Dora the Explora

A Jeopardy! category tonight asking for "Dora" rhymes was obviously assuming an r-dropping or non-rhotic dialect. The clues they came up with yielded these responses (sans question-form):

Snora the explorer
Dora the restorer
Dora the floorer
Dora the scorer
Dora the corer

There's an odd one in there. One contestant offered up "Snora the Explorer" in response to the first clue and the judges accepted it (with a little warning for the contestants from Alex). I can't be sure if she actually intended the underlying pronunciation Snora (as represented in the captions) or if she was doing her best r-less Kennedy impression of Snorer. The tube was on mute so I didn't hear her pronunciation of explorer.

There are enough types of rhyme to allow all of these to be called rhyming pairs with or without word final rhoticity on the < -er> words. Assonance, slant rhyme, vowel rhyme, pararhyme...… Not all rhyme is perfect rhyme. That's fine. And fitting with the rhyme theme established by the cartoon that inspired the category, these responses make sense.

So let's play our own little game. Let's go for perfect rhyme in an r-ful dialect. Strict Jeopardy! rules apply.

Dora the ______

$100: Near the North or South poles, this little tike is sure to brighten your night-sky.

$200: This little friend was named after plants indigenous to a region, but not after the animals.

$300: Tired of ring-around-the-rosy? Do this little dance instead.

$400: If your syllable is too light, give it some weight by adding this little darling.

$500: This little seafarer is a gentle shark. She's a killer with a broken heart.

[Update: Nicely done Adrienne -- only one to go. Anyone? Also: It occurs to me that perhaps the clues were prompting responses that rhyme with the phrase Dora the Explorer -- in which case the Jeopardy! responses did conform to perfect rhyme. Does anyone remember the exact wording of the category? Either way the r-less r-ful issue is salient.]

[Update 2: And Mxrk takes the $500 clue. From one of my favorite Kids in the Hall bits. All the responses are there in the comments now. Of course you can still play at home before you check.]

Putting the intellect in president-elect.

I just started listening to a podcast from last week of the Diane Rehm Show. I could have sworn that I heard her refer to first intellect Obama. I agree that he's a smarty-pants but I didn't quite understand why she would call him that. By the time she finished the sentence I reassembled the pieces and decided that she had almost certainly said President-elect Obama.

I've gone back to listen to the line several times and now I see why I misheard. Instead of a clear three syllable pronunciation of president Rehm utters two syllables. Not only that: instead of a clear [ɛ] nucleus on the first syllable it sounds like she's very close to a syllabic "r" [ɹ̩]. So president elect becomes purse-dent elect. And the nucleus of -dent is neutralized to a [ə] or [ɪ] unstressed vowel. With a slightly stressed final syllable of president we have a phrase, purse-dint elect that sounds a lot like first intellect.

Rehm's speech is affected by spasmodic dysphonia which gives her voice a quavering or halting quality. This can make judgment of the voicing very difficult. In this word it could have caused a very quick devoicing of the /z/ making it [s] and perhaps even devoicing the following /ɪ/ which could give the impression of elision or syncope. Voiceless vowel? Yes. They exist. Even in English. It's not clear, however, that this is what's happening here.

So we listen on to see of this was an error or if it is in fact her regular pronunciation. About two minutes into the program she says it again: [pɹ̩s.dənt].

Mixed in here is her pronunciation of constitutional. Around ninety seconds in she says it with what almost sounds like a syllabic [s]. And a few minutes later she pronounces it with a similar quasi elision of the unstressed syllable. Maybe even both unstressed syllables: It's something like [kants̩tuʃnɫ̩] or [kan(t)s(ə̥)tuʃn̩ɫ̩] or some blend of the two. She could be producing three syllables or four or even five. Four tokens is not enough to figure out the representation.

The main reason I wonder about the syllabification and about those vowels being voiceless, is for the sake of patterning. Would her pronunciation of them be the same if the vowels weren't between two voiceless segments? I wonder too about spasmodic dysphonia as a factor. If this were my dissertation and if I knew enough about the voice disorder I'd take the time to gather the data and figure something out. But for now it'll have to remain an interesting question.

The road not understood

Today I ran into two sentences that caused mild confusion due to a garden-path-like effect. Each of them influenced by a different red-herring.

The first occurred sometime before noon. Here at Purdue (and certainly at other institutions) everyone logs on to the computer network via their career account. It's the same account that stores files and hosts personal web pages. Mine has been acting up and I was going through a little manual fix. My friendly officemate walks in and asks how I'm doing. Without turning around and with an apparently distraught tone I say: 'Oh…I'm just trying to work out some problems with my career account.'

It's a pretty specific and obvious garden-path effect. In the full sentence it should be clear that the noun career is a specifier on account. So it functions like an adjective. But until you've heard the entire sentence you might think that I've said I have career problems. And the look of concern on my officemate's face betrayed the temporary misdirection. She was relieved. I started to explain a model of the source of her confusion. She changed the subject.^†

The second mis-taking occurred when I was listening to Buffy explain her recent fatigue. I don't think I drink too much coffee yesterday. And so I thought she was tired enough to produce that ungrammatical sentence. But she didn't flinch. And in the moment just before I prepared to tease her I finished processing the effect of her Minnesota accent on the sentence. I started to explain to her and another officemate what led me astray and they told me to write a blog post instead. So…

You see, Buffy's a pre-velar raiser. She raises the cat hat back snack vowel /æ/ to a closed-mid front [e] (name bake say) when it comes before a voiced velar stop /ɡ/ or before a velar nasal /ŋ/ —the gang bang coda consonant. I don't raise much (if at all) before the stop. I do raise a little bit before the nasal. But nothing like Buffy. She raises so much that it's almost a lax high front [ɪ] (or perhaps the higher close central [ɨ]).

So her pronunciation of drank is almost identical to her pronunciation of drink. And without a disambiguating context leading into the word I couldn't tell the difference. If she had said Well, yesterday I only drank a small cup of coffee I wouldn't have been as likely to wander down the wrong path.

The first sentence, wandering down the wrong career path, is a pretty typical temporary detour and the correct meaning becomes clear quickly and easily.

The second sentence is almost a simple mishearing because her pronunciation is ambiguous. But I'm not usually confused by her pre-velar raising and I can see how the path of the sentence made it easier to hear the wrong word. So it isn't just pronunciation that can make all the difference.

---

† But not because she's bored by linguistics. She simply had a question about other linguisticky matters. Such officemates are a treasure.

Latest political flap

Over at Mr. Verb you'll find some discussion of Sarah Palin's dialect features. (Check out James Crippen's long comment on the second link.)

Most of Palin's dialect features are familiar -- maybe jumbled from various regions. The salient features seem to put her somewhere in the northern plains at first. But as Susan comments, it almost sounds affected. I don't think it is. It's just pronounced -- so to speak (so to speak).

One odd feature that I heard in her interview with Charles Gibson: intervocal flapping outside the typical environment in prioritize: [pɹɑɪɔɹɪɾɑɪz] (around 4:10)



It might actually be a voiced stop [d] instead of a flap. Close call. I don't know if this is a regular pronunciation of hers. If it's not then a [d] could be some sort of partial preservation of the stop in the middle of an overgeneralization error.

The typical flapping environment would allow alternation before the final syllable in priority but it is just picky enough to exclude the alternation before the final syllable in prioritize. The necessary unstressed syllable environment is lost (at least in my dialect) with a secondary stress which is often heard in a syllables whose nucleus is a diphthong.

And not just with diphthongs. It can be simple stress. Some might process words such as retail and retard more like spondees than as trochees. And then there are some morphemic considerations that might be complicating the rule. But not for this post.

A somewhat related counterfeeding effect of the diphthong can be heard in the regular preservation of [t] in anti when the prefix is used as a free morpheme (it's not common but in focussed use it sometimes occurs: e.g. decide whether you're pro- or anti- the proposal.) Normally we would see t-deletion after the [n]. Say the sentence 'I see plenty of bounty hunters.' In my dialect I would usually delete all 3 of the /t/s. But I might preserve one or two of them occasionally. I'd never say all three unless I was making some sort of point about pronunciation.

Phonology isn't as fun at Subway

One test of the structure of a phoneme is the behavior. And one place we can observe the behaviour is in language games and errors.

I've mentioned my friends' Horse Latin speech disguise. The rules are simple you follow the first consonant of every syllable with -ibe (rhyming with bribe). So hot is hibe-ot; cold is kibe-old. banana is bribe-a-nibe-a-nibe-a.*

Let me back up. It's not fair to say that the -ibe follows the first consonant. It actually follows any onset cluster. So TRee becomes TRibe-ee instead of Tibe-Ree.

This hasn't told us anything about phonemic structure. But imagine a similar game that doesn't take the onset cluster but just the first consonant sound. In that language game tree would be tibe-ree and fly would by fibe-ly. And if we were analyzing the data when this game is applied to an unknown language we might find an clue to phonemic structure if we heard the disguised form of a made-up word like choom. Our question would be about that ch onset. Assuming that the pronunciation is appropriate to an Anglicised spelling convention we would know that the word is pronounced ʧum (rhyming with room).

But what of that affricate onset? Is it a single phoneme or two? Well if we know the rules of the language game we simply ask a speaker to disguise the word. And we know that the speaker will break apart any onset clusters. So if the disguise is chibe-oom [ʧaɪbum] we have some evidence that the ʧ is a single consonant sound because it's being treated that way. If the disguise is tibe-shoom [taɪb.ʃum] we see that the t and ʃ are being split which is evidence that they are seen as separate sounds and not a single phonemic affricate. Evidence. Not proof. More testing is required.

Now speech errors:

We look for similar effects. When someone offers up a spoonerism we see some evidence of how segments are organized. Sometimes whole clusters get switched so FLank STeak becomes STank FLake (I dated one once). But sometimes the speech error effects a change of only the first segment of a cluster. So Brew Clubber becomes Crew Blubber. One thing you might expect to notice in English is that an affricate isn't split because it's a single consonant sound. It should behave like one and not split into the two segments: t and ʃ.

But don't count on such clean data. Language is performed by people. And people hate to be contained.

My nieces love to eat at Schlotzsky's. But they have trouble pronouncing it. One of the slogans: "Funny Name. Serious Sandwich." How funny is the name? [ʃlatskiz]: That onset cluster ʃl is rare in English. It's usually found in words borrowed from Yiddish (or a few from German). One of my friends simply solved the phonotactic dilemma by epenthesis. "Sha-lote-skees" he said.

My nieces are much more impressive. They replace the ʃl cluster with a more comfortable cluster: sl. So what happens to the ʃ? They just move it over to the place formerly occupied by the s. Between the t and the k.

That complicates things. Because this makes for an odd repair. They've replaced a somewhat awkward (in English) cluster ʃl with an easier one sl. But they've completely mucked up the other cluster. The next cluster would normally be an easy onset sk on the 2nd syllable following a coda t closing off the first syllable.** But their repair makes it an almost unheard of onset ʃk. Ah but wait: there's no problem if the ʃ attaches to the preceding coda instead. So now you have a coda ʧ and a simplified onset k. And there's no constraint violation and you didn't have to resort to such an inelegant repair as epenthesis. These kids have thought about this carefully.***

[ʃlat.skiz] → [slaʧ.kiz] when you let kids work their magic.

---

* A word about stress and vowels: typically the stress of the original form changes and the new form gets penultimate stress: i.e. on the the last '-ibe'. Vowels tend to get neutralized to ə. Some high vowels like i or u might retain their quality. But others like æ and o are neutralized unless it's the final vowel. So you get bibe-oat for boat but bibe-a-tiber for boater.

** I propose this is a coda t and onset sk because I like onset maximization.

*** Not really. That's what makes phonology so interesting.

Malwebolence -- evil in the tubes

I hadn't heard the word malwebolence before today. But it gets 144,00 Google™ hits. Many of them are recent. It's malevolence on the web.

Rich Hannon in a recent Spectrum blog post uses it in the title of a NYTimes article he read about trolls and the online havoc they wreak.

It's an interesting word. Mal- is of course the prefix indicating general … uh … badness -- be it through evil or neglect. Malevolent malnourished maladroit malign &c The sense of willful evil isn't still there in all these words tho malus was evil in Latin.

Web is the locative infix. No it's not. But I've not used the phrase locative infix yet on this blog and when it comes to a bad joke I believe better wrong than never.

And -olence?

We can't get too technical with coined terms such as these. They don't often follow an etymological orthodoxy. So the -ol- would normally be connected to a -volen- base (a form based on the present participle of Latin velle; desire, will) that we find as the center piece in male-/ bene-/ [volen] \-t \-ce and other related frankenwords.

Hannon suggests another etymology:

Malwebolence is a newly coined word that hacks together mal (bad), web and violence.

I'm not sure where Hannon gets this analysis. The web story doesn't offer the etymology. Tho he says the title is "Malwebolence – The Trolls Among Us" the online page itself only uses "The Trolls Among us" as the title. There is a link to the story under the heading Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling. But the body of the story doesn't even have the word. Is it in the print version? Any readers out there?

Well -- whoever did it -- throwing violence in there is an unnecessary stretch. It's etymologically gratuitous violence. I'll stick with web malevolence as the influence.

But what I like most about the word is the solid phonological link to the original. If all we're doing to malevolence is using -web- instead of -ev- we have a nice ∅ → w / l__ɛ which makes some sense. It's almost vocalization. In a while we'll test the pronunciation to see if the l can sustain an adjacent w without being swallowed up into pure vocalization. And then of course going from v to b requires only a tiny little change from +continuant to -continuant. The sound is still consonantal. It's still voiced. And since English doesn't have a labiodental stop the loss of continuance naturally nudges it over into the bilabial column. And phonologically they're both just [labial] anyway. Gorgeous.

Lazy river shortcuts

When I was a kid we played football with a Mississippi-count rule before we could rush the passer. Usually a 5-Mississippi.

You had to count it out loud and if you were caught saying 'Missippi' instead of 'Mississippi' a sack [of the quarterback] wouldn't stand. Offense could call a do-over.

But while we didn't allow haplology we did allow syncope.

How could we tell?

Haplology is the loss of a repeated (or similar) syllable: sphygmomanometer → sphygmonometer. It can be hard to tell which syllable is lost because of the similarity. In sphygmomanometer the first of the two similar syllables appears to be dropped because the resulting pronunciation preserves the [mə] of [momə]. But that could also be a result of vowel neutralization in an unstressed syllable adjacent the primary stress.

Haplology in /mɪsɪsɪpi/ is loss of one [sɪ]: /mɪsɪsɪpi/ → [mɪsɪpi]

Syncope is the loss of a medial (usually) vowel (usually). Some common examples: territory /tɛ.ɹɪ.tɔ.ɹɪ/ → [tɛɹɪtɹɪ]; frightening /fraɪ.tɛ.nɪŋ/ → [fɹəɪt.niŋ].

Syncope in /mɪsɪsɪpi/ is loss of one [ɪ] (we'll say the unstressed one): /ˌmɪ.sɪˈsɪ.pi/ → [mɪssɪpi]

Syncope retains both [s] segments tho they are now adjacent. That's a geminate -- transcribed either [ss] or [sː].

Both haplology and syncope shorten the word by one syllable. And in Mississippi we can't be absolutely sure which syllable it is. It's most likely the unstressed. But it seems that on my playground more important than the surface syllabification was the length of the middle consonant [s]. As long as the [s] was geminate (either [ss] or [sː] in transcription) it sounded like a four-syllable word and nobody complained.

Haplology -- minus [sɪ]: mɪsɪsɪpi *[mɪsɪpi]
Syncope -- minus [ɪ]: mɪsɪsɪpi √[mɪssɪpi]

The difference in the consonant would sound something like the different [s] sounds in the following:

The sippy cup
This sippy cup

Now this was just a rule during the game. Afterwards we were haplologizing to Missippi with wild abandon.

The markedness of repetition helps to explain why the rhythmic spelling of Mississippi was sometimes 'shortened' to a longer form.

from 'em eye ess-ess eye ess-ess eye pee-pee eye'
to 'em eye double-ess eye double-ess eye double-pee eye'

The repetition in 2σ ess-ess and pee-pee was more work to say than 3σ double-ess and double-pee. Altho double-pee often became something like dulpee. That's more like syncope than haplology.

Or maybe it was just a sense of Spanish etiquette that kept me from saying eses and pipi.

You rain?

About a year ago I mentioned that Carl's Jr had filed a lawsuit against Jack in the Box claiming that commercials were creating phonetic and aural confusion between the words Angus and anus. (Unfortunately the ads are no longer available on YouTube. They were pretty funny.)

I didn't comment on it then but I thought the claim of phonetic similarity was a stretch. As I heard them the words were quite distinct and not too likely to be confused.

Consider that [æŋɡəs] and [eɪnəs] differ by a different initial vowel a different nasal and a full segment [ɡ] missing in the latter.

By analogy: how likely is it that angle and anal would be confused? The comparison is similar: [æŋɡl̩] / [eɪnl̩]

I figured the similarity of orthographic form was an important influence. That and the paradoxical attraction of a word to a clearly inappropriate context. Perhaps it's so odd to use words like delicious and tasty to describe anus that we're a little more likely to mistakenly see it with a slight nudge. Sort of a lexical forbidden fruit effect. A Chomskyan slip?

But then I'd overlooked the obvious possibility of very similar phonetic forms. All it requires is two common processes.

First: [ɡ] deletion. Not that the actual process of deletion still occurs commonly in a synchronic analysis but <ng > is typically read as [ŋ].

Second: pre-velar raising of [æ] to [e]. I should have thought of this given that Buffy's speech patterns this way.

It's easy to see how [eɪŋəs] it could easily be confused with [eɪnəs]. Only one segment different. And place (alveolar/velar) is the only major feature change.

But I never considered this pronunciation until a couple of days ago when I heard a Golden Corral commercial. What kind of steak? I asked myself when the announcer raised the [æ] just enough to confuse me. It didn't sound too tasty at first.

DS Eliot?

I don't feel like taking the time to go through and count every voiceless stop in the following reading by TS Eliot of his poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". If I could I might figure out some sort of a pattern to his alternation of ±aspiration when /t/ /p/ and /k/ are word/syllable initial.



A quick listen reveals that the aspiration is a little stronger and more frequent on /k/. We hear "come" "coat" and "coller" pronounced [k^hʌm] and [k^həʊt] and [k^hɑlə]. Not heavy aspiration. He says "coffee" with much less. It's almost unaspirated.

There's also some evidence that when a /t/ is word final Eliot aspirates it. In the line "let us go and make our visit" the /t/ in "let" sounds slightly aspirated (there's not much flapping going on) and there's a clear aspirated release on "visit" at the end of the line instead of a glottal stop.

Of course there's also the phrase "of insidious intent to lead you" and the /t#/ of "intent" is clearly not aspirated -- which is expected because of the adjacent /#t/ of "to". It's the unaspirated word initial /t/ that sounds most conspicuous.

There's his pronunciation of "days" around 1:40. If an exceedingly intent speaker was to enunciate the consonants in "and days" it would likely come across as [ɛnd^h deɪz]. Normal speech would rarely separate the adjacent Ds. The pronunciation would typically delete the coda resulting in [ɛndeɪz]. Following "and" it's odd to hear a stop of voice. And that's probably what makes his pronunciation sound like [teɪz] to me: I don't expect to hear the break between an alveolar nasal and a voiced alveolar stop so I perceive the -voice as a feature of the stop.

Of course I wonder how specifically affected Eliot's phonology is. Pay attention around 3:00 when Eliot says "to spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways." The reading of a poem is a performance and it's not necessarily relevant to any questions of dialect or production. It's more relevant to questions of perception. The distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stop onset is difficult to illustrate to students. I use a [t^h] and they recognize it easily. I get rid of the aspiration and they think it's a [d]. I alternate between [t⁼] and [d] as a minimal pair and they often can't even hear the difference. (Intervocalically it's easier.)

From now on I'll just play this clip for them. If they can't hear that it sounds odd I'll just give up and move on to the next topic.

Barnyard humor

I can't believe I sat through an entire 2 hours of The 100 Most Outrageous Moments of All-Time! last night. It was the same battery of TV clips and bloopers that NBC likes to play whenever they don't expect many viewers. Last night it was sort of a ratings tap-out opposite the Grammys.

There's no longer any surprise that the capstone of the show is going to be the witless newlywed's confused response to Bob Eubanks: "In the ass..."

Or at least that's what I figure is being bleeped. The first time I heard about this clip I was in high school and it was in the middle of its urban legendary mutation. It was supposedly a black man who responded quickly (because he was making an obvious joke according to my friend): That'd be up the butt Bob. For some reason Bob always makes it into the legend.

One of the funnier clips is one cameraman's reaction after a Space Shuttle countdown when the boosters aren't igniting and the there's nothing happening on the launchpad. He suddenly swears "Oh @#$% I'm in the wrong place!" and the camera pans frantically over to a shuttle that has already taken off from another launchpad.

And I saw a new one this time. New to me. It has been on YouTube for a while. An announcer calling a horse race almost 20 years ago gives an excited call as the announcers typically do.

But first:

(I don't give away the joke with this preamble. But you can just skip to the video if you don't want the phonological background information.)

There is a phonological rule in English that shortens lengthens a vowel before a voiceless voiced consonant or when word final. So the vowel in sweet is the same as the vowel in Swede -- just shorter. [Update: I absent-mindedly combined this prevoiced/no coda lengthening with the prevoiceless effect of Canadian Raising.]

sweet [swit]
Swede [swiːd]

There are some confusing possibilities. Consider the interaction with a rule that leads to a glottal stop instead of a voiceless alveolar stop at the end of a word. Changing the pronunciation of cute: [kjut] → [kjuʔ].

So let's imagine that Gwyneth Paltrow's little daughter is adorable: we could call her a cute Apple. And 'cute Apple' would likely be pronounced without the [t] sound as a coda. The phrase [kjuʔ.æpl̩] might be confused with 'Cue Apple' a phrase a stage director might say when it's the little darling's turn to make her stage appearance. That possible confusion is because word with a vowel onset will often get a glottal stop onset if the preceding word doesn't end with a consonant: [æpl̩] → [ʔæpl̩]

So how can we tell if the uttered phrase is 'Cute Apple' or 'Cue Apple'? Well that vowel lengthening rule helps. If the vowel is short it would likely be perceived as part of a word with a voiceless stop coda. either [kjut] or [kjuʔ] would be pronounced with a short [u]. But if the vowel is perceptively longer [uː] it would likely be heard as part of a word that has no coda -- just like [kjuː].

So the glottal stop in [kjuʔ.æpl̩] gets syllabified as a coda because of the short vowel -- and in [kjuː.ʔæpl̩] it's syllabified as an onset because of the long vowel (since the syllabification would be in a feeding relationship with the vowel lengthening rule). Now watch this.



The onset [f] makes a clearer onset than does the [h] and might serve as a sort of maximizing segment so [hufˈhaɹɾəd] might give way to [huˈfarɾəd] -- especially when the announcer certainly gets the joke and is willing to play along -- and he really draws out that one [huːː] that sells the resyllabification.

For a pronunciation that is clearly working to avoid the joke just listen to Keith Olbermann's clearly syllabified [ˈhuf . haɹɾəd] here. Notice how short the vowel is in his pronunciation of hoof. And of course the long enough pause completely avoids a mishearing.

The sheep he rode his cattle back

For the last couple of weeks I've had The Clash running through my head. I've been humming them incessantly. It was only today that I realized why.

[Update: The Ridger has alerted me to the following video made by some folks who have noticed the same thing.



Ha.]

Always on my mind

What I love about phonology is how automatic so much of it is. There's so much that we do (or avoid) because of rules (or constraints if you're into OT) that we don't even realize. The example I use as illustration for interested non-linguists is the plural morpheme. What's the plural of dog? What's the plural of cat? What sound did you use to make those words plural? They almost always say 'S' and I explain that there were actually two sounds: [s] and [z].

For some that's immediately apparent. So we move on to slightly less obvious alternation. What's the past tense of dial? What's the past tense of wish? What sound marks the past tense? Even when I explain that the past tense of wish is marked with with [t] a few of them argue. I've had several students argue Well you might say it that way but I say wished with a [d] at the end. That's part of the fun of teaching phonetics and phonology. It's a nice challenge trying to find all the right tricks to convince them without belittling or ridiculing their untrained ear.

But are linguists immune? Well I'm not. Last semester while I was prattling on in some silly 215 Heavilon conversation an officemate jumped up from his chair and started writing on the board. This usually occurs when someone has said something particularly amusing or offensive or confusing. So I wondered what I said. He wrote down an odd two word phrase. Oh wheeze.

What's that? I asked.

That's how you say 'always' he explained.

I was stunned. I thought about it. And I almost didn't believe it. I looked over at another officemate and he nodded.

In the next class period I mentioned it to my students and I noticed a few of them nodding as well. One added You just said it a few minutes ago and I noticed it.

There are a few things going on with that pronunciation that interest me. As a cot/caught merger I'm a little surprised to learn that my pronunciation of the first vowel is even higher and more rounded than the [ɔ] that often occurs before [l]. But then I delete the [l] anyways. And I don't speak with an intrusive 'l' which could have accounted for hypercorrection and [l] deletion. And instead of a [eɪ] diphthong in the last syllable I use something almost like a high front [i]. This is similar to the sundee mondee tuesdee pronunciations that I thought were disappearing. But I don't say those.

Well instead of [ɔːlweɪz] I say something like [oːwiz] tho I suspect that second vowel is more likely a barred-i [ɨ]. Not so far forward as [i].

And now that I think about it the first vowel is probably something closer to [əʊ].

This is like the moment I learned that not everyone's second toe is longer than their big toe.

You say potato I say dadada

Ah the joys of family and little kids -- and obvious input/output phonological data provided by a 19 month old niece. Some basic early phonological processes.

wipes → peeps: /wəɪps/ → [pips]
chip → pip/peep: /ʧɪp/ → [pʰIp]/[pʰip]
grape → peep: /gɹeɪp/ → [pip]
Blake → Pete: /bleɪk/ → [pit]
cookie → teetee: /kʊki/ → [titi]
TV → beebee: /tivi/ → [bibi]
crayons → crots: /kɹeanz/ → [kɹats]
santa → tahta: /sæntə/ → [tʰãta]
michael → cocku: /məɪkl̩ /→ [kʰaku]
buffy → fuffy: /bʌfi/ → [ɸʌfi]/[fʌfi]
sock → cock:/sak/ → [kak]
Mark → cock: /maɹk/ → [kak]

(And she would probably not say [dadada] for 'potato'. Maybe [tito] because she's stuck on 1 and 2 syllable words. And 'tomato' comes out [mimo].)

Of course these pronunciations are changing. She's getting closer and closer to some of the expected phones in her pronunciation. And there's of course a lot of room for variation since her articulation isn't precise.

The aspiration on some of the voiceless stops isn't always clear but I transcribe it where I see it most regularly. I like that altho the /t/ stop of the affricate in 'chip' becomes [p] the release in the affricate is performed as an aspirated release.

There's clear favouring of reduplication in the output and it's almost always regressive. There are a few words that don't pattern like the rest. I would expect her to say [kik] as the output for "Blake" but she introduces two sounds that aren't in the input. Perhaps everyone around here produces a glottal stop in [bleIʔ] and she has learned it as an allophone of /t/.

She says "Santa" with a nasalized [a] but no alveolar nasal as the coda. She is able to articulate the nasal in a coda -- as in corn which she pronounces [kɔn] -- but it might be tougher before a C (given how much more natural the CVCV syllable structure is in early language development).

There are some vowels that show something about the way these adults around here speak. Nobody says kɹænz here altho that's a common pronunciation of crayons. The [a] gets drawn out and thats the sound that she holds onto.

And of course everyone's favourite is when she points at Mark and starts calling him names. He's a nice guy but she apparently thinks he's a bit of a jerk.

Getting your turds wisted

Some of the most offensive jokes I know use an implied spoonerism as the punchline. Certain answers to the question 'What's the different between X and Y' easily evoke the same phrase with some inverted onsets. Especially when the words in the punchline aren't too common or are similar to conspicuously offensive words.

And the relative frequency of spoonerisms as a speech error is good evidence that word sounds are organised in a manner that makes onset inversion one of the easier switches.

But similar sounds can easily invert even if one an onset and the other is a coda. Even if the syllable onset is word internal.

In the office the other day Ed our renaissance scholar was admitting the daunting task of submitting writing to our esteemed professors. One professor--last name Ross--is known for speaking his mind and not suffering foolishness. "I definitely feel the presure...pressure with Ross. I do feel the presure."

Buffy looked over at me. I looked up at her. "You're going into his blog" she announced to Ed.

I've chosen "presure" to represent his pronunciation with the alveolar [s] instead of the postalveolar fricative [ʃ]. I was sad to hear that he didn't actually flip the [s] and [ʃ]. He caught himself before he completed the phrase--corrected the pronunciation of pressure--and proceeded to say "Ross" instead of "Rosh" as I was hoping to hear.

But when I told him that he paused and suggested that he might have in fact said "Rosh."

"No" I assured him. "I was hoping you would."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I was disappointed when I heard you pronounce the [s]."

But he did offer another interesting error. When he repeated pressure it flipped back to the alveolar fricative.

That leads me to the following mysteries:

It's not clear that the first [s] was a result of switched segments. He corrected himself and perhaps it was regressive assimilation (over a long distance) from the [s] in Ross. Maybe he was never going to say Rosh. That's not as fun.

The [s] in the last performance of pressure didn't precede an occurrence of Ross--so progressive assimilation from the already pronounced "Ross" is likely. But it's more exciting to think that it was a partially realized inversion--the other half of which was never going to be pronounced. If so then even tho the second "Ross" wasn't going to make it to performance it was still part of the organization and structure of his sentence. And we saw its ghost by the appearance of the coda [s] in the 2nd syllable onset when he said "presure" [pɻɛsɹ̩ ] instead of "pressure" [pɻɛʃɹ̩ ].

An inversion through phonemic haunting perhaps?

_

An technicality at worst

I'm not sure I want to write this post. Ben Zimmer's study of (and commentary on) language is impressive reasonable thorough precise entertaining and...good.

And he has been kind enough to leave a few comments here. For all--our thanks. So I don't want to protest too much.

In his wholly reliable style he recently posted over at Language Log about Victor Washington's case against the NFL. Washington seeks fuller retirement benefits because of his injuries. The NFL doesn't want to pay out so much. Washington's plan offered higher benefits if he suffered "a football injury" and the NFL is sticking to the argument that his several injuries don't entitle him to "Level 1" benefits. (Follow this link to read the story.)

The sentence that caught my attention was the following observation by Zimmer regarding arbitrator Sam Kagel's use of "a" instead of "an" in the phrase "a injury."

"The legal emphasis on the word a would apparently be lost if it underwent the regular addition of the epenthetic consonant /n/ to create an before a word beginning with a vowel like injury."

His suggestion makes sense regarding the rhetoric. I'll buy it. I'm not sure about his analysis of the a/an alternation as epenthesis: the /n/ being an additional letter. It is additional if we say the underlying form of the article is a. But historically the form was an which was realized as a before most consonants. In that case "an" alternates with "a" by deletion of the /n/ coda. So at most this is a pure technicality.

But let's say that for the sake of a clear point Zimmer is using the wording of the retirement/disability plan as the underlying form. Since the plan uses the phrase "a football injury" we'll say our input is "a"; and from that form to its reflex in the phrase "a(n) injury" we would expect that /n/ would be added because the new phrase places the article before [i] instead of [f]. But I'm still not sure I'd call it epenthesis in that case.

And I'm not sure that I wouldn't.

_

Was Björn Borg born bored?

Recently on another blog I read a comment offering a few typical observations and almost interesting comparisons of online networks. Then the commenter alerted the post writer to a spelling error with the following admission: "It's actually the reason I'm writing this now."

It's a shame to see a conversation about interesting ideas turns into a prosaic editing session. And the spelling error in this case is actually an interesting example of a reduplicative coda. The spelling of smorgasbord as smorgasborg is relatively common. Below I list the Google™ hit results for "smorgasbord" and several misspellings

smorgasbord----1,770,000
smorgasborg----40,500
smorgesbord----2,090
smorgasbrod----652
smorgosbord----619
smorgisborg----439
smorgusbord----209
smorgisbord----194
smorgasbort----165
smoorgasbord---64
smorgasbore----6
smorgasborn----3

The 4th spelling above is even attested in the OED as an erroneous spelling--reasonably related to smørrebrød/smørbrød/smorbrodt: Danish and Norwegian for a type of sandwich.

Does the g occur more commonly or naturally as a coda? Certainly -org would not be more common than -ord -ort -orn or -ork. Tho I'm not going to take the time to count right now. The -g spelling even gets almost 40 times as many hits as the pretty obvious and completely homophonous spelling pun smorgasbored. And if a 'fingerslip' typo is at work here a much more common spelling string like -ore would probably show up more than just 6 times. There's even a January 1964 review in Time Magazine the 1963 film The Prize with the headline/title Smorgasbore (less than enthusiastic).

I'll go so far as to say that it isn't really a typo. I've heard this as a pronunciation as well and this pattern in the orthography looks like a reflection of the pattern in the phonology.

An interesting result: schmorgasborg gets 2,210 hits--more than schmorgasbord which gets 1630; and shmorgasborg (522) gets almost as many as shmorgasbord (682).

Is it contamination by the cybernetic organism⇒ cyborg ⇒ borg compression? Not likely.

The best explanation seems to be an echo in the final syllable. [Update: A better term of course is reduplication. See Neal's comment for a link to Kie Zuraw's paper on "aggressive reduplication".)]--perhaps combined with an impression of -org as a Scandinavian syllable. But then why do we only find 33 hits for smorgasbjord? Wait. Only 33 hits? That actually seems like pretty good evidence of the Scandinavian effect. I wish I had the time to investigate how often smorgasborg occurs in use by people who have followed tennis since the mid seventies.

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A bit of a digressive epilogue: The commenter I mentioned tacks the common complaint onto his spiel: "p.s. one of my pet peeves is the misuse of 'your' and 'you're'... how is it that people can't figure out when to use each one???" (peevologist is really so appropriate a term).

People do know how to "figure" it out. People know the rule. They know the difference between the words. But spelling is closely tied to the 'mind's ear' which helps explain why words like to and too are used interchangeably as are there their and they're. I've committed the error many many times. Many. I will commonly interchange where and wear but it's less common for me to confuse them with were. It happens but not as often.

A sub-optimal output

Several weeks in a practicum I had suggested that a very basic introduction to Optimality Theory might be a worthwhile for the few students who might go on to study more linguistics. It seems to me that if the OT table makes enough sense that an introduction could work very easily. The general reception was cautious disagreement. It was definitely disagreement but it was cautious. I imagine the only thing that held people back from calling it a stupid idea was a regard for my feelings.

So I did a presented a quick mock lesson in class today. The assignment was to introduce a topic as if I was teaching an intro to linguistics course. I introduced OT as a model for the way we might make any decision--using the example of purchasing a car. I mentioned very highly ranked constraints (such as 'cannot explode on ignition') and lower constraints (such as 'must be red'). That part went fine.

Then I tied it into phonology where the names of the constraints had to change (unless there is risk of some word exploding on utterance--Monty Python comes to mind). This is where my lesson fell apart because I had made some assumptions about what students might ask. I never assumed they would ask why faithfulness constraints should be expected. And my fellow students put me on the spot asking 'why should we assume that nothing will be added to an underlying form?' and I made the fateful mistake of trying to argue that faithfulness constraints function on principle. As if we have a reason for expecting faithfulness constraints to play an important part in language without seeing them in action. How do we know that DEP-IO and MAX-IO are ranked somewhere? Only because that would explain some of what we see.

How do we know that an output form will in some ways correspond to the input? Because we see places where that constraint makes sense. Not because it should correspond. And obviously it doesn't always.

Two things you don't want to hear from a professor after you've done a presentation:

1. As a student I was willing to accept what you said. As a phonologist I have some issues.
2. It was certainly brave of you to try.

I'm not sure which one is worse.
_

You two behave or I'm gonna separate you

The pronunciation of many place names is difficult to deduce because they are long which confuses the scansion; they are full of digraphs which combined with confused scansion confuses the vowels; and they are unfamiliar. It's the same thing that makes my last name so daunting for so many people. I say it [ˌkʰow.vəˈɻuː.bjəs]

But consider a place name like Hamtramck a city geographically embraced by Detroit. There's no real ambiguity there. It looks pretty clear: [hæmtræmk]. But the final consonant cluster is a problem in English so it has to be fixed. That's where the ambiguity comes in. We don't like a nasal and following adjacent consonant to have contrasting places of articulation when syllabification forces us to make them a cluster. So the labial [m] and velar [k] doesn't work for us word finally. How to fix it?

It could be any of several repairs including:

• simple progressive place assimilation--[hæmtɹæŋk]: this has worked in tank and rank and tin cup (even tho it's not word final) and is one of the most common repairs. But that's a coronal [n] assimilating. Labial [m] is not as willing to move.


• excrescent progressive place assimilation--[hæmtɹæmŋk]: but this is very unlikely because there's now a more complex cluster and the adjacent mŋ still needs to be fixed. One likely repair would be to delete the [m] leading to the first repair as a final form. It's not a likely extra step.


• excrescent progressive manner assimilation--[hæmtɹæmpk]: the m takes the voiceless stop feature of the [k] which sometimes occurs with words like tense [tɛnts] and answer [æntsɻ] but isn't a fix because it leaves adjacent [pk]. If the [k] is then deleted we would come around to another possible repair.


• regressive assimilation of place--[hæmtɹæmp]: this is more simple than the previous mentioned repair; it would require one step: k → p. But that's not a likely repair. The [k] likes to stay put. It's not like those peregrine coronal nasals that assimilate to place of articulation with relative ease.

But the local fix is none of these. Call epenthesis to the rescue. The city is pronounced as if it was spelled 'Hamtramick' with primary stress on the 2nd syllable--[hæmˈtɻæmɪk]. Think of the rhythm of ham sandwich.

This is not so surprising a repair. About a year ago Eric Baković put up a post on phonoloblog describing his wife's playful truncation of berry names. When she encountered a similar problem she avoided assimilation and turned to epenthesis as a repair. Baković writes

assimilation (*[bɔɪzəmbz]) is independently blocked by whatever is responsible for the lack of word-final noncoronal nasal-voiced stop clusters ([mb] and [ŋg]) in English, deletion (as in bomb [ba:m]) is also blocked because the point of the truncation is for the [b] of berries to be retained, and so epenthesis is employed as the last resort. At least, that's an interesting way to look at what may just be Karen’s funny way of talking.

Epenthesis is not a favoured repair for illegal clusters. It may be too 'obvious' a fix. But it apparently has its place. Stretching at least from San Diego to Detroit.

------------
Lately there's been a tiny burst of discussion regarding place names and their pronunciation. Recently the LA Times ran an article about MissPronouncer.com: Jackie Johnson's website meant to help with those hard-to-pronounce Wisconsin names. Ben Zimmer and Nancy Friedman alerted Mr. Verb to the article and he covered it in a post. Then the topic showed up on the ADS-L board and subscribers are still throwing out all sorts of observations and questions about the words and attitudes involved.

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.

Stress management

In a recent post (Problems with lexical stress--27 July 2007) John Wells suggests that compound adjectives such as "long-term" and "sabre-toothed" are probably double stressed and should be marked in isolated occurrence with primary end-stress: ˌlong-ˈterm, ˌsabre-ˈtoothed.

These adjectives usually occur in a phrase before a noun (long-term plans; sabre-toothed tiger) and as Mr Wells hears them the stress in this environment would shift, creating a contour: long-term plans; a sabre-toothed tiger.

Because lexical stress is usually determined by the contour of the word in isolation Wells identifies a problem of contrastive implication. As he sees it, if the stress in predicative position remains initial "we would implicitly be contrasting sabre- with some other kind of toothedness."

Since stress is lexical it's also prone to dialectal variation. While reading his post I kept repeating "sabre-toothed" and realized that primary stress on the initial syllable sounded most natural in almost all contexts. The contrastive exception would be if someone misunderstood me and thought I had said "sabre-hoofed" the correction would be: "No. I said 'sabre-toothed'.

Buffy used the same initial stress when I asked her to answer using the isolated compound adjective. And the same result with "Was the tiger Siberian?" "No. It was sabre-toothed."

Of course there are some phrases that are frozen in their stress pattern. Wells identifies "pear-shaped" as one such fixed contour in which the primary stress is the only option. In his dialect 'sabre-toothed' is not such a phrase though it is in mine.

A while ago (19 June 2007) he wrote about the emerging spelling pronunciation of 'wort' in St John's Wort. He grew up hearing it pronounced [sənt ˈdʒɒnz wɜːt] with the same vowel as word and worse. Now he hears many people pronouncing the 'wort' as 'wart' a spelling pronunciation influenced by the short snort report pattern.

This makes some sense considering that the traditional contour did not put stress on 'wort' but the emerging contour does. Wells notes that the traditional pronunciation "is still generally the botanists’ pronunciation." While the new pronunciation is common among "British aficionados of herbal remedies." American ones too.