more on Russian ж

An anonymous commentator on yesterday’s blog (why don’t people identify themselves?) wrote

Russian ж is a retroflex, so shouldn't we use IPA ʐ?

This suggestion risks opening a whole can of worms.

If you compare a typical French ʃ or ʒ with a typical English ʃ or ʒ, you may notice that the French ones sound slightly ‘darker’ than the English. As Armstrong and Ward put it,

The palatal (i.e. j-like) quality which is often heard in English ʃ and ʒ is absent from the French sounds. [The Phonetics of French, 1932]

If you compare the Russian sounds written ш and ж, transliterated sh and zh respectively, you will notice that they are darker still. Here is Daniel Jones.

English ʃ … is a somewhat palatalized sound … in comparison with Russian ʃ, and does not have the characteristic ‘dark’ or ‘hollow’ quality of the latter. […] English ʒ differs from Russian ʒ in exactly the same way that English ʃ differs from Russian ʃ. [Jones and Ward, The Phonetics of Russian, 1969]

All three ʒ sounds (English, French, and Russian) are ‘darker’ than the ‘alveolopalatal’ ʑ of Polish, Japanese and other languages. On the other hand none of them are as ‘dark’ as the ‘retroflex’ ʐ of Standard Chinese (Pinyin r, as in 人 rén).

So what we are dealing with is a continuum of possibilities. I used to make my students first produce with their usual ʃ (or ʒ) and then prolong it while modifying the articulation so as to make it sound first clearer then darker, then slur backwards and forwards between the extreme points of ɕ ʑ and ʂ ʐ, passing through a range of subtly different varieties of ʃ and ʒ.

Providing a language has no phonemic contrasts of place within this range, it is entirely acceptable, indeed recommended, to use the symbols ʃ and ʒ. The precise coloration does not matter: we write ʒ in transcriptions of French and of English without causing any confusion (even though the sounds are not exactly identical).
In cases where a lanɡuaɡe does have a contrast within the ranɡe, we can discuss which symbols to use. So for Polish it is usual in the IPA tradition to write ɕ ʑ for the clearer pair and ʃ ʒ for the darker pair, though some prefer ʂ ʐ for the darker.

Russian is an interesting case. There is no simple direct contrast of place, but the fricatives spelt ш and ж are dark (non-palatalized) and very different from the palatalized fricative spelt щ, which tends to be longer and can also be interrupted by a plosive element, so ɕɕ or ɕtɕ. (Jones and Ward use the obsolete IPA symbols ʆ, ʆʆ, ʆtʆ.) But for the non-palatalized ones J&W write ʃ and ʒ.

Ladefoged and Maddieson, in The Sounds of the World’s Languages (1996), have a long discussion of the articulatory postures involved in sounds of this general type. They categorize the Polish sound spelt rz, which I equate with Russian ж, as ‘flat post-alveolar (retroflex)’. Yes, somewhat retroflex. But they are nowhere near as retroflex as the “genuinely retroflex gesture” L & M report in the Toda language, or in other Dravidian languages.

Perhaps we would do best to confine the use of the retroflex symbols to those languages where there are not only fricatives but also plosives and nasals that are distinctively retroflex. For Russian ж I’m sticking with ʒ.

the digraph zh

In transliterating Russian names, the question arises what to do about Cyrillic ж, IPA ʒ, the voiced palatoalveolar fricative. The usual convention is to write it zh.

Today’s Guardian carries a full page devoted to the abrupt sacking of the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov (Юрий Лужков). The feature comprises three articles by three named authors. And whereas Luke Harding and Simon Tisdall consistently spell his name correctly as Luzhkov, David Hearst spells it correctly twice, but incorrectly, ‘Luzkhov’, four times. Let’s hope this is just due to his inaccurate typing. It would be too depressing to think that Hearst, who spent several years in Moscow as the paper’s foreign correspondent there, is not sure how the name is written in Cyrillic and thus how it should be spelt in English.

(Phonetic footnote: since Russian assimilates voicing in consonant clusters, Luzhkov is actually pronounced luʃˈkɔf. So it would be phonetically accurate to write it as Lushkov or indeed Lushkof. The usual Luzhkov is not a transcription but a transliteration.)

How familiar is this zh convention to a general readership? We all know about Dr Zhivago, or at least all of us who are over a certain age. (Pasternak’s novel was published in 1957, and David Lean’s film of it came out in 1965.) Some will have heard of General Zhukov or other figures from Russian history whose name includes this sound/digraph. But there don’t appear to be any familiar Russian placenames that include it [PS: but see comment below!], nor any Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Serbian names.

The logic behind the use of zh for this sound is transparent. As the letter s stands for the sound s and the digraph sh for the sound ʃ, so given that the letter z stands for the sound z the digraph zh must stand for the sound ʒ.

Respelling systems deployed to show pronunciation in some monoglot English dictionaries (notably those published in the USA) represent ʒ as zh pretty much without exception. So one can say that writing zh is a well-established convention, despite the claim in Wikipedia that it is ‘ad hoc’.

The only European language that uses zh for ʒ (or for anything else) in standard orthography appears to be Albanian — not a language often learned by outsiders. I can’t think of any non-European languages that use it, either.

But this digraph is indeed used in the Chinese romanization known generally as (Hanyu) Pinyin. So we are all becoming familiar with names such as Zhang, Zhou and Zhu. But here zh stands for a different sound! The corresponding sound in Mandarin is not ʒ but an affricate dʐ, or more precisely unaspirated tʂ. I notice that sports commentators who know very little about foreign languages often pronounce it z in the names of Chinese competitors. Those who are somewhat more sophisticated say ʒ. Only those who have bothered to find out the facts say dʒ, which is the closest English equivalent.

prusiking around

Today’s entry is not so much about pronunciation as about spelling. There are several English verbs that we can spell confidently in their base form, but which may throw us into uncertainty when we want to write the 3sg, the past tense, or the present participle.

Take to rendezvous ˈrɒnd(e)ɪvuː. What’s the 3rd person singular? Clearly, it’s pronounced ˈrɒnd(e)ɪvuːz. The Concise Oxford wants us to spell it when he rendezvouses with us, but I cannot be the only one who feels very awkward with this. But then it would also be awkward to write when he rendezvous with us. The other two inflected forms, rendezvoused ˈrɒnd(e)ɪvuːd and rendezvousing ˈrɒnd(e)ɪvuːɪŋ, are not quite so bad.

Then there’s to ricochet, another French word. On the assumption that we pronounce it ˈrɪkəʃeɪ or ˌrɪkəˈʃeɪ, it would feel quite wrong to double the t when adding -ed or -ing. I certainly prefer ricocheted, ricocheting.

A former Russian correspondent got very excited about the verb to prusik, a technical term in mountaineering. When forming the present participle, he wanted to know, is it correct or not to double the k? He was disappointed when I declined to deliver an authoritative answer. I still don’t know: in comparison I can only adduce to frolic, frolicking, which doesn’t really help. Americans, who write worshiping, may be confident with a single k in prusiking. But what about us Brits, who write worshipping?

What stimulated all this was catching myself writing stymieing, only be struck by doubts whether it should not perhaps be stymying. (The COD gives both possibilities.) The word stymie ˈstaɪmi originated as a technical term in golfing, though I imagine most non-golfers know only its general meaning ‘thwart, obstruct’.

rh and rrh

Can you spot the repeated spelling mistake in this, from Saturday’s Guardian magazine section?Yes, it ought to be mycorrhizae and mycorrhizal. The h goes after the rr.
How do you know the words must be misspelt, even if you’ve never come across them before? Answer: because they’re of Greek etymology, and Greek double rr is always followed by h. Think of catarrh, myrrh and diarrh(o)ea.

So, of course, is Greek word-initial r: we write rhapsody, rheostat, rhesus, rhetoric, rheumatism, rhinoceros, rhizome, rhododendron, rhombus, rhubarb and rhythm, all being words derived from Greek; and there are no Greek-derived words in English that begin with plain r.

In Wikipedia we read that a mycorrhiza is a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.

Why do Greek words have these apparently superfluous h? It can be traced back to an allophonic fact about Ancient Greek /r/, namely that it was voiceless in word-initial position and when geminated.

Generally speaking [r] is a voiced sound, but in certain environments in classical Attic it seems to have been voiceless. What we are actually told by the grammarians is that ρ was ‘aspirated’ at the beginning of a word, and that when a double ρρ occurred in the middle of a word the first element was unaspirated and the second aspirated. … These descriptions are followed in the Byzantine practice of writing initial ῥ and medial ῤῥ, and are supported at an earlier period by Latin transcriptions such as rhetor, Pyrrhus… [W.S. Allen, Vox Graeca, CUP 1968]

Allen goes on to say that it can be shown to have been a matter of voiceless r̥ (rather than a cluster rh) by the fact that it was borrowed into Latin on the one hand as rh but into Armenian on the other hand as hռ hṙ, thus hռետոր hṙetor, and similarly in Coptic.

When I did Greek at school, the transition from the fourth form into the fifth was marked by requiring us thenceforth to write the proper polytonic accents on our Greek, which we had until then been allowed to ignore. So every initial rho had to be written with a rough breathing, and every doubled rho with first a smooth breathing and then a rough.

The Greeks themselves did not bother with breathings and accent marks until the Hellenistic period. They first appear in papyruses in the second century AD, and then only sporadically.

It seems a bit silly that now, well over a thousand years later, we have to go on including this unnecessary letter h after r in English spelling: but that’s the power of tradition.

The Greeks themselves officially abandoned polytonic orthography, including the breathing marks, in 1982. The rough breathing, in the shape of the letter h, lives on only in English, French and German.

If the second part of a compound word in Greek began with r, the consonant was automatically doubled. That’s why we have one r in rheostat but two in diarrhoea. And one in rhizome but two in mycorrhiza.

never been there

On behalf of Akiko Ohkita, one of his students, Masaki Taniguchi asks what would be an appropriate intonation pattern for the phrase I have never been there in this passage, taken from a junior high school textbook.

The place I want to visit is Korea. My email friend, Mina, lives in Seoul. She writes to me about schools, movies, and music in Korea. I write to her about life in Japan. Korea is close to Japan, but I have never been there.

The textbook says that this been should be pronounced with a weak form, implying that it would not be accented.

Masaki, however, rightly thinks that been can be stressed and may even carry a nucleus in this context. As he says, visit was mentioned at the beginning, but is too distant to be counted as given/old information. He wonders if it would be possible to deaccent been in this context and place a nucleus on the first syllable of never. Are both options possible, he asks, depending on the speaker's mind?

The first thing to say is that the textbook is clearly wrong. It seems to me that native speakers would virtually always choose to place a nuclear accent on been. kərɪəz \/kləʊs tə dʒəpæn | bət aɪv nevə \biːn ðeə
(Or the nuclear tone might be a fall-rise. In idiomatic English, we’d probably include the word actually, too.) The typical Japanese error, I suspect, would be to accent never but not been:

…* \never been there.
It would be possible to give never a nuclear accent, but only, I think, if there were another one on been.
…\/never | \been there.
Alternatively, it would be possible to place a contrastive accent on I’ve, to convey an implicit or explicit implication.

...but \/I’ve never been there (even though you may have).
This is one of the cases where been seems to function almost as the past participle of go. We say I go there often, I’ve been there often. In this context it is a content word.

Been is not a word for which it is useful to speak of strong and weak forms. Although there may be people who use biːn as the strong form, bɪn as the weak, Americans usually have bɪn as the only form, used in strong position as well as weak, while conversely in BrE there is nothing odd about using biːn in weak positions.

Judging by the spelling mistakes one sees, many people must pronounce been and being as homophones. Not me!

the jewelry is out?

Paul Reed, writing from South Carolina, says

I heard on the radio today an interesting statement. The DJ said,'The jury is out, and I don't mean the diamonds and pearls, but 12 of your peers.' I thought that this was intriguing that the DJ felt it necessary to clarify his meaning.
Is there an AmE variety where jewelry/jury are homophones? I have queried several of my friends (all students like me), and we all tend to have the /l/ or a different vowel, GOOSE for jewelry and FOOT for jury.

I wouldn’t have thought there were any speakers for whom jewelry and jury are categorical homophones (i.e. always pronounced identically), though I suppose it’s possible that there are speakers who sometimes pronounce them so similarly that a listener might be momentarily confused. Even if you vocalize the l, turning ˈdʒuːəlri jewelry into ˈdʒuːori or something of the sort, the vocalic element between the dʒ and the r is still going to be different in AmE from that of ˈdʒʊri jury.

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, in BrE. We usually spell the first word differently, as jewellery, but this doesn’t really imply any significant difference in pronunciation. In RP the uː can be smoothed prevocalically to ʊ, producing ˈdʒʊəlri. I suppose that if you vocalize the l in that version you might get something containing some sort of indeterminate ʊəo or even ʊːː that could be confused with the ʊə of jury, nominally ˈdʒʊəri but in practice often ˈdʒʊːri. However with the decline of the phoneme ʊə jury can also sometimes be ˈdʒɔːri or ˈdʒɜːri. In non-RP you can also get the historically conservative version ˈdʒuːri (lumped in with the majority form in this LPD graphic). None of these are likely to be confused with jewellery.

Furthermore, jewellery also has a BrE version ˈdʒuːləri, which I mark in LPD with the siɡn §, non-RP. Since the l in this form is prevocalic, it would not be a candidate for l vocalization.

room, now and then

For you, does room rhyme with tomb, boom and zoom, or not?

In one of my preference surveys (1988), 81% of my British respondents said ‘yes’. They are the people who prefer ruːm, with the GOOSE vowel. The remaining 19%, the ones who said ‘no’, prefer rʊm, with FOOT. The 81% must also include the people from Scotland and Ulster who have no GOOSE-FOOT contrast, just an undifferentiated u or ʉ vowel.

Yuko Shitara-Matsuo’s 1993 survey of AmE preferences showed an even larger majority, 93%, for the GOOSE vowel.

A few days ago Stevie Rickard wrote

I'm teaching 1920s RP to some actors and I've advised them to pronounce 'room' rʊm on the basis of almost nothing at all. Shame on me. One of the actors thinks he was told to use ru:m for the same accent in another play. Would one of these pronunciations have been more acceptable than the other in this accent 90 years ago, do you think?

Fortunately I can quite easily answer this question. In the 1956 edition of EPD (and perhaps earlier — I haven’t checked), Daniel Jones, while still prioritizing the FOOT vowel on this word, commented

Note.—The use of the variant ruːm appears to be much on the increase.

This suggests that previously it had been unusual. I conclude that in the 1920s rʊm would have been the more usual pronunciation in RP.

Returning to the present day, the pronunciation of room as an independent word is not necessarily a guide to its pronunciation in compounds. Some who say ruːm for this word on its own nevertheless say rʊm in bedroom.

Personally, I’m with the minority who say rʊm in all environments.

We also get some fluctuation between GOOSE and FOOT in broom and groom. But as far as I know boom, doom, loom, and zoom always have uː. So does bloom, although in the old-fashioned mild BrE expletive blooming some use ʊ.