Bride of Tamil Nadu
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Following up on "Crap Lolly Pop" (11/21/2022), Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent in this xeet, featuring a poster that glorifies the present Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu as the “Bride of Tamil Nadu” instead of the “Pride of Tamil Nadu”, again because of the b/p equivalence in Tamil:
Oops!
Tamil Nadu's banner blunder turns Stalin into the 'Bride' of the state… instead of 'Pride? #BannerFail #TamilNadu pic.twitter.com/3ZJSGGjNw4— Nabila Jamal (@nabilajamal_) March 5, 2024
As Ambarish explained in the earlier post, "Because Tamil traditionally doesn't distinguish voiced and voiceless plosives, there's lots of confusion with English loan words learnt through hearing" — which in that case was a restaurant menu rendering crab as "crap".
Th 'p' → 'b' error in pride → bride is the opposite of the 'b' → 'p' error in crab → crap — and thus goes against what I suggested at the end of that post:
[N]ative speakers can also make spelling mistakes that reflect their particular speech patterns — thus Treiman and Barry, "Dialect and authography: Some differences between American and British spellers" (2000), report that
Our results show that adults who speak British English make certain dialect-related errors when they spell. Speakers of this dialect appear to have learned that final schwa has two primary spellings: vowel + r (as in mother and tiger) and a (as in pizza and sofa). Given words such as leper (Type 1) and polka (Type 2), speakers of British English do not always know which spelling is appropriate. They sometimes select the wrong alternative, producing errors such as "lepa" and "polker."
I'm guessing that Tamil speakers are more like to make 'b' → 'p' errors than the opposite — though maybe hypercorrection would reverse that?
J.W. Brewer said,
June 5, 2024 @ 6:33 am
The earlier post doesn't include the rationale behind myl's "guess" that p-for-b errors would be more likely in this context than b-for-p errors, and there's a comment in that thread from Ambarish Sridharanarayanan indicating an expectation that errors in both directions would occur. Obviously a sample set of one in each direction is insufficiently large to resolve the question of whether there's any systematic tendency for one direction of error to be more common than the other, but I would be interested (absent better data) in a more detailed explanation of why one might expect that to be the case.
is it as simple as the fact that (if my 90 seconds of internet research is accurate) the standard romanization of Tamil uses "p" rather than "b" for the bilabial plosive that could be either voiced or unvoiced (since voicing is not phonemic in Tamil), such that one would expect a default to "p" unless hypercorrection (based on an understanding that English has two options where Tamil has only one) instead causes a default to the more exotic and "foreign-looking" "b"? Or is it something else?
Gokul Madhavan said,
June 5, 2024 @ 6:56 am
Native Tamil speaker here. It is overly simplistic to state that Tamil does not distinguish between voiceless and voiced bilabial plosives. Rather, /b/ and /p/ are allophonic in certain contexts. (This is of course complicated by Tamil speakers’ millennium-plus engagemrnt with Sanskrit, where they are both distinct sounds, and in more recent times with English.) We also have certain limitations of the Tamil writing system to deal with here.
Unlike other Brahmi-derived Indic writing systems, the Tamil writing system has only a single grapheme ப் that can represent this set of allophonic sounds. It is therefore read differently in different contexts.
Word-initially, it is more often than not pronounced [p] in Tamil words. Take, for instance, words like படம் (“picture” or “movie”), written but invariably pronounced /paḍam/, where the /ḍ/ is the voiced retroflex plosive. The script is unable to represent a distinction between word-initial [p] and [b] even in words where Tamil speakers can pronounce the difference. For example, no Tamil speaker would read the word பாபா as anything other than /bābā/, just as they would also invariably read பாப்பா as /pā(p)pā/.
• Word-medial ப் both preceded and followed by a vowel is usually pronounced [b], with the potential to turn into a Spanish-style fricative. Thus the word கோபம் (“anger”), from the Sanskrit कोप /kōpa/, is written and pronounced in very careful speech as /kōbam/, but more like [kōvã] in casual speech. (The nasalization of the vowel is a separate and unrelated phenomenon.)
• Word-medial geminated ப்ப் is invariably [pp], as in words like கப்பல் (“ship”) , pronounced /kappal/. Note that this makes it virtually impossible to represent non-Tamil words with geminated word-medial [bb] in writing.
• Word-medial ப் preceded by a nasal would invariably be pronounced [b] without any hint of spirantization. Hence அம்பு (“arrow”) is pronounced /ambɯ/. It is impossible to distinguish between [mb] and [mp] in Tamil writing, and I would add that many Tamil speakers also fail to make this distinction in speech as well.
Gokul Madhavan said,
June 5, 2024 @ 7:05 am
Ah the Romanization for the words in Tamil script got clobbered by the system, possibly because I used angular brackets. Adding the correct Romanizations here:
• படம்: pa-ṭa-m
• பாபா: pā-pā
• பாப்பா: pā-p-pā
• கோபம்: kō-pa-m
• கப்பல்: ka-p-pa-l
• அம்பு: a-m-pu
Fragments of my message otherwise seem very misleading, such as “written and pronounced in very careful speech”, when in fact I had intended to say “written kō-pa-m and pronounced … /kōbam/” to make the point that the writing and the speech don’t quite match! My apologies.
Mark Liberman said,
June 5, 2024 @ 7:23 am
@J.W. Brewer: "The earlier post doesn't include the rationale behind myl's "guess" that p-for-b errors would be more likely in this context than b-for-p errors […] I would be interested (absent better data) in a more detailed explanation of why one might expect that to be the case."
It's just that (in the phonotactic contexts in question — word-initial and word-final — Tamil stop consonants are (I believe) phonetically voiceless. Which may be irrelevant, who knows…
(Note in passing that Tamil doesn't allow word-final stops in "prosaic" words, as I understand it, but does in "expressive" words (= "ideophones") — see Caroline Wiltshire, "Expressives in Tamil: Evidence for a word class", 1999).
J.W. Brewer said,
June 5, 2024 @ 7:40 am
I appreciate the more detailed explanation from Gokul Madhavan. It shouldn't be that surprising that actual current Tamil phonology may recognize a phonemic contrast between /p/ and /b/ in certain contexts where the inherited orthography doesn't have the capacity to show that contrast in writing.
BZ said,
June 5, 2024 @ 11:05 am
I wonder if there is similar phenomenon in English used in Russia since b and p, d and t, v and f, g and k, z and s, zh and sh, are indistinguishable pairs at the end of a word in Russian. I've seen my share of broken English signs in Russian parts of New York and Philadelphia, but I don't recall any mistakes along those lines. Perhaps it's because the Cyrillic writing system allows for all those sounds, and it's just in speech that they are not differentiated.
Jason said,
June 5, 2024 @ 5:01 pm
Nobody gonna comment the semiotics of the fact that he's posing like a Bollywood villain, rocks a moustache, and his name is "M K Stalin"?
Mark Liberman said,
June 6, 2024 @ 5:49 am
@Jason: "Nobody gonna comment the semiotics of the fact that he's posing like a Bollywood villain, rocks a moustache, and his name is "M K Stalin"?"
Go for it! But maybe that should be "Kollywood villain"?
David Marjanović said,
June 7, 2024 @ 10:24 am
I don't know if it's true of English as spoken in India, but in English spoken elsewhere /b d g/ are not reliably voiced in all contexts; especially after a pause they're more often voiceless than voiced. /p t k/ escape confusion mostly by aspiration or glottalization, all of which Tamil lacks.
Chas Belov said,
June 7, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
I regularly see b-v and s-z swaps on handwritten Spanish signage. I've personally swapped d and t at the ends of [English] words, I suspect on unaccented syllables.