The Golden Age continues?
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Speech Prosody 2026 starts tomorrow, and I've been asked to present 5 minutes of welcoming remarks at the opening session.
My plan is to start with a quick reading of the abstract from my 2011 Henry Sweet lecture, "Towards the Golden Age of Speech and Language Science":
For the sciences of speech and language, the 21st century promises to bring the kind of progress that the 17th century brought to the physical sciences.
Our telescopes and microscopes, our alembics and Pneumatical Engines, are today's vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive networked computation.
However, the scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly exploratory and potential. There are several critical problems for which we have at best partial solutions; and like our 17th-century predecessors, we need to unlearn some old ideas on the way to learning new ones.
Focusing especially on Henry Sweet's own interests in phonetics and in the history of English, this talk will discuss some of the barriers to be overcome, present some successful examples, and speculate about future directions.
I'll then add a few words about how things have changed since 2011, just as things were changing in the early 17th century.
On the technological side, we have (good and rapidly improving) programs for speech recognition, understanding, and generation. We also benefit from amazing progress in the instrumentation relevant for prosody studies. For example, this code on my laptop can pitch track an hour of speech in just a few seconds! And we're even seeing the first stirrings of "AI co-scientists".
There has also been some theoretical progress, including especially greater freedom from bad theories promoted by political methods.
And the final slide from my 2011 talk remains valid, in work on prosody just as in other areas of speech and language research:
[Geoff Pullum was also at the 2011 LAGB meeting, and posted about it.]
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 26, 2026 @ 1:24 am
freedom from bad theories promoted by political methods — I'd be interested to hear about this…
Peter Grubtal said,
May 26, 2026 @ 1:31 am
"An historic opportunity…". The "a history/an history" debate throws some interesting light on perceptions of correct usage.
My take: "an historic…" is an affectation.
Philip Taylor said,
May 26, 2026 @ 1:48 am
Well, although I flinch visibly on hearing Canadian (silent-) "herbs", I don't turn a hair at "an historic" — it does not seem in the least affected to me, even rho' I would probably not have written it myself.
Mark Liberman said,
May 26, 2026 @ 4:28 am
With respect to (a|an) historic, I'm pretty sure I generally say "a historic", but I usually write "an historic", since I expect marginally fewer complaints on that side, especially for a talk at the LAGB. But in this case, maybe change it to "The historic opportunity"?
David Morris said,
May 26, 2026 @ 7:03 am
Google Ngrams shows that 'a historic' and 'an historic' were about equally common until about 1950, when 'a' grew rapidly until very recently while 'an' first grew more slowly then tailed off significantly.
languagehat said,
May 27, 2026 @ 7:16 am
I usually write "an historic", since I expect marginally fewer complaints on that side
That strikes me as odd. Do you tweak your writing to satisfy peevers in other ways? I too find "an historic…" to be an affectation, and even Bryan Garner calls it that; it surprises me to see it used by an actual linguist.
Rodger C said,
May 27, 2026 @ 9:37 am
I think it's relevant that the first syllable of "historic" is unstressed. My mother would say things like "an hibachi."
HTI said,
May 27, 2026 @ 11:16 am
Is h-dropping in unstressed syllables too working-class to fall outside the realm of “affectation”?
Chris Button said,
May 27, 2026 @ 4:37 pm
I love how Llog comments go off on complete tangents (i'm often guilty of causing that myself)
@ Philip Taylor
Yes "a herb" (with h- onset) vs "an (h)erb" (without h- onset) is a nice one.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 27, 2026 @ 11:58 pm
"an historic" is special (cf. apparently no "an hippopotamus" "an hysterectomy" etc. since the early 20th cent.) but not an affectation to the extent its just a collocation one hears/sees a decent amount in highfalutin-type contexts and thus redeploys. And note it should properly be paralleled by "thee historic" that is /i/ in the definite article… stats on that would be interesting.
And no idea what Ngrams for a/an historian, a/an historic mean, tho' there was a magic moment c. 1905 when the 4 converged…
Chris Button said,
May 28, 2026 @ 6:01 am
@ Rodger C
@ Rodger C
Your hibachi comment is interering. I think it is stress related too.
Compare how a long time ago "an hotel" was acceptable. But "hostel" (etymologically the same word as hôtel with the "s" for the later circumflex) has an English-style first-syllable stress instead.
The behavior of stress in more recent French loans is interesting. In two syllable words, American English tends to go with a French-esque final-syllable stress (baLLET, maSSAGE) while British English applies the standard English first-syllable stress on nouns (BALLet, MASSage)
Philip Taylor said,
May 28, 2026 @ 10:02 am
"An hotel" still features in upper-class British English, Chris.
Chris Button said,
May 28, 2026 @ 1:38 pm
It makes sense: an hoTEL, an hiSTORic, an hiBACHi
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
May 29, 2026 @ 7:01 am
I seem to recall, in middle school French, being taught that some "h" words can take "l'", but other "h" words have to take "le" or "la", and that the reason had to do with whether or not Roland and Charlemagne would have aspirated the "h" or not.
David Marjanović said,
May 29, 2026 @ 1:39 pm
Yes, but there were still people in France who actually pronounced such h as [h] in the 20th century. Outside France, at least, there still are some; I once heard someone in Mauritania say la haine with [h] on TV.
All the other h words, the ones inherited from Latin whose [h] was lost in Roman times, not only can but must take l' (and mon even if feminine, and so on).
Chris Button said,
May 30, 2026 @ 7:48 am
In the plural, it blocks liaison with "les" too.
It would be a lot easier if only the "aspirated" h- was written (unless you're in one of the few places that retain a distinction between the two).
Chris Button said,
May 30, 2026 @ 7:55 am
Come to think of it, any liaison at all–whether "un", "des". That makes sense–even if the orthography is no help.
Philip Taylor said,
June 9, 2026 @ 3:57 pm
Heard on BBC Radio 4 this evening (speaker: almost certainly Evan Davis) "an horrific" (in the context of the stabbing in North Belfast);