Say my name! Say my name!

John Wells writes on his phonetic blog: It’s Wimbledon fortnight, and our television screens are full of tennis.

Mine are too. Tennis comes second after hockey among my favourite professional sports to watch. Perhaps it's the names. Both sports offer some gorgeous spellings and pronunciations. So Wells provides helpful advice on some pronunciations that are often slaughtered:

English people seem to have a complete blind spot about the letter c having the value ts in eastern European languages.

Remember: When Polish is Anglicized orthographically, a <c> is pronounced ts.

But: In Turkish the <c> is a voiced postalveolar affricate ʤ: the consonant in 'edge' and twice in 'judge'.

He adds:

Ljubičić gets his medial tʃ in English, too, although Ivanišević, like the late Milošević, usually misses out on his ʃ.

What's a fellow to do? Especially when all your efforts to correct a pronunciation fall prey to a clumsy tongue.



Not only does the chair umpire miss the ʃ; he pronounces it as n. He gets closest at the end but instead of the more common depalatalisation to s it sounds to me like he added voiced: z.

Goran was always fun to watch. I remember when he won as a wild card at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 2001. I almost cried. I can turn into a baby watching this sport.

Don't blame him for what you're thinking he's obviously doing

Bill Cunningham is "a bit of an historian". He's now on a campaign to continue the traditions of respect for presidential candidates.

"You might recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight David Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, William Jefferson Clinton. The man who would be president...normally the middle name is employed in order to give the man more dignity and more respect."

So that's why he insists on using the full name of Barack Hussein Obama.

His goal: "simply to state the fellow's name much like I often say John Sidney McCain the Third."

His intentions are his own to know -- and the rest of us can only make judgments based on his probable rhetorical interests.

(listen to his NPR interview with Robert Siegel)

I might never be able to prove it, but this looks like a relevant twist on the question I posed a while ago about loaded terms. The intention in question: why use language that's both accurate and loaded.

Cunningham claims it's because it's accurate.

I believe it's because it's loaded.

Facetious terms

Later in the interview Siegel asks Cunningham what he thinks of John McCain choice to denounce the use of Obama's full name with divisive intentions.

[~4:50]

Sad -- it is very sad for a gentleman who did not hear what I said -- who has met me several times but has forgotten about it he might have half-heimers -- the guys gettin' a bit old. It is sad when he forgets meeting me and then having not heard me he criticizes words that I didn't say, that he didn't hear, and then throws me under the Straight Talk Express.

It's new play on Alzheimer's. The old joke was the eggcorny joke: 'old-timers'. The joke is now with 'Alz' apparently being analyzed as the 'all' morpheme. So if full dementia is of the All(z)heimer's type, temporary mild or selective memory loss is of the Half-heimers type.

Google™ hits.

"halfheimers"    749
"half heimers"   590
"halfheimer's"   85
"half heimer's"  57

With monitors like this...

Follow-up to the last post.

The Global Language Monitor has been monitoring itself. The paragraph calling Barack Obama "Obama Barack" has been corrected.

The switch struck me as a production error when I saw it. Then I tracked down a clip of Mr Payack himself talking about political buzzwords. This video was posted on YouTube last August.



Pay attention to the #2 buzzword (2:20). It could just be one of those words/phrases he keeps messing up. Like people who can't say cinnamon. And he stumbles on the last name too -- saying something like "Bryereck". He might be nervous. He sounds nervous.

But this isn't just a speech error. Mr Payack simply doesn't know the name. Keep listening. I'll transcribe his remarks (ellipses mark his stammering).

OK. So number 2 is Obama. Obama. Obama Barack. ... He's a junior senator from the state [of] Illinois and he's running for president. He's had quite a following and ... he uses this facility a lot to ... talk to and have commercials and things of that such from supporters and ... and how Obama the first name alone is a #2 political buzzword affecting the campaign.

Even tho I don't quite understand what's happening with all of his syntax it's clear that he believes (or believed) that Obama is a first name.

From most people this slip is not a big deal. And it would not deserve a post. But this guy is claiming to have a definitive count of words in the English language. It's a number that requires a level of precision that the finest lexicographers largely agree is beyond the grasp of the most assiduous attention to detail -- if a single number even exists. And he just yesterday learned the name of the most celebrated politician in my lifetime.

And it's a name he has been following and discussing for more than 6 months.

His book is available from Amazon.

Nabokov Schmabokov

It's 'naBOKov'

John Wells has given us some entertaining guidance regarding the pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov (i.e. the pronunciation of his name/s of course). I grew up thinking it was a dactylic dimeter. And by "grew up" I mean from the time I first heard the name in junior high from my sister who loved Sting and decided to learn more about Nabokov after hearing his name in the song "Don't Stand So Close to Me."

3 poems to make the point that each name is not a dactyl. Lines 1-3 of each stanza are dactylic dimeter. One line has to be a single word. Lines 4 and 8 must rhyme. (These were the regulations of the New Statesman competition. The third poem below was the winning entry.

Humberty-nymphety,
VN the novelist
Wrote of a passion pro-
scribed by the law.

Careful! His names must be
Stressed à la russe, i.e.
Paroxytonically:
("...dímir Nabó...").
-Nigel Greenwood

The next one is in Dutch. The rhythm is the same so you should be able to "utter" it and hear how it works. I'm assuming the "Na-" of "Nabokov" in the final line is orphaned from the second dactyl in the preceding line. Translation follows:

Vlinder- en kindervriend
Vladimir Nabokov...
Lezer, uw uitspraak doet
Pijn aan mijn oor.

Volgens de Russische
Intelligentsia
Moet het Vladimir
Nabokov zijn hoor!

Translation:
Lover of butterflies and children,
'Vladimir 'Nabokov...
Reader, your pronunciation
hurts my ear.
According to the Russian
intelligentsia,
it ought to be Vla'dimir Na'bokov!
-Jan Kal

The winning entry:

Higgledy piggledy
Vladimir Nabokov —
Wait! Hasn't somebody
made a mistake?

Out of such errors, Vla-
dimir Nabokov would
sesquipedalian
paragraphs make.

Why should we care? Only because Nabokov himself cared. Wells writes: "Apparently Nabokov himself characteristically liked to point out that his first name rhymed with Redeemer."

Keeping up with the Joneseses

In an article about a snide memo from the Obama camp (regarding Hillary Clinton's financial interests in India) is an interesting use of the plural possessive.

The AP article explains that the memo

referred to Bill and Hillary Clintons' [sic] investments in India; her fundraising among Indian-Americans; and the former president's $300,000 in speech fees from Cisco, a company that has moved U.S. jobs to India.

So apparently the surname now has to agree in number with compounded personal names.

• Bill Clinton


• Hillary Clinton


• Bill and Hillary Clintons

Benefit of the doubt disclaimer: It could be a simple cut-and-paste/editing error. It might have originally read "referred to the Clintons' involvement" and when the names "Bill and Hillary" were added they writer/editor didn't catch the change. But that's so boring an explanation that it's probably true.

Changing names

The name of this blog will change this weekend. I will surrender In a Word... and adopt a name that echoes the URL: Wishydig.

Wishydig is an Old English compound word meaning "wise thinking." The first word in the compound, wis is clear. The second word, hydig is a variant form of hygdig, (adjective form of hygd, mind, thought) meaning heedful, careful, prudent. The arrogance is just obvious enough for me to hope it doesn't come across as a serious and heavy handed boast. Let's just say that I don't think of the sobriquet as an epithet. It's just wishful thinking. Wishy-ful? Heh? Heh?