“Star” “Wars.”

November 6, 2023 by 12 Comments

Here is a supercut of every time someone says “Star” or “Wars” in any of the Star Wars movies: “there’s barely more than a minute of total screen time across 9 films in which anyone even says the words,” but as rozele, who sent me the link, said, it’s “some kinda child’s garden of non/rhoticity”!

Comments

  1. Noetica says
    November 6, 2023 at 6:15 pm

    Good! Now what I’d like to see is a similar exercise for the name Liu across all Putonghua films. Even in the same film one hears it from some speakers as /ljoʊ/ (“officially” correct) and from others as /ljuː/. No one seems to notice.

  2. John Cowan says
    November 6, 2023 at 7:54 pm

    Actually, the child (at least the first one) is rhotic. Then he grows up to be non-rhotic. That’s quite a trick: Industrial Light, Magic, and Sociolinguistics.

  3. mollymooly says
    November 6, 2023 at 9:53 pm

    Boingboing?! Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

  4. Stu Clayton says
    November 7, 2023 at 2:54 am

    The Gerald McBoing-Boing of Saturday morning cartoon programs !

  5. David Marjanović says
    November 7, 2023 at 7:24 am

    No one seems to notice.

    I’ve heard [lɪʊ̯] pretty often!

    (But not in a film – I understand far too little to watch one.)

  6. Noetica says
    November 15, 2023 at 5:15 pm

    But not in a film – I understand far too little to watch one.

    Same here. But having travelled seven times in China (and gained scandalously little explicit knowledge of Putonghua), when I watch with subtitles I sometimes catch enough audible nuance to appreciate the quality of the delivery. A strange feeling (or absence of feeling), like a sort of blindsight transferred to audition.

  7. Y says
    November 15, 2023 at 5:56 pm

    I can sometime appreciate the delivery of sign language interpreters of theatre and such, despite knowing no sign language.

  8. Ryan says
    August 26, 2024 at 1:51 pm

    Are there accents that drop l’s in the way that non-rhotics drop r’s.

    I certainly know accents where l’s are swallowed into a sort of w sound, but that’s different. There’s still a phoneme there. I mean someone who says spind-uh for spindle.or crink-a for crinkle. In English or some other language?

  9. mollymooly says
    August 26, 2024 at 2:00 pm

    L-vocalization is mostly “still a phoneme there” but sometimes merges with the vowel next door.

  10. adam says
    August 26, 2024 at 3:48 pm

    Bristol, home of the sisters Evil, Idle and Normal, was reputed to merge syllabic l with schwa, but I’ve heard it’s not really true.

  11. Ryan says
    August 27, 2024 at 10:50 am

    Thanks for the pointer, mollymooly. Reading that and recognizing walk and yolk, should and would helped me see similarities in the way these things work, how the quality of the liquid affects the vowel, and how the full drop can occur in some contexts and not others, and perhaps slowly expand its hold on the space.

  12. drasvi says
    August 27, 2024 at 2:14 pm

    Oh. Yesterday I was thinking about articulations of /l/ in a dream. (I fell asleep while music was playing in my room. The dream was about speakers of Afrikaans, but then Arabic maḥlūla penetrated it. My brain immediately suggested that it is the name of an (imaginary) soap opera with the female Malay main character. But /l/ didn’t sound like anything in Afrikaans at all. I began to think and woke up:))

Speak Your Mind

*