a heavenly haven

Peter Roach wrote

I wonder if you noticed the interview on TV yesterday on Channel 4 News with Christine LaGarde, French Finance Minister. My wife and I were marvelling at her excellent English (including her pronunciation) but wondering why she kept referring to "tax heavens" instead of "tax havens". We then remembered that the French for this is "paradis fiscal". I hope somebody has put her right now.

A lovely example, which segues neatly from yesterday’s post!
Mme LaGarde’s English is indeed much too good for her to confuse eɪ (as in haven) with e (as in heaven). But with heaven being a near-synonym of paradise, one can understand the confusion.
It suggests that she has learnt the English expression tax haven by hearing it used in context, rather than by encountering it in the course of reading.
Strangely enough, I was discussing this topic just a few days ago (27 March) in my other blog. English haven has moved away from its historical meaning ‘harbour’ to its current meaning, a refuge.
Where English speaks of a tax haven for those reluctant to pay taxes in their home country, French, German and Spanish speak of a paradise (paradis fiscal, Steuerparadies, paraíso fiscal).
But the Slavonic languages go a different route: in Russian they call it an оффшорная зона (ʌfˈʃoɾnəjə ˈzonə, offshore zone), and in Polish terytoria offshore. The Japanese follow English with タックス・ヘイヴン (takkusu heivn).
At least, that’s how the various Wikipedia articles are entitled in the respective languages.

raw fish

Masaki Taniguchi tells me he was on a train in Japan recently when he got talking, mostly in English, to a Swiss lady who was touring Japan with her family. She was from Lausanne and her first language was French. She mentioned that she loved sushi.
Sushi comes in many varieties. While westerners usually like most of them, not everyone is enthusiastic about those that include uncooked fish.
Masaki said to the Swiss lady “Do you like raw fish?”.
Her unexpected reply was “Oh, you speak German?”.
It so happens that the (standard) German roher Fisch ʁoːɐ fɪʃ sounds very similar to the English raw fish ɹɔː fɪʃ. (Don’t ask me how it would be pronounced in Swiss German.)
This reminds me of a more complicated multilingual example, probably apocryphal. A visiting Frenchman in Enɡland went to buy an ice cream. The vendor asked him what size he wanted. The Frenchman understood the question but answered in French, “à deux boules” (with two scoops) a dø bul. Fortunately communication was not impaired, despite the interlocutors’ ignorance of one another’s language, because the English vendor heard it as “a double” ə dʌbɫ.

ginkgo

In the front quad at UCL there are two ginkgo trees, which every autumn shed their distinctive leaves on the ground.
According to a Wikipedia article (which I have no reason to doubt), the Latin (and hence the English) specific name of the tree, Ginkgo, results from a combination of folk etymology and misreading.
All the OED can tell us about the etymology of ginkgo is

[Jap., f. Chinese yinhsing silver apricot.]

In Chinese characters and Hanyu pinyin this Chinese etymon would be written 銀杏 yínxìng. When the tree was introduced into Japan from China the Chinese name was borrowed into Japanese with the pronunciation ぎんなん ginnan. (The Japanese pronunciation of Chinese words and “readings” of the kanji in which they are written is a topic way beyond my knowledɡe.)
But the same Chinese characters can also be read in Japanese as ginkyō, which is where the folk etymology comes in. Apparently Engelbert Kaempfer, the first Westerner to see the species in 1690, wrote down this form, with its pronunciation, in his Amoenitates Exoticae (1712). But his y was misread as a g, and the misspelling stuck.
Our pronunciation follows the spelling, so that we call this tree ˈɡɪŋkəʊ. If it had not been for Kaempfer’s bad handwriting, we’d presumably be calling it ˈɡɪŋkiəʊ.
Because of the pronunciation, people also often misspell it as gingko.
Confusingly, there is also a Japanese word ginkō, pronounced with -ŋ-. But it means ‘bank’.

The specific part of the scientific name Ginkgo biloba transparently means ‘having two lobes’, a reference to the shape of the leaves. You’d think that it would be pronounced in English as ˌbaɪˈləʊbə, since this is what we get for the Latin prefix bi- in bisexual, bifurcation, bipolar and other words. But in practice people who talk about the supposed medical benefits of Ginkgo biloba extract generally seem to say bɪˈləʊbə.

a controlled rolling grunt

Anyone who studies phonetics at a British university, and no doubt in many other countries too, has to learn to recoɡnize and produce a number of “difficult” or “exotic” consonants, among them the one that we transcribe ʕ, which is classified on the IPA Chart as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Here’s what it sounds like (from Ladefoged’s website).
For a language that includes this sound, people usually think first of all of Arabic, where the sound associated with the letter ع (ʿayn) has traditionally been classified by phoneticians as a voiced pharyngeal fricative and written ʕ. (The IPA symbol was chosen to be reminiscent of the top half of the Arabic letter.)
However, Robin Thelwall argued in 1990 (JIPA 20.2:37-41) that the Arabic sound is not actually a pharyngeal fricative but a pharyngealized glottal stop. I think he is probably right. When pronounced by native speakers of Arabic, it often seems to involve, as well as a constriction in the pharynx, a momentary cessation of the vibration of the vocal folds.
The Hebrew alphabet, too, includes a letter ayin (ע), which in some kinds of Hebrew is pronounced in the same way. Apparently this was its historical pronunciation, but nowadays many Israelis just pronounce it as a glottal stop, ʔ (which also has its own letter in the Hebrew alphabet, aleph א).
The foregoing discussion assumes that you, the reader, have enough familiarity with phonetic terminology and classification to be able to follow it. I hope you do. Those who don’t are forced into inventive but incoherent descriptive attempts such as this one that a correspondent came across in a wiki about Hebrew. He sent it to me as a “gem for your collection of examples of the complete inability of the phonetically naive to describe speech sounds”.

Ayin is not pronounced the same as Aleph. Ayin has a gutteral sound
applied to it, a gutteral sound void of tonality almost a controlled
rolling grunt.

My correspondent commented

I don't mean to mock people for knowing nothing about phonetics, but the sheer desperate inventiveness (and uselessness) of the description was striking.

pronunciation of r

There are some emails that I receive that ask simple questions for which the answers are complicated.

Hello Sir
I am k***** [name removed]. My native language is not English so I have a problem in the pronunciation of word "r". I want to know that where we should pronounce it and where not and what are rules

thanks
K*****

[Obviously s/he means not the word r but the letter r.]
Where should the EFL student pronounce the sound r? What advice should one give? It all depends.
• For a simple life, and if your model is American English, pronounce r wherever the letter r is written.
• However, if your model is RP or a similar form of BrE, or Australian or New Zealand English, or to fit in with those around you in Africa (for example), then you should pronounce an r-sound only if the sound that follows is a vowel sound. So there should be an r-sound in red, arrive, very, tree, address, purity, but not in hard, firm, north, persuade, standard, modern. At the end of a word — as in better, far, near — you should not pronounce r if the word is on its own or at the end of a sentence; but you may pronounce one if the word is followed, without a break, by another word beginning with a vowel sound.
More importantly, what is your purpose in learning English? If you just want to understand and be understood, then pronounce all the rs. If you want to fit in with native speakers in some particular place, then you must learn to do as they do. If you want to pass school examinations for which the examiners require that some particular type of pronunciation be used, then you must fit in with their requirements.
It is important to learn not just where to pronounce r but also how to pronounce it. If, as your name suggests, your language is Arabic, which uses a tapped r-sound (ɾ), it is worthwhile trying to acquire an English-style approximant r (ɹ).
I am afraid an answer along these lines would disappoint K****, who would doubtless prefer a clear short answer. And anyhow his/her command of English would probably not be high enough to understand fully what I say.
Probably a better answer would have been

Go and ask your teacher. Or ask your friends.

Unicode Phonetic Keyboard

Mark Huckvale saw that I had been unable to get his Unicode Phonetic Keyboard to work in Vista Home Premium (blog, two days ago). But the fault turns out to have been mine, not his.
He wrote:

To enable the language bar you need more than one input language
installed. So add another language first, then you can find the
language bar to enable the phonetic keyboard. To add a language, see this:
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/52e368fa-bd32-4749-955e-331f9130889f1033.mspx
Let me know if this works!

Yes, it did! Here is what the instructions said.

1. Open Regional and Language Options by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Clock, Language, and Region, and then clicking Regional and Language Options.
2. Click the Keyboards and Languages tab, and then click Change keyboards.
3. Under Installed services, click Add.
4. Double-click the language you want to add, double-click the text services you want to add, select the text services options you want to add, and then click OK.

Alongside the existing English (United Kingdom) I proceeded to add Russian, Greek, and Chinese. Having downloaded the Unicode Phonetic Keyboard I activated it as an option under United Kingdom, and now the language bar on my desktop (see picture) enables me to switch between the standard keyboard and the phonetic keyboard with a single click of the mouse.
In one mode I can type TIN; exactly the same keystrokes in the other mode produce θɪŋ. Result! (The keystrokes follow SAMPA very closely.)
For anyone using Windows XP or Vista with a UK keyboard, this is undoubtedly the most convenient input method. You can also use it to type IPA directly into a comment box for the blog.
And the multiple language capabilities of Windows are great fun. In Chinese mode, if I type shan (mountain) a menu bar immediately offers me a list of possibilities, starting with 山 (mountain), the one I want.

imaginary secondary stress

Intrigued by Justin Watkins’s posting on Facebook of a video clip of himself jumping into a pool under the headline “cenote plunge”, I looked up the word cenote. Where does one most conveniently look up a presumed technical term these days? In Wikipedia of course, where I duly found

A cenote (pronounced in Mexican Spanish [seˈnoˌte], in Iberian Spanish [θeˈnoˌte] and in English [səˈnəʊˌteɪ] …) is a sinkhole with exposed rocky edges containing groundwater.

When you find an error in Wikipedia you’re supposed to just quietly correct it, not publicize it. But I thought it worth while drawing attention to this over-use of the secondary stress mark by some would-be phoneticians.
Not every unreduced vowel has secondary stress! Particularly not in languages that, like Spanish, do not go in for vowel reduction. The Spanish pronunciation should most definitely be shown as seˈnote, θeˈnote, and the English, in my view, as səˈnəʊteɪ.
Few if any Spanish words have more than one stress (the claimed exceptions are usually adverbs in -mente). And none have post-tonic secondary stress.
In English we have post-tonic secondary stress in compounds such as ˈgrandˌfather and ˈwashing maˌchine. But not (in my view) in words such as ˈeducate (not “ˈeduˌcate”) or ceˈnote.