Naomi

How do you pronounce the English female given name Naomi?
I’ve always said ˈneɪəmi. That is also what you will find in Daniel Jones, alongside a less common variant with an unreduced GOAT vowel in the second syllable, ˈneɪəʊmi (notation modernized). As with other -eɪə- sequences, there is also the possibility in RP of compression and smoothing to -eə-, giving ˈneəmi.
But I have become aware of two other possibilities. One has the stress on the penultimate instead of the antepenultimate, thus neɪˈəʊmi. I know two West Indian bearers of the name who use this stressing. It is the only form given in Webster’s Collegiate. To my surprise, I find that this is also what Young’s Concordance gives (1879): NA-O´-MI.
The other concerns variability in the final vowel. Kenyon & Knott’s Pronouncing Dictionary of American English gives (in their notation) ˈneəˌmaɪ, neˈomaɪ, -mɪ, -mə. Mangold & Cho’s Pronouncing and Phonetic Dictionary of Biblical Names (Saarbrücken 1994) lists four possibilities: ˈneɪəmɪ, neɪˈəʊmi, ˈneɪəʊmaɪ, neɪˈəʊmaɪ. But I have never heard -maɪ in Britain, still less -mə.

There is yet another possibility, which I have been vaguely aware of for some time and have now just heard from a returning officer in one of last week’s UK election results. It has a different first vowel: naɪˈəʊmi . I have no idea where this comes from. It can hardly be a spelling pronunciation. Could it be contamination from naïve naɪˈiːv? That seems far-fetched.

The name is of Hebrew origin, נָעֳמִי na’omi ‘pleasant’. In the Hebrew Bible Naomi was the mother-in-law of Ruth.
According to Wikipedia, the name also happens to go very happily into Japanese as 直美 naomi ‘honest beautiful’.

classical elision

In his comment on Wednesday’s blog (5 May) John Cowan raised the question of hiatus avoidance in Latin, quoting the example

monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lūmen ademptum

which, as he says, has to be scanned as

monstr’ ’or|rend’, in|form’, in|gens, cui | lūmen a|demptum

to form a regular hexameter (six feet, namely four spondees, a dactyl, and a spondee; caesura in the third foot).
Another example: the third line of the Aeneid is

lītora,| mult(um) il|l(e) et ter|rīs iac|tātus et | altō

with two elisions as shown.

I am one of that dying breed: people who spent many hours as a teenager having to compose Latin and Greek verse. By the time I was sixteen I knew the rules of elision and hiatus avoidance, and would apply them in my weekly task of putting English poetry into Latin hexameters (or sometimes elegiac couplets) and into Greek iambic pentameters. This is a skill I can say I have since lost.

Looking now at my copy of Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, I am surprised to see that the whole matter is disposed of in a single paragraph.
(At my school we called it neither Synaloepha nor Ecthlipsis, just elision. This is where the use of the term “elision” in English phonetics comes from.)
The reason that a vowel plus m was subject to elision was that the spelling m here did not stand for any actual nasal consonant but just for nasalization of the vowel. So monstrum was pronounced mõ:strũ: (and ends up in Italian as mostro). The nasalized vowel, like any other vowel, would be in hiatus if immediately followed by another vowel and would normally be elided in this context.
In Latin, elision is not usually shown in writing (except sometimes in inscriptions, where you can get things like scriptust = scriptum est). This is different from the convention for classical Greek, in which elision is regularly shown by removal of the letters standing for deleted vowels, in modern texts with an added apostrophe to show the loss. Only short vowels could be elided in Greek.
Here’s what it says in my Sidgwick and Morice, An Introduction to Greek Verse Composition.

Chideock

The village of Chideock in Dorset has been in the news recently because of an imaginative protest against the heavy goods vehicles speeding along its main street, which also forms part of a through route, the A35. Protesters are repeatedly operating the pedestrian crossing button so as to force the traffic to stop.

How do we pronounce Chideock?

The answer is ˈtʃɪdək, as if spelt “Chiddock”.

According to the village website,

The origin of the Name Chideock is uncertain; it possibly comes from an Old English word 'coediog' which means 'wooded' or 'woody'. Alternatively, it may have derived from 'Cedda's Oak' - Cedda being a common Anglo-Saxon name.

I have news for whoever wrote this. Coediog is not an Old English word. It is Welsh. It is the adjective from coed, the Welsh for ‘trees’ (Celtic *cę̄d ). If it is indeed the origin of the name of the village, it must of course have been adopted into their own language by the Anglo-Saxons who took it over. But it would have been a loanword. (Compare Eccles in Lancashire, from the Celtic word that gave us modern Welsh eglwys ‘church’, itself from Latin ecclēsia, in turn from Greek ἐκκλησία).

As an element in placenames, coed may be familiar even to those who do not know Welsh, from the placenames Betws-y-Coed in north Wales (‘chapel of the wood’) and Cyncoed, a suburb of Cardiff (= cefn coed ‘back of wood’).

In Buckinghamshire, the village of Chetwode ˈtʃetwʊd near Aylesbury shows us an OE wudu added to explain the Celtic *cę̄d. Its name means ‘wood-wood’, just as Pendle in Lancashire is ‘hill-hill’.

scoprar il nuovo dì

Pronunciation is not determined by spelling. Contrary to popular belief among non-phoneticians, when we speak (or sing) we do not say letters aloud. I have always thought that one of the best pieces of evidence for this fact is the intrusive r that we non-rhotic speakers use — an r-sound where there is no letter r. This sound can only result from neurological (phonological) processes in the brain, not from marks on paper.

We use intrusive r even, and perhaps most strikingly, when attempting to speak or sing in foreign languages.
Here’s a YouTube clip of a pubful of English people singing Que/Y Viva España. You can just about detect the r in ˈvi:vɑːr eˈspænjɑː. Faced with a final open vowel at the end of viva, followed by another vowel at the beginning of the next word España, it would require a rather sophisticated effort for us not to link them with an r-sound.
(Since the karaokeers are nonrhotic, they naturally also sing por favor as ˈpɔː ˈfæˈvɔː. Please don’t anyone write to tell me that in proper Spanish it’s i ˈβiβa esˈpaɲa, poɾ faˈβoɾ.)


That was untrained karaoke. But even trained singers do the same thing. The choir I sing in is currently rehearsing the drinking song from La Traviata.
The song ends with everyone promising to enjoy drinking and singing until dawn.

Godiamo, godiamo, godiamo,
la tazza e il cantico
la notte abbella e il riso,
in questo paradiso,
ne scopra il nuovo dì,
si, ne scopra il nuovo dì.

For each song our choir plans to perform, the music team very nobly prepare rehearsal tracks for us to listen to as we learn the words and music (blog, 19 January). Here’s a clip of the very last phrase, from the tenor 2 rehearsal track. It contains a very clear intrusive r between scopra and il.
This also serves as a counterexample to the claim sometimes made, that a preceding r (scopra) blocks the operation of the r-insertion rule.

uptalk in the papers

There have been two articles in the newspapers this week about uptalk, the use of a rising tone in a declarative (where most of us would use a fall). In the Sunday Times the education consultant, Chris Woodhead, answered a reader’s query about “the moronic interrogative”

whereby the speaker when making the statement ends the sentence with rising intonation, thus implying they are asking a question.

Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, confessed in his reply that

The phenomenon of rising intonation drives me mad.

(I wonder if he knows that all of us use “rising intonation” in about half the intonation phrases we utter.)
Then in yesterday’s Guardian Tim Lusher asked

Have you noticed more people uptalking? You know, that tedious habit of speaking in a rising cadence, with, like, an especially perky uplift in tone at the end, so your sentence sounds like a question? Even though it isn’t?

Lusher is much better informed about the topic than Woodhead. He knows the terms “uptalk” and “high rising terminal”, and refers to possible sources in Australia and southern California. His new take on the matter is to suggest that

now there seems to be a conscious, ironic use of the tone in circulation. People are using it deliberately, humorously. What do they mean to convey? It can act as a self-deprecating pin to deflate any awkward sentiment accompanying the words, a sort of preemptive apology.

I don’t think it necessarily has any of these special meanings. It’s probably just an instance of language change. A rising tone on a final statement (made by younger people) no longer has the meaning that older people read into it (because that’s what it would mean if they used it themselves).
My advice to the EFL learner in my intonation book (§2.9 Uptalk) was

• If you were born before about 1980, do not use uptalk.
• If you were born later, you can imitate its use by native speakers: but do not overdo it. Uptalk is never essential. Bear in mind that using uptalk may annoy older people listening to you.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to this Language Log article, where there are several sound clips.

Houghton

It is thought that the first constituency to declare its result after the polls close in the UK General Election this Thursday evening will probably be that of Houghton and Sunderland South. This poses a nice test for the radio and TV announcers.
Should they call it ˈhɔːtn̩, ˈhaʊtn̩ or ˈhəʊtn̩? THOUGHT, MOUTH or GOAT? Our pronunciation dictionaries give all three possibilities for places with this spelling.
It’s the rest of the constituency’s name that resolves the matter. The town southwest of Sunderland in Tyne & Wear is known more fully as Houghton-le-Spring. All our pronunciation dictionaries tell us that that particular Houghton is ˈhəʊtn̩. (People do however speak with a northeastern accent there — “Mackem” rather than straight Geordie — so their local GOAT vowel could be anything from [ʊɔ] to [ɵː]. I’m not an expert.)
The picture at the top shows the Seven Sisters at Houghton-le-Spring (don’t ask). Photo: GeordieMac Pics.

Places in other counties of England may differ. Graham Pointon’s BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (OUP, 1990) gives us a long list.But this list, long though it may be, doesn’t help us with places of that name in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Canada. Nor does it help with United States placenames. There, according to EPD, Houghton MI is ˈhoʊtn̩, like the one near Sunderland. But Houghton WA, according to Wikipedia, is ˈhaʊtn̩.

On the M61 motorway in Lancashire there is a directional sign pointing to “Westh’ton”. Not all road users would know that this is short for Westhoughton, which is pronounced westˈhɔːtn̩.

recently...

The standard descriptions of English phonetics really fall down — it seems to me — when it comes to the sequence involving a voiceless plosive preceded by a nasal and followed by a lateral, such as we have in recently.
Reading Gimson’s Introduction, even in Cruttenden’s latest revision (the seventh, 2008: §9.2.4 The Release Stage of English Plosives, (5) Lateral release, p. 167), you would imagine that in such a case we always get lateral release of an alveolar plosive, i.e. ˈriːsnt^lli. True, there’s also a section in the book headed ‘Glottal replacement in RP’ (§9.2.8 (c), p. 180), but it contains no examples of a plosive preceded by a nasal. (To be fair, neither does the panel on Glottal Stop in LPD.)
There are people who do indeed have a laterally released alveolar plosive, just as described. I do myself, in relatively formal or careful speech. But I also have another option, as I think most people do.
This is to have a glottal stop between the sonorants: ˈriːsnʔli. Listening to the party leaders debating on television last night, I was struck by the fact that not only the Scotsman (Brown) but also both of the privately educated Englishmen (Clegg and Cameron) used this variant, in this word and even more strikingly in importantly ɪmˈpɔːʔnʔli.
Actually, though, just labelling the segment a glottal stop does not tell the whole story. Once the tongue tip has made contact with the alveolar ridge for the n segment in recently, it retains the contact until the end of the l segment. What we have for the plosive between them (in the variant I’m discussing) is a double articulation, alveolar and glottal. You can tell there’s glottal closure as well as alveolar from the absence of the typical burst noise of lateral release as we move on to the lateral. The glottal closure is the more important of the two closures, since once the air stream is dammed by the closed glottis it is not available to build up pressure behind the alveolar closure, hence no noise of lateral release. If you find it helpful to have a phonetic symbol for every allophone, you could write this one [t͡ʔ] (t and ʔ joined by a tie bar).
It is not even clear that the double plosive has nasal approach. At the end of the n segment the airstream may well be cut off not so much by the rising soft palate as by the coming together of the vocal folds. Perhaps the /t/ in recently has neither nasal approach nor lateral release.
I think this is the usual pronunciation of /t/ in this phonetic environment in AmE, too.