English Language Learners meet-up June 27, 2017

I've been volunteering every week at an English language learners meet-up for a long time now. I thought it would be interesting* to record all the vocabulary I taught people today. It's a snapshot of the life of an English learner.

• drizzle
• soothing
• newcomer
• prejudice
• (right) over your head
• period piece
• twilight
• dusk
• dawn
• air quotes
• sarcasm
• irony
• chicxulub
• comet
• solar
• lunar
• eclipse
• meteor shower
• obsessed
• "beat the heat"
• pant
• bless
• shrine
• thumbprint
• lifeguard
• "have a good nose for ___"
• insight
• Independence Day
• the Fourth of July
• cul-de-sac
• dead end
• central

*I was right! It's fascinating!

On Tutoring

I just wrapped up another quarter of volunteer ESL tutoring at Seattle Central College. This was, I think, my fifth quarter, and I still really enjoy it. I like feeling that I can play a role in someone's life, helping to introduce them to English, to Seattle, to the US. I admire these students, who have probably had to overcome far more than I have, and I'm proud to have the chance to help them. Unlike previous quarters, this quarter I had only one student. R is from Somalia. She's peppery. That's the best word I can think of to describe her. She is prone to kvetch, not shy about complaining. But she warmed up to me, and we would laugh as we read together from her workbook or when I quizzed her on past tense forms.

I still think that's one of the toughest things about English. It's just so confounding, the way the language forces you to memorize unguessable exceptions to everyday words, words you'll use and encounter in every English conversation. It seems so mean. R had trouble with this. She couldn't remember some of the most common irregular verbs, and she resorted to a workaround: did leave for left. I told her that didn't sound very natural, but it was good enough for her.

Prepositions in general were difficult, too: I came six o'clock. The truck leave Somalia. She talked him.

Another thing many English learners, including R, have a great deal of trouble with is articles. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that English forbids certain nouns—singular count, or countable, nouns—from appearing naked: *I ate cookie. *We visited museum. *When playing soccer, the man broke finger.

In each of these almost-but-not-quite-English sentences, a singular count noun (cookie, museum, finger) appears without an article. (Actually, what they lack is a determiner, of which articles are one type.) You have to use a determiner with a singular count noun: for instance, I ate the cookie; We visited that museum; When playing soccer, the man broke his finger.

I have seen English learners from all kinds of linguistic backgrounds produce sentences like those, sentences with bare singular count nouns. This particular mistake seems pretty resistant to correction. In my solipsism I always wonder: How can they not hear how... unfinished that sounds? I know that's a dumb reaction. They don't hear it because they haven't yet mastered this arbitrary requirement of English. Just as I haven't yet mastered plenty of arbitrary requirements of, say, Korean (or any arbitrary requirements of Somali).

R and I ended the quarter on a good note. She told me more about her personal story, how she made her sometimes harrowing way to Seattle. And I was reminded, again, of the importance of language. How this person's experiences—all our experiences—are locked away inside until language can send them out into the world.

The Problem with English

Learning Korean, I'm usually so focused on a new system—trying to recognize patterns, remember details, and grasp nuance—that I forget I've already mastered a system: English. I'm volunteer-tutoring again, and my student this quarter is from Somalia. She is struggling with English, and today we went over an aspect of English that must drive English learners crazy: the tense system.

Sure, forming the past tense of most verbs is straightforward: add -ed (which has three pronunciations, of course—"t," "d," and "id"—which is its own small annoyance).

walk > walked
stare > stared
compute > computed

But even though this is the standard method (referred to as "weak" by grammarian-type people), there are a great many verbs that don't fall in line:

sing > sang
swim > swam
give > gave

Imagine that you're trying to learn this system, which we should probably call a "system." Maybe by this point, you've tried to find a pattern and you've thought, "Most verbs add -ed, but with some short verbs with an i, you change the vowel to a." Nice try.

fling > flung
bring > brought
hit > hit

How are you supposed to get your head around the fact that the past tense of catch is caught? "Maybe," you might reason, your desperation growing, "words that end in a -tch sound have these bizarre past tense forms?" Words like teach (taught)?

Sure they do.

reach > reached
search > searched
etch > etched

"Maybe common words are more likely to have irregular ("strong") past tense forms? Please!" After all, look at do (did) and see (saw).

But no.

talk > talked
say > said (strange spelling and slightly off pronunciation, but this is basically say + ed)

I'm not even talking about the bizarre words (be and go) that have past-tense forms that come from a different planet. (This happened through a process called suppletion, where two different words get married and adopt a strict division of labor.) And then there's stand (stood) and make (made) and hold (held).

And what happens when you consider the third principle part of verbs, the past participle? This is the form used in the passive and the so-called perfect forms:

watch > watched > watched (this is the typical “weak” verb pattern)
drink > drank > drunk (three different forms of a “strong” verb)
take > took > taken (three different forms that work differently from drink)
sit > sat > sat (two different forms of a “strong” verb)
run > ran > run (two different forms, but following a different pattern from sit > sat > sat)
put > put > put (only one form!)

The patterns go out the window. The bottom line is that while there are indeed generalizations, they will only get you so far. What you'll have to contend with is memorizing the past tense and past participle forms of tons and tons of verbs.

And what about the places where even native English speakers disagree? What's the past tense of spit?

I'm not suggesting I'm the first person to notice all this. I'm probably more like the billion and first. And there's plenty more to say about the patterns and the exceptions and the exceptions to the exceptions.

Professional intellectual and interesting person Steven Pinker wrote a whole book about this, and it's a real page-turner! (It's actually really good. You should read it. It starts with this phenomenon and ends up getting into the mysteries and wonders of the human mind. Seriously.)

I'm going to try to remember all this when I'm struggling with Korean (that is, always and at all times). Every language has its hurdles, and this is definitely one that English sets up in front of beginners. So the problem with English is really the problem of every language: it's hard to learn it on purpose. When you learn it as a baby, it's easy. Yes, you'll make mistakes, but you won't know they're mistakes, and you'll correct them gradually and automatically, as your knowledge of the system grows and becomes more sophisticated.

Then there's prepositions. And the way you can make what are essentially new verbs with them: do in, take over, buy out... And the proper use of articles! And contractions! And...

That Thing

It's time for another misguided article in the New York Times about language and how terrible Americans are at it.

This go-around the subject is the @ symbol and what the heck we're supposed to call it. What most of us (most of us Americans) call it, of course, is "the at symbol." The reason for this puzzles the piece's author, which seems strange. I mean, wouldn't you think a journalist could spare fifteen seconds to look it up if he didn't already know? It's called "at" not because it's now most often used in email addresses to signify that So-and-so can be found at, say, the New York Times, but because it's short for "at the rate of" and it was originally used to indicate the rate at which something was charged: 2 lbs. of onions @ $0.69/lb. (Did he actually not know this?)

Anyway, back to the part that really bugs me. After going through the adorable names other languages use for @—in Danish it's elephant trunk A, in Hungarian it's worm, and so on—and being reminded that Americans are a bunch of dopes with no vision, no sense of wonder, we get this pronouncement from a real-live linguist:

"It just doesn't seem like it's a habit of ours as English speakers. If you want to go for some sort of very, very general cultural metaphor, we go for function while the other so-called artistic cultures take an immediately holistic view. Instead of 'What do you do and who are you?' it's more, 'What do you appear to be?'"

Where do you even start with this kind of thing?

First off, "Americans go for function" isn't a metaphor. It's a generalization. 

Second, how is it more "holistic" to name things according to their appearance rather than their function? Or was that word chosen only because it would let her fondle a pet prejudice? I think it's clear that she meant those other cultures (the "artistic" ones!) are clever and cute and charming, and boring-old Americans go for the obvious answer.

(The piece also mentions that quotation marks are called "goose eyes" in Danish and "little paws" in Belorussian. To which I say: Now, hold on. Are you telling me Danes and Belorussians never use more prosaic terms to name quotation marks? I don't buy it for one second.)

Even if we ignore the astounding fecundity of American slang and jargon and confine ourselves to typographical symbols and numbers, we easily see that the piece's thesis is absurd. Here are some "holistic" terms English-speakers use for numbers and typographical symbols:

0  Goose egg
† ‡  Dagger and double dagger
!   Bang
…  Dot-dot-dot (not very clever, no, but also not the functional flavor of boring mentioned in the piece)
“”  Curly quotes (then there are also smart quotes and dumb quotes)
•  Bullet
/  Slash (not something functional, like demarcator)
⌘  (the Apple command key symbol) called clover, pretzel, etc. 
And what about dingbat?

None of these are "functional." They all describe the appearance of the symbols—sometimes playfully—and thus put the lie to the idea that Americans are a bunch of by-the-numbers halfwits. And remember, this is looking only at symbols. Imagine the rich—and virtually endless—stream of jargon from sports, medicine, the military, government, and every other trade, profession, hobby, discipline, and subculture you can name. 

This linguistic abandon and invention was something H. L. Mencken hammered hard in his The American Language, from 1919.

[T]he American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. [...] The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that “the creative powers of language are even now not extinct.” 

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech.

And then there's this:

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. […] It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. […] One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English.Bill-board is better than hoarding. Officeholder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.

But that's only H. L. Mencken talking.

You know, it's practically a law: Every generalization about a particular language variety or its speakers is completely wrong. It's true: we call @ by something pretty darn functional. What's your point?

Addendum: I realize now that I might have climbed onto my hobby horse a little prematurely. The piece didn't make a distinction between Americans and other English-speakers. It made a (spurious) distinction between English-speakers and the speakers of other languages. All that Mencken stuff up there is still true—and still worth reading—but not quite as super-duper relevant as I had thought.

Ad Watch: why we take off and don't flap

Let's enjoy another Delta Airlines ad narrated by Donald Sutherland.

This one's called "Take Off: Why We Go," and I think they're trolling us now. 

In case you don't want to waste thirty seconds of your time watching an ad on purpose, here's what we got: on top of blurry footage of bands and blotches of color rushing by, Donald Sutherland steadfastly refuses to flap. It's almost heroic.

What’s happening here is not normal; it’s extraordinary.
Two hundred and nineTy-one people, three hundred and fifTy tons,
one hundred and eighTy-six miles per hour. 

(Blah blah blah. A bunch of heavy breathing about pioneers and covered wagons and the wonderfulness of people who sit on planes.) 

EighTy thousand people now, on the ground, in the air, engines on.
Because there is no stop in us, or you. Only go.

In case you're new here, those capital Ts are my way of representing what we (yes, all of us) call aspirated Ts. This is the sound you hear at the beginning of a word like Tuesday. It's very different from the sound we spell with a t, but which we (well, we Americans) pronounce in a word like water. That sound—the one in water—is a flap, and it's what we would expect to hear in the word eighty. But not in a Delta ad. No, sir and/or madam.

Because that would fail to... It would fail to, well... I don't know why they can't do that, but they can't. Like many others, they seem to believe that flapping sends the Wrong Signal. It indicates a lack of precision and maybe even a lack of being able to fly airplanes. It's all very strange.  

Addendum (9/28/15): I didn't include this in the partial transcript of the ad above, but there's another peculiar thing in here, beyond Donald Sutherland's infuriating refusal to flap. At the 0:20 mark:

You're not sure what's on the other side to that time after you land...

If you're anything like me, you're thinking, "Wha?!" On the other side... to something? Did the completely standard English phrase "the other side of something" change when we weren't looking? (But we're always looking!) I simply don't believe that anyone else anywhere has ever said something like, "The remote? Oh, it's on the other side to the couch." Why are advertisements so weird?

The Danger of Dictionaries Part II: The More Dangering

I've talked about the limitations and absurdity of dictionaries before, and I'm back with a new bunch of examples. These all come from a word-finding app called Spellix. When you find a word in the game, you are (sometimes) shown its definition. Now, I have no idea why the game does this. It's of no use as far as gameplay goes. The definitions have nothing to do with scoring, and as they show up after you enter words, all I can think is that the game designers wanted to throw in a little "educational" component.

Which... okay. Fine. The world can always use more "educational," um... components. But the definitions are so strange as to be doubly useless. (But they did provide an additional dimension of entertainment, so that's something.) Here, take a look and see what I mean.

Each of these is such a perfect bauble of superfluous gibberish that it's almost impressive. Why do these things exist? Why did the game designers spend the time (and—oh god—the money?) to produce these "definitions"? They are of no utility for anything. Where they aren't tautologous (SICKS as people who are sick and SING as, basically, to sing), they are almost sort of accurate, in a well-meaning but fevered way (see CAT and BEEPS). And then you come to OGRES, the definition of which—as they say—isn't even wrong. Everything about this is gloriously, breathtakingly unlike anything of any value. Even if ogre had something to do with numbers, who on earth would describe any number as the sum of 7 and 1? And GEN as an informal term for information? Wh—? I mean—? Why did—?

Word Watch: conserve

Yesterday (9/01/15), I was listening to NPR (infinite geyser of weird pronunciations!), and I heard a correspondent pronounce the word conserve as "conzerve." Repeatedly. It was in a story about the sage grouse and the Endangered Species Act, but that's probably not relevant. Because I'm filled with curiosity about Our World®, I started thinking about this. Was it just a tic, or can we say something more interesting about it?

Conserve is typically (as in, virtually always or maybe actually always) pronounced "conserve." On the surface, this word looks like it's composed of two morphemes (meaningful components): con + serve. After all, English is packed with words that start with con- (contain, conceal, control, confer, and on and on). Let's leave con- and conserve alone for a minute and look at other prefixes that appear to combine with other morphemes to make words in a similar way.

For instance, re-, pre-, and de-. Notice first that these prefixes can have easily understood, "transparent" meanings. re- (can) mean something like again or back, pre- (can) mean before, and de- (can) mean something like negate or rescind. Look what happens, though, when those prefixes are combined with certain one-syllable words starting with s:

re + side = reside
re + serve = reserve
re + sign = resign
re + sort = resort

pre + side = preside
pre + serve = preserve
(Why is there no presign or presort? Beats me.)

de + serve = deserve
de + sign = design
(Deside? Desort? Nope, I guess not.)

In each of these words, the verb that begins with an s-sound when the word stands alone begins with a z-sound when combined with these prefixes. Just like that strange "conzerve" above, right? Not so fast!

Reside, reserve, resign, and resort aren't always pronounced as "rezide," "rezerve," "rezign," and "rezort." When the prefix re- has its "transparent" meaning—that is, when the meaning of the whole word is an obvious, "mathematical" combination of the prefix and the verb—those verbs are pronounced with s-sounds, just like they are when the words stand alone as independent words.

That is, when reside means "to side something again" (or "to install siding again") it's pronounced "re+side" (with an s). When reserve means "to serve again" it's pronounced "re+serve" (with an s). When resign means "to sign again" it's pronounced "re+sign" (with an s). And when resort means "to sort again" it's pronounce "re+sort" (with an s). But in what sense does re- mean again in reside ("to live in")? Now that you mention it, in what sense does side mean side in that word? Where is the sense of signing in resign ("to step down from a position")? Where is the sense of serving in reserve ("to set aside")? They're not there. Those words only look like they're combinations of meaningful parts.

So! It's only when the prefix+verb combo has a meaning that can't be derived by looking at the meanings of its parts that the s-verbs are pronounced with z's. In other words, it's only where there's a distinction between a-word-made-by-combining-parts and a-word-that-only-looks-like-it's-a-combination-of-meaningful-parts that we can sometimes see those s-verbs pronounced with z's.

Let's return to "conzerve." It's clear to me that that word came about on the analogy of what happens to s-verbs when they're combined with prefixes like re-, pre-, and de-. But notice that con- (lacking as it does an easily understood, "transparent" meaning) doesn't lend itself to those tricky pairs (like pre+side vs preside, "to side something ahead of time" vs. "to supervise or lead proceedings"). There's no possible confusion between "conserve" and "conzerve," because con- doesn't really mean anything on its own. Notice also what kinds of things con- typically gets stuck onto. It often only appears to combine with verbs: contain, conceal, control, confer. Tain isn't an independent word. Nor are ceal, trol, and fer. Nor are many of the "words" con-'s cousin com- "attaches" to. Look at compel, compare, combine, compute. con-/com- just doesn't work the same way as re-, pre-, and de-.

And that's why "conzerve" is weird.

Update (9/11/15): I just heard (on NPR, naturally) "rezources." This appears to follow the story I tell above (except "resources" is a noun, so who knows?), where we expect to see a distinction between "resources" and "rezources." Even though the verb resource (meaning something other than "to source something again") would be pronounced "rezource," I still think the noun "rezource" is bizarre.

Lyrics Watch: "Proud Mary"

Breaking news! (Breaking news that's more than 40 years old.) Tina Turner doesn't understand her own signature song!

I'm talking about "Proud Mary," of course, written by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival and released in late 1968 or early '69.

Ike & Tina Turner first started performing the song in 1970, and their "nice and rough" version eventually came to define Tina Turner.

You know how it goes:

Left a good job in the city,
Workin' for the man every night and day.
But I never lost one minute of sleeping'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been.

Only, that's not how Tina Turner usually sings it. She usually says something like, "But I never lost one minute of sleeping—I was worrying about the way things might have been." Which is not only the opposite of the intended meaning; it's also kind of meaningless. (If you don't lose any sleep, it means you're not troubled. You're not worrying. "I never lost sleep; I was worrying about something" is a contradiction.)

I've been thinking about this for a long, long time. How can she have sung this song so many times without singing it the right way? Is that the answer—that she has sung it so many times she's stopped paying attention? She can certainly be forgiven for adopting a less-than-fresh attitude to the number she must have performed a thousand times. (And we all know what she means. We don't really listen too closely, either.) But! Her strange wording goes back to the 70s. She's been singing the song like this from the beginning! (See 1:30.)

But then in this 1982 performance she does it right! (See 3:05.)

Beyoncé got it wrong in her rendition at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Tina Turner in 2005. Which I guess isn't surprising; she was emulating Tina Turner, after all. (See 1:25.)

Am I missing something? Does it actually make sense the way she (usually) sings it, and I just can't see it?

Flap Songs 2: Getting Better at Flapping

It's the third flap-related post in a row, and this is the timeliest one yet, involving, as it does, a snappy little number from 1967.



So here are the lyrics to "Getting Better," from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, presented in my usual format (where D represents a flap and T represents an aspirated t):

It's geTing beTer all the time 

I used to get maD at my school 

(No I can't complain)

The teachers that taught me weren't cool

(No I can't complain)

You're holding me down

(Ah-ahh)

Turning me round

(Ohh)

Filling me up with your rules

(Ooo)

I've got to admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

A liDle beTer all the time

(It couldn't get no worse)

I have to admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

It's geTing beTer since you've been mine

Me used to be angry young man

Me hiDing me heaD in the sand

You gave me the word

I finally heard

I'm doing the best thaD I can

I've got to admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

A liDle beTer all the time

(It couldn't get no worse)

I have to admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

It's geTing beTer since you've been mine

GeTing so much beTer all the time

It's geTing beTer all the time

(BeTer, beTer, beTer)

It's geTing beTer all the time

(BeTer, beTer, beTer)

I used to be cruel to my woman, I beaT her

And kept her apart from the things that she loved

Man, I was mean, buD I'm changing my scene

And I'm doing the best thaD I can

(Ooo)

I admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

A liTle beTer all the time

(It couldn't get no worse)

Yes, I admit it's geDing beTer

(BeTer)

It's geDing beTer since you've been mine

GeTing so much beTer all the time

It's geTing beTer all the time

(BeTer, beTer, beTer)

It's geTing beTer all the time

(BeTer, beTer, beTer)

GeTing so much beTer all the time

I’m only an amateur flap detective, so there might be a lot more to this business than I’ve been assuming. But considering the post-lexical nature of flapping—the rule’s exceptionlessness—I don’t know what to make of all those places where Paul or whoever is flapping. I would have expected to see “geTing beTer” (each word with an aspirated t) or “geDing beDer” (each word with a flap), and not this hybrid “geDing beTer” flapping. Does it reflect the underlying tensions and cultural upheaval of the turbulent ’60s? The pull between established norms and exciting new possibilities of expression? No, I don't think that's it. But what, then? I know that in my speech, my flapping isn't inconsistent like this is. This is all over the place, a freewheeling ecstasy of unpredictable flapping!

Ad Watch: no flap left behind

And here's another one. On the heels of the "rotten kitten" ad comes this spot, known in the biz as "No Bag Left Behind."

The script:

Traveling can feel like one big mystery.
You’re never quite sure what is coming your way.
Though when you’ve got an entire company who knows that the fewest cancellations and the most on-time flights are nothing if we can’t your things there, too…
It’s no wonder more people choose Delta than any other airline.

Which... fine. I mean, I'm not sure it makes much sense. (When there's a company that knows it needs to get passengers' luggage where it's supposed to go, it's no wonder Delta is the most... popular airline?) The real issue here—surprise!—is that nonflapped t in "You're never quite sure whaT is coming your way."

What TIS coming your way?

What is the significance of this nonflapped t? All this time I've been assuming it's deployed to convey some combination of authority and precision, a kind of stand-in for British propriety. Which, of course, is silly. How does speaking in an artificial, stilted way convey any of those things? And if they wanted a British spokesperson, why didn't they just hire one?

Of course, Donald Sutherland has made a career out of this kind of phony-baloney o-ver-e-nun-ci-a-tion (see also Fishburne, Laurence), so why not him? 

Ad Watch: the rotten kitten

Before I quit this blog and devote myself full-time to the study of flapping (and the denunciation of flap refuseniks), let's look at this commercial that demonstrates a high degree of flaplack.

Here's the script:

I was getting into my car one morning when I heard…
<meow>
It sounded like a kitten was trapped in my car, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Neither could my husband. And neither could the fire department.
<meow>
We couldn’t lure it out. So we decided to drive very slowly to Les Schwab.
The team took my car apart—“Oh! Here he is”—and rescued the kitten. Today’s he’s alive and well and spoiled rotten.

When you watch this thing, the word kitten practically attacks you through the screen. (That is, kiTTen, with that t aspirated, resulting in a pronunciation that is thoroughly at odds with the woman's American English. She also pronounces rotten as roTTen.)

As always with the things I dredge up here, there is plenty of ordinary flapping—I was geDing into my car one morning, I couldn’t find iD anywhere, so we deciDed to drive very slowly—along with the weirdness.

Now, to be fair (and obsessively specific), this is a matter of too-much-aspiration instead of not-enough-flapping. Kitten and rotten don't have flaps; they have unreleased t's and syllabic n's. But I think the impulse that leads to roTTen and kiTTen is the same as the impulse that causes people to run screaming from flaps.

But when the film crew was recording the story, what did they think of that nonstandard kitten and rotten? Was it intentional? Did they ask her to say those words that way? (Why would they do that?) I tried to find other audio of the woman whose testimony the commercial was built around, but I couldn't. I dug up stories on local TV about the story, but I couldn't find her flapping or not flapping. I am assuming she doesn't typically avoid flaps. But who knows? And more to the point, who cares?

The S-Word and the Other N-Word

A few months ago, a news item caught my eye. It was about efforts to remove the word squaw from place names in Oregon. (Here's a list of proposed changes.) Similar efforts have gone on—and continue to go on—in other states.

For ages, before white people got to it, squaw wasn't a problematic word. It didn't refer to or have anything to do with copulation or defecation, for instance, the two things most likely to spawn euphemism as well as insult. It doesn't appear to have been a charged word.

According to my exhaustive* research, squaw can be traced back to a Proto-Algonquian word, *eθkweːwa (something like "ethkwaywa"), which meant woman. This developed into various forms in Proto-Algonquian's daughter languages, for instance iskwēw (Cree), xkwē (Lanape), ekwēwa (Shawnee), and ikwe (Ojibwe). And in Massachusett, the language the Europeans first made contact with in that part of the world, the cognate was squa. Oh, let's just go ahead and spell it squaw. This was first put into print in the early 1600s and was said to mean woman.

In time, when used by white people, squaw came to belong to a category of words we tend to find offensive—words that name female members of racial or ethnic groups. Because words like these—like negress and Jewess—are used within contexts of bigotry, misogyny, and racial hatred, they're all suspect, and they've fallen from favor. They now sound not only offensive but also archaic. They are dehumanizing, almost... zoological. It's hard to imagine even the most racist racist using them with a straight face, although I bet there are plenty who are game to try. In light of that, it's unsurprising that squaw would come to be offensive, even if it started life innocuously.

All of which makes me wish people argued against the word on those grounds. The case against squaw doesn't sound hard to make: it belongs to the category of racially defined gendered terms we have largely rejected, and I'm sure it had acquired an unsavory history as a racist, sexist slur. Instead, the arguments for ditching the word seem to involve falsehoods about the word's origins, and that's the part of the story that bugs me.

Apparently, squaw's humble beginnings were unremarkable until 1973, when Literature of the American Indian introduced the idea that the word is actually derived from the Mohawk word ojiskwa (or something like that), meaning vagina. Then, in 1992, a Native American activist told Oprah (!) that the word was Algonquian for vagina. The problem is that Mohawk isn't an Algonquian language. It's Iroquois. Algonquian and Iroquois are completely separate language families. (Picture Russian and Turkish and you'll see two languages from similarly different language families.) And the white people who first heard and recorded squaw were in contact with speakers of Algonquian languages. And still, if you ignore all that, all you're left with is... a coincidence. Two words in wholly different languages with similarish shapes and related meanings. That's not much to build a case on. It's not even circumstantial evidence. False friends, as they're called, are surprisingly common. Words that look alike don't always have a common origin. 

(You can pick any two languages and easily find loads of words that sound kind of similar and mean kind of similar things, even when the two languages have no historical or "genetic" connection. Let's do an experiment. I'm going to pick two languages from a list. Hang on. OK. Basque. That's interesting. Basque is an isolate, meaning it's not known to be related to any other language. To go with that, I picked Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken far away from Spain. You wouldn't expect to find many similarities, except for "cultural" terms like, say, telephone or taxi. So, after a few minutes with Google translate—of course this isn't authoritative; it's Google translate—I found a pair of false friends: Basque txakur and Bengali kukura, both meaning dog. Boy, is this case ever closed! A smashing success! Drinks for everyone!)

Regardless, this argument—that squaw is a crude, sexualized slur—is now so widely believed that it has taken on the kind of truth that only articles of faith enjoy. Regardless of its actual falseness, it has become true enough to render the word taboo. And so now, it has to go.

It reminds me of the controversy around "the other n-word" when it was used by an aide to the mayor of Washington, DC, in 1999.

As far as I can tell, the mayor's aide was guilty only of having a tin ear. True, the word he used has no racist pedigree, but how could anyone use it and not immediately hear within it a word that, to many of us, is unspeakable? The word niggardly—I have to admit that I'm uncomfortable even typing it—has been contaminated. You can mourn that, as the future-fearing language prigs usually do when word meanings shift and languages rub up against changing cultures. But it's not like we don't have other, perfectly serviceable words at our disposal for meeting the same purpose, ranging from the blunt to the flowery: cheap, stingy, tightfisted, miserly, penny-pinching, parsimonious, and penurious, to name only a few. I want to make sure this is very clear. I assume most English speakers don't even know this term. But, apart from the way the word sounds, it has nothing to do with that famous racist slur. The similarity is nothing but coincidence.

(In researching this piece, I found a Wikipedia article about the DC mayor's aide's use of the word—and many other peoples', too. Apparently, there was something in the air, and the word was thrown around—and objected to—like never before.)

No one will miss the other n-word. As rare as it was, it didn't even bring its own nuance to the table. Or, at least, none I'm aware of. Although it's an innocent bystander, lexical collateral damage, guilty only by association, I still say good riddance.

*I mean not exhaustive.

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.

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.

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.

Flap Songs

I never realized how interested in flaps and flapping I am. I've been collecting things like this for a while, it turns out. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess. There's just something about this one little speech sound that seems to open a window into what we're doing when we talk. Or in this case, when we sing. Right now I want to talk about songs with inconsistent flapping. (You all know what I'm talking about by now, don't you? See this post about Flaps and NPR for some background.)

On the Rolling Stones 1978 single "Shattered" we get a whole lecture on the sociological essence of flapping. Or... something. Throughout the song, Mick flaps his t's. Shattered, tattered, battered, chitter chatter, party, dirty, I can't give it away, what a mess, does it matter?: he flaps in all of these, like the New Yorker he's personifying. (In the whole piece, I counted one place where Mick doesn't flap: listen at :58 and you'll hear the repeated Yiddish shmatte shmatte shmatte! with aspirated t's.) But the backing vocals (by Ronnie Wood and... whoever?) are a different story. These guys stubbornly refuse to flap. It can first be heard clearly around :22 and really stands out around 2:40. It's as though they're holding on to their Englishness, aspirating t's all over the place, while Mick goes native, belting out his ambivalent ode to the Big Apple right over them. The result is so discordant, almost like they're singing two different songs at once.

Everything is ordinary, flap-wise, in Heart's blistering 1977 classic rock standard, "Barracuda." Until the 1:30 mark, that is, when Ann Wilson doesn't flap the d in barracuda! That is a full-on d! (Compare this with the flapped barracudas at :40 and 2:48.) I know! That d always strikes me as a jolt of childlike innocence in the center of a scathing takedown. It's... Well, it's pretty remarkable.

















Now, I don't know what to say about "The Authority Song," John C. Mellencamp's 1983 anthem to underdogism. In the chorus Mellencamp tells us, "I fight authority; authority always wins" 13 times. And, strangely, in seven of those instances, he aspirates the t in the first authority, but flaps the t as expected in the second. (In other words, using the same simplified transcription I used in the NPR post linked to above, a little more than half the time, he says, "I fight authoriTy; authoriDy always wins.") It's like he's fighting himself. Fascinating. Listen to all the pairs and see for yourself. :42 (one aspirated t, one flap), :48 (again, one of each), 1:00 (both authorities are flapped), 1:37 (one of each), 1:43 (one of each), 1:56 (both flapped), 2:35 (one of each), 2:42 (both flapped), 2:54 (both flapped), 3:00 (one of each), 3:06 (both flapped), 3:18 (both flapped), and 3:25 (one of each).

I don't know how everyone doesn't hear this stuff. I can't not hear it. It jumps out at me and says, "Listen up!"

Addendum: Here's a fun article about analyzing the Southern Californian "punk rock" accent. Tip of the tongue to Torque for the link.