I found this on Facebook and of course couldn’t resist filling it out; it helps further linguistic science and exposes me to lots of terms I didn’t know about (e.g., topinambour for ‘Jerusalem artichoke’). Warning: it takes quite a while (approximately 200 questions) and is sometimes irritating (it’s not clear why for some you have to check one answer and for others you can choose several). There are some items/actions that are unfamiliar to me (“What do you call the action of drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle?”) and some questions that are controversial, either linguistically (“How do you pronounce ‘forte’”?) or culturally (“What kind of animals does a ‘vegetarian’ eat?”). Of LH note: “samara” was one of the choices for ‘maple key.’ Of course, I’m not sure they’ll even be able to use my responses, because of this question and response:
Do you feel that there are any other features of your dialect or dialect acquisition that need mentioning? If so, write about your dialect acquisition or history here:
My father was from the Ozarks (E Oklahoma, NW Arkansas), my mother from a Norwegian-American community in E Iowa; he went into the foreign service, so I grew up abroad with friends of many nationalities. I moved to the US for college in Los Angeles, went to grad school in New Haven, moved to New York City, and currently live in Western Massachusetts.
Do I even have a dialect? Anyway, if you feel like giving it a go, click the link.
marie-lucie
Jesús:
(here)
also porrón
“What do you call the action of drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle?”
In my English that’s a “birdie.”
Edit: after Googling I was surprised to learn that this is apparently very specific to Orange County, CA, where I grew up. I had an inkling it could be SoCal-specific but didn’t realize it was so local.
I in turn did not know иерусалимский артишок:-/ Russian WP says :
(not sure what they mean by “semantically”).
As the reference it offers the opening lines of Gryll Grange by Thomas Love Peacock…
The opening lines:
in Russian (as referenced in WP):
Much of the survey is badly designed. As I pasted into the comments field many times, “You have tried to force a single answer when more than one are correct.”
Yes, I did that too.
…People do that?
I always thought drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle was one of these cultural things from South India, where it is called “drinking water”. So I was surprised to read @E’s comment that there was a local term for it in Orange county.
hat in some sense must have a dialect because everyone does — unless there are peculiarities in his idiolect such that no other living Anglophone corresponds to a working majority of his quirks? There are millions of living Americans with that sort of lack of strong regional roots due to a parapetetic childhood-or-adulthood and parents who did not originate in the same region or other relevant demographic unit. How much uniformity of speech there is among such Rootless-Cosmopolitan-Americans is not clear to me, but there’s probably some.
How much uniformity of speech there is among such Rootless-Cosmopolitan-Americans is not clear to me, but there’s probably some.
Huh? How on earth do you reach that conclusion? That’s like saying all creatures who evolved on planets with conditions vaguely similar to Earth’s must look and talk like people. Why would someone with a father from the Ozarks and a mother from a Norwegian-American community in Iowa have anything whatever in common with someone whose father was from (say) South Boston and whose mother was (say) from Mississippi? Rootless-Cosmopolitan is a negative, not a positive, category.
People from the Ozarks, Iowa, South Boston and Mississippi are not alien life forms. When they speak their particular kinds of English with and understand each other, it is something they have in common. And they do in fact do that and have that. That’s an observation, not a contentious claim.
I take JWB to be wondering about the details when he uses the expression “how much uniformity of speech”.
When they speak their particular kinds of English with and understand each other, it is something they have in common. And they do in fact do that and have that. That’s an observation, not a contentious claim.
Yes, they have English in common. That’s like saying “We’re all human” — a vacuous conclusion. I’m pretty sure JWB meant something more specific.
In almost everything JWB wrote about “uniformity of speech” I find unremarkable premises, which you are now calling a vacuous conclusion.
The only conclusion was “hat in some sense must have a dialect because everyone does”. Do you feel dissed by that?
What, by the way, is a “negative category”? What is negative about “rootless cosmopolitan” ? A tree grows in Brooklyn.
My working theory is that the mobility and rootlessness tends to lead (at least with the right social-class dynamics) to the sort of styles of AmEng (the way generic tv newscasters talk, the way generic college professors talk) that are not generally perceived as marked for regional origin or ethnicity. Not necessarily fancy/posh accents, just generic/unmarked. I have much less life experience in growing up among Anglophone peers outside the US than hat does, but my experience (Japan, 1973-76) was that expat American kids did not form a valid statistical cross-section of all American regional/ethnic/class accents but were overweighted toward the rootless-but-vaguely-prestigious-and/or-wealthy ones, such that coming back to the U.S. in the context of brand-name educational institutions would just reinforce that sort of upbringing.
Given the time period, I’m guessing that hat’s father tended at least in professional contexts to suppress a full-on Ozarks accent in order to progress in his career in the Foreign Service. If he didn’t do that, and got away with that, more power to him.
What, by the way, is a “negative category”? What is negative about “rootless cosmopolitan”
A negative category is one defined by exclusion, like non-mammalian.
Rootless cosmopolitan is a calque of a Soviet slur on Jewish intellectuals, implying that they had no loyalty to the Soviet Union. A native English expression of the same antisemitic trope would be globalist.
I spent time completing the megasurvey. Too much time, and it was a thankless task. They should do far more to express appreciation for our time and effort, and give a running indication of how far we have gone in the process. The messaging at the end is especially scant and poor.
Still, I was happy to see the perennially vexing (“skunked”?) “next Wednesday” given significant coverage. I made generous notes on this for them, and added:
David M:
People do that?
Your “that” is ambiguous: “the action of drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle”, or “touching your mouth to the bottle”?
Rootless cosmopolitan is a calque of a Soviet slur on Jewish intellectuals, implying that they had no loyalty to the Soviet Union. A native English expression of the same antisemitic trope would be globalist.
I am rootless and cosmopolitan, and not a Jew, and have no globalist leanings. I refuse to pay slur royalties. In addition, this has nothing to do with JWB’s comments.
I am only provisionally, temporarily, and doubtfully an entity in good ontological standing, and defer to atoms and the void. "Globalism" makes me smile (in as much as I am, to smile at all); improbably-small-and-fragile-blue-speckism, if you're lucky. Slurs? I issue a few and regret them almost immediately. Most I do not intend. My present wish is that I had introduced my two-item list with grammatical propriety, in my preceding comment. "I can do no other." Heaven – in ontological standing no whit more established than my own – help us all.@stu
You identify as rootless. That might not be the same as being rootless. Transplanted X’s or hybrid X-Y’s fall within a continuum of rootlessness.
“at half three” (a time of day, or night), which in some places and some English variants means “at two thirty” and in others “at three thirty”.
Really? My understanding is that those who say half three always mean 3:30, and the rest (the vast majority) do not use the expression at all. In other languages the meaning is commonly 2:30, but not in English.
I am rootless and cosmopolitan, and not a Jew, and have no globalist leanings.
That is neither here nor there. A sweetheart is not a heart that is sweet either.
British “half four” is the same as American “a quarter of eight”, though attested slightly earlier (3 hours 15 minutes earlier, to be precise)
…People do that?
I do this action frequently when I’m traveling someplace with doubtful tap water and rinsing my mouth with bottled water after having brushed my teeth. This is in order to avoid contaminating the water with any inadvertent backwash. It would never have occurred to me, however, that there was any specific noun or verb to describe the action.
In other languages the meaning is commonly 2:30, but not in English.
Not in English, ever? My experience differs. I am surrounded where I live by speakers from all over the anglophone world and beyond – and connected internetically with people from all manner of language backgrounds that colour their communication in English. I edit the writing of some of them. Just today a Nobel Prize winner whom I had briefed for a piece he had to write used gambit instead of gamut.
In the land of miles per gallon, pounds, and acres, and “I could care less”, I assumed there would be similar apprehension of diversity: its charms, and its hazards for those attempting accurate communication.
Thank, um … heaven for this forum, which reminds us again and again how easy language is, eh?
The only conclusion was “hat in some sense must have a dialect because everyone does”. Do you feel dissed by that?
Are you deliberately being perverse? As I said, that’s a vacuous conclusion. If that’s all “dialect” means, then it has no meaning. (What everyone has is, in technical terms, an idiolect.)
“If that’s all “dialect” means, then it has no meaning.”
No, rather a different meaning. As meaningful as, say, “variety” (not a name of a “thing”, but a relation between things): you can’t seriously ask questions like “is this star a variety?”, but you can profitably use this word in context.
(The observation that every person has it is not of course informative)
The former.
The water bottle I drink out of holds about 2 liters and is about 3 cm across. If it’s almost empty I can pour it into my wide-open mouth, but if full I’d be hard put to it to do so.
Let me rephrase my point more precisely. Everyone has an idiolect by definition so that’s certainly a trivial claim. My claim, which does not strike me as particularly controversial, is that very very few native-speaker Anglophones have idiolects that are so distinctive, or have such unusual combinations of features, that they can’t be usefully grouped with the idiolects of some number of other native speakers showing a broadly similar pattern of features into what may usefully be called a “dialect.” Obviously the boundaries of any particular “dialect” will be fuzzy and lumper/splitter issues will be ubiquitious and there will be people whose idiolects are right on whatever fuzzy line you’ve drawn between dialect A and dialect B, not to mention people whose idiolect is predominantly A but shows some substrate or superstrate influence from B. So not literally “everyone” has a dialect but well over 99% of native speakers do (or have an idiolect reflecting some mix of dialects that can be somewhat coherently described).
Sometimes of course “dialect” is used in a way that at least implicitly defines the unmarked standard/prestige variety of the relevant language as “not a dialect.” I find that unhelpful; it’s like saying someone speaks without an accent.
I suspect that there are a nontrivial number of other American Anglophones with ideolects patterned sufficiently similar to hat’s that it is useful to think of them as speaking the same dialect. I suspect that very few of those others will have had hat’s specific life circumstances in terms of places of parental origin and places of personal upbringing.
i’ve basically stopped using the word “dialect” in favor of other -lect words that are specific about what type of speech community they’re referring to. but “dialect”, however imprecisely, means a speech community with shared linguistic characteristics. and that’s what someone like hat (or myself, for that matter) does not have (at least above the level of a family-of-origin lect). i don’t see deregionalized/cosmopolitan english speakers as forming a speech community in any meaningful sense, or as having shared linguistic characteristics – they/we might be an identifiable population, but that doesn’t translate automatically into either.
Yeah, what rozele said.
I can understand that a narrow-scope definition of “community” can be useful for certain sorts of anthropological-type analyses, but I’m not sure what is gained by saying “oh, these people aren’t a community, they’re just an ‘identifiable population.'”
I do see the following on wikipedia: “in some analyses, the group of speakers of a register is known as a discourse community, while the phrase ‘speech community’ is reserved for varieties of a language or dialect that speakers inherit by birth or adoption.[citation needed].” I am, however, skeptical about these “analyses” because it seems pretty empirically obvious that dialect often tends to follow childhood peers over parents when there is a difference between the two, so “inherit” is not even a good metaphor. (Who your parents are, including in terms of ethnicity and social class, can have a causal impact on who your childhood peers are, of course.)
…and I have to remind myself that’s a population in the statistical sense and not in the population-genetic sense.
I always thought drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle was one of these cultural things from South India, where it is called “drinking water”. So I was surprised to read @E’s comment that there was a local term for it in Orange County.
…People do that?
This was a very common practice among kids and teens when taking a sip of someone else’s drink so as not to share germs. I guess in adulthood it’s less common to share a drink with a stranger (even less so since 2020, of course…)
but “dialect”, however imprecisely, means a speech community with shared linguistic characteristics. and that’s what someone like hat (or myself, for that matter) does not have (at least above the level of a family-of-origin lect)
Up to a point, Minister. I’ve spoken face-to-face with Hat, and he unquestionably speaks U.S. English. I very much doubt if there is any L1 speaker whose lect cannot be identified at the country level.
dialect often tends to follow childhood peers over parents
Without doubt, or the children of L2 speakers who grow up in L1 communities (like me) would also speak L2-wise
I’ve spoken face-to-face with Hat, and he unquestionably speaks U.S. English.
Again, if that’s all JWB meant he chose a very strange way of saying it.
While I labor under the disadvantage of not having spoken with hat, I assume that beyond saying “he speaks U.S. English” one can also say that there are a fair number of known/described/identifiable-by-ear dialects of U.S. English he does *not* speak. Concluding that by iterative process of elimination there is some identifiable subvariety of U.S. English, probably not particularly unique to himself, that he *does* speak seems to me to follow fairly naturally. His idiolect either does or doesn’t have the caught/cot merger. It does or doesn’t use double modals with some frequency. Etc. etc. Maybe you don’t want to call that subvariety defined by shared features* a “dialect” because the “population” defined by speaking it doesn’t fit into some specific sort of anthropological model. Fine. What shall we call it?
Re “at the country level,” I think there are plenty of folks who grew up near (certain segments of) the U.S.-Canadian border where you can’t tell by ear which side it was.
*Or some shared features. There may be some variations like perhaps “toMAHto” v. “toMAYto” that don’t correlate particularly well with other variations and are thus not usefully diagnostic.
@JWB
I believe I once asked drasvi if there was a Russian proverb to the effect that “if the hole you have dug yourself in to is deep enough, you can stop digging”. Regarding the “TV/radio announcer” dialect, I do not believe that Army/diplomat-bratness is a positive indicator, unless the brat identifies with the peer group he meets at his private school, which I have a strong feeling that Hat did not. I am reminded of a character in a film who proclaimed that he and his school clique are the UHB ( for Urban or maybe Ultra Haute Bourgeoisie).
There are certainly rootless L1 English speakers who speak “international school English” which, as JWB notes, tends to be similar to “Broadcast English”, US but lacking any obvious regional features. Not all rootless Cosmopolitans speak that way and certainly plenty of people who belong to the US upper middle class speak the same way.
I am not really sure why LH is fixated on his parents origins. For most people peer group determines your accent and your -lect. Especially if your parents speak different dialects, chance are you will speak like neither one. I would actually expect “someone with a father from the Ozarks and a mother from a Norwegian-American community in Iowa” to speak exactly like “someone whose father was from (say) South Boston and whose mother was (say) from Mississippi” if both individuals had spent significant time overseas attending international schools (or even if both individuals grew up in somewhere like Brookline, MA or Westport, CT). It would be odd if either individual sounded anything like their individual parents. And I have often observed this living with other rootless cosmopolitans outside the US.
I am not really sure why LH is fixated on his parents origins.
I’m not “fixated” on it (what an odd locution!), I just thought it removed me from the category of “people with clear roots and a defined dialect” that they were trying to investigate. You’re quite right, of course, that kids generally speak like their peer groups, but I don’t have a defined peer group either. Again, I do not consider “rootless cosmopolitans” a useful group for this purpose.
PlPad: Maybe a trans-Atlantic difference in tv/radio announcer stereotypes? It’s not a particular “posh” way of speaking in the U.S., just neutral/unmarked. Part of my theory of mechanism here is some tendency (not necessarily a conscious or intended one) to drift toward models of speech depicted as normal/unmarked in mass media unless there is a critical mass of peers/neighbors/etc. collectively offering a coherent alternative model to be emulated instead.
Someone in a prior thread (maybe John Cowan) has remarked that there is no uniform standard/prestige “General American” pronunciation but rather a range of pronunciations that are not sufficiently deviant to be taken to signal some specific “dialect” marked by region or ethnicity or class. So one of the things I’m interested in is whether you can coherently divide folks whose speech falls within that range into somewhat coherent subgroups (defined by certain shared features whose distribution is correlated with each other) or whether instead you get a lot of random mix-and-match idiolects as to the features where a certain range of possibilities are all within the perceived-as-unmarked range.
I guess it would be more interesting if a given “deregionalized/cosmopolitan” (to borrow rozele’s phrasing, and abstract away from our actual host here) AmEng speaker had an idiolect with several features that were outside the perceived-as-unmarked-neutral range, but not ones that typically correlate with each other as indicative of a particular dialect or demographic origin.
I took the survey, by the way, and probably found it less irksome for having been forewarned by others about some of its quirks. I only occasionally used the comment feature to tell them a particular question was badly structured. I found that going with a first-reaction answer and generally not pausing to overthink it was the best way to get through the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time, and certainly cut down on the temptation to give open-ended “other” answers of the form “it’s more complicated that your options suggest or allow.”
In light of recent discussion on another thread, I was rather disappointed that they didn’t ask about “lay of the land” versus “lie of the land.”
I did the survey on my phone. I hope there are not too many autocorrect errors. There were a few where I said “when I was young I said X, now I say Y”; others with “I remember this being a thing when I was young, but if we had a name for it I have forgotten.”
I did the survey, with a lot of comments like “this question allows only one answer, but I use both X and Y.” Depending on the interlocutor, I guess.
Separately, maybe I blew by it, but I didn’t notice while doing the survey any indication that they only wanted data from “people with clear roots and a defined dialect.” I would think there would at least be some interest in what patterns there are in the responses of those without that sort of clarity/definition. Do they cluster around some “this is the default/majority word/pronunciation for it, at least in the U.S.” set of answers, or is it something other than that?
Re Vanya’s point, I found it interesting that they wanted to know if my parents had both been L1 Anglophones (yes) and where they’d grown up but they didn’t ask for or allow any greater specificity on the latter question
than “both in the U.S.”
The prior “Samara” post that hat linked to turned out to contain the following statement from me “I find it vaguely puzzling that I cannot remember what I called them as a boy although I must have called them something, since they were certainly common where I grew up.” That made me feel better about my “I don’t have a word for it” response on the survey. At least my inconsistent memory of childhood-specific lexicon has not deteriorated in the last 5 years!
I didn’t notice while doing the survey any indication that they only wanted data from “people with clear roots and a defined dialect.”
They didn’t say that, but they did want you to tell them where you acquired your dialect and where your parents were from, which suggests those items of information were important to them.
I specified that it’s my L2, I initially acquired it from lessons starting age six — RP, but then was influenced by dialects from (California, New England — high school age) (Arizona, Ireland, Scotland late twenties to mid thirties). I thought that’s the kind of information they were looking for?
His idiolect either does or doesn’t have the caught/cot merger. It does or doesn’t use double modals with some frequency. Etc. etc.
Sure. But given five binary features A through E, it may be that no dialect exhibits +A -B +C +D -E, and yet Frank’s idiolect does exhibit this combination, in which case it is fair to say that Frank does not speak any dialect.
Someone in a prior thread (maybe John Cowan) has remarked that there is no uniform standard/prestige “General American” pronunciation but rather a range of pronunciations that are not sufficiently deviant to be taken to signal some specific “dialect” marked by region or ethnicity or class.
That sounds like what David M says about Standard German. What I say is that Standard English, per Trudgill, is not an accent or even a range of accents: one can speak StdE in any accent, L1 or L2.
“when I was young I said X, now I say Y”
I did the same — was ladybirds, now ladybugs, for example.
The question about vegetarians was perplexing — I responded that it’s precise meaning depends on the person defining themself as a vegetarian, not on me.
an idiolect with several features that were outside the perceived-as-unmarked-neutral range, but not ones that typically correlate with each other as indicative of a particular dialect or demographic origin.
this is exactly my experience of the various idiolects of folks who i’d describe as “deregionalized/cosmopolitan” speakers: some marked features that come from family sources, some that come from the geolects and sociolects of the contexts where they grew up, some that come from the geolects and sociolects of contexts they’ve lived in as grown people. my sister’s english, for instance, has some classically post-yiddish-new-yorker elements [from our parents], some distinctively boston-area (and some specifically cantabridgian) elements [from our upbringing], and a scattering of shetland, newfoundland, and general-maritime-canadian elements [from subsequent exposure] – all with somewhat different class associations, and slightly varying generational/age indications.
@JWB: not all communities are speech communities* (and, arguably, not all speech communities are also other kinds of communities). and not all identifiable groups in a population are either. and, of course, both are subject to change: the chronologies and lines between german(s)-spoken-by-jews, distinctive judeo-german(s), and the oldest attested forms of yiddish(es) are intensely debated, and basically come down to what indicators in written texts different scholars see as corresponding to what kinds of speech communities.
any lect corresponds to a speech community – that’s pretty much the definition. but deregionalized/cosmopolitan english-speakers do not constitute such a group; they/we don’t interact with each other in the kind of concentrated, coherence-creating way that has me (for instance) saying the name of Throop Avenue the way my neighbors do, as opposed to how i said it when i first started spending time in brooklyn.
similarly, [nurses who work in brooklyn] do not form a speech community, though they do form a clear group, and one that (for instance) a borough-wide collective bargaining process might form into a meaningful political/social community. on the other hand [everyone who works at Kings County Hospital] might form a speech community, if they have specific terms, phrasings, etcetera, shared across the different job categories and units that constitute communities within the hospital. [redheads] don’t constitute either a speech community or any other kind (as arthur conan doyle pointed out quite some time ago), though they are a distinct group.
.
* which i’m using in its broadest sense: a group of people whose web of spoken interaction coheres into a distinctive form of speech, at any scale from 1 person (any given ideolect) to millions over a transcontinental area (e.g. castellano, in all its varieties – what we could perhaps call an imperiolect?). i prefer to talk in terms of “speech communities” and “lects” because they’re terms that can be used in materially grounded ways, while “language” is frequently used in ways that are mainly about statehood and nationality (political lines that are pretty unreliable as linguistic indicators, short of the usual genocidal interventions), and the usual uses of “dialect” – “geolect of a sub-national political unit” or “a language without an army or navy”, basically depending on whether the speakers are white or not – are even worse.
@ David L : I think I did the same with the vegetarian question — leave a comment with that general meaning.
saying the name of Throop Avenue the way my neighbors do, as opposed to how i said it when i first started spending time in brooklyn
What ways are those?
So if deregionalized/cosmopolitan AmEng speakers aren’t a “speech community” then per rozele the sort of AmEng they speak by definition isn’t a “lect”? What is it, then? If “sort” should be “sorts,” what are they, then?
Separately, it’s a wild and diverse world, and I have known people who ate fish but not the meat of warm-blooded vertebrates. In my own experience, these people self-identify as “pescatarians.”* I am certainly open to the possibility of people who self-identify as “vegetarians” but eat fish, and thus use the word “vegetarian” with a different meaning than I am used to encountering, and the question presupposes such people (or others who talk about them) exist. But who and where are these people? Is this a non-U.S. usage, or a thing I have just somehow failed to stumble across? I assume we’re not talking about people who self-identify as “vegetarian” but with less than perfect compliance with the ideal norm they are nominally committed to, like the stereotypical teetotaling aunt who has somehow convinced herself that the occasional nip of sherry doesn’t count.
*Or some of them do. People who e.g. don’t “eat meat” on Fridays for religious reasons may and often do eat fish because the religiously-relevant definition of “meat” doesn’t include fish. I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to self-identify as pescatarian-but-only-on-Fridays but I would likewise not expect them to identify as vegetarian-but-only-on-Fridays.
@J.W. Brewer: One previous discussion of what constitutes standard English begins here.
As to the scope of vegetarian: My daughter identifies as a pescatarian, but she has had friends with essentially the same dietary rules who would say they are “vegetarian, but eat fish.”
Jein. The context is quite different: in the US there’s so little variation in vocabulary and, outside AAVE, in grammar that GenAm is pretty much just a range of accents. (Not quite, but close.) Standard German is a distinctive and narrow range of grammar, a distinctive but fairly wide range of vocabulary, and a distinctive range of phonologies (with a few features that don’t seem to occur in any dialect, notably the mergers of the two sources of ei and the two sources of au); the “range of accents” part applies to filling in the actual phonetic values and the rest of the phonology. All of these accents are marked for a region, but the regions are all considerably larger than that of any dialect – even though the only person whose accent cannot be pinned down more narrowly than Germany is the actor Sky du Mont who grew up in Argentina.
There’s a hierarchy of Western vegetarianism, something like red meat > fowl > fish > shellfish > eggs and dairy > plants, where if you eat something on the list, you also eat what’s to the right of it. With eggs and dairy there’s no clear order: some eat only one, some eat both.
There are exceptions, self included.
@Y: That kind of ordering underlies my occasional remark that, “If you’re vegetarian, you might as well be Jewish.” However, it is generally not appreciated by either Jews or vegetarians, and least of all by vegetarian Jews.
I wonder how much Orthodox Talmud students who are also vegetarian engage with the minutiae of kashrut law.
@Y: that hierarchy can lead to practical problems for Orthodox Christians living in Western countries, because the animacy hierarchy embedded in the Church’s traditional fasting norms is flesh-of-mammals-and-birds > eggs-and-dairy > fish* > wine-and-oil [don’t ask] > shellfish-and-plants. How far to the right you go in refraining from stuff to the left (if you follow the norms rigorously, which obviously not everyone does) depends on the specific day of the specific year and it is common/convenient to have an appropriately-coded wall calendar for the current year so you don’t actually have to remember all the formulae and how they interact. But having not-infrequent days where it is fine to eat fish but only with a sauce devoid of butter, or eat shellfish but not if they are fried with a breading that involved egg can create practical hassles when the more common hierarchy in the local secular society is not ordered the same way. It is easy to explain the stricter diet as “vegan if you treat invertebrates as honorary plants,” but AFAIK there’s no common English word for that concept.
*My own view is that reptiles/amphibians group with “fish” and I think I could probably get the average bishop to agree with me if necessary, but apparently reptiles/amphibians were not commonly eaten in the late-Antiquity “Mediterranean diet” context in which the norms arose and were codified. Some but not all sources will tell you that on Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday) you may eat caviar or other fish roe but not fish-as-such, which is a fine subdistinction in the hierarchy not otherwise drawn.
I once told my daughter, when she was about thirteen, that the only opinion I had about her choice of dietary exclusions was that I thought the animals she wouldn’t eat should form a valid clade.
“vegetarian, but eat fish”
And turkles is hinsects, right? I myself do not eat mammal flesh of any kind – including monotremata. I’d never call myself a vegetarian.
On hinsects see also kosher locusts.
@LH, JWB, I think what you two disagree about is an actual and important problem for linguistics.
@JWB, so what we have:
(1) dialects that arise in speech communities (in a correlated way, because of conventionalisation).
(2) dialects arise in a correlated way for some other reason.
(3) statistical entities. These two points are close in your graph but you have no idea if they correlate or just approached each other stochastically…
Your distribution is good, it has a mode and everything but if by “dialect” you always mean systems where elements are interconnected and correlated in complex way, you can’t just say “hey, it is multimodal, ergo we are dealing with many ‘dialects'”.
(4) there is perception. “You speak like a ….”.
Perception can form dialects, and it can make people identify dialects.
Dialects exist in speakers’ heads – and these perceived dialects are of interests to linguists, of course.
But dialects that exist in speakers’ heads don’t have to be dialects according to any definition.
@JWB: my point is exactly that it’s a constellation of idiolects, not a lect itself. we all speak different englishes, and may overlap as members of various speech communities, but do not constitute one ourselves.
my idiolect, for example, probably resembles hat’s more than it does a lot of people’s, because of the shared new york and massachusetts contexts (though western mass and the boston area are fairly distinct to my ear), but diverges in many others. but there’s no meaningful sense in which you could call the two of us and, say, my suburban-boston-raised friend from an arkansas german family, who has lived significant amounts of his life in mandarin and mexican spanish (and in english/spanish and english/mandarin bilingual contexts), speakers of a single lect. there isn’t a redhead lect, either.
@JC: i should’ve specified! earlier, i’d’ve said it with [θ]; central brooklyn uses [t]. (and for folks from elsewhere: throop avenue runs up the center of the bedford-stuyvesant section of brooklyn, with a short hook into the broadway triangle between bed-stuy and williamsburg.)
“there’s no meaningful sense in which you could call the two of us …”
Sounds like a conjecture.
It seems obviously true to rozele and LH and untrue to JWB. And I think it is because the matter is complicated, not becayse any of the three is an idiot (I personally have no opinion).
The friend I invited for dinner this evening uses the term fishVtarian for herself rather than pescVtarian, where V can be a or e. We shared a salad.
Dialects exist in speakers’ heads
Also in listeners’ heads.
Dialects exist in speakers’ heads
We Hatters have no truck with such Chomskyite thinking. Pass me the ice-axe, Ramón!
Men in hats. And ladies. Ladies in fedoras, men in whatever they like.
There seems no logic to whether or not they allow more than one choice, or whether they provide a ‘have no word for this’ option. I’ve seen American references to ‘smores’ online, but never eaten one or heard them spoken of in the UK; neither do we have the species of grebe they ask about.
Yes, it’s a very odd survey — it seems more like something one guy tossed together and put out there on the spur of the moment than an official academic survey. Did they even have people test it first? Surely the obvious problems would have come up immediately.
@Kate Bunting: Ironically enough, the “s’mores” question was phrased in a confusingly BrEng fashion by claiming the dish involves “biscuits” for a sense of “biscuit” that is not part of AmEng. (I was with my eight-year-old on a rainy Cub Scout campout this past weekend. S’mores were prepared over the campfire after dinner because how could they not be?)
One other oddity in the survey where they were actually trying to be technical and use IPA symbols: the question about what vowel the respondent uses in the first syllable of “water” offers “[ɔ] as in ‘sport'” as an option. Dudes, have you even met a rhotic speaker? It’s not particularly obvious or intuitive to me (and I have an actual degree in linguistics) that the pre-rhotic part of my NORTH/FORCE vowel (used in “sport”) is the same as my CLOTH/THOUGHT vowel (used in “water”), because rhoticism tends to interfere with your perceptions of that sort of thing. So I checked “other” and gave “[ɔ] as in ‘daughter'” as my answer.
I will go so far as to say it is not the right vowel in my case: for me, the pre-rhotic part of NORTH/SPORT is between THOUGHT=CLOTH [ɔ] and the beginning of GOAT [oʊ].
This may be a good place to mention that on Quora recently I collided with someone who is obviously not ignorant of English phonetics, but saw fit to tell me that unmerged LOT/CAUGHT is a nonstandard pronunciation of AmE. Evidently he was taught somewhere that there is exactly one standard pronunciation, though I wasn’t engaged enough to probe for whatever other features this supposed “standard AmE accent” has.
======
When John Wells’s blog was still active, I wrote there (or conceivably a similar place) asking whether the commenters who were teachers in the UK would accept a paper written in AmE. (Computers can help with AmE spellings, but not with AmE idioms.) The consensus answer was “earlier in my career I definitely would not, but now I would.” Obvs the respondents were more linguistically sophisticated than average, but this suggests an increasing acceptability of AmE, not merely borrowings but actual texts, in the UK.
I’ll reiterate the question here, and add to it if any Hattic has been required to write in a different written variety from the one they was riz in (beyond spelling and punctuation), and how hard it was.
@ J.W. Brewer : “depends on the specific day of the specific year and it is common/convenient to have an appropriately-coded wall calendar for the current year so you don’t actually have to remember all the formulae and how they interact.”
My mother always has such a calendar for the current year on hand, but a pocket one. (Orthodox (christian) dietary restrictions).
@ Brett : “I once told my daughter, when she was about thirteen, that the only opinion I had about her choice of dietary exclusions was that I thought the animals she wouldn’t eat should form a valid clade.”
That’s a very admirable attitude, IMO. I should strive to impose it on my nephew, as long as my sister-in-law agrees. I think she’ll like it.
neither do we have the species of grebe they ask about
I’m bilingual (US/UK) and had no idea what that bird was.
Oh, that’s not even the issue. BBC-RP-oid accents don’t have [ɔ] in sport either, but [o], which in those accents is also, nowadays, the THOUGHT vowel. (It’s the GOAT vowel for True Scotsmen.)
I think the only accents that probably have [ɔ] in NORTH words (I don’t know if sport is one!) are those that lack the NORTH-FORCE and the PALM-LOT merger. The Americans I’ve heard, whether LOT-THOUGHT-merged or not, all had [o] in NORTH/FORCE even though they didn’t have an [o] anywhere else in their inventory.
All that was probably different in the days of Daniel Jones… but people who learn their IPA from outdated written examples never notice.
I think the only accents that probably have [ɔ] in NORTH words (I don’t know if sport is one!)
It isn’t. It’s given under FORCE on this list of lexical sets. Unfortunately, for words not on the list you have to ask an unmerged speaker. When the unabridged AHD4 was still on line, it listed one pronunciation for NORTH words and two for FORCE words, and even when it went offline, you could still use the index at bartleby.com and then look in the Internet Archive, but I’ve forgotten how to do that. (I suppose you could look in anthologies of rhyming Irish or Scottish poetry.)
Analogy is pretty much useless: cork, fork, stork, York, torque, Dork(ing) are all NORTH, but fork is FORCE (it should probably be spelled foark). Per contra, most port words are FORCE, but important, importunate are NORTH.
Here is a supposedly complete list of free (unchecked) NORTH words: or, nor, for, abhor, tor, war, plus grantor, guarantor, mortgagor, pledgor, promisor and other legalisms and Thor, Gabor, Cawdor and other foreignisms (where not schwa). Compounds in war- like warlock are free even though a consonant follows. For lots of details, mostly from Wells, see Lexical Sets for Actors: The NORTH Lexical Set” and “The FORCE Lexical Set”.
all had [o] in NORTH/FORCE
There’s a recessive NORTH/START merger that blocks NORTH/FORCE: “born in a barn” comes out as “barn in a barn”.
As someone whose NORTH and FORCE are identical, I’m unable to imagine what the difference between them could be. Is there a handy clip online somewhere that illustrates (or audibleizes, I should say) the distinction between NORTH and FORCE in whose who have it?
I will note that the survey competently asked people if they had a NORTH/FORCE merger by asking if they pronounced “war” and “wore” identically or not. The non-Wellsian name of the merger I’m familiar with is “horse/hoarse merger,” but war/wore works just as well as a diagnostic I suppose. I’ve got the merger myself, and have never trained myself to model what the non-merged contrast would sound like for any of these word pairs.
for words not on the list you have to ask an unmerged speaker.
Or look in an old dictionary, most conveniently the Century online: horse (hôrs), north (nôrth) vs. hoarse (hōrs), force (fōrs) in their notation. You can also find the old distinction in the OED2, which preserved it even though they knew it was outdated, because their deadline didn’t allow time for revision; if you don’t have access to the online OED, 15 of the 20 volumes can be checked out from the Internet Archive.
AHD4 is on the Internet Archive as well.
A recent paper from Manchester:
the Century online: horse (hôrs), north (nôrth) vs. hoarse (hōrs), force (fōrs) in their notation
That confuses me further, unfortunately. The pronunciation guide for the dictionary defines ō “as in note, poke, floor,” but for me the first two differ from the last. And then ô is defined by nor, song, off — and the first one differs from the last two. (I think I’ve got that right — the symbols are not altogether clear).
For me, the three different vowels here are note and poke, floor and nor, song and off. The middle one is my NORTH/FORCE vowel.
@David L: i think that’s how those work for me, too.
Is there a handy clip online somewhere that illustrates (or audibleizes, I should say) the distinction between NORTH and FORCE in whose who have it?
The difficulty is that the non-merging areas are pretty well separated geographically. Quoth WP: “Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish and Caribbean accents as well as some African American, Southern American, Indian, Irish, older Maine, South Wales (excluding Cardiff), and West Midlands English”, and the size of “some” is shrinking all the time. In each of these areas, the exact phonetic realization is different. It simply doesn’t make sense to ask how to pronounce unmerged NORTH and FORCE in, say, a modern Philadelphia or Cleveland or San Francisco or London or Aussie accent, any more than it makes sense to ask if Americans pronounce shan’t with a TRAP or PALM pronunciation (answer: we don’t).
Generally we can say that NORTH is enunciated higher in the mouth (with a more closed mouth) than FORCE, reflecting their origins as GOAT+/r/ and THOUGHT+/r/ in Middle English. In addition, FORCE tends to be more of a diphthong than NORTH is, though not in all accents.
most conveniently the Century online
That is pretty convenient. I didn’t think of looking at the OED2 link in OED3 pages: their (always non-rhotic) pronunciation guides are [nɔːθ] and [fɔəs], reflecting the long monophthong NORTH vs. diphthong FORCE pronunciation that underlies modern RP. Searching the AHD on the Archive takes approximately forever for each search; the copy I had in mind had a separate archived page for each word.
Wow, that’s not a pronunciation guide at all (except maybe for Scottish accents), that’s an abstract phonological analysis! Specifically, it postulates that FORCE is what happens to GOAT when it’s followed by /r/, and NORTH is what happens to LOT and/or perhaps THOUGHT (there’s a CLOTH word in the examples, maybe even two…) when it’s followed by /r/. As a statement of how the system came to be, that’s probably accurate; as a statement of how the system works today, it may also be accurate; as a statement about actual pronunciation, it’s not.
FORCE, with or without the merger, seems to contain [o] everywhere. Unmerged NORTH is [ɔ] or [ɒ] or thereabouts, so the same as an unmerged LOT vowel; the NORTH-START merger can be interpreted as just part of the LOT-PALM merger (even though, these days, most of the people with the latter don’t have the former and have the NORTH-FORCE merger instead).
Edit:
OK, that’s weird. That’s majorly weird.
Here’s the page of audio clips made to accompany John Wells’s Accents of English. (The page insists, in my Firefox, on starting to play all of them at once in a terrifying pandemonium, but I eventually managed to scroll down and turn off all but the one I wanted. YMMV.) I think the only one that has a NORTH-FORCE distinction is number 8, Scotland. In that clip, the words “horse” and “force” can be heard close to each other in the test passage between about 2:44-2:50, and don’t exactly rhyme; at 2:57, “horrible awesome” both have the same first vowel (same as “horse”).
John Cowan: “It simply doesn’t make sense to ask how to pronounce unmerged NORTH and FORCE in, say, a modern Philadelphia [etc.] accent”
Which is why David L specifically didn’t ask for that, but for an example from “those who have it”.
John: “Generally we can say that NORTH is enunciated higher in the mouth (with a more closed mouth) than FORCE, reflecting their origins as GOAT+/r/ and THOUGHT+/r/ ”
You have that backwards: FORCE is higher/more closed/toward GOAT, if they’re distinguished, as the Lexical Sets for Actors pages that you linked say.
@ktschwarz: Thanks for that page from John Wells — although for me the clips don’t load at all. I can try a different browser.
I can roughly imagine a Scottish person saying north and force in a different way. As it happens, I now live in Maine so I will have to ask an old Mainer to say the words. In fact, I know someone who will probably do…
The clips play fine for me in Firefox, and the Scottish samples have LOT = THOUGHT = [ɔ], GOAT = [o], NORTH = [ɔɹ], FORCE = [oɹ]. Horrible has [ɔɹ], but in RP at least it’s supposed to have THOUGHT rather than NORTH in the first place because of the syllable boundary; I don’t think that’s universal in the US.
At 0m38s in this Irish radio interview you can hear Sean O’Rourke saying “forty-four thousand employees with North Shore LIJ”.
cork, fork, stork, York, torque, Dork(ing) are all NORTH, but fork is FORCE (it should probably be spelled foark).
You have fork in both NORTH and FORCE. For me it is NORTH, whereas pork is FORCE.
“fork” is NORTH according to the Century, OED2, AHD4, Accents of English, and Lexical Sets for Actors. John was just confused. He may have meant to say “pork”, which is indeed FORCE in all those same references. That’s probably why its recorded spellings include poorke, poork, porcke, and pourke. I’m guessing this has something to do with its French origin.
The French origin would actually suggest the opposite distribution: porc, fourch(ett)e!
Why would French origin suggest anything other than FORCE, just like force itself?
Fork was first borrowed into Old English from Latin, then reinforced by Anglo-Norman. I guess its history in Old English left it somewhere where it didn’t join up with post-Norman borrowings like pork, force, port.
Brain farts galore here. Yes, FORCE is more open than NORTH (“NORTH is south of FORCE” on the vowel chart): the two chapters I linked are written in terms of “open” and “closed” (vowels) as opposed to my native “high” and “low”, and I sometimes translate the former set incorrectly (note that the comparison here, which I wrote down just the way I thought of it, is not parallel). Likewise, my second use of fork/foark should indeed have been pork/poark.
=======
Wells says that the whole class of /orC/, where C is any consonant, is unpredictable. However, the distribution of C in FORCE words is quite limited for whatever reasons, systematic or accidental:
The labials and labiodentals /orp/, /orb/, /orm/, /orf/, /orv/ are always NORTH.
The velars /org/ and /ork/ are also always NORTH, with pork as an apparently unique exception. The velar nasal /orŋ/ does not exist at all.
Voiced fricatives are likewise always NORTH. However, /orz/ does not exist, except for the plural and 3sg of nouns and verbs in /-or/, which are NORTH or FORCE according to the underlying form, like boarder (FORCE) vs. border (NORTH). The foreign name Dvořák (which anglophones pronounce as if Dvoržak) is apparently the only /orʒ/ word, and it is NORTH.
The two chapters I linked say that oral is FORCE, making it a minimal pair with aural (NORTH). For me, however, oral is LOT.
Corrections welcome as always!
Dave Marks comments on a 2017 LH post that the speaker in the linked clip shows a clear NORTH-FORCE split. While his Kerry accent’s NORTH vowel might in isolation be misinterpreted as START, they are not merged.
FORCE: “resOURces”
NORTH: “sORta” , “shORt of” , “ORder”
START: “killARney national pARk”, “ARmy”
@John Cowan: The two chapters I linked say that oral is FORCE, making it a minimal pair with aural (NORTH). For me, however, oral is LOT.
If this is a more widespread New-York-area dialect feature, it seemingly indicates that there are not enough lexical sets in Wells’ analysis. Or, at least, it raises the question of how widespread a distinction should be to merit the creation of another set.
Anyone can define more granular lexical sets for any accent. Wells only defined enough lexical sets to cover the most standardized British and American accents, as he explains:
(My bolding.) It’s a great strength of the concept that it’s so easily extensible.
John C: “Yes, FORCE is more open than NORTH”
That’s backwards again. I remember that FORCE is the one that’s higher/closer because it has a silent e on the end, which means it’s supposed to be (in the vicinity of) the vowel of “note” or “hope”, as if it starts with “foe”. Not a reliable rule overall, of course, but at least it works for these two particular words.
While his Kerry accent’s NORTH vowel might in isolation be misinterpreted as START, they are not merged.
Indeed. His START vowel is pretty front, so I would hear his NORTH as my START, both of which are back. It reminds me of a rhotic version of AusE START, which is so far forward that (because it is non-rhotic) it sounds to me like TRAP (so Australian Mark sounds like my Mac).
So NURSE is treated as a single set, because the reference accents have merged the formerly distinct vowels of verse, serve etc as against nurse, curve etc.
I helped to create what I call the Wells/Mills/Cowan/Rosta set: discussion here. I am no longer as sure as I was in 2012 that it is really comprehensive. In any case, not every accent variation is worth treating as a lexical set: for me and people near me, words in -og are LOT=PALM except for dog, which is CLOTH=THOUGHT (i.e. “dawg”), but I don’t think it’s appropriate to introduce a lexical set DOG just for this one word.
IIRC, Wells’s solution for such words was that they don’t belong to any set and can only be treated individually.
… weird. That’s majorly weird.
This clip sounds at first like a standard London (not Cockney) accent, then from about 0:50 ‘do’, the vowels get weirder and weirder. Some N. Irish influence? Particularly the word that must be ‘own’, as in ‘on their own’.
I was at first watching it for the content, but ended up distracted by the phonemes. Or have I lived so long away from London I’m out of touch with the yoof?
At the end/a different cultural observation, the Chair is “a bit speechless, actually” — durned toffs always mincing their reactions.
Wow: so is “say”! do is “dee”! Majorly weird!
do is “dee”: GOOSE fronting. Comment from JWL (Jack Windsor Lewis): “But a very large proportion especially of younger speakers in England have very markedly advanced and weakly if at all rounded values, making ‘too true’ much more like ‘tee tree’ than it is in more conservative accents.”
There is a place in one of Clive James’ books of memoirs when he is working in London and his colleague asks him if he wants a cake, and when it is clear he has not understood, she says, no, a cake-a-kayla.
Somewhere on Wikipedia there’s a claim that they say Cöca Cöla (yes, that’s the example) in the Ötztal, which might explain why that name has an Ö in the first place…
It starts at 0:30 with most. …No, it starts right at the beginning, with were: NURSE (also in Woolworth much later) comes out as [ɛ]! I think GOAT is [ɵɪ̯] or even fronter. Also, FOOT (in a stressed could) is [ə]. I wonder what determines which ones of the back and central vowels get fronted and which don’t; THOUGHT (water) remains [oː] (itself a fairly newfangled value).
Also, L-vocalization (final ends in [ʊː]), and of course the High German Consonant Shift (Westminster Sissy Council both times – well, not quite, there’s a lenis glottal stop preceding the second /s/ of City –; to as [tsə] near the beginning; taken once with [kʰ], once with the merest whiff of a wide-open [xː]).
I didn’t notice the own; where is it?
I’m afraid söi. I’ve heard such accents before, just not enough at once to be a bit speechless.
I just listened a third time, and it dawned on me: “my tea colleagues” are my two colleagues. No HGCS in this one!
do occurs just before most, and… that vowel is [ɪi̯] at the most, so we seem to be being a bit speechless at a GOOSE-FLEECE merger.
Also, the shift from DRESS to TRAP when [s] follows is evidently transatlantic: compare vest to hairband.
I have a sister-in-law, who’s lived mostly in the Thames Valley and western suburbs of London, who talks like that. Her vowels are generally not quite that extreme, but she tends to talk fast and there are times when I have genuine difficulty understanding her.
Listened to the whole thing again. GOOSE is a bit more rounded than [ɪi̯], and often more monophthongal, but [ʉː] or [ʏː] aren’t it either. It’s unrounded enough that interviewed loses its [j]. Complete NURSE-SQUARE merger: square and were at 1:40. /h/ is restored, /ð/ apparently remains merged into /v/.
Still didn’t notice own. 🙁
Still didn’t notice own
It’s at 1:20 “on their own”.
Just listened to it. Like David M. I wondered about “my tea colleagues”, until I read his comment. Now, I wonder:
1-What would her phonology be like in a non-formal setting? And more broadly, how (in)comprehensible would we non-Londoners find her (normal, everyday) speech?
2-Without Hans’ comment above I do not think I would have recognized her realization of “own”, despite the rather obvious context. How many other ordinary words in her repertoire are now (to me at least) phonologically unrecognizable?
3-Tellingly, in the comments, no observation is made about her accent, making me suspect it must be widespread in London among her generation.
4-On this thread (https://languagehat.com/how-did-latin-become-a-dead-language/) I had made a comment (September 25, 2016 /4:39 pm), which was expanded upon, pointing out that several (non-prestigious, socially/geographically peripheral) varieties of English (leaving creoles aside) are already barely mutually intelligible and are already well on their way to becoming separate languages if present social trends continue (I think the claim that modern industrial civilization is headed for its fall is much less controversial today than it was back in 2016, but that is a debate for another time/place).
Listening to this clip makes me suspect that the break-up of English into separate languages may well be further advanced a process than I had suspected at the time…
@DavidL I have a sister-in-law, who’s lived mostly in the Thames Valley and western suburbs of London, who talks like that. …
Yes I grew up in (outer) western suburbs, so I didn’t have any problem with the accent until about the 0:50 mark. (I didn’t usually ‘talk like that’ except deliberately to annoy my upwardly-mobile father.)
@DM No, it starts right at the beginning, …
I guess depends on what ‘it’ we’re talking about. I recognised this was more of an inner suburbs accent. I have plenty of rellies scattered around outer suburbs. The L-vocalisation is very familiar. It was the ‘do’ and then the ‘own’ that threw me.
Thank you for your analyses.
Ref @Etienne, I can understand this reasonably well — compared to (say) Glaswegian or strong Scouser as of 40 years ago. So I don’t hear evidence of English break-up ‘en cours de formation’ as they say of French pot-holes.
@PP in one of Clive James’ books of memoirs when he is working in London and his colleague asks him if he wants a cake, …
That doesn’t ring true to me at all. (I’d have been growing up in London about that time.)
Unless he means that whatever he heard sounded like the ‘Strine for ‘cake’. I don’t command enough IPA to represent London-drawl ‘coke’. It is a truly eye-watering dipthong, ending in a glottal of course.
James is a raconteur who doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a pungent punch-line.
@AntC. Did you acquire “rellie” ‘a relative’ in Australia or New Zealand or is the word also used in England?
@M Yes I acquired “rellie” in NZ.
It might by now also be used in U.K. thanks to ‘Neighbours’ — need to ask my yoof rellies.
@AntC
Mid-sixties London, from Falling Towards England, “Statistical Catastrophe”:
Pandora, after all, told me outright that I was breaking a butterfly on a wheel, or words to that effect. ‘Making a meal of it, aren’t you?’ Without lifting my head I converted the five Sierra Leone students at the Bradfield Polytechnic into a green Greek gamma with a pink circle around it. ‘Just put down the tea, smart-arse,’ I retorted. It was part of my new plan to relax her with obscene banter. It wasn’t working any better than the old plan, but it wasn’t working any worse either, which made it a potential step forward.
‘Would you like a cake?’ she asked with what sounded like less than total indifference to my destiny.
‘Sticky cake or crumbly cake?’ I riposted, edging the pink circle with yellow.
‘No, not cake. Cake. Cake-Akela. Thought you might be hot.’
I looked up to see that she had brought two bottles of the familiar American beverage in its sensually draped and fluted bottle. This was tantamount to a love-tryst. I followed it up immediately and once more crunched the bridge of my nose into her spectacle frames. If she had not been turning away as I lunged forward with my eyes closed, the hinge where the ear-piece joined the main frame would not have cracked open and spilled the tiny brass pivot. A long way above me as I crawled around looking for it, she kept saying ‘Really’ without the question mark, which made it sound even worse.
Ref @Etienne, I can understand this reasonably well — compared to (say) Glaswegian or strong Scouser as of 40 years ago. So I don’t hear evidence of English break-up ‘en cours de formation’ as they say of French pot-holes.
Nor do I, and my English is probably further from the Witness’s than AntC’s. I think it’s a general principle that L1 speakers understand other L1 speakers better than you might expect from how different their phonology is. (Glaswegians are not, of course, L1 speakers of English at all.)
a pungent punch-line
The passage that PP quotes is indeed pungent. How you can convert five students into either a γ or a Γ escapes me altogether.
“Cake-Akela” sounds like a Sloane Ranger rather than anything in the Cockney~LMCE space.
Not in English, ever?
I believe you know quite well what I meant and are quibbling, so I decline to clarify my point.
In the land of miles per gallon, pounds, and acres, and “I could care less”
You forgot to mention gunslinging this time.
@mollymolly is on to it.
There’s one word in what @Plastic quotes that’s more-or-less a shibboleth.
Does James’ mis-en-scene give us any background to this ‘Pandora’ — the name also clearly evidence of Sloane Rangerism? I put it to the court that James had just got off the boat to London and hadn’t yet gauged the accents that London-as-skein-of-villages is (and especially was at that time). He had literary aspirations, which is the milieu into which he’d sling ‘is ‘ook methinks.
‘Really’ without the question mark — i.e. with downward inflection — is utterly not within the LMCE space. Think, rather, Lady Di.
@AntC: I don’t think you can make anything of the name. James gives everyone pseudonyms. And constantly saying, “Really,” with various intonations, is a significant element of how he depicts “Pandora.”
I have a fairly fronted GOOSE vowel, but it doesn’t get unrounded so there’s no risk of a merger with FLEECE. Syllable-final /l/ blocks the fronting, so I have a split between e.g. FOOD and FOOL. Parallel to the split between GOAT and GOAL that may or may not, depending on who you ask, justify separate lexical sets versus just saying “oh the vowel in this lexical set comes w/ allophones depending on context.”
Re divergent dialects and mutual incomprehensibility. If peripheral dialects A and B are not mutually intelligible but both are (with some effort) mutually intelligible with non-peripheral dominant/prestige dialect C, what’s the right analysis in terms of whether we’ve got one language or multiple languages?
If peripheral dialects A and B are not mutually intelligible but both are (with some effort) mutually intelligible with non-peripheral dominant/prestige dialect C, what’s the right analysis in terms of whether we’ve got one language or multiple languages
The terminus technicus for that kind of situation is “can of worms”.
I’ve seen people, especially coming from a continental European tradition, stating as long as there is a dialect continuum and a common cognate Dachsprache, they are dialects, while the Anglophine tradition takes mutual intelligibility as the sole criterion, so they are two languages. I think we had this discussion somewhere here on LH before.
I’m sure we have, and I have no idea what I think except that it’s messy.
James gives everyone pseudonyms. And constantly saying, “Really,” with various intonations …
And ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ is another of his books. (And is screamingly funny in places.)
Then nothing he says or of what he alleges anybody else says is any sort of linguistic/idiolectical evidence. Pandora is a caricature/pastiche of a Sloane Ranger. Not at all what we’re talking about.
“oh the vowel in this lexical set comes w/ allophones depending on context.”
Since there are no minimal pairs in any accent, I don’t see the need for distinct lexical sets.
what’s the right analysis in terms of whether we’ve got one language or multiple languages?
Armey un flot.
This joke illustrates another situation, where B understands A and C, but may not be able to interpret very well, because he thinks both A and C understand B…
Sitzen ein Züricher, en Schwabe und ein Mann aus Hannover in einem Zugabteil. Keiner sagt was. Denkt sich der Züricher, dass es doch mal Zeit für eine Unterhaltung wäre. Er fragt den Herrn aus Hannover freundlich: “Sind’se schmol z’Züri gsi”? Der Norddeutsche versteht kein Wort und zuckt mit der Schulter. Mischt sich der Schwabe ein und wendet sich an den Herrn aus Hannover: “Ha, er moint gwä”.
Here A speaks Swiss, B schwäbisch and C Hochdeutsch…
In Hochdeutsch
schmol = schon einmal
gsi = gwä = gewesen
For a sufficiently strict definition of “minimal pair,” GOAT/GOAL is not a minimal pair even though they appear in my dialect to have different vowels yet in other dialects to have the same vowel. There is a useful-for-some-purposes definition of “lexical set” that would therefore put both words in the same set even when describing my dialect. Yet this highlights that “how many different lexical sets does this variety of English have” will not, for that usage, predictably yield the same answer as “how many different vowels does this variety of English have.” Saying “oh those aren’t really different vowels” seems like nonsense even if it’s important to know that the two vowels involved are allophones. Saying “oh but they’re both the same ‘phoneme'” just underscores that “phoneme” is an abstract concept which may be more useful that e.g. phlogisthon, but is still abstracted from the reality of how actual people actually talk. It does have a somewhat eerie resemblance to the old deep/surface distinction that even Chomsky himself has, as I understand it, disclaimed.
Saying “oh those aren’t really different vowels” seems like nonsense even if it’s important to know that the two vowels involved are allophones.
Does it seem like nonsense to say that the /p/ of play and the /p/ of splay constitute separate lexical sets, given that in most Englishes the first is aspirated and the second is not, but in South African English neither is aspirated? To me they constitute the same lexical set in all native varieties of English.
Ah, yes, thanks. Same GOAT as in the rest of the clip.
The Wellsian lexical sets are functionally organized to show variation between dialects in English in vowels, not in consonants, so the reported oddity in South African consonant pronunciation would be irrelevant, allophone or otherwise. If “play” and “splay” have the same vowel as each other in all varieties of English than they belong in the same lexical set, presumably FACE.
The good question here is whether splay has /p/ or /b/. Unless of course that question is wrong in the first place.
It certainly doesn’t have /b/ in ZAEng.
Judging from my experience with German-and-Dutch and Slavic, I think this is almost entirely a matter of exposure.
I agree with DM.
One thing I noted about listening to that London lady in the video is that quite often my brain “corrected” what she said automatically to a pronunciation I am familiar with and it took me some effort to register the vowel qualities she actually uses.
Familiarity obviously is an issue, but I think it also depends on whether the different phoneme systems correspond in such a way that a phoneme in one system often sounds very like a different phoneme in the other. On the whole, English RP speakers don’t seem to have much trouble understanding Standard Scots, for example (a very different thing from Lallans, but also with a phonogical system pretty unike RP.)
@Hans: I analogized the difficulty of determining the boundaries of languages by intelligibility to determining the boundaries of species by interfertility in this thread.
The Wellsian lexical sets are functionally organized to show variation between dialects in English in vowels, not in consonants
That’s true, but it’s because the dialects of English, and especially those Wells deals with, have mostly the same consonantal phonology. Lexical sets for Spanish, where the vowels are mostly the same phonologically (and even phonetically), would naturally be concerned primarily with consonants. Indeed, this thesis on variation in Northern Ireland English / Ulster Scots lists not only the standard vocalic lexical sets but also these consonantal lexical sets: THink, breatTHE, louGH, waTer, TRap (badly chosen, in my view), geT, feeL, soRE, WHich, Cab (I am not sure what this one is about: palatalization of /k/, perhaps?).
@Brett: Thanks!
I’ve got a question. Not sure if this is related to NORTH/FORCE or not, but seems as good a place to ask as any.
I used the word “forage” (as a verb), and my mom seemed pretty put off by my pronunciation. At first she literally didn’t understand what I was saying, and then after she did, she seemed to think that my pronunciation was some sort of abomination (not sure what kind of an abomination–maybe something like Midwestern- or Californian-sounding rather than East Coast). I pronounce forage with the first syllable like the number four; in my mom’s pronunciation, it sounds like the word far.
The OED has:
Brit. /ˈfɒrɪdʒ/, U.S. /ˈfɔrɪdʒ/, /ˈfɑrɪdʒ/
and m-w.com has: ˈfȯr-ij ˈfär-
So, both pronunciations are used in American English, and my pronunciation is the more common one.
But much more interestingly, wiktionary has:
(Received Pronunciation) /ˈfɒɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/
(General American) /ˈfoɹɪd͡ʒ/, [ˈfo̞ɹɪd͡ʒ]
(NYC, Ireland) /ˈfɑɹɪd͡ʒ/
Aha! Both of my parents grew up in the NYC area, but I grew up elsewhere in America. But is it really true that the FAR-ij pronunciation is used only in NYC (and in non-US English)? And if so, why? Is it related to NORTH-FORCE in some way? Or did part of the country just decided to start pronouncing this specific word in a new way? If the latter, who were the innovators: the NYC folks or the non-NYC?
This is called pre-rhotic merging and is independent of the NORTH/FORCE merger. What has happened in most of AmE is that words that were historically fo-rage, fo-rest, hist-o-ric, Flo-ri-da, mo-ral, po-rridge, fo-reign, o-ri-gin etc. with the short-o vowel of LOT, and still are so outside North America, have become for-age, for-est, hist-or-ic, Flor-i-da, mor-al, porr-idge, for-eign, or-i-gin etc. with the diphthong of NORTH and/or FORCE, thus merging with the NORTH/FORCE words forum, memorial, storage, story, etc.
The areas of North America that have resisted pre-rhotic merging are metro NYC, metro Philadelphia, most of New England, and historically the whole South, though the South is changing. However, individual words in various dialects have “crossed the borders” independently: some Easterners say for-eign, or-i-gin, for example, and although I would naturally say O-re-gon, I pronounce that specific word Or-e-gon as Oregonians do. Per contra, I say o-ral with LOT as distinct from aur-al with NORTH/FORCE.
As special cases, the words borrow, sorrow, sorry, (to)morrow are LOT words pretty much throughout the U.S. as well as in RP, though not in Canada.
I say borrow and (to)morrow with LOT but sorrow and sorry with NORTH/FORCE.
Thanks John Cowan, very comprehensive answer. I think for most of those words I use the NORTH/FORCE vowel, but for a few (forest, horrible) I may use LOT (must be my mom’s influence).
> Per contra, I say o-ral with LOT as distinct from aur-al with NORTH/FORCE.
I don’t think I’ve heard or spoken the word aural many times, but I would have guessed the opposite here.
I’ve noticed (and mentioned before) that sorry is sore-y for Canadians.
The Chambers Dictionary, being of Scottish extraction, still distinguishes NORTH from FORCE, at least up to the 11th (2008) edition. The symbolism used seems somewhat redundant: north is nörth while force is fōrs, förs instead of just fōrs.
I would have guessed the opposite here.
Yes, that’s an oddity of my own. Another oddity is that I do pre-rhotic merging on hurry (NURSE) making it rhyme with furry, like people west of me; you’d expect unmerged hu-rry (STRUT) vs. furr-y (NURSE) from my otherwise
bald and unconvincing narrativeNorthern-New-Jersey-overlaid-with-NYC accent. A young woman from India told me once that I had a “light American accent, easy to understand”; I think that was mostly because I was unconsciously mimicking her own accent to a small degree (which is what I told her), but it may have been these specifically Northeastern speech patterns as well, which are closer to some UK accents though definitely distinguishable from them.force is fōrs, förs
Presumably reflecting the fact that some (most) speakers have merged FORCE into NORTH. The AHD4 used the same system, though not the same diacritics.
Americans think Germans can’t say “squirrel”, Brits think Americans can’t.