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Transcribin' again

There's some interesting socio-politico-linguistic discussion, along with links to a lot more of the same, in Dylan Stableford's post "Was the Associated Press transcription of Obama’s CBC speech ‘racist’?", The Cutline 9/26/2011. I don't have time this morning to add significantly to this discussion, but in any case, I'd largely be recapitulating the material covered […]

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Annals of "needs washed"

Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has posted a podcast today about the "needs washed" regionalism, which is mostly associated with the North Midland dialect region of the U.S. Though her goal is to provide prescriptive advice about when it's appropriate to use the "need + V-en" construction, she has conducted some nice data collection from […]

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Ask Language Log: Writing "gonna" or "going to"

Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations: I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of […]

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Pawlenty's linguistic "southern strategy"?

Tim Pawlenty's speech on March 7 to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition suprised many observers, and not entirely in a good way. Dana Milbank, "With Pawlenty's Iowa speech, a side of syrup", Washington Post 3/9/2011, wrote … Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern preacher. At the Faith & Freedom event, […]

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How you speak and how you think you speak: Part 1

Among the comments on yesterday's pin-pen post, Eric (one of several) asked: Hey academic linguists, I have a nerdy question. I assume that in phonetics "field research" or whatever, lots of scenarios have several investigators listen to a speaker, make independent IPA transcriptions, and then check their transcriptions against each other. And then when the […]

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Whither the Velar?

A few days ago, Cyndy Ning sent me this Website for learning pinyin pronunciation.  It has both female and male voices which you can activate by clicking on nánshēng 男声 and nüsheng 女声 just above the initials D, E, and F at the top of the table.  I also found similar tables here and here. […]

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Aksking again

[This is to follow up, as promised, on yesterday's brief note, "Racist sociolinguistics from El Rushbo?"] On Feb. 22, President Obama met with a group of state governors at the White House, as described in Peter Baker and Sam Dillon, "Obama Pitches Education Proposal to Governors", NYT 2/22/2010. He opening the discussion with an 11-minute […]

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Pickin' up on those features also

Today's Doonesbury celebrates Sarah Palin's way with function words and inflectional affixes:

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Palin's tactical g-lessness

I really like Mark's "empathetic -in'" in place of "g-dropping," though it may require a public campaign to make the substitution. Just by way of a footnote to that post, I did a "Fresh Air" piece on accent and authenticity last week which ended with some comments on the development of Palin's g-dropping (with video […]

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Empathetic -in'

In a recent exchange ("Pinker on Palin's 'nucular'", 10/5/2008; "Pinker contra Nunberg re nuclear/nucular", 10/17/2008; "Nucular riposte", 10/18/2008), Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Nunberg disagreed, among other things, about whether President George W. Bush is engaging in "conscious linguistic slumming" when he uses the pronunciation commonly written as "nucular". Geoff argued that George Bush … can't […]

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Nucular riposte

Steve Pinker understates the case when he says that there's a master's thesis in "nucular" studies: I envision dissertations, conferences, endowed chairs, journals, broken marriages…

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What Palin's gonna do

Philip Gourevitch's "The State of Sarah Palin" (New Yorker, 22 September, p. 66-7) quotes from an interview with the vice-presidential candidate: "We're not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly–Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips–and beg them to do this [build a natural gas pipeline] for Alaska," Palin told me last month in Juneau. […]

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Wright on language and linguistics

According to Dana Milbank, "Still More Lamentations From Jeremiah", Washington Post, 8/29/2008 The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs yesterday: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove […]

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