A common phonological rule of North American English is to change /t,d/ to a “flap” transcribed as either /D/ or /ɾ/. In other words, a /t/ in words like atom, writer sounds an awful like like a “d”.

In phonology class, I present cases where a flapped /t,d/ could cause potential ambiguities (see below).

• Swe[D]ish ‘from Sweden’, swee[D]ish ‘slightly sweet’
• ri[D]er, wri[D]er

Another ambiguity encountered in real life was Toyota vs. toy Yoda. One of the speakers in this case was British who may not have been used to decoding flaps as /t/ as North Americans are.

Still, I’m not alone because at least two organizations promised what sounded like a “Toyota” as a prize but delivered a “toy Yoda” instead. Sadly the winners, were not amused and pursued legal action.

If a phonologist had been on call, they could have provided the plaintiffs an important tip. The vowel before original (unerlying) /d/ is slightly longer phonetically than original /t/. Thus the vowel of “toy Y[o:D]a” is slightly, but perceptibly longer than “Toy[oD]a” in many dialects of American English. That’s why there isn’t more confusion in conversational English than there is.

The good news is that at least one waitress did win the suit enough to “pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants.” I guess the Force was with her after all.

I was just checking out some language preservation efforts out there in YouTube land and I ran into these two Xhosa videos from South African video blogger Khayav. I admit that I wouldn’t show every video in the classroom, but these two videos on Xhosa are lighthearted and full of Xhosa clicks in the wild – enjoy!

YouTube in Xhosa (Translated and Ad Free)

A Xhosa Tongue Twister (with sociolinguistic digression)

Found another good linguistic moment from sci-fi, specifically Battlestar Galactica 2.0 prequel Caprica

A little background first – One of the more popular characters in the Battlestar Galactica series is Commander Adama. In the 1970’s original “Adama” was a personal name for the character played by Lorne Greene (apparently they only had single names then). In the 2000’s update, “Adama” was actually a family name, so the new Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) was actually “William Adama.”

In the Caprica prequel, the storyline goes back 58 years (before the Cylons nuked the Colonies), but it still features the Adama family. Except that in the pilot, it wasn’t the “Adama” family, but the “Adams” family. Apparently Commander Adama’s father, Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) had wanted to assimilate into Caprican (i.e. Anglo) culture and had changed his original “Tauron” (i.e. non-Anglo) family name from the original “Adama” to “Adams”. After Joseph’s family suffers a terrible tragedy, he re-evaluates his Tauron heritage and decides to return to using his original family name.

This is cool from a sociolinguistic point of view and you can see a good commentary, but my favorite moment is actually phonetic. We have a great scene where Joseph Adama reveals his true family name to young William…but with a Spanish dental /d/ instead of an English alveolar /d/.

Esai Morales is, of course, a Latino actor (specifically of Puerto Rican heritage) and a Spanish speaker. Now in English, the sound /d/ which is pronounced with the tongue on the ridge behind the teeth – hence phoneticians describe English /d/ as “avleolar d”. Spanish on the other hand, pronounces /d/ with the tongue touching the back of the teeth – hence a “dental /d/”.

When Esai Morales is speaking English, he generally uses an alveolar /d/, but clearly he is bilingual enough to switch into Spanish pronunciation mode when he wants – as he did with “Adama.” When he did that, it definitely emphasized that Adama was NOT a local Caprican name. Well done!

On a final note, Esai Morales commented that the Taurons are any non-Anglo group, not just a “Latino” group. For imstance Joseph Adama’s full Tauron name is Yousef Adama (with a Middle Eastern twist). Morales also points out that not all Taurons have the same skin tone, so we do see some red heads in the scruffy Tauron bar (generic non-English Celtic anyone?).

I’ll be interested to see where this “Tauron” distinction goes, but we can verify a Spanish dental /d/ in the mix…at least in the Adama family.

Postscript: Feb 26

The most extreme change in the pronunciation of “Adama” only happens once, when Joseph first explains it to his son William. Later, it appears that the actor Morales uses a pronunciation more consistent with English. Interesting.

As any regular reader may know, my television viewing habits have led to more than a few linguistic observations. One of the dippiest may be from the sci-fi drama Dollhouse. Yes this is the one where you can order people to be preprogramed personalities to fit the assignment (which do vary in range). The head of the Los Angeles operation is Adele DeWitt played by the deliciously arch Olivia Williams, complete with a perfectly precise Received Pronunciation British accent.

In one episode, the House (and Adele) become infected with a mind-altering substance which removes inhibitions. We aren’t sure if Adele is infected until she begins asking her in-house geek Topher how people view her persona. Her linguistic observation

Still, you have to admit, I am very…British. I don’t say….[intense concentration here] hard…R’s

Or as we would transcribe in IPA “I don’t say….[intense concentration here] hard…R’s [ha:d a:z]”. On the second viewing, I realized that Adele wasn’t merely informing us of the non-rhotic characer of her dialect, but seriously making an experimental attempt to produce an American style final /r/. Alas, the result was as British as ever.

Fortunately for Adele, her attention quickly turned to crisps, at which point her employee revealed his drawer of inappropriate starches. But I love Adele for wondering, for a brief moment, what it would be like to produce a coda-final /r/.

One of my Listservs announced that the Library of Congress has classified some of its audio recordings from around the country into a set of American English Dialect Recordings
organized by place (click “C” for Canada). The core is probably the set of collections made by linguist Walt Wolfram, but other samples are included, and the collection also includes some notable figures such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. These last two recordings are old enough that you can see how speech in formal settings has changed over time.

The tapes are primarily open-ended conversations or speeches, but the extensive metadata gives you a good context of who, what and when. Many of these were recorded on site, so audio quality for spectrographic analysis is probably hit or miss, but it does have some good samples, and they are available in the .wav format as well as MP3 and Real Player. Note also that samples were recorded across a period of several decades (from the 30s to the 80s), so dialects in that area may have changed since the original recording.

However, they are freely available for educational or research use, so that’s a major benefit. This collection was organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), so I am happy to see this as a use of our tax dollars at work.

A video making the rounds in John Wells’ Phonetic Blog is a 1940s educational piece on helping a Sinhala speaker (from Sri Lanka or Ceylon as it was called back in those days). The student is trying to get directions to 48 Paddington Street, Edgeware Road, but the newspaper vendor he asks is perpetually confused. Hence the student visits the local phonetician’s office (wouldn’t you?).

Wells makes some interesting comments on how old-fashioned the phonetics instructor (A. Lloyd James) sounds. It is amazing how even the “standard” has significantly shifted in 50 years. What’s interesting to me though is that I actually find the Sri Lankan speaker far easier to understand than the instructor (or the newspaper vendor). Apparently, I’ve had more exposure to speakers from South Asia than this variety of British English.

I have no explanation for the instructor’s advice to “change the rhythm.” It’s not a recommendation most linguists would make today, certainly not in terms of “Morse code.” However, now that Professor James has mentioned it, it is true that there is a longer pause between phonological phrases in English than the Sri Lankan student. I think the professor is trying to point out that in the address “48 Paddington Road, Edgeware Road” there is a pause in English (indicated by the comma) which the Sri Lankan speaker is not always making. I guess that “pause” is supposed to make the difference. To me, the change sounded very miniscule though.

In fact, in the student’s second attempt, he only inserts pauses in the address. The rest of his sentence has the same “rhythm” has before!