One Syllable, Three Pronunciations

Korean likes to keep you on your toes.

Take the syllable spelled 의. Rivaling the absurdities of English's spelling conventions, this syllable has three pronunciations depending on... stuff:

• 의 is "ee" when at the end of a word and not a separate morpheme (as in 강의, kangeui [kang-ee] "lecture")
• 의 is "eh" when it's the possessive marker (as in 집의 옆, chibeui yeop [chibeh yeop] "the side of the house")
• 의 is (more or less) "uh-ee" when it's not at the end of a word (as in 의사, euisa [uh-eesa] "doctor")

So. Thanks?

Expensive Onions: more Korean backwardness

I've talked before about how, at the deepest levels of its structure, Korean is like mirror English, built in a way that seems backward to an English speaker. Today I want to mention some trivial—but still interesting—examples of "backwardness."

Look at the English words onion and green onion. The way the English lexicon works, big round onions are basic. Those things are called by one simple word: onion. The long-stemmed type of onion that isn't round and bulbous is treated as a special variety of that larger category: a green onion. It won't surprise you to learn that Korean does it the other way around.

In Korean, the long-stemmed green thing is called 파 (p'a), and the big, round thing is 양파 (yangp'a). It's backwards! The Korean lexicon treats the long-stemmed thing as the default, the basic exemplar of the category, and it's the big, round thing that's a different version of that. (It would be like English saying "chive" and "big, round chive." In other words: chaos.)

It's the same thing with the words for "expensive" and "inexpensive." (There might very well be hundreds—thousands!—of examples like this. These are the only two I can think of at the moment. With a bigger vocabulary I'm sure I could come up with more.) In English the basic state is expensiveness, and we modify it to negate it: in + expensive. Korean is the other way around: the more basic form is 싼 (ssan "inexpensive"), and the marked form is 비싼 (pissan "expensive"). So it's like having the basic form in English be cheap, with the standard way of referring to something that isn't cheap as uncheap.

I'm not pretending that this means anything, other than that different languages encode these things differently. I don't know whether this different encoding actually leads to different attitudes or perceptions—I assume it doesn't—but I still think it's interesting.

Ad Watch: vomiting and linguistic insecurity

Auvi-Q (terrible name) is an epi-pen manufactured by Sanofi (also not a great name). This isn't another post about questionable naming practices. Instead, it's about my other hobby horse: Americans' linguistic insecurity and those fascinating flaps! (If you're new here, a flap is a speech sound that seems to give some Americans fits. Here is my first post about flaps. This one was good, too.)

In the ad, a "doctor" explains all the benefits of the product and cautions us about its side effects. It's all standard stuff. Like a typical American, she flaps when flapping is expected, giving us the following over the course of her spiel (I'm using my same-old system for representing flaps [D] and aspirated t's [T]):

• auDo-injector
• supporDive therapy
• aD increased risk
• ouDer thigh
• heart-relaDed symptoms
• sweaDing
• anxieDy
• diabeDes

All of these are garden-variety pronunciations in American English.

But then, toward the end of the spot, she throws us a curveball, cautioning us that the product can cause... vomiTing. Not vomiDing, the way the word is typically pronounced, but vomiTing, the way it's never pronounced. Not in the US, at any rate.

So, why? Where did this come from? Is it possible the TV doctor did this by accident? (Have you ever pronounced a word that way by accident?) Was it deliberate? (Why on earth would you call attention to vomiting this way? Were things seeming too American-casual and thereby failing to inspire I-must-ask-my-physician-about-this-medicine confidence?) What does it all mean?

For some outrageous reason, this ad is not available on YouTube. So, you'll have to content yourself with watching it at this link.

(If anyone out there can help me wrestle Blogger into line, I would really appreciate it. Getting stuff formatted the way I want it—with consistent fonts and type sizes—seems impossible, all the "convenient" controls notwithstanding. I swear this is going to drive me nuts. It doesn't seem to matter what font or type size I select—Blogger will make things look however it likes.)

The Thanks People

I realize that this post might be tricky. It's all because of the sorry state of English orthography. We have different sounds referred to (by weirdos) as interdental fricatives. These are sounds made with the tip of the tongue between the teeth: the th sounds. Wait. Sounds? We have more than one of these interdental fricatives? Sure we do: a voiced and a voiceless interdental fricative. Just like we have two labiodental fricatives, for instance (sounds made with the upper teeth against the lower lip)—that is, v and f—we have two th sounds. The problem is that we have only one way of writing those two sounds. We don't even have single letters for those sounds. We're forced to use ungainly combinations of letters. But we used to be able to write them with ease. Say hello to the edh and the thorn.

ð This is edh. It represented the voiced interdental fricative (the first sound in therefore).

þ This is thorn. It represented the voiceless interdental fricative (the first sound in theory).

If we only still used the edh and the thorn, this post would be smooth sailing, and I'd be able to explain my next superinteresting point more easily.

The voiceless sound (the thorn) is found (among other places) at the beginning of nouns (thistle, thumb, thalamus), verbs (think, throw, thump), and adjectives (thin, thorough, thermal). (These sounds don't come only at the beginnings of words—see athlete, filthy, and myth.)

But—typically—the voiced one (the edh) is found in pronouns of all kinds (they, them, this) and more strictly functional words (though, there, and the).

Still not sure you hear the difference? Just compare thigh (which starts with a voiceless th) to thy (which differs from it only by that voiced th).

The first group is sometimes called open-class words, and the second is sometimes called closed-class words. Open-class words are far more numerous and new members are brought in all the time. When new words are borrowed from other languages or coined from scratch, which happens all the time, they're usually nouns, verbs, or adjectives. New conjunctions, articles, or pronouns don't take root very often. 

I have noticed that some people pronounce the word thanks with a voiced (and not a voiceless) interdental fricative That is, they're saying it with an edh. Not only is this just, well... strange, but it's also bucking the tide when it comes to the way English likes to use these two sounds. Thanks is an open-class word, and finding an edh at the beginning of an open-class word is highly unusual. So the edh-thankers are really blazing a trail. The edh-thankers I've encountered haven't shared any obvious trait: they have been of different ages, genders, and regions. It's like watching a new genetic mutation cropping up. Will it spread? Is it dangerous? (Does it have any connection to the distinction between edh-with—picture the word with pronounced like the beginning of the word wither—and thorn-with?)

Full disclosure: I am a thorn-with person. I say with with a voiceless interdental. But the edh-with people... They're out there. Watching. Waiting.

The 40th TOPIK: an unhappy update

The scores are in for the 40th TOPIK.

I got 110.

Level 1.

Better than I thought I'd done.

Worse than I wanted to do.

Way worse than the practice tests suggested I'd do.

Pharmaceutical Madness

The pharmaceutical industry is huge. I'm going to say it's probably a $170 trillion business. (Actually, I just looked it up and it's "only" a $300 billion business. Close enough.) When they lovingly craft a new drug and the justification for prescribing and consuming it, there's a lot at stake. Which is why I don't understand why so many drug names sound like they were cooked up in the Star Wars Naming Laboratory.

I know there are a lot of considerations here: names have to be distinct enough from other names so as not to be easily confused, generic names have to be strange enough so as to be less likely to become dominant after patents (or whatever) expire and the name brand is no longer the only game in town, and names have to be crafted so as to trigger the right kinds of associations in people's minds. That's a lot of tightropes to walk, which leads to some real naming disasters. (OK, so I guess I do understand how these awful names come to be. I just don't believe they can be this bad. OK, I guess I do believe it. I just don't approve of it.)

Here are 10 of my current "favorite" drug names, along with what I think they'd be better names for.

1. Aubagio: Reno, Nevada's hottest daytime-hours-only video poker lounge
2. Harvoni: a resort fully enclosed within the Mall of America
3. Sklice: soft drink made "With the Goodness of Skin!"
4. Qnasl: social media platform and app that tracks and ranks celebrity nose jobs
5. Foltx: Norwegian death metal band (original spelling: Føltx)
6. Frova: female hobbit wisely cut from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
7. Krystexxa: up-and-coming porn star (generic name: Lorna Mustin)
8. Trulicity: real estate gossip website (it features Trulisitings®, instead of listings)
9. Duavee: teenage pitching phenom currently playing Memphis AAA ball
10. Xgeva: exercise equipment targeting muscles of the chin and cheeks

English Pizza Challenge

I'm not familiar with this guy, but I gather that he's a professional funny Japanese guy who makes Internet movies, at least some of them involving various challenges, as in this one. Here, he's ordering pizza over the phone, in English. (I guess they're in the US.) He's accepted a number of missions: order particular pizzas, decline any offers of something to drink, give his address, and so on. A chyron in the corner helpfully tracks his progress.

His English isn't so hot, and he struggles here and there. But through it all, he never loses his smile and go-getter optimism. I won't spoil the thing for you by letting you know whether he successfully completes his tasks, but I'm not sure that's even the point. For me, it's watching him do something most of us find really difficult—trying to communicate in a foreign language you don't have proficiency in—and just plugging away at it. When he doesn't understand what the pizza guy on the other end of the line is asking, he just plows ahead, hoping it'll all work out. And I should say: the pizza guy is very patient, in keeping with my observation that Americans—for all our vaunted xenophobia—are pretty decent when it comes to helping out people who are having a rough time with English. 

It reminds me my experience tutoring ESL students at the community college. These people—all adults—came from all over the world. Some of the students had a solid command of English. You could tell right away they weren't native speakers, but they had no trouble holding a conversation in English. Others, even though they might have been living in Seattle for years, needed a lot of practice. But there they were, studying, chatting, plugging away. I had a lot of admiration for them. 

This pizza challenge also makes me imagine how I would do ordering over the phone in Korea. It would not be pretty.

Learning Korean 3: stumbling blocks (the honorific and politeness systems)

Apart from the things that make learning any language as an adult difficult—the vocabulary, the unfamiliar speech sounds and their novel combinations, the different ways the grammar encodes simple ideas, the unending frustration of having to work at something that is effortless and automatic in our native languages—what is it that makes learning Korean difficult for me?

(Probably the hardest thing is listening comprehension. But this isn't specific to Korean. When we hear our native language, we recognize and process the speech signal almost instantaneously, retrieving words from a mental lexicon and deconstructing sentences in a split second. When I hear actual Korean, I struggle to match up what my ears catch with what I know about the language. It's too fast—my ears aren't nearly fast enough—and words change shape when they're shoved next to each other in people's mouths. Again, that's not a Korean thing. That's a speech thing. I think of myself as someone with a great ear: I'm "good at accents," I can easily identify voices, I'm sensitive to slight differences in speech. I studied phonetics in grad school. This is supposed to be my thing. But when I hear Korean—even simple Korean I should have no trouble with—I just sit there staring dumbly. My reading comprehension, though just at a beginner level, leaves my listening comprehension in the dust. I'm really self-conscious about this. Now that I think of it, I had the same problem with Russian in college. I enjoyed learning Russian grammar, and my vocabulary and pronunciation were pretty good. But when I was faced with an actual person speaking Russian to me—or at me, as it often felt—my ears just couldn't keep up. One of my professors was so eager to keep me taking Russian she told me to concentrate on learning grammar and vocabulary. "So, you won't talk. That's OK.")

One thing that doesn't contribute much to the challenge is hangeul, the ingenious Korean writing system. It's just an alphabet, after all—only 33 symbols. Yes, the letters are arranged into units in a way that takes a little getting used to, but an alphabet isn't too tough to learn. 

But Korean does have a number of features that cause me a lot of problems. (I'm ignoring the not inconsiderable fact that, at all levels, Korean is structured in such a way that renders it a backward English.) The one I want to talk about now is Korean's systems of marking deference and politeness.

The Honorific System

Korean requires (polite, respectful) speakers to employ different verb forms, different case markers, and even completely different words when speaking to those worthy of a heightened level of respect. If I ask my friend about renovations going on at his house, I will use the word 집 (chip "house"), but if I ask about, say, the renovations undertaken by my math professor*, I have to use the word 댁 (taek). There's a whole list of word-pairs like this, covering (mostly) highly personal matters, like age, name, birthday, health, and eating.

Then there are different words for things like giving and meeting with someone, depending on their status or the level of deference due to them. If I want to say, "I gave my friend a book," that might be 전 친구한테 책을 줬어요 (Cheon ["I"] chinguhante ["to my friend"] chaegeul ["a book"] jweosseoyo ["gave"]). But "I gave my grandfather a book" could be 전 하라버님께 책을 드렸어요 (Cheon ["I"] harabeonimkke ["to my grandfather"] chaegeul ["a book"] deuryeosseoyo ["gave"]). The two things that make this frustrating are 1) there's a different dative marker depending on the status of the recipient of the action (한테 for regular-old people vs. 께 for those deserving special respect), and 2) there's a different verb entirely! When you give something to your friend or someone of your social level, you use 주다 (juda)—which shows up here as 줬어요 (jweosseoyo)—but for those you wish to honor, you use 드리다 (deurida)—which shows up here as 드렸어요 (deuryeosseoyo). Actually, 드리다 doesn't really mean "give"—it means "give to someone to whom you show respect"! (Maybe 드리다 should be translated as "bestow upon," which would at least indicate its heightened sense.)

And when there isn't a special verb, Korean requires you to stick in the particle (으)시 ([eu]shi) when speaking about someone you wish to (or need to) honor. To say "The dog lives in the city" I could say, 개가 도시에 살아요 (Kaega toshie sarayo). But if I want to say, "The president of the company lives in the city," that would be 사장님께서 도시에 사세요 (Sajangnimkkeseo toshie saseyo). It might not look like that special honorific particle (으)시 is in that president-of-the-company example, but it is. It just helpfully changed shape. So that everything would be just that much more complicated.

Wrapping your head around this is a challenge. Remembering when to use different vocabulary and how to form the honorific forms of regular verbs takes real effort. For an American English speaker, this whole system goes against the grain. For one thing, English grammar (that is, the entire system of rules and patterns underlying the language) just doesn't do this stuff. While English speakers (of course) modify their speech depending on context—you probably wouldn't speak to your friend's elderly grandmother the same way you'd speak to your friend—we don't have anything that matches the systematic nature of this kind of code-switching. And while it would be laughable to claim that America is a society without class distinctions (ha ha?), I think it is true that American customs—in general—speak to a certain (perhaps illusory) egalitarianism. It's not unusual to call your boss by his or her first name. We sometimes like to pretend class distinctions don't exist. Calling attention to or emphasizing someone's (or even one's own) status can seem impolite.

So that's hard. Korean requires you to pay attention to this and make judgments about it, if only to select the correct words and case endings and verb forms. But it gets worse.

It Gets Worse

As tricky as this can be, the whole thing is complicated by the fact that there's a separate set of considerations and forms overlaid on top of the honorific system: the system of politeness. (Or maybe it's best thought of as formality? Or social distance? Or I'm not really sure what? You might need to grow up inside this to really get it.)

Whereas the honorific system deals with your relationship to the person you're talking about, the politeness system deals with your relationship to the person you're talking to. If you're talking to a stranger or someone of higher status (and maybe in certain formal situations?), your sentences must end in -요 (yo). That particle doesn't really mean anything, exactly. It merely signals or acknowledges that the nature of your discourse is of a certain degree of formality or social distance.

(There are other sentence-ending markers, too, corresponding to yet other relationships between speaker and listener, but I think I understand them even less. And enough is enough, already.)

The part that's especially annoying is that the honorific markers and the politeness marker are independent of each other. You can make well-formed sentences with every combination of deference and formality: 1) talking about an "honored" person to a person with whom you share a degree of social distance, 2) talking about an "honored" person to a person with whom you have a more intimate relationship, 3) talking about someone who isn't "honored" to a person with whom you share a degree of social distance, and 4) talking about someone who isn't "honored" to a person with whom you have a more intimate relationship. 

So! If our situation involves me talking to someone about someone, say, traveling —여행하다 (yeohaenghada)—the verb will take four different forms, depending on who I'm talking about and who I'm talking to.

1) Talking about my math professor* to my friend's parents: 여행하세요 (yeohaenghaseyo)

2) Talking about my math professor* to my buddy: 여행하셔 (yeohaenghasyeo)

3) Talking about my buddy to my friend's parents: 여행해요 (yeohaenghaeyo)

4) Talking about my buddy to my other buddy: 여행해 (yeohaenghae)

You know, looking at all this, I don't feel quite so bad about having trouble with the whole mess.

*My Math Professor

No, I don't have a math professor. And, yes, the point in question holds for professors in other disciplines, too.

Americans on Italy: more linguistic insecurity

On Travel with Rick Steves May 31, 2015 (I'm only now getting around to posting this), Steves was talking about life in Italy and Italian politics with an Italian correspondent and an American expert on Italy.

Steves pronounced Italy the way (not quite all!) Americans pronounce it—as though it were spelled iddaly. It's thoroughly unremarkable to say it that way. That's just how Americans say it. (If you are American, try it. If you're not American, take a five-minute break.)

The Italian guy pronounced the name of his country as a sort of cross between the American way and the Italian way, Italia (iTalia, if I use my same-old system for representing this stuff). His hybrid (or maybe just British?) pronunciation yielded iTaly, with the stress on the first syllable.

The American Italy expert insisted on pronouncing the name of the country the same way: iTaly.

Why did that woman refuse to say iddaly? Could it be because she was in the (radio) presence of an Italian—a "genuine" expert on Italy—and this triggered the American fear of sounding unsophisticated? Note that her pronunciation doesn't just avoid a (supposedly crude, unworldly, childish) flap. It inserts an aspirated t where we never see them: right after a stressed vowel. She ended up with a word that's neither Italian nor natural-sounding American English.

Everyone: there's nothing wrong with iddaly. (Or with Italy. I'm sure it's lovely. I've never been.)

Yes, I talk about flapping a lot. See the NPR post about this and my post about flaps in music.