epergne

On the BBC2 TV antiques show Flog It! a member of the public had brought in a silver-plated object she owned and that she was hoping to auction. She wasn’t sure what it was; but the expert was at hand to tell her. “It’s a — a French word, it’s an eɪˈpeən — a French word for a table-centre display.”

Fair enough, except that the name of the object in question, epergne, is not a French word at all. Despite its spelling, which looks more or less French (though if it were really French it would probably have an acute accent on the first vowel, so épergne), and despite the more or less French pronunciation that the expert used (as if in French it were epɛʁɲ(ə) — despite this, there is no such word in French. The nearest French word that does exist is épargne epaʁɲ(ə); but that means ‘savings’, and has nothing whatsoever to do with table decorations.

So it’s all a bit of a mystery really. Here’s the OED:

In LPD I followed EPD in giving the mainpron as ɪˈpɜːn, with varprons e-, -ˈpeən. I did add a note, “not actually a French word”, and for that reason gave no French pronunciation. Perhaps I ought to have done, though, so as to cater for those, like the TV antiques expert, who pronounce it as if it were.

nonrhotic respellings

Talking of confusing non-rhotic respellings (yesterday’s blog and comments), yesterday’s Independent newspaper had an interesting take on the correct pronunciation of German.

In German, Miele is pronounced ˈmiːlə, ending with a closish schwa. (German has a contrast between this close-mid schwa and the open-mid schwa ɐ, as in the minimal pair bitte ˈbɪtə ‘please’ vs. bitter ˈbɪtɐ ‘bitter’.)

Unfortunately, the English spelling ar, while indeed standing for schwa in nonrhotic beggar, particular, collar, standard etc, also stands for ɑː in cigar, pulsar etc. And of course rhotic readers will interpret it as implying a following r sound too.

Today’s Guardian, on the other hand, has an interesting mistake which presumably results from a nonrhotic reporter’s mishearing of what was said in court or at a press conference.

The term hermetic means (COD) ‘1. with an airtight closure. 2. protected from outside agencies. 3 of alchemy or other occult sciences, esoteric’. The word intended must have been anti-emetic.

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Happy Christmas everyone. Next posting: 31 December.

he nar get none

It’s some time since I last discussed Montserratian Creole English (see 21 Nov 2006 here) in this blog.

But yesterday a news report on the web caught my eye. Under the headline Premier Meade Says Montserrat Is Blessed and 'He Nar Get None' we read

During the statement, whilst talking about sand mining, the Premier sought to take a dig at Montserrat born calypsonian De Bear, for his 2012 hit song entitled 'All Ah Dem Ah Get' by stating that contrary to insinuations in the very popular song, Meade stated, "me nar get none."

The point of interest here is the spelling nar for the Creole word pronounced naː. This is a function/structure/grammar word/particle used in certain Caribbean creoles (certainly Jamaican and Montserratian, at any rate) but not in standard English. Its meaning is a combination of negation and progressive aspect, ‘not …-ing’. The calypsonian’s claim aːl a dem a ɡet could be paraphrased in standard English as ‘they are all getting’, i.e. ‘they’re all on the take’, and the premier’s riposte as ‘I’m not getting any’. Here’s the relevant entry in the Dictionary of Jamaican English.

Notice that the DJE spells it naa, in accordance with the phonemic spelling system devised by Fred Cassidy for Jamaican Creole and now recommended by the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies as a ‘standard writing system for Jamaica’. You also sometimes see the spelling nah. (In JC, but not MC, the progressive aspect is also used to refer to habitual action: nah gwan a Jamaica ‘don’t go on in Jamaica’.) But Jamaicans never spell it nar (the spelling used in yesterday’s report from Montserrat), and for a very good reason: in JC this particle does not rhyme with car, far, tar etc, which in JC retain their historical r in pronunciation (kjaːr, faːr, taːr).

Montserratian Creole, however, is non-rhotic. There naː rhymes exactly with faː and so on, making it common sense to spell it in the same way, with an r.

If you’d like to hear what Montserratian standard English sounds like, try this. For Montserratian (semi-)Creole the best I can offer you is this clip of De Bear, who was born and grew up in Montserrat; but he doesn’t happen to say naː at any point in this calypso.

different strokes

We sometimes use the punctuation mark “/”, normally unsurrounded by spaces, in running text. Here’s an example from my blog posting of 10 October.

A correspondent writes to ask how to read this aloud. Good question.

The meaning of “/” here is to indicate alternatives. We could gloss it as ‘or’. Indeed, one way to say it aloud is to pronounce it, unstressed, as if it were written or, thus ˈlætɪn ɔː ˈɡriːk ɔː ˈhiːbruː.

But that would be like reading i.e. aloud as ðæt ˈɪz. What would be the equivalent, for “/”, of ˈaɪ ˈiː?

The usual thing, in contemporary BrE at any rate, seems to be to pronounce it as if it were written stroke, thus ˈlætɪn strəʊk ˈɡriːk strəʊk ˈhiːbruː. Another possibility is slash, or even slash mark, thus ˈlætɪn slæʃ ˈɡriːk slæʃ ˈhiːbruː.

Faced with, say, he/she, in BrE we often say he stroke she. I think Americans would prefer he slash she. (Some Brits, on the other hand, feel awkward with slash because of the informal spoken use of have a slash as a synonym of ‘urinate’.)

When it first became usual to name web addresses (URLs) on air, the BBC went through a period of pronouncing the “/” as forward stroke. But nowadays the forward part is usually dropped. (We know that URLs do not contain the backward stroke or backslash, “\”, so there is no danger of confusion of the two marks.)

In the days of my childhood, before the decimalization of our currency, you would pronounce 3/11, for example, as three and eleven, or formally and in full as three shillings and elevenpence (-pəns). (No one would have dreamt of saying three stroke eleven.) An alternative way of writing this sum then was 3s. 11d.

There are various other names for the punctuation mark we are discussing. Typographers sometimes call it a solidus ˈsɒlɪdəs. There are also diagonal and oblique. See a longer list in Wikipedia.

keynote inflation

In China and Japan, the term ‘keynote speech’ seems to have undergone serious grade inflation. At the Shanghai conference I alluded to yesterday there were no fewer than 15 different ‘keynote speeches’ delivered, which seems to imply a polyphonic reluctance to remain in tune. I would have just called them ‘plenaries’.

Anyhow, a particularly interesting one was given by the organizer of the conference, Bu Youhong. She reported on some of the intonation errors she had observed among Chinese learners of English. In line with Francis Nolan’s advice, she was concerned only with ‘the division of the speech chunks’ (tonality) and ‘nucleus placement’ (tonicity), not tone.

I have tended to regard chunking (tonality) as a pretty common-sense matter, not varying much across languages, and therefore not needing much explicit teaching. Judging by some of the material Prof. Bu presented, this is not entirely the case.

Her subjects had to read aloud a written passage of English. Some of their intonational treatments were nothing short of bizarre.

• English is spoken | as a | first language | in over forty countries | around the | world

Separating the articles a and the from their noun phrases and giving them nuclear accents suggests to me either extreme disfluency or complete failure to understand the meaning of the sentence. Isn’t it obvious that they need to be closely linked to their respective following noun phrases? (Evidently not.)

• … Crystal also estimates | that | English plays a significant part…
• …those | who speak | it |…

Isn’t it also obvious that the complementizer (‘subordinating conjunction’) that has to be grouped with the clause it introduces, rather than treated separately or grouped with the verb it depends on? Again, evidently not: the example quoted is only one of a whole number in which Bu’s subjects had wrongly treated that as if it were a determiner (= demonstrative) rather than a conjunction ( = relative pronoun or complementizer). And isn’t it obvious that a pronoun object (here, it) has to be grouped with the verb that precedes it? It would get its own i.p., and therefore a nuclear accent, only in the rare case where it was thrown into contrastive focus.

These points are all subsumed in the general rule for not accenting function words — a rule that nevertheless calls for quite a bit of work. Do we really need to spell out that the indefinite and definite articles are covered by this rule, along with that when it is not a demonstrative, and pronouns?

what's important in intonation for EFL?

As I found in Shanghai, most people in mainland China cannot access my blog, because Blogspot is hosted on the Google ‘cloud’, which the Chinese government routinely blocks. They can’t see Facebook, either. They can, however, see my UCL pages, and can exchange email freely.

I also thought it strange that the conference I attended, despite being billed as the “1st Chinese International TESOL Symposium on English Phonetics Teaching”, apparently had no web presence. But I don’t think that has anything to do with official restrictions, more with a low awareness of the internet among Chinese academics.

The conference was also referred to as “the 2012 English Phonetic Conference in China”, this being a series of biennial conferences. Since my return, I have discovered that the 2010 conference, held in Jiangsu, does have a modest web presence, from which I have been able to recover the abstract of the keynote speech given by my colleague Francis Nolan of the University of Cambridge, who had some sensible things to say about the teaching of intonation in an EFL context.

Those who have had explicit instruction in English intonation will be aware that English has a rich intonation system, one that from the foreign learner’s point of view is possibly quite daunting. In the first part of this talk I will risk making English intonation even more daunting by giving a summary of the substantial intonational variation found in major accents (or dialects) of English in the British Isles. In the second part I will attempt to reassure non-native speakers of English by suggesting that, in fact, native speakers’ familiarity with this variation makes them relatively tolerant of learners’ intonational deviations. Unless learners wish to have an absolutely native English accent – a questionable goal outside spy school – their efforts should focus on a number of priorities in the prosodic system.
…Speakers in Belfast produce a rise-plateau in pitch where RP speakers produce variously a fall, a rise, or a fall-rise; yet there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility (as long as the segmental features are not too different). Such alternative patterns should remind us that English listeners are used to coping with considerable intonational variation. Admittedly, some nuances may be misinterpreted across dialects, but such misinterpretation in itself suggests that even the acquisition of perfect RP intonation won’t solve everything – unless the learner never mixes with non-RP speakers.
…I will suggest that what learners need is a strategy which will optimise the pedagogical cost-benefit ratio in terms of (in order of priority) intelligibility, the avoidance of inadvertent offence, and (lowest in priority) the mastery of intonational nuances. Broadly corresponding to these three goals would be three prioritised learning targets: the mastery of accentuation (involving stress placement, rhythm, and pitch prominence achieved by a reduced inventory of pitch accents); the eradication of any L1-influenced phonetic realisations of pitch accents which might convey unintended meaning in English; and (lowest in priority) the acquisition of a more complete set of intonational pitch contrasts.

Thus he sees the mastery of English tonicity (aka accentuation, aka placement of the nucleus/tonic) as the most important goal, much more so than mastery of the fine details of pitch contours in tone contrasts. I agree wholeheartedly.

I also see this as my defence against critics of my own intonation book who suggest that because my description is based on RP it is irrelevant to the needs of most learners, or that it ignores AmE and other models. On the contrary: that is why I relegated details of minor differences in pitch patterns to a late chapter, ‘Beyond the three Ts’. Everything in the earlier part of the book is applicable, I believe, to all core L1 varieties of English, and that is what is of importance to EFL learners.

shoe dye etc (ii)

Ren Houbo writes to say that he is delighted with yesterday’s answers and examples, and is looking forward to hearing about handle. So here goes.

The l at the end of handle constitutes a syllable on its own, usually with no separate ə after the d. The word is pronounced ˈhænd.l̩. Being, therefore, ‘syllabic’, this l may be somewhat longer in duration than it would otherwise be.

When a syllabic consonant is followed by a ‘weak’ (unstressable) vowel, it may optionally lose its syllabicity and become the ordinary (nonsyllabic) equivalent. Thus in handling, with the weak-vowelled suffix -ing, the basic three syllables ˈhænd.l̩.ɪŋ are usually reduced to just two, ˈhænd.lɪŋ. (This is the process I refer to as ‘compression’.) In this compressed form, the l is indeed now at the beginning of a syllable. The same applies in handle it, ˈhænd.l̩.ɪt or ˈhænd.lɪt, where the compressed version sounds identical to hand lit. Note, though, that handle lit is different, ˈhænd.l̩.lɪt, with a syllable-final l followed by a syllable-initial l. Here, as always happens when a syllable-final fricative or liquid is followed by an identical syllable-initial consonant, the two consonants are articulated by simply prolonging the steady state, not by moving any articulator. (Compare the prolonged s in bus stop and the prolonged m in same man.)

As I see it, the only common cases in English in which a syllable-final consonant is moved into the following syllable are the intensifier at all ə.ˈtɔːl and the combinations it is ɪ.ˈtɪz and it isn’t ɪ.ˈtɪz.n̩t. These three expressions usually have a strongly aspirated t, which tells us that it must be syllable-initial. (Some people think that syllable transfer also happens in the case of linking or intrusive r in BrE. I disagree, because more ice mɔːr ˈaɪs sounds different from more rice mɔː ˈraɪs.)