tittles and jots

It is only just over two months since I last discussed the question of foreign “accented letters” in ordinary spelling. We need them for loanwords (façade, cliché) and in particular for foreign names (congrats to the Guardian for getting Žižek right, see above). They are perceived as problematic not only because we don’t use them in writing ordinary English, but also because not all software can cope with them (certain email clients being notoriously unable to deal with anything beyond ASCII), and because documentation on how to input them is often inadequate.

The current issue of the Economist has an interesting article on the subject.

OVER at Gulliver, our correspondent reports on his trip through Tromso airport. Or, as a commenter, Lafayette, notes, shouldn't we write it Tromsø, as the Norwegians do?
Our style book rule is to use the diacritic marks on French, German, Spanish and Portuguese names and words. The rest have to do without. Why?

It’s not difficult to input diacritics for those languages nowadays. Users of Word for Windows ought to be conversant with the keyboard shortcuts (see table). They’re just as easy to input in a Mac.

We need to remember that in German Günther is a different name from Gunther, and Köhler a different name from Kohler.

The Economist article was a follow-up to an earlier one that dealt particularly with the diacritics used in eastern European languages.

Estonia[n] has the õ, Latvian the ķ, Lithuanian the ų, Polish the infernally similar ż and ź, not to mention the ł; the Czechs have the ů, the Slovaks the ŕ and the Hungarians the ő. There are dozens of other examples, but you get the point. They tend to get overlooked.

East Europeans will have regained their real place in the world once their names are spelled properly, not mutilated by an inadequate foreign character set.

...But they matter. Estonia’s national anthem, for example, starts: “Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm” (My fatherland, my happiness and joy). Written in the western character set, “onn ja room” becomes something quite different: the comical "small hut and crawl".

The õ of Estonian happens to be needed for Portuguese, too, so it is covered by the Word keyboard shortcuts. But if ctrl-apostrophe e gives us é and ctrl-comma c gives us ç, why can we not use ctrl-apostrophe s to input ś and ctrl-comma k to input ķ? Wake up, Word!

Meanwhile, you will be glad to know that you can include any Unicode character lacking on your keyboard in your blog comments here, but only if you first compose your message in a Unicode-compliant word processor (e.g. Word), then copy and paste. In Word itself, failing implementation of the improvements I have suggested, you can use Insert Character, or alternatively enter the Unicode number and then do Alt-X.

brothel

…talking of which (yesterday’s blog), why is the dental fricative in brothel ˈbrɒθl̩ voiceless?

There are two reasons why we might expect to find ð rather than θ in this word.

First, the apparent cognates in other languages have a voiced consonant. The French word is bordel bɔʀdɛl, the Italian is bordello borˈdɛllo, the German is Bordell bɔrˈdɛl.

Second, the spelling th in this position (following a stressed vowel in a disyllable) regularly corresponds to the pronunciation ð: father, mother, brother, other, bother, feather, gather, whether, rather, slither, smithy, swarthy, worthy, Swithin. True, there are no other words in -thel except the names Bethel and Ethel, which both have θ. Even so, the pattern is very clear. Words spelt with medial th and pronounced θ are otherwise just those of Latin or Greek origin: author, cathode, lethal, method. But brothel looks and feels Germanic.

The OED reveals the reason for the exceptionality of brothel. It’s really not a cognate of bordel at all. The etymology goes back to Old English.

ME. broþel, f. OE. broðen ruined, degenerate, pa. pple. of bréoðan to go to ruin

but

The modern sense arises from confusion with an entirely different word BORDEL (q.v.); the brothel was originally a person, the bordel a place. But the combinations bordel-house and brothel's house ran together in the form brothel-house, which being shortened to brothel, the personal sense of this word became obs., and it remains only as the substitute of the original bordel.

from bitch to beach

Native speakers of English have no difficulty in hearing and making the difference between the FLEECE vowel and the KIT vowel. We effortlessly distinguish green from grin, reed from rid, and reach from rich. But anyone who has been in contact with NNSs knows that for many EFL learners this distinction can be very problematic. For most people from southern Europe, and from many other parts of the world too, English iː and ɪ both sound like versions of the i of their own language. They find it really difficult to hear any difference between them, and even more difficult to consistently make the difference when speaking English.

It’s not for nothing that in the US spick is a derogatory term for ‘Hispanic’.

It is interesting that the potential confusion can extend into written English. You’d think that even if hearing the difference is difficult, nevertheless seeing it and spelling it would be straightforward. The letters in G-R-E-E-N look different from those in G-R-I-N. But there is plenty of evidence that people get the spellings of such minimal pairs confused, too. Sometimes it can lead to awkward or embarrassing results. This, from the Engrish website, was the frontage of a hotel in Jurmala, Latvia. With this name, you might take it for an up-market brothel.I’m glad to say that they have now corrected it. This is from the hotel’s current website.
An unrelated point of linguistic interest: on the website, the hotel gives its address with the street name in Latvian (in the Latin script), as 23 Jūras iela, but the name of the town in Russian (Cyrillic), as Юрмала. Presumably most of their clientele consists of Russians, who wouldn’t notice the difference between a bitch and a beach anyhow.

Even so, why don’t they get their English checked?

The unique location in the dune area lets You enjoy peaceful relax... Be sure, that Your day can have different taste, if You wake up with a sunrise at the sea shore and breathe in fresh pine-wood aroma, walking along sandy beach!

yanks and kiwis

A collaborative US-NZ research project being carried out at the universities of Yale and Auckland is collecting data on different accents in American English.

We'd like recordings from anyone who has grown up speaking English in America or Canada. We would like to get information about as many different types of American English as possible. The more diverse our participants, the more representative it will be of the ways Americans speak.

Everything is being done over the internet, and recordings can be made by anyone who has access to a computer with a microphone and a sound card.

Your computer’s internal microphone is usually good enough, or you can use an external microphone or headset.

The researchers say

We want to record speech examples from as many people as possible, but it is not feasible for us to record participants in person. That's why we've set up this web site. When you click on the link below, a web page will come up with a recording box and a set of questions to enter into the comments box for the recording. When you're ready to begin the survey, there will be a "record" button to click on. You can then read aloud the words for the experiment.
When you've finished the words, press the "stop" button and the "send" button. The whole survey will take about 3 minutes to do.

So the recordings will be restricted to words read aloud. Sociolinguists have demonstrated that people’s pronunciation in this formal “word list” style can differ considerably from what they do in less formal styles, and in particular from what they do in spontaneous conversation.
We know that New Yorkers and Bostonians are more likely to articulate a nonprevocalic r when reading lists of words aloud than they are in other styles of speech. What might be ˈfaːmə (farmer) in a New Englander’s ‘natural’ speech may become ˈfɑːrmɚ when read aloud. A typical casual bẽəd for bad reverts to bæd in careful speech.
Nevertheless, despite this limitation, something is much better than nothing. Go for it, American and Canadian readers!

accent intolerance

The call centre for my bank is evidently located somewhere in Scotland. At any rate, every customer service officer I have spoken to there speaks with a Scottish accent. I’m ashamed to say that sometimes I have had difficulty understanding them, particularly over a bad phone line and when they speak fast, no doubt parroting a script they have uttered many times before. I sometimes have to ask them to repeat what they’ve said, more slowly.
But I acknowledge that my difficulties in coping with the Scottishness of their pronunciation is a shortcoming of my own rather than of theirs.
Not everyone takes that line.
Today’s Guardian has an amusing article poking fun at the letters page of the Daily Mail (a sensationalist right-wing paper).

Its criticism is directed towards the letters editor of the Mail for printing a xenophobic rant about TV coverage of the World Cup. The writer of the letter had to sit through “a match between Bongo Bongoland and the Former Soviet Republic of Bulimia and other meaningless events”. In mitigation (?), the Guardian points out that the paper also saw fit to print “the tragic tale of a man from the Home Counties who has been forced to listen to a Northern Irish accent”.

I can't understand the popularity of the woman on The One Show on BBC1 each evening [Christine Bleakley]. Her accent is almost indecipherable. Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.

I agree that we English people tend to feel that from the point of view of intelligibility a Belfast accent is a Glasgow accent in spades. But it does not follow that Ulster people should be banned from the airwaves.

There’s a lesson here for EFL, too. Learners should not be exposed only to an unvarying diet of RP (or General American). Like NSs, they need to practise their listening comprehension for a wide range of varieties of English.

Fred Cassidy and Jamaican

Fred Cassidy (1907–2000) is best known among linguists as the moving force behind the Dictionary of American Regional English. A decade after his death, this enormous work is still not quite finished. Publication of the fifth and final volume, S–Z, is expected next year.

But Cassidy had another string to his bow. Creolists and people interested in West Indian English know him as the joint author of the Dictionary of Jamaican English (CUP: first edition 1967, second edition 1980), and also of an earlier popularization, Jamaica Talk (London: Macmillan, 1961). I studied both in great detail when I was working on my PhD on Jamaican pronunciation in London. Cassidy’s DJE co-author, Bob Le Page, was my external examiner.

As well as being a remarkable work of historical scholarship, the DJE also introduced the world to the orthography Cassidy invented for Jamaican Creole. This can actually be seen as an English spelling reform designed explicitly for JC. It is a phonemic notation, and uses some English letter combinations in ways that are logically chosen but at first can seem surprising. For example, the Jamaican FACE vowel, although a monophthongal [eː] in educated or ‘acrolectal’ Jamaican, is an opening diphthong of the [ɪɛ] type in popular or ‘basilectal’ Jamaican. Cassidy therefore writes it ie. But this means that the reader has to be able to interpret pie as the word we usually spell pay, and bied as either bathe or beard (homophonous for most Jamaicans).

When I was working on JC, people — Jamaicans, particularly — thought that to study it was a strange and eccentric thing to do. The intervening forty-odd years have seen a revolution in attitudes towards the local language/dialect/patwa, and we have now reached the stage where a local company, with the support of the Jamaican Language Unit of the University of the West Indies, is putting out video clips in which the language formerly used only on informal occasions is now used formally. Here is a serious-minded account of Haiti and its troubles, all narrated in JC. Key sentences are flashed on the screen in Cassidy’s orthography.

A Fi Di Piipl is produced by the Jamaican Language Company in association with the Jamaican Language Unit. This video, presented and narrated in Jamaican (Creole), takes its theme from the January 2010 disaster in Haiti, and from the perspective of a neighbouring country, seeks to understand the history of Haiti and its role in the world.

In ordinary spelling and standard grammar, this would be Because after the earthquake CARICOM was doing a large amount (a whole heap) to help out the country. (Don’t ask me why h is preserved in whole but dropped in heap and help.) The name of the series, A Fi Di Piipl, means “it’s for the people”.

Some years before his death, Cassidy was visiting London and invited me to dinner at his hotel. His main purpose was to try and persuade me to become active in the movement to reform English spelling. I suppose it is partly because of this arm-bending that I am now president of the Spelling Society.

advocating carbonates

The pronunciation of the suffix -ate is quite tricky from the EFL point of view. (NSs never think about it, of course.) The general rule is that it is strong, eɪt, in verbs, but weakened to ət (or, for some, ɪt) in adjectives and nouns.

So on the one hand we have celebrate, deteriorate, imitate, lubricate with eɪt, and on the other considerate, obstinate, private; climate, consulate, palate, senate with ət.

There are no verbs in which the suffix is weakened. Not for me, at least — though I do occasionally hear someone saying that he ˈædvəkəts this or that policy, which makes me want to elicit the ing-form or the past tense, since I really can’t believe that anyone would say ^?ˈædvəkətɪŋ or ^?ˈædvəkətɪd.

EFL learners need to be aware of the ambiguity of the spelling in words like moderate, separate, deliberate, delegate, which are pronounced differently depending on whether they are verbs or adjectives/nouns. An adverb like separately ˈsep(ə)rətli, of course, has a weak suffix like the adjective from which it is derived. In phonetics, we speak of affric[eɪ]ting a plosive but of producing an affric[ət]e. We hope to be articul[ə]te as we articul[eɪ]te.

Adjectives and nouns are trickier, though. There are a few adjectives that categorically have a strong vowel in the suffix (innate, ornate, sedate). There are many nouns in which usage is not settled (candidate, magistrate). In “more technical words”, as I put it in LPD, the suffix is strong: thus in botany the adjectives describing shapes of leaves (cordate, lanceolate, peltate) and in chemistry the names of salts (nitrate, phosphate, sulfate).
But even this is not fixed. The other day I was slightly startled to hear someone speak of carbon[ɪt] of soda. Perhaps I need to get out more.