inputting accented letters

As I have mentioned before (blog, 26 Aug 2008 and 25 Jan 2010), the Guardian newspaper is now able to print accented (= diacritic-bearing) Latin letters not only for west European languages but also for those from eastern Europe. My picture shows part of a page from the 15 April edition of the paper. In the course of an obituary for Anna Walentynowicz, “godmother of the Solidarity trade union” they managed Gdańsk and Wybrzeża correctly (though they didn’t attempt Solidarność). But look what happened to Wałęsa! The barred l was fine, but the ogonek under ę turned into a cedilla instead, giving ȩ.
I don’t know whether the Guardian journalist tried to compose the letter from an e plus a diacritic, and chose the wrong diacritic, or whether s/he just picked the wrong precomposed letter from a dropdown list. Either way, it provokes the question: what language, if any, has U+0229 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CEDILLA in its orthography? If none, who uses this symbol, and for what? Presumably it must be or have been in use, because otherwise Unicode would not have admitted it. (It’s in the Unicode block Latin Extended-B, in a section headed “Miscellaneous additions”.)
Can anyone enlighten us?
Stranger still, at U+1E1D (Latin Extended Additional) Unicode also recognizes LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CEDILLA AND BREVE, i.e. ḝ.
You can check it out on the on-line Unicode site here.
The on-line version of the obituary has ę correctly.

Commenting on yesterday’s blog, with reference to the character ö, one contributor apologized “Sorry, I don’t have easy access to diacritics”. I was wondering just what input device he was using that can’t input an o-umlaut. Even a mobile phone can do that. On any Windows computer you can key in
• Alt+0246 (on the numerical keypad)
• or on some computers Alt+148
I am sure you can do something similar on a Mac (option-apostrophe?). If using Word you can do
• Ctrl+(Shift+):, o
• or 00F6, Alt-X
For HTML, including blog comments, you can also type
• ö
• or ö
• or ö.
Perhaps these don’t count as “easy access”. Or perhaps people just don’t know about them. If anything, we have a confusingly large range of possibilities.

The corresponding methods for inputting æ are Alt+0230, Alt+145, Ctrl+(Shift+)& a, æ, æ, æ.

Eyjafjallajökull

A family wedding a few days ago, causing a gap in this blog, means that we have not yet discussed the pronunciation of the Icelandic volcano that is causing such unprecedented air traffic disruption in Europe. By now everyone else has, though.

Here is the advice from the BBC pronunciation unit. The BBC’s formulation does not use IPA, relying instead on its special respelling system. Interestingly, the headline replaces the character ö with oe, which seems very lame. So do the maps below. I suppose it’s better than Eyjafjallajokull (no diacritic), which is what some of our newspapers have been printing.

For an IPA rendering you’ll have to turn to Wikipedia, which tells us that it’s pronounced ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl̥.

I think, though, that many of us would find it a challenge to come up with precisely that on the basis of the sound clip supplied.

Language Log offers us not only a number of rival versions pronounced by pukka Icelanders but also a selection of feeble attempts by non-Icelanders, including a Youtube compilation of newsreaders’ efforts.

I have to say that for Icelandic final/preconsonantal ll I’ve always been tempted to write tɬ rather than tl̥. I hear quite a bit of friction in the lateral component, so that we have a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate. I have a friend named Hallgrimur, whom I call ˈhatɬkɾɪmʏɾ̥, I hope correctly.

There’s an article about Icelandic phonetics here.

Iapetus and tonotopy

I was reading a book about the geology of the British Isles when I came across the word Iapetus, the name of an ancient ocean that is believed to have once divided Laurentia from Baltica/Avalonia, and hence the future Scotland from the future England.
I read it to myself as aɪˈæpɪtəs, but was then struck by doubts. Ought it rather to be ˌaɪəˈpiːtəs?
This type of uncertainty arises whenever we meet a word from Greek or Latin for the first time, and the penultimate vowel in that word’s spelling is followed by a single consonant letter. The general rule is that if that vowel was long in Greek/Latin we’ll stress it in English, but if it was short we won’t, placing the stress instead on the antepenultimate.
So my hesitation can be reformulated as uncertainty over the ancient quantity of the e in Iapetus.
Iapetus is also the name of one of the moons of Saturn. In Greek mythology he was one of the titans.
I suppose I must have heard this word pronounced once or twice in my life. And I must have looked it up somewhere twenty years ago, because it is there in LPD. It’s also to be found in the Oxford BBC Guide.
In any case, my first surmise was right: it is indeed stressed on the antepenultimate, because the e was historically short. We say aɪˈæpɪtəs.
Greek spelling makes the history clear, because in Ancient Greek long and short e are represented by different letters: η (eta) for ē, ε (epsilon) for ĕ. And the titan was Ἰαπετός Iapĕtŏs.

Ancient Greek also distinguished long and short o: ω (omega) for ō, ο (omicron) for ŏ. The vowel in -log- ‘word, reason’ was the short one, which is why we stress words such as biology, philology on the antepenultimate. So was the vowel in -top- ‘place’, which is why I was taken aback when Sophie Scott (blog, 2 April) pronounced tonotopy as ˈtəʊnətɒpi. I would have expected təʊˈnɒtəpi.
— —
I shall be away for the rest of this week. Next blog: 19 April.

a weritable willain

Scanned image by
Philip V. Allingham

It appears that the Londoners of a century or two ago sometimes interchanged or confused the sounds v and w. Dickens certainly portrays this in his literary representation of Cockney: Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit says on the one hand “wery best” and “[the] walley of the shadder [of death]” and on the other hand “vich” for ‘which’.
In Pickwick Papers we find

Ve got Tom Vildspark off..ven all the big vigs..said as nothing couldn't save him.

and

I may trust you as vell as if it was my own self. So I’ve only this here one little bit of adwice to give you!

(Notice that in this second passage “I’ve” and “give” presumably had the usual v and “one” the usual w.)
Writing in 1936, H.C. Wyld recalled the use of [w] in place of [v] as a jocular usage among middle-class speakers in the nineteenth century. It is utterly unknown in Cockney today. (Accents of English p. 333)
The OED (second edition, 1989) says

In south-eastern English dialects the change of v- to w- does occur, and older representations of Cockney speech exhibit a converse change of w- to v-, which recent investigators have been unable to verify as still existent.

In present-day English such occasional interchange of the two consonants has been reported from parts of the Caribbean, particularly the Bahamas (Accents of English, p. 568 and 589).

I was accordingly delighted when a workman in Montserrat, exchanging gossip about local events, told me that in his view a certain person was a ˈwɪlən (villain).
I had never previously encountered this in Montserrat, although George Irish (see yesterday’s blog) does list one such entry.

warmunce - vermin; a mean or base person

With the dubious exception of Bahamian, where the two sounds may conceivably be in complementary distribution, all core native varieties of English, including Cockney and Caribbean, appear to have a firm phonemic contrast between v and w. (In parts of Jamaica and perhaps elsewhere there may be some confusion between v and b, but that is another story.)
Indian English is notorious for often lacking this phonemic contrast, with the two consonants being merged as ʋ (a labiodental approximant). This is often perceived by non-Indians as w, so that for example a maths teacher of Indian origin in a British school acquired the nickname “Mr Wortical” because of the way he pronounced vertical.
In the EFL world Hungarians are notorious for being deaf to this contrast and for using v in place of w. This is also part of the popular stereotype of a German accent, although nowadays most German speakers of EFL seem to have mastered the contrast.

Caribbean centipedes

There was an interesting pronunciation that I observed during my recent stay in Montserrat in the Caribbean: centipede pronounced as ˈsantipi. Not only is the final d lost as compared with the BrE/AmE ˈsentɪpiːd, -ə-, but the stressed vowel is that of TRAP rather than the usual DRESS.
The only published book about Montserratian speech, George Irish’s Alliouagana Folk (Plymouth: Jagpi, 1985), is a collection of local proverbs, sayings, words and phrases. It duly records this word in its glossary.

santipee - centipede

Richard Allsopp’s scholarly Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (OUP 1996) also records this pronunciation of the word (though with a different medial vowel) as common to the entire Caribbean English Creole region, and speculates about its origin as Portuguese.I can see that a Portuguese source could explain the loss of the final consonant — though this could also be due to the characteristic Creole uncertainty about final d (compare for instance galvanize meaning ‘corrugated metal roofing’, shortened from galvanized iron). Apart from that, though, I would have thought that Portuguese centopeia, phonetically sẽtoˈpeja, does not seem on phonetic grounds to be a more likely source than a straightforward English origin. (OK, English got it via French from Latin centipeda ‘hundred-foot’, as did the Portuguese.)

s-lessness

Adam Brown’s original query (blog, 7 April) had two components, one about [θ], which we have discussed, and the other about [s].

My gut feeling is that, of the 6,000+ languages, almost all of them, probably 90%+ have [s] (although I know that Tamil and Maori are exceptions), and that very few, probably 10% at most, have [θ].

He now returns to the question of [s].

The second question, about the non-occurrence of [s], was equally interesting, but harder to find an answer to. WALS (Ian Maddieson) doesn't investigate precisely this, but states that 8.7% of the sample contained no fricatives, and that if languages have only one fricative, it is usually [s]. In other words, the percentage of languages that do not have [s] is probably less than 10%.
WALS states that languages that have no fricatives are mostly Australian aboriginal languages, and languages of New Guinea and the interior of South America. I ploughed through phonologies of other languages, and found some Pacific languages without [s]: Hawaiian, Maori, Nauruan, Tahitian and Tokelauan. Frankly, none of the above can be described as major world languages. The only major language without [s] seems to be Tamil.
Could I persuade you to ask your blog's audience whether they know of any other major world languages without [s]?

Fine. Over to you, my readers.
But first: why does Adam think that Tamil has no [s]? Sorry, but there are thousands of Tamil words containing this fricative. Here is the text of The North Wind and the Sun in Tamil, from the IPA Principles booklet (1949).You can see that the word for ‘sun’ is transcribed suːrijanum, and that the passage contains several other words containing s. OK, Tamil s may sound a bit ʃ-like sometimes, but it still counts as s and is still a fricative.
Perhaps the source of Adam’s misapprehension is this Wikipedia article, which unaccountably omits s from its list of consonants. Go to the Wikipedia article on Tamil phonology, however, and the omission is repaired.
For what it’s worth, the Tamil writing system includes the letters ஸ (Unicode TAMIL LETTER SA) as well as ஶ (SHA) and ஷ (SSA).
But there’s no mistake with the Australian and Polynesian languages, many of which do indeed lack s. Who can forget the Hawaiian version of ‘merry Christmas’, meli kalikimaka?
Since Hawaiian has no s, the medial and final fricatives of Christmas are rendered as k.

Christmas Island in Kiribati, on the other hand, becomes kiritimati. As with the name Kiribati (< Gilberts) itself, this demonstrates the fact that in Gilbertese (like Hawaiian, a Polynesian language) there is no phoneme /s/ as such, although /t/ before i is assibilated to [s]. So English s is rendered as /ti/ and written ti; and we, in return, are supposed to pronounce Kiribati as ˈkɪrɪbæs (though we mostly don’t).

EE, yet again

Students around the world often write to me and ask for advice or help on research they say they are carrying out on Estuary English. Unfortunately many of them are not in a position to collect actual speaker data from people in the southeast of England, so their “research” has to be an armchair study.
They write to me because I was foolhardy enough fifteen years ago to launch a website on the topic of EE, with the aim of bringing together the material on the subject that I could find on line or, in most cases, put on line. A lot of it was journalism, usually more or less sensational, making wild claims about this new variety of English supposedly sweeping the country and ousting RP from its former position of preeminence. Later, when academics were able bit by bit to investigate the truth of such claims, I did my best to publish (or link to) their research findings. In my view the most important of these were those by Joanna Przedlacka, incorporated in her 2002 book Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties. ISBN 3-631-39340-7, pb. Bern: Peter Lang. This work, as I put it,

demolishes the claim that EE is a single entity sweeping the southeast. Rather, we have various sound changes emanating from working-class London speech, each spreading independently.

I summarized her findings for my UCL students here and here.

In Britain media interest in the EE phenomenon has now died down, and it is three years since I have had anything to add to the site (most of which is now eight to twelve years old, an eternity in web time).
Nevertheless, I still receive emails like this one from Ámbar Romero in Chile.

I'm interested in doing some research on Estuary English and Received Pronunciation in order to do my Thesis project… I would like to ask you if you knew or if you had any information about the percentage of usage of these 3 characteristics of EE that are mentioned in the literature i.e. L-vocalization, the use of the glottal stop in final position and before consonants, and Yod- coalescence in tonic syllables. Is there any comparison between RP and EE speakers regarding the use of this features? ...I would very much [like to] know your opinion on the current status of RP, if you think it is including or not some of the characteristics of EE and if the latter might replace it as the accent of EFL in the short term.

What can one say? Here’s what I actually said.

Please read (or reread) Joanna Przedlacka's work. The point is that there is no real definable entity “Estuary English”. You can't divide up the speakers in the southeast into those who speak EE and those who speak something else. So there can be no comparative statistics of the kind you ask for (“Is there any comparison between RP and EE speakers regarding the use of this features?”). All we can do (given money, time, and effort) is to estimate the proportions of the population of a given area who do glottalling, yod coalescence etc in given phonetic environments and in given styles of speech.

If someone uses a relatively high proportion of glottalling, you might say “Ah! This must be a speaker of EE.” If you define EE speakers as those who use a lot of glottalling, you will indeed find that EE speakers use more glottalling than RP speakers (etc). But this argumentation is circular, therefore unscientific. A scientific approach would be to divide your speakers up by social class or some other non-linguistic criterion, then establish the possible correlation of phonetic variables such as glottalling with the non-phonetic variables.

All we have is various sound changes in progress. Many sound changes seem to spread out from London and from the working class into the middle class (and defining social class is another scientific nightmare). These sound changes all move at different rates. This kind of thing has certainly been going on in English English for at least five hundred years.

The leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron, is an Old Etonian and an archetypal RP speaker. But political commentators have recently asserted (with what truth I do not know) that he has been trying to make his speech sound more popular by using glottal stops. How does that relate to "the current status of RP"?

For EE to be used as the sole or main pronunciation model in EFL someone would have first to define it clearly and then produce learning materials (dictionaries, textbooks etc) using it. I don’t see any likelihood of that happening. Rather, BrE-oriented ELT will continue to be based mainly on a modernized version of RP (aka Standard Southern British English or SSBE, the modish term at BAAP last week).

But I hope that we’re gradually getting the message across that students will benefit from being exposed to a wide range of different varieties of English, just as native speakers are.