Where did all the Boston "r's" go? Beijing
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This one is a bit long (6:15), but the comedian is so fantastic that I couldn't stop watching until the very end, which is like a linguistic analog to the conclusion of a fireworks show. With good subtitles in English and Mandarin.
Title on YouTube: "American Jesse Appell performs standup comedy in Chinese! 老外说中文脱口秀"
(6/17/13)
Selected readings
- Irwin, Patricia and Nagy, Naomi (2007) "Bostonians /r/ Speaking: A Quantitative Look at (R) in Boston," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 13 : Iss. 2 , Article 11. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol13/iss2/11
- "Accents" (2/23/16) –"Boston Accent" trailer; brilliant! JFK accent; Britisher trying to imitate Boston accent
- "Surprising Transformations of a Beijing Street Name" (1/29/11)
- "Concentric circles of language in Beijing" (6/8/20)
- "Why we say 'Beizhing' and not 'Beijing'" (5/2/19)
- "How they say 'Beijing' in Beijing" (8/18/08)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf}
Vance Koven said,
October 23, 2022 @ 9:33 pm
This was good; nice to see someplace where comedy can still be comedy without the roof falling in. However, as someone from Boston, I need to remark that traditionally, though I haven't heard it much lately, the lost Rs from the places where they should have been were usually transported to places where they shouldn't be. Thus, a tuba was something you ate, whereas a tuber was something you played.
David Marjanović said,
October 24, 2022 @ 4:38 am
That bit at the end must have taken forever to practice!
Is the "they're all Koreans" part an allusion to different tones – Hàn vs. Hán? (It went way too fast for me to tell if he even used that word.)
That's already the hypercorrectivism stage, started by people who grew up dropping them all and then trying to sound more General American by putting them back in but not knowing where they should go.
Peter Grubtal said,
October 24, 2022 @ 9:16 am
This hypercorrection or getting the correct pronunciation in the wrong place is not such an unusual phenomenon.
I once knew a young French lady who could manage a proper aspirated "h", but only where it didn't belong, so on getting her hair dishevelled on a windy day said "I've got hair in my air".
I was certainly no better in French though, not being able to distinguish between a thumb and a flea.
There's a Catullus poem mocking someone who (in Greek) got his aspirations in the wrong place.
Jerry Packard said,
October 24, 2022 @ 11:55 am
God forbid we should have our aspirations in the wrong place.
Michael Watts said,
October 24, 2022 @ 11:37 pm
Interestingly, I see the subtitles in what appears to be an overtly Japanese font, with 直 taking the appearance characteristic of Japan. ( See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%9B%B4 .)
The subtitles are burned in to the video (appearing as video data rather than a separate subtitle stream), so this must have been intentional. But 长 appears in that form, which is (as far as I know) exclusive to simplified Chinese.
Is the appearance of 直 in Chinese usage more freeform than I've come to believe?
That's probably not what was happening. As Vance Koven notes, the difference between rhoticity and lack of rhoticity was phonemic in the local dialect. ("a tuba was something you ate, whereas a tuber was something you played")
This matches with an anecdote I've seen about a teacher marking incorrect answers on a spelling test when /kəriə/ was spelled K-O-R-E-A and /kəriɚ/ was spelled C-A-R-E-E-R — it should have been the other way around. (I tend to suspect that the anecdote is a joke made up to highlight the pronunciation style, rather than a factual occurrence.)
This isn't a case of hypercorrection; it's a case of one dialect having different rhotic vowels than the other one.
Bob Ladd said,
October 25, 2022 @ 3:26 am
@Michael Watts: I don't think that's what Vance Koven meant at all. He was just talking about non-rhotic Boston speakers putting /r/ in the wrong places when they were trying to sound rhotic. Peter Grubtal's example of /h/ for French speakers is exactly parallel.
My father grew up non-rhotic in SE Massachusetts, but "fixed" his accent when he went to college. Most of the time he got everything in the right place, but for a couple of years when I was growing up we lived on a street called Hawthorn Avenue. The two vowels of "Hawthorn" were identical in his native accent, and he often had trouble putting /r/ after one but not the other.
Michael Watts said,
October 25, 2022 @ 4:27 am
I'm not sure those two phenomena are parallel. Stipulating that non-rhotic Boston speakers put /r/ in random locations when they want to sound correct, I would attribute a large part of their difficulty to the fact that they already know the words they're producing, but without the correct /r/s.
A second language speaker isn't in that situation at all — you have to learn the foreign words at the same time you learn how they're pronounced. I don't see any particular reason why a speaker of French would confuse English "air" with "hair" (when producing them); the weird sound at the beginning of "hair" has to be memorized, just like the fact that it means "cheveux".
That said, I do know a native Mandarin speaker who, after learning how to produce [θ], began using it in words like "single"; I attributed that to her practicing English mainly through audio.
Michael Watts said,
October 25, 2022 @ 4:31 am
(Though on the question of random locations – every example of the "reappearing R", as it was labeled in an old edition of HoToGAMIT, that I've ever seen has it appearing word-finally. Can it also appear mid-word?)
David Morris said,
October 25, 2022 @ 7:26 am
For this Australian, the two vowels of Hawthorn are identical, and I would have great trouble pronouncing them differently, let alone the second one convincingly.
Philip Taylor said,
October 25, 2022 @ 8:30 am
Although I am not rhotic when speaking informally, my two vowels in "hawthorn" are noticeably different, the latter being more rounded (ˈhɔː θoːn/). There is almost a /w/ in the latter part (/θoː${}^{w}$n/), which probably a carry-over from my childhood inability to pronounce my 'r's correctly — to this day, I trill my 'r's to avoid the humiliation which I would feel were I to pronounce them as 'w's.
David Marjanović said,
October 25, 2022 @ 12:19 pm
How would that ever have come about?
I have several colleagues from France who hypercorrect /h/ when they speak English. Here the difficulty is something completely different: learning to interpret [h] as a phoneme and not just as a voice onset. If you or I learned Hawai'ian, we'd probably have a great deal of trouble remembering which otherwise vowel-initial words actually start with a glottal stop and which don't, because we're used to glottal stops as postpausal voice onsets (or at most as syllable-final /t/).
This strikes me as yet another issue: learning a language that distinguishes two similar sounds when the L1 doesn't. I'm writing this in Germany, where most people have understood that the English /r/ is [ɹ ~ ɻ]. Many of them have confidently concluded that the English /v/ is [w]…
I've always found [θ] much more similar to [f] than to [s], though.
Michael Watts said,
October 25, 2022 @ 1:38 pm
This is objectively correct in the very specific sense that English-speaking children start out by substituting [f] for [θ].
/f/ and /s/ are separate phonemes in Mandarin and [θ] belongs to the equivalence class of /s/, and Mandarin speakers seem to hear it as a normal /s/. (As opposed to, say, a sound that is strange but is best approximated by /s/.)
I am told that Cantonese speakers (who also distinguish /f/ from /s/) hear [θ] as an /f/. This immediately raises the question of what someone who is bilingual in Mandarin and Cantonese — this can't be all that rare — hears when they hear [θ]; I don't know the answer.
There are words in Russian in which a Greek [θ] was replaced by a Russian /f/; I don't know whether this is still done or is an artifact of an earlier time. There are also examples of [θ] developing from a stop (Greek), or into a stop (Dutch), which suggests a certain similarity between the dental fricative and a dental or alveolar stop.
I believe Hiberno-English generally has stops where English has dental fricatives, but again I don't know if that reflects a current difficulty with the sound, a past difficulty with the sound, or a development within Hiberno-English.
Bob Ladd said,
October 27, 2022 @ 1:29 am
@ Michael Watts:
"I would attribute a large part of their difficulty to the fact that they already know the words they're producing, but without the correct /r/s."
Yes, because there is no such distinction in their native dialect. Exactly as in the case of /s/ vs /θ/ for Chinese speakers of English or initial /h/ vs initial nothing for French speakers of English, they have to learn to take what for them is a single category (schwa, in the case of tuba/tuber), and divide it into two groups – schwa vs schwa+/r/.
Michael Watts said,
October 27, 2022 @ 8:51 pm
@Bob Ladd
I continue to believe that these are not similar phenomena. The hypothetical hypercorrecting Bostonians have already learned the words "tuba" and "tuber", and they know that they are pronounced the same way.
No part of that is true for the Frenchman speaking English. He has never known the words "air" and "hair" to be the same. His entire exposure to them has been marked with a giant asterisk saying "air is fairly normal as far as English words go, but hair has this weird sound at the beginning that no normal person would ever produce".
There is no reason that the Frenchman would consult his mental lexicon for "cheveux" and get "air". There are reasons why he might consult his lexicon for "cheveux", get "hair", and then say "air" – but that process doesn't apply to the mirrored event of consulting the lexicon for "air", getting "air", and then saying "hair", which was described above.
Your theory would predict that French people have just as much trouble distinguishing "air" from "hair" in writing as they do in speech. Is that true?
Philip Taylor said,
October 28, 2022 @ 4:56 am
Well, there is at least one instance of the erroneous substitution discussed in your last sentence, Michael — Photo: Repas en plein hair au patio..
Rodger C said,
October 28, 2022 @ 12:04 pm
The particular case is no doubt influenced by the fact that the French for "air" is "air."
As an American radio listener I particularly associate gratuitous initial /h/ with Canadian Francophones speaking English.
Bob Ladd said,
October 29, 2022 @ 1:07 am
@Michael Watts: I don't know about French speakers of English putting orthographic /h/ in the wrong place (though Philip Taylor's example suggests that they might), but I've definitely seen examples of non-rhotic British speakers of English putting orthographic /r/ where it doesn't belong – I once saw "Dracular" in a newspaper movie listing.
Michael Watts said,
October 29, 2022 @ 9:00 pm
I believe I've repeatedly made it clear that I'm talking about a difference between how people use their own languages and how they learn and use foreign languages.
But Philip Taylor's example shows a French speaker using French, and Bob Ladd's latest example shows an English speaker using English. Neither is relevant to what I've said so far.
What drives you to believe that, when I say that a Bostonian attempting to produce standard English is a different kind of phenomenon from a Frenchman attempting to produce standard English, I would think that an Englishman attempting to produce standard English is more similar to the Frenchman than to the Bostonian?
Michael Watts said,
October 29, 2022 @ 9:18 pm
As to "Dracular" in specific, I find that interesting because I was just reading the pronunciation guide Rudyard Kipling provided as an appendix to an edition of The Jungle Books, and he seems to systematically distinguish between "ar" representing /ɑ/ and "er" representing word-final /ə/. This includes his note that THA is pronounced "tar". ( https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_junglebook_names.htm )
I would expect the final syllable of Dracula to be /lə/. (And the Youglish UK results seem to bear that out.) Is "ar" felt to be a good rendering of that vowel by modern British people?
Somewhat relevant to my main topic, Kipling generally does not include an orthgraphic R in his Indian words that are pronounced without one. The R is always present in his indication of the pronunciation. But there are two Indian words, Bandar and Gidur, which he spells with an R and then notes a non-rhotic pronunciation for. ("Bunder" and "Geeder".)
This appears to be due to an R being present in the Indian words, which Kipling reflects in his spelling even as he ignores it in his pronunciation.
Philip Taylor said,
October 30, 2022 @ 4:49 am
Michael — As a life-long Kipling fan, I find your most recent comment most interesting, so a very sincere "thank you" As to « Is "ar" felt to be a good rendering of that vowel by modern British people ? », as you will already know I am probably not typical of "modern British people", but for me the final syllable of "Dracula" is /lə/ with 1009% certainty, even though I am someone who tends to follow spelling in my pronunciation more then most, whence my /ˈeŋ ɡlənd/ and /ɪ ˈnɒ və tɪv/.
Philip Taylor said,
October 30, 2022 @ 5:03 am
And if I might be permitted to add a Kipling-specific P.S., I now see that I have mis-pronounced at least two of Kipling's words for most of my life —
I have always pronounced "Mowgli" as / ˈmoʊ ɡli/ and "Akela" as /ɑː ˈkeɪ lə/, the latter because that is how I was taught to pronounce it when a Wolf Cub [aged 9 to 11] — Akela was pack leader, with helpers Bagheera and Baloo.
Bob Ladd said,
October 31, 2022 @ 3:13 am
In my experience, it's common for British speakers to use "ar" as a "phonetic" spelling for a low vowel that Americans would render with "ah". It's possible Kipling was an exception, but I'm skeptical.
In any case, in ordinary spelling it is not a case of "ar" being "felt to be a good rendering" of final schwa. The point is that there is no difference in non-rhotic speech between the final syllable of Dracula, copula, spatula, etc. and the final syllable of particular, jugular, titular, etc. So the choice of whether to put an "r" at the end in writing strikes the non-rhotic speaker as arbitrary (at least from the pronunciation – obviously there's a morphological basis for the difference that isn't reflected in non-rhotic pronunciation). So given the phonetic arbitrariness, it's not surprising that you get slip-ups like Dracular.
And for the same reason, to go back to Vance Koven's original example, non-rhotic Boston speakers who are trying to sound General American may refer to the tubers in the marching band.
Michael Watts said,
October 31, 2022 @ 5:30 am
Philip Taylor, the vowel "a" in Hindi words often represents what English speakers would consider the STRUT vowel. Thus the practice of burning to death in your husband's funeral pit was once spelled suttee but is now spelled sati, Kipling notes that bandar and Hathi are pronounced bunder and huttee, etc.
The replacement of English spellings based on the foreign pronunciation (such as suttee or Calcutta) with English spelling based on the foreign spelling (such as sati or Kolkata) is something there appears to be no good reason for, but it is very popular with some element of the modern Anglophone culture that feels entitled to change official spellings.
Michael Watts said,
October 31, 2022 @ 5:32 am
Bob Ladd, I am completely confident that where Kipling uses "ar" in his pronunciation guide, he means the same low vowel that Americans would render with "ah". I was drawing a contrast between his use of "ar" for /ɑ/ and his use of "er" for /ə/.
Michael Watts said,
October 31, 2022 @ 5:38 am
I understand this. But I don't think it applies to foreign speakers. If you're French, then whether the English word for "rame" begins with [h] or with a zero onset is fully arbitrary. But it is no more arbitrary than any other aspect of the word; the choice of English speakers to use "oar" instead of "zilch" is just as arbitrary. So you'd need to reach further than that to explain why a French person might accidentally say "whore" when they mean "oar", but why they never accidentally say "zilch" when they mean "oar".
Terry K. said,
October 31, 2022 @ 9:44 am
@Michael Watts, it may be no more arbitrary than anything else, but if it's a phonetic distinction that the speaker doesn't make in their native language, then it's a lot harder to get right. I can pronounce Spanish r and rr (as in pero and perro) just fine. But accurately distinguishing between the two in fluent speech I can't do, because English only has one R. Even where I know by spelling which one it should be. Doesn't seem too different from a non-rhotic English speaker trying to speak rhotically who knows by spelling the difference between tuba and tuber, which one has an R, but mixes them up sometimes in fluent speech.
Michael Watts said,
October 31, 2022 @ 6:08 pm
Terry K., Spanish r is heavily used in English and rr is unused. How often do you produce the rr where r is called for?
This was never a discussion about "failing to distinguish the two sounds in fluent speech". This is still a discussion about accidentally producing a sound that requires special effort to produce.
Philip Taylor said,
November 1, 2022 @ 8:16 am
Not answering for Terry K (of course) but "How often do you produce the rr where r is called for" — once, and never again. I addressed a friend's wife Xaro as Xarro — she demanded to know why, I was completely unaware of my error, but she calmed down and went on to explain that in Catalan, "xarro" is a term for "a loose woman".
Terry K. said,
November 1, 2022 @ 11:27 am
While there are varieties of English that have a sound like the Spanish r sound as an r phoneme, it seems to me it's not all that common, and it's not such in my variety of English. That sound in American English (native speakers) is an allophone of D and for me doesn't mentally connect to the Spanish R.
As for if my errors go both ways, I couldn't say, as I haven't kept track. They are, in effect, both new-to-me sounds that attached to my existing mental R phoneme, even though neither actually matches in sound.
Michael Watts said,
November 2, 2022 @ 6:50 pm
I know the flap is an allophone of /d/ (also of /t/). The fact that it is so frequently required in English means that English speakers don't have trouble producing it, whereas many of them claim to be unable to produce [r]. (Indeed, the claim is popular in America that your genetics determine whether or not you can produce [r]. I have never heard of a Spaniard or Russian being unable to do so, so I'm not sure how this idea sustains itself.)
As a tangential observation, I once heard a Chinese speaker attempt to pronounce "hoodie", using a full non-flapped [d] (or possibly an unaspirated [t]; I can't tell the difference), and I was disturbed by the incorrect sound. So the sounds aren't interchangeable in American English. But there are many contexts where either is acceptable — as you note, one may be regularly reduced to the other.