keeping schtum

Usually, when English borrows a word from some other modern language, we keep the spelling used in the source language and hesitate about the pronunciation. Thus we all agree on the spelling restaurant (from French), but disagree on how to pronounce the last syllable. We may take a cavalier line with diacritics, as when Swedish smörgåsbord becomes just smorgasbord. And with languages not written in the Roman alphabet we use a romanization, thus perestroika or tsunami. But generally speaking the spelling is not controversial, though the pronunciation may be.

There’s a word ʃtʊm that has become quite well established in the UK (or perhaps particularly in London and environs; I don’t think Americans ever use it). There is no question about its pronunciation. But we can’t agree on how to spell it. This is the other way round from what is usual.

The word means ‘silent’, and is used almost exclusively in the phrase keep ʃtʊm or its variant stay ʃtʊm ‘keep quiet (about something)’. (The OED also offers us a verb, to ʃtʊm up, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard that.)

We agree on how to say it: but how do we spell it? There are quite a few candidates.

Rather than attempt to interpret the mysteries of Google’s hit statistics, I searched the Guardian newspaper website for various possible spellings of the word.

I found
   184 hits for schtum,
   78 for shtoom,
   41 for shtum,
   21 for stumm (but some of these are for a proper name),
   15 for stum (ditto),
   5 for shtumm,
   4 for schtumm
   and 3 for schtoom.

The OED’s first citation is dated 1958. The origin of the word is Yiddish, the equivalent of German stumm ʃtʊm ‘dumb, speechless, mute, silent’. (That’s ‘dumb’ in the older sense, ‘unable to speak’, not the modern AmE sense ‘stupid’.) But we see that the spelling used in German, stumm, comes only in fourth place in the Guardian statistics. In Yiddish it’s spelt שטום, which transliterates as shtum (please correct me if I’m wrong), and this transliteration-spelling is in third place.


In German the word-initial spelling st- corresponds to ʃt. The English spellings with scht-, which look German to us, aren’t German at all.

boundary marking

In intonation, tonality (chunking) appears to work in much the same way in all languages. The boundaries between successive intonation phrases (IPs) generally correspond to the location of syntactic (= grammatical) boundaries. Here’s what I wrote six years ago.

We regularly place an intonation break between successive sentences, usually between successive clauses, sometimes between successive phrases, and occasionally between successive words. We can even break within a word — though this is unusual and only used for special emphasis.

…The presence or absence of intonation breaks, and their location, signals to the hearer the syntactic structure of the sentence. Sometimes this structure is potentially ambiguous, and the tonality can disambiguate it. An intonation break signals a syntactic boundary…
[English Intonation, p. 187]

What I did not say was that sometimes we find an equivalent effect without an actual intonation break. A syntactic ambiguity within a single IP can sometimes (optionally) be resolved merely by a slowing down at the relevant point.

   (i) There was a lot of bloodshed.
   (ii) There was a lot of blood shed.

We can try to make it clear that we mean (ii), ‘a lot of blood was shed’, by slowing down as we say blood shed, as opposed to not slowing down for the compound noun bloodshed in (i).

I saw a nice example of this in the Sunday Times magazine two days ago, illustrating an article about ‘cheeky seaside postcards’ of half a century or more ago.
If we want to be pedantic, the compound-noun reading ought to be spelt screwdriver, solid; the noun plus vocative ought to be spelt with a comma, screw, driver. In speech, the more we slow down the more we push the hearer towards the second interpretation.

puma

Some people call it a cougar, some call it a catamount, panther, or mountain lion. A Canadian lady I was talking to the other day, who was telling me about the hazards of hiking in the Pacific Northwest, called it a puma, and this is also its usual name in Britain.

What struck me was that my Canadian friend pronounced it ˈpuːmə, whereas I say ˈpjuːmə.

According to the OED the immediate source of this word is Spanish (and ultimately Quechua). In the case of Spanish and Italian words containing stressed u, anglicization always involves something of a contest between a foreign-style uː with no preceding palatal semivowel and a more native-style juː with one.

In the case of the island of Cuba the ordinary English pronunciation is ˈkjuːbə. It would be most unusual to pronounce it Spanish-style with no j.

Canned/tinned tuna likewise seems to be pronounced English-style. We Brits, who have tj- or its successor tʃ- in tube, tutor, tune, say ˈtjuːnə, ˈtʃuːnə (making it for most of us a homophone of tuner). Those Americans who have plain t in tuːb, ˈtuːt̬ɚ, tuːn say ˈtuːnə. (This is not exactly a Spanish word, since in Spanish the fish is atún, from Arabic تون tun and Latin thunnus, Greek θύννος thynnos. It is not clear why we stopped calling it ‘tunny(fish)’ and started calling it ‘tuna’. The OED says it’s American Spanish.)

In the phrase numero uno (actually of Italian rather than Spanish origin) the nu- part has or doesn’t have j according to the way we pronounce new and nude; but the uno always, I think, has plain uː with no preceding j.

Utah always has juː-, but several other words seem to be variable, with Brits tending to include j and Americans usually omitting it: barracuda, iguana, jaguar, iguana, mulatto, Nicaragua, vicuña.

Back to puma: I hastened to check whether I had included the yodless form in LPD. I was relieved to find that — unlike the OED and the ODP — I had. The fact that it is in thin (not thick) black type after the || shows that it is what the database calls an AME VARPRON, i.e. not the main AmE pron. I continue to regard ˈpjuːmə as the MAINPRON for both BrE and AmE, whatever my Canadian friend says. Perhaps I ouɡht to do a preference survey.

and in French

And so to Adams’s treatment of French. (As before, all transcriptions are his.)

Phoneticians jib at calling a language “phonetic”. What you really mean, we tell our beginner students, is that the writing system is phonemic, faithfully representing the pronunciation of the language. (To us all languages are phonetic in the trivial sense that all languages are spoken and therefore have a phonetics that can be described.)

Adams is unaffected by our preciseness of language.Quite apart from the uncertainties and indeterminacies of its orthography, French is also particularly difficult for speakers of English to pronounce. It sometimes seems as if almost everything that could be different is different: there is no contrastive lexical stress, the voiceless plosives are unaspirated, the vowels — all monophthongs — include front rounded vowels and nasalized vowels, the schwa is (i) rounded and (ii) appears and disappears in complicated ways depending on the surrounding sounds.

For schwa, I think Adams’s wording could have been clearer.

In spoken French, when the letter e with no accent is the only vowel-letter in a syllable and it ends the syllable or word, it is usually silent:
   mouvement [muvmɑ̃]   médecin [medsɛ̃]   ville [vil]
This silent vowel-letter is called mute e. In singing, it is generally pronounced, transcribed as /ə/ (schwa), and sounded as /œ/…
…When a mute e ends a word and the next word begins with a vowel or h, the e is never sounded in speech or singing.
   elle est [ɛlɛ]   comme a [kɔma]
   fatigue amoureuse [fatiɡ amurøːz(ə)]

That might suffice for someone who already knows about the evanescent schwa, but not I think for a beginner who doesn’t know much French. And surely comme a ought to be comme à.

For “nasal” (= nasalized) vowels, Adams rightly warns English speakers not to include an unwanted nasal consonant in words such as onde [õːd(ə)], lamente [lamɑ̃ːt(ə)], impossible [ɛ̃pɔsibl(ə)], embarquer [ɑ̃barke], encore [ɑ̃kɔːr(ə)] (“not [ɑ̃ŋkɔːr(ə)]”).

I am not convinced by Adams’s advice on how to pronounce ɥ. But surely the crucial thing is not the timing of the lip movement, it’s the position of the body of the tongue (front, not back).

Any discussion of French consonants must make a distinction between consonant sounds and consonant-letters, since the letters are often silent.

Hear, hear. Adams devotes over twenty pages to the French consonants, with a comprehensive discussion of the difficult issue of liaison. (I have to confess I wasn’t aware that final c is silent in estomac [ɛstɔma] and tabac [taba]. I did know it isn’t in sec [sɛk] and Poulenc [pulɛ̃ːk].)

For r in French art songs and opera, Adams recommends a tap, ɾ (or rather what he calls “a flip of the tongue”). However, “judicious use of the uvular sound has recently become accepted in some circles for classical singing”.

singing in German

When he turns to the “diction” of German, Adams argues that the reputation of German as a “difficult” language (for singers whose mother tongue is English) is unjustified.
The difficulties for speakers of English are mainly the fricatives ç x, the “mixed vowels” (front rounded vowels) yː ʏ øː œ, and the monophthongs eː oː. Americans (though not so much Brits) may also find a difficult. (“The typical problem with Americans pronouncing /a/ is that it is not bright enough.”)

Adams’s advice on producing the front rounded vowels is just right. Start with the tongue position for iː, then keeping that position “colour” it by rounding the lips to give yː. In the same way turn ɪ into ʏ, eː into øː and ɛ into œ.

As we saw yesterday, Adams calls ʔ a glottal “stroke”. It is “required” in German not only word-initially but also in compounds and after prefixes.
• in einem Augenblick ʔɪn ʔˈaenəm ʔˈaoɡənblɪk
• ɡeändert ɡəʔˈɛndɐt
In singing, however, “glottal strokes should be light and quick so as not to detract from the legato line”, and are often omitted in Lieder performance.

German spelling-to-sound rules are very straightforward, with only a few traps for the unwary.
• oː in hoch, but ɔ in doch, Koch, Loch, noch etc
• aː in nach, sprach, brach but a in ach, Bach, Dach
• aː in sagen and all its forms including sagst, sagt; also in haben, but a in hast, hat
• eː in erst, Erde, Pferd, Schwert, werden but ɛ in erben, ernst, fern, hertig, gern, Herz, Schmerz, Werk
(Remember, we’re talking about classical singing here. Not all native speakers make all these vowel length differences in everyday speech.)

Adams is wrong in stating that the letter ß was abolished in the 1996 spelling reform. In fact it has been retained in such a way that certain formerly ambiguous spellings are now no longer ambiguous: ß remains in Buß, Fuß, Gruß which have uː, but has been replaced by ss in Fluss, Kuss, muss, Nuss, Schluss, which have ʊ. Previously (and therefore in many texts that singers will be expected to use), spellings such as Nuß left the vowel length unclear.

Italian for singers

The title of David Adams’s book A Handbook of Diction for Singers, discussed in yesterday’s blog, is followed by a subtitle “…Italian, German, French.

Despite the critical comments I made about it yesterday, I repeat that it is in many ways an excellent piece of work. (Thanks to Jill House for first bringing it to my attention.)

By “diction” Adams does not mean what literary types mean, namely choice of words, choice of means of expression — he means pronunciation and clear articulation, and in particular how to infer the pronunciation of Italian, German and French words and phrases from their spelling. I know of no other work in English that offers such a comprehensive, and as far as I can tell accurate, account of these spelling-to-sound relationships.

Here are some of the points he makes about Italian, seen from the point of view of the AmE-speaking singer. (In what follows, the phonetic transcriptions and the bracketing are those used by Adams. Let’s not get hung up criticizing this or that detail of the transcription system.)

• In pietà [pjeˈta] and fiore [ˈfjoːɾe] we have the glide /j/. To pronounce it as the vowel /i/ “is a common error that must be corrected”.

• Furthermore, when the vowel-letter i follows c or g it is important to recognize whether it “has a vowel function” or whether it is silent, serving only to soften the c or g.
caccia [ˈkattʃa]
gioco [ˈdʒɔːko], but magia [maˈdʒiːa]

• Italian u is never “silent as in French”.
French qui [ki] vs. Italian qui [kwi]
French guerre [ɡɛːr(ə)] vs. Italian guerra [ˈɡwɛrra]

• Adjacent vowels separate into different syllables under various (specified) circumstances.
a-iu-to[ aˈjuːto]
pa-u-ra [paˈuːɾa], compare au-ra [ˈaːuɾa]
Conversely, when they come together across word boundaries they form “phrasal diphthongs” or “triphthongs”.
La donna è mobile
…finchè l’aria è ancor bruna
“A characteristic of English is that words beginning with vowels are usually articulated with a glottal stroke. Students must learn not to do this in Italian, but to connect the words smoothly.”

• The letter h is always silent. After c and g it indicates “the hard sounds of those consonant-letters”.
chiaccherare [kjakkeˈɾaːɾe]
ghiaccio [ˈɡjattʃo]

• The combination gn “results in” the sound /ɲ/, and -gli- in /ʎ/ (doubled unless initial).
sogno [ˈsoɲɲo]
signore [siˈɲɲoːɾe]
meglio [ˈmɛʎʎo]
gli uomini [ˈʎwɔːmini] (“It is absolutely incorrect to pronounce the i when gli is followed by a vowel…”)

And there’s everything you would expect about doubled consonants, including those resulting from raddoppiamento sintattico.

It’s all tied in with extracts from musical settings by classical composers. Note the syllabification here in my all-time favourite aria: sia il makes a single syllable. There are fifteen pages devoted to the musical treatment of vowel sequences, diphthongs and triphthongs, in words and in phrases. Another fifteen are devoted to Guidelines for Determining Open and Closed [sic] e and o in the Stressed Syllable.

Just what the classical singer wants.

Still to come: Adams’s treatment of German and French.

what the ell...?

Our Deputy Musical Director is struggling to find the right words to express what he wants to say to the choir. When we sing the phrase we will sing, he wants us to pronounce the l-sound in will differently from the way we would speak it.

In speech we make our l big and fat, we swallow it a little bit…

And he demonstrates the way he wants us to pronounce will when we sing.

It’s a good thing he does demonstrate it, because he doesn’t have the technical vocabulary to explain what he means. And if he had, the choir members probably wouldn’t have understood it.

If the DMD and the choir members all knew some phonetics, he could have said

When speaking this phrase we use a dark l, or even a vocalized sound. But in singing it I want you to use a clear l.

I have to hand an excellent book entitled A Handbook of Diction for Singers, by David Adams (OUP, 2008). Excellent, that is, up to a point. The author is not a phonetician (and does not claim to be). Here is what he tells us about “the Italian /l/ sound”. Although he is American, and is targeting speakers of AmE, he is attempting to make the same point as our DMD. Let’s analyse this account.

• “…with the tongue rather tense…” I know of no evidence that the two languages differ in the degree of lingual tension for l.

• “…making contact with the palate well behind the teeth…”. That is, English l is alveolar, while Italian l is dental.

• “…with a collapsed pharynx…” I’m not sure what would be involved in the collapse of the pharynx, but I’m sure it doesn’t happen every time we utter English l. Narrowed or constricted pharynx, could be; but not collapsed.

• “…the tongue must be forward…” Now we’re getting to it. Not only is the Italian sound dental, but the body of the tongue has a different configuration.

• “…the vowel shape of the preceding vowel must be behind the tongue…” Sort of true. But how do you put a “vowel shape” “behind the tongue”, rather than somewhere else? Certainly the l of Italian crudele kɾuˈdeːle should have front, e-type resonance, rather than the backer vowel resonance of the l in AmE daily. But it would be wrong to suggest that the l in Italian nulla must have u-resonance. It’s ˈnulla, not ˈnuɫɫa. Likewise, the l in colpo is not o-coloured.

• “…the sound must have resonance as well as forwardness.” But l always has resonance of some kind. The question is, of what kind?

As Kenneth Pike documented in his ground-breaking Phonetics (1943), there is a sense in which the use of vague impressionistic terms, even if they are not well-founded in anatomical and physiological fact, does not matter, as long as the teacher also offers an ostensive definition by directly demonstrating the sound involved. He called these pseudo-facts “imitation labels”.

How would I teach English-speaking students of phonetics to produce a clear l when required?

I’d start by getting them to produce some kind of l involving contact of the tongue tip with the teeth or the alveolar ridge. Keeping the tongue tip in its place there, I’d point out that it is possible to arrange the remainder of the tongue in all sorts of different configurations, which correspond to all the various vowel sounds the students know how to make. I’d get them to produce an ɑ-coloured l, then an ə-coloured, an ɔ-coloured, an ɛ-coloured, an i-coloured, even perhaps an y-coloured or œ-coloured lateral. Try all the possibilities! Make it a game! We call the laterals with back-vowel resonance “dark”, those with front-vowel resonance “clear”.

Then I’d get them to analyse what colour of l they use in various English words. Try let, look, allow, bullet, tell, field, full, all…. Are they all the same? If not, what determines the choice between them? Are the l-sounds different when we compare tell us and tell them?

Then I’d demonstrate some Italian words and get them to imitate them and analyse them in the same way. Does the l in crudele have the same vowel coloration as the l in English daily? (For some British students, it might.) If not, what is the difference? How does Italian alto differ from English alto? How does the Italian pronunciation of coloratura differ from the English pronunciation of the same word? (Not just in the l-sound!) What about fatale faˈtaːle compared with English fatal ˈfeɪtɫ̩? Say molto ˈmolto, bella ˈbɛlla, scialbo ˈʃalbo, all with a clear l.

Maybe it wouldn’t work any better or worse than Adams’s approach. But at least I’d have the warm glow of believing I had taught my students something true rather than obfuscate the matter with nonsense.