Mark Liberman had a post at the Log quoting a correspondent as follows:
I read your article on the alphabet olympics yesterday and followed one of the links, and then one of its links, and so on. I was merrily traipsing thru the internet when I came upon a page that threw me: “The Rules and Misrules of English Spelling“.
The note on “th” (note (f)) gives a list of words with the “this” sound (what I’d call “voiced th” — ð rather than θ) that includes the word “with”. I was surprised — I have always used unvoiced as the pronunciation of that word, and had never noticed anyone doing otherwise. Sure, voicing gets *added* sometimes due to context, but surely unvoiced is the target — right? Apparently wrong. My Pocket Oxford gives only the voiced pronunciation, and my Houghton Mifflin Canadian gives the voiced version first, as does my New Lexicon Websters. The two pronunciation sites I found online also gave voiced pronunciations.
I asked my wife to pronounce the word slowly and carefully, and she likewise gave an unvoiced pronunciation, and was surprised that anyone aimed for the other (tho’ she did point out that Bono has a buzzy version when he sings “with or without you”). (I grew up in Nova Scotia, and my wife grew up in southern Ontario.) OK, so I’ve got a non-standard (or less standard) pronunciation — it’s not the only one I have. I’m interested in what the distribution of this variant is, but I’m having a hard time finding it online.
I thought “Yes, I’ve heard people use a voiceless final in that word”; I checked with my own wife, and what do you know, she had a voiceless final herself. Well, today Mark posted a followup citing John Wells’s phonetic blog to the effect that 84% of Americans use a voiceless final (/wɪθ/), only 16% sharing my voiced /wɪð/. (In the UK, the proportions are reversed: /wɪð/ 85%, /wɪθ/ 15%—though /wɪθ/ is heavily favored in Scotland.) Eighty-four percent! Rarely have I been so astonished to find myself in a small minority (though I’m used to that situation in general).
Incidentally, John Wells is annoyed that people aren’t using his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary
Glad I’m not the only one who was surprised how few people use voiced th in with. Until I read the post, I believed that everyone used voiced th in that word unless there is some phonotactic reason to unvoice it.
I suppose we can attribute this to the two sounds sharing orthographic th; combined with the low functional load of the distinction, most speakers aren’t even aware there’re two separate phonemes.
It’s hard to imagine a similar variation between say /s/ and /z/ in a high frequency function word going unnoticed.
Though many people would be surprised that of has /v/, so maybe I’m wrong…
I take that back: if some people said /ʌv/ and others /ʌf/, I’m pretty sure it would be commented on, and eye-dialect spellings ov and off (or uv and uff or something…) would occur.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that most people from the USA deploy a voiceless th in with and most in England don’t. Cockney “wiv” wouldn’t really work if the norm were voiceless, and it’s certainly voiced in my own, RP English. I think of voiceless in the British Isles as coming from Ireland (an Irish accent being more US sounding).
The people who don’t voice the th in with: do they never voice it or does it depend on the following word?
For me, it’s usually but not always unvoiced. I can’t find a consistent pattern:
With – usually unvoiced?
Within – usually voiced?
Without – can go either way?
Thin – usually unvoiced, though other word-initial ths are usually voiced.
There aren’t any minimal pairs of th vs. th are there?
Without – voiced
Outwith – unvoiced.
The first audio at the log seems to be saying “weth”.
Also unvoiced (for me):
Firth, Forth, furth, fourth.
There is, actually, a sort of minimal pair: “with” versus “withe” (a tough supple twig, esp. of willow).
Since the th of “with” is at the end of a word, where it is subject to being devoiced and lenited, probably the distinction for most people who do distinguish a voiced from a voiceless th in this word, is the length and quality of the preceding vowel.
My own “with” has “voiced th”, which is really voiceless, with lengthened and inglided lax “i”. But I often hear the “voiceless” variety, also, especially in the prepositional verb “come with” used intransitively.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that most people from the USA deploy a voiceless th in with and most in England don’t.
Well, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that most people in England have a voiced th, since that’s the historical form. But that shouldn’t stop you from being surprised about the situation in the US. I mean, I’m a certified American who’s heard American speech all his life, and I’m surprised. When did this happen, I wonder? Since dictionaries largely still prefer the voiced form, it must be pretty recent.
As another certified American, I am also shocked. It never crossed my mind that you can pronounce “with” with an unvoiced final consonant. I can’t recall ever noticing an American speak that way. I’ll have to listen more carefully in the future.
I would be interested in seeing the underlying data for the 84/16 claim (which is said to be something called a “preference poll” — I don’t think it’s phrased as an unequivocal claim about actual use). I too find that level of supposed overwhelming support for unvoiced surprising — maybe it’s bad data, or maybe there’s a regional distribution such that I’m personally less exposed to this majority practice, or maybe as suggested above because the voiced/unvoiced distinction here isn’t used very often to distinguish minimal pairs of words our ears aren’t attuned to notice it as much as we notice voiced/unvoiced contrasts for other consonants.
The alternation of voiced and unvoiced th is predictable by rules, but the rules are complicated and appeal heavily to non-phonological notions, so minimal pairs can and do exist. Here’s my best current shot at formulating the rules:
1) Loan words never contain voiced th, even when borrowed from languages that have either [ð] (like Spanish padre, comrade < camarada, etc.) or /ð/ (like Modern Greek skordalia ‘Greek-style aioli’). This rule overrides all following rules. There may be very old loan words to which this does not apply, but I don’t know any.
2) Morpheme-initial th falls into two categories:
2a) The function words the, they, their, them, this, these, that, those, there, thither, thence, then, thus, than, thou, thy, thine, thee (and perhaps a few more) are voiced. Note that although < all though, so its th is voiced too.
2b) All other initial th, as in thin, think, thick, Thor, thorough, thief is unvoiced. Through is a function word, but it is unvoiced because it is just a shortened form of thorough. Known minimal pair: thigh/thy.
3) Th which is both morpheme-medial and intervocalic is voiced: father, weather, lather, etc. Exception: brothel is traditionally unvoiced, though many people now pronounce it voiced by analogy (I do). Intervocalic rth is also voiced, even in rhotic dialects: northern, worthy, etc. All other morpheme-medial th is unvoiced (if any; I can’t think of any examples). No known minimal pairs, but near-minimal earthy/worthy, where the latter is no longer felt as worth+y.
4) Morpheme-final th falls into three categories:
4a) With is unvoiced in Scotland, Ireland, and America, but voiced in most other places. Australia is apparently variable in this respect. Outwith is unvoiced in Scotland and unknown elsewhere.
4b) Morpheme-final th that was once intervocalic before the fall of final e and the reduction of plural -es mostly retains its voicing. The nouns baths, booths, oaths, paths, sheaths, truths, wreaths, youths and sometimes moths end in unvoiced th, but are voiced in the plural (taking /z/ as the plural ending). This voicing is completely lost in the U.S., maybe in other locations too, and some people in England have it in only some nouns. For the same reason, denominal verbs like breathe < breath, bathe < bath are consistently voiced. Lathe < lath also belongs to this family. There are probably others. Bathing may be < bathe or bath (v), and is voiced or unvoiced accordingly. Known minimal pairs: lo(a)th/loathe, mouth (n)/mouth (v), wreath/wreathe, sheath/sheathe, sooth/soothe, teeth/teethe.
(All these were once intervocalic and are exactly analogous to f/v alternation in leaves, wives etc. and s/z alternation in houses and for some people by analogy spouses. None of this kind of fricative voicing applies in Scotland, at least not in varieties close to Scots.)
4c) Other morpheme-final th is unvoiced, as in pith, death.
I grew up voiced and am still find the voiceless pronunciation odd. Was there a time when gangsters started being depicted as saying “wit youse” instead of “wid youse”? (The gangsta pronunciation is evidently voiceless, as in “I wanna get witchoo.”
Hey, I used voiced th in baths, booths, oaths, paths, truths, wreaths and youths (but not, for some reason, oaths and sheaths), so that voicing is not completely lost in the U.S.
Are you callin’ me un-American, John Cowan? Is this the new phonetic McCarthyism? Because subject to the usual dangers of introspection, I think I’ve been generally voicing the th in with my entire native-AmEng-speaker life and it’s only in the last few days that I’ve first become aware of claims (which I am not yet accepting the empirical veracity of) that this puts me in a minority among AmEng speakers.
John,
I voice singular “booth” (e.g. telephone-booth) and I believe that’s a common (if not standard) pronunciation in the UK. The surname “Booth”, too.
Charles Perry: I stand corrected as to that detail, but not as to the general principle: the noun plurals are irregular, and therefore subject to loss. In my speech, at least, and in that recorded in U.S. dictionaries, all are lost.
Apparently the traditional accent of New York (and, I’d guess, at least some other Eastern cities, probably not Philadelphia) have voiced with too.
I should also say that -ern in northern, southern, eastern, western is a cranberry morph, so these words are now monomorphemic, despite their transparent relationship to north, south, east, west respectively.
Michael Peverett: I had vaguely heard that booth was voiced even in the singular in the U.K., but couldn’t confirm it. Well, I’ll be, yet another individual exception like brothel. Booth is also a fine example of those “very old borrowings” I mentioned in point 1, as it was borrowed from Old Danish before interdental fricatives were lost in the mainland North Germanic languages.
Keep those exceptions coming in, folks.
Australian: I used the voiceless variety for many years before discovering (in my teens or twenties, I think) that the voiced variety is supposed to be correct.
This is a but of a baader-meinhoff moment for me. I’m taking a Intro to Linguistics class and transcribed “with” as voiced on a quiz a few weeks ago, which was initially marked incorrect. I was shocked to realize that most of my east-coast classmates weren’t voicing it. Now I’m just waiting to get home to the Bay Area to see how most of my old friends say it–I hope the voiced version isn’t just an idiosyncrasy.
Cowan: “3) Th which is both morpheme-medial and intervocalic is voiced: father, weather, lather, etc. Exception: brothel …”
Ethel, ethyl, methyl, ether(eal), ethos, ethics, Ethan, Ethiopia, catholic, apothecary, catheter
I should also say that -ern in northern, southern, eastern, western is a cranberry morph, so these words are now monomorphemic, despite their transparent relationship to north, south, east, west respectively.
I guess that depends on your analysis and criteria. I personally don’t find them monomorphemic. Each can be analysed into a morpheme (adjective, direction of the compass), followed by the non-productive morpheme ‘-ern’. I’m wondering how you would handle ‘northerly’, etc.
I’m just saying I wasn’t surprised, not that I wasn’t surprised because I know of a whole lot of evidence. And I’m a certified USian too, I just have a British accent.
Booth as in “General” Booth or Connie Booth (American) are both voiced (by me & I’d guess by most Englishpersons).
Is there anyone who doesn’t voice “smooth”?
I used to work with a guy from Arkansas who said “roof” to rhyme with “woof” and “roofs” to rhyme with “woofs”, whereas I say “roof” to rhyme with “youth” and “rooves” for the plural. So there.
Crown: rhyming “roof” with “woof” is reasonably common in a number of non-prestige varieties of AmEng. I grew up over a thousand miles ENE of Arkansas, and “roof” was one of four words I can recall my 8th grade English teacher using as shibboleths to distinguish “incorrect” dialect pronunciation from standard/prestige pronunciation (with rhymes-with-woof on the wrong side of the divide). But I can’t recall ever hearing “yoof” for “youth” in an AmEng context although i take it from eye-dialect written representations I’ve seen that it must be common in some (stigmatized?) varieties of BrEng.
I’m not sure of the origin to “yoof”, but I think it’s probably a 1960s comment on cockney Rolling Stones-type emerging culture and may come from “youth club” which was a publicly-funded place where yooves could meet in the evenings (I think).
My workmate from Arkansas was also a Yale grad. I’m guessing his accent wasn’t totally unprestigious. He was quite emphatic about his pronunciation, I remember, sounding almost like a dog.
I’m guessing that a youth club had fluorescent lighting, a linoleum-tiled concrete floor, two ping-pong tables and many orange plastic stackable chairs.
No one in our certifiable American family voices “with” — and I think that explains why our teenage son always thought Bono was singing “Wither without you.”
With is unvoiced in Scotland, Ireland, and America
Well, in “prestige” dialects in America, i.e. the Northeast, it is still voiced.
I just tested my wife, from Philadelphia, and she pronounces “with” unvoiced as well. This is terrifying – how long has this been going on? I feel like the protagonist in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”
It had never occurred to me that “roof” needn’t rhyme with “woof” though of course I’ve met many people who pronounce that leading “r” as “w” anyway.
I have met people who pronounce “roof” as “roove” and “grease” as “greaze” and, come to think of it, they had the trait, rare in Scotland, of using the voiced pronunciation of “with”. Hoodlums, I suppose.
I say both woof[lax] (like “look”) and woof[tense] (like “moon”). It’s tense in “warp and woof”, but lax in “my dog goes woof, woof”. And I say both roof[lax] and roof[tense]. It’s lax in “the roof of my mouth”, but tense in “so mad he went through the roof”, and could be either in “fix my roof”. I’m from northwest Ohio.
Born WV 1948, now live in KY. Say “with” with voicing. Have only noticed the unvoiced variety on NPR. Also say “roof” lax and “root” tense (is there some sort of complementary distribution pattern for those words)?
Ah well, as Howard Cruse said, make woof not warp.
I just tested my wife, from Philadelphia, and she pronounces “with” unvoiced as well. This is terrifying – how long has this been going on? I feel like the protagonist in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”
My reaction exactly!
I used to work with a guy from Arkansas who said “roof” to rhyme with “woof”
I have Arkie roots myself (father’s side) and I think I rhyme it with “woof” about half the time. I have a number of linguistic uncertainties like that.
@Greg Lee: your 3)s are covered by 1): “Loan words never contain voiced th … This rule overrides all following rules.”
However: algorithm, logarithm, rhythm, zither seem to be exceptions (although Wells’ dictionary gives a voiceless US variant for zither).
Other exceptions:
nada
(Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language gives two alternative pronunciations \ˈnädə, ˈnäðə\; the original transcription uses an underlined th)
eisteddfod
(/aɪˈsteðvɒd/, along with /aı`stedfɒd/)
Rog: (is there some sort of complementary distribution pattern for those words)?
That’s what I’m wondering. I think John Cowan will know.
I have a number of linguistic uncertainties like that.
Me too. I think some people are more susceptible to acquiring bits of new accents than others. While living in the US I leaned to say “bin” for been about half the time (before that I only said “bean”, like most Englishpersons).
@ mollymooly “Loan words never contain voiced th …”
Oh, I see. Then how about “Netherlands”?
I’m English-born — ‘with’ is certainly voiced but ‘booth’ (whether the name or the almost defunct telephone installation) is unvoiced. Rhyming ‘booth’ with ‘smooth’ sounds very odd to me. I grew up in southern England but my parents were from the north. To my ear, unvoiced ‘booth’ fit wells with a Yorkshire accent.
And as a possible exception to Cowan’s 3) (since my first set was mistaken), “gotham”.
My old AHD lists both the tense and lax (in that order) pronunciations of roof, but my 8th grade teacher (whose views I’m not endorsing as scientific or anything . . .) had no doubt that the first was proper and the second not. She would have linked them to “route” (in the “get your kicks on Route 66” sense) just b/c it was another of the shibboleths – the correct/prestige pronunciation being homophonous with “root” and the “wrong” low-class variant being homophonous with “rout.”
Greg Lee: is “Netherlands” really a loanword or just a calque of “Nederlanden” (and/or a somewhat archaic-on-its-own synonym for Low Countries, which calques Pays-Bas)? “Nether” as a freestanding word now sounds a bit old-fashioned, but one does see it in e.g. the euphemism “nether regions.”
Greg Lee: Gotham is indeed an exception. The village in Nottinghamshire is now spelled Gatham.
Dearieme: There’s no GOOSE/FOOT split in Scotland anyway.
Mollymooly: I knew about those exceptions to rule 1, but forgot about them. I suspect the fact that the following sound is a syllabic consonant not present in the original language has something to do with it.
I was actually mocked for using the GOOSE instead of the FOOT vowel in roof when I moved to the New Jersey town where I spent most of my childhood. I ignored the abuse / And stuck with GOOSE. When I told my wife about this several years ago, she immediately said that /rʊf/ is what a dog says.
J. W. Brewer asked “is “Netherlands” really a loanword or just a calque of “Nederlanden” …
Yes, both. Looking at the Wikipedia definition for “calque” below, I conclude that a calque is a kind of loan:
In linguistics, a calque (/kælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Latin: “verbum pro verbo”) or root-for-root translation.
I suspect that something else is going on here. Noting that the Cowan rules seem to be, synchronically, impossible to interpret for a naive speaker, who is not going to know whether a form is borrowed or not, I think there might be a synchronic rule that voices “th” after a short stressed vowel and before unstressed “er”, and that guides speakers who see written “th” and have to figure out whether to pronounce it voiced.
After reading the LL article, I am now too self-conscious of how I say “with”. I sampled my wife and 5-year-old daughter. Wife pronounces it unvoiced. Daughter pronounces it with a voiced consonant somewhere between ‘dh’ and ‘v’. Both are native-born Americans, living in the San Francisco Bay Area; my wife grew up in Iowa.
Proud Dog Owner: My dog can talk. Tell him, boy. What’s on top of a house?
Dog: Roof!
Stranger: Get out of here!
PDO: No, no, listen: What’s sandpaper like:
D: Rough!
S: Scram!
PDO: No, no, hang on. Tell him, who’s the greatest baseball player of all time?
D: Ruth!
S: Beat it. And take your damn dog with you!
D (on the way out): Maybe I shoulda said Hank Aaron …
I seem to voice the end of “with” most of the time, but the more attention I give to the matter the more unsure I am about that “most of the time”. Certainly I have long been aware of the unvoiced version, and possibly I have a lingering sense that it is “right” or “better”.
Here are more forms that occur to me in support of my proposal above that “th” becomes voiced between stressed short vowel and unstressed “er”:
blather
blithering
(Cotton) Mather
(Orrie) Cather
Carruthers
Fothering
smithereens
(Sally) Struthers
druthers
Of course there are many more ordinary words that have voiced “th” in the relevant position, but proper or less usual words are more to the point, if we want to figure out present day speakers understand their language.
I suspect you’re going to be shocked to find that Mrs Ø doesn’t voice it. The conclusion I’m coming to is that women in the US don’t voice “with”, just as Norwegian & German women quite often take an inward hiss of breath instead of saying “yes”.
Having done extensive research I can now reveal that John Cleese says unvoiced “Booth”, but voiced “Cleese”.
AJP – yes but John Cleese’s family name was originally “Cheese”.
J.W. Brewer: I can’t recall ever hearing “yoof” for “youth” in an AmEng context although i take it from eye-dialect written representations I’ve seen that it must be common in some (stigmatized?) varieties of BrEng.
Yes, in Cockney/lower-end Estuary: the modern “Jafaican” pronunciation among under-35s in London would be “yoot”, as in “da yoot”.
What sort of person changes their name from Cheese to Cleese? You didn’t see Harvey Milk’s parents trying to cover up the dairy-product connection. And so half arsed, why not change it to Baker or Constantinides?
Not youts?
Youf is common in AAVE too. Think the Jay-Z line “Brand new convertibles/I’m so roofless (ruthless)”
It might have been mere corruption rather than a conscious change.
I’m not well-positioned to be getting aural confirmation on my work computer, but I associate “roofless” for “ruthless” with NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta” (where it rhymes with “toofless”) from approx. a quarter century back. I suppose if that’s really a standard AAVE-ism it might generalize to yoof, but I can’t personally recall having heard that and (correctly or not) took “toofless” and thus the following “roofless” to be not a standard AAVE-ism but a jocular imitation of how someone’s speech might be altered if they’d just (as would follow from the context of the narrative) been punched repeatedly in the mouth by the young-and-not-yet-mellowed-out Dr. Dre.
A note on my own pronunciation of initial /ð/, which has puzzled me for years, as I’ve always known it’s different from the standard. I have spent some time now thinking about the mechanism.
I pronounce both /θ/ and /ð/ with the common interdental variant and my /θ/ is an exemplary interdental. But somewhere along the way I have picked up the other variation for /ð/, the plosive /d/.
But when I try to pronounce the target /d/, I have a problem, because the interdental tongue position means there is aperture via the very back teeth.
It seems that to approximate the silent plosive onset of /d/ I restrict airflow at the glottis (creaky voice). So I have a (very) creaky-voiced fricative onset (~20ms) followed by plosive release, or affricate if the voice happens to kick in just before the plosion.
The creak restricts airflow so much that I had a lot of trouble figuring out over the past hour(!) exactly where the sound was coming from.
The IPA for this is hard to write in this size but here ɡoes [ð̰̟͡d̟], that is a creaky /ð/ tie-barred with /d/, all advanced (viz. interdental).
I suspect the target phoneme /d/ is due to a father with Cockney features and this is why it’s only associated with word-initial, voiced /ð/.
Don’t know if this is interesting, never heard tell of this variation before though I have been doing it all my life.
“F” for final theta occurs in AAVE, but I don’t know if it’s “standard.” Earlier in that verse, Ice Cube pronounces “youth” with what I think is a “th,” but I’m pretty sure Youth has an “f” in Dead Prez’s Behind Enemy Lines and definitely in Zion I’s The Bay. Freddie Gibbs says “boof” in 187 Proof. Jay-z says “troof” in Otis. Boots says “wealf” in The Coup’s The Name Game. Eazy-E says “rufless” in Ruthless Villain. I hope all these are accurate.
Sorry for the random songs, I’m bad at finding relevant lyrics. And there are a lot of counter-examples, so it’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s also hard to be sure when it’s used in a song because -ooth words are often rhymed with -oof words, like in C.R.E.A.M. “Leave it up to me while I be living proof/To kick the truth/To the young black youth(youf?)” I have the nonscientific impression that it may be more common in certain words (“boof”) than others (never heard “wif,” instead “wit”).
“I mean, I’m a certified American who’s heard American speech all his life, and I’m surprised. When did this happen, I wonder? Since dictionaries largely still prefer the voiced form, it must be pretty recent.”
It has to be old enough for dialect forms like “what’s up witchoo? to derive from it.
Interestingly, Gangsta Gangsta itself has “wit” for with (not “wif” as to the rarity of which I am happy to defer to Joe R’s superior knowledge) in a later verse, but that’s arguably forced for the sake of the rhyme (with “shit”).
I once studied with an African American whose English was entirely standard except for final /θ/ > /f/. Thus he said “maff” for math. I never asked him about it, but I expect he preserved this one signal of ethnic identification.
for “this one” read “this as one”
Just found a great example of how variable this is. Was listening to 2 Chainz’s Birthday Song (yeah, I know), and in the chorus and throughout it’s “birtday,” but in the outro he says “And it’s your birfday, baby.”
And a final example, from Biggie’s Juicy “Birfdays was the worst days/ Now we sip champagne when we thirsty.”
Okay, sorry for spamming. No more.
Greg Lee: Your -ther /-ðər/ rule definitely does not work across a morpheme boundary, as truther ‘one who does not believe in the usual theory of 9/11’ and birther ‘one who does not believe that Obama was born in the U.S.’ exemplify. Trying out such nonce words as clother (cloth+er, not clothe+er), deather, eighther, faither, fifther, growther, healther, pither (one who piths frogs?), seventher, sixther cause my internal machinery to report /θ/ as well.
Creating that list caused me to look into the verb badmouth, which is listed in m-w.com, NID3, AHD4, and RHD2 with both voiced and unvoiced pronunciations, presumably because some derive it from the verb mouth, some (like me) from the noun. Alas, ODO gives no BrE pronunciation. What say the Hattics of the five sub-countries of Rightpondia (viz. Londonia, Eboracia, Bagpipia, N’Iron, and Quaint)?
ObSemiRelated: Apparently the only “normal” minimal pair for /ʃ ~ ʒ/ is dilution / delusion, provided you pronounce the latter with a reduced vowel in the initial syllable (I do). If you include proper names, there are also Aleutian/allusion and Confucian/confusion. Kashmir/cashmere is an interesting case as well, since the words are etymological doublets.
There’s a /ʒ/ in cashmere?
It’s my pronunciation and the first pronunciation given in U.S. dictionaries, though they list /ʃ/ as an alternative per their usual practice. British dictionaries favor /ʃ/.
I use /ʃ/, but I don’t have much occasion to say it.
Confucian/confusion is the only one of those that works for me. I pronounce cashmere and Kashmir the same. Dilution begins with the ‘dye’ vowel and delusion has short i/schwa, I can’t quite decide which. On the very infrequent occasions I might say Aleutian I think it begins with al-yoo. Because residual Britishness, probably.
For me equation has /ʒ/ when it means a mathematical expression and /ʃ/ on the rare occasions when it means an act of equating.
Yup. Same for me.
Fancy! For me it’s the same in both cases.
For me too.
badmouth: definitely unvoiced for me, but I am transatlantic so probably not a good data point
@Kieth Ivey: That puzzle had previously been mentioned here, here, and by you yourself here.
I had never noticed that booth is Bude “hut”…! Bude isn’t anywhere near my active vocabulary, but still.
Oh! That (Weide) is what we call the whole willow in German.
Blessed indeed are the cheesemakers.
Quoth WP: “His family’s surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name ‘Cleese’ when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923.”
I note that the leading actors of Fawlty Towers are John Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth.
I use the variant pronunciation /waɪð/, which I picked up from a withe-bender. The river in the Old Forest is Withywindle, which I pronounce with PRICE and /θ/.
@David Marjanović: Calling Sukkot the “Festival of Booths” seems to be an old mistranslation from Yiddish but/בוט, meaning “hut.”
Thanks, Brett. I knew I must have mentioned it somewhere.
For “leading actors” read “writers.” Cleese of course appeared in FT, but not Booth.
The etymology for the word booth is given as ultimately from *bhuH, as in dwelling place. The word bothy in dialect and bothán in Irish are treated as borrowings, either from English or Norse. However there is also boitean, meaning “bundle of hay”, I suppose deriving from *bhendh “to bind”. So I prefer to think of a booth as a house of straw.
Why mistranslation, Brett? Hut doesn’t seem right since huts are permanent primitive dwellings. Wigwam might have been accurate, but even after Lincoln’s nomination, it never made the jump from a meaning strictly constrained to native culture. Festival of Lean-tos? The tabernacles that anyone knows are either elaborate storage boxes or even churches. Booths is awkward, but there’s not a great word available.
Connie Booth did appear in Fawlty Towers. You were right the first time. Philip drunk …
Yes she did.
@PP, maybe you were not here yet, but we had a long discursion on how *bHu- probably gave both bo og bygge in Scandinavian, as well as bonde and G bauen/Bauer. This just to mention that bod/booth is well connected at home in non-West Germanic.
(L discurro = ‘run in all directions’ innit?)
Is this what you mean?
That’s the one I meant. Discucurrimus further than I recalled, even unto Latin (yea).
But it started with a Lombard sword and suppletive copulas a few days earlier.
Yes, that was quite a thread.
However there is also boitean, meaning “bundle of hay”, I suppose deriving from *bhendh “to bind”.
Which brings to mind Chaucer’s spinning “House” of Rumour, not straw but withes:
And al thys hous of which y rede
Was mad of twigges, falwe, rede,
And grene eke, and somme weren white,
Swiche as men to these cages thwite,
Or maken of these panyers,
Or elles [hottes] or dossers;
That, for the swough and for the twygges,
This hous was also ful of gygges,
And also ful eke of chirkynges,
And of many other werkynges;
And eke this hous hath of entrees
As fele as of leves ben in trees
In somer, whan they grene been;
And on the roof men may yet seen
A thousand holes, and wel moo,
To leten wel the soun out goo.
And be day, in every tyde,
Been al the dores opened wide,
And be nyght echon unshette;
Ne porter ther is noon to lette
No maner tydynges in to pace.
Ne never rest is in that place
That hit nys fild ful of tydynges,
Other loude or of whisprynges;
And over alle the houses angles
Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles
Of werres, of pes, of mariages,
Of reste, of labour, of viages,
Of abood, of deeth, of lyf,
Of love, of hate, acord, of stryf,
Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges,
Of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges,
Of faire wyndes, and of tempestes,
Of qwalm of folk, and eke of bestes;
Of dyvers transmutacions
Of estats, and eke of regions;
Of trust, of drede, of jelousye,
Of wit, of wynnynge, of folye;
Of plente, and of gret famyne,
Of chepe, of derthe, and of ruyne;
Of good or mys governement,
Of fyr, and of dyvers accident.
And loo, thys hous, of which I write,
Syker be ye, hit nas not lyte,
For hyt was sixty myle of lengthe.
Al was the tymber of no strengthe,
Yet hit is founded to endure
While that hit lyst to Aventure,
That is the moder of tydynges,
As the see of welles and of sprynges;
And hyt was shapen lyk a cage.
@Ryan: The OED lists the relevant sense of booth (“a temporary dwelling covered with boughs of trees or other slight materials” as “archaic in general sense”), which seems correct to me. Only the more specific sense, “a covered stall at a market; a tent at a fair, or the like, for the sale of wares or refreshments, exhibition of the feats of jugglers, etc.,” is in common usage today.* For that reason, the use of “booth” to refer to a sukkah seems inapt.
In contrast, tabernacle works fine, at least for Jews. English translations of the Torah are full of references to the Tent of Meeting as a “tabernacle,” in the sense “a temporary dwelling; generally movable, constructed of branches, boards, or canvas; a hut, tent, booth.”** The use of that particular word was popularized by the 1382 Wycliffite Bible, which used “tabernacle” (plural, “tabernaclis”) extensively. However, there are instances of the usage from earlier than Wycliffite.
* I notice that the OED does not list the generalization of this sense to similar but roofless structures playing the same role at indoor fairs, trade shows, and exhibitions. It does, however, have another draft addition (2017), which I found interesting:
booth capturing n. Indian English a method of interfering with the process of an election whereby members of a particular party occupy a polling booth, excluding and voting in place of those people who are registered to vote there.
** Like you, I tend to think of a hut as a rude but comparatively permanent structure. However, the word’s oldest usage in English seems to be to refer to a specifically temporary and portable housing structure in a military cantonment. The OED says, “a wooden structure for the temporary housing of troops,” is “apparently the earlier use.”
The OED is clearly out of date here: telephone booth and ticket booth are the uses that first come to my mind. In addition, a booth in a restaurant is an enclosed or partially enclosed table, with shelf-like seats affixed to its (normally three) walls, but no top. (Sometimes it isn’t clear whether the wall is a wall or just a high back to the seats.) Wikt, m-w.com, AHD, Collins, and Macmillan all agree.
But it can’t be cognate to both Bund (m., “bundle, league, association”) and Bude (f.)…
…oh, of course it can, if Bude is an “ingvaeonism” in Old Saxon or a downright Frisian loanword in Middle Low German. But I’m just speculating here.
This, too, has passed. Voting booth is what comes first to my millennial mind.
Those too, although where I vote they are basically desks with walls, what a library carrel would be if it didn’t have a chair in it. And of course you don’t literally vote there any more, you just fill out your paper ballot (enclosed in a folder for privacy) and take it to the scanner, in a sense a return to the days (long before my time) when you dropped the folded ballot in a box with a locked lid and a slit in the top.
I’ve always liked the small-scale low-tech system my tenant’s union uses. You are given a ballot, a small blank envelope to put the ballot in, and a larger envelope with your name and membership number on it to put the small envelope in. When the polls close, the large envelopes are counted and the names, numbers, and total count of the voters verified and recorded. Then the large envelopes are opened and destroyed, and the smaller envelopes counted and randomized by spreading them out on a table and muddling them before picking them up again. Finally, the smaller envelopes are opened and the votes counted.
That’s how votes by mail are counted. I’ve done it myself (EU parliamentary elections last year).
As you’ve found, the main sense of booth is a temporary roofed structure, and that’s the point I was making.
So we’ve got huts, which moderns think of as residential but permanent; booths, which moderns think of as temporary but non-residential; and tabernacles, which sounds arcane, I would guess even to most Jews, including my wife and in-laws, who I’ve never heard utter the term tabernacles. It’s not in the vernacular for most people. My in-laws don’t use much Hebrew, but they always say ‘sukkah’, I’d guess because they’ve never found an English word that seemed right.
I think there’s a reason that many synagogues use ‘booths’. It’s not a mis-translation. It’s just a poor option amid other poor options.
My in-laws, who are Catholics, speak of tabernaklet all the time, which surprised me at first, since the only modern context I knew it from was as a name for Pentecostal assembly houses.
A Catholic tabernacle is where the consecrated hosts are kept. Not a building, not a room, just a little locked shrine in a wall.
Tabarnac!
@Ryan: The OED lists that sense of booth as archaic, and as lots of others have pointed out here, many or most modern usages (“voting booth,” “restaurant booth,” etc.) do not fit that definition—primarily through rooflessness. In modern usage, booth is strongly associated with business transactions or similar activity.
It’s always a tabernacle if the consecrated host is kept there. However, the traditional structure in Italy is in the center of an altar, and it ranges from a small shrine with an ornate door to a rather large and baroquely elaborate building-like structure. Needless to say, the latter extreme is well represented by Bernini’s tabernacle for St. Peter’s.
> The OED lists that sense of booth as archaic,
That isn’t borne out by the portion you quoted. It only says “dwelling” is archaic. You yourself write that it gives a definition which is exactly what I wrote about — “a covered stall at a market; a tent at a fair, or the like.” I don’t have the OED, but if you simply google, the first meaning in google’s dictionary is “a small temporary tent or structure at a market, fair, or exhibition.”
At least in the US that meaning – temporary outdoor structure big enough to do something in – is accessible to virtually anyone. Farmer’s markets, county fairs, the hugely popular Christkindlmarket in Chicago all have booths – temporary structures. While JC may think of ticket booths as windows in long buildings at pro sporting events, millions of Americans go to high school football, college soccer and other secondary sports, where the ticket booth is still just a shack.
Thus my point — “booth” is a living word for a temporary but non-residential structure, one familiar enough and plastic enough to be recruited for other purposes; “hut” is a living word for a residential but not temporary structure; and tabernacle is a word which most people couldn’t identify at all, and which virtually no one connects with a small temporary outdoor structure of any sort. Tabernacle is either a grand permanent public religious building, or a stylized indoor cabinet.
There’s a reason for that, which comes out if you go back to Torah.
Torah distinguishes between mish’kan, permanent housing, particularly the mobile housing of the Arc of the Covenant, routinely translated as tabernacle; and sukkah, an impermanent, informal shelter in the fields used by people for the harvest festival. A mish’kan/tabernacle seems meant to be as grand as the Israelites could create in the context of the Exodus, with lavish carpets for walls. There are important and elaborate rules for the creation of the tabernacle, which is a “sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,” keeping in mind that the speaker is God.
Whether as the cabinet for the Catholic Eucharist; the church building itself in some Protestant usage, or the original meaning in Torah, a tabernacle is God’s house.
This is nothing like a sukkah.
A sukkah is a hasty thing you improvise so you can stay in the field for a week, at a time of year when you need to use all the time for harvest rather than running back to your hut in the village each day. There are no rules for throwing up a sukkah. It’s from a word that has the sense of woven boughs.
No plush tapestry hung. Wattle with no daub.
(I think I overstated this before, and I’m editing it back a bit – a mish’kan is a permanent dwelling, and in most cases, it’s an impressive structure. Mish’kan of Jacob, or of wise men who believe their homes are quite something. Certainly the mish’kanot translated as tabernacles are God’s dwelling. But it seems mish’kan can also just be a home.)
I fully concede booth is clumsy. Wigwam really would be best, if it had ever caught on. Shanty wouldn’t be bad, but my guess is those for whom Sukkot is important balk at the dirty, impoverished connotation. Booth sucks. It’s just the best of the options.
By the way, a sukkah is what you (Brett) raised to keep the rain off you on your boy scout outing in another recent thread, while the tabernacle is the luxury yurt at a destination glamping spa.
Yours is a feat I’m impressed by. At my camp, a week of daily sessions on roughing it taught us virtually nothing, culminating in a night where I managed to balance a few sticks against each other, swatted away mucke for an hour or so, then went wandering till I found a few other miserable scouts, and we stayed up the rest of the night talking.
I got the merit badge. Talk about grade inflation.
Heh. And yes, I think most of the Jews I’ve known have used “sukkah” for want of a better English word.
Russian actually has a good word for it, шалаш (shalash). With somewhat mysterious etymology “from Turkic”.
So we’ve got huts, which moderns think of as residential but permanent
I don’t know that a residence is what first comes to my mind when I think of a hut. Groundskeepers have huts where they keep the lawnmower and the weedkiller and the cans of creosote for painting fences, that kind of thing. A beach hut is a little cabin where you can put on your swimsuit and shelter from the rain and biting wind in places such as Skegness (it’s so bracing!) Roald Dahl had a writing hut. Etc.
>Groundskeepers have huts where they keep the lawnmower and the weedkiller
That’s interesting. I believe you, though with 3,000-odd “groundskeeper’s hut” returns on google, all those on the first couple pages either refer directly to Hagrid’s hut at Hogwarts, or come from recent fantasy novels inspired by Harry Potter.
Such an outbuilding would be a shed to me; and to most Americans, I think. I’d never heard of a beach hut or a writing hut. There is Pizza Hut and various Hot Dog Huts, but I think those are metaphorical houses rather than service buildings.
Maybe the meaning of hut couldn’t drift as far for us because of our greater exposure to Gilligan’s Island.
Pizza Hut
ObHat: The chain started to show up in German inner cities when I was in my teens, and I first thought that it was a German chain – Hut means “hat”, and the red roof part of their logo looks a bit like a hat. So I pronounced it [‘pıtsa ‘hu:t] for years until I learnt that the chain is American.
(The German WP says that it’s a frequent mistake in Germany.)
Ha, that’s great!
Groundskeeper is BrE except as applied to golf courses, I think. Gardeners in the U.S. have sheds.
Why the outdoor orchestra pavilion at Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra gives summer concerts, is called “The Shed”, even though it’s got 5100 regular seats and almost 13,000 on the lawn outside it:
Such an outbuilding would be a shed to me
I have some sort of mental distinction between ‘hut’ and ‘shed’ but I can’t say precisely what it is. I think of a shed as a small building just for storage, whereas a hut would have room for a folding chair where you can sit and read the paper, and maybe even an electrical outlet for a kettle so you can make a pot of tea.
Akbar and Jeff were big on huts, of course.
So I pronounced it [‘pıtsa ‘hu:t] for years until I learnt that the chain is American. (The German WP says that it’s a frequent mistake in Germany.)
I’ve never heard any German pronounce it any other way. First because of the red hat, and second because the “uh” sound doesn’t appear in a stressed syllable of any German word I can think of offhand, only in unstressed final position. Phonotactics are a Thing !
Bob Venturi not long before his death on the Decorated Shed versus the Duck in architecture. In architecture, a shed-roofed building has a roof pitched in one single direction (as opposed to a flat- or a gable roof, for instance).
I’ve never heard any German pronounce it any other way. First because of the red hat, and second because the “uh” sound doesn’t appear in a stressed syllable of any German word I can think of offhand, only in unstressed final position. Phonotactics are a Thing !
And yet German WP says “Pizza Hut [ˈpiːtsəˌhʌt].” When Germans pronounce English names like Bud and Sunderland, do they say “Boot” and “Zoonderlant”? I suspect not.
@hat
I am just trying to think about this. What you would hear for pub is either Poob with the oo as in good or Pahb. But pub does not exist as a German word or look like one (OK, there are words corresponding to public and publicity, which may explain the poob).
When Germans pronounce English names like Bud and Sunderland, do they say “Boot” and “Zoonderlant”? I suspect not.
That, however it may be, is not relevant to my statement that
the “uh” sound doesn’t appear in a stressed syllable of any German word I can think of offhand
You might consider that for 50 years I have been speaking, listening to and absorbing German as it is practiced. On what basis do you venture to claim “I suspect not” ? First principles ? Introspection ? A gut feeling ?
Of course examples of German words I couldn’t think of offhand would prove me wrong. But not wrong on first principles.
@AJP Crown: A shed roof is the degenerate limiting case of a salt box roof.
– A term that’s just asking for a wider audience, Brett. Thank you.
On the salt box, true or not it’s interesting about Queen Anne taxing 2-storey houses, I was reading earlier that she was the one who started the window tax (thence “daylight robbery”). She seems to have had a grudge against construction and yet she ended up having a whole bunch of styles of building named after her.
the “uh” sound doesn’t appear in a stressed syllable of any German word I can think of offhand
But Pizza Hut is not a German word. Czech and mate. You have not responded to my question about how Germans pronounce English words, probably because it destroys your position. You know damn well Germans don’t use a German /u/ in English words with central vowel.
If they’re singing “The Hut Sut Song,” do they sing “Hoot zoot”? Again, I think not.
But Pizza Hut is not a German word.
I didn’t claim it was.
You have not responded to my question about how Germans pronounce English words, probably because it destroys your position.
To your examples I responded with “however that may be”. Germans pronounce foreign words and names as best they can by imitating. I have no position on that.
Even people whom I have known for years can’t pronounce “Stuart” or “Clayton” as they otter, nor understand it as they’d better. When I order a taxi on the phone, I use Ralf’s last name “Walter” to avoid yet another round of questioning: “what was that again?”
My idea was that the “pizza hat” pronunciation is reinforced by the lack of “uh” in a stressed syllable. I have no position on hat, though. The hat is on the mat.
Language Hut.
To your examples I responded with “however that may be”. Germans pronounce foreign words and names as best they can by imitating. I have no position on that.
But you do, because you originally said Germans couldn’t say Pizza Hut the way German WP recommends ([ˈpiːtsəˌhʌt]) “because the “uh” sound doesn’t appear in a stressed syllable of any German word I can think of offhand, only in unstressed final position.” Whereupon I pointed out that they could.
I did not refer to the German WP, Hans did. I did not claim a German *couldn’t* pronounce the sound. I said only that there is no such stressed non-final sound in German words. That is fully consistent with the appearance of IPA sequences in the German WiPe.
Even you could tell whether a person saying “Pizza Hut” is German or American. All the printed ʌʌ in China won’t make any difference to the actual production. Not even injecting them will cure phonotactics.
I’m sure I already told about Stockholm’s Pizza Hatt of fond memory (it seems to have closed since I was last there in ’17). The native pronunciation of hatt is very very close to the native mapping of English hut, but of course it means ‘hat’ and since trademarks are written and/or based on meaning, I assume there was no conflict.
Time to link to Hatten är din again!
And of course it’s got its own Wikipedia page:
Two things:
1) As in most of the rest of Europe, the German sound considered closest to [ʌ] is whatever the local /a/ is, so mainly [a]. Anyone with a middling accent will render it that way when speaking English or when mentioning an English name.
2)
In various American sound systems, [ʌ], which only occurs stressed, and [ə], which only occurs unstressed, have been reinterpreted as allophones of the same phoneme (the “uh” sound). That would hardly occur to the average Briton, let alone pretty much anyone else this side of, I don’t know, Korea. I don’t find [ʌ] and [ə] similar at all, and found it very noticeable when Lady Gaga aimed at p[ə]-p[ə]-p[ə]-pokerface, missed, and came out with p[ʌ]-p[ʌ]-p[ʌ]-.
So, the reason so few Germans get [ʌ] right isn’t phonotactics but phonetics: they classify it as /a/ and pronounce it accordingly.
Culturally, however, it is considered suboptimal to Germanize the pronunciations of foreign names (quite unlike in English, French or Serbian language cultures). That’s why Wikipedia simply puts the English pronunciation there, and why people who have noticed it’s not a hat generally try to approximate that as far as they can.
So, the reason so few Germans get [ʌ] right isn’t phonotactics but phonetics: they classify it as /a/ and pronounce it accordingly.
Right, and I assumed most Germans would say /hat/.
ObDanish: There is only one /a/ but its (conditioned) allophones are all over the place, from kan [kʰæ̘n] to kap [kʰʌp̥]. It was only on reading a detailed phonological description of Danish(!) that I realized that I had been hearing STRUT the same as PALM because for me they were allophones. (And I think I pronounced cup the same as cop before that because PALM sounded wrong after all, and that was what my teachers did anyway).
JC may think of ticket booths as windows in long buildings at pro sporting events
I don’t do sporting events, but I do do rail{road,way} stations, which have ticket booths of this type, though typically on an inside wall. Subway stations have token booths, permanent structures with roofs and locked doors, and those old enough to remember subway tokens still call them that, though the helpful person inside will now direct you to a vending machine to buy a refillable fare card if you want to go somewhere, or (in recent years) tell you to swipe your chip-equipped debit or credit card. As of this year, the helpful persons are now to be outside the booths but inside the stations (save the largest ones); the booths will be used as break rooms for them. Chip-swiping is now possible at all subway and Staten Island Railroad stations (a hybrid between a subway and a commuter railway), as well as on all city buses; eventually the proper commuter railways will accept them too.
the helpful person inside
Like these folks.
David M wrote
>I don’t find [ʌ] and [ə] similar at all
Wiki offers the inland American gut vowel as an example of the former. That’s sometimes my schwa Can someone tell me what a schwa sounds like to old worlders who don’t pronounce it like the Inland American gut vowel?
The wiki for schwa is hopeless – offering several examples that in my accent are different vowels, some closer to short i (taken, havoc), some (about) the uh vowel that I was taught schwa signified. Partly because I’ve long felt noticed that their vowels designated schwa that I didn’t pronounce uh, I sometimes think of schwa as not a fixed term, but simply the default short vowel in whatever your accent is. South of Peoria, I think schwa trends towards short i. Except that as a first syllable (about), I believe it’s uh in all American accents.
When Americans hem, they say uh/um while I believe most or all Brits say eh/em. Is a British schwa closer to short e?
Do the .ogg files in Wikipedia help? The entire IPA vowel chart with links for a page for each recognized vowel is here.
Indeed, looser and/or phonemic transcriptions routinely use the schwa symbol for whatever the (most) reduced vowel is. I think that’s why the IPA insists the symbol is unspecified for roundedness – so you can use the same symbol for English and French in slightly better conscience.
Geoff Lindsey did a number of YouTube videos on ʌ and ə symbols for General American and the confusion they cause.
the inland American gut vowel
Gut vocalization is not polite.
Very true.
Even the Gaelic and the German, guttural though they be, are at least not visceral.
(Visceral consonants are even worse than visceral vowels.)
The trills, in particular. And one does not speak of the ejectives.
A crossword I did recently had the clue ‘both vowels in “humdrum””, for which the desired answer was ‘schwa.’ This seems plain wrong to me, but I think confusion has been sown by M-W, which consistently equates schwa with what I would call a short u. In their entry for abut, they spell it with two schwas, and the audio file is alleged to be consistent with that. But for me, abut clearly has two different vowels, an unstressed schwa and a stressed short u.
But “short u” is a layman’s term based on spelling; it’s true the stressed and unstressed vowels are phonetically different, but (as has been said above) they can be and are sometimes both called “schwa” — it may not always be the best solution, but it’s not “plain wrong.”
And for what it’s worth, both vowels in “humdrum” sound the same to me.
They are both STRUT and not COMMA; neither is unstressed enough to become COMMA.
In accents that definitely do distinguish, notably RP, humdrum (or undone) still have the same vowel for both, but with different stress. Versus abut, which really does have a central vowel in the unstressed. So a good measure may be whether you think the same contrast applies in all three words.
Also Wikipedia does have a section on STRUT–COMMA merger.
I agree that both vowels in humdrum are the same, but I wouldn’t call them schwas.
What I call a ‘short u’ is (I think) what is represented in IPA by the upside-down witch’s hat (I don’t know how to reproduce it here).
ETA: Oops, I mean the right-side up dunce’s cap — *dons one shamefacedly*
Copy-paste from one of the comments that used it yesterday.
the upside-down witch’s hat
It’s called a caret. First time I heard it, I thought it was “carrot”, and I can’t blame me.
Pullum on the names for this. He prefers “turned v” and argues against “wedge” and “caret.”
I hadn’t recognized it was a turned v. I guess I usually see it in a sans serif font.
I thought a caret was specifically a little hat that sits on top of a letter.
IIRC some version of “turned V” (more commonly spelled “inverted V”, I think) is common in numismatics as a description of a bar-less version of A, both in serif and sans-serif font (though more commonly serif). I think I’ve also seen “lambda” for it and it’s definitely common in auction or catalog descriptions to represent those with actual lambdas normally used for legends in Greek (previously on LH).
(I don’t think I’ve ever seen “lambda” for the phonetic symbol – perhaps because it would be ambiguous between Λ and λ and we don’t want to imply the latter. TIL that the <ʎ> symbol for the palatal lateral approximant in IPA is not in fact any kind of lambda but an inverted “y” – I always thought of it as a lambda, and a lambda makes sense as it patterns with L-sounds.)
I thought a caret …
I was going to also ask about ‘circumflex’ — wiktionary/wikip seems to muddy the two.
I think for me the caret is the ^ symbol, normally used for powers but also in assorted programming contexts? I’m not sure offhand if I’ve seen the same term used for the circumflex, though I understand how it could be a thing.
I think for me the caret is the ^ symbol
For me as well, and I don’t like its use for the circumflex.
Language Hat seems like someone who would know that caret is Latin for “it is lacking”, originally referring to the proofreader’s mark for something to be inserted. (This was mentioned in the old discussion of caron/hacek.) All other uses are extensions of that.
In Standard Bulgarian [ʌ] is an allophone of /a/ before a stressed syllable and [ə] is everywhere else non-stressed.
You now see ^ at shift-6 on your keyboard, but that’s less than 60 years old. Some American typewriters used to have a cent sign (¢) at shift-6, but I don’t think that was ever very standardized; typists could just overstrike a c with a / if they didn’t have a key for it. ASCII originally had an up-arrow in 1963, but it was replaced in 1967 by ^ “under pressure from international committees requiring it as an alphabetic diacritical mark” according to this history of ASCII; see also another history of ASCII. That’s why it was put on computer keyboards.
Time marches on, and now Unicode includes ‸ (U+2038 Caret) for the mark at the bottom of the line.
Now I’m starting to understand why I’ve heard so many nonnative speakers of English confuse “cat” and “cut” etc. It always seemed bizarre to me, since I experience them as quite different vowels (helped by the spelling?).
WP tells me that St. Petersburg uses [ʌ] wherre Moscow uses [ɐ], for the unstressed /o/. I’ve never noticed that, but I don’t usually hear much Russian.
Rodger C: I think nonnative speakers with five-vowel systems usually map [æ] to either /a/ or /e/, but the latter much more often. I wonder why the two are not equally common.
Not only those with five-vowel systems. I think native speakers of German and Slavic generally map [æ] to /ɛ/, those of Romance to /a/.
That’s genuinely a hard distinction to notice in unstressed examples.
That’s genuinely a hard distinction to notice in unstressed examples.
A matter of practice, perhaps. I can distinguish English accents with ǝ/ʌ/ɐ schwas.
I want to correct myself : I think /a/ is [ɐ] word-finally, when stress is penultimate in Bulgarian. So ǝ/ʌ/ɐ are all allophones of /a/ in Stadard Bulgarian, not just [ǝ] and [ʌ].
Y : “I think native speakers of German and Slavic generally map [æ] to /ɛ/, those of Romance to /a/.”
I think I’ve noticed that — but there are (or used to be) Bulgarian dialects that retain [æ] for yat (Ѣ) also, in what is now Northern Greece.
I think native speakers of German and Slavic generally map [æ] to /ɛ/, those of Romance to /a/.
Native speakers of Italian also map [æ] to /ɛ/, at least nowadays*. On the other hand, it is not strange that French and Spanish speakers map it to /a/, as French /a/ is pretty front anyway, while Spanish /e/ is not quite open enough. I wonder what the Catalan and the Portuguese do.
*I think it is mapped to /a/ in some loanwords, perhaps because they entered the language at an earlier time. Similarly, English /ʌ/ is (quite sensibly) mapped to /a/ today, generally allowing Italians to keep it distinct from /æ/, but it used to be adapted as /ɛ/ back when English loans were filtered through French, where Eng. /ʌ/ > /œ/.
Roberto Batisti : I’ve encountered English [æ] rendered in Bulgarian as /ja/. Mostly in eastern accents, but also in Sofia.
Roberto Batisti: In my observation, Catalans map [æ] to /ɛ/.
I seem to have gotten a ball rolling here. Let me say in clarification of my original point that what really strikes me is when the CUT vowel comes out as something very close to [æ].
I’ve encountered English [æ] rendered in Bulgarian as /ja/
Japanese has /a/ for English [æ], but palatalises velars before it: gyararī “gallery”, kyappu “cap.” Interestingly, West African English-lexifier creoles sometimes do that too, e.g. Pichi kyáp “cap.”
Norwegian maps the CUT vowel to /ø/, and writes it thus in a few cases. Pønk , bløff, trøbbel but pub [pøb], rubbe [røbbe] (prepare skis by rubbing the surface).
What would the Norwegian be for Rubbellos (prepare paper by rubbing the surface) ?
As if etymologically nativized as Ѣ!
(I’m… amazed but not surprised, speaking a dialect where OK has been imported with /ɛ/ because that’s the most common correspondence for Standard German /eː/, and wählen has been imported – not as “choose” but as “elect/vote” – as a monosyllabic /vœn/: Standard /eː/ imported as /ɛ/, the resulting sequence */ɛl/ turned regularly into /œ/.)
For German there’s a factor other than the choice between /a/ and /ɛ/: [æ] is imported as ä because it’s the name of that letter – but because that’s a one-word phoneme in most accents, and short ä is pronounced /ɛ/ everywhere in Standard German, aiming at ä results in /ɛ/.
Huh? I have the distinction between long “ä” and long “e”, and long “ä” is clearly [ɛ:] for me and everyone I know with the distinction, not [æ:], and that’s also how I pronounce the name of the letter “ä”. I had to specifically learn how to pronounce [æ] when I first learnt English, and even then I only distinguish it from [ɛ] when speaking carefully.
@David L. “A crossword I did recently had the clue ‘both vowels in “humdrum””, for which the desired answer was ‘schwa.’ This seems plain wrong to me, but I think confusion has been sown by M-W, which consistently equates schwa with what I would call a short u. In their entry for abut,”
Was it not John Wells who first proposed the same symbol for both vowels (which he sees as differentiated only by stress: stressed [ʌ] versus unstressed [ə])?
@M: I don’t know who originated the idea. John Wells is British, and as a fellow Brit-speaker (despite many years in the US), I’d be somewhat surprised if he thought the two vowels differed only in stress. When I say “abut” there is clearly a change in the configuration of my mouth from the first vowel to the second.
Geoff Lindsey, who is from Merseyside, says that his native accent has one phoneme for both, differing only in stress. And relates how as an undergrad tasked to transcribe RP phonetically he had all the same challenges that Americans do.
As far as I understand, where the distinction is native and actually consistently made, long ä is [æ:]. I’ve told the story before how, in Vienna, I once overheard a conversation between two professors, one of them from Frankfurt, who suddenly dropped an [æ:] and… derailed me; for several seconds I didn’t understand anything anymore before I consciously reminded myself this was German and I had read about the phenomenon before.
Because this is a distinction that is reflected in the spelling, people in large parts of Germany have been trying to imitate it for generations – but inconsistently (more often in minimal pairs, less often otherwise), and as [ɛ:], derivable from the native [ɛ] by simple lengthening, rather than the wholly novel [æ:]. I’ve seen a series of beautiful maps of this phenomenon somewhere online, with some text that said what I just said, but it’s not in the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache where I was sure it was. 🙁
So… has [ɛ:] gone native and consistent?
What words in German are supposed to have [æ:]? I can’t find it in WP.en on Standard German Phonology, but maybe that’s the wrong place to look.
(Danish has a front open +atr [æ] which I think is an allophone of /a/ and not an independent phoneme: hat is [hæ̟d̥] and hav = ‘sea’ is [hɑu̞̯]. I don’t know who taught me to use [æ̟] for that, maybe [a̘] would be better. In any case, the standard IPA value of /æ/ confuses me, I don’t think I natively have anything there). And it’s not just +atr, my lower jaw is several millimetres further forward for those allophones of /a/).
Benigni, in his best accented English, pronounces “cat” with what sounds to me like an [a̝], not quite an [æ]. Not sure about “animal”, maybe a little higher.
You’ll find [ɛ:] there, which is after all used by more people (and AFAIK prescribed in stage pronunciation). It’s simply all words with ä where the context suggests it’s long (i.e. stressed and not followed by too many consonants).
Actually, in places where [æ:] is native, there might be exceptions. For example, Bär “bear” isn’t an example of any historical umlaut process and did not have any long or short [æ] in MHG; what it has is a PIE-to-MHG [ɛ] that was regularly lengthened in monosyllabic words with no more than one coda consonant.
So… has [ɛ:] gone native and consistent?
As I said, it’s the only pronunciation I ever have encountered (besides, of course, [e:] by that majority of speakers who doesn’t distinguish long “ä” and “e”). I grew up with the distinction, making me an outlier among the Northern German speakers I went to school with, who had [e:] for both. I can’t say for sure whether my parents simply internalized the literary pronunciation or whether that is a regiolect issue; in general, my idiolect has some features typical for the Rheinland, where my father was born and my mother grew up, but the e-ä distinction doesn’t seem to be one.