Maybe Rhyming Words Can Sound the Same

One of my favorite poems is Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”. I know at least one first-grade teacher who dares not read it aloud to her students these days, but I used to read it aloud a lot to Doug and Adam — both the Little Golden Books version that’s on loan from Mom and Dad (who used to read it to my sister Ellen), and a newer version that Jan Brett illustrated. I like that you can sing it to the tune of “Beep-Beep” and have it match right down to the repetitions at the end of each verse; that when Doug was a toddler he’d say “you elegant fowl” as “you elephant fowl”; and that piggy-wig is an exception to Steven Pinker’s rule on rhyming nonsense pairs.

However, I cannot abide Edward Lear’s limericks.

Hinkery Pinkery

I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, and in the chapter on phonetics he reveals an interesting pattern. Here’s what he says:

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you’d never ask. Consonants differ in “obstruency” — the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. (p. 166)

All his examples, naturally, fit this pattern perfectly.

Save the Voice for Last

What did I do wrong? It worked so well with the second graders last year! The second graders had figured out what made [z] different from [s] in pretty short order. Remember the kid who said,“Your tongue vibrates more for the Z”? And the one who said, “Your teeth vibrate more, too”? They nailed that distinction in voicing, and from there we were able to sort all the other consonant sounds into ones that were voiced like [z], and ones that were voiceless like [s]. But now, here I was with Adam’s first grade class, and the same technique was crashing. Maybe I should explain…

Degemination Trouble

I’m used to the fact that in English spelling, doubled consonants aren’t always pronounced twice. Sometimes they are; for instance, to say top pick, you hold your [p] (oh, grow up!) for a longer time than you would to say topic. This extended pronunciation is referred to as gemination (”twinning”). But often, doubled consonants are pronounced just the same as a single consonant, and that’s what makes words like accommodate so difficult to spell if you don’t learn their Latin roots. The cc and mm were pronounced as geminates in Latin, but somewhere along the way to modern English, they got degeminated. I’m fine with all this.

But darn it, it doesn’t work in the other direction! You don’t go around pronouncing non-doubled consonants as geminates. Well, usually you don’t. The words thirteen, fourteen, and eighteen are exceptions that come to mind: Many speakers (including me) pronounce them as if they were thirt-teen, fort-teen, and eight-teen. Actually, though, eighteen is a good example of what I’m talking about. I don’t like it when people take a compound word written with a doubled consonant, remove one of them, and still expect me to pronounce the word with a geminated consonant. For example, there was that playpen we bought for Doug when he was a baby. I remember it… as if it were… about nine years ago…

Yateraw Gwiding

The December 2007 issue of Language arrived while we were packing for our trip to visit Mom and Dad. I glanced at the contents and some abstracts, figuring I’d read more when we got back. The first article: “Positional neutralization: A case study from child language,” by Sharon Inkelas and Yvan Rose. When I looked at the abstract, I realized this article couldn’t wait for us to get back from our trip; it would have to go in my carryon bag for the plane. It was about a child they referred to as E, who from the ages of about one and a half to three years exhibited … lateral gliding.

Lateral gliding, you say?

Yes, lateral gliding! Lateral is the phonetic term for /l/ sounds, and glide is a term referring to vowel-like consonants such as [y] and [w]. (They’re also known as approximants.) Lateral gliding, then, is the pronunciation of /l/s as [w]s and [y]s. Sound familiar?

Maybe you remember a few years ago, when I wrote about how Doug pronounced his /l/s until he was about six years old. Sometimes he’d say them as [y], sometimes as [w]. (BTW, I should mention that I’m using a corrupt version of the International Phonetic Alphabet here. Technically, the consonant y sound is written as [j]. The j sound, meanwhile, is written [ʤ]. But for consistency with the posts I’m linking to here, and to lessen confusion for my nonlinguist readers, I’m representing the y sound as [y].) I was dissatisfied with my own analysis of the rule describing when Doug would produce a [y] and when he’d produce a [w]; another linguist had a better one, but I was naturally curious about what a paper in a scholarly journal would have to say on the subject. This wasn’t academic; it was personal.

Candy Canes

Potential conflicts for recently married couples, as they determine how Christmas will be celebrated in their new household:

Gifts: Do you open some on Christmas Eve, or do you save them all for Christmas Day?

Christmas Eve: Do you go to a midnight service, or an afternoon one? (Or neither?)

The word candy cane: Do you pronounce it with the stress on candy, or on cane?

My wife and I still have not reached a reconciliation on the last item. My pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the first word. It’s the same stress pattern you get with compound nouns like Christmas tree and Nativity scene. Her pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the second word, like what you’d do with pumpkin pie or Christmas Day.

Tuh-Duh!

Over at Language Log, Arnold Zwicky commented on a recent Zits cartoon regarding some outdated diction from Jeremy. In the relevant panel, Jeremy says:

Somebody would go, “Got your keys?” and I’d be all, “Tuh! Whadda ya think?” and they’d be all, “Dude!” and…

Zwicky focuses on the quotatives be all (which I indeed haven’t heard since the mid-90s) and go (which I haven’t heard since elementary school). Now to some extent, we’d expect Jeremy’s language to be somewhat outdated, since he ages so very slowly. But what I noticed more than the quotatives was something that may be right on the cutting edge: the tuh!.

This is the second time I’ve noticed Jeremy saying “Tuh!”, and the last time was less than a month ago. Why not duh? I think it has to do with the fact that for American and British English speakers, word-initial /d/ is (usually) realized as [t]. (Phonology note: characters in slashes are how the sound is perceived in the relevant language; characters in square brackets are how the sound is actually pronounced.) Not aspirated [tʰ], which is what you get in words that are spelled beginning with a ‘t’, but unaspirated [t]. When English speakers hear a word beginning with an unaspirated [t], they tend to hear it as a /d/. Duh, for example, is typically pronounced as [tʌ], though you’ll also hear [dʌ], especially if it’s preceded by a voiced sound, for example a vowel, as in No duh!. In Spanish, though, /t/ at the beginning of a word is pronounced as [t]. I remember a Mexican-American kid in my kindergarten class that I thought was named Dino, until one day when we were going through the alphabet and identifying classmates whose names began with each letter. I volunteered Dino’s name for D, only to find out that his name was actually Tino. Now I realize that it was because I was hearing [tino] as /dino/. Of course, once I learned his name was Tino, I started pronouncing it as [tʰinow].

However, if you pronounce a word with a word-initial /d/ emphatically enough, that [t] can start to sound a bit more like a /t/. That seems to be the case with tuh! According to one definition on Urban Dictionary, tuh is:

The written equivalent of a short burst of laughter, usually in response to someone or something

which describes an emphatic kind of pronunciation.

Robots in Disguise in the Skies

I’m not usually tempted by movies based on videogames or toys, but sometime this weekend I want to go see Transformers. I’m curious about it because Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman wrote the screenplay, and although they didn’t enlist me to write a poem this time, they did name a character after my brother. (It’s true; I’ve read that this character is supposed to be “a techno-geek,comic relief”, and it looks like he’s played by one Anthony Anderson.) Anyway, on to the linguistic stuff…

Even More Elementary School Linguistics

“Okay, ready?” I asked. All Doug’s classmates put a hand on their throat, and we began: “Aaaaaalaaaaaa.” I couldn’t resist adding, “Peanut butter sandwiches!” One girl said, “Huh?” Other kids just looked puzzled. What had I been thinking? Had I really expected them to catch a 1970s Sesame Street reference? That’s OK; I had no idea what the kids in the back were doing when my “peanut butter sandwiches” line inspired them to start chanting, “It’s peanut butter jelly time! Peanut butter jelly time!”

Now for my Lost/Alias-style transition: 20 MINUTES EARLIER

Speech Accent Archive Story on NPR

Hey, remember this panphonic paragraph that I mentioned back in May in this post?

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

They did a segment on NPR about it this morning. It’s about Steven Weinberger’s Speech Accent Archive project at George Mason University.