John Wells’s phonetic blog

Ian Bekker writes from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

A student of mine is working on the realisation of CURE in South African English. We are coming to the tentative conclusion that a current locus of change is the replacement of CURE by NURSE (with a few exceptions like ‘sure’ which are often said with /o:/ and a few others which mutate into GOOSE).
I’m aware that there are similar developments elsewhere; in particular parts of the US and East Anglia. What seems different, however, is that the use of NURSE extends (we think) to non-post-palatal or palato-alveolar contexts. Thus while it’s not particularly surprising to find ‘pure’ pronounced as [pjɞː] (using ɞː [— my symbol, JCW, replacing Ian’s @: —] to indicate the rounded SAE NURSE) we seem to be finding pronunciations like [twɞː] for ‘tour’ and [pwɞː] for ‘poor’.

He asks whether I have come across anything similar elsewhere, to which the answer is no.

If these pronunciations are verified, they would represent a development comparable to the change in the NEAR diphthong from ɪə to jɜː that is familiar from South Welsh English (and treated by Daniel Jones as an RP possibility in EPD, an option dropped by Gimson when he took over as editor).
This represents merely a switch from a falling (diminuendo) to a rising (crescendo) diphthong, and is thus a very natural kind of development. The syllabicity moves from the first, close segment to the second, mid one. A diphthong is recast as a semivowel plus strong vowel.
The putative South African change is structurally identical, but back rather than front.
I wonder if it extends to words such as jury. Presumably not: I imagine it cannot apply after velar or palatoalveolar consonants.
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This blog will now take a month’s break. Next posting: 19 March.

We’re used to the Japanese habit of decorating t-shirts and the like with meaningless combinations of words of English. The purpose is evidently not so much to convey any overt slogan or message as rather to give a general impression of being fashionable, modern, international and in tune with the globalized times.
Now we may be seeing the same thing in reverse, and I keep noticing it on the streets in London. A British clothing company, Superdry, has devised a logo that contains what appears to be Japanese text above the company name. There are four kanji (Chinese characters) followed by four parenthesized hiragana (Japanese syllabic symbols). The hiragana read shinasai.
You see this logo in a prominent place on the clothes and accessories sold by this company.

Is it real Japanese, or is it fake?

I asked Masaki Taniguchi.
He tells me that 極度 kyokudo ˈkjokudo means ‘extremely’ and 乾燥 kansō ˈkansoː ‘dry’, so the kanji are meaningful and say the same as the English name. (He thinks, though, that 超 chō tɕoː would be a better translation for ‘super’ than 極度.)

But the hiragana bit, しなさい ɕinasai, seems pointless, because it is no more than the imperative ‘do!’.

Harry Campbell draws my attention to a newspaper report to the effect that

The company which owns a care home where an Oxford teenager died after being bathed in scolding water will be sentenced today.

He comments,

It’s my impression there are people for whom “scalding” and “scolding” are homophones, both having (I think) /ɒ/.

I think this is probably correct. There are certainly varieties of English English in which there is great confusion among back vowels before dark l.

It is well known that words like salt can have either ɔː or ɒ. Although I have continued to prioritize ɔː in LPD I have to confess that the most recent poll I did on salt showed a sharp trend of change over time in the direction of ɒ. The youngest age group voted 71% for the LOT vowel. Only 34% of my own age group voted that way, which accounts for my bias in favour of THOUGHT in this and similar words (i.e. words in which the vowel is followed by l and a voiceless consonant — alter, false, fault, waltz etc.).
Where the consonant after the lateral is voiced I believe there is less variation. Nevertheless I recall that my mother pronounced scald as skɒld, which was odd because she had the expected ɔː in bald, alder etc. (Why, even as a child, did I think her pronunciation of scald was odd?)
In this position before l and a consonant some people also have ɒ where RP traditionally has GOAT (əʊ, including for some its positional variant ɒʊ). That is presumably how scold can come to be a homophone of scald for some. This can apply to the vowel before final l, too. One sometimes hears -ˈtɒl for traditional -ˈtəʊl (-ˈtɒʊl) in extol, and similarly in bolster.

I play a musical instrument called a melodeon. One of the well-known designs of melodeon is Hohner’s poker-work design, with side panels imitating wood decorated by burning the motif in with a hot poker. On the melodeon website I have seen this called polka-work (and even polkerwork). I wonder if anyone really has polka and poker as homophones, as this seems to suggest. For me they’re ˈpɒlkə and ˈpəʊkə respectively. I think there may be a different explanation: contamination from the spelling of folk fəʊk, plus of course the fact that the melodeon is a very suitable folk instrument for playing polkas on.

I have been continuing to look through the “Languages for the 21st century” booklets included with last week’s issues of the Guardian newspaper.
Of all the things one might possibly say about Portuguese pronunciation, which are the most important?
Opinions can legitimately differ on this point. But I would claim that among the very least important is the fact that the writing system uses the letters k, w, and y only in foreign words, despite their being recognized as “official letters” of the Portuguese alphabet. Yet that is what the treatment in the Guardian’s Brazilian Portuguese booklet starts with and wastes valuable space on.
If we have to focus on spelling rather than pronunciation, you might expect some comment on the accented vowel letters that Portuguese orthography does include, and what (other than stress) they imply in terms of reading rules: ã, ê, õ; á, à, â, é, ó, ô. There’s nothing in the booklet beyond the misleading statement that ã is “as in ‘rang’”. (Actually it represents [ɐ̃], nasalized [ɐ], and the closest model in English would be the first vowel in money ˈmʌni.)
What would I prioritize if I had to write one short paragraph on Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation? I would say that in very general terms it is similar to that of Spanish or Italian (since the reader is likely to have some knowledge of these). However, I would say that it is important to note that vowels in unstressed syllables undergo reduction, posttonic e becoming i and o becoming u. (This makes the general auditory impression very different from that of Spanish.) I would draw attention to the nasalized vowels and diphthongs and do my best to describe what they sound like: e.g. vão is like English vow, but with nasal escape. Yes, I would tell the reader about the spellings lh, nh, x, standing for [ʎ, ɲ, ʃ] respectively, and would attempt to describe the first two. I would say that in Brazil the spellings t and d before i and e usually stand for the affricates [tʃ] and [dʒ].
One of the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese is the pronunciation of initial r (and double rr). In (some kinds of) Brazilian it is a voiceless fricative, glottal [h], uvular [χ], or velar [x]. As we discovered with an informant from Rio at UCL, it can even be pharyngeal [ħ]: our informant called her native city [ˈħiu], though others would say [ˈhiu] or [ˈχiu]. How does the Guardian describe this phenomenon? “A little bit like a hard ‘h’.”
Neither the layman nor the phonetician can extract a meaningful description from the expression “hard ‘h’”. What would I say if I were writing this booklet? Perhaps that initial r and double rr are voiceless fricatives, like the ch in loch.

And I don’t even know Portuguese.


(I do, however, know the difference between a train and a bus, a distinction that the author of the booklet seems to have problems with.)

If you can’t say anything useful, say nothing. If the reader has no phonetic knowledge there is not a great deal you can do. So you ought to cater for the intelligent layman who does know a little phonetics and can understand such terms as “voiceless” and “fricative”.
If you were writing about archaeology and wanted to discuss bronze, would you explain it as being a mixture of two kinds of melted stony stuff? No, you would say that it is an alloy of copper and tin.
The technical term “voiceless” ought to be no more frightening to the general reader than the technical term “alloy”. “Velar” ought to be no more offputting than “tin” (the chemical element, not the container).
Wikipedia doesn’t hesitate to use appropriate technical terms and technical descriptions. Why should a newspaper catering for an educated and literate readership be more timid?

The Guardian is currently running another series of introductory language phrasebooks, now “Languages for the 21st century”. (See comments on an earlier series: blog, 8 and 14 July 2009.) Parts of them are excellent.
You can’t expect depth in a 24-page A6 booklet, but we can at least demand clarity.

(1) The Japanese booklet mentions that Japanese has a handful of geminated plosives, as in もっと motto ˈmot:o ‘more’. They are like those of Italian or Finnish: articulated just like ordinary plosives, but with a noticeably longer hold phase (compression stage). Thus the duration of the plosive is approximately twice as long as usual. To its credit, the Guardian does not ignore the question of how to pronounce them, though it could have used better wording for its explanation.

A double consonant indicates that you should pause slightly before saying it, as you would in these English examples (say them out loud):
headdress (pause after ‘hea’ - not ‘head’)
bookcase (pause after ‘boo’)

In my judgment, to refer to a pause “after” the vowel is misleading, no matter whether you interpret “pause” in the musical sense of sustaining a note (fermata) or in the usual phonetic sense of a brief interruption in speaking. The pause surely comes during the consonant, not before it. ‘Headdress’ is not an apposite example, because Japanese does not have doubled d; but ‘bookcase’ is a good model for geminated [kː].

(2) Full marks to the Hindi booklet for a valiant attempt to explain retroflex versus dental. However, I’m not sure that the novice would understand ‘unaspirated’ vs ‘aspirated’ when the explanation given is just that “the first is much less breathy than the second”. The crucial difference is a matter of timing: whether or not there is a delay between the release of the closure and the start of voicing. If there is a delay, you get an audible puff of air; if there isn’t, you don’t.

(3) I found the Russian booklet unimpressive. How does Russian work?

You'll be glad to know that Russian is a logical language and that all you need to make up your own sentences is an understanding of the patterns of the language.

Yeah, right.

Russian words and phrases are given only in romanization, not in Cyrillic. Unfortunately the romanization is not a transliteration or a proper transcription, but a respelling (e.g. “ee as in street”), with all the inaccuracies and inadequacies that entails. Both х (IPA x) and ч (IPA tʃ) are represented as ch.
How do we pronounce the vowel transliterated y? “As in toy”. Try that on the pronoun ‘you’, romanized as vy. (You and I know it’s actually вы vɨ.) Worse, try “Let’s drink”, presented as ”Davai vyp’yem”. If I were learning Russian I’d much prefer to be given the proper spelling and phonetic transcription, which is давай выпьем dʌˈvaj ˈvɨpjjɪm. (I don’t actually know Russian. Thanks to commentators for corrections now implemented. By the way, please let’s not repeat the debate over how to represent Russian a in pretonic syllables: I’ve followed Jones & Ward in writing ʌ.)At least there’s an audio clip.

There’s an English folk dance tune called Buttered Peas. You can watch and listen to it here, played on the Northumbrian small pipes.
On Tuesday evening I took part in a folk music session in the depths of rural Walthamstow (London E17), and this was one of the tunes we played. (I was on the melodeon, and five other people were also playing melodeon; in addition we had several fiddlers, guitarists and so on.) One of the other musicians, a fiddler, commented that the name of the tune was actually a “corruption” of a Welsh name Pwt ar y Bys, which he claimed meant “fingering exercise”. He said the tune was originally a fingering exercise for harpists.
I had never heard this explanation of the name Buttered Peas before. The name does perhaps need some explaining, since we have no tunes called Buttered Parsnips, Buttered Cabbage, Buttered Potatoes or the like, nor for that matter Mushy Peas or Peas in White Sauce: so why Buttered Peas?
I didn’t say anything beyond expressing polite interest, because I felt I had better check. As I suspected, Welsh pwt pʊt means not “exercise” but “stump, something short”. Ar y bys ar ə biːs, ar ə bɨːs does indeed mean “on the finger” (though that’s finger in the singular: the plural is bysedd ˈbəseð).
It’s certainly true that the Welsh name for the tune is Pwt ar y Bys (here), and it means literally “something short on the finger”.

Here is someone playing it on the harp.

The folk music traditions of the various parts of the British Isles are hopelessly entangled together — in my experience, English folk musicians at least have lots of Welsh, Scottish and Irish stuff in their repertoire. You can see how folk etymology could easily turn pwt ar y bys ˈpʊtarəˈbiːs into a north-of-England buttered peas ˈbʊtə(r)dˈpiːz, ˈbʊtəb ˈpiːz.
I think that’s more likely than that Welsh folk etymology would turn buttered peas into pwt ar y bys.

The word synod is back in the news with the meeting of the Anglican General Synod in London.
In LPD I prioritize the traditional pronunciation with a weakened second vowel, ˈsɪnəd. This was the only pronunciation recognized in EPD during Daniel Jones’s editorship. But nowadays one often hears this word said with a strong vowel in the unstressed syllable, ˈsɪnɒd.

Classicists will recognize that synod is parallel in its morphology with method and period, words whose final syllable is unquestionably always weakened to -əd. All three consist etymologically of a Greek prepositional prefix plus the stem of ὁδός hodos ‘way, travel’ (cognate with Russian ходить ‘go’).

We have two other words in English that have this structure: anode (etymologically ‘way up’) and cathode (‘way down’). We know that they were coined by William Whewell in 1834 at the request of his friend Michael Faraday. Another friend, one Dr Nicholl, coined electrode (‘amber/electric way’). Strange, then, that Whewell and Nicholl chose to write them with a final unetymological (or French-style) e and to say them with the corresponding strong pronunciation -əʊd. This was then also applied to the later coinings diode, triode, pentode etc.

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