Well considering the crystalline structure...

Question on Jeopardy! tonight in a category asking for numbers as responses:

Number of sides on the typical snowflake

Correct response: What is six?

That's an ambiguous clue. Would Alex have accepted it if the contestant had responded with 'What is two?'

Dialectal equality in jeopardy on Jeopardy!

One of Friday's Jeopardy! categories comprised pieces of advice to future contestants. Every clue/question pair offered a little detail that would make the difference between a correct response and an incorrect response.

One of the Jeopardy! policies is that an incorrect spelling of a word doesn't count against you unless it changes the pronunciation. So "Sally Feeld" would be acceptable but not "Sally Fields". (The common but incorrect final S in her name was mentioned in one of the clues.)

A later clue read: "Please please please put the Y before the N when we ask for this site of the vocal chords cords." (tho "chords" would be acceptable on Jeopardy!--unless the question was asking for the correct spelling.)^{note below}

Accepted response: What is the larynx?

Adding a short comment on the correct answer Alex Trebeck specified the 'mistaken' form: "not the 'larnyx'" he said.

Now because the clue mentions Y I might guess that they're talking about spelling and not pronunciation. But you never know with Jeopardy! questions. Every once in a while their premise or claim deserves a buzzer.

And this clue is problematic. It shows a clear intolerance for metathesis in the common pronunciation: [laɹnɪks]--vowing to accept nothing but the slightly more common [læɹɪŋks]. (Vowels may be disputed but the relevant segments here are the [n~ŋ] and the [ɪ].) By this standard would they accept a spoken [ʤuləɹi]--a common pronunciation for jewelry? Would they penalize someone who wrote 'nucular'?

The problem here as I see is that the speakers who say 'larnyx' are not unaware of the other form nor are they mistakenly pronouncing it because of an error. Many people have learned the word this way because the pronunciation is an establish variant. They have probably been told by some ninny that they're saying it incorrectly. But they keep their pronunciation which is a witting choice--even if at a low-level.

We can get into the argument of standard and non-standard forms. But that's only going to get the Jeopardy! judges as far as an elitist and ignorant view of language variation can go. Right into the tar pit of...well--elitist ignorance.

I would understand if metathesis in 'earlobe' leading to 'eelrobe' was not accepted. That's a speech error. And it's not an attested learned/established variant.

I wonder how long ago Alex started accepting 'wasp' as an acceptable variant of 'wæps'.

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*[Update: So perhaps the judges would now have to accept "chords" as a variant spelling. As OUP's Ben Zimmer assures us they are in fact both common enough to be attested standard--or at least widely accepted--spellings.]

Bananya peppers?

I'm not sure they were actual hypercorrections. This evening on Jeopardy! Alex Trebeck used two incorrectly affected pronunciations. Okay--on one I'm not sure I heard him correctly. The correct response called for the capital of China. The clue was "Hu Jintao" as each clue in the category gave the name of the country's president and asked for the name of the capital city. No contestant took a guess so Alex provided the answer: Beijing. His pronounced the middle consonant using the de-affricated [ʒ] (a common English pronunciation of Beijing instead of the more accurate consonant sound [ʤ].

The name is pronounced by native speakers with the non-English [tɕ]. I'm not sure why the English pronunciation voices the affricate. The initial consonant [p] is realized as [b] in English--probably because of the unaspirated quality of the [p] which in English is almost indistinguishable from a [b]. (See here for a related discussion.) Perhaps a fortis analysis would help explain the voicing. I'll ask John Wells about it. But we do have affricates in English. The pure fricative [ʒ] in place of [ʤ] or [ʧ] is probably based on a belief that [ʒ] is a more 'foreign' or 'exotic' sound, and more likely to be found in borrowed words. It is an relatively uncommon sound in English, found mostly in recent and ostensible borrowings. But it's not necessary in Beijing as it uses an affricate and we have affricates in our inventory.

The other pronunciation I noticed was in Alex's reading of a clue naming three dances. One was the Habanera, the Cuban dance. Alex pronounced it [abanjɛra] affecting the 'n' as if it was identical to the palatal nasal in jalapeño. This palatal nasal [ɲ] is not an English phoneme, so it's usually pronounced with an alveolar nasal followed by a palatal glide [j]. In a word like jalapeño the 'e' is pronounced as the diphthong [ej] and this will often palatalize the following nasal making it very close to the Spanish [ɲ]. Nasals love to assimilated in place of articulation.

But Alex's mistake was not due to any gap in his phonemic inventory. His mistake was to assume that "Habanera" is pronounced with the palatal nasal in the first place: in Spanish. The name of this dance comes from its connection to Habana/Havana in Cuba. The 'n' is not palatalised. I've heard this mistake many times in the masculine form of the word when referring to the habanero chile. It's likely by contamination with jalapeño and probably by an exoticizing effect similar to the previous process by which [ʤ] becomes [ʒ].