Showing posts with label rhoticity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rhoticity. Show all posts

rhymes

Aug 3, 2008
I'll be off-line for a few days, so here's something to discuss amongst yourselves.

Fatherhood has made Better Half go all musical--he's constantly making up songs to sing to little Grover. I've been keeping track of some of the rhymes that he makes that wouldn't rhyme at all if I were to say them:
garden - Baden-Baden
banana - James Garner
snorty - naughty
All three of the so-called rhymes are scuppered by our different rhoticity (BH being non-rhotic and me rhotic), but we also have different vowels in banana and naughty. (We both approximate the German Baden-Baden in roughly the same way.) His banana has low, back vowels in both the last two syllables; mine has an [ae] (imagine that as a single symbol) in the middle. Thus, the middle syllable differs in much the same way as our pronunciations of bath differ--so check out bath on the Sound Comparisons website, if you'd like to hear that difference. The first vowel in naughty is much rounder in BH's dialect than in mine--see daughter on the Sound Comparisons site. In both cases on that site, my pronunciation is more like Ohio than 'Standard American' (the Standard American guy has a really annoying uptalk thing going on) and his is close enough to RP.

Incidentally, all this seems related to the reason [or one of the reasons] that Grover isn't named Frances, though we both like that name (that, and the fact that we like the name we gave her that much better). Our pronunciations of the 'a' make Frances sound like two different names, and we were afraid that would cause a personality disorder in our child. (Unfortunately, there are no 'a'+/ns/ words on Sound Comparisons, so again, you'll have to extrapolate from the difference in bath.) Somehow the fact that we've given her a name (yes, her real-life name, as well as her pseudonym) with a post-vocalic /r/ didn't seem like as much of a problem. I have no idea whether she's figured out yet that what Daddy says and what (BrE) Mummy says are both the same word, and her name. They say that a baby can recogni{s/z}e her/his name at four months old, but Grover doesn't particularly take notice when I call her name, so perhaps we've already done what Larkin said we'd do.

So, over to you, what rhymes have come between you and a speaker of another dialect?
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more on orthographic r

May 14, 2008
Language Log has a discussion by Mark Liberman, reacting to a BBC News Magazine article on whether a certain country should be called Burma or Myanmar, that is relevant to our on-going observations about the contrast between 'r' in BrE orthography (spelling) versus its Received Pronunciation in post-vocalic (after vowel) contexts. The upshot is:

Leaving aside the notion that the local pronunciation is a "corruption", the BBC's discussion omits the most interesting part of the story, at least from an American point of view. They should have asked John Wells, whose discussion of the question I linked to at the time ("Myanmar is mama", 10/15/2007). And the explanations that I've heard and read this time around — yesterday on NPR, for example — again miss the key point. So here it is.

There is no 'r'!

Never was. Not in Burma and not in Myanmar. The 'r' is an orthographic imposition of post-rhotic British colonialists.
Click on the links to read more.
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uh, er, um, erm and eh

May 4, 2008
When I was young, some of my favo(u)rite books were by British authors. The title of one, Five Dolls and a Monkey, I was interested to find, is (until I publish this post) cited only once on the web. Am I the only person who loved that book? After I grew out of Five Dolls, I made my way through Agatha Christie's oeuvre. And in one or the other of these books I first encountered er and erm, as in this transcription of a comedy sketch (please keep in mind that this is an example of the English poking fun at themselves—as they do so well—and not poking fun at African Americans):
CLIVE (playing an interviewer):
Erm, I think it can be truly said that the Americans have, er, their soul singers, and we English have ars-oul singers. And, er, Bo is one our leading, er, soul singers.
DEREK (playing 'Bo Duddley'):
Arsehole singers, yes.
CLIVE:
Bo, I-, I wanted to ask you first of all, erm, .....
DEREK:
Yes.
CLIVE:
This is obviously a sort of, er, boogie, er, .....
DEREK:
This is a boogie, erm, .....
CLIVE:
What? Jive stuff, is it?
DEREK:
Jive boogie woogie song, erm, and, erm, it is-, it is a, a story of ..... well, shall I, shall I sort of go through it?
CLIVE:
Yes, I-, I-, I was thinking that some of the lyrics for, er-rm, English speaking audiences might be a little obscure.
DEREK:
Absolutely. Well let me .....
CLIVE:
I wonder what the-, what-, what-, what it really is all about?
DEREK:
Well, let me-, let me just go through it, erm, for you. Ah: (sings and plays piano:) "#Mamma's got a brand new bag!" Er, "Mamma's got a brand new bag", er, this means, erm, that the-, the Harlem mother has gone out into the bustling markets of Harlem .....
CLIVE:
Yes.
DEREK:
..... er, to buy a gaily coloured plastic bag. Erm, and there's a certain amount of pride in this: Mamma's got a brand new bag.
CLIVE:
I-, I suppo-, I suppose a gaily coloured plastic bag is, er, a bit of status symbol in Harlem.
DEREK:
It certainly is. Certainly is. Obviously, er, you know, sign of a birthday or something like that.

Now, when I was a 12-year-old reading British novels, I liked to read them out loud, in my best "English" accent, probably gleaned from Dick Van Dyke's murder of Cockney. One of the unfortunate effects of this was that I pronounced Hercule Poirot as something like "Ercule Pirate" (never mind that he's Belgian—he was in England and so must speak as my 12-year-old self believed the English to speak). But another effect was that I believed that when British people paused in speech, they made sounds that rhymed with my American pronunciations of her and worm. And for much of my life, I continued to believe that there were millions of English-speaking people somewhere (or somewhen) pronouncing /r/s in their hesitations. 

 But then I had a baby, and the penny dropped. I regret to say that this is not because motherhood has made me smarter/cleverer. It's because you spend a lot of time watching tv with the subtitles on while trapped under a baby. Watching in this way, I've become addicted to Eggheads, but when it's not 6 p.m., I often end up watching Friends or Scrubs, since one or the other seems to be on at all times. And it was only when seeing er and erm in the subtitles for American characters in these American sitcoms that I reali{s/z}ed: it's not that the British put different sounds into their filled pauses, it's just that they typically spell those pauses er and erm instead of uh and um. Since many BrE dialects do not pronounce the /r/ after vowels in such contexts, the /r/ here is just to indicate that the vowel is not a proper 'e' but a long schwa-like vowel. And before any of you complain that I should not have been allowed to have a doctorate in Linguistics if it took me this long to figure out something this basic, let me tell you: I've thought the same thing myself. I think the technical term for this is: Duh! When I mentioned a few posts ago that I'd be covering er/erm/uh/um soon, reader David Up North (as I'll call him to differentiate him from the other Davids I've mentioned before) wrote to ask:

I was interested to see in the comments to your latest blog that you were planning an article on 'er' and 'erm'. I wondered if you'd be covering 'eh?' as well? It's often pronounced (or possibly replaced by) 'ay?' (or something like that – rhymes with 'hey', but I don't recall ever seeing anyone writing either as 'eye dialect' representations of the sound, they usually use 'eh?'). It came to mind because I've occasionally seen Americans transcribe the sound as 'aye?' – which is obviously wrong.

I can't imagine why an American would transcribe eh as aye (pronounced like I in every dialect I know) and haven't seen it happen, myself. I speak a northern AmE dialect that, like Canadian English, ends many sentences with eh? (Famously parodied by the Great White North sketches on SCTV: How's it going, eh?) And when we write that, we spell it eh and pronounce it to rhyme with day. (I was happy to discover upon moving to South Africa that SAfE has the same kind of interjection, but it's pronounced hey. It was very easy to adjust to. Much better than when I moved to Massachusetts and was mocked relentlessly for the ehs that I'd never noticed myself saying.) 

 The problem we're seeing here is that these interjections are usually spoken and generally only written when one is trying to represent natural speech. Since they're not part of the written language (since they're not needed in the same way when the language isn't immediately interactional), people aren't used to spelling them, and thus the spellings have been slower to become standardi{s/z}ed than the spellings for nouns and verbs. Even within AmE, I find that the informal version of yes is spelt in different ways (yeah, yeh, yea, ya) by different people. To me, yeah is informal 'yes', and yea is pronounced 'yay' and is a positive vote, yay is what you say when you're giddy and ya is what South Africans say instead of yeah. I believe that my spellings are the 'standard' spellings for AmE, but, as I say, I've seen a lot of variation and it's hard to 'correct' such spellings, since the 'standard' is not as well-established for these mostly-spoken sounds. It's worth noting that all of these discourse particles have meanings, though they can be hard to put into words. My favo(u)rite quotation from the OED's entry for er is:

1958 Aspects of Translation 37 The really astute Englishman..must feign a certain diffident hesitation, put in a few well-placed — ers.
The interjections' meanings are generally the same in AmE and BrE, but what may differ, as indicated by the above quotation, is how often and why people use them. One reason to use er/uh is to feign hesitation—to make it seem like you're reluctant to say something. Another reason is to hold your place in the conversation—to indicate that although you're not saying anything at this very second, you intend to finish your thought, so no one should interrupt you. It may be that people in different places from different backgrounds use these sounds for these purposes at different rates and in different situations. I believe that the stereotypes would have it that the British use er/erm to hesitate--not to rush into committing themselves to any proposition--and that Americans use um/uh because they're inarticulately rushing to commit themselves to all sorts of opinions. Nevertheless, both American uh/um and British er/erm have the potential to be used in either way by individuals.
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some pronunciation links

Feb 20, 2008
I'm still trying to get a project done during my limited computer time. I can type with a sleeping baby on my chest, but not with a wakeful baby...and sometimes (ok, nearly constantly) one needs to use sleeping-baby time for laundry and sterili{s/z}ing and (joy of joys!) sleeping. So, the blog has been suffering. I miss (northern AmE) you guys.

So, as a placeholder until my next bit of blogging time, here are a couple of links that were pointed out to me this week.

First, an academic link. Linguists at the University of Edinburgh have put together a website called Sound Comparisons that allows you to hear the sounds of a variety of English accents from around the native-English-speaking world. You can either click on a region/dialect and get the full set of sounds for that dialect, or you can click on a word and see/listen to all of the different pronunciations of that word. I'm sure this site will come in handy for future discussions here.

Second, a fairly silly link: the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre has a Doctor Who-themed video that plays a bit on the spelling/pronunciation confusions that are possible in non-rhotic dialects --as we've discussed before. For you to discuss: do the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets have Scottish accents?
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scoff and scarf

Feb 4, 2008
I found myself doing something that I take others to task for: assuming that a usage that differs from my own is 'wrong'. Well, at least I had the good sense to look it up before blogging about it. You see, I was reading along (belatedly as ever) in the 22/29 December 2007 issue of New Scientist, in an article titled 'Death by chocolate' by Claire Ainsworth, and I came across this sentence:
If you're reading this after scoffing your fifteenth chocolate Santa, don't panic: we humans have been safely enjoying the beans of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, for millennia.
I wonder how many other readers would find the use of the verb scoff strange here. I only know scoff as meaning 'to deride, mock', and so I assumed that what had happened here was that a BrE-speaking author or (BrE) subeditor/(AmE) copy editor had misspelt the verb to scarf because in their dialect, the /r/ wouldn't be pronounced--and so if they'd not seen the word written down before, they might reason that it's really scoff--a familiar verb that is also onomatopoetic for the action of whipping food into one's mouth. (Some linguists call such errors--where an unfamiliar word is replaced with something that seems to 'make more sense'--eggcorns.)

Except that my reasoning is completely backward. It's fairly frequent that, when faced with two versions of a word, people believe that the version that they came across first is the older version. But, of course, the world doesn't work that way. The OED records scoff as meaning 'devour' from 1846, and lists it as 'slang and dialectal'. Another version of the word, scaff is dated back to 1797, and a slang dictionary records the variant scorf in 1864. On the other hand, the OED doesn't have documentation of AmE scarf until the 1960s. (Though others have found it as early as 1938.) So, instead of an 'r' being lost by speakers of a BrE non-rhotic dialect, we probably have speakers of an AmE dialect (probably one of the non-rhotic ones) inserting an 'r' in the spelling of the word.

The 'eating' meaning of scoff is not particular to BrE--it's used in AmE too, though not by me. (And, of course, the unrelated 'deride' meaning of scoff and the 'neckwear' meaning of scarf are both dialect-neutral and unrelated to the 'eating' homonyms.)

I would have known all this earlier had I not been on my honeymoon in August when the issue was raised and discussed on the American Dialect Society e-mail discussion list. Once again, my personal life interferes with my quest for know-it-all-dom.
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more on vowels

Nov 9, 2007
Being too lazy to make myself a sandwich today, I went out for a so-called Reuben. There in the bagel shop what looked like a mother and daughter were having a disagreement. The daughter was pronouncing castle like I would--with the same 'a' sound as in bat. The mother took her to task for this--saying it is pronounced with an 'ah' sound (like in father).

The daughter's response was one that an American (at least not outside eastern New England) would never say: "It's not 'cah-stle' because it doesn't have an 'r' in it!"

(The mother went on to take the daughter to task for trying to be someone she isn't. Unfortunately, I missed the relevant bit when she said "You were born in Brighton, not [inaudible]!" Could have been someplace in the US, could have been someplace in the UK--since the 'ah' vowel-before-/s/ 'rule' is a particularly southern/'standard' English kind of thing.)

Americans who speak dialects with post-vocalic (i.e. 'after vowel') /r/s tend to think of ('standard') BrE accents as 'leaving out the /r/s'. But the daughter's response here gives an indication that that's not how BrE speakers perceive their dialects. Instead, they perceive the /r/ as being part of the vowel sound. (Really, the /r/ and the vowel preceding it are pretty much a single merged-together sound in any dialect--that's the nature of /r/. It's also one of the things that bad impersonations of AmE accents tend to get wrong--e.g. saying farm as fah-rrm. I had an old SAfE-speaking boss whose impersonation of AmE accents was spot-on except for that detail.)

And all this goes back to the previous post from today, about tot and that it's pronounced differently from tart. AmE speakers may think of a ('standard') BrE pronunciation of tart as 'not having an /r/'. But that's not necessarily how BrE speakers are perceiving (or even pronouncing) it.
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arse, ass and other bottoms

Aug 14, 2006
Howard at the UK/US forum e-mailed to request discussion of BrE arse and AmE ass. It seems Howard has come across at least one American wondering why the British "put an /r/ in ass", when, of course, the real question is why Americans have taken the /r/ OUT of arse. There are many useful discussions of arse/ass available, so I'll lazily quote Wikipedia:
Until the late eighteenth century, "ass" presumably had no profane meaning and simply referred to the animal now mostly called donkey. Because of the increasingly non-rhotic nature of standard British English, "arse" was often rendered "ass". However indirect evidence of the change from arse to ass traces back to 1785 (in euphemistic avoidance of ass "donkey" by polite speakers) and perhaps to Shakespeare, if Nick Bottom transformed into a donkey in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1594) is such a word-play. This usage was also adopted in America, which is why the word "arse" is not usually used in the United States. The age of Victorian propriety resulted in the rechristening of the horse-like animal, changing the name to "donkey" (not recorded in English before 1785, slang, perhaps from dun "dull grey-brown," the form perhaps influenced by monkey, or possibly from a familiar form of Duncan, cf. dobbin) to avoid any improper inferences. Some people in Britain have adopted the American version in writing. Although before World War I they were similar, the British pronunciations of "ass" /æs/ and "arse" /ɑːs/ are now quite different. While arse is commonly used in Atlantic Canada, west of the Ottawa river, ass is more idiomatic.
So, the /r/ in arse used to be pronounced, but now it's not pronounced as an /r/ in many (particularly southern English) British dialects, including Received Pronunciation. Nevertheless, it's spel{led/t} with an r no matter which British dialect one speaks. So why do some Americans think that the /r/ has been added in, rather than taken out?

My hypothesis is that it's because most Americans are familiar with dialects that add /r/s after certain vowels, even though the r is not present in the spelling. They're used to seeing the written form without an /r/, and so figure/reckon that any other form is a corruption, just as they consider it a corruption when people pronounce idea as idear and washing as warshing. Some British dialects have an intrusive r, so it's not unreasonable to guess that the word that is familiar as ass is the victim of /r/-adding.

Adding or dropping /r/s is a definite marker of geography and social class. In the US, people often consider added /r/s to be a mark of a hick or "white trash". (It's done in many parts of the country, including rural Pennsylvania and the Ozarks.) Thus in one on-line discussion one participant said "English people are cute. They say 'arse' instead of 'ass'", to which another American hotly replied:
"Arse" is not cute. "Arse" just makes me think of welfare moms living in low-rental housing and wearing sweatpants, running babysitting operations out of their ghetto apartments and threatening the kids into behaving themselves by shrieking "I'll tan yer arse!" with a Virginia Slim hanging out the side of their mouth.

Arse. So not cute.
So, here we have an American judging BrE arse in much the same way that many Britons judge the American pronunciation of herb. Even though it's the older pronunciation and the one that is natural to the dialect, it's judged on the basis of class-based assumptions that don't translate over international borders.

In BrE, arse can also a verb. Can't be arsed to means 'can't be bothered to'. I see that another blogger (Troubled Diva) is promoting an acronym to be used when you want to admit you're too lazy to back up the claims you're making on your blog: CBATG, or 'Can't Be Arsed To Google'. Another verbal use of arse, to arse about is vaguely equivalent to AmE goof off. The OED includes some examples of ass being used as a verb in ass about, but this just isn't a common usage in the US. I actually could be arsed to Google that, but the results were contaminated with lots of examples of give a rat's ass about, and I couldn't be arsed to sort those out.

And while we're on our rear-ends, a few other sources of international confusion over the gluteus maximus:

Perhaps I just had a poor vocabulary in my pre-passport days, but it was only after leaving the States that I learn{ed/t} that pratfall literally means 'falling onto the rear-end'. In BrE, prat is known to mean 'buttocks', but is mostly used as an epithet for a dolt or a (orig. AmE) jerk--much as ass is used in AmE.

Americans should be warned strongly against referring to one's fanny while in proximity to British persons. In the UK (and other parts of the English-speaking world), fanny means a woman's genitals. Either hilarity or deep embarassment (depending on the company) ensues when American tourists refer to their fanny packs. In the UK, these items are known as bum bags. Bum is, of course, another BrE word for the buttocks, which is a bit less crude than AmE butt. Thank goodness that Americans gave up on naming babies Fanny in the 1940s, but the Swedish still love it (though they pronounce the 'y' as a fronted 'u'; see Think Baby Names).

Bottom only means 'buttocks' in AmE, and while it can be used in the same way in BrE, a distinction can be made between the front bottom (i.e. the [female] genitals) and the back bottom.

Since I've just hit bottom, I'll make this the end (ha-ha) of this instal(l)ment.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)