queries

I get quite a few emails from people asking about names that are not in LPD.
Sometimes I can give a quick and straightforward answer. This is usually for names that have only come into the news (or to my attention) since the current edition was prepared. So when Lucas Guevara asked me about the name of the film actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal it was easy to reply that their surname is pronounced ˈdʒɪlənhɑːl (particularly since that information is available anyhow in Wikipedia).

Fortunately the pronunciation in Swedish of this originally Swedish family name is not relevant here. (I would guess ˈˈjʏlənhɑːl.)

Emanuele Saiu wanted to know how to pronounce the name of the South American language family Zamucoan. I replied

I don't really know. Probably with the stress on -co-. Compare Minoan.

Sometimes my ignorance is displayed to all. Khosrow Tavakoli said

I couldn't find the correct pronunciation of these two well-known brand
names:
Raymond Weil
Moschino

I had to reply

I am not familiar with these names. They are not "well-known" as far as I am concerned. But then I don't buy luxury goods.
As a German name, Weil would of course be vaɪl. As an Italian name, Moschino would be moˈskiːno, anglicized (BrE) as mɒˈskiːnəʊ.

Other correspondents are more demanding, even peremptory. One such, writing from Poland, sent me a shopping list of 36 words and names, of which I recognized only two. I suggested politely that she do her own research. A few days later she wrote again

Few days ago [sic] I asked you for help with some foreign words. You advised me to do some researches [sic] and I did so. Unfortunately I did not found [sic] answers for [sic] my questions. I spent much time [sic] on doing it. I would like to ask you again for help. Could you send me recordings how to pronounce these words? Or some directions how I should pronounce them. … I need it for my phonetics classes.

The many errors in her English suggest to me that she is probably a student rather than a teacher. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, though, I said, tongue in cheek,

If you haven't time to do the research yourself, why not get your students to do it? Find out which language each word is from, and what English context it is used in (if any). Track down the phonetic information about the original language, and find people who use the word/name in English (if any), to ask them how they say them.
It is utterly unreasonable to expect me to do this work for you unpaid.

There are limits to my helpfulness.
_ _ _
Tomorrow I shall be busy with family matters. Next posting: 31 March.

Minkowski

As I was reading Why Does E=mc² by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (blog, 9 Feb) I came across the name of Albert Einstein’s colleague and tutor, Hermann Minkowski, the man who first claimed that space and time must be merged together into a single entity, spacetime.

I read the name to myself as mɪŋˈkɒfski and thought no more about it.

(About the name Minkowski, that is. I’m still trying to get my head round spacetime.)

In supplying this mental pronunciation of his name, I was following the pattern of other -owski names I know: the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, whom my UCL teachers referred to as ˌmælɪˈnɒfski, or Jacob Bronowski, presenter of the 1973 BBC TV documentary series The Ascent of Man, whom everyone called brəˈnɒfski.

Mention of Hermann Minkowski revealed a gap in my general knowledge. He was evidently an important figure in the mathematics underlying modern cosmology. In Wikipedia we read that he came from Kaunas (Kovno), now in Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire, and was of Jewish descent, educated in Germany. He was awarded his doctorate at the University of Königsberg and subsequently taught there and at Bonn, Göttingen, and Zürich, all German-speaking universities.

The mathematician Hilbert called him his best and most reliable friend.

Seit meiner Studienzeit war mir Minkowski der beste und zuverlässigste Freund…

As a German name, Minkowski is pronounced mɪŋˈkɔfski. This indeed anglicizes as (BrE) mɪŋˈkɒfski.

Since he is such an important figure in cosmology, I was thinking that I ought to add his name to LPD.

But if I do that I must check how it is actually pronounced by English-speaking physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists. Do they use the same pronunciation as I inferred?

It’s possible that they don’t, because Americans tend to treat -owski names differently, rendering them in accordance with English spelling-to-sound conventions as -aʊski. Do Americans refer to him as mɪŋˈkaʊski, then? Given the dominance of Americans in most fields of scientific research, would you find this pronunciation among British scientists too?

There’s no way to find out except to listen to people or to ask them. Fortunately we can nowadays sometimes save time by exploiting on-line resources.

I did a quick YouTube search. Given the existence of a classical musician and recording artist Marc Minkowski, the search term had to be “Minkowski -Marc”. This brought up this video and this one, showing that at least two Americans do call our man mɪŋˈkaʊski, as I suspected.

This British one, despite a promising title, has a sound track containing no speech.

Probably my entry for Minkowski, if I decide to add one, should read

Minkowski mɪŋ ˈkɒf ski || -ˈkaʊsk i —Ger [mɪŋ ˈkɔf ski]
But I need to check the BrE. Any British cosmologists out there?

strong and weak

Veronika Thir wrote

I am wondering when the KIT vowel (or the FOOT vowel) is actually a
strong vowel and when it is a weak vowel. I think it is weak when occurring in an unstressed syllable […] Thus, it should be strong when occurring in syllables that receive either primary or secondary stress. My questions is: is it weak when occurring in a monosyllabic unstressed structure word like "in" within a sentence?
What about content words which […] do not receive stress for [some] reason?

The general rules about strong (= stressable) and weak vowels in English are that
1. in a stressed syllable you can only have a strong vowel;
2. in an unstressed syllable you can have any vowel.

It would be nice if vowels were always weak in unstressed syllables. But clearly that is not the case in English (unlike, say, Russian), as shown in famous pairs such as modest ˈmɒdɪst (last vowel weak) but gymnast ˈdʒɪmnæst (last vowel strong); informant ɪnˈfɔːmənt but torment (n.) ˈtɔːment; Thomas ˈtɒməs but commerce ˈkɒmɜːs, etc.

Most noticeably, the vowel in the less prominent part of a compound is strong despite being unstressed, e.g. bedsheet ˈbedʃiːt, tentpeg ˈtentpeɡ, kettledrum ˈketl̩drʌm. But notice also non-compounds such as colleague ˈkɒliːɡ, phoneme ˈfəʊniːm, hypotenuse haɪˈpɒtənjuːz.

Some analysts (particularly Americans) argue in the other direction, claiming that the presence of a strong vowel is sufficient evidence that the syllable in question is stressed. In the British tradition we regard them as unstressed.

(There are a few exceptional compounds in which the secondary element DOES weaken, notably some in -man and -land, as milkman ˈmɪlkmən, Finland ˈfɪnlənd. Compare, though, snowman ˈsnəʊmæn, Nagaland ˈnɑːɡəlænd with no weakening.)

The weakening process converts what would otherwise be a strong vowel into a weak vowel. This is most obviously seen in function words with distinct weak forms. (All examples from BrE.)
at strong æt, weak ət
them strong ðem, weak ðəm
from strong frɒm, weak frəm
us strong ʌs, weak əs
are strong ɑː, weak ə
for strong fɔː, weak fəNB: there are some function words that do not weaken in this way, e.g. on, always ɒn.

When ordinary lexical words bear no sentence stress, there is no weakening of their vowels. So start, for example, always has ɑː; stop always has ɒ; best always has e; and worst always has ɜː, no matter how non-prominent they may be made in an utterance. Weakening has nothing to do with sentence stress (accentuation), only with word stress.

As Veronica rightly points out, the KIT vowel seems to present something of a problem, since ɪ can be either strong or weak. In bridge it is obviously strong; but in the ending -ed, as in waited ˈweɪtɪd, it is obviously weak, competing as it does with the ed sometimes used in formal singing style.

So with the FOOT vowel. I would regard the ʊ as strong in the lexical word full fʊl, but as weak in the ending -ful, e.g. beautiful. The suffix vowel usually weakens further to ə anyway, though the darkness of the l, combined with syllabic consonant formation, and now its vocalization, may make this difficult to determine. The penultimate ʊ in executive and ambulance is weak, and similarly is alternatively pronounced ə.

Words like in and it indeed present a puzzle. Do these words have a weak form, which happens to sound identical to the strong form? Or are they like on, lacking a weak form?

If I assert that the first vowel in finishing ˈfɪnɪʃɪŋ is strong but the other two weak, can I prove it? Does it matter?

It seems to me that there are two further kinds of evidence that can shed light on the issue of strong and weak ɪ.

One is to look at accents of English that have lost the distinction between ɪ and ə in weak syllables. Australian English is one such: for rabbit, where I say ɪ, Australians say ə, making it rhyme with abbot. So if I want to know whether the last vowel of armistice, my ˈɑːmɪstɪs, is strong or weak, all I have to do is look the word up in my Australian Macquarie Dictionary. There I find this word transcribed with -stəs, proving that the last vowel is weak for them. So presumably the vowel in my -stɪs is weak too (despite being derived from the second part of a Latin compound).

In Australian English it and in, strong forms ɪt and ɪn, DO weaken to ət and ən in contexts where we would expect a weak form.

The other kind of evidence comes from phonological processes that are sensitive to the presence of weak vowels. Take AmE t-voicing, or “flapping” as it is often inaccurately called. Within a morpheme it operates only where the following vowel is weak. So we get the t̬ output (= ɾ, more or less) in atom (last vowel weak) but not in latex (last vowel strong). In words such as emphatic we DO get t-voicing, which tells us that the last vowel must be weak ɪ, not strong.

unpacking the conventions

On 22 March someone left a comment on this blog, under the cloak of anonymity, saying

It reminds me of how the dictionaries can be confusing. For example, one gives ˈsteɪʃ^ənəri, the other /ˈsteɪ.ʃ^ən.^ər.i/, where both are unpronounceable. As written, taken literally, without certain implications. The choice of sounds not to be pronounced is also so random, the prescriptivity arbitrary... Then you have the recorded actor's voice and it doesn't match the written.

I don’t usually react to anonymous negative criticism, but on this occasion I will.

The word stationary/stationery is a good example of how an English word can have several subtly different pronunciations all trivially different from one another. This is because of the interplay of two optional phonological rules in English. They are (i) syllabic consonant formation, which permits a sequence of schwa plus a sonorant to become a syllabic sonorant, and (ii) compression, which involves a reduction in the number of syllables in the word. As the author of a pronunciation dictionary, my dilemma is (a) whether to include all these variants, and (b) if so, how to avoid spelling them all out in detail, which would be too wasteful of space. (AmE is much simpler here, since Americans do not reduce the suffix vowel.)

In BrE our word can be pronounced in any of eight ways, which our seɡment-based transcription system enables us to distinɡuish as follows.
1. ˈsteɪʃənəri (four syllables, no syllabic consonants)
2. ˈsteɪʃn̩əri (four syllables, including a syllabic nasal)
3. ˈsteɪʃənr̩i (four syllables, including a syllabic liquid r̩ = ɚ)
4. ˈsteɪʃn̩r̩i (four syllables, including a syllabic nasal and a syllabic liquid)
5. ˈsteɪʃənri (three syllables, no syllabic consonant)
6. ˈsteɪʃn̩ri (three syllables, including a syllabic nasal).
7. ˈsteɪʃnəri (three syllables, no syllabic consonants)
8. ˈsteɪʃnr̩i (three syllables, including a syllabic liquid).

From the point of view of the EFL student, any one of these is fine. A similar but simpler combinatorial explosion affects words such as liberal and national. Then dictionary and missionary are like stationary.

If I were designing a pronunciation entry for an elementary or intermediate dictionary, I would select one variant and ignore the others. For LDOCE and the like, the entry ˈsteɪʃənəri is entirely adequate. On the other hand the COD’s entry ˈsteɪʃ(ə)n(ə)ri could be taken to imply, wrongly, that the word can be pronounced with two syllables only.

But LPD is meant to be a specialist dictionary. I do not want to dumb down by pretending that the other variants do not exist. I want to specify them unambiguously.

My solution is to use abbreviatory conventions. My entry reads
stationaryˈsteɪʃ ^ən ər_i -^ən_ər i || -ə ner i What is shown here as an underline should actually be a low breve, which for typographical reasons I cannot reliably reproduce here. This symbolizes the site of possible compression. As explained in the part of the dictionary that people tend not to read, a raised symbol indicates a segment that is usually absent (creating a consonant that will be syllabic unless compressed), though it may alternatively be included. An italic symbol indicates a segment that is usually present, but may be omitted (ditto).

To understand the entry you have to be able to ‘unpack’ the abbreviatory conventions. If you can do so, you will find that it covers all eight possibilities mentioned above.

The advice on page 149 of the third edition says that you can, if you choose, simplify the abbreviatory conventions by preserving italicized symbols, deleting raised ones, and ignoring the compression mark and syllable-division spaces. Applying this to our word we derive ˈsteɪʃnəri, variant number 7. Fine.

As for the claim that

the recorded actor's voice … doesn't match the written

— it is simply untrue. She says ˈsteɪʃn̩ri, version number 6. There is of course no way in which she could have produced all eight versions simultaneously.

Looking at the other pronunciation dictionaries, we see that variants 5 and 6 are not covered by the Cambridge EPD’s ˈsteɪ.ʃ^ən.^ər.i, ˈsteɪʃ.n^ər-. The ODP’s ˈsteɪʃn̩(ə)ri, ˈsteɪʃən(ə)ri does not cover versions 7 and 8.

The LPD entry may be complicated — but the facts are complicated. The optional segments are not ‘random’. Rather than ‘arbitrary prescriptivity’, you could claim that I go to an extreme of inclusiveness and non-prescriptivity. I certainly gave a very great deal of thought to the problem of how best to design an accurately inclusive entry for tricky words like stationary.

our new multiethnolect

In connection with its ongoing exhibition Evolving English the British Library is holding a series of ‘events’.

Yesterday’s was a lunch-time lecture by Paul Kerswill on the subject of Multicultural London English (this blog, 02 July 2010, 25 Mar 2008 and 16 Nov 2006). I am gratified to say that the event was sold out, but less happy to report that many people had to be turned away.

In his lecture, richly illustrated by sound clips, Paul showed how traditional Cockney, once upon a time centred on inner eastern areas of London such as Bethnal Green, has now moved out to the outer suburbs (his team had studied Havering, on the Essex borders). In inner areas (his team had studied Hackney) the incomers who replaced the white working class had in many cases more than one variety in their repertoire, being able to switch, for example, between Cockney and Jamaican.

(We can illustrate this with the 1984 hit Cockney Translation by the late Smiley Culture, sung in Jamaican Creole but explaining words and usages from Cockney — as Paul pointed out, with no reference at all to Standard English.)

me come to teach you right and not the wrong
ina di Cockney Translation
Cockney’s not a language, it is only a slang
an was originated yaso [= here] ina Englan’…

For today’s teenagers, though, this has given way to a new local multiethnic speech variety shared by adolescents of all different ethnic origins. It is sometimes referred to as ‘Jafaican’, though Paul’s team prefer their term Multicultural London English.

To illustrate the point, Paul played us sound clips of four Hackney adolescents talking, and challenged us to guess the ethnicity of the speakers. They did indeed all sound much the same. Yet one was self-described as Bengali, one as White British, one as Black British Caribbean, and one as Turkish. (I did get two out of four correct, but that may just have been by lucky chance.)

We can illustrate this new variety by this clip of Dizzee Rascal being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman just after Obama’s election. You can hear all sorts of ‘Cockney’ features in his speech (t glottalling, l vocalization and so on) but also plenty of features foreign to traditional Cockney (unshifted FACE and PRICE diphthongs,‘man’).

And he has great answers to Paxman’s condescending and supercilious questions.

Do you believe in political parties?
Do you feel yourself to be British?

_ _ _

I have handed over to Paul Kerswill the original tapes of the interviews I conducted with Jamaicans in London in 1969-70 for my PhD work. If the recordings are still playable after sitting in a drawer for forty years the BL will help digitize them so that they can be properly archived.

how do we pronounce train ?

Students of phonetics who are NSs of English are regularly given the task of “doing transcription”, i.e. transcribing a passage of English into phonetic notation. This task may not be as easy as it would seem at first sight. The gifted get it right first time, but the average student is tempted to make frequent mistakes. Many can be attributed either to being dazzled by the familiar orthography (so wrɒŋ, for example, instead of rɒŋ), or to failure to take account of weakening and other features of connected speech (e.g. ˈtuː ɒv ðem hæv ˈfɪnɪʃd instead of ˈtuː əv ðəm əv ˈfɪnɪʃt).

The teacher who sets the transcription task has to exercise a certain discretion when correcting the student’s work. Students are encouraged, after all, to represent their own accent rather than some variety different from their own (though in Britain we normally allow them to choose to transcribe RP if they prefer, even if it is not exactly their own accent). Where do we draw the line between a mistake on the one hand and a permissible local-accent feature on the other?

Consider someone who transcribes train as tʃreɪn, drink as dʒrɪŋk etc (which is by no means unusual).

What I would do faced with this is to draw the student’s attention to the fact that the usual transcription is treɪn, drɪŋk. I would mention the allophonic rule that makes English r fricative in the clusters tr and dr, and also the corresponding allophonic rule that retracts t and d when followed by r. I would then try to get the class to discuss which analysis is right, and why.

Do the initial clusters of train and drink contain any phonetic matter that cannot be attributed to the fricative r that we expect in this context? Is the friction element followed by the r element, or simultaneous with it?

The concept of phonological neutralization is relevant here, though sometimes difficult for practically-oriented students to grasp. The point is that there is no possible contrast in English words between a posited cluster tr and a posited cluster tʃr. This means that the opposition between t and tʃ is neutralized in the context _r, at least word-initially, and likewise the d - dʒ opposition. So in a sense it is meaningless to ask which is involved.

It may be relevant to consider the pair century – sentry. Obviously, century is basically ˈsentʃəri and distinct from sentry ˈsentri. However, like other words with this phonetic structure, it is subject to optional compression in the form of the loss of the schwa, leaving ˈsentʃri. Is this still distinct from sentry?

If the answer is no, they are not distinct, it confirms our diagnosis of phonological neutralization. If it is yes, they are distinct (which it tends to be), then we ask whether ther initial affricate of train is like the -tʃr- of compressed century or like the -tr- of sentry. It is like the latter, and we transcribe accordingly.

You will now see why I was not convinced by Joshua Smiles, who wrote to me asking

I wonder whether you might know the name of a phonological change occurring in London speakers of RP (and those who simply watch too much television). What I refer to is the shift of any alveolar plosive preceding a rhotic consonant to a post alveolar affricate. Examples of this would be "tripoli", and "children" which are often rendered /tʃɹɪpəli/, and /tʃɪldʒɹən/ in RP and EE alike.

I don’t believe there is any such phonological change in progress. So naturally I don’t have any name for it.

shattered brains

Yesterday I heard an announcement that so-and-so had died of səˈriːbrəl cancer. Personally, I would have said ˈserəbrəl.

Cerebral is one of those medical-anatomical adjectives in which we don’t all agree where the main stress should fall. Other similar cases are skeletal, cervical and our own palatal.

What characterizes these derivatives is a clash between two psychophonological principles. One principle is that of maintaining the shape of the stem to which the suffix -al is attached. Just as person gives us personal and option optional etc, so we may expect to treat the suffix as stress-neutral, giving ˈserəbrəl, ˈskelɪtl̩, ˈsɜːvɪkl̩, ˈpælətl̩, all with initial stress. Compare the initial stress of skeleton, cervix, palate.

(Where the stem has three or more syllables, Chomsky and Halle’s ‘Alternating Stess Rule’ moves the initial stress of the stem to penultimate stress in the adjective, as in ˈuniverse – uniˈversal, ˈdialect – diaˈlectal etc. That is irrelevant here.)

The other principle is the Latin stress rule, largely inherited in English, which says that a long vowel in the penultimate, or any vowel followed by two or more consonants, attracts the main stress to that syllable. So ˈhormone gives us horˈmonal, ˈsepulchre seˈpulchral, and so on. But if the penultimate vowel is part of a ‘weak cluster’, i.e. light — having a short vowel, followed by one consonant or none — then the stress goes not on the penultimate but on the antepenultimate, as ˈpyramid – pyˈramidal.

In English as in Latin, to operate the Latin rule it is crucial to know the quantity (length) of the penultimate vowel. But very few people know Latin these days, and even those of us who do may be uncertain about the classical quantity of this or that vowel.

Dentists and anatomists (in BrE at any rate) “know” in some sense that Latin pălātum has a penultimate long vowel, and accordingly pronounce palatal as pəˈleɪtl̩. Phoneticians don’t have this “knowledge”, or “choose” to ignore it, so we pronounce the word as ˈpælətl̩.

The Greek form of skeleton has -λετ-, with a short vowel, which would regularly yield, via Latin, ˈskelɪtl̩; but those who say skɪˈliːtl̩ do not “know” this.

Latin cervix has the stem cervīc-, with a long vowel, and the surgical tradition is to pronounce cervical accordingly as səˈvaɪkl̩; but the pressure of all the hundreds of other adjectives in -ical leads most lay people to prefer ˈsɜːvɪkl̩.

In the case of cerebral, the relevant vowel of Latin cĕrĕbrum is short. The issue here is whether the consonant cluster br is sufficient to ‘make position’, i.e. make the syllable heavy. Clusters with liquids are characteristically uncertain in this regard (which is incidentally the origin of the term ‘liquid’, i.e. ambiguous or uncertain). If we make the syllable heavy we get ceˈrebral, if light ˈcerebral.

You may recognize this Latin word as part of one of the standard examples of tmesis, in the famous half-line from the poet Ennius,

saxō cĕrĕ- commĭnŭit -brum
‘he shattered his br- -ain with a stone’.