a Faroese mystery

There’s a mysterious entry in the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch (German pronunciation dictionary):Brú fär. brɨθu
I know very little about Faroese except that it’s a Scandinavian language, related to Norwegian and Icelandic, and spoken by the fifty thousand people who live on the Faroe Islands, halfway between Scotland and Iceland. But one thing I thought I did know about this language was that despite using the letter ð in its orthography it has no dental fricatives — no phonetic ð and certainly no θ.

So how can this Faroese name be pronounced as shown in Duden?

I consulted my colleague Michael Barnes, who until his retirement was Professor of Scandinavian Studies at UCL and is an expert on Faroese. He tells me that Heðin Brú is a pen-name taken by the Faroese writer Hans Jacob Jacobsen.

This pseudonymous surname is a form of the Faroese word for ‘bridge’, which is more usually brúgv brɪɡv. The older form brú is found in Faroese ballads. Prof. Barnes says it would be pronounced roughly bryu, where the first part of the diphthong is somewhere between Norwegian y and Norwegian ʉ. In the reference work Faroese by Höskuldur Þráinsson et al. (Tórshavn: Føroya Fróðskaparfelag, 2004) it is given as brʉu.

So Duden’s “brɨθu” must be one of that dictionary’s very few misprints. It should read “brʉu”. Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus. And we who live in glass houses mustn’t throw stones.

cosmic pitchers

I’ve rather a lot of things to do today, so there’s no time for a proper blog entry. Instead I offer you a lolcat. It’s rather literate for a lolcat, knowing about correct apostrophes in pronoun-verb contractions and having heard of epenthesis eˈpen^tθəsɪs.
My other offering is a short video on the danglers of replying on a spellchequer. (Thanks, Lynne Murphy.)

bilding a cubbard

The Guardian recently had an interesting leader entitled “Unthinkable? Simpler spelling”, to which Greg Brooks subsequently offered a rejoinder “These variations on English spelling simply won’t work”.

The Guardian’s editorial has been rightly pilloried for repeating the absurd claim that

phonetic languages like Italian and, apparently, Finnish not only have no problem with dyslexia, they don't even have a word for it.

Of course the Finns do have a word for it. Dyslexia may be less of a problem in languages with regular spelling, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, still less that their speakers can’t name or discuss it.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to see the Guardian arguing that the time has come

to step back where we can from uniformity and let in variety and simplicity [in our spelling].

Greg Brooks welcomes this openness and gives some examples.

Some oddities in conventional spelling occur in only a few words, and could be changed without causing problems: bild, cubbard, dubble, gost, gard, lam, bom, crum, autum, potatos, sope, foke, buty, canoo, frute. These would be easier for native and non-native speakers, but would have to become official – not alternatives to existing spellings [emphasis added — JCW].

On the assumption that we are content to allow reform of these “oddities”, I don’t see the logic in insisting that the traditional spellings must no longer be permitted alongside the reformed spellings. Why not allow the two forms to co-exist, to compete if you will, until one or other becomes obsolescent and ultimately obsolete?

That is what has often happened in the history of our spelling.

Even within my own lifetime I can think of examples. As a boy I was taught that we could spell the word pronounced ʃəʊ either as show or as shew.

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee. Gen 12:1

No one would write shew today.

That reminds me. When I was at school it was still quite usual to write no-one and to-day with a hyphen. That hyphen is now obsolescent in the first, obsolete in the second. Nowadays (now-a-days), you will see mostly no one and only today. A hundred years ago our newspapers wrote Oxford-street; today it’s Oxford Street. All those hyphens first coexisted with the unhyphenated forms, then finally lost out.

When I was a boy the spelling gaol (for jail) was the usual spelling in Britain. Only Americans would write jail, we thought. Wrong: British newspapers too now write jail.

In Britain we tolerate both organise and organize, and similarly with many other -ise/-ize words. (Some British people wrongly imagine that only -ise is correct for us. On the contrary, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, like many others, prefers -ize.) It does no harm to allow both forms. The same applies to judg(e)ment and various other cases.

And so we come to build and cupboard. On the first, the OED comments (with its charming Victorian syntax)

The normal modern spelling of the word would be bild (as it is actually pronounced); the origin of the spelling bui- (buy- in Caxton), and its retention to modern times, are difficult of explanation.

On the second, we all know that despite its etymology a modern cupboard is not a table or board for cups. It is a cabinet or closet in which we store all sorts of things. A “broom cupboard” has nothing to do with cups or with boards.

So if people want to write about bilding a cubbard, let’s allow them to do so. As for those who prefer building a cupboard — let them continue to do so. Let a hundred or so improved spellings like these exist alongside the traditional forms. Let a hundred flowers bloom. And let’s see what survives.

singing in foreign

The choir I sing in is working on our next show, which will feature songs from all over the world.

We’re having another go at Jacques Brel’s “Carousel”, which we did last year (blog, 19 Jan 2010). Listening to our very creditable efforts, I was struck by the word carousel itself. I find that (in singing style at least) I want to pronounce the middle syllable with u. But most people in the choir pronounce it with ə, even in singing, thus ˌkærəˈsel. Airport baggage reclaim halls have made this a familiar word nowadays in the UK, where the fairground amusement in question is called not a “carousel” but a “roundabout” or a “merry-go-round”. Clearly I was right to prioritize the ə form in LPD, despite my own conservative habits.

We had an extra rehearsal last night, which has left me in something of a nit-picking mood. We have brilliant professionals producing original arrangements of the music we sing — so how is it that they can’t spell their Italian musical directions correctly? In Italian accelerando is spelt with two cs and one l, just as English accelerate. And I think the arranger means “resume”, not “assume”.
Even my poor smatterings of Italian are enough to know that this should be “molto sonoro”, not “molto sonore”.

Linguistically the most challenging for us of the new songs is an arrangement of two Hindi hits, Chaiyya Chaiyya and Jai Ho. (You may know the second of these from Slum Dog Millionaire.) An Indian member of the choir has been pressed into advising us on the pronunciation, but he’s struggling a bit because Hindi is only his third language, after English and Telugu. We have the lyrics in romanization of course, not in Devanāgarī. This brings its own problems (ee represents ई iː , not ए eː). We’re doing our best. What is tricky, though, is that the lyrics of Jai Ho at one point suddenly switch from Hindi into a sort of Spanish: “ahora conmigo tu baila para hoy…”. Our tame Spanish speaker had to admonish us not to pronounce h in ahora, Spanish aˈoɾa. There’s nothing he can do about the questionable grammar, though.

There’s more Spanish in a song called “In These Shoes”.

No le gusta caminar.
No puede montar a caballo.
Como se puede bailar?
Es un escandalo.

It’s a lost cause to try and persuade a choir mainly of English people to pronounce a Spanish-style r at the end of caminar and bailar, though we can manage an r-sound of sorts in montar — I’m sure you can see why. Interestingly, everyone knows about the double ll in caballo. We do it as j, which is fine, rather than as the disappearing Castilian ʎ. But an awful lot of our singers wrongly extend this treatment to bailar, producing baɪˈjɑː (Spanish baiˈlaɾ).

No way, Jozé. Ez un escándalo. But I don’t suppose the audience will notice. Rant over.

Malagasy

There was another idiosyncratic pronunciation from David Attenborough last night, repeated several times in his programme Attenborough and the Giant Egg (iPlayer here). For Malagasy, which most of us call ˌmæləˈɡæsi, he says ˌmæləˈɡeɪzi. I suppose it can be considered a spelling pronunciation, though there aren’t actually any other words in -asy that might have acted as a model for it.

No dictionaries, as far as I know, give anything other than ˌmæləˈɡæsi (or their idiosyncratic transcriptions of the same pronunciation, as in the new edition of the OED, with Upton’s a for æ).
Etymologically, the alternation between the d of Madagascar and the l of Malagasy is due to an alternation in the Malagasy language itself. The OED says

There is a division in Malagasy between dialects with /d/ and dialects with /l/, which accounts for the coexistence of forms in Mal- and forms in Mad-.

Wikipedia adds that Malagasy l becomes d “in reduplication, compounding, possessive and verbal constructions, and after nasals”. Malagasy belongs to the Bornean branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language family.

The other English adjective/ethnonym from Madagascar, namely Madagascan ˌmædəˈɡæskən, is interesting in that it is morphologically irregular. It “ought” to be Madagascarian, like Gibraltarian from Gibraltar. For non-rhotic speakers the irregularity is only in the spelling: as far as pronunciation goes, ˌmædəˈɡæskə — ˌmædəˈɡæskən is just like ˈæfrɪkə — ˈæfrɪkən.

* * *
I feel quite chuffed that my lexical sets PALM and LOT have made it to lolPhonology.
As you can see, internal evidence (wif) suggests that this lolcat is American.

funny har-har

Alan Iwi sent me some non-rhotic puns.

First, there’s the British children’s TV character called “Shaun the Sheep”. Would Americans pick up the pun in his name?

Next, a joke suitable for English, Australian etc ten-year-olds. Presumably it wouldn’t work for American fourth-graders.

What do you call a deer with no eyes?
  —No idea.
What do you call a deer with no legs and no eyes?
  —Still no idea.

For that matter, would they think the reason we call diarrhoea (AmE diarrhea) by that name is that it gives you a dire rear?

Then there’s this joke about not wanting to get involved.

People see church like a giant helicopter. They fear getting too close in case they get sucked into the rotas.

The joke wouldn’t work in AmE — not only because of rhoticity (groan) but also because Americans don’t use the word rota.

Alan also draws my attention to a commercial website where we read that Abingdon Eye Centre was “formally” known as Classic Eyes Opticians.

Lastly, there’s a carpet company calling itself "Walter Wall Carpets".

This is noteworthy for two reasons:
(1) the company is located in Exeter, which happens to be one of the rather few urban centres in England that are still largely rhotic; and
(2) Walter Wall is not actually an exact homophone of wall-to-wall even for non-rhotic speakers, because the t in Walter exerts a pre-fortis clipping effect on the preceding ɔːl, while for the t in to this effect is blocked by the internal word boundary. So the two phrases differ rhythmically. (For people who say ˈwɒlt- rather than ˈwɔːlt-, the difference is even greater.)
Nevertheless the pun presumably works well enough to justify its use.

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Those of you living in the UK (or anywhere else where you can access the BBC iPlayer) may be interested in this interview with Peter French on the topic of forensic acoustics. It’s available for a few days only.

quantit(at)ive

In the BBC R4 panel game Just a Minute the panellists have to attempt to speak for sixty seconds on a given topic without hesitation, deviation, or repetition.

In last week’s episode one of the topics was what is usually written as quantitative easing. I would pronounce the first word here as ˈkwɒntɪtətɪv. However the chairman (Nicholas Parsons), and everyone else on the programme as far as I could tell, pronounced it ˈkwɒntətɪv. This raises the same sort of issue as mischiev(i)ous and prot(r)uberant (blog, 3 Feb). Is ˈkwɒntətɪv a variant pronunciation of quantitative, or is it to be treated as a separate word, “quantitive”?

Formally, I suppose this is a haplology (blog, 7 Mar 2007), comparable to library ˈlaɪbri. A repeated consonant gets deleted along with its support vowel.

The OED has a separate entry for quantitive, which it regards as “irregularly” formed. It adduces citations from 1626 onwards.In Just a Minute, given that the chairman specified the topic as ˈkwɒntətɪv easing, I wonder whether panellists would have been penalized for deviation if they had referred to ˈkwɒntɪtətɪv easing. More to the point, you’re allowed to repeat the words on the card (but no others) without penalty. If someone had more than once repeated “quantitative” ˈkwɒntɪtətɪv, would that have counted as disallowed repetition, since that was not exactly the word the chairman had specified as part of the topic? Are the “words on the card” those that the chairman utters, or those that are written?

Americans and some others prefer ˈkwɒntəteɪtɪv, a variant which I imagine would be resistant to haplology.