Fascinating video of Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller’s instructor) explaining how Helen was able to learn to speak despite being blind and deaf. It was done by Helen placing he hands on Anne’s face and sensing vibrations – but note how the hands were placed.

It’s always fun to see how marketers attempt to add an exotic foreign language “je ne sais quoi” to their product line, and one of the better ones (IMHO) was the McDonald’s McCafé line which attempted to show how this extraordinary brew could add a touch of French elegance to your daily commute (commuté).

Aside the cheesy sociolinguistic aspect (as documented by Mark Liberman on Language Log), I do think think this does give a little bit of insight into how our grammar treats French (and pseudo French) borrowings.

When analyzing borrowings into a language, it is clear that some languages are a little more privileged than others. For some languages like French, most English speakers will actually make an attempt to pronounce the words “correctly” (the same is true for Spanish in the U.S., but not necessarily outside North America).

For instance, we “know” that French words have stress on the final syllable, drop the final consonant and have /wa/ clusters where English doesn’t (e.g. quoi /kwa/, DuBois /dubwa/ and croissant /krwasã/). If you’re really talented, you may even try to replicate the nasal vowels such as the one in en suite (/ã swit/) as something like /ã/ or maybe /ãn/, but not plain /an/

On the other hand, if the borrowing is from another language like Hindi, Japanese, Welsh or even a native American language, the same effort isn’t usually made (unless an individual speaker knows the language). The reason for the status of French and Spanish is of course due to both proximity and cultural history. There’s enough contact between the two populations that many English speakers have developed linguistic tools to categorize and pronounce these words differently.

For instance both French and Spanish introduce /pw/ and /kw/ consonant clusters, particularly consonant+w /Cw/ which are normally not allowed in English. French words are also marked as having word-final stress, even though the normal English stress pattern is NOT word-final stress. In phonological terms this could be considered a “stratum” or an area in the lexicon (mental dicitonary) where the normal rules don’t apply.

Depending on the level of contact a stratum can become very developed. English technical borrowings with Latin and Greek rules have a class of rules and even suffixes/affixes all to themselves which apply only to Latinate words (One is the alternation of “c” between /k/ and /s/ as in “electric ~ electricity”.

The French part of the grammar isn’t that robust in English, but it does have the traditional property that it’s NOT 100% accurate of real French grammar. For one thing, there are limits in how much authentic French phonology we can accommodate. Few English speakers will pronounce French “u” in the correct way – as the front vowel /y/ or /ü/ depending on your transcription system. It’s very hard for English speakers to distinguish unless they have special French class training.

Also, there are errors in implementation in our English pseudo French versus real French. A classic example is the cold potato soup vichyssoise which in French grammar is pronounced with a final /z/ or /viʃiswaz/. A lot of waiters who didn’t take all four years of high school French though routinely drop the final consonant (i.e. /viʃiswa/)…because that’s what happens in the French stratum.

The one from the McCafé ad I noticed was how the final “e” always became “é” or /e/ “eh” with a stress. Hence “cubicle” /kubikəl/ becomes cubiclé /kubikle/ and “shuttle” /ʃʌtəl/ becomes shuttle /ʃʌtəle/ . Ironically though, in actual French spelling the “e” in “cle” and “tle” would actually be dropped altogether. Hence “cubicle” would be /kubikl/ and “shuttle” might be the really exotic /ʃytl/. Try saying that early in the morning over your McCafé

I also have to applaud McDonald’s for one more thing. In the past few years French has been a neglected cultural resource (even on the Food Network). It’s nice to know there’s a marketer out there who’s willing to bring back some old-fashioned mystique français (or is that mystique française?).

P.S. Technically “French magic” is la magie française. while la mystique is mysticism. Did I mention that borrowings can undergo change in word meaning?

John Wells from UCL in London has migrated his phonetics blog into Blogspot, thus improving search capability significantly (Yippee!). If you haven’t read it, it’s a great blog on pronunciation examples from real life and from the media.

For instance, John Wells asks the important question of why Ali G (Sasha Baron Cohen) is spelling Brüno with an umlaut, when it should be plain Bruno according to German spelling convention.

Wells mentions the common metal umlaut (e.g. Mötley Crüe, Motörhead), but argues that Brüno isn’t really part of metal culture. Two commenters beat me to the punch in pointing out the Häagen-Dazs also has a fake umlaut and one commented that an umlaut looks “uber-German” (shouldn’t that be “über German”?). In other words, the metal umlaut has expanded in our ditzy Anglophone collective culture to include anything vaguely Germanic. Maybe it should be the “Fake Eurotrash Umlaut.”

Actually a more interesting phonetic feature that struck me was the quasi-breathy phonation in the movie trailers. Phonation refers to how the vocal cords can be adjusted to pronounce vowels in different ways. Most vowels in world languages are pronounced in a “normal” (unmarked) voiced fashion or whispery, but a few languages can make them creaky (like a creaky door) or breathy (like Marilyn Monroe, but more extreme).

In the Brüno trailers, the announcer has gone with the breathy option, especially when he says “Brüünoo is rated aaaR!”. Ironically the transcription for breathy Brüno CAN include umlauts, but they are beneath the vowel, not above it. So breathy Brüno would be /brṳno̤ / (more or less).

Just some pronunciation notes I observed from speakers from Asia (South Asia and East Asia).

Slumdog Millionaire L

Because the movie features the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”, I heard actor Anil Kapoor (the host of the show) speak the word millionaire … a lot. But of course the pronunciation is in the form of Indian English and struck me as particularly unusual, especially in terms of the /l/

There are only two changes he’s making from American/UK English which is [mɪłyəner]. First, he’s dropping the /y/ after the /l/ – which is pronounced but not really spelled.

Second, Kapoor doesn’t velarize this /l/ as it would be in my version of English. What I mean is that many instances of /l/ after a vowel in American English are “dark l” with the tongue raised in the back. In the “light l”, the back of the tongue remains lowered and only the front moves.

American English almost always velarizes /l/ in the ends of syllables (coda position). Because millionaire has a hidden /ly/ cluster (and English words don’t begin with /ly/ clusters, you can break up the syllables as [mɪł.yə.ner], hence the /l/ will be velarized. Another case of a hidden /y/ affecting pronunciation patterns even though it is not actually spelled and English speakers probably don’t realize it’s there – until Ling 100 that is.

So what Kappor is saying is [mɪləner] with plain /l/ and no /y/. Amazing how distinct it was for me.

I should mention that dark l is spreading in U.S. English. It’s found in “ambisyllabic” position (between vowels, depending on stress) in words like Philadelphia, Philly, Hilly and others. It’s also in word initial position for some speakers (sometimes Tom Brokaw for instance, per discussion on Linguist List). I think it’s primarily a Midwestern phenomenon (although others report it’s further spread), but even I velarize initial /l/ in “emphatic” pronunciation. At some point “dark l” wil probably just be the way American English pronounces “L”.

Double-Up or Develop?

Another Indian English quirk I first heard in college was hearing “double-up” /dʌbəl ʌp/ when the speaker meant to say develop /dəvɛlʌp/. Part of this is due to a difference in stress position – on the first syllable in India and the second syllable in the U.S/U.K.

The other, of course, has to do with the “v”. For most English dialects “v” is /v/, a voiced labialdental fricative with upper teeth on lower lip. In many languages though “v” is really bilabial /β/ with just two lips pressed together. To English speakers, this may sound like a /b/ which is the bilabial stop – hence “v” is sounding like “b”. In other cases though /β/ may sound like a /w/ which is also bilabial.

It’s all phonetically natural, but I admit I have to smile everytime I hear it happen.

I’m listening to Lily Allen’s new album, but I have to confess that I chose the “Clean” version. One of the songs that was obviously edited was the political protest song “F**k You” (let’s just say I’m not expecting Allen to vote Republican soon).

I’ve heard a lot of edited songs throughout the years, but this may be the best. Normally the offending word is changed or just replaced with a silly sound, but here there a silly sound, but only partial deletion which leads to the trippy effect of Allen singing “Q very much. Please don’t stay in in touch….Q…Q…Q.”

Phonetically it’s a very simply explanation because the final /k/ and /yu/ of “you” combine to form /kyu/ which is how we pronounce the letter name “Q” (i.e. /fʌk yu/ ➔ /kyu/) – it’s confirmation that there really is a /y/ there, even if it’s not spelled. It’s also an good case of how phonological processes can cross word boundaries, but it’s also interesting that no one has taken advantage of this before. Maybe it’s something that got noticed in the final sound edits.

Is it two rhinoceri or two rhinoceroses? The spelling of final -os (instead of Latin -us) told me that any -i plural would be a new formation. The -os is usually a sign that the learned word is actually Greek (and rhinoceros is the compound of Greek rhino- ‘nose’ plus ceros ‘horn’).

Yet, I have to confess, I favored rhinoceri because I wasn’t very phonologically happy with having to deal with the another -es (especially because the singular already has Neo-classical antepenultimate stress). And lucky me, the keyword rhinoceri pulled up tons of hits on Google, include a possible entry from the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

What’s interesting to me here is that my preference suggests that English phonology may be driving the formation of some neo-classical plurals. That is, some neo-classical plurals may be the result of a grammar trying to avoid unstressed /əsəs/ sequences. It would be interesting to devise some sort of experiment to determine if there is a pronunciation preference.

FYI – Depending on how you analyze the post-Greek compound, the etymologically correct plural may actually have been rhinocerotes or possibly rhinocera (if the original Greek was rhinoceron).

Abbreviations are always interesting. Some like HTML prounounced letter by letter as in /eč ti ɛm ɛl/, but others are prounced as a “new word” as in NASA or /næsə/. This pattern is fairly random – for instance I have heard the database query language SQL as both “S-Q-L” and “sequel”.

An interesting class are abbreviations with no vowels that are still pronounced like words. Whenever you have a word, the phonological component has to “organize” it into syllables. For most, languages the rule is generally to cluster consonants around a vowel where each vowel (or diphthong) is the nucleus (or backbone if you will) of a syllable. To take the NASA case again, you can generalize that it has two syllables because it has two vowels.

HOWEVER…in some languages (like American English), you can form syllables around other sounds such as /l,r,n/. If you’re not sure what vowel is in the final syllable of words like table, prism, butter, button and others, it’s because they’re not phonetically not a vowel but syllabic consonants. You may see these transcribed as /n̩,r̩,m̩/ (n,r,l,m, etc with dashes beneath)

The consonant-free abbreviations shows that English can go pretty far. For instance I have heard the term VRML become /vr̩ml ̩/ or “vrmle”. But even more interesting case is the Penn State first year counseling process called FTCAP or more fondly [fɪtkæp] or “fit-cap.” Although a vowel has been inserted, it’s not the usual epenthetic schwa /ə/ (vowels inserted to break up unwieldy consonant clusters (as in the Maryland river Potapsco /pətæpsko/ becoming [ptæpəsko] or “Potapsaco” in some parts of Maryland).

One analysis would be to posit the vowel /ɪ/ as the epenthetic vowel in particular situations (when syllable is stressed?). However, I’m going out on a limb here, and say it’s almost as if the /t/ in FTCAP has become a syllabic /t/. It is definitely the case that a high front like /ɪ/ allows the tongue to remain in /t/ position until the /k/ is pronounced. It would be interesting to compare spectrograms on some of these words.

I should note that are some derviations from the pattern. SQL becomes “sequel” [sikwl ̩] and not “sickle” [sɪkwl ̩]]. And the one that inspired this blog post is wff (well-formed formulation) which becomes not “wiff” [wɪf] but “woof” [wʊf]. Is this a case where speakers are using /ʊ/ as the closes vowel to /w/ or a chance to make an interesting pun from an acronym?

Some time last week, Jeopardy had a “Phonetics”, and we know it’s an obscure topic for most of the educated world because it was in a Double Jeopardy round for a Tournament of Champions (prelim round).

The most interesting question was something like this

Question: The word agency contains the most common sound in the English language. What is this sound?

I admit I missed this one, because the answer was supposed to be schwa /ə/ (say what?). Pondering, this I think I found a quirk in my dialect

First, where did the Jeopardy schwa come from? Probably from actual pronuciatiion. In many dialects of English (certainly U.S. English) many unstressed vowels are changed to schwa. Hence a word like piña kolada which is pronounced as /piña kolada/ in Spanish usually emerges as something like [piñə kəladə] in English (with 3 schwas). This is why schwa is probably the most common vowel. Even in my dialect agency is something like [ejǰɛnsi] or [ejǰɨnsi]

But why did I miss it? Here’s my phonemic transcription of agency – /eiǰɛnsi/. You’ll note that there is no schwa in there because in my mental dictionary, I don’t think of this “e” vowel as a schwa, but as the same vowel as in sense /sɛns/.

Similarly I think that agent rhymes with gent /ǰɛnt/ (or at least pretty close). On the other hand, I don’t think agent rhymes with hunt /hʌnt/ or /hənt/. So even though I know about the proliferation of schwas, I really didn’t think it was in this word. For me, it’s not the same status as the schwa in the [ðə] or a [ə]

However, I may be the quirky one here.

For instance, I did find that the Oxford English Dictionary transcribes agency as [eiǰənsi] with the schwa [ə]. I also found one rhyming dictionary (http://www.rhymer.com/RhymingDictionary/agent.html) which does identify agent and hunt as rhymes.

On the other hand, WikiRhymer is matching agent with magenta (definitely a /ɛ/ in the second syllable), so maybe it’s not just me. Since none of the contestants detected the schwa, I am wondering if they had the same computational problem I did.

Thinking about my dialect, I suspect that my difference in perception partly because because I can distinguish [ə] (first vowel of Alissa) from [ɨ] (first vowel of Ilisa). As far as I can tell though, this happens only in a narrow band in the urban northeast, and other speakers have only [ə]. And the Jeopardy writers are working in California (heavy schwa territory).

Fortunately, descriptive linguistics, unlike Jeopardy, doesn’t always have to have one right answer.