Forms of Address.

Via Joel at Far Outliers, a nice quote from Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham:

Tam, a musician my age, introduces himself. Solely on his salutation, I know we will be friends. This is easy because the Vietnamese form of address allows two people to assess each other and extend overtures of friendship. It has several tiers, each indicating the nature of acquaintance (informal, formal, business, friends, intimate) as well as the hierarchy. Just by pronouns used, one can discern the type of relationship between two people. For instance, if Tam refers to himself as toi (I) and calls me anh (big brother, or, in this context, you), then the relationship is formal and equal, with neither having the upper hand despite age; however, if Tam is in fact younger than me, then unless there is something else—social, economic status—to normalize the age difference, Tam is being disrespectful by not referring to himself as em (little brother). And if I were, say, fifteen years older than he, Tam should use chu (uncle) and chau (nephew). There are many forms, including regional variations.

Tam calls me ban: friend.

I like him instantly. He reminds me of an old childhood friend from my days at the French Catholic school in Saigon, who used his own name, in the third person, instead of “I” and called me “friend” rather than “you.” Tam invites me to one of his regular gigs at a hotel disco.

This stuff fascinates me, but I’m glad I don’t have to navigate it in daily life.

Comments

  1. Stu Clayton says

    This stuff fascinates me, but I’m glad I don’t have to navigate it in daily life.

    People in a culture foreign to theirs usually have difficulties with the things they didn’t grow up with. How could it be otherwise ? Imagine how Vietnamese must feel among Americans.

    When A and B have experienced the different cultures of B and A (respectively), at least they can trade amusing anecdotes about the strangeness and difficulty.

    What all people have in common is that they have no such thing. You can’t even rely on a nod or a smile to mean what you expect them to. Man muß sich nicht verstehen, manchmal reicht es, sich zu verständigen.

  2. These forms of address mostly exist in English as well, but unfortunately have fallen into disuse. They make life easier, removing the kind of ambiguity that English speakers have to tolerate when, for example, the boss orders everyone to address him by his first name, as if he’s your best bud, not the guy who can ruin your career.

  3. Maybe for people whose children will have nothing to eat without this specific career this is convenient. Maybe not. But I think there are not many such people here.

  4. Okay, maybe my example was a touch overwrought. I was trying to say these forms of address are useful relationship markers, and as such they simplify my life, except in English, where they are often eschewed in favor of “friendliness”. As far as complexity is concerned, forms of address are only as complex as the relationships they are describing.

  5. @Ook the boss orders everyone to address him by his first name, as if he’s your best bud, …

    It’s been 30 years since you’d address a boss by their surname only. Unless the boss is head of a vast conglomerate; you’ve never met them; you’re in no sort of executive position. Even then you might get circulars from them signing off using their first name. It no longer means ‘best bud’. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re not invited to a beer with them on Friday after work. And your lowly status is not “ambiguous”.

    except in English

    So you can move smoothly between vous/tous in French? Please explain: I struggle.

    Now alleged ‘friendliness’ is different in American and it’s polluting Brit English. Yes corporate encourages you to think of colleagues and even clients/customers as ‘friends’. Observe Trump: ‘friend’ means he done business with them — until they turn out to be a child molester, then Trump ‘doesn’t even know them’.

    I plain refuse to use the language of ‘friend’. Especially when I’m about to present a report explaining how badly their running their business.

  6. Stu Clayton says

    So you can move smoothly between vous/tous in French? Please explain: I struggle.

    There is no conclusive explanation. It’s habit, not cognitive prowess. You acquire the habit or you don’t.

    I refer to Sie/du in German, as far as “move smoothly” goes. I do not expect the situation to be “the same” in French with vous/tu. What would “the same” even mean?

    In fact I know from experience that it’s not. Yet I do not struggle. I stick with vous as default. That’s what it’s for, goddamit. I have no occasion to navigate degrees of intimacy in one of my secondary languages.

  7. Stu Clayton says

    I mean that’s what it’s for between adults, absent other clues. Such as suddenly finding yourself herding pigs in a remote corner of the landscape, together with a person you’ve not met before.

    Even then there may be a moment of hesitation. Should we try to rise above the occasion ?? You see, this is about establishing propriety, not trying to figure out a preexisting one.

  8. German person says

    (This is a rant, so expect traces of hyperbole. Also, I’m making up the verbs ‘to duz’ and ‘to siez’ for German ‘duzen’ [‘to use “du” to address someone’] and ‘siezen’ [‘to use “Sie” to address someone’]. ‘per du’ and ‘per Sie’ are German expressions that should be transparent enough.)

    >I refer to Sie/du in German, as far as “move smoothly” goes.

    I hate Sie/du in German. For me (native speaker, living in Germany all my life), there is nothing smooth about it. On several occasions I have spent days, weeks or even longer circumnavigating directly addressing someone because a) I didn’t know if we were per du or per Sie, or b) we were indeed per Sie but it had become awkward, however I didn’t know if (and when) it was appropriate for me to suggest that we duz each other.

    There just aren’t any clear rules! The guidelines we do have are ambiguous and contradictory:

    ‘young’ people of roughly the same age meet on the street: du
    ‘old’ people in the same situation: Sie
    Where is the line between being ‘old’ and being ‘young’ drawn? I don’t know …

    Everyone, for example, queueing up at metal concert: du
    Meeting the same person two weeks later in a business context: Sie? or still du?
    Meeting your boss, or a co-worker, whom you normally siez, at a metal concert: I don’t know. Probably du (especially when they are in a bandshirt or kutte), but it would still feel awkward.

    The person selling me my brötchen in the morning at the local bakery: Sie
    The person serving my brötchen in a local café: traditionally Sie, I guess, but nowadays more often du
    What about a bakery which is also a café: I don’t know …

    When I was a fifth-grader, to my horror, a person became my teacher who was technically my uncle, although I had seen him before only once. Should I duz or siez the man? Duzing would probably have been more appropriate, but I chose to siez him because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my classmates.

    Who should initiate duzing instead of siezing? Why, easy, the person higher up in the hierarchy, or the older one, isn’t it? Well, we’re not living in, I don’t know, the 1950s anymore, so obviously someone quite young can, eg in a working context, find themselves higher up than someone significantly older. Your loss, you two’ll be stuck siezing each other for ever …

    While today’s Germany is by no means an egalitarian society, we don’t have unambiguous ‘absolute’ hierarchies anymore (if ever there was such a thing). What I mean is, there are still hierarchies within organisations (companies, universities, what have you), but those don’t translate well outside of those respective contexts. Someone can be a bigwig in their company, but that doesn’t mean much if I, who don’t work there, meet said person on the street. The same holds true for me and my position within my organisation. So, if two ‘Abteilungsleitungen’ (heads of department) of two different organisations have dealings with each other over some time, and get along well with each other, and are of the same age, whose job is it to say, well, let’s duz each other? An Abteilungsleitung in a private company isn’t the same thing as an Abteilungsleitung in a ministry, so who’s higher up? I don’t know.

    Also, age: How am I supposed to know how old someone is? I’m notoriously bad at this. (This is what terrifies me about the Andrew X. Pham quote above. I imagine that in a society where a lot depends on being able to correctly assess the age of the person you’re talking to, there are some conventions that help with that. For example, I don’t know, people around thirty part their hair on the left, or people between forty and sixty wear blue, or things like that. But I have no idea how it works in Vietnam.)

    Another problem: There is no universally-agreed-upon, not-overly-verbose way of addressing a group of people, some of which you duz and some of which you siez. Just saying ‘ihr’ is gaining ground, and I appreciate it, but traditionally you can only use ‘ihr’ with people you duz.

    Also, the whole ceremony of initiating duzing is awkward every single time. And you have to re-train your reflexes afterwards because accidentally siezing someone you should duz is, again, awkward. (It looks like you’re trying to distance yourself from that person.)

    I really wish there had been something like the Swedish du-reform in Germany, too. But I fear that the time for such ‘utopian’ changes in society as a whole has passed.

  9. This is a rant

    And a very enlightening one — thanks for that!

  10. David Marjanović says

    I confirm the entire rant, except I have much less personal experience with it because I’ve never worked in the Real World. There’s been a major change going on since 1968, and nobody knows where it’ll end or even how far along exactly we’re in it today.

    Part of this (but by no means the whole story) is a shift in the age that makes you an adult socially: first 15 regardless of context, then 18 regardless of context, now it slowly fades out into your 30s or beyond depending on the situation.

  11. John Cowan says

    Per the Wikipedia article on T-V forms in particular languages, Modern Greek is even more complicated than German:

    The modern social custom when using Greek in Greece [in Cyprus there is no V pronoun except when code-switching to Standard Greek] is to ask the other person “may we speak in the singular [familiar]?” in which the other person is expected to answer “yes” and afterwards the discussion continues using the informal εσύ; it is unthinkable for the other person to answer “no” or show preference for plural forms, and for this reason one should not even ask this question to a person of high status, such as a professional. Therefore, asking this question can itself be considered a form of disrespect in some social situations. Likewise, not asking this question and simply using the singular without prior explicit or implicit agreement would also be considered disrespectful in various social contingencies. In other cases, even using the formal plural (without a question) could also be considered offensive.

    On the other hand, there is Irish:

    In Irish, the use of sibh as an address to one person has died out, and is preferred. Formerly, Roman Catholic priests were addressed with the plural form sibh, especially in Ulster, due to the possibility that the priest may be carrying the Eucharist on his person—belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist would require the use of the plural.

    Now alleged ‘friendliness’ is different in American and it’s polluting Brit English.

    Per contra, polite American address to people we don’t know at all makes use of sir/ma’am

  12. I always hated being called “sir”. It makes my socialist heart rankle.

  13. German person says

    To John Cowan:

    > it is unthinkable for the other person to answer “no” or show preference for plural forms, and for this reason one should not even ask this question to a person of high status, such as a professional. Therefore, asking this question can itself be considered a form of disrespect in some social situations. Likewise, not asking this question and simply using the singular without prior explicit or implicit agreement would also be considered disrespectful in various social contingencies.

    Insofar, the situation is the same in German (of Northern Germany, at least), although the relevant social situations/social contingencies might of course be quite different.

  14. Keith Ivey says

    Per contra, polite American address to people we don’t know at all makes use of sir/ma’am

    This presumably varies a lot, but certainly in my experience sir is pretty rare. And I suspect ma’am is a good deal rarer, since few women under 50 would react well to it.

  15. I agree with Keith — I can’t remember the last time anyone called me “sir,” and I definitely look like a Respected Elder.

  16. Keith Ivey says

    I do remember being called “sir” several years ago by a guy who worked at the Woman’s (sic) National Democratic Club when I went there for an event. Since he was some years older than me and Black, it was memorable for the discomfort it induced.

  17. I was referred to as “pan” in Poland last year in a casual situation (and I’m not even in my 40’s) by people noticeably younger than me. They were speaking Polish to other Polish people.

  18. I feel like I only get “sir” when I’ve done something wrong.
    Like walking through a metal detector too soon.
    “Sir, we’re going to need you to…”
    They’ll address the drunk and disorderly like
    this too (at first). It’s either someone who takes
    their job too seriously, or is trying to mollify you.

  19. In my experience, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are most commonly (and widely) used to get the attention of an adult whose name you don’t know. Is that not true outside the U.S.? They’re far more neutral than “Guv,” “Mate,” “Bro,” “Bruddah,” “Madam”, “Miss/Miz,” etc.

  20. Keith Ivey said:
    “Per contra, polite American address to people we don’t know at all makes use of sir/ma’am”

    This presumably varies a lot, but certainly in my experience sir is pretty rare.”

    Maybe not so much. I was called “sir” several times recently, despite looking young for my age, and this was on the West Coast of the U.S. of A.

  21. As I read the comments it strikes me it can be easier dealing with a T-V distinction in a non-native language sometimes. My experience with speaking Spanish here in the U.S. with strangers (at a public service desk as part of my job) is that people aren’t bothered if I used tú instead of usted. (I learned Spanish in classrooms years ago, so more opportunity to use the familiar/informal.) While it will vary with language, community, and situation, I suspect it’s not unusual for there to be leeway for 2nd language speakers.

    As for French, which I’m currently learning (not in a classroom), I figure, just learn vous as my default, because I don’t foresee myself in a position to need to address someone with tu.

    Sir and Ma’am, I do use those when I need to get the attention of someone I don’t know. No connection to social class or social status. Though I very much understand “sir” as a way to address an authority or someone with higher social standing, I do not use it for that.

  22. sir/ma’am-ing in. the u.s. (and i’m mainly thinking of allegedly egalitarian nyc) is very much alive and well in my experience. it shows up to some extent in social situations (my anecdata would say: less in nyc, more in vermont or tennessee), but is almost universal in interactions where one person is at work (especially low-paid / “service” work) and the other isn’t: coffeeshop; diner; white-tablecloth restaurant; gas station; theater lobby; panhandling; art museum; bank; department store; dollar store; you name it. in some cases, that’s likely an explicit employer mandate, but by no means all the time.

    and then there are all the other formal (and informal-as-formal) forms of address used between men who don’t know each other, which bleed out further from workplace interactions, in particular when there’s not a significant, visible class difference: “boss”, “buddy”, “man”, “bro/bra/bruh”, etc.

  23. Joel: That’s true. (Delaware here.)
    I had mentally grouped those instances in with doing something wrong. “Sir!…You forgot your phone/can’t park there!”

    (I remember someone telling a story here about there being no good way to get someone’s attention like that in Russian, and their improvising a slick “Сударыня!”)

  24. I’ve heard enough Japanese over my lifetime that I think I have a pretty good feel for the implications of the many forms of address available. I once had a Japanese acquaintance in the U.S. who addressed me when speaking Japanese as “you” to avoid the implications of too-familiar omae or overly distant anata. Back in the 1970s, there was a young Japanese feminist at the East-West Center in Hawaii who insisted on referring to herself as boku, as males commonly do in informal contexts. I’ve been using boku since I was a kid (watakushi in more formal contexts), but during my upcoming trip to Japan, I’m going to make a concerted effort to use replace boku with the dialectal form used by elderly people, washi.

  25. @WJohn Cowan: English has the same kind of question, about whether someone may be addressed by their first name. (“Good afternoon, Mr. Allen. Can I call you Bill? Now Bill, I want to let you know about a new opportunity….”) It would normally be considered surly to answer a question like that with a no, although it is not unknown. I have, two or three times in my life, responded to somebody asking if they can call me “Brett” with, “I would rather you didn’t,” to make it clear that I was not positively disposed towards them. Of course, since this involves names, it is not a formality that is always necessary before calling somebody by their first name; more typically, how someone is introduced will guide how they are subsequently addressed.

    @Dusty: “Sir,… you’re making a scene.”

  26. I have to admit I can’t get used to doctors and others acting in an official capacity addressing me by my given name. In my heart of hearts I wish I could say “That’s Mister Dodson to you, pal,” but all I can do is return the favor if I can tell from their nametag what their given name is. Otherwise I try to avoid addressing them by name/title at all; I’m damned if I’m going to “Doctor” somebody who’s calling me “Steve.” What do you think I am, a schoolboy?

  27. David Marjanović says

    I remember someone telling a story here about there being no good way to get someone’s attention like that in Russian

    There isn’t in German. In Paris, if someone gets out of the métro and leaves their wallet behind, you’re expected to shout Monsieur/Madame. The German language just leaves you stranded. Pretty much the only thing you can do is take the wallet, run after the poor person, overtake them, turn around and pant “excuse me, you forgot…”.

    doctors and others acting in an official capacity addressing me by my given name

    That’s a thing? Ew.

  28. John Cowan says

    In my experience, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are most commonly (and widely) used to get the attention of an adult whose name you don’t know. Is that not true outside the U.S.?

    In my understanding, it is not. (Maybe in Canada, I don’t know.)

    It would normally be considered surly to answer a question like that with a no

    Indeed, but ‘surly’ is not the same as ‘unthinkable’.

  29. David: Could you shout “Hey!” or “Bitte!” or whatever, or would no one turn around to those?

    I guess the point with “sir/ma’am” over
    “hey/excuse me” is that it’s more selective
    of the person whose attention you need.
    But it really isn’t, unless there’s exactly one man
    or one woman in the area.

  30. @DM: That’s a thing? Ew.

    I would feel uncomfortable with my regular doctor calling me anything but my first name.

    Are psychotherapists/psychiatrists in your part of the world also expected to address their patients formally?

  31. German person says

    >In Paris, if someone gets out of the métro and leaves their wallet behind, you’re expected to shout Monsieur/Madame. The German language just leaves you stranded.

    Entschuldigung!! Sie ham da was verlorn!

    (Although, since we’re in Paris, I’d probably stick to Madame ! or Monsieur !)

  32. At some medical facilities in the United States (doctors’ offices, hospitals, etc.) the questionnaire filled out by new patients asks, “How do you want to be addressed?,” and you check your preference. If I am not mistaken, you can also check “Other…” and specify your preference.

  33. German person says

    re: Doctors addressing patients by given name

    English-language films are usually dubbed in Germany. I’m pretty sure this kind of usage gets translated as ‘Sie’ + given name, which, come to think of it, is pure translationese and not at all natural in German* (although stuff like this tends to bleed out into everyday conversations, given the ubiquity of American cinema and TV productions).

    I don’t watch films that often, and I haven’t seen anything in German dubbing for a while, but I have a soft spot for the German dub of the original Star Wars films, because, well, you know. It’s perhaps worth noting that almost everybody are siezing each other, including Han and Leia, I think throughout the first film. At least I don’t think duzing between those two starts until the second one, I’m not 100 % sure.

    * Except in some specific contexts, none of which are relevant here.

  34. Christopher Culver says

    I was referred to as “pan” in Poland last year in a casual situation (and I’m not even in my 40’s) by people noticeably younger than me. They were speaking Polish to other Polish people.

    Polish is a language where I think any adult male would be referred to in the third person as Pan once that fellow could no longer reasonably be addressed as young man in English.

    I find that I am still addressed as tu in many rural contexts in Eastern Europe probably because, in spite of being in my 40s and having the graying hair to prove it, I am unmarried (divorced, but usually people don’t know that) and am not raising any children. Since starting a family is such a marker of adulthood, and I haven’t, I am apparently still regarded as a youth.

  35. Jonathan D says

    Every time I consider using the tiny fragments of primary school diaspora Vietnamese that I remember with the couple of Vietnamese speakers that I now regularly interact with, I get stuck wondering whether the pronouns I want to use are ok, or whether it’s a bit too much like I’m still speaking like a 10 year old…

  36. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    I don’t know what would come out if I needed to get the attention of someone who’d left their phone on the bus seat, but something would come out. Maybe hej der! or du der!. Maybe Herr! or Frue! if it was someone from the pre-war generations (late 70s or older).

    (A few times I’ve had green-nosed shop/7-11/juice bar/coffee bar assistants address 60+ me with the old style Vil De have en kvittering, Herr?. Mostly boys, for some reason).

    ObLang: Herr is the only word in Danish that’s officially spelled with a double final consonant. Ostensibly because it’s short for Herre, which is still used for addressing God. On envelopes it is spelled Hr.. ← oblique period, normal period

  37. Also, the whole ceremony of initiating duzing is awkward every single time.

    In Russian still commonly referred to as Bruderschaft trinken (italicized word in German, with u):)
    As a child I was inclined to hear it as burderschaft.

    Well, usually people do it with an actual ceremony, but when they are going to drink anyway, why not.

  38. I remember someone telling a story here about there being no good way to get someone’s attention like that in Russian

    Odd, Russian has (or had) an easier solution than German for that. You just address the person your age or younger as the gendered individual you perceive them to be. Hey young man! (молодой человек!) woman! (Женщина!), etc. Young people addressing old people can say “uncle, auntie, grandma” etc. Or is that becoming obsolete?

  39. David Marjanović says

    David: Could you shout “Hey!” […] or whatever, or would no one turn around to those?

    Either nobody or everybody would; the information conveyed would just be “I want attention right now”.

    Entschuldigung!! Sie ham da was verlorn!

    In the end, yes, but that’s way less polite than blurting out M./Mme is in French.

    Are psychotherapists/psychiatrists in your part of the world also expected to address their patients formally?

    Absolutely. Professional distance. Fellow adult who’s not a friend.

    I’m pretty sure this kind of usage gets translated as ‘Sie’ + given name

    Oh yes, and I hate it. Where I’m from, there aren’t even “specific contexts” where that’s natural; it feels outright grammatically wrong to me.

    молодой человек!

    You can actually address men as junger Mann in German, but in the last few decades that’s always been sarcastic in some way (and not limited to young-looking men).

    Herr without a name would be “Lord” (religious or medieval); Frau without a name doesn’t compute.

  40. Stu Clayton says

    Frau without a name doesn’t compute.

    Sure it does. Even Jesus calculated it: Was willst du von mir, Frau ?

    Husbands say that still unto this day. Just not to their mothers.

  41. jack morava says

    FWIW I agree with rozele. I use Sir whenever I get a chance, why not?

  42. David Marjanović says

    Was willst du von mir, Frau ?

    Yeah, well. A thoroughly dated insult.

    Husbands say that still unto this day.

    Not that I know of.

  43. German person says

    To David Marjanović, re ‘Sie’ + given name:

    Perhaps the only context in which I experienced this myself was at school (Gymnasium). At the beginning of some school year (I can’t remember which one) it was customary and indeed consistently done that teachers would stand in front of their respective classes and more or less formally announce: ‘From now on, I’m going siez you’ (or something to that effect), *immediately* switching from ‘du’ + given name to ‘Sie’ + given name. I don’t know if this is still a thing today.

  44. David Marjanović says

    Probably not. In my case (Austria, mid-late 90s), at the beginning of the 9th school year, one or two teachers asked if they should switch to Sie; the one given example included Herr + last name. We declined; the culture shock would have been too great, and we weren’t desperate to be recognized as adults at age 14/15. The other teachers simply carried on with du + first name unasked.

  45. “You can actually address men as junger Mann in German, but in the last few decades that’s always been sarcastic in some way (and not limited to young-looking men).”

    This patronising usage is becoming common in Britain. Typically, at the garage the big burly youngster handling payment for a service will address an obviously elderly man (me, for example!) as “young man”. I hate this…

    In the NHS, address by first name has always been universal. As it starts when you’re a child you don’t really notice until you reach the age when you are older than the typical GP. Hang on a second there, matey… Receptionists at most health centres do it routinely, too (“Is that Michael?”), which is infuriating. I have always suspected this custom began in order to put users of a “free at the point of use” health service in their place… I bet private doctors don’t use your first name!

  46. You lose your bet — at least in America, it’s universal (we don’t, of course, have a NHS). But I’m glad to have company in my fury.

  47. David Marjanović says

    In the NHS, address by first name has always been universal.

    Always? People put up with that in the 50s?

  48. PlasticPaddy says

    1.5.3 Ask the patient how they wish to be addressed and ensure that their choice is respected and used.

    https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg138/chapter/1-guidance

    Perhaps one of the resident UK medics knows how far back this goes and whether it is “honoured in the breach”.

  49. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    I do make a point of giving first and last to the receptionist, but the dentist/hygienist/opthalmologist’s assistant will call for “Lars” simpliciter every time. Not that I actually mind.

  50. When I write an email for the first time to an academic, I start it with “Dear Firstname…” I used to start them with “Dear Dr. Lastname” if they have a PhD (couldn’t bring myself to use “Prof.”), but these days that seems too much. Almost inevitably, they will answer with “Hi Y”, and from then on the correspondence will be on a Hi+Firstname basis.

    For the sign-off, the semi-informal “Cheers” seems to have given way to the formal “Best”, even when mutually hiing.

  51. I always start with “Dear Dr. Lastname”; I expect that the exchange will rapidly turn to first names, but in case they feel more comfortable with a more formal exchange, I don’t want to make them uncomfortable. Particularly in the case of women, I can imagine their not being thrilled with a guy using their given name out of the blue.

  52. Stu Clayton says

    All this fuss merely because so many people now, apparently, demand and offer social serenity 24/7, unruffled and straight out of the box. So they run open-eyed into Pronoun Trouble, despite what we learned from Bugs Bunny decades ago.

    I’ve muddled by with other people for 70 years without expecting or needing serenity.

    There is a mass princess hysteria in progress. The demand for pea-free mattress living is the problem here, not the peas. Feelings will be hurt, so get a life.

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    In the NHS, address by first name has always been universal.

    No. It just isn’t.
    I’ve never done this, for example, and I’m hardly exceptional, wonderful though I be.

    I’ve occasionally experienced unsolicited first-naming as a patient, but not typically, let alone “universally.” I get the impression that it’s actually becoming less common.

    Perhaps I’m just too scary.

  54. Stu Clayton says

    Perhaps I’m just too scary.

    I definitely rely on that to simplify matters. A quelling glance works wonders.

    Back when I was very very young, I was being examined for something or other at a hospital here in Germany. The doctor’s young assistent auscultated me, frowned and said to the doc, talking over my head as she thought: “Did you notice the respiratory arrhymia?” (that’s respiratorische Arrhythmie to you peons). I said: “Nonsense, your stethoscope was as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass bra. I caught my breath as an automatic reaction to the contact”.

    The doc said: “Oh, do you have some medical background?” I replied: “No, I’m just not stupid”.

    For extra points: guess whether either of those two said “du” to me.

  55. Stu Clayton says

    arrhythmia. What an annoying word. Reduplicated “r” with no advance notice.

    The doc said: “O, sind Sie medizinisch vorgebildet?

    The more I review my life, the stronger is my impression that I could be pretty abrasive without even intending to. I am grateful for this gift, which I definitely do not deserve.

  56. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    The Quelling Glance.

    Also premeditated gemination of erres is a regular feature of Spanish orthography, not just Greek: rollo ~ arrollar.

  57. Stu Clayton says

    Also premeditated gemination of erres is a regular feature of Spanish orthography

    Gosh, hadn’t been consciously aware of that. I like Spanish orthography because it otherwise doesn’t geminate much at all. acusar, asesinato. Or is that degemination in some cases ?

  58. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    According to the RAE, spoken Spanish only has two geminated consonants: obvio, tragannos. Everything else has been degeminated, and spelling follows speech.

    (The rr in arrollar is a single phoneme, it just happens that it’s spelled with r at the start of a word and contrasts with the one spelled r elsewhere. But you knew that).

    More fun example: puertorriqueño

  59. Keith Ivey says

    Does the RAE expect /nm/ in inmigración? Wiktionary thinks it’s /mm/.

  60. @LH: I’m totally with you about first name use in situations in which we expected, and were used to being treated as “Usted” in Argentina, even in our youth. But in a way Argentinians have now solved the problem they shared with French and German by everybody switching to “vos” in all cases, in all occasions, almost with no transition, as can be seen and heard in current movies and commercials. I have to confess that it’s still jarring to my ears (as I expect the transition from 2nd single+plural to just 2nd plural must have been to some English speakers in the day)

  61. Stu:

    Gosh, hadn’t been consciously aware of that.

    Many English speakers are unaware of their own geminations and degeminations, just as many have no explicit appreciation of aspiration – their own or others’.

    It is remarkable to me how little insight or discussion there is concerning the common AmE gemination of /t/ in “-teen” numbers (and “-teenth” ordinals). This educational presentation on YouTube is entirely typical (and I surveyed many). Most of the time (not always) the relevant numbers are pronounced with a clear gemination; and when it comes to eighteen, young Monica makes a special point of its gemination, as if nothing like it occurred with the other numbers. She seems completely unaware of this as a general feature.

    Spoken AmE pronunciations in Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD) are inconsistent, for example geminating in thirteenth but not in thirteen. There is no consistency in any of the AmE written representations either. Sometimes gemination is given, as a second option; but there is no correspondence with the spoken versions.

    This “-teen[th]” gemination is seldom heard in Australian English. Same, I think, in UK and NZ English.

  62. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    inmigración is the only form recognized by the RAE. Even the DPD does not treat the -nm- as a problem: the articles for inmigrar; inminente; inmiscuir and inmune are concerned with other potential problems.

    That said, all the sources I’ve read tell me that /-nm-/ would violate phonotactics and the pronunciation should be [-mm-], so I don’t know where the spelling comes from in a supposedly speech-following system. (I’m used to seeing the Latin Vorlagen with -mm-, but I can’t rule out different scribal traditions — it’s not like it’s hard to see the in- there).

    Also, which Wiktionary? Both the English and Spanish ones only know of inmigración AFAICT

  63. PlasticPaddy says

    Re in+[C] I think the n is weakened (making the preceding i longer/ less open), at least in some accents. So there may be no perceived problem with phonetics or orthography.

  64. David Marjanović says

    Everything else has been degeminated, and spelling follows speech.

    Historically speaking, the Latin [pː tː kː sː fː jː] have all been shortened, and the spelling eventually caught up; [lː nː] have somehow managed to merge into [ɲ ʎ], and their spellings took over (ñ ll); [rː] has remained distinct from [r], and the difference between the two has even increased – but, as often happens with length differences, r in places where the old length difference did not apply, i.e. at the beginnings and ends of words, sided with the long one.

    It is remarkable to me how little insight or discussion there is concerning the common AmE gemination of /t/ in “-teen” numbers (and “-teenth” ordinals). This educational presentation on YouTube is entirely typical (and I surveyed many). Most of the time (not always) the relevant numbers are pronounced with a clear gemination; and when it comes to eighteen, young Monica makes a special point of its gemination, as if nothing like it occurred with the other numbers. She seems completely unaware of this as a general feature.

    …and it isn’t a general feature in her own speech. The second time she says eighteen is her first and last [tʰː]; that’s the one where she reminds herself it’s eight-teen (as her IPA transcription already claims) and then pronounces it accordingly. The first, just after the 4-minute mark, has a short [tʰ] like every other -teen up to then.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of other people really do have [tʰː] in eighteen specifically; English is, after all, perfectly happy with long consonants across morpheme boundaries, so anyone who really thinks of 18 as eight-teen is likely to restore the lost length. But not Monica here, except when she consciously thinks about it.

    Perhaps I should add that I don’t see any reason to think everyone thinks of 18 as containing the full eight-. Numerals routinely undergo unusual clippings. 16 and 60 really are sechzehn & sechzig in German, with a morph sech- that does not occur anywhere else in the language: 6, 600, 6000 = sechs, sechshundert, sechstausend, all with [ks] outside of Switzerland.

    Does the RAE expect /nm/ in inmigración?

    Spanish doesn’t distinguish syllable-final nasals; in pronunciation they assimilate to the place of articulation of any following consonant (so, yes, I expect [mː]), and the spellings are largely morphemic-etymological, but n by default (word-finally, reflecting that it’s [n] prepausally regardless of etymology: Adán, Belén; before f: anfibios…). I’ve read that illiterate spellings routinely extend n to positions before b p, e.g. Colonbia; and in Basque, that is actually official, and m is never used syllable-finally.

  65. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    I only know what I read in treatments of the phonology of Spanish since I don’t trust any of the learning apps to be precise in that regard. (And I’m bad at picking out relevant words from online news vel sim). The strange thing is that the nasal archiphoneme /N/ is spelled m before bilabials, except m, and n before all other consonants (including labiodentals).

    inm- is a strange corner case, but one thing that strikes me is how indistinguishable inm- and imm- would be in minuscule scripts. We could just be dealing with a misreading that got perpetuated.

  66. Keith Ivey says

    inmigración is the only form recognized by the RAE.

    Isn’t that what I wrote? I was talking about the pronunciation, not spelling. Sorry for the confusion. My point was that there seems to be a third possible geminated consonant: /mm/, in addition to /ββ/ and /nn/. But maybe the idea is that it’s /nm/ realized as [m:].

  67. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    Ah, sorry, and yeah it would seem so. I have the claim about the number of geminated consonants from somewhere in the RAE’s big grammar, but I don’t have time to look for it now. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include /mm/, but not sure if it actually explains why it’s not “really” a geminated consonant. If the phonemes are /Nm/, is it actually geminated?

  68. David Marjanović says

    Phonetically yes, phonologically it’s arguable… 🙂

  69. It is quite possible to hear people saying ‘inmigración, inmediato’ etc. with the n pronounced though; I guess mostly in slower, more self-conscious speech as an attempt to sound more ‘correct’, but perhaps also more naturally. I elicited a couple of these words from some acquaintances earlier, and both thought that they pronounced the n, but in fact they used m:, apart from when I asked how the words were pronounced afterwards.

  70. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    My experience with speaking Spanish here in the U.S. with strangers (at a public service desk as part of my job) is that people aren’t bothered if I used tú instead of usted.

    It’s more complicated than that, because to know whether tú, usted, ustedes, vosotros or vos is appropriate you need to know what which country you’re in. All the sentences I’m about to write should be prefixed “I think”, but that’s tedious to write and tedious to read, but you can assume it applies passim. In addition, I mention Chile and Spain a lot more than, say, Mexico or Colombia because Chile and Spain are the countries I’ve spent most time in. (Visits of a week or two in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico).

    Tú is used just about everywhere as the familiar singular you use for family and close friends. In Spain (other than the Canaries), its plural is vosotros, but that isn’t used anywhere else. In Chile the plural of tú is ustedes. In Argentina and Uruguay tú is often used where usted would be more appropriate in Spain or Chile. Usted is the standard polite form in Spain and Chile, but it’s not much used in Argentina and Uruguay. (Hat: come in here, as a former resident of Argentina, if that is nonsense!) The word that replaces tú as the very familiar form in Argentina and Uruguay is vos, which is very rare elsewhere (not used at all in Spain and Chile). Once in a shop in Montevideo the shop assistant address my Oriental* companion as “tú”. Afterwards I asked him if they knew one another, and he said no, but that tú is the usual word in such cases. My wife tells me that that is also common, but not universal, in up-market small shops in Santiago.

    To make it all so much simpler, the different words for “you” take different verb forms:

    Tú eres
    Usted es
    Ustedes son
    Vosotros sois (I’ve never heard or used that one, but Google Translate says it’s correct)
    Vos sos

    *”Oriental” is Uruguayan for “Uruguayan” (La República Oriental del Uruguay).

  71. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    According to the RAE, spoken Spanish only has two geminated consonants: obvio, tragannos.

    I’ve long maintained that obvio has a geminated consonant, but I’ve not usually found people to agree with me.

  72. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    When I write an email for the first time to an academic, I start it with “Dear Firstname…” I used to start them with “Dear Dr. Lastname” if they have a PhD (couldn’t bring myself to use “Prof.”), but these days that seems too much.

    I still use Dear Dr. Lastname in a first approach, even if I suspect that they’re too young to have their PhD. I agree with you about Dear Prof. Lastname. I only switch to Hi Firstname when I’ve had a Hi Athel reply.

    Email has killed the traditional way French way of ending a letter: Je vous supplie, mon cher ami et collègue, d’accepter l’expression de ma plus profonde admiration. My wife was once (35 years ago) in our then Director’s office when he was dictating a letter by telephone to his secretary. He ended with that sort of greeting, and after he put the telephone down he said to my wife “God, that guy is an idiot, a disgrace to the university”.

  73. Hat: come in here, as a former resident of Argentina, if that is nonsense!

    That was over a half century ago, so the situation in the country has changed pari passu with the degradation of my memory. I’m pretty sure we used usted with older people, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s largely gone by the wayside since the late ’60s.

  74. Athel Cornish-Bowden, while everything you said in response to what you quote from me is true, it’s irrelevant to what I was saying. I was not an attempting to describe the 2nd person pronouns of Spanish, but simply a commenting on what happens when one gets it wrong (as a non-native speaker), with an example of getting it wrong being no big deal.

  75. When British sign-offs went from variants of “I remain your most humble and obedient servant” to “I remain, etc., etc.”, I wonder how that came off. Practical? Slightly ironic?

  76. David Marjanović says

    Je vous supplie, mon cher ami et collègue, d’accepter l’expression de ma plus profonde admiration.

    Oh, that is beautiful.

  77. I’m going to start using IRYMHAOS as my text message sign-off.

  78. @Athel Cornish-Bowden: I thought that when dictating letters, it was traditional to say something like, “Yours, etc.”—counting the secretary to know what the boss’s preferred closing was.

    The “obedient servant” stuff was such boilerplate, it was common to find it is extremely hostile letters. I wonder whether nineteenth-century correspondents felt the same level of icy irony as we do when reading something like this letter from General Sherman to an opposing commander:

    HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI, IN THE FIELD, NEAR SAVANNAH, December 17, 1864.

    General WILLIAM J. HARDEE, commanding Confederate Forces in Savannah.

    GENERAL: You have doubtless observed, from your station at Rosedew that sea-going vessels now come through Ossabaw Sound and up the Ogeechee to the rear of my army, giving me abundant supplies of all kinds, and more especially heavy ordnance necessary for the reduction of Savannah. I have already received guns that can cast heavy and destructive shot as far as the heart of your city; also, I have for some days held and controlled every avenue by which the people and garrison of Savannah can be supplied, and I am therefore justified in demanding the surrender of the city of Savannah, and its dependent forts, and shall wait a reasonable time for your answer, before opening with heavy ordnance. Should you entertain the proposition, I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army–burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war. I inclose you a copy of General Hood’s demand for the surrender of the town of Resaoa, to be used by you for what it is worth. I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

    W. T. SHERMAN, Major-General.

    Sherman was normally punctilious about closing his letters with variations on the polite formula, so it is notable when he omits it. In his memoirs, he includes quite a number of the letters that went back and forth between himself and General Grant, and it testifies to the close friendship and mutual admiration between the two men that sometimes their closings are much more casually phrased.

  79. “Yours etc.” appears in handwritten private letters, too, as I recall.

  80. J.W. Brewer says

    SPOILER: Savannah was occupied by Union troops without any armed resistance four days after Sherman’s letter, its recipient in the meantime having figured out the one pathway that had not been effectively blocked off and by which his troops could thus retreat from the city and evade capture. This led to Gen. Sherman’s famous telegram to Pres. Lincoln beginning “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah …” I take it that due to cost/space considerations, those “have the honor” flowery formulae were not customary in telegrams.

  81. Notably, the capture of Savannah at the end of the March to the Sea marked the first time in weeks that Sherman’s army had had consistent telegraph access.

  82. Christopher Culver says

    “In Spain (other than the Canaries), its plural is vosotros, but that isn’t used anywhere else.”

    This is not actually the case: vosotros is used in Equatorial Guinea. It was also used by those who received a Spanish education in Western Sahara – that generation is now dying out due to time and the effects of the Moroccan occupation, but during my first visit to the region in 2007 I met several old Saharawis who spoke practically native Spanish.

    I have always wondered how exactly uneducated Latin Americans learn vosotros forms, for they never have any problem understanding me when I, who learned Spanish in Spain, speak that way. Last winter I cycled Baja California and stayed with several poor rancheros who had never got much schooling and lived very isolated in the desert, and yet they were unphased by my vosotros. Does radio (these people only got TV recently) in Latin America really present some vosotros forms often enough that any child would grow up familiar with them?

  83. DM:

    The first [time she says eighteen], just after the 4-minute mark, has a short [tʰ]* like every other -teen up to then.

    Hmm. With thirteen, just after here, she is geminating the /t/, not just making a clear aspiration. And often elsewhere. Some of her geminations are more marked than others; but the shorter ones are not to be dismissed as mere aspirations.

    With sixteen and the like she is doing something different; but other speakers I have heard introduce an interruption just before the release of the /t/, which can be variously analysed I think.

    * Is the item enclosed in [ ] showing correctly? If not, refer to DM’s original comment. A browser issue interferes, for me.

  84. Christopher Culver Said:
    “I have always wondered how exactly uneducated Latin Americans learn vosotros forms, for they never have any problem understanding me when I, who learned Spanish in Spain, speak that way.”

    I only have time for a quick reply but in short, I think most people do get some sort of exposure, even if they have only a little schooling, so that they are aware that some people do talk that way. One means of exposure is through traditional hymns and prayers which often use the “vos” and “vosotros” forms and are often reprinted little booklets that you can buy at street stalls and gift shops, even in Mexican communities in the U.S. ( such as a book table at church, or a stall at a swap meet).

    Edited to add: Any rote prayers and hymns they might have learned as a child, and any older translations of biblical and liturgical passages to which they would have been exposed would have used those forms, at least until more recent times. This was true for me and I’m a Mexican-American.

  85. John of New Avalon says

    Or is that degemination in some cases?

    Very Long Ago it was of course degemination: Latin, like Italian today, was full of geminates, all represented in the spelling. But non-Italian Romance either blew off gemination or switched to another phoneme, like Latin annum > Sp. año. (The ~ was originally a scrawled n.) In Romanian and friends, gemination was simply lost with no special cases. Whether Spanish rr counts as a gemination of r synchronically is a question: diachronically it definitely was, and Latin probably had auto-gemination of initial /r/.

    I expect the transition from 2nd single+plural to just 2nd plural must have been to some English speakers in the day

    Not in the same way, I think, because it was an upgrade, not a downgrade. At that time, V was used to social superiors and T to social inferiors, with varying uses between equals.

    thirteenth but not in thirteen

    I geminate both, so the combining form of three is thirt- (but not in thirty, where the combining form is thir.

    anfibios […] [n]

    Are you sure this isn’t [aɱfibios]? That’s what Wikt says, and it’s official in Italian before any labial.

    It’s more complicated than that, because to know whether tú, usted, ustedes, vosotros or vos is appropriate you need to know what which country you’re in.

    Sure. But in the EE. UU., which is a Spanish-speaking country, is usual in all cases. At least, that’s what I hear around me, even when younger people speak to older ones. Things may be quite different in the West, I don’t know.

    The voseo zone is actually pretty big, but patchy. English WP says s.v. “Voseo”:

    Vos is used extensively as the second-person singular in Rioplatense Spanish (Argentina and Uruguay), Eastern Bolivia, Paraguay […], and Central American Spanish (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, southern parts of Chiapas and some parts of Oaxaca in Mexico). Vos had been traditionally used even in formal writing in Argentina, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines and Uruguay. In the dialect of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay […], vos is also the standard form of use, even in mainstream media. In Argentina, particularly since the last years of the 20th century, it is very common to see billboards and other advertising media using voseo.

    Vos is present in other countries as a regionalism, for instance in the Maracucho Spanish of Zulia State, Venezuela, in the Azuero peninsula of Panama, in various departments in Colombia, and in parts of Ecuador (Sierra down to Esmeraldas). In Peru, voseo is present in some Andean regions and Cajamarca, but the younger generations have ceased to use it. It is also present in Ladino (spoken by Sephardic Jews throughout Israel, Turkey, the Balkans, Morocco, Latin America and the United States), where it replaces usted [as in older Spanish]. In the United States, Salvadoran Americans are by far the largest voseo users followed by other Central Americans, including Guatemalans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Costa Ricans.

    The verb forms used are different in different places: see the article. In Chile in particular, it is common to use vos agreement even with , as in tú sabís. Chavacano also uses voseo, but apparently standard Philippine Spanish no longer does.

    I still use Dear Dr. Lastname

    When someone writes to me that way, I reply “Neither doctor, nor master, nor even bachelor am I, but plain John of New Avalon,” and maybe add a smiley emoticon.

    I wonder how that came off. Practical?

    That’s what I would guess. It takes real time to write all that out with a quill pen.

    I take it that due to cost/space considerations, those “have the honor” flowery formulae were not customary in telegrams.

    Indeed they were not. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians:

    But Lord Panmure had troubles of his own. His favourite nephew, Captain Dowbiggin, was at the front [in the Crimean War], and to one of his telegrams to the Commander-in-Chief the Minister had taken occasion to append the following carefully qualified sentence—”I recommend Dowbiggin to your notice, should you have a vacancy, and if he is fit.” Unfortunately, in those early days, it was left to the discretion of the telegraphist to compress the messages which passed through his hands; so that the result was that Lord Panmure’s delicate appeal reached its destination in the laconic form of “Look after Dowb.” The Headquarters Staff were at first extremely puzzled; they were at last extremely amused. The story spread; and “Look after Dowb” remained for many years the familiar formula for describing official hints in favour of deserving nephews.

  86. John Cowan says

    Lord P was the Secretary of State for War, and the C-in-C was Lord Raglan.

  87. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    I have always wondered how exactly uneducated Latin Americans learn vosotros forms, for they never have any problem understanding me when I, who learned Spanish in Spain, speak that way.

    Likewise I have wondered why Latin Americans (whether educated or not) never have any trouble with the [θ] in my name, though they (mostly) have no [θ] in their ordinary speech. This contrasts with French-, German- and Italian-speakers, who can’t get it even approximately right. I suspect, but don’t know, that they have the proper Spanish Spanish way of pronouncing z (and c in appropriate words) drummed into them at school.

  88. Keith Ivey says

    On the other hand, my Venezuelan Spanish teacher always called me something resembling “Kate”, to the point that I tried asking her to say “Quiz”, which she then pronounced in something approximating the English way.

  89. David Marjanović says

    Are you sure this isn’t [aɱfibios]?

    I’m sure it is, sorry for the confusion!

    I suspect, but don’t know, that they have the proper Spanish Spanish way of pronouncing z (and c in appropriate words) drummed into them at school.

    I once met a Oaxacan (in Paris) who was aware of [θ] but said she didn’t even know the rule for where to put it.

    Hmm. With thirteen, just after here, she is geminating the /t/, not just making a clear aspiration. And often elsewhere. Some of her geminations are more marked than others; but the shorter ones are not to be dismissed as mere aspirations.

    Oh, length and aspiration are completely different things that don’t sound similar to me.

    In this particular thirteen, she’s aiming for a dramatic pause, but it doesn’t quite come out as thir – teen; I think she refuses to lengthen the syllabic r and closes the syllable, either glottally or by beginning the /t/ already, so the dramatic pause is inside the /t/, which is thereby greatly lengthened.

    Every other thirteen, though, has a short /t/, arguing against the possibility that she thinks of it as thirt-teen or third-teen. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the last option is actually widespread.)

    With sixteen and the like she is doing something different; but other speakers I have heard introduce an interruption just before the release of the /t/, which can be variously analysed I think.

    In any case the explanation as “the /t/ goes with the /s/” is nonsense; sixteen, like fifteen, has an unspectacular [tʰ] like every one of her -teens, fifty and sixty have a [d̥]. I lack the material to speculate on whether that’s stress-related or whether she really has a /d/ in every -ty.

    * Is the item enclosed in [ ] showing correctly?

    Yes.

  90. Keith Ivey says

    I believe that I geminate in thirteen, fourteen, and eighteen, and those pronunciations are recognized by Merriam-Webster and Wiktionary. But neither recognizes gemination in nineteen, which I also do.

  91. So do I, and I’m surprised that’s not treated the same by dictionaries.

  92. I also have geminated t in thirteen, fourteen, eighteen, and nineteen, but not the other teens.

  93. What I find particularly interesting is that for some of those number names, whether I geminate the t is somewhat variable, but for others it is not. Specifically, I have

    thirteen always geminated
    fourteen usually geminated
    seventeen usually ungeminated
    eighteen always geminated
    nineteen usually geminated

  94. David Eddyshaw says

    I don’t have gemination in any of these, and don’t recall ever having heard it (though I probably wouldn’t have noticed, to be honest.)

    I wonder if this is yet another of those UK vs US things we keep stumbling upon?

  95. My PCP, who is several decades younger than me, is referred to by support staff as, “Dr. Firstname” and first introduced herself as just “Firstname.” This has been true of the last few of them (high turnover), so I suspect it’s an explicit rule of the provider’s.

  96. For a scientific comparison of genmination in the ‘teens, I present Stuff Smith’s I’se a-Mugging, specifically part 2, the “numbers game” (also suitable for occupying kids in the back seat of a car). The version I first learned is that by The Three T’s. Here you can hear all the ‘teens (except 14 and 17, for reasons which are made clear), carefully divided into two syllables (starting about 0:50). 13 and 15 sound ambisyllabic, split on the t; 16, 18, and 19 less so. In the original Stuff Smith version (which also has a discussion of what cipher means), all these words are clearly geminated (starting about 1:07). In the Mezz Mezzrow version there’s no hint of the gemination anywhere.

  97. David Marjanović says

    What I find particularly interesting is that for some of those number names, whether I geminate the t is somewhat variable, but for others it is not. Specifically, I have […]

    Maybe you give all teens the same length by stretching the /t/ by, on average, the amount needed. That would make sense in counting.

    I’m reminded of the ordinals in German: “1st” through “12th” all have 2 syllables, except for the most conservative form of “7th”, which has 3; lots of people, myself included, cut it down to 2 in one of two different ways.

  98. DM:

    Oh, length and aspiration are completely different things that don’t sound similar to me.

    Yes, of course. I was wondering why you went to the trouble of specifying an aspiration in your annotation of the sound. Generally, but perhaps not in the case of some pronunciations of sixteen, we can leave the matter of aspiration aside.

    In this particular thirteen, she’s aiming for a dramatic pause, but it doesn’t quite come out as thir – teen; I think she refuses to lengthen the syllabic r and closes the syllable, either glottally or by beginning the /t/ already, so the dramatic pause is inside the /t/, which is thereby greatly lengthened.

    I’m surprised that you don’t hear a great number of clear geminations in the Monica presentation: some slight, some typical, some quite exaggerated. I’m surprised that you want to invoke the alternative of a glottal stop in one particular thirteen (consider the two occurrences after that point, in fact). While that is a possible account, it seems odd to hear it as anything other than a long gemination (and see it, from the disposition of teeth preceding the interruption of airflow). For one thing, it would take a good deal more effort (unnecessary effort) for her to produce a glottal stop in that context with her mouth configured that way, as opposed to a simple stretching of her default gemination.

    As for sixteen, in US speech I sometimes observe an interruption of the flow between /k/ and /s/, and sometimes between /s/ and /t/. Hard to discern the difference, but it’s there all right.

    D Eddyshaw:

    I don’t have gemination in any of these, and don’t recall ever having heard it (though I probably wouldn’t have noticed, to be honest.)

    It’s pretty well confined to US speech, as I have noted. But I also find it used as an occasional option (among a small range of alternatives) in UK and Oz speech when we need to be emphatic, or highlight some difference.

    As for not noticing, right: that’s my main interest here. Like anosognosia, but for our speech practices rather than for our diseases. I’m more often interested in lapses in noticing stress patterns and their variations, and a demotic obliviousness to matters of stress generally.

    I wonder if this is yet another of those UK vs US things we keep stumbling upon?

    I’ve noticed it for years. But as I say, it seems hardly ever to be studied or discussed.

  99. PlasticPaddy says

    @dm
    Re 7th
    https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_siebte_Kreuz
    What is the second way?

  100. German person says

    @PlasticPaddy

    Possibly ‘siemte’ (never actually spelt that way, too lazy for IPA) …

  101. PlasticPaddy says

    Thanks. Even if I heard that, I would probably hear it as sieb(e)mte, with elision on the (e) and radical weakening of the b (assimilation to following m).

  102. David Marjanović says

    Almost – the vowel is short in Vienna.

    I was wondering why you went to the trouble of specifying an aspiration in your annotation of the sound.

    Just pedantry, plus I notice aspiration generally because southern German lacks it. (Getting rid of it was half the point of the High German consonant shift.)

    with her mouth configured that way

    I can’t listen again right now, but I don’t understand what you mean (and why you mentioned the teeth). Unreleased glottal stop = holding your breath. That’s mouth-independent.

  103. German person says

    >Almost – the vowel is short in Vienna

    Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it that way. I’m familiar with ‘siebte’ with a short and close-mid (? – the IPA-small-capital-I-thingy) vowel (but never use it myself).

  104. DM:

    Yes, of course Monica could have used a glottal stop exactly at the same time as positioning her teeth and presumably her tongue for a /t/ (for release a good number of milliseconds later). It’s hard to do though, and bizarre to think she would be making that strange effort in this presentation.

    Gemination is obviously what’s going on elsewhere from her, and from several other US English educational YouTubers that you can readily find.

    All that I have found geminate in most of their “-teen[th]” pronunciations, fitting rather well with AmE speakers reporting above in this thread, and with the inconsistent and often inept dictionary evidence. None of the UK YouTubers teaching number pronunciation make any such default interruption of the airflow. None that I found, anyway.

  105. David Marjanović says

    Ah, sorry, PlasticPaddy’s comment wasn’t there yet. Historically, the first vowel in sieben was short; it’s long now because it’s in an open syllable, the spelling is not etymological. In the Central and most other Bavarian dialects, vowel length is not phonemic, but works like in Russian: stressed vowels are longer, plus a lesser effect from the number of consonants that follow. The second vowel has long dropped out*, creating a syllabic [m]. The Bavarian trick is that /b d g/, even though they’re voiceless, are dropped (except in slow, careful pronunciation) when syllabic nasals follow. Result: [sɪˑm̩], in two syllables, but the syllable boundary is vulnerable to stress-timing, so it is dropped in longer words: siebenundzwanzig [sɪmːɐt͡sʋãnt͡sg̊] in just three syllables. (I’m not sure what the long /mː/ is doing there, but I suspect the idea is to make all comparable numerals equally long.) Viennese dia- and mesolect uses this version of sieben in siebente: [sɪm(ː)tɛ].

    I, from 200 km to the west, have siebte [sɪb̥tɛ] instead.

    * Even for Standard German I would rather say “syllabic consonants are spelled with a preceding e” than “e in unstressed final syllables drops when it can”.

    Now let’s see if I can listen to a few more thirteen

  106. David Marjanović says

    13:

    1:03: The /t/ is released after a long pause; I can’t tell how the pause begins.
    1:11 (when the IPA appears): This pause almost certainly begins by holding her breath.
    1:36: Short. That’s where she’s just mentioning the word at normal speaking speed instead of performing it.
    1:58: Again a pause; I’m quite sure it begins with a glottal stop. Again performance.
    1.59: Short. Definitely no glottal stop. Still performance, but now she’s remembering that the point here is the /n/ and not the /t/.
    2:05: Short, but preglottalized.
    2:11: Dramatic pause to emphasize the stress; it probably begins by beginning the [t].
    2:14: Same pause for the same reason; I can’t tell how it begins or if there’s any closure going on during it.

    14:

    2:21: Short, but preglottalized.
    2:27: Here, I think, the /r/ is lengthened instead. It becomes more or less syllabic and does not merge with the preceding vowel.
    2:41: Dramatic pause for the stress, probably inside the /t/.

    15:

    2:45: Short. She’s speaking faster now to get her performance all the way to 20.
    2:49: Genuine pause: the second /f/ is released, then there’s silence, then the short /t/ begins.
    3:10: I think the /t/ gets lengthened a bit here.

    16:

    3:16: Short.
    3:21: Genuine pause between the second /s/ and the short /t/.
    3:31: Short.
    3:36: Short, preceded by an artificially long /s/ to make her evidently false point.
    3:39: Ditto.
    3:47: Ditto, even though here the point is the stress.

    17:

    3:51: Short.
    3:56: Short; stretching the word is instead achieved by promoting the /ə/ to /ɛ/. She does that a lot, actually; vowel harmony?
    4:01: I think that’s a genuine pause.

    Isolated -steen at 3:38: Short.

    I have to stop for now, but so far I think she doesn’t lengthen the /t/ in -teen in her normal speech. It is still interesting what she does for emphasis.

    It’s hard to do though, and bizarre to think she would be making that strange effort in this presentation.

    Quite the opposite. Unstressed and/or non-initial /p t k t͡ʃ/ that survive as voiceless stops are widely and increasingly preglottalized in the UK and to a lesser extent the US: the aspiration is not merely weakened or left off, but actively taken away by holding one’s breath. I have colleagues from England that give me trouble breathing when they speak through a bad microphone! There’s a paper on this, starting on p. 15 of this book in Google Books; there’s also a PDF floating around, but I can’t remember where I got it.

  107. John Cowan says

    Gemination in eighteen is etymological, and I would guess it has probably been lost by analogy in varieties that don’t have any gemination. I myself geminate only thirteen, fourteen, eighteen.

    As for -ty, I have //D// in forty, seventy, eighty, ninety as expected for a Yank. (Twenty is /twɛni/ except in careful speech.) In H.G. Wells’s scientific romance When The Sleeper Wakes (I would have written Awake(n)s), the future is duodecimal, and one character says he is “sevendy years old”. When I first read the book as a teenager, I understood the analogy ten : -ty :: dozen : dy just fine, but I thought it was strange that the distinction would be made only in writing and not in speech!

    I bet private doctors don’t use your first name!

    In the U.S. they certainly do. Maybe doctors-for-the-rich don’t, I wouldn’t know. If you don’t like it, address them by first name (with sentential stress so they can’t miss it) in return and see how they take it. Of course this can backfire.

    For me, the most important form of address is to leave it out altogether.

    Unreleased glottal stop = holding your breath.

    Hardly. I can hold my breath with an unreleased /p/, or an unreleased glottal stop, or with no closure at all. In another sense, every stop involves holding your breath.

  108. JC:

    [DM:] Unreleased glottal stop = holding your breath.
    [JC:] Hardly. I can hold my breath with an unreleased /p/, or an unreleased glottal stop, or with no closure at all. In another sense, every stop involves holding your breath.

    I agree on both your points, JC.

    DM:

    Quite the opposite. Unstressed and/or non-initial /p t k t͡ʃ/ that survive as voiceless stops are widely and increasingly preglottalized in the UK and to a lesser extent the US: the aspiration is not merely weakened or left off, but actively taken away by holding one’s breath.

    You are right (except on the holding of breath: see above), and I’ve learned something about the subtleties here. But I stand by all the essentials in my claims. Some revision would be best, following your correction. I had written (with bold now added):

    I’m surprised that you don’t hear a great number of clear geminations in the Monica presentation: some slight, some typical, some quite exaggerated. I’m surprised that you want to invoke the alternative of a glottal stop in one particular thirteen (consider the two occurrences after that point, in fact). While that is a possible account, it seems odd to hear it as anything other than a long gemination (and see it, from the disposition of teeth preceding the interruption of airflow). For one thing, it would take a good deal more effort (unnecessary effort) for her to produce a glottal stop in that context with her mouth configured that way, as opposed to a simple stretching of her default gemination.

    I would revise it to this:

    I’m surprised that you don’t hear a great number of clear geminations in the Monica presentation: some slight, some typical, some quite exaggerated. I’m surprised that you want to invoke a glottal stop, or perhaps something like a glottal coarticulation, as if this were an alternative in one particular thirteen (consider the two occurrences after that point, in fact). While that is one possible realisation of a gemination (especially one involving /t/), it seems inapposite to construe what’s happening as anything more particular than a generalised long gemination (and see it as one, from the disposition of teeth and therefore presumably of the tongue that is most likely and naturally executing the stop, at the exact start of the interruption of the airflow). [End here.]

    I would in consequence also revise some later material in my comments.

    Anyway, I remain surprised by your take on all this. To me even the quickest and most incidental “Xteen” pronunciations from Monica are slightly geminated – by whatever standard or interminable more concealed means (noting that even the obvious and accepted gemination in part-time is often realised with a plain open-mouthed glottal stop before a [t] or a [tʰ]). Rather than rely on my own unaided perception (my overarching theme being that unaided perceptions are unreliable, often wildly), I have downloaded that entire YouTube presentation for analysis of the waveforms at crucial points. When that’s complete I’ll post some responses to the detailed judgements you have delivered above.

  109. (Oops: for “interminable” read “indeterminable”.)

  110. John Cowan says

    ‘Sie’ + given name:

    This is also “Hamburger Sie”, which is so locally prominent that it gets a page at the Goethe-Institut, with the obviously synthetic example „Elke, kommen Sie bitte mal?“

  111. David Marjanović says

    It has dawned on me that placing dramatic pauses into a phonemically short consonant is actually normal. If a dramatic explosion happens right in front of you, and you have Wiener Schmäh “Viennese deadpan snark”, you’re going to say da scheppert es “there’s quite the din here, like pots and pans falling to the ground” as follows: [ˌd̥ɔˈʃːːːɛʋɐd̥͡s]. No phonemic length of vowels or word-initial consonants; phonetically, stressed vowels are long(er), word-initial consonants are… short otherwise.

    As for -ty, I have //D// in forty, seventy, eighty, ninety as expected for a Yank. (Twenty is /twɛni/ except in careful speech.)

    That’s exactly as in the video: [ɾ] in 30, 40 & 80, [d] in 70 & 90, [d̥] in 50 & 60, absence in 20 (I think I’ve heard other people use a nasal [ɾ̃], but I’m not sure).

    I can hold my breath with an unreleased /p/, or an unreleased glottal stop, or with no closure at all.

    OK, but the glottal closure is by far the easiest, isn’t it? (And when I’ve been able to check, my ability to hold my breath without any closure has turned out to be illusory every time. It should be possible, but I lack positive evidence so far.)

    To me even the quickest and most incidental “Xteen” pronunciations from Monica are slightly geminated –

    I suspect you’re hearing the difference between fortis [t] and lenis [d̥] as length, which is about 1/3 right on average. But I’m definitely looking forward to your analysis!

  112. @Christopher Culver: I have always wondered how exactly uneducated Latin Americans learn vosotros forms, for they never have any problem understanding me when I, who learned Spanish in Spain, speak that way.

    They probably recognize it from encountering it in Mass: “Yo confieso ante Dios todopoderoso y ante vosotros, hermanos, que he pecado mucho[…]Por eso ruego a Santa María, siempre Virgen, a los ángeles, a los santos y a vosotros, hermanos, que intercedáis por mí ante Dios, nuestro Señor.[…]El Señor esté con vosotros[…]La paz del Señor esté siempre con vosotros

    There are probably many other examples, but Mass is the limit of my knowledge of Catholicism

  113. DM:

    I have by no means forgotten about the Monica analysis. To summarise, I find not one ungeminated /t/ for “Xteen” in her entire presentation. Though some gemination gaps are as short as ~40 msec, they are audibly there. And visibly, when I inspect the waveforms and spectrograms. At least a few may be realised by something beyond a strict [t:], with the tongue at the alveolar ridge; but they count phenomenologically (which is what matters) as geminations nonetheless. They are brief silences between compression and release.

    More particular points later.

    Meanwhile I invite you to consider a similar but British number lesson. That’s how non-gemination of /t/ in “Xteen” sounds – and looks, on close examination of all relevant waveforms and spectrograms.

    For any of these YouTube items it’s sometimes handy to slow the speed to 0.25 (click on the tool icon beneath the video). I can do closer visual inspection of the mouth than that of course, with my downloaded video versions.

  114. David Marjanović says

    I’ll listen to the new video ASAP; meanwhile, though, I’m rather stunned you consider a plosive as short as 40 ms geminated.

  115. Monica has those 40 ms gaps (or longer) in Xteen pronunciations, and Chris (the Brit) does not. This is pretty consistent, and visible in the graphic evidence. To me it’s audible. It fits the definition of gemination. But if this systematic difference is not a matter of gemination, let’s give it some non-stunning name. However we name it, it’s there.

  116. PlasticPaddy says

    Obviously DM can speak for himself, but what he may be getting at is that the 40 ms ‘gap’ may not be restricted to *teen but might be found in other *x environments where x, like teen is an “almost morpheme”, say tant in constant, extant, distant, important,…

  117. David Marjanović says

    I can’t speak for myself as long as I haven’t watched the other video. 🙂 It just struck me that aspiration alone routinely causes a delay in voice onset time over 100 ms, and /t/ at the beginning of a stressed syllable in English is generally aspirated (if not necessarily that much).

  118. J.W. Brewer says

    Whether the “-teen” syllable in the 13-19 number words in English is stressed or unstressed depends crucially (at least in my idiolect, man …) on context. Never stressed when “counting to twenty” or otherwise running through the series in sequence. Almost never stressed when modifying a noun (“fifteen employees are out sick today” or “anything taller than fourteen floors is gonna require a zoning variance”). Sometimes/often stressed when “freestanding,” especially but not only when understood as a clipped equivalent of “Xteen years old” (e.g. “Didn’t Polanski know she was only thirteen?” or “okay I know that may sound like a dumb thing to have done, but in my defense I was nineteen at the time”). You could I guess try to sort some of these audio recordings along these lines and see if the gemination-like phenomena vary accordingly.

  119. David Marjanović says

    Yes, yes, it is well known that the stress in such words shifts when another stressed syllable comes too close or when contrastive stress overrides everything. In the Monica video, however, all the -teens are in contrast with -ty, and therefore they’re all end-stressed.

  120. Not that it matters to the linguistic point, but Roman Polanski committed a forcible rape. Ever since, apologists for his behavior have focused on the victim’s age, to imply that it was “only” a statutory infraction. (And statutory rape was happening all the time in showbiz in the 1970s. People are happy to turning a blind eye, and probably were even more so then.)

  121. J.W. Brewer says

    Don’t wanna get sidelined into Seventies-showbiz-bashing, but not all forcible rapes are functionally equivalent in the eyes of the law and an unusually young victim might plausibly lead to a more severe sentence than a more typical-age victim. At least in a “normal” context rather than California in the Seventies. (California IIRC also had an unusually high age of consent as a theoretical matter, despite having a “Hollywood” culture where the plausibility of grown men copulating with sixteen-year-old girls was perhaps more mainstream* than it was in many states where the age of consent was technically sixteen. Always a recipe for suboptimal outcomes when your actual governing cultural norms are not in synch with the theoretical norms embodied in your criminal law.)

    *”Forget that I’m fifty ’cause you just got paid,” as David Bowie memorably put it.

  122. And let’s not even get started on Jerry Lee Lewis.

  123. J.W. Brewer says

    The old-school view was that if you marry ’em first it’s definitely not a crime. No doubt there is a newer-school rival view. Of course, marrying ’em first means you are disabling yourself from just being a discreet hypocrite about the whole thing.

  124. Jerry Lee doesn’t even seem to have felt the call of hypocrisy — he never understood what all the fuss was about.

  125. David Marjanović says

    The uplifting part of that article is the language-relevant part: “spent two years in prison in 1960”.

  126. John Cowan says

    Roman Polanski committed a forcible rape

    Nonconsensual rather than forcible. He was charged with rape by drug (namely alcohol). Of course the culpability is the same.

  127. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    nonconsensual by default (also w/o C2H5OH) when partner is below age of consent…

  128. J.W. Brewer says

    If one indulges the polite presumption that the young lady in question would have resisted (with such resistance then needing to be overcome by force) had she not been doped up to the point of inability to resist, it is not particularly meaningful to say it wasn’t forcible. If we think that the alleged rapist was such a wimp he would not in fact have resorted to force had he been unable to drug his victims into resistancelessness, I’m not sure he really deserves credit or an oak-leaf cluster for that.

    ETA: @PlasticPaddy. Not to be overly technical, but the law really does distinguish between situations where, on the one hand, actual subjective consent is given but it’s deemed legally irrelevant because the person in question is too young or otherwise disabled for us to think they can make reasonable decisions, and, on the other hand, actual subjective consent is not given. (Extreme intoxication can make it practically difficult to ascertain given v. not given so the rule there is not-given by default.)

  129. Indeed. And perhaps we can let it go at that.

  130. David Marjanović says

    Finally!

    Meanwhile I invite you to consider a similar but British number lesson. That’s how non-gemination of /t/ in “Xteen” sounds – and looks, on close examination of all relevant waveforms and spectrograms.

    Definitely no third-teen or eight-teen in there!

    However, what that bloke does (I almost wrote guy, hah) is he completely refuses to let -teen, or -ty for that matter, cause pre-fortis clipping. Instead, he presents the numbers very rhythmically, stressing every foot (two syllables in seven-, otherwise one) almost equally and making them all equally long (except that eigh- remains a bit shorter). So he gives us [θɜːːtʰiːːn fɔ̝ːːtʰiːːn fɪfːtʰiːːn sɪ̆ʔ̚k̚stʰiːːn sɛ̞və̆ntʰiːːn e̞ːɪ̯tʰiːːn näɪ̯nˑtʰiːːn] – note the [fː] in fifteen and the [nˑ] in nineteen.

    Also, the first time he unambiguously stresses -teen only comes at 1:50.

    (And he thinks of his eyebrows as part of his speech apparatus. And he does not start eighteen with [ʔ] despite the pause that precedes it.)

  131. Stu Clayton says

    And he thinks of his eyebrows as part of his speech apparatus

    Is there an IPA symbol for “eyebrows” ? With sub- and superscripts for “raising”, “lowering” etc. Or something with a function similar to that of tone indicators.

    Reality has long passed IPA on the inside lane. Even emoticons carry information more easily processed than [θɜːːtʰiːːn fɔ̝ːːtʰiːːn fɪfːtʰiːːn sɪ̆ʔ̚k̚stʰiːːn sɛ̞və̆ntʰiːːn e̞ːɪ̯tʰiːːn näɪ̯nˑtʰiːːn] .

  132. Yes, if you’re unfamiliar with something it’s hard to process it. Similarly, if you don’t know German but you know English, English is considerably easier to process. You may be onto something there.

  133. Stu Clayton says

    <* raises eyebrow *>

    [Actually I can raise only both together, not one at a time. Is this like wiggling your ears – you have to be born with the ability?]

  134. David Marjanović says

    I can only raise both together, too. I was well over 10 years old, though, when I noticed I can move my ears – and that I can do one at a time.

  135. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    My theory is that I learned how to wiggle my ears because I wear glasses and get visual feedback when my ears move. But now that I know when my ears are moving, it turns out that there is also a proprioceptive signal from the movement — but it’s possible that I wouldn’t have been able to recognize that signal if I didn’t know what it correlates with.

    By this theory everybody can wiggle their ears, but you have to figure out how you know when they wiggle to be able to do it at will. Maybe you can get lucky by trying out stuff in front of a mirror…

    (I can’t wiggle one ear at a time, but then I don’t think I’ve spent more than 20 seconds trying to learn).

  136. DM:

    All interesting. I may have more to say about this, but meanwhile:

    Also, the first time he unambiguously stresses -teen only comes at 1:50.

    Chris stresses -teen rather well three times at 0:26–0:32, once at 0:52, and once at 1:03. Anyway, much of the time he’s not recommending a stress pattern for the -teen words but addressing some component feature.

    What underlies perceived stress? With thirteen at 1:50, peak amplitude is higher at the first syllable than at the second syllable, surprisingly enough.

    Duration, intonation, and some sort of early pause (by gemination or whatever other means) can all contribute, and personal judgements of stress may weight these differently. To me, at 5:14 in our host’s excellent reading of his translation of Mandelstam’s “Бессонница” (“Insomnia”), which occasioned the magnificent thread A draft of Mandelstam, the word Achaean definitely sounds stressed on the first syllable. But partly because there is a preceding silence from the gemination of /k/ (duration ~60 ms), and from our general expectation for the word Achaean, despite lower peak amplitudes at the second syllable it will be judged as stressed by many listeners. I presented a clip of this file out of context and without explanation – just “Achaean men” – to three innocent bystanders, then asked them to say how many syllables there were and to assign stress weightings to them in the range 1–4. All heard four syllables but could not work out the meaning, or determine the exact sounds. Their values for the stress of syllables (higher number means more stressed) were as follows:

    2114
    2113
    2212 or 2213

    Your kilometrage may differ.

  137. David Marjanović says

    a preceding silence from the gemination of /k/ (duration ~60 ms)

    The /k/ sounds distinctly short to me. It is aspirated, though, and that must be what accounts for why it’s 60 and not 20 ms long. In other words, quite unremarkable English.

  138. Well DM, that /t/ may appear “short” to you. But the waveform and the spectrogram reveal a distinct relative silence (practically absolute) of ~60 ms, without any sound of aspiration within it. Achaean can be pronounced without so long a silence. Long? Yes, 60 ms is quite a discernible interruption. Many phonetic features are of that duration or less – and a sudden cessation has stark “temporal edges”, yes?

    So anyway, what stress pattern do you perceive in Hat’s “Achaean men”? What are the determinants of your perception, given that you have heard it in its sentential context and knowing the meaning of the whole and the canonic pronunciation of Achaean?

  139. the word Achaean definitely sounds stressed on the first syllable.

    I just listened to it, and I can’t imagine where you’re getting that — did you mean “second”? I said /əˈkiːən/, and I can hear no perceptible stress on the first syllable.

  140. David Marjanović says

    But the waveform and the spectrogram reveal a distinct relative silence (practically absolute) of ~60 ms, without any sound of aspiration within it.

    60 ms is short, not long. The aspiration is coupled with a bit of palatalization, so it sounds similar to [ç], and it’s longer than the closure.

    I have long consonants natively in my kinds of German. (That goes so far that I once misunderstood German alle, in an accent without consonant length, as Polish ale.) Trust me, even with stress-timing, they’re longer than that – and they’re not aspirated. I natively have [ç], too.

    So anyway, what stress pattern do you perceive in Hat’s “Achaean men”?

    Stress in the middle, but I did not pay attention; I’ll try to repeat the experience later today.

  141. That’s fascinating to me, Hat! It’s so contrary to my own experience, and the experience of my three experimental subjects (all extraordinarily adept in English, and all talented musicians for what that may be worth; two Australians, one NE US). To say nothing of the abstracted physical evidence, which itself could yield only partial explanations.

    This is all relevant to a major interest of mine.

    Context and awareness of the spoken words count for a great deal, I’m sure. But these and the other factors carry different weight for different hearers. The ways of speech proprioception and speech alteroception are dark indeed, just like other domains of self- and other-perception.

    DM:

    60 ms is short, not long.

    You say that as if length were a binary variable. It is not, of course.

  142. The phrase is at 5:14, if anyone else wants to give it a try. I just listened again, and I repeat, I can’t imagine hearing stress on the first syllable. Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean by “stress.” To me, it’s a bog-standard unstressed schwa.

  143. My perception matches Hat’s, but of course I don’t know how I’d react to the phrase in isolation without knowing what it’s supposed to be.

  144. Hat, it sounds like a bog-standard /æ/ when it’s presented in isolation by clipping it out for examination. And its peaks of amplitude are visibly higher than any in the second syllable.

    As for what is meant by stress, that’s a question for all of us – and one much discussed in the literature I’ve been looking at.

    Keith:

    Understandable. I’m pretty sure most hearers would be swayed by context and knowledge of which words were being spoken. Somehow, I was not so swayed. In this present case.

  145. Primed for “Achean men”, and having listened to a portion of the recording before the phrase in question, of course I heard /əˈkiːən/.

    But if I try to forget that and if I pretend that it’s a meaningless string of sounds spoken by an uknown speaker, I can easily make myself hear stress on the first syllable.

    I think this is to do with the fact that, as Noetica mentioned, amplitude is high on the first syllable, unlike pitch, which peaks in the second syllable. And sudden pitch changes are more important than intensity when it comes to accented vs. unaccented opposition in English.

  146. I hear the /æ/, but for me as well the stress rises from the first to the second syllable.

  147. Oh, and in terms of quality, this is something between [ɜ] and [ɛ], but that’s within the range of English phonological schwa.

    Lass describes his initial schwas as [ɘ] and [ɪ̈] depending on the following sound (NOT [ə]).

  148. FJ:

    But if I try to forget that and if I pretend that it’s a meaningless string of sounds spoken by an uknown speaker, I can easily make myself hear stress on the first syllable.

    That is the required effort, of course. Some people will succeed in it, some evidently will not.

    It’s more variable than trying to see, in those famous visual illusions, areas of colour as the same when they sure-as-hell look different: by their context, interpreted according to our utterly automatic understanding of lighting effects in the scene represented. I think very few with standard neural wiring can overcome that effect of context.

    But the two scenarios here – one visual, one auditory – do seem broadly and informatively analogous.

  149. Very interesting!

  150. David Marjanović says

    I hear the higher volume and unexpectedly high pitch on the first syllable; the falling pitch that I hear as stress is on the second (and so is the length that contributes to this impression).

    I also hear massive umlaut: the [ɛ̞] of men has spread to every /ə/ of [ɛ̞kʰiːɛ̞nmɛ̞n].

    You say that as if length were a binary variable.

    Of course not. 60 ms including aspiration is always on the short side, however. If that’s long, short aspirated plosives barely have a chance to exist.

  151. DM:

    60 ms including aspiration is always on the short side, however. If that’s long, short aspirated plosives barely have a chance to exist.

    You respond as if I had claimed that the length of the whole /k/ is itself 60 ms. But no. I explicitly referred to just the silence that is a component of the /k/. For example, I wrote (now correcting my careless /t/ to /k/):

    Well DM, that /k/ may appear “short” to you. But the waveform and the spectrogram reveal a distinct relative silence (practically absolute) of ~60 ms, without any sound of aspiration within it. Achaean can be pronounced without so long a silence. Long? Yes, 60 ms is quite a discernible interruption.

    I agree that there is some “palatalisation” (affrication, rather?) in the release of the /k/. That release element is the same length as the silence that precedes it: ~60 ms. Surprisingly, the elements that come next and precede the first [n] – you identify them as [iːɛ̞], though there is also an intervocalic glide – have a combined duration of <190 ms. I am confident in reporting this rather than the length of the [iː] (or [i]) alone: its end is unclear because of that glide. But it would be ~90 ms including that glide.

    That’s the immediate context of our ~60 ms interruption, which should accordingly be judged not ridiculously short at all – and comparatively well bounded and perceptible. Now, if I reduce that silence to an absolute silence no difference is discernible. If I shorten or remove it, the whole phrase is still just as clearly identifiable as a normally spoken “Achaean men”, but more rapidly delivered. And interestingly, in my own judgement there is then a stronger tendency to hear syllable one as stressed. This supports my contention that the silence is a factor in making a perceived stress on syllable two more likely.

  152. Hat, it sounds like a bog-standard /æ/

    I don’t know what that means. It certainly could be someone’s /æ/, but it does not sound anything like [æ] to me (and my /æ/ in non-nasal contexts is very close to [æ]).

    I started to play the recording before checking out the text, and I hear the narrator giving Hat’s birthday as 1851. Startled, I verified that the text says 1951, so I played the recording twice more and heard 1851 both times. I don’t know if this is a curious accent, a curious speech error, or a curious misperception.

    =======

    I note that Hat pronounces yawns as /jɑnz/, i.e. the caught-cot merger.

  153. JC, the “bog-standard” trope is borrowed from Hat. See above, where he calls the relevant sound a bog-standard schwa.

    Do you equally object to that description of it? To me it does not sound like a typical schwa at all. For one thing it is objectively louder than any other vowel in the phrase; and it has too many high-frequency components.

    On further scrutiny, comparing this vowel from Hat with his first a in catalog (examining a spectrum plot for each, and just listening), I find that they’re not exactly the same. Still, they’re quite close. I stand by my first impression: it’s more similar, all things considered, to that vowel than to any typical schwa. But again, a range of different weights can be placed on the various factors.

  154. David Marjanović says

    You respond as if I had claimed that the length of the whole /k/ is itself 60 ms. But no. I explicitly referred to just the silence that is a component of the /k/.

    Oh, sorry, my mistake.

    Still. That’s not long.

    Surprisingly, the elements that come next and precede the first [n] – you identify them as [iːɛ̞], though there is also an intervocalic glide – have a combined duration of <190 ms.

    Yes, my usage of [ː] here was well below my usual pedantry standards; the /i/ is barely longer than the other vowels in the phrase.

    not ridiculously short at all –

    It’s not ridiculously short, it’s ordinarily short, like an ordinary plosive at the beginning of a stressed English syllable.

    I don’t know what that means. It certainly could be someone’s /æ/, but it does not sound anything like [æ] to me (and my /æ/ in non-nasal contexts is very close to [æ]).

    I actually had to check the lyrics to be sure it’s men and not man; to me it sounds intermediate.

  155. Interesting, DM. To you the vowel in men sounds intermediate? Till now the disputed one has just been the first vowel in Achaean. I must compare those two when I next have my tools to hand.

  156. I’m becoming increasingly aware that I know less than nothing about phonology. That’s what comes of studying Indo-European, where clay tablets are an innovative technology and sound a distant inference!

  157. David Marjanović says

    Till now the disputed one has just been the first vowel in Achaean.

    As I said, the way I hear it (or heard it yesterday; I can’t try again right now), both of the phonological schwas in Achaean men have fully assimilated to the vowel of men. I didn’t expect that, though I’ve noticed before that English schwas sometimes vary with their surroundings (…and I don’t have one in my kinds of German, except in the question tag [nə].

    I’ve been making a few attempts to find sound files contrasting short & long plosives; no luck so far.

    and sound a distant inference!

    Except exceptions!

  158. I’m becoming increasingly aware that I know less than nothing about phonology.

    Here, it’s phonetics…

  159. DM:

    As I said, the way I hear it (or heard it yesterday; I can’t try again right now), both of the phonological schwas in Achaean men have fully assimilated to the vowel of men.

    Here is exactly what you wrote:

    I also hear massive umlaut: the [ɛ̞] of men has spread to every /ə/ of [ɛ̞kʰiːɛ̞nmɛ̞n].

    I have made frequency plots for the purest inner stretches of each of the four vowels. One caveat: Hat’s portion of the whole file shows little above 3500 Hz, and in fact I would not trust it above 2500 Hz.

    That said, I find that vowel 4 (of mEn, capping vowels now) does indeed colour the immediately preceding vowel 3 (-An), as expected. On inspection the two are pretty well indistinguishable.

    Vowel 2 (-chAE-) of course has a more distinguishable profile, since it is [i] or perhaps [iː].

    Vowel 1 (Ach-) looks like an intermediate between vowel 3 (or 4) and the /ae/ I spoke of before (Hat’s cAtalog vowel). I would have been surprised to find it any more like vowels 3 and 4, because there is the intervening [i] of vowel 2. We might almost as plausibly consider it coloured by that anticipated [i].

    FJ:

    … I can easily make myself hear stress on the first syllable. / I think this is to do with the fact that, as Noetica mentioned, amplitude is high on the first syllable, unlike pitch, which peaks in the second syllable. And sudden pitch changes are more important than intensity when it comes to accented vs. unaccented opposition in English.

    I can report, from the spectrogram for the whole phrase, that the overall pitch profile is higher for vowel 1 than for vowel 2, but the lowest distinct pitch is very slightly higher in vowel 2. There is greater pitch change within vowel 1 than within vowel 2, presumably another factor in the subjective evaluation of prominence.

    Y:

    Here, it’s phonetics…

    More phonetics than phonology perhaps, but both are under discussion. Their demarcation is still disputed in any case. See for example extended treatment in Linda Shockey’s Sound Patterns of Spoken English (2008), a great little book whose early definitional wrangling I unfortunately can’t link to at Google books and I’m not going to type it in. Referring to deliberations stretching from p. 3 to p. 11 she writes:

    Let us now return to the question of whether this book is about phonetics or phonology. In the light of what was said above, it is not clear that this question needs to be answered, or even that it is a meaningful question. By definitions 1 and 2, most of the material covered here will have to be thought of as phonetics. By definitions 3 and 4, it is mainly phonology. Suffice it to say that it deals with systematic behaviour by native speakers (of English in this case, though not in principle) using fluent speech in everyday communicative situations.

    Hat:

    I’m becoming increasingly aware that I know less than nothing about phonology.

    I struggle also. It’s a whole nother world; but I’m learning a lot as this thread progresses, especially from David M.

  160. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo just sent off a coldly angry letter to Mahmoud Abbas, stripping him of the médaille Grand Vermeil de Paris she had conferred on him in 2015, because of his recent Holocaust-denialist statement. The letter signs off with “Je vous prie, Monsieur le Président, de recevoir mes salutations.”

  161. Bah. This is all French nonsense. Benjamin Franklin knew how it was done:

    Philada. July 5. 1775

    Mr. Strahan

    You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction. You have begun to burn our Towns and murder our People. — Look upon your hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! — You and I were long Friends: — You are now my Enemy, — and

    I am,

    Yours.

    B. Franklin

    Mr. Strahan was among other things the publisher of Johnson’s Dictionary (curious that given Johnson’s animus against the Scots, his publisher was Scottish and so were five out of his six amanuenses), and at the time Printer to the King. He had originally sympathized with the Americans, but in 1775 he said to Hume, “I am entirely for coercive methods with these obstinate madmen”, and he ended up voting for war.

    In the end, Franklin never sent the letter and he and Strahan resumed their friendship after the war.

  162. Johnson was talkative about how much he despised Scotland, but he had never been there until he and Boswell took a grand tour of the country, about which they both wrote books promoting tourism in both the lowlands and the highlands. (The trip included a visit to Monboddo House.) I wonder whether the particular reported animus Johnson expressed towards the Scots (as opposed to, say, the Irish or the French) is due to Boswell’s reporting such remarks out of proportion to their actual occurrence and/or Johnson being particularly venomous toward Scotland as a way of needling Boswell and his other Scottish friends.

  163. Boswell’s, great reading. Johnson’s, less engaging. His animus toward the Scots? They were readily accessible victims; but in fact his curmudgeonly venom was distributed rather promiscuously.

  164. We hear much of Johnson’s rudenesses, rather less of his kindnesses, as someone or other said.

  165. Stu Clayton says

    Boswell does not stint his reports of Johnson’s kindnesses.

  166. Boswell is not stinting with detail of any kind, in portrayal of his idol. Think Smithers and Burns.

  167. Smithers wrote nothing still read today.

    That we know anything at all about them is the merit of Matt Groening.

  168. David Eddyshaw says

    Unstressed and/or non-initial /p t k t͡ʃ/ that survive as voiceless stops are widely and increasingly preglottalized in the UK

    I just came across this unfamiliar word in a 1992 Kusaal news-sheet: ma’antuoka.

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to recognise that it was a loanword from English (the thing in question is usually referred to by a different English loan, and the spelling of the news-sheet is pretty non-standard in general; I suspect that the writer was actually a speaker of the Tonde dialect, too, though the forms are mostly Agolle.)

    This may not reflect Kusaasi interpretation of the English /t/ as preglottalised, though: it could be a contamination from ma’an “okra”, though the meaning has nothing to do with that vegetable …

  169. Don’t keep us in suspense: what is the English source word?

  170. David Eddyshaw says

    “Motor-car.” (Usually lɔr, which has been adopted all over the place, even in officially Francophone places, like Burkina Faso and Togo. Makes you proud to be British.)

    I’ve always like the Lingala motuka, with its nice Bantu plural mituka.

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