Our stay in Montserrat last month happened to coincide with the annual conference of the Leeward Islands District of the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas, held in Montserrat for the first time since the volcanic disaster of 1995-1997. Translated into Anglican terminology, this was the equivalent of a diocesan synod.
I attended the Conference Welcome Service. As well as over a hundred conference delegates, there were scores of dignitaries present, including the Governor of Montserrat and the Premier of Montserrat, and also hundreds of people from the general public, by no means all of them Methodists. (Montserrat is very ecumenical. The service was actually held in a Roman Catholic church, since none of the Methodist churches on the island were large enough.)
We tend to forget how multilingual the Caribbean is. The Leeward Islands Circuit covers not only the formerly British islands of Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts-Nevis, and the still British Montserrat and the British and American Virgin Islands, but also the Netherlands or ex-Netherlands Antilles (nearby St Martin, Saba and St Eustatius, and distant Aruba and Curacao) and missions in the French island of Guadeloupe. So we had greetings not only in English but also in Dutch, French, Papiamento, “patois” (i.e. Kwèyól, the French Creole spoken in Dominica) and Spanish — though not in any English-lexicon Caribbean Creole. We had Bible readings in French and Dutch as well as English.
Most of the service, though, was in English. This provided a useful opportunity to observe varieties of clerical English from throughout the Leewards. I was struck by how homogeneous they all were. In the formal style of a church service I really cannot distinguish an Antiguan from a Kittitian from a Virgin Islander (though perhaps locals could).
From an EFL perspective, all fall very clearly under BrE, not AmE. In most BATH words they have the long vowel, the same as in father. Except to some extent in NURSE words, they are non-rhotic (and in this the Leeward islanders differ from Jamaicans and very strikingly from Bajans). Local characteristics include usually monophthongal FACE and GOAT vowels and merged NEAR-SQUARE, together with variability in θ~t, ð~d and variable cluster reduction.
This applies even to the delegates from St Thomas, St John and St Croix, which have been American for nearly a century but retain the British-style English their forebears had under Danish rule.
Another interesting paper at the Łódź conference was given by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak (seen with me in this photograph, taken by Alice Henderson).
He started by showing us some of the appallingly improbable and stilted “English” sentences given in Polish textbooks of elementary English over the course of the twentieth century. For example, can you imagine a husband and wife ever saying this?
—Am I a man? —Yes, you are a man, and I am a woman.
Equally improbable is that any native speaker, talking to other NSs, would come out with
The house is high.
or even
I am a teacher. I have many students.
More importantly, Sobkowiak demonstrated how many of the “elementary” example sentences in fact contain multiple points of phonetic difficulty for the Polish learners at whom they were aimed.
This is his dog.
In this simple example there are several tricky pronunciation features: the difficult consonant ð; the orthographic irregularity that final -s corresponds to s in this but to z in is and his; and not least the final g in dog (Polish devoices final obstruents).
Any sentence containing preconsonantal the is problematic — not only phonetically, with the non-Polish ð and ə, but also grammatically, since Polish has no articles.
An ideal sentence for absolute beginners, he thought, might be
I like music.
This maps happily onto pseudo-Polish aj lajk mjuzyk.
Sobkowiak has identified some 61 points of phonetic difficulty for Poles in the pronunciation of English words. Using these, he has devised a Phonetic Difficulty Index (PDI) and has analysed the PDI of thousands of vocabulary items presented to Polish learners accordingly.
He reckons that the phonetically most difficult vocabulary items he encountered were authoritariansɔːˌθɒrɪˈteəriənz, light-colouredˌlaɪtˈkʌləd, pearl fisheriesˈpɜːl ˌfɪʃəriz, and square-shoulderedˌskweəˈʃəʊldəd. Each of these, he says, scores 11 points of difficulty.
Learners from other language backgrounds would have similar though not identical problems. (For example, English θ is a difficult consonant for speakers of Polish, but not for speakers of Castilian Spanish, Standard Arabic, or Greek.) Phonetically aware language teachers could construct a PDI for any L1-L2 pair. _ _ _
And a happy new year to all!
This blog will again be suspended for the whole of the month of January. Next posting: 1 February 2012.
At the Łódź conference John Coleman presented an interesting talk about the spoken component of the British National Corpus. It comprises about ten percent of the entire corpus.
It includes a wide range of authentic spoken material, recorded in 1991-92 by volunteers wearing Walkman devices recording all their conversational interactions over a 24-hour period. As well as all kinds of structured and unstructured talk directed at other people, from sermons to discussions of boyfriends, the files include dog-directed and parrot-directed speech. Who’s a pretty boy, then?
The material has now been digitized by the British Library from the original analogue recordings.
Although comprising only ten percent of the whole corpus, the audio material of the BNC extends to 9 TB (nine terabytes), about 1800 hours’ worth. So you won’t be downloading it all and storing it on your hard disc any time soon.
Although the whole spoken corpus is unmanageably large, a selection of audio files from the BNC is now available online.
The ten most frequently used words in the spoken corpus, Coleman says, occur more than 58,000 times each. At the other extreme, 23% of the words used (12,400 words) occur only once. Many other words that are surely in people’s vocabulary never occur at all.
Coleman presented some observations about assimilation of place of articulation. As well as the familiar dealveolar type (ˈtem ˈmɪnɪts, ˈɡʊɡ ˈɡɜːl), he found various instances of “nonstandard place assimilation of word-final /m/ and /ŋ/”. Delabial examples included siːn in seem to and seɪŋ in same kind of. As well as plenty of cases of aɪŋ(ɡ)ənə etc for I’m going to, he reports “18 tokens per 10 million” of əˈlɑːŋ klɒk for alarm clock. The most frequent item classified as develar was swimming pool pronounced as ˈswɪmɪm puːl — but there of course the underlying form of the -ing ending would be ɪn rather than ɪŋ for some speakers in some styles of speech (as the sociolinguists have documented), so that the assimilation could be dealveolar after all, not develar. The same applies to ˈwedɪm in wedding present.
Yesterday’s brief mention of Brno triggered interest in its pronunciation. In Czech it is ˈbr̩no, two syllables, the first having a stressed syllabic trill. Mendel, though, being a native speaker of German, would have known it as Brünn brʏn.
Inspired by this thought, Stephen Bryant sent me a picture of the Nový Most (‘new bridge’) in Bratislava, which I show in reduced size alongside. He adds the comment
What I really like about this photo is the green panel on the sign, pointing to Brno, Žilina, Győr and Vienna, four cities in four countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria respectively.
Perhaps the pronunciation of Győr — which I for one struggle with — could be the subject of a future blog entry.
Győr is pronounced ɟ(ʝ)øːr. You can tell the name is Hungarian, since the letter ő, with its double acute accent, is used in the spelling of no other language (or at least, no other European language). The logic behind this unusual diacritic is that Hungarian uses a diaeresis, as in German, to show front rounded vowels (ö, ü), and an acute accent, as in Czech, to show vowel length (á, é, í, ó, ú): so for long front rounded vowels you have an acute diaeresis (ő, ű).
There is some debate as to how the initial consonant, orthographic gy, is best classified. All agree that it is a voiced palatal obstruent. The question is whether it is a plosive, ɟ, or an affricate, ɟʝ. The 1999 IPA Handbook treats it as an affricate, but adds this note.
In formal style /cç, ɟʝ/ are realized mostly as palatal stops, i.e. [c] and [ɟ].
Its predecessor, the 1949 Principles booklet, says simply
c, ɟ cardinal palatals.
Anyhow, the result is similar to the English gj in regular. The vowel is as in German schön; the final consonant is an apical tap, or in my experience may alternatively sometimes be fricative. Listen here.
Győr has a number of names in other languages: as well as nativized forms such as Дьёр in Russian and Đur or Jura in Croatian, it has the apparently unrelated name Raab in German. But as far as I am aware there is no traditional anglicized form of the name.
I’ve been reading Siddharta Mukherjee’s fascinating book The Emperor of All Maladies. I’d go along with Dacid Rieff’s judgment:
Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things - a noble book.
I had not previously been aware of the importance of the German doctor and biologist Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902), who made several important discoveries to do with leukemia. Coming across his name in the book, I naturally wondered how to pronounce it. Its spelling combines three different uncertainties in German spelling-to-pronunciation rules: the initial letter v (f or v?), ch (ç or x?) and the final w (f or silent?).
Mangold’s Duden Aussprachewörterbuch gives
Virchow ˈfɪrço, auch ˈvɪ…
This is confirmed by the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch.
fˈɪʁçoː od. vˈɪʁ…
Merriam-Webster 11 offers the anglicization
ˈfir-(ˌ)kō, ˈvir-
which translates into BrE as ˈfɪəkəʊ or ˈvɪəkəʊ. So be it. _ _ _
The rest of this post is a rant about the failure of authors and editors to carry out appropriate fact-checking before publication.
My quibble is this. As I came to the book I knew very little about the aetiology and therapeutics of cancer. I was eager to hear what Mukherjee had to tell me about surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the biology of carcinoma cells. Naturally, I was prepared to accept as authentic what he wrote on these topics. But every now and again, as he introduced some new technical term, he would tell us the purported etymology of the word in question. Now language is something I do know a bit about, and here almost everything Mukherjee says is inaccurate. This reduces my faith in him as an authority on other matters.
Marie Curie called the new element radium, from the Greek word for “light”.
No, radium is not Greek, and it does not mean ‘light’. The word was coined from rad- (in French radioactif) plus the suffix -ium (used to form the names of metallic elements). Rad- is from the Latin word radius, which means ‘rod, spoke, ray’. The Greek for ‘light’ is φῶς phōs (contracted from φάος phaos), stem φωτ- phōt-, which gives us photography, photon etc.
…vinca, the Latin word for “bind”.
No, the Latin word for ‘bind’ (verb) is vincio, vincire, vinxi, vinctum. The related noun is vinculum ‘a bond, fetter’. The form vinca is late Latin and botanical Latin for a genus of plants known in English as ‘periwinkle’. The drug vincristine was derived from a plant formerly included in the genus Vinca (but now placed in Catharanthus).
adjuvant, from the Latin phrase “to help”
No, the Latin origin of this word is adjuvans, with stem adjuvant-. It is not a phrase, but a single word. It means ‘helping’ and is the present participle active of the verb adjuvo. ‘To help’ is adjuvare, its infinitive.
[a propos Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificum Diatriba] …one such morbis…
The intended word is morbus, the nominative singular of the word meaning ‘disease’. The form morbis is the Latin ablative plural, used after the preposition de.
mitosis — Greek for “thread” —
The Greek for ‘thread’ is mitos (μίτος). Mitosis is a modern Latin coinage based on this root.
Not about language, but a matter of general knowledge, is
…the isolated hamlet of Brno, Austria…
Brno, where Mendel carried out his pea experiments at St Thomas’s Abbey, is no “isolated hamlet”, but a large city, the capital of Moravia.
I’m not saying that Mukherjee ought to have known all these things. I’m saying that someone — either the author or the publisher’s editor — ought to have checked the facts, which are readily available.
I find it really depressing that announcers on our most popular classical music station, Classic FM, have so little idea how to pronounce foreign languages. Surely anyone concerned with classical music needs at least a smidgin of awareness of the phonetics (reading rules) of Italian? And of German, too, I’d have thought.
A currently popular record album bears the title Il progetto Vivaldi 2. The Classic FM presenter called it ˈɪɫ prəˈɡetəʊ vɪˈvældi ˈtuː. I can see that it’s unreasonable to expect an educated Englishman to know the Italian for ‘2’ (due), but can’t everyone see that progetto is the Italian equivalent of the English word project and, like it, has dʒ?
There’s a classical ensemble called Gli Incogniti (‘the unknown people’). How do you think the Classic FM announcer pronounces this difficult name? That’s right, ˈɡliː ɪŋkɒɡˈniːti . Perhaps he thinks gli is related to the English word glee. (It’s actually the form the Italian plural definite article takes before a vowel, and in Italian gl stands for a palatal lateral.) OK, I know we do tend to anglicize incognito with penultimate stress, but in Italian the stress is actually antepenultimate. To the best of my knowledge, the Italian pronunciation of the ensemble’s name is ʎi iŋˈkɔɲɲiti. There's a video of them here.
In other news, a recent contestant on the TV panel game University Challenge referred to Descartes as ˈdeɪkɑː, which is taking the deletion of French final consonants too far. In French, he's dekaʁt(ə).
But I salute our choirmaster’s skill in anglicizing Italian musical terms during a recent practice.
When we come to the ækəˈpeləri bit, I want you all to…
That’s an adjective formed by suffixing -y to a cappella, with word-internal intrusive r.
Rant over. Happy Christmas, everyone. Enjoy the music. Next blog: 27 Dec.
there is in each case also an optional variant involving schwa plus a nonsyllabic consonant.
— to which he replied that he didn’t know what I meant.
I’m not sure how to put it more clearly. I mean that although the word hidden, for example, is mostly pronounced ˈhɪdn̩, it can also be said as ˈhɪdən. Most cases of n̩ can be replaced by ən, and vice versa, with no change of meaning. And the same applies to the other syllabic consonants of English. You can say əl instead of l̩ in medal - meddle (though that might sound odd or childish, depending on where you come from). For hesitant you can say ˈhezɪtənt or ˈhezɪtn̩t. For blossom you can say ˈblɒsəm or ˈblɒsm̩. For gathering you can say ˈɡæðərɪŋ or ˈɡæðr̩ɪŋ (= ˈɡæðɚɪŋ), or indeed compressed as ˈɡæðrɪŋ.
In terms of phonology, I would say that syllabic consonants are not phonemes, i.e. not part of our underlying sound system. Rather, they are derived by rule from an underlying string of ə plus a non-syllabic sonorant consonant. I call the rule Syllabic Consonant Formation, and it takes the general form
ə [+son] → [+syll] / …
Two segments are reduced to one, with the sonorant consonant retaining its various attributes (place, nasality/laterality, etc) as it acquires syllabicity.
The conditioning environment of the rule (shown here just as “…”) is pretty complex. It varies according to different accents and different speaking styles, and also depending on which consonant is concerned. For ən after a strong vowel plus d, as in garden, the rule is strongly favoured (though evidently now becoming less so in some BrE). With a preceding fricative, as in lesson, it is still favoured, though perhaps less strongly. With an affricate, as in kitchen, it is disfavoured. In common and lion, i.e. after a nasal or a vowel, it is so strongly disfavoured as to be virtually unknown in RP-style English. Although a syllabic nasal following a nasal is a no-no, a syllabic lateral, on the other hand, is fine: channelˈtʃænl̩.
Although the AmE NURSE vowel could in principle be analysed as a strong (= stressable) syllabic r̩, this would not fit the above rule, which requires a weak ə as part of the input. So I treat the NURSE vowel in both BrE and AmE as a primitive, ɜː ~ ɝː. The second vowel of AmE father, however, does fit, and I analyse it accordingly: ˈfɑːðər → ˈfɑːðɚ.
This is the reasoning behind the notation I use in LPD, where potential syllabic consonants are shown either as əl ən ər əm or as əl ən ər əm, depending on whether a syllabic consonant is more or less likely as the output. The LPD notational convention is that a raised symbol denotes a possible insertion, an italic symbol a possible omission. So ən implies a default n̩, as in hiddenˈhɪd ən → ˈhɪdn̩, while ən implies a default ən, as in hesitantˈhez ɪt ənt → ˈhezɪtənt.
* * *
Here by request is a quick-and-dirty video of me saying ˈhɪdn̩ ˈhɪdən ˈmedl̩ ˈmedəl. Sorry about the poor sound quality.
Our stay in Montserrat last month happened to coincide with the annual conference of the Leeward Islands District of the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas, held in Montserrat for the first time since the volcanic disaster of 1995-1997. Translated into Anglican terminology, this was the equivalent of a diocesan synod.
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