,
June 19, 2020 @ 5:02 pm
That's p, t, k at the syllable final end of a word in Burmese I mean.
V said,
June 19, 2020 @ 6:16 pm
I'm pretty sure Fay and her mom are from Savannah.
V said,
June 19, 2020 @ 11:22 pm
It is implied that Faye's mother's family goes back from Savannah from back to the Civil war.
Philip Taylor said,
June 20, 2020 @ 5:19 am
Andreas — "I think you're confusing a dark (i.e velarized) L with a vocalized one". That is quite possible. I will go away and do more research. Thank you.
Chris Button said,
June 20, 2020 @ 5:51 am
A history of the emergence of a glottal coda in Sinitic languages where there was originally an unreleased p, t or k could be interesting. Shanghainese seems to replace all with a glottal as in Burmese. But Min seems more selective. Other languages could also help. I was just reading an article that pointed out that Malay often just has a glottal for unreleased k but not for p or t (which on the surface seems pretty intuitive)
Philip Taylor said,
June 20, 2020 @ 6:52 am
Andreas, yes, you are quite correct. Whilst "[e]ven to-day there are old-fashioned RP speakers who make scarcely any difference between their [ɫ] and [l]" (Eustace, 1969), the distinction that I was seeking to draw is that all speakers of RP will instinctively ensure that their final "l"s remain /l/s (most dark, some very conservative light), while the speaker of what Daniel Jones terms "the London dialect" (these days Cockney, London, Estuary, …) will almost invariably pronounce their final "l"s as [w], [o] or [ʊ].
And so I must also apologise to Andrew, in that my "minimal pairs" were differentiated not by a dark-l/light-l distinction but by /l/ v. [w], [o] or [ʊ].
And to Andreas once again, yes, I was indeed confused by the visual similarity of the Polish consonant ł and the IPA symbol [ɫ] — clearly this is an area in which I have been mistaken for over 20 years.
Andrew Usher said,
June 21, 2020 @ 7:02 am
And I'm pretty sure that is no coincidence; the IPA symbol was taken from the Polish letter, which represented exactly that sound. Surely the sound change in Polish was well underway when this was done; but confusion was not expected on that account, evidently a bad assumption.
After that, using the common meaning of 'dark l', my statement makes sense.
David Marjanović said,
June 23, 2020 @ 1:52 pm
What do you think of Bermúdez-Otero's work, e.g. this 14-page conference handout and this 35-page book chapter?
David Marjanović said,
June 23, 2020 @ 1:55 pm
What do you think of Bermúdez-Otero's work, e.g. this 14-page conference handout and [in the next comment to get past the spam filter]…
David Marjanović said,
June 23, 2020 @ 1:55 pm
…this 35-page book chapter?
Chris Button said,
June 23, 2020 @ 8:54 pm
@ David M
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=39959#comment-1555206
David Marjanović said,
June 24, 2020 @ 4:07 pm
I applaud your memory!
From the comment you link to:
First, does that rule really feel simple to you? To me it feels counterintuitive, backwards (I'd expect flapping within words to be more widespread than across words) and complex (it's two rules). That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me ask "why?".
What B-O's approach gains me is that it can explain the distribution of prefortis clipping at the same time without needing the either unparsimonious "simple rule" or a globally weird departure from the universal preference for CV syllables.
Chris Button said,
June 24, 2020 @ 6:10 pm
@ David Marjanović
Not the first time for us on LLog :)
As you'll see from what I wrote farther down that post in terms of intonation, it's presumably a question of signposting and an expected degree of linguistic flexibility.
Actually, it's the kind of thing that made John Wells ask "why?" Respectfully, you're only asking it now because he did.
A preference in terms of popular linguistic analysis, which quite frankly appeals to me about as much as a preference for a consonant-vowel distinction over an obstruent-sonorant distinction.
Chris Button said,
June 24, 2020 @ 10:38 pm
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm
Philip Taylor said,
June 25, 2020 @ 5:55 am
Possibly no more than an example of "causative formation" / "formative causation", Chris. There is no a priori reason for believing that both might not have come up with the same question independently, is there ?
David Marjanović said,
June 25, 2020 @ 6:23 am
Oh, but there is: Wells got the ball rolling on research into how syllables work in English. He's the giant on whose shoulders Bermúdez-Otero and many others stand. I had little interest or knowledge of the topic before I read (some of) Wells's and then B-O's work; it's entirely true that "you're only asking it now because he did".
What I don't understand is what that has to do with anything. We do trample on the shoulders of giants in science.
I saw that, and found it very wishy-washy compared to B-O's precise explanation that appears to explain the observations precisely.
A parsimony argument. Don't add epicycles just because epicycles aren't popular. :-)
Chris Button said,
June 25, 2020 @ 6:37 am
How many "latex" and "retail" type words are there? Nuff said.
The argument against CV. CV does not rest on this. Neither does the parsimoniousness.
Chris Button said,
June 25, 2020 @ 7:04 am
He syllabifies them as lat.ex and re.tail in the LPD. No flapped t in either
Chris Button said,
June 25, 2020 @ 7:19 am
The point about intonation was that accent placement on stressed syllables is variable, schwa reductions are not always fixed, and t-voicing is not fixed. As we discussed above, why doesn't "k" glottalize in British english where "t" does? Why do some speakers prounce two words differently in their idiolects when logically they should be identical? The parsimony comes from the simplest explanation to cover the reality of the situation. Not skewering a very simple principle on the basis of a handful of examples by demanding the rigidity of a mathematical model. This is lingusitics after all. For all I know, the explanation may well come down to historical stress shifts or prefixation.
Philip Taylor said,
June 25, 2020 @ 7:33 am
"He syllabifies them as lat.ex and re.tail in the LPD".
but interestingly, acknowledges that in the informatics domain, "LaTeX" is syllabified differently : /ˈleɪ tek/. I am sad, though, that he fails to give the final "X" its correct sound : /x/, the so-called "voiceless velar fricative".
Andrew Usher said,
June 25, 2020 @ 7:51 am
I think lat-ex is just a mistake, at least for my pronunciation; the first vowel is definitely longer than in 'late'. The flapped /t/ may be _possible_ in 'latex', which would require his choice, but is not at all usual.
Personally I don't believe there's one correct syllabification for English words; there may be some languages regular enough to have one, but not English. John Wells's analysis is certainly plausible, in that I don't find it flawed, but neither does it persuade me that the usual dictionary type is wrong, either.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
David Marjanović said,
June 26, 2020 @ 8:18 am
I do actually find it amazing how much work on syllables it has been possible to do in English, a language where syllables are clearly much less important than in, say, French, never mind anything in the league of Hawaiian. I would not be surprised to find that some of the very numerous effects that have been attributed to syllabification actually have other causes*, but so far it all seems to work out, down to amazing arcana of L-darkening and whatnot…
* In English, that is. Outside, I am confident that the description of the High German consonant shift as a syllable-driven process, cited in B-O's book chapter from earlier literature, is completely wrong – what was syllable-driven was not the shift itself, but its spread as a fashion to Central German dialects where syllables were and are more important than in Upper German. Picking and choosing when a sound shift is borrowed seems to be quite common.