Brother you've changed. Why?

I'm watching 1vs100 right now. Bob Saget just made a joke about the contestant (a single 21 year old man) fraternizing with all the women. But I could swear he said 'fratranizing' [fɹætɹənaɪzɪŋ] instead of [fɹæɾəɹnaɪzɪŋ].

Here's the puzzler: What's the process here? Is this a case of simple phonological metathesis or is it contamination from patronize?

paternity:patronize
fraternity:fratranize

But notice that the analogy isn't pure. While patronize takes the 'o' fratranize takes an 'a'. Of course the fraternity family doesn't have fratron to influence the spelling of the -ize form.

Discuss.

(The geeky but likable kid just won a million by guessing on a question.)

[Update: Well this is what I get for deleting what I think is unnecessary elaboration. It's quite a leap to simply assume that a speaker (such as Mr Saget would spell (or imagine) the word with the 'a' like I did. I based that leap on a Google™ search that gave 186 hits for 'fratranizing' 83 hits for 'fratrenizing' and only 12 hits for 'fratronizing'. Those numbers have changed a little since then -- but the point is that 'fratranizing' looks like the goto spelling.

Oftly ambiguous

I just came across the phrase "which is going to be oftly hard" during my daily perusal of the worldwide net. It's going to be hard often? I thought. Then I caught the eggcorn possibility. I searched for "oftly" before various adjectives and adverbs. Here are some of the phrases I found:

• It was oftly late, and he was tired. here


• it's oftly dark and dreary right now. here


• dane cook is oftly funny also. here


• you're going to feel oftly dumb when you lose out here


• Who knows if Eli Manning will ever be as good Peyton, its oftly early to tell, here


• You were oftly quick on that one Corry. here


• I was only curious because that Navigation button looks oftly difficult to use. here


• They're easy to make, healthy, and you'd have to try oftly hard to screw it up. here

I provide fuller snippets of this use because oftly meaning often or frequently could be used in pretty much the same phrasal environment. Longer bits of text give us clues that help distinguish between the two uses. Consider the possibility of an eggcorn or not in the following pairs of sentences:

1. His shirts are oftly wrinkled


2. That shirt is oftly wrinkled


3. His shirts are oftly hideous


4. That shirt is oftly hideous

Sentences 1 and 2 can be referring to how often the wrinkles occur. It's easy for a shirt to be sometimes wrinkled sometimes not. Of course both sentences could also be using oftly for awfully. These are ambiguous.

Both 3 and 4 could refer to how often the shirts are hideous. But 4 looks less likely. The implication of sentence 3 would be that he often wears hideous shirts--not that the appearance of each individual shirt often 'becomes' hideous. Sentence 4 focuses on a single shirt and is less likely to mean 'often'. Would the shirt change prints? There is still ambiguity but there's a more likely meaning of 4.

Fortunately I found sentences like "you'd have to try oftly hard to screw it up" because often wouldn't likely occur between "try" and "hard". Modifying "try" it's more likely to follow the phrase ('try hard oftly') or perhaps precede it ('oftly try hard')--unless the intention was to use "hard" to modify how you "try oftly"--[[try oftly] hard]. Not a likely reading considering how common the phrase "try awfully hard" is.

The necessary reanalysis of meaning (to make it an eggcorn) looks reasonable. This isn't likely a mere misspelling of a misheard word--especially since the new spelling is a less common word (270,000 hits for oftly vs 6,650,000 for awfully).

The voiceless alveolar [t] might be excrescent between the voiceless [f] and the alveolar [l]. Then again who knows if it's pronounced by those who write it? There's plenty of historical evidence for [t]→Ø/[f]__: soften often not that a similar rule/process is necessarily applied or at work here but the result of the Early Modern English trend provides the precedents for a possible analogy.

But it's still tricky trying to trace a clear path from oftly=often to oftly=very. There's a shared sense of escalation between the two words. And consider that from really to rather to terribly to quite and of course to awfully we see terms of intensification coming in from all directions.
_

Taking a break from summer

Today is the first day of classes. Posting may now be a little lighter than the summer blitz. Several new officemates have wriggled their way into 215 and I've been told that 2 of them are linguists. Odd that everyone assumes that's important to me. Have you met LING₁? Have you met LING₂? Yeah we told them about you too!

And it's not just for linguistics. All fields get the same reaction. Oh you're a medievalist! Have you met...? I've never been a very compartmentalized person. I like to blend the colours of my life to a nice neutral tone instead of a sharp plaid pattern. Well let's say the pattern is so tightly woven that although the threads retain distinct colors they appear (at not much of a distance) a rich umber.

Of course the linguists will blend in fine.

Tomorrow I meet with the history of the English language class (327). It's going to be a new experience. So far all classes I have taught here at Purdue have had a heavy cant towards engineering. So far the roster shows that all 29 students in 327 are enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts. This could be fun.

All of a sudden the fabric of my class loses the steely-blue tint of math and engineering; it takes on the earthy tone of a leather-bound tome. Of wooden bookcases gilded by thumbprints and coffee.

What's that Mistert Colbert?

Last evening we had several friends over representing the academic fields of renaissance medieval comparative and classic literature; Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Old English and Old Saxon, linguistics and math. We spent the evening playing a board game and watching Ali-G on YouTube.

We took some time to watch Dave's videos as well. (Be sure to watch this one. I was particularly amused and pleased to learn that the football players at the end of the video had no idea what was going on. They were just heading out for a game and Dave jumped in to do his guerrilla filming.)

I found myself revealing my social ineptness when in the midst of several humorous stories about family, former students, odd professors, horrible bosses, funny movies, and dog-sitting I was carried away by a usage in one friend's story. She was reporting some of the misspellings she has encountered in her job as a tutor. In one paper a student wrote of 'robberts' 'gangsterts' and 'mobsterts'.

I don't know what anyone said for about 75 seconds after that. I kept going over those 3 words in my mind. My lips were moving and Buffy rolled her eyes when she looked over at me. She knows I have a happy little land in my mind full of shiny sounds and metallic IPA symbols happily flashing in the [sʌn].

"'robberts' 'gangsterts' 'mobsterts' 'robberts' 'gangsterts' 'mobsterts'..."

Why would this student spell and say all three of these words this way? Google™ shows 737 results for "gangstert" 179 results for "mobstert" (but very few English results, one of which is this same friend telling the story in the comments section on another blog) 1.4 millions hits for 'robbert'. But it's mostly a proper name and no relevant results that I could find. So I searched for "cops and robberts" and I got 9 hits.

This is a weak trend to be sure. But there's something happening here. Whether we can find the trend spreading or we have only this one student's usage the grouping of three makes me wonder what's behind this extra 'T' even if just in her idiolect.

I've come up four suggestions and I'm not sure how much laughter to stifle as I offer them.

Reduplicative metathesis: Two of these three words show a chiasmus or metathesized reduplication. The intrusive [t] turns [-stɻz] into [-stɻts]. Has 'robber' undergone the same process by analogy of related terms? But this does not work as elegantly if the singular also gets the final [t].

Voiceless plural morpheme after liquid: the plural morpheme [z] that we hear on words like bear bull and car is in some dialects sounding more like [s]. This is the same as saying the plural of whore exactly like horse. Might this voiceless alveolar fricative prime the environment for an intrusive voiceless stop in these words?

Corruption by another criminal -ert: Is it possible that the ending of pervert/s has influenced these three -er criminal words?

Hyper-correction by influence of Comedy Central: This is my favorite possibility. Stephen Colbert has allowed the silent 'T' in his name to corrupt his pronunciation of "report" in his show's title The Colbert Report: the "Colbare Repore" (if you will). For all I know this student only wrote the 'T' and she might not actually pronounce it. She might simply be following Stephen's lead.

The best laid grammars...

Stop that vowel shift! Kill that r-r-r-regionalism!


Around 1:30 into the following clip (~5:50 in the countdown) Martin dreams about being "wondrous wizard of Latin" "a dervish of declension" and a "conjurer of conjugation."

I've heard Buffy mumbling this in her sleep a few times.



Around 1:52 (~5:30 countdown) Groundskeeper Willie says "You've mastered a dead tongue. But can you handle a live one?" I say this question is key to understanding the fears of peevologists/language mavens/grammar police. "We have to kill that language before it spins out of control and strangles us!"

How's this? Peevologists are like George Milton and language is their Lenny. Or is language the little mouse and dialects are Lenny? Or are peevologists Steinbeck and linguists are Lenny and high school English teachers are George? or...

Suggestions?

Murphy's law in action

Sunday on Meet the Press (15 July 2007) Tim Russert asked about "The Bill factor"--How Hillary's chances are affected by her husband's growing visibility on her campaign.

Mike Murphy, pundit for the right, chose to illustrate via analogy.

MURPHY: Here’s, I think, the Bill Clinton problem. I’ll use a Hollywood example. If you’re Robert Redford’s agent and the producers want him to star in a new movie, and they come to you and say 'We’ve got a great co-star, Brad Pitt.' They’re going to, 'No, no, no, we want Ernest Borgnine.' He takes the energy and the...

BOB SHRUM: Are you calling Hillary Ernest Borgnine?

MURPHY: No, no, no, I’m using a Hollywood—I figured Democrats, Hollywood—a dated Hollywood reference here. No, but it’s a problem. He takes up all the energy, and he makes a change election about going backwards, which is death for her, I think.

Watch the video (he starts his bit at around 33:52) and you'll hear Murphy's pronunciation of "co-star" as "co-stair" without correction. Because he says it so clearly and he runs right over without noticing I don't think it was just a mangled vowel--his oversight is more indicative of a phonemic error (such as a spoonerism or other switched segment) that is more likely to go unnoticed. I think back on those times when I accidentally said the wrong name when telling a story (X did that? I thought it was Y. to which I respond Did I say X? I meant Y!). This is a higher order speech error: evidence of a broader awareness of several items though we utter just one at a time. Not just a stumble of the tongue that has more to do with tripping than choosing. So I wonder what contaminated his pronunciation. Is it the [e] in "great"? Is it anticipation of the identical [er] in "They're going to..."? We've all committed such tips of the slung.

Another little note:
The transcript represents his truncated phrase as "They're going to, 'No no no'" even though he actually says something more like "they're gah, 'aaaa.'" A very nasal mid vowel--perhaps [ɘ̃::]. I'm not sure about the syllabification. It's rather like a bleat.

Also:
Notice that Murphy first puts the audience (Russert?) into the story as Redford's agent ("If you’re Robert Redford’s agent...and they come to you and say") then he reports the reaction in third person ("they're gonna..."). It's a common switch when the player isn't the point of the story--the reaction is.

And further:
Murphy's line that is interrupted by Shrum, "he takes the energy and the..." actually includes one more syllable. It sounds like he's about to say either "honesty" or "all" but I have no idea where he was headed. Since it's not clear there is no reason for the transcript to provide sounds. The point of a transcript is to reproduce words not phonemes. Ideas not sounds. That's why they commonly ignore stuttering and repeated articles like the and a.

But finally:
Here's why I first noticed Murphy's little speech. It has nothing to do with linguistics. He uses the analogy that Redford's agent would never make the mistake of pairing him with Brad Pitt as a co-star. Ever heard of Spy Game Mr Murphy?

Labov calls it a full count

Let's be honest. Most readers of this web log are not professional linguists. The heavy majority are curious and intelligent patrons of the humanities. Probably a lot of English majors.

So when I mention that my studies are focusing on phonology and English language history you have a pretty good idea that I'm talking about the sounds of our language today and yesteryear.

Sometimes I'm asked for specifics about phonology. "What's that?...precisely?" I go through a couple of stock phrases. One standard answer is the mental representation of speech sounds and their relationships to other speech sounds. I know to expect the tilted squinting stare, meaning "huh?" I've had some trouble explaining to people that it isn't psychology. It might come close to some schools of psychology...sometimes...but not really.

One of the easier ways to illustrate a very basic phonological analysis is to ask my curious friend for the plural of dog. "Dogs" she says. So I then ask for the plural of cat. She says "Cats."

Here's the switch. I ask her what she did to make the words plural. "Added 's'" she says with that challenging half smirk that says "Uhhh...isn't that obvious?" So I explain to her that in fact she added a sound. And it wasn't the same sound for both words.

"So I don't add an ess?" She asks. It might be an ess that sometimes is expressed like a zee. It might be a zee that's sometimes expressed like an ess. It might be underspecified and take it's form only once it's articulated in its environment. But whatever we decide to say it is "before it's pronounced" phonology claims that both the [z] and [s] start off as the same segment.

My phonology II professor used an analogy from baseball and she applies it specifically to the difference between phonology and phonetics. She imagines a batter at the plate facing four pitches. He swings and a misses on the first pitch. He tips the next pitch (a fastball) foul. He tips the third pitch (another fastball) into the same exact place. He sits staring as the fourth pitch passes right over the plate at waist level. The umpire yells "Yeeeeur ouddaheeere!"

A "phonetic" umpire would say that these "events" fall into three types: Type 1) swing and miss. Type 2) called strike. Type 3) foul tip (2 times). The "phonological" umpire would say these "events" fall into two types: Type 1) strike. Type 2) uncounted foul tip.

I like this analogy. What I really like is that it establishes a form of analysis that most people have performed. They know the rules that need to be applied and in what order and they know which details of each event are relevant to the analysis. It's easy for a rational student to ask relevant and helpful questions. I've been trying for about a year to come up with a better illustration. So far I'm at a loss.