speech and writing

Speech is sounds, vibrations in the air arising from movements of the human organs of speech under the control of the brain/mind (or of an electrical device simulating this). Sounds can be heard, but not seen directly.

Writing is marks on paper or some other surface, or patterns of light and dark on a screen. Letters can be seen, but not heard directly.

It is incredible how difficult people find it to grasp the difference.

Several times last week, in our discussions of pronunciation, interviewers or commentators raised the matter of text messaging and the innovative spellings associated with it. But that is not speech! Other than occasional initialisms such as lol spoken aloud as lɒl, txtng has nothing at all to do with pronunciation. It is a matter of writing, not speech.

Other commentators, under the heading of pronunciation, complained not only about “text talk” but also about misplaced apostrophes.

Apostrophes, whether misplaced or not, are not part of speech. They are part of our writing system. Why don’t people get it? Even highly educated journalists?

Perhaps one reason for the confusion is the common sense of ‘pronounce’ in the sense of ‘say letters aloud’ (er... you can’t actually do that), i.e. ‘say the sounds corresponding to written letters’.

The letters ng are pronounced ŋ, or sometimes ŋɡ or ndʒ.

Spanish has a letter ñ, which is pronounced as a palatal nasal.

But this rests on the fallacy that writing is primary, speech secondary. It implies that when we speak we are merely supplying sounds appropriate to the written form of the words we use.

If that were so, how could the illiterate ever speak at all? How is it that children learn to talk before they learn to read and write?

spreading the word

Yesterday’s explosion of public interest in pronunciation was triggered by a press release from the British Library announcing a new project to “track the changing sounds of modern English pronunciation”. The BBC arts correspondent, David Sillito, had made a short introductory video.

I first got wind of it on Wednesday, when the BBC phoned to ask if I would be willing to take part in the Today programme on Radio Four the next morning. The plan was that I should sit in the studio for half an hour as Evan Davies and Justin Webb presented the live broadcast, and then discuss with them any matters of pronunciation interest that I had observed. (Listen here.)

I agreed. An hour or two later BBC Radio Five Live rang to say would I do a quick interview with them first. I agreed to that too, though it meant getting out of bed half an hour earlier. They would send a car for me at 06:30.

I duly arrived at the Television Centre in Wood Lane, White City, which is where BBC radio is temporarily housed during the refurbishment of Broadcasting House. I did the R5 interview, and was waiting in the green room for R4 when an emissary from the World Service waylaid me to get me to do an interview with them too. OK.

I don’t generally give out my mobile phone number, but I did supply it to the BBC in case of emergencies. They must have circulated it within the organization, because by now there were text messages asking me to do interviews for BBC local radio in (a) Belfast and (b) Wales. Nothing came of the first, but the second turned into a 45-minute phone-in.

That was the point at which I started turning down further invitations, though I did accept one further one, television rather than radio, for the BBC World News with Zeinab Badawi (which necessitated a second visit to the Television Centre). Fortunately Britain has plenty of other competent phoneticians. Michael Ashby wrote

I think I was the only phonetician in Britain who wasn't on one or other radio or TV channel this morning—in fact, I was asked to be, but had an Exam Board to chair.

Three of UCL’s first-year linguistics students were interviewed, proud to be treated as experts. Paul Kerswill told me

I was to have been the linguistics talking head on C4 news tonight, but Lancaster U's studio has broken down! All good stuff though. 'Impact'.

…which is true, and is what justifies all the hassle these things put us through. It heightens people’s awareness of phonetics, and helps (I hope) dispel some of the prejudice and ignorance surrounding popular views on pronunciation.

The BBC is notoriously mean over payment to contributors, while also being strangely lavish in the use of chauffeured cars. I explained to them that for me to get from my home to the Television Centre it was quicker to use the Underground than to struggle by car through the traffic on London’s roads, but they insisted. By Underground it takes me sixty minutes door-to-door, including the fifteen minutes’ walk to my local station. The chauffeured car took up to an hour and twenty-five minutes and for the four journeys must have cost the BBC something like thirty times the price of a one-day travelcard. I would rather have travelled on public transport and augmented my meagre fee by the sum they paid the taxi company. It would have been better for the environment, too. Ah well.

prevalence

In English adjectives ending in the suffix -ant or -ent we still see the ghost of the Latin stress rule.

By this I mean that the word stress in such adjectives depends on how the stem to which the suffix is attached ends. (Obviously, we are dealing here with words of three or more syllables, i.e. with stems of two or more syllables.) If the stem ends in what Chomsky and Halle (The Sound Pattern of English) call a ‘weak cluster’, then the stress goes on the preceding syllable. If it ends in a ‘strong cluster’, then the stress goes on that syllable itself. A weak cluster consists of a short vowel followed by a maximum of one consonant. A strong cluster, on the other hand, has either a long vowel, or 2+ following consonants, or both. So a weak cluster reflects a Latin single-mora (‘light’) syllable, while a strong cluster reflects a Latin multi-mora (‘heavy’) syllable.

The stress rule in Latin itself is: stress the penultimate if it is heavy (impeˈrātōr; conˈfectus, asˈcendō), otherwise stress the antepenultimate (conˈfĭcĭō, ˈrăpĭdus). Classicists call this the ‘Penultimate Law’ (W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina, CUP 1965, p. 83).

So in English we have on the one hand
(i) ˈarrogant, belˈligerent, beˈnevolent, conˈstituent, ˈdecadent, ˈfumigant, perˈcipient, ˈpermanent, ˈreticent, sigˈnificant, ˈsubsequent
—with antepenultimate stress reflecting the Latin short vowel in rŏgō, gĕrō, vŏlō, etc.; and on the other hand
(ii) exˈponent; abˈsorbent, aˈbundant, aˈstringent, correˈspondent, conˈvergent, inˈsistent, maˈlignant, reˈluctant
—with penultimate stress reflecting the Latin long vowel in pōnō and the consonant clusters in the other words.

In acquiescent and abhorrent the spellings sc, rr reflect what were consonant clusters in Latin, even though we now pronounce single consonants in English. In apparent the Latin vowel of appārĕō was long, even though we now pronounce it in BrE as short æ rather than as long eə. Conversely in provident Latin -vĭd- was short, generating antepenultimate stress, although we have a long vowel aɪ in provide.

It wouldn’t be English if we didn’t have a number of exceptions and irregularities. The vowel of Latin plăcĕō was short, yet we say complacent kəmˈpleɪsənt as if it were long. By rights excellent ought to be penultimate-stressed (Latin excellens with a double consonant), as should protestant. But they aren’t.

All this is by way of a lead-in to an unusual pronunciation I heard the other day: prevalent pronounced not as the usual ˈprevələnt but as priˈveɪlənt. Latin vălĕō had a short vowel, which is why most of us use antepenultimate stress not only in prevalent but also in equivalent and ambivalent.

I can see two factors which might lead someone to give this word penultimate stress, -ˈveɪl -. One is the verb to prevail, obviously related in morphology and (to some extent) in meaning. The other is chemical terminology, which has now spread to disciplines such as linguistics. In chemistry, valency ˈveɪlənsi (BrE) or valence ˈveɪləns (AmE) is a measure of the combining power of atoms of a given element. Chemists pronounce words such as trivalent, pentavalent and multivalent with penultimate stress, -ˈveɪlənt.

In LPD I do recognize the possibility of ˌæmbɪˈveɪlənt. But not yet of priˈveɪlənt, prə-. Ought I to?

_ _ _

I won't be posting a blog entry tomorrow (Thur.), because I'll be busy in the BBC studios for brief interviews on BBC Radio 5 (around 07:35) and Radio 4 (around 08:10). It's to do with a new pronunciation initiative at the British Library.

length of Italian vowels

Yes, the transcription I used for Italian yesterday included length marks where appropriate for phonetically long vowels, and yes, vowel length (duration) is predictable in Italian.

The transcription I use for Italian is based on my late colleague Marguerite Chapallaz’s The Pronunciation of Italian (London: Bell & Hyman, 1979) a book long out of print but particularly suited to the practical needs of English-speaking learners.

I think it is helpful to show vowel length explicitly in transcribing Italian. One reason is that segment length is perceptually very salient in this language, making the rhythm of words and sentences sound very different from that of, say, Spanish or Greek. Compare the words for ‘hand’, spelt the same, mano, in Italian and Spanish: ˈmaːno in the first, ˈmano in the second. It does no harm at all to remind foreign learners of this characteristic of Italian at every opportunity.

The other reason is that the rule concerning vowel length is not altogether straightforward. A vowel is long in an open non-final stressed syllable. That means a vowel that is stressed and syllable-final but not word-final, the following consonant (if there is one) being initial in the next syllable. All other vowels are short. (Check out yesterday’s examples.) The matter is complicated by the fact that some consonants are pronounced double even though written single (as a single digraph), which means the preceding vowel is short, e.g. ogni ˈɔɲɲi, paglia ˈpaʎʎa.

We conventionally transcribe long (geminate) consonants by writing them twice rather than by using length marks. This is partly because they typically straddle a syllable boundary. It’s also because, unlike vowel length, consonant gemination in Italian is phonemic. My favourite minimal pair fato vs. fatto is thus transcribed ˈfaːto, ˈfatto, reminding the learner of the difference at two points. It would not be visually distinctive enough if we were to write ˈfaːto, ˈfatːo. (The same arguments apply in transcribing Finnish, where vowel and consonant length vary independently.)

But yes, it would be adequate and unambiguous to omit vowel length marks in Italian, as Italians do themselves. This reminds us that there is more than one way to transcribe any given language phonetically, even remaining strictly within IPA.

de’ Medici

The spelling-to-pronunciation rules for Italian are reasonably straightforward once you have learnt them. Apart from the e–ɛ and o–ɔ contrasts, which some Italians ignore anyway, the only important thing the spelling doesn’t tell you is where the word stress goes.

The default is for it to fall on the penultimate syllable (‘parole piane’: caro ˈkaːɾo, fanciullo fanˈtʃullo, dottore dotˈtoːɾe, incominciare iŋkominˈtʃaːɾe). But in a minority of words it falls elsewhere. Final stress is always shown by a written accent mark (‘parole tronche’: città tʃitˈta, caffè kafˈfɛ). The big trap for the foreigner is words with antepenultimate stress (‘parole sdrucciole’: povero ˈpɔːveɾo, scatola ˈskaːtola, vicolo ˈviːkolo).

It is very easy to be caught out ordering “feˈɡaːto” from the menu in an Italian restaurant, instead of the correct ˈfeːɡato (fegato, ‘liver’). You may remember the earthquake at L’Aquila (blog, 13 April 2009) and the difficulty we had getting that name correctly stressed.

So I had some sympathy when a friend of mine recently came back from a weekend break in Florence. He was enthusing about the art and architecture he had seen and about the influence of the … meˈdɪtʃi family there. But no, in Italian the (de’) Medici have antepenultimate stress, ˈmɛːditʃi.

Actually I am in no position to crow, because I see from my Dizionario italiano multimediale e multilingue d’Ortografia e di Pronunzia (blog, 19 July) that the stressed vowel in Medici is open-mid rather than the close-mid that I wrongly put in LPD as the Italian pronunciation.

This name does though raise a point of principle. My friend is by no means alone in giving this word penultimate stress. On the contrary, even though we may agree that the correct anglicization is ˈmedɪtʃi, nevertheless meˈdiːtʃi and the like are very commonly heard from English speakers. Was I right to include them as secondary variants in LPD? Or ought a pronunciation dictionary to shun such incorrect forms? It’s the old question of description vs prescription. While I prefer to go for accurate description, at least I try to prioritize the correct form.

As we all know, there are cases like Beijing in which the ‘incorrect’ -ˈʒɪŋ is much more prevalent in English than the -ˈdʒɪŋ that corresponds to the pronunciation in the original Chinese.

oft internèd (?) with their bones

Confession: OK, the man whose funeral I went to (yesterday’s blog) was black and of West Indian (namely Montserratian) origin. Like most Montserrat families since the volcano disaster of 1997, his descendants are scattered among the Montserratian diaspora around the world, but particularly in the UK and the US. So some at least of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren on whose names I commented may be American and following the naming fashions of African-Americans rather than of English people.

Believe me, though, that the register of children at any London primary school will indeed contain a fair number of names that are missing from LPD and other pronunciation dictionaries. Even from the white working class (think of names like Kayleigh).

One of my social duties from time to time is to create funeral service sheets for Montserratians who have died in London. Most are buried rather than cremated, and that means that whereas the funeral service is held in church near the deceased’s residence the actual burial takes place in one of the cemeteries located several miles away. So the service sheet has to tell you where this will be.

Rather than ‘burial’, people prefer to use the posh word interment. The trouble is that many Montserratians think it is spelt ‘internment’ and pronounced correspondingly. In the service sheets I make myself I spell the word correctly, of course. But others don’t. Here’s what Wednesday’s service sheet said.
As we know, internment ɪnˈtɜːnmənt is imprisonment without trial. You can see how readily it might be confused with interment ɪnˈtɜːmənt. Think of the common pronunciation of government with a single nasal, ˈɡʌvəmənt. (Actually, it gets worse: there are newsreaders who seem to pronounce government virtually identically with gunmen. I’m sure JWL has examples.)

And finally... as an EFL mistake I have even heard interment pronounced as ˈɪntəmənt. It does look confusingly like words with the prefix inter-.

what was your name again?

Proper names are an important part of a pronunciation dictionary. Although most of them are not covered in general dictionaries, they are part of every NS’s knowledge of the language and therefore deserve to be properly documented as part of our on-going description of English. And in the case of English we have the added complication of the often opaque relationship between spelling and sound. (Think of the familiar names George, Leonard and Leo, where eo corresponds to ɔː, e and iːəʊ~iːoʊ respectively.)

Today I’m concerned not with geographical names, commercial names, or characters in fiction and mythology, but just with names of people; and among them not with surnames but with personal names (christian names, forenames, first names).

Naturally I tried to do my best to give these good coverage in LPD. But I’m conscious of a fair number of gaps: in particular, Indian names and Islamic names. Plenty of native speakers in Britain bear these names, and neither LPD nor any other pronunciation dictionary covers them adequately.

But it’s not just Indian and Islamic names. Parents today feel very few constraints on the choice of names for their children. They are free not only to create new spellings for familiar names, but also to invent entirely new names. How then is a pronunciation dictionary to keep up? It can’t.

(I am still feeling a bit embarrassed that I missed Britney in the 2008 edition of LPD. I console myself that at least I managed to add the surnames Obama and Miliband in time.)

This was brought home to me yesterday when I attended a funeral for a man of the same age as myself. The service sheet listed the names of all his immediate family. He was called Dan, and among his brothers and sisters (he came from a big family) were John, Helen, Edith, Joyce, Olivia and Ethel. No problem there. His sons and daughters included George, Dawn and Lorna, but also the unusually spelt Dannii. Then come the grandchildren. The names of one or two are unremarkable (Marcus, Karen, Shawn), but they are in a minority. Most of them have names not to be found in pronunciation dictionaries: Vonetta, Chiedza, Khaila, Shelayne, Keanna. Then his four great-grandchildren are named Stephon, Sha’Myri, Tierra and Teondray. I suppose the first may just be an unusual spelling of Stephen, but the others have every appearance of having been invented on the spot.

Not all parents choose to do their own thing in this way. Like everything else in Britain, it tends to be sensitive to social class differences. I have no grandchildren, but my great-nephews are called Jack, Joseph, and Joe, and my great-nieces are Sophie and Lucy.