stressed out, or not

Jack Windsor Lewis has been discussing a question put by Tami Date, who was puzzled by the stressing of the phrasal verb in three sentences in a dialogue from People Speaking.

So I’m terrified of giving her something that’ll bring her out in spots.
səʊ aɪm `terəfaɪd | əv ɡɪvɪŋ hɜː ˏsʌmθɪŋ | ðətl ˈbrɪŋ ər aʊt ɪn `spɒts.

But I believe she comes out in a rash if she touches onions.
bət aɪ bəˈliːv | ʃi ˈkʌmz aʊt ɪn ə `ræʃ ɪf ʃi tʌtʃɪz `ˏʌnjənz.

For goodness sake! Ring up her house and ask them.
fə ˈɡʊdnəs `seɪk. ˈrɪŋ ʌp ə `haʊs ən `ɑːsk ðəm.

The phrasal verbs bring out, come out, and ring up are all lexically double-stressed, which means that we expect both the verb word and the following particle to be accented. Tami wants to know, therefore, how it is that out and up in these sentences are shown as unstressed.
My answer would be more succinct than Jack’s. I would refer Tami to the rule of three (English Intonation, p. 229). This says that whenever we have three potentially accented syllables we have the option of downgrading the middle one.

The option to downgrade potential accents is a pervasive characteristic of English rhythm. It tends to operate whenever an accent is located between two other accents in the same IP.

The potential accents are

…ˈbring her ˈout in ˈspots.
…ˈcome ˈout in a ˈrash…
ˈRing ˈup her ˈhouse.

In each case we can apply the rule of three and suppress the middle accent. Hey presto! we have exactly the very natural-sounding version that Jack transcribes. (I don’t think there is any specific maximum of successive unstressed syllables in English connected speech.)
As Jack says,

Whether a speaker chooses to stress them or not depends entirely on how fluently or quickly he or she happens to wish to say the sentence.

macaronic mondegreens

Paul Tench wrote, in a posting to a listserv I belong to,

I took my mother to try a new Italian delicatessen round the corner from where we live, but she was not feeling very adventurous and opted for a cup of tea, whereas I went for a latte. The Italian waiter got my order: “A cuppa tea ’n’ a latte please”.

Imagine my mother’s surprise when she received a cappucino! (I got my latte!) A neat case of an Italian speaker interpreting colloquial English with “Italian ears”, and probably thinking “These Brits just can’t get their Italian pronunciation right!”

(Just in case anyone’s not sure, the Italian pronunciation of cappuccino is kapputˈtʃiːno. So the phonetic distance from ˌkʌpəˈtiːnə, in noise, is not great.)

This led another subscriber, Jamie Kirchner, to comment

After a pronunciation lesson on aspiration of voiceless consonants, a
Brazilian student of mine suddenly realized why he always got the wrong beer in noisy nightclubs. He would order Killian’s and get Guinness, not just once, but all the time. Apparently amidst all the din, American waitresses and bartenders thought his unaspirated [k] was [g] and would consistently bring him the wrong thing.

And Billy Clark says that when he told his daughter “do your revision” she took this to be “do Eurovision”.

Conversely to Paul’s experience, I remember the possibly apocryphal Londoner many years ago who, going with his girlfriend to a coffee bar and hearing that there was a trendy new drink called cappuccino, ordered two cups o’ chino, one for him and one for her.

epenthesis

From the LOLphonology group on Facebook, two illustrations of epenthesis.
I think these pictures are more fun than banging on about ˈfen^tsɪz and ˈɡæŋ^kstəz.
0 → kæt / kæt _ kæt

PS Please don’t ask me to be your FB friend unless we actually know one another. Sorry, but otherwise the whole thing gets out of hand.

memory

One of the things I most regret about growing older is the decline in my ability to memorize things. Not boasting, but between the ages of 10 and 18 I somehow committed to memory great swathes of Latin and Greek morphology (or Accidence, as it was then known — declensions and conjugations, regular and irregular), not to mention mathematical formulae, geometrical proofs, historical dates, French verbs and vocabulary, how to read music, and I suppose well over ten thousand additional English words with their spellings and meanings. That was in school. On my own I taught myself a limited amount of Italian, the Cyrillic alphabet, thousands of Gregg shorthand outlines, and to play the melodeon. To add to school-generated conversational fluency in French, I acquired rather better privately-acquired fluency in German and Esperanto.
You want to know the value of pi? No problem. What the sine of an angle is? How to calculate the area of a circle? Solving quadratic equations? The lyrics of every pop song from the early fifties? Of course. Once learnt, always remembered.
And scores of square dances, country dances and Scottish dances.
Not any more. Now I struggle just to try and memorize a paltry hundred kana symbols or a few lines of song for the choir. Learnt today, gone tomorrow.
What makes it especially galling is that so much of this memorizing in my youth was effortless and unplanned. No one made me learn the words of Doris Day’s The Deadwood Stage. I didn’t even try to learn them. They just came.
I suppose the period of effortless learning extended to my undergraduate and postgraduate years. I never remember having to make any particular effort to remember a hundred-plus phonetic symbols. My teacher or my book told me about them: from then on I knew them. (However I do have to admit that as an undergraduate I failed to acquire Sanskrit morphology and the Devanāgari to write it with. So motivation was obviously a factor by then: Sanskrit wasn’t part of the examination.)

Now I can’t even remember the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. That’s because I didn’t attempt to learn them till later in life.

These depressing thoughts came to me when for some reason I was thinking of the Latin Grace recited before dinner in Hall when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge. There were two Graces, one of which is taken from Psalm 145:15-16. I remember it as

Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine, et tu das escam illis in tempore opportuno. Aperis tu manum tuam, et imples omne animal benedictione. [The eyes of all wait upon thee, O Lord, and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.]

Searching the web shows, however, that this Latin text differs from that found in the Vulgate in one word. The Vulgate reads

Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine, et tu das escam illorum in tempore opportuno. Aperis tu manum tuam, et imples omne animal benedictione.

Had Trinity changed illorum (of them) to illis (to them)? Or am I remembering it wrong? Perhaps my memory is not really as good as I imagine.

That’s what it semt to be

Peter Roach wrote:

I heard a Rotherham man being interviewed on Radio 4 earlier today about the effects of the recession. I thought I heard him say 'It semt to come on suddenly' ('semt' where 'seemed' would be expected). If I heard that correctly (I wasn't listening carefully at the time), it would be presumably be analogical to /dremt/ - /dri:md/. Have you ever heard this? Or did I mis-hear?

I answered

I’ve never heard it, but it seems entirely plausible. The OED has a past tense semde, sempt, semt in the 13th-16th centuries.
You could possibly check in the Leeds Survey of English Dialects.

Peter then reported

I consulted my cousin-in-law, who knows the area well - he used to be Head Teacher of Grimethorpe Comprehensive. I remember him telling me of hearing one of his teachers saying to a boy “don't tha thee-thou me!”. His reply concerning semt:

Yes semt (I'm not sure exactly how it's spelt - it can be pronounced more like sempt) is common in Rotherham, Sheffield and Barnsley, tha’ knows. They also use tret (for treated).

So I think I must have heard this form correctly.

And I in turn can say that I have heard tret for the past of treat.

Yes, sir!

Discussing the weak form of saint (blog, 9 June) reminds me of another word that has a weak form in BrE but not in AmE: sir. As a vocative, it’s sɜː(r) everywhere. But when it precedes a name, in BrE it normally has the weak form sə(r).
So we say sə Humphrey, sə Galahad, Professor sə Howard Fergus.
With a possible linking r, we have sə(r) Alexander Fleming and sə(r) Alan Sugar (star of The Apprentice, recently ennobled and given a cabinet post).
The only circumstance where sir would be strong in this position is if accented for emphasis or contrast. There was a case just today when the Scottish Olympic cycling champion Chris Hoy received a knighthood. Here’s the TV interviewer asking him “How does ˈsɜː Chris sound?”
Note to non-Brits: he’s Sir Chris Hoy or Sir Chris, but never Sir Hoy.

Not Wavian but drowning

In my blog for 5 Sep 2008 I asked a question intended to be jokey and rhetorical:

Shavian ˈʃeɪviən, for the writer George Bernard Shaw, is more recent (OED: 1905). And Fitzrovia, for the area around Fitzroy Square near Euston, is a mere half-century old (OED: 1958).
(Do you think anyone would give Waugh an adjective Wavian? No? Neither do I.)

I spoke too soon. The word had already been coined and used. In a review of Alexander Waugh’s book Fathers and Sons: the autobiography of a family, Christopher Hitchins wrote

If students of George Bernard Shaw can be called Shavians, a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s named John Sutro argued, then those interested in all things Waugh might be called Wavians. I now realize that, without knowing it, I have been a Wavian for many years.

The review is dated June 3, 2007.
Another review, by Barbara Kay, dated June 13, 2007, bore the headline Parental neglect: the Wavian muse.
In November 2007 there was even a punning headline, Wavian goodbye.
Let me update my question. In years to come, when someone writes a biography of our Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, will his views and behaviour be called Stravian?
Or we might reverse the process and start calling birds aws. (Think about it.)