aitches

Latin h tended to be dropped even in classical times, particularly in the middle of words. Thus nihil ‘nothing’ has an alternative form nīl, and mihi an alternative mī, while dē- plus habeo yields dēbeo ‘I owe’.

In initial position it was more tenacious, though even here by classical times it was only the educated classes who pronounced h. At Pompeii, destroyed 79 CE, there are inscriptional forms such as ic for hic ‘this (m.)’, and conversely hire for ire ‘to go’. In his poem about Arrius, Catullus pokes fun at hypercorrections such as hinsidias for insidias. Even the educated sometimes got confused: the letter h in the regular spelling of humor, humerus, and humidus is apparently unetymological.

The Romance languages inherited no phonetic h from Latin. The h that we pronounce nowadays in English words of Romance or Latin origin reflects a spelling pronunciation: habit, hesitate, horror and for most speakers humo(u)r, humid. As we all know, in various other Latin-derived words we have not restored h despite the spelling: there is no h in heir, hono(u)r, honest. In herb Brits and Americans agree to differ.

I was thinking about this because I have been noticing people pronouncing adhere, adherent, adhesion, adhesive without h, thus əˈdɪə etc. In LPD I give only forms that include h — əd ˈhɪə etc. In this I follow Daniel Jones’s EPD, though I notice that the Cambridge EPD now includes the h-less forms. Rightly so; on reflection, I think they are widespread enough to warrant inclusion, at least for BrE.

I have long been aware of the corresponding h-less pronunciation of abhor, which both LPD and the current EPD (but not the DJ EPD) include.

I don’t think there is any tendency towards a spelling-inspired restoration of h in words with the prefix ex-, as exhaust, exhibit, exhilarate, exhort, which all have -gˈz-. But exhale is a notable exception, always having -ksˈh-, and so sometimes is exhume.

You sometimes encounter the hypercorrect spelling exhorbitant for exorbitant. I can’t say I’ve ever heard the corresponding hypercorrect pronunciation, but presumably it exists.

GIGO

At the EPSJ conference Takahiro Ioroi presented some statistics about the relative frequency of lexical stress patterns in English words. The pedagogical point was to investigate how far L2 English learners are “exposed to attested patterns in the inputs available”.

Ioroi did this by combining data on stress placement from the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary with word frequency data from the British National Corpus and a word list from a collection of EFL textbooks for Japanese schools.

In this way he demonstrated that the most frequent exemplar of an initial-stressed disyllable in the school textbooks was people (at 3606 per million), followed by very, other, many and our (sic), while in the BNC it was other (1336 per million) followed by only, also, people and any.

The methodology was irreproachable. But some of Ioroi’s findings demonstrate the truth of the old adage “garbage in, garbage out”.

Let’s not quibble about our (which NSs usually pronounce as a monosyllable).

What about disyllables with final stress? The most frequent one in the textbook corpus was about, which is fair enough. But the most frequent one in the BNC, and second most frequent in the textbooks, comes out as into.

Into? But into is stressed on the first syllable, ˈɪntu, ˈɪntə. It does not have final stress. CMUPD says it does: IH0 N T UW1, which is how they represent ɪnˈtuː. CMUPD is wrong, wrong, wrong.

(In running speech, which is not under consideration here, into may of course lose all stress.)

A useful generalization about English words is that all polysyllables have a primary or secondary lexical stress on either the first or the second syllable. So revolution, for example, has the main stress on the penultimate but on the initial syllable a secondary stress: ˌrevəˈluːʃən. Having supplied stress patterns for several complete dictionary headword lists, I can say that the only exceptions I am aware of are (for some speakers) the two unusual words peradventure and forasmuch. Although they are written as single words, some speakers pronounce them pərədˈventʃə, fərəzˈmʌtʃ, as if they were prepositional phrases, like for a change fərəˈtʃeɪndʒ. (Alternatively, they can be ˌpɜːrədˈventʃə, ˌfɔːrəzˈmʌtʃ, which fit the rule.)

What do Ioroi’s stats tell us about such polysyllables? The most frequent BNC words with lexical stress on neither of the first two syllables are purportedly insufficient and valuation. Again, I am afraid, CMUPD is to blame for supplying wrong information, having forgotten to show secondary stress on the initial syllable of each. (But CMUPD does get the stress pattern of revolution correct.)

For the textbook corpus the results are even odder, since the most frequent such words come out as various proper names, mostly Japanese: Sugihara, Nakamura, Yamagata, Morimoto, Antonelli, which CMUPD shows as having stress only on the penultimate. The fact is that these, too, have initial secondary stress. The incontrovertible evidence for this is the ‘stress shift’ effect when followed by another accented word: ˌSugihara’s ˈwidow (found in this passage).

Again, CMUPD is wrong. GIGO.

that'd be OK

A simple question from a Japanese university student: how is that’d pronounced?

My immediate answer was to tell him that it’s ˈðæt əd. I still think that’s the riɡht short answer, but things are actually a little more complicated.

Some relevant variables:
(i) The that element will have a strong vowel, ðæt, only if it is demonstrative, as in that’d be fun, that’d be OK, I don’t think that’d work. If it is a relative pronoun, as in someone that’d been here before, it will almost always be weak, ðət.
(ii) The ’d element may stand not only for would, as in the examples given, but also possibly for had, as in that’d never worked in the past. This makes no difference to the pronunciation.
(iii) There is also the possibility of pronouncing that’d as a monosyllable, ðæd or maybe ðæt, perhaps with further contextual assimilation: that’d be OK ˈðæbbi əʊˈkeɪ.
(iv) for speakers who use t-voicing (esp. AmE), the intervocalic stop/tap in the disyllabic version will be voiced. Here’s a case in point from YouTube.

I can’t find any dictionary entry for that’d that includes pronunciation. Many dictionaries do not even have entries for that’ll and that’s, but leave their pronunciation to be inferred from entries at that and (if you are lucky) ’ll and ’s. LPD does have entries for these contracted forms, though.
The LPD entry at ’d mentions the comparable it’d but not that’d. But now I wonder if I ought to add the possible monosyllabic versions of both.
More generally, in what varieties and styles is it usual to write contracted that’d rather than the usual full that would, that had? I’m really not sure.

sung rhythm

There were several interesting papers given at the EPSJ conference just over a week ago in Kochi, and I plan to discuss a few of them over the next few days.

Two of the speakers touched on the use of songs and nursery rhymes in the classroom as pedagogical devices to improve the teaching of pronunciation to EFL students. Both concluded that although they can be valuable they nevertheless need to be handled with caution. This is because the rhythm used in singing is not necessarily identical to the rhythm used by NSs in ordinary speech. (Neither of the two speakers furnished detailed preprints or handouts, so what follows is my own thoughts inspired by their presentations.)

Take the location of stresses. In singing these take the form of the rhythmical beats imposed by the music. Generally speaking, song lyrics reflect lexical stress well: where there’s a lexical stress you get a beat, where there isn’t you don’t. But the correspondence is by no means 100%.

  ˈJack and ˈJill went ˈup the ˈhill to ˈfetch a ˈpail of ˈwaˈter
  ˈJack fell ˈdown and ˈbroke his ˈcrown and ˈJill came ˈtumbling ˈafˈter.

But in ordinary speech we don’t double-stress water and after. On the other hand we might well stress went and fell.

In particular, rhythmic beats in singing are not a good guide to the deaccentuation of function words. Take this example.

  ˈI’m ˈdreaming of a ˈwhite ˈChristmas
  ˈJust like the ˈones I used to ˈknow

In these lyrics, since there’s no call for contrastive focus on I’m, in ordinary speech we wouldn’t accent it. (Compare ˈI’m ˈdreaming,| but ˈyou’re aˈwake.) So these lyrics would offer a bad model to those EFL learners who tend to accent pronouns inappropriately.

One speaker got into a terrible muddle with the Burns song Comin’ thro’ the Rye.
  Gin a body meet a body
  Comin thro’ the rye,
  Gin a body kiss a body,
  Need a body cry?

For the second body, the music imposes a longer, higher-pitched note on the second syllable than on the first. This led the speaker, if I understood him correctly, to conclude that in the song the word is wrongly stressed, as bɒˈdiː. On the contrary, I would say that it is correctly stressed, and neatly demonstrates the point that in English accent may on occasion be manifested by LOWER pitch than that of a following unstressed syllable, and that in disyllables with a short stressed vowel in the first syllable the second syllable may well be of greater duration than the first.

In any case, the stylized strathspey rhythm of the song is pretty different from the rhythm of ordinary speech. I agree that this song is unsuitable for pedagogical use (except possibly for advanced students), not least because it’s in Scots.

I hope I do not need to add that gin here is pronounced ɡɪn and means ‘if’. Perhaps I ought to add it to LPD.

żurek in Connacht

Thanks to all commentators for the very useful responses to yesterday’s posting. I shall now with confidence add to the next edition of LPD (when and if there is one) as follows.

uillean, uilleann ˈɪl ən ˈɪl jən — Irish [ˈɪ lʲənʲ ˈɪ lʲən]

While on the subject of Irish, I notice that on the American voice association’s email list a lady from Texas is asking about the pronunciation of the name of the western province of the Irish Republic, which she gives as Connaught.

Anybody out there know whether the emphasis in Connaught Province is on the second syllable? Pronunciations online seem to indicate a slight emphasis on the first syllable. My director, who lived in Ireland (but is in no way a vocal coach) seems to insist that the emphasis is on the second syllable.

Straightaway she got a reply from a voice teacher in Maryland.

I have always heard it pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. The first syllable is not 'thrown away', but de-emphasized.

Interesting. See how what appears to be misinformation disseminates. Perhaps it is true that in America you “always” hear this name given second-syllable stress. But that’s not what you hear in Ireland, or indeed in Britain. The only pronunciation I have ever heard is ˈkɒnɔːt, with initial stress.

Wikipedia offers us a range of authentic-sounding possibilities, all with initial stress:

Connacht (pronounced /ˈkɒnəxt/, /ˈkɒnəkt/ or /ˈkɒnɔːt/ —Irish: Connachta / Cúige Chonnacht —pronounced [ˈkɔnəxtə]), formerly anglicised as Connaught.

Indeed, we nowadays spell the name of this province as Connacht. We retain the old spelling in the case of the Duke of Connaught, a dukedom now extinct, and in various placenames and street names. The enquirer was talking about a play, A Lie of the Mind, whose author, Sam Shepard, no doubt uses the old spelling.

I suggest in LPD that for Connacht, though not for Connaught, we can reduce the second vowel to ə, as happens in Irish. Next time I ought to add the Irish-language pronunciation, too.
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In the past I have congratulated the Guardian on its newly acquired ability to print letters bearing diacritics, not only for names and other words from French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, relatively familiar languages for us, but also from other languages that use the Latin alphabet (blog, 20 April 2010). Today, though, it slips. Simon Hoggart, in his always entertaining parliamentary sketch, fantasizes about the UK prime minister, excluded from hobnobbing with the big boys of the eurozone, having instead to dine (horror!) with Swedes and Poles, Hungarians and Latvians. (Even the Slovaks and Estonians are in the inner circle, but not us.)
As any fule kno, these should be “żurek” and “blåbärssoppa” respectively. Though why someone might want three kinds of soup at the same time I have no idea.
 
 
 
 
 
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I shall be away for the next two weeks. Next blog: 14 November.

uilleann pipes

Let’s try a bit of crowd sourcing. How do we pronounce uillean or uilleann, as in uillean(n) pipes?

Please do NOT respond if you’re not familiar with this word. Tell me what you say ONLY if you have heard other people use it in English, and particularly if you commonly use it yourself in English.

If you are a speaker of Irish please tell me how you pronounce it in Irish, too.

I should explain that Nicholas Jones wrote to me pointing out that LPD

doesn’t have ‘uillean (pipes)’, [a word] that is guaranteed to give English speakers problems. Collins English Dictionary gives only /'u:lɪən/. I may be wrong – I guarantee nothing – but I thought it was more commonly /'i:lɪən/.

In my reply I mentioned that Wikipedia says it’s pronounced ˈɪlən. This is also what is given on an American website for enthusiasts. I have now looked it up in the online OED, too, where I find the pronunciation given only as ˈɪljɪn.

Etymologically, the word appears to be the genitive singular of the Irish word for ‘elbow’, variously given in the nominative singular as uillinn (my Learner’s English-Irish Dictionary, and online here) or uille (Wikipedia, the OED s.v. union pipes, and the image shown alongside). Another source says it is an adjective meaning ‘acute-angled, having a sharp elbow or angle’. However, as the Wikipedia article recounts, it is also possible that it is really a reworking of the English word union.

To hear what uillean pipes sound like, go here and follow the links on the righthand side; or here.

Meanwhile I’ll ask around at the EFDSS and the London Irish Centre.

demurring

As regular readers will know, I am always on the lookout for English intonation patterns that are not predictable on the basis of the general rules we know about, and which I have attempted to record in my book English Intonation.

Each case that we discover can be seen as demonstrating the inadequacy of the existing rules. This is not something to be upset about. Rather, it helps us work towards a fuller account of the language and of what native speakers implicitly know about it.

Linguists are not content with vague hand-waving in the direction of ‘sprachgefühl’ every time we are faced with something we cannot explain. We seek a fuller, more principled account.

I’ve been thinking about the phrase I don’t know. Apart from its obvious use to say that one doesn’t know some fact or the answer to some question, we also sometimes use it to demur — that is, to show that we disagree slightly with what has just been said.

How do people typically demur? Politely. Politeness being what it is, we also use this phrase, in BrE at least, to show that we disagree strongly (rather than slightly) but don’t wish to enter into an immediate fierce argument.

Here’s LDOCE’s example of this usage (s.v. know 21 c).

‘I couldn’t live there.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It might not be so bad.’

What intonation would be appropriate for I don’t know in this sense?

I think it has to be a rise.

  Oh, I ˌdon’t /know.
or
  \Oh, | I ˌdon’t /know.

Ah, say followers of Brazil’s theories, that’s because we’re referring (to our lack of knowledge) rather than proclaiming it. To which I reply, but how do you know? Why should demurring be referential, whereas straightforward disagreement is proclamatory? It sounds nice as a post-hoc explanation, but if you were a NNS and needed to use this phrase — say, as an actor in a play — how would you know that a falling tone is inappropriate and that you should use a rise?