The owl vowels

Some days I step into the cyber office and the flurry of activity is obvious. Footprints from all over the world are leading up to my doorstep.

One of the nice things about putting up a blog is the freedom to be responsive to readers. One of the nice thing about good statistics software is the insight it gives us into what readers/visitors are wanting to know. Several months ago I put up a list of the ADS Word of the Year finalists. Web searches for "plutoed" and "Cambodian accessory" had all sorts of strangers standing in my foyer.

Another spike was in response to the mousetrap stunt that still baffles me.

The latest spike has to do with the IPA transcription of the owl diphthong.

Here's an answer: I transcribe owl as either [aʊl] or [awl].

Here's a question: Why is this such a popular search term right now? Are students around the world all cheating on the same final exam? Did the Democratic debate pose this as one of its questions? Did Alex Trebek ask this during Teen Week?

Here's some more information: the one we should ask about diphthongs is John Wells. He has written about them before and even in response to some of my questions. A while back I asked him why he prefers the two vowel transcription rather than /ow/ or /oʷ/. He wrote on his blog

I use the two-vowel-symbol notation for English diphthongs because the diphthongs behave as single indivisible units. A vowel-plus-glide notation would imply the identification of the first part of the diphthong with one of the simple (non-diphthong) vowels. If the nucleus of English goat is taken as /Vw/, what is the /V/? It could be (BrE) /ɜː/, the vowel of bird, or /ɔː/ the vowel of thought, or /ɒ/ the vowel of lot, or /ʌ/ the vowel of strut, or /ə/ a schwa. In this context there is no phonemic contrast between these vowels, and no strong reason to choose one solution over the other. By treating the diphthong as indivisible we avoid facing this false choice. (This concerns its phonological analysis. We still have to choose a notation for it in transcription.)

He further explains that the superscript W is not a possible notation of the /o/ because it indicates labialization and the vowel is already labialized.

Although I saw the superscript notation used by my phonology II professor, I like Mr Wells' correction enough to discard the convention.

It's also worth noting that the symbol is a tool. Symbols are not facts and in phonology sometimes they don't even represent facts. They represent analyses of the facts. It's a fine line but an important one.

Where have all the good glides gone?

I was watching the end of a House MD rerun and I got lost regarding the plot. So I looked online for the script and found it pretty easily. Reading through it I came across the following lines. A young girl (Kama) is asking the doctor (Foreman) about her brother's prognosis:

KAMA: Is he gonna die?

[Foreman looks at her.]

FOREMAN: No. No one's gonna die.

KAMA: [smart-ass] In the whole world ever? That's so great.

FOREMAN: [chuckles] I meant...

KAMA: I know what you meant. But I also know bad things do happen. My dad always had a few drinks whenever he went out. Always said it'd be okay to drive. [shrugs sadly] Until it wasn't. I would just like some mourning this time.

[Foreman looks at Kama, sympathetically.]

FOREMAN: We're nowhere near anything like that happening right now.

It's an odd wish that Kama has for "some mourning." I though maybe the story was about having to rush through a loss and the poor girl never had a chance to mourn her father's death. So she wanted to know ahead of time if her brother was going to die so that she'd...

Oh. Yeah. That makes more sense. Some warning.

The two phrases are often identical. After some consonants it's common for a [w] to be deleted. As evidenced by the some warning/some mourning confusion the deletion can even occur across a word boundary. Between the labial [m] and rounded [ɔ] is an especially suitable environment for w-deletion. It can be hard to distinguish between some more and some wore (except that the former is usually an iamb and the latter is often a trochee). And we sometimes find this deletion after other consonants in words like towards [tɔrdz] and quarter [kɔɻɾɻ]. These words can still be pronounced either with or without the [w], while sword lost it permanently long ago (except in the not-so-common spelling pronunciation).

Of course there are several words in which the deletion does not occur. Before a front unrounded vowel the [w] stays put in tweed switch square and quack. If a speaker pronounces quartz with a distinctly low and unrounded [a] my guess is that the [w] is regularly preserved. I've never heard the mineral pronounced identically to carts.

I'm not prepared to give an answer to the question that I now pose: why did sword lose the [w] while swore has kept it? Usually we look to the original language or the time of adoption to help with an explanation. Because both words have been with the language since it was Old English that doesn't give us much help. It may have something to do with the preservation of a front vowel in swear. By analogy with a related form the [w] could have been preserved by kinship.

But that's only a primary suggestion and I'm happy to hear a more informed explanation.

How is that now?

My brother-in-law Mark recently sent out a response to one of those questionnaire emails that that gets sent around as a forward. This one was simple and contained very pedestrian questions about everyday things: what's your favourite color, favourite restaurant, favorite flavour of ice-cream, where would you like to retire...

For a cuisine he doesn't care for he wrote down a type of rice that he called "pagaw." I had no idea what this was.

Now my family, influenced by my mother's taste for Puerto Rican cuisine, has always loved the rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan and toasts to a lovely crunchy crunchiness. I once attended an Hispanic potluck where a Hispanic but non-Puerto Rican woman serving the rice reached to the bottom of the pan with her spoon and grumbled something about the rice being almost burnt. As she picked up the dish and was about to take it into the kitchen to throw it out every Puerto Rican within earshot of her annoyed complaint charged the table and demanded that she scrape out the rice and serve it. It's the best part! they yelled (in Spanish) even louder than usual.

In Puerto Rican Spanish the dental approximant [ð̞] in -ado, the past-participle ending of a word, is often elided resulting in an ending [-ao] sounding very close to the diphthong in English "how" "now" "brown" and "cow". Slightly less rounding of the falling segment.

I remember my grandfather offering toast to everyone in the house calling out ¿quién quiere pan tostao? instead of "tostado." When going to the beach I'd have to have cuidao or I'd end up quemao.

So as the Spanish word for "stuck" is "pegado" Puerto Ricans will often pronounce it [pɛgao].

When I first read Mark's "pagaw" I had in mind a pronunciation more like [paga] or [pɔgɔ]. Something that would rhyme with the second syllable of "heehaw". The spelling did not at all look like [pɛgao] to me. Apparently he hears the lax [ɛ] in Spanish (or at least our relaxed pronunciation of it) as a schwa. And in an unstressed syllable an 'a' makes sense in English for the schwa even though I would have expected an "e". And I must assume that he hears the diphthong as [aʊ] or [aw] which is probably how we gringified speakers say it--which I would have expected him to represent with the spelling "-ow". But that can be confused with the [oʊ]/[ow] sound in know low throw and blow.

And confusing things a more was that since this was probably a foreign word (some rice he had recently eaten at an exotic restaurant I assumed) I figured the "a" was probably not a schwa. In fact I thought the word might have the equal stress of a spondee. This assumption might have been further contaminated by the spondaic city name nearby: Paw Paw. A name which I always pronounce with an even stress and the single vowel [ɔ] as in "saw" "law" or...well..."paw" -- but which my mother (who speaks with a notable accent) always pronounces with the diphthong [aʊ] -- much closer to the "how" "now" contour.

But Mark doesn't speak Spanish and since he doesn't have a southern accent I can't think of any word spelled with [-aw] that he would pronounce as [aw] or [aʊ]. Is this a case of vigilantly foreignized orthographical transcription?