One segment of last night’s PBS broadcast on American English particularly struck me: the one devoted to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, prominent in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo (surprisingly, it seems to be spreading in St. Louis). You can get a description (with chart) here (scroll down to “The Northern Cities Shift”) and hear samples here; it’s one thing to read about it, but you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a recording of someone saying (what clearly sounds like) “boss” and discovered that what she was actually saying was “bus.” According to the Wikipedia article:

The shift is more notable in Caucasian speakers and those who identify themselves with the region in which the vowel shift is occurring. Speakers of African American Vernacular English show little to no evidence of adopting the Northern Cities Shift. The NCS also is not being used by Canadian speakers despite the geographic proximity of speakers in the United States and Canada about the Great Lakes region.

Paul Meier Dialect Services has a webpage with interactive charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) designed by Eric Armstrong of York University, Toronto, and voiced by Paul Meier, of the University of Kansas.

If you… want to hear one of the “signature sounds” in isolation, or in comparison with other sounds, you may do so using the charts here. Vowels, consonants, ingressives, suprasegmentals, intonation, diacritics, ejectives, implosives, diphthongs, and clicks are demonstrated. Clicking one of the charts below will link you to a Flash animation… Some of the files are quite large and may take some time to load with a dial-up connection, while others are smaller and will load more quickly.
The latest version of the IPA Alphabet was published in 1993 (updated in 1996) by the International Phonetic Association.
In addition to the official IPA charts, we have also provided a chart demonstrating the diphthongs and triphthongs of Received Pronunciation (Standard British English,) and General American (GenAm.)

Kudos for this wonderful link go to CellarFloor‘s MonkeyFilter post.
Update. See related MetaFilter post.

PBS has a program called Do You Speak American? that looks to be a well-informed investigation of issues like dialect and neologisms, with actual linguists aboard. It’s being broadcast at 8 PM tonight here in New York; if you live in the US, check their local schedule page for your local time. The website is well worth investigating for its own sake; here’s a snippet on Chicano English from this section by Carmen Fought (an associate professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California):

In Los Angeles’ Mexican-American communities, the Spanish spoken is distinct from the Spanish spoken in Mexico. For example, speakers say Te llamo para trás, a literal translation of the English phrase I’ll call you back — a phrase not used by speakers in monolingual Spanish-speaking communities (in Mexico or elsewhere). The English of L.A.’s Mexican-American communities is also different. It includes a variety called Chicano English that reveals just how thoroughly social context can affect language structure. When recent groups of Mexican immigrants arrived in Los Angeles, they learned English as a second language. Most of us know someone who immigrated to this country as an adult and speaks English with a noticeable “foreign accent.” Like other adult second-language learners, the early Mexican immigrants spoke an “accented” variety of English that included phonological and other patterns from their first language, Spanish. The children of these immigrants, however, generally grew up using both Spanish and English. They used the “learner English” of the community as a basis for developing a new, native dialect of English. Of course, the kids didn’t sit down and say to themselves “We need a better dialect of English than our parents have!” So what did happen, exactly? The way that Chicano English developed tells us something about language, cognition and the human brain.

The emergence of Chicano English is similar in some ways to the development of a special set of languages called pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a simplified language that develops when groups of adult speakers without a common language come into prolonged contact. It has no native speakers, but is spoken as a second language, varies a lot from individual to individual, and is more simplified in certain ways than other languages. When children grow up in a community where a pidgin is the predominant language, they quickly —within a generation — make it more elaborate (by putting in more complex grammatical structures), and more stable, with less individual variation. This newer variety eventually becomes a creole, which despite its unusual origins, is linguistically indistinguishable from languages that develop in other settings.

Linguists take great interest in how children elaborate and ‘strengthen’ a pidgin’s language structure in this way. How do children know what to add? How do they agree on the elements of the system? Linguists hope to be able to address these complex questions someday.

The history of Chicano English is similar. The non-native English of the early adult Mexican immigrants provided a basis for their children to develop a more stable and consistent dialect, Chicano English. Now Chicano English has rules of its own that set it apart both from Spanish and other English dialects.

By the way, you can’t tell from hearing a person speak Chicano English whether he or she also speaks Spanish. You may think you are hearing a “Spanish accent” because of the influence of Spanish on the development of Chicano English. But whatever you might think you hear, many people who speak Chicano English are monolingual, especially if they are third generation or later. You can’t tell if they are bilingual just from listening to their English. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself.

Thanks to Songdog for the link!

Update. Christ, they’re interviewing that idiot John Simon. Ah well, they only waste a couple of minutes on him…. oh no, there he is again! “A society in which the uneducated lead the educated by the nose is not a good society…. Maybe change is inevitable. Maybe dying from cancer is inevitable…” I guess they could have used a subtler voice for prescriptivism; his blatant snobbery is probably a plus for my side. But it sure grates to listen to him.

The very first LH post was about the “My language is the original language” phenomenon, and here we have a sterling example of it. For non-Russian-speaking readers: Valerii A. Chudinov, professor of, um, culturology and management at ГУУ (the State University of Management, founded in 1919 as Московский промышленно-экономический практический институт [Moscow Engineering-Economic Institute], in case you were thinking it was some ’90s fly-by-night creation), although his graduate studies were in physics, has an abiding interest in Slavic mythology and paleography, and when he talks about Slavic paleography he doesn’t mean medieval runes—he means “что славянская письменность и прежде всего русская письменность существуют, по крайней мере, несколько десятков тысяч лет” [‘that Slavic writing, and above all Russian writing, has existed for at least several tens of thousands of years’]. He has found Slavic runes not only on Byzantine icons of the fifth to tenth centuries, but on Greek vases from the second to sixth centuries BC—not to mention the prehistoric cave paintings of France:

And when you begin to work on them [obrabatyvat’ ‘treat, process; refine, polish’] skillfully, because otherwise the inscriptions are not visible, it turns out that on the mammoth is written mamont [‘mammoth’], and on the horse is written dil! This is where the Russian word korkodil [apparently 16th-century Russian chronicles refer to water-dwelling beasts called “korkodily”] comes from. Because the plan of word formation is identical – korkovyi dil – horse from korka [‘crust/rind’], and korka is ‘scale.’ So we don’t have a distortion of an English or Latin word, but rather the reverse: the Latin word is a distortion of the Russian: it was korkodil, and it became krokodil [‘crocodile’].

Mind you, he’s not a dogmatist—he admits that Chinese may possibly be as ancient as Russian (“I haven’t touched on southern Asia”)—but he’s quite sure that all of northern Asia, from Britain to Alaska, “in the Stone Age was entirely Russian.”

I’m quoting from the amused summary at i_crust’s Live Journal page; those wanting to read the full interview (or just see a couple of photographs of the impressively bearded professor) should go here. And if you’re truly interested in his theories, he’s got a new book out.

(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana for the link, which made my day!)

Iain Higgins’ contribution to History and Archives: Sextet, a collective editorial in Issue 178 of Canadian Literature (“Iain, who came on board in 1995 as poetry editor, has overseen special issues on ‘Poetry and Poetics’ and on ‘Nature/Culture.’ He wrote editorials in which the creative and the scholarly were inseparable companions, and he was a proof-reader non-pareil”):

Language, said Heidegger, is the house of being, and he may be right, but whatever the case, it is certainly true to call language a house of memory, which is to say a house of oblivion, a house in which things of every sort can be called to mind or allowed to lapse into nothingness. Language is, in other words, an archive, a word as well as a concept that English borrowed from French, which borrowed it from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek, where it originally referred to the public building that housed records and documents. Words in use never stay still, and in a typical metonymic shift—reinforced by a telling grammatical drift into the plural—the word archive has come to refer also to the building’s contents. Archives, that is, are both the container and the contained; like languages, they are the houses of what we recall and what we forget, and the things themselves. What they do not hold, or cannot, is no less important than what they do or can hold. If possession is nine points of the law, then forgetting is nine points of the archive.

We cannot live except by forgetting, any more than we can sense some stimuli except by ignoring others; just imagine if you could sense every thing in its own thisness all the time, from the smallest flutter in your lungs to every single point of light entering your eyes. History—a word whose journey into English followed the same path as archive, only earlier, and which originally meant inquiry—works like our perceptual apparatus, whose seeing is enabled by our blindnesses, by focussing on one thing or set of things to the exclusion of others. That is why there can be no one history, only histories, and these can never be complete, ever.

Between getting it all in and leaving it all out, the possibilities are endless.

(Via wood s lot.)

“Bone, Beak, and Apples,” a poem by Higgins with a fine rhythmic flow, is online here.

An article by Simon Romero in today’s New York Times [archived] describes the dispute over how to pronounce Texas placenames of Spanish origin that have long since become anglicized:

JACINTO CITY, Tex. —

Forget the Alamo. It is the letter “J” that is under siege in Texas, at least to Mike Jackson, the mayor of this town near the old shipyards and oil refineries of Houston. Nearly everyday, Mr. Jackson told The Houston Chronicle, he corrects people who he thinks are mispronouncing the word “Jacinto.”

To Mr. Jackson, who grew up here, it is “Juh-SIN-tuh.” To others, including many newcomers who are part of the city’s Hispanic population, which now constitutes nearly 80 percent of the total, it is “Ha-SEEN-to.” Jacinto, after all, was originally a Spanish word, so why not pronounce it properly in the language of Cervantes?

The pronunciation of place names is one of those quiet conflicts that are played out everyday throughout the Southwest as the numbers of Hispanics in areas originally colonized by Spain and Mexico continue to grow – and in some cases nudge Anglos into the minority.

Texas is full of place names whose pronunciations confound Hispanics but sound natural to others. Palacios is pronounced “Puh-LAY-shus” instead of “Pa-LA-see-os.” Manchaca is “MAN-shack” instead of “Man-CHA-ka.” Pedernales is “PER-dan-al-is” instead of “Peh-der-NA-les” and so on. Even Texas should be “TEH-jas,” according to some traditionalists…

Linguists studying the evolution of English and Spanish in the Southwest say that [insistence on anglicized pronunciation] is fading. Maryellen Garcia [sic; a Google search convinces me her given name is MaryEllen], a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, noted that many newscasters in Texas now pronounce Hispanic names in the Spanish manner, a habit, she said, that was growing in prestige.

“It’s a bit puzzling,” Dr. Garcia said. “Even as the Hispanic middle class uses less Spanish, the rest of society is not as threatened by Spanish, perhaps because of the very emergence and recognition of that middle class.”

No one knows exactly where the intermingling of Spanish and English in the Southwest will lead. Some young Hispanics in Texas pronounce place names in the Spanish way among themselves, but use the Texan pronunciation when speaking with Anglos. That may be one model.

I’m sympathetic to both sides in this dispute and will be interested to see how it plays out, but I have to say I don’t believe for a minute that anyone anywhere pronounces the name of the state “TEH-jas.”

Sally Greene has a blog entry expressing her annoyance with the increasing prevalence of compound nouns over the traditional adjective-plus-noun combination, eg “Law Department” vs “Legal Department,” “science issues,” “logistics problems,” and the like. I too find many of these collocations less than charming, but her final example, “desert island,” happens to be wrong: desert in the OED’s sense 2, ‘Uninhabited, unpeopled, desolate, lonely’ (1297 Robert of Gloucester: “The decyples.. Byleuede in a wyldernesse.. That me cleputh nou Glastynbury, that desert was tho”) is an adjective, and considerably earlier than deserted (first citation 1629 James Maxwell, Herodian of Alexandria his History of twenty Roman Cæsars: “The deserted Villages”). To prefer “deserted island” is to make the same mistake as to insist on “go slowly” rather than the much older “go slow.”

“To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!”
    —Robert Louis Stevenson (via wood s lot)
I wish the very best of new years to all my readers.

I’m finally reading Gogol’s Dead Souls in Russian, and a few pages into Chapter Four I encountered the following line (addressed by the cheerful scoundrel Nozdryov to the protagonist, Chichikov, who has just refused to join him because of pressing business):
— Ну вот уж и дело! уж и выдумал! Ах ты, Оподелдок Иванович!
Like much of Gogol’s dialogue, this is more or less untranslatable, but the first two exclamations can be prosaically rendered “‘Business’! You just made that up!” The last one, however, baffled me; word for word, it means “Oh you, Opodeldok Ivanovich!” Opodeldok was clearly not an actual Russian name, so I looked it up in my trusty Oxford dictionary (where it is listed under the more usual spelling оподельдок), and there it was—helpfully defined as “opodeldoc.” I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED. There I found:

[Read more…]

Having studied both Old and Modern Irish (the later with the amazing Micheal O’Siadhail, poet and scholar) and visited the Gaeltacht of Connemara, I am very interested in the fate of the language, and was glad to see a brief but authoritative report in Language Log by Jim McCloskey of UC Santa Cruz, “one of the foremost experts in the world on the modern Irish language,” courtesy of Geoff Pullum:

I think that talk of a ‘rebound’ for the language is misplaced, but I do not equate that position with pessimism. The situation is a complex and fluid one, but largely it seems to me that things are on the same trajectory that they have been on for several decades (with a couple of interesting changes). By which I mean that the traditional Irish-using communities (the Gaeltachtai/) continue to shrink and the language continues to retreat in those communities. Nobody that I know who is involved in those communities is optimistic about their future as Irish-speaking communities (though lots of other good things are happening to them and in them).

The observers I trust most (friends and colleagues engaged in intense fieldwork in Gaeltacht communities) maintain that the process of normal acquisition (for Irish) ceased in most areas in the middle 70’s, and it is now increasingly difficult to find people younger than about 30 who control traditional Gaeltacht Irish. If you walk along a road in a Gaeltacht area and try to listen for the language being used by groups of teenagers and children by themselves, it is always (in my recent experience) English. Someone I know who is the principal of a primary school in the Donegal Gaeltacht reported that of the 22 children who entered his school at the beginning of the current year, only two had, in his judgment, sufficient Irish.

So traditional Gaeltacht Irish will almost certainly cease to exist in the next 30 years or so.

But what is unique in the Irish situation, I think, has been the creation of a second language community now many times larger than the traditional Gaeltacht communities (I think that 100,000 is a reasonable estimate for the size of this community). And being a part of that community is a lively and engaging business…

There is a great range of varieties called `Irish’ in use in this community. People like me speak a close approximation of traditional Gaeltacht Irish and there are people who speak new urban calques, heavily influenced by English in every way. For the communities of children growing up around Irish-medium schools in urban centres it may be right to speak of pidginization and creolization (along with a lot of clever inter-language play like the recent ‘cad-ever’). Many teenagers are thoroughly bidialectal, switching easily from the version of Gaeltacht Irish they have from their parents to the new urban varieties in use among their peers.

It will be interesting to see what happens to these varieties when the model of Gaeltacht Irish becomes a memory, but one thing that is clear is that this community is not going to fade away just because the Gaeltacht fades away.

It will be sad to return to the Aran Islands (if I ever do) and no longer hear the easy chatter in Irish all around me, with never a word of English, but I’m glad to learn the language is unlikely to die out.