tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178740902024-03-13T23:44:04.270-04:00Positive AnymoreAmerican Dialects, Yiddish, New Yorker Cartoons, Pop Music - they all go together, right?Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-54891214652031186522009-10-29T13:35:00.003-04:002009-10-30T13:06:28.036-04:00Long /i/ LandYup, terrible pun. Not the first time, and it won't be the last.<br /><br />Did you know English has two "long i" sounds? If you do, you know more than the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Think about it: do "ride" and "right" have the same vowel? No, they don't. Yet the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary has them both with "<span class="pr">ī." Not that I have any beef with the </span>Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary; this is a subtle distinction, and it's really beyond the scope of their pronunciation guide.<br /><br />Why do I bring this up? Well, aside from it being an inherently interesting fact (at least to weirdos such as your humble author), there is a dialectal issue here. Perhaps I've discovered it, perhaps not. Probably not. In any case, here's what it boils down to:<br /><br />If you're phonologically astute, you may have already noticed that the "ride" vowel occurs before voiced consonants, and the "right" vowel before unvoiced ones. But what about /r/? For my wife, a native of the western U.S., /i/ before /r/ is, unsurprisingly, the vowel that occurs before voiced consonants—the "ride" vowel. For me, a Chicagoan, it's not so simple. Some words have the "ride" vowel: wire, mire, acquire/require, choir, and admire are some examples. But most have the "right" vowel. Thus, "FireWire" contains two different vowels for me.<br /><br />Words that have (historical) diphthongs have the "ride" vowel for me. This produces some minimal pairs: higher/hire, dyer/dire, spyer/spire. You could quibble about issues of syllabification, but that's beside the point, especially since I feel that most speakers of American English don't make real syllabic distinctions here. I may be wrong.<br /><br />I was inspired (guess which vowel) to write about this by a recent headline concerning Hiram Monserrate, a NY state senator who was recently involved in a very sad scandal. The headline, which was for an article about calls for Sen. Monserrate's resignation, was:<br />Hiram: Fire 'im. (Fact checking for this post reveals a variety of headlines involving this pun, including one from the paranomasiacally venerable <span style="font-style: italic;">Post</span>.) But for me, this doesn't work; "Hiram" has the "ride" vowel, and "hire" has the "right" vowel.<br /><br />I have no idea about the geographic distribution of any of these vocalic distinctions, but I have two initial thoughts. 1: Assuming these headlines accurately reflect New York pronunciation (which is hardly a safe assumption), this is an interesting case of a dialect feature that is shared by parts of the Northeast and the West, but not by the Inland North (another example of this is the /o/ vowel before /g/ in certain words, such as "fog," and another is "poor" being homophonous with "pour"). 2: The general rule is that the Northeast is more conservative when it comes to vowels before /r/. I don't know how that relates to this, but it's worth mentioning.<br /><br />I bring up Hiram Monserrate in partial justification of the admittedly inexcusable pun in the title. It is worth noting, however, that although Queens is geographically located on Long Island, New Yorkers never refer to the parts of New York City that are on Long Island (Queens and Brooklyn) as "Long Island;" this term is reserved for the parts of Long Island that are outside the city limits: Nassau and Suffolk counties. I assume that this is because it is the only part of New York state outside of the city that is not part of "Upstate New York." Thus it needs its own label.<br /><br />Speaking of New York geographical terms, most New Yorkers refer only to Manhattan when they say "the city." Older New Yorkers can also use"New York" to mean only Manhattan; perhaps this is a relict of the period before the annexations of the outer boroughs.<br /><br />Feel free to chime in with your own personal data.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-54768952543015830632009-08-25T14:35:00.008-04:002009-08-25T18:54:12.433-04:00Lost and FoundIt isn't often you get the chance to rediscover something that had been lost to history for over fifty years. Tempering my pride at having done just that, however, is the fact that what I rediscovered was fairly trivial. Nevertheless, it is with pride that I now reveal:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpQwbbriA9I/AAAAAAAAAdM/c-go1SdVzyY/s1600-h/DSCF0340-1.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpQwbbriA9I/AAAAAAAAAdM/c-go1SdVzyY/s400/DSCF0340-1.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373973503204787154" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Ethel Merman's Birthplace.<br /><br />That is, she was born in the house that stood precisely here. But where is here? And why didn't anyone know? And how do you know? These are all excellent questions.<br /><br />First of all, why didn't anyone know? Well, as her biographer Caryl Flinn writes,<br /><blockquote>In both of her autobiographies, Merman says that she was born... at 359 Fourth Avenue, Astoria [Queens]. Several sources indicate a residence on 33rd Street; the official municipal record gives 265 Fourth Avenue, Long Island City [also Queens].... Sources vary on whether Merman grew up in her birth home or if the family moved when she was a girl.... In her first autobiography, she gives 2903 1st Avenue as the place where she grew up; in her second, 31st Avenue. Her biographer Bob Thomas claimed it was 359 Fourth Avenue.... Like the birth address, the record will never be set entirely straight.</blockquote>Well I feel confident I set them both straight. But her biographers shouldn't feel bad about not having figured out Ethel Merman's birthplace; indeed, Merman herself wasn't su<span style="font-size:100%;">re:</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="line-height: 1.2em;"> "Since then they have changed the names of the streets in that section and I don't know what it is now cal</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="line-height: 1.2em;">led</span>,</span>" she writes in her 1978 autobiography, <span style="font-style: italic;">Merman</span>. As Flinn writes, "As early as 1950, Ethel went 'home' to search for her childhood house and couldn't find it."<br /><br />First of all, the street name changes: these are easy to decipher; "Fourth Avenue" has been called 33rd Street since the 1920s. That was easy to figure out. But what about the number? Where was 359 Fourth Avenue? That was harder to figure out.<br /><br />As it happens, I live on 35th Street, and I have walked on 33rd Street many times. Several of the old houses have their old addresses. Here's a picture, courtesy of the incomparable <a href="http://www.forgotten-ny.com/">Forgotten NY</a>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.forgotten-ny.com/NEIGHBORHOODS/astoria2/33rdoldnumbers.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 432px; height: 324px;" src="http://www.forgotten-ny.com/NEIGHBORHOODS/astoria2/33rdoldnumbers.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />So we see 512 Fourth Avenue is now 32-57 33rd Street and 510 Fourth Avenue is 32-59 33rd street. (In case you're wondering, they're between Broadway and 34th Avenue on the east side of the street.)<br /><br />We learn several things from this. One is that even-numbered addresses were on the east side of the street. Another is that the numbers decrease as you go south. So 359 Fourth Avenue would have been several blocks south of Broadway, perhaps around today's 36th Avenue, on the west side of the street.<br /><br />So then I did a little "archival research." In the federal censuses of 1910 and 1920 I found the (Zim)Merman family living at 359 Fourth Avenue, between Webster and Washington Avenues—that is, today's 37th and 36th Avenues. (I also found Ethel Merman's mother and grandmother living at the same address in 1900.) I know this block; the west side consists entirely of newer buildings. I thought that this was as far as I'd get. Then I noticed the east side of the street:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpRg-ST2l6I/AAAAAAAAAdc/floR3lpCIHI/s1600-h/DSCF0348-1.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpRg-ST2l6I/AAAAAAAAAdc/floR3lpCIHI/s400/DSCF0348-1.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374026878543108002" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />As you can see, there are three late-19th-century houses here. So I looked at this side of the street in the censuses, and found that there were indeed three houses on the east side of Fourth Avenue in the early 20th century: 354, 356, and 364.<br /><br />Here's a view of the block in Google Earth:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpRlbUmSWlI/AAAAAAAAAds/4ZNKLoAElYA/s1600-h/33rd+St+Labeled.bmp"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 389px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eb-5tcZd9_k/SpRlbUmSWlI/AAAAAAAAAds/4ZNKLoAElYA/s400/33rd+St+Labeled.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374031775420013138" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />You see that they fit perfectly. You can even count the lots where 358, 360, and 362 would have stood had they existed. This lets us triangulate that 359 would have stood across the street from 360. Which is now the right-hand side of the picture at the top of the post.<br /><br />So that mystery is basically solved. As for the birth record that states she was born at 265 Fourth Avenue, I think that must be a mistake. The census records clearly show that the Zimmerman family was living at 359 Fourth Avenue when Ethel was born (in 1908), and Ethel repeatedly said she was born at home.<br /><br />So what, then, of the question of whether she moved during childhood, and where to? Well, the 1930 census shows her and her family living at 29-08 31st Avenue. Thus it is clear they moved sometime during the 1920s (the building at 29-08 31st Avenue, an apartment building called the Windsor Garden, was built in 1927). At the very least this gives us a terminus post quem for the move to the Windsor Garden; whether or not there were other previous moves is a good question.<br /><br />To quote Sarah Silverman, "Yeah, I'm proud of myself."Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-34542135102573570572009-06-27T11:41:00.002-04:002009-06-27T12:00:11.581-04:00Basswoods, or Why I Love Early Summer<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:3X6pPgVQmeXp9M:http://biology.missouristate.edu/Herbarium/Plants%20of%20the%20Interior%20Highlands/Flowers/Tilia%20americana%20-%202.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 98px;" src="http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:3X6pPgVQmeXp9M:http://biology.missouristate.edu/Herbarium/Plants%20of%20the%20Interior%20Highlands/Flowers/Tilia%20americana%20-%202.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Basswoods are a kind of tree that is pretty commonly planted in cities. They bloom just about now (at least in <a href="http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html">climate zone 5/6</a>) and they smell wonderful. If you ever walked down a city street in late June and smelled a wonderful smell that you couldn't quite locate, it was probably a basswood.<br /><br />Basswoods are also known as lindens and tilia--Tilia is the Latin name of the genus, but it can be used as a common name. Some folks apparently call it whitewood, but I've never hear that.<br /><br />In the years since I last posted, I've become a father, switched careers, and released an album. Aside from that, not much has changed.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-85986094471123558872006-11-13T20:19:00.000-05:002006-11-13T21:33:21.594-05:00Ginkgo Season, or Why I Hate Fall<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/7338/2181/1600/Gingko_fg01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/7338/2181/320/Gingko_fg01.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Well, I don't really hate fall.<p>And the only reason I hate fall is that I grew up in Chicago, where fall was cold and rainy and portended a Chicago winter.<p>And another reason I hate fall is that it means the start of the school year, which for years meant the end of the freedom from bullying that summer provided.<p>But the main reason I hate fall is that it is when ginkgo trees drop their berries. According to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo">relevant Wikipedia article</a>:<br /><blockquote>The seed coat contains <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanoic_acid" title="Butanoic acid">butanoic acid</a> and smells like rancid <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter" title="Butter">butter</a> (which contains the same chemical) when fallen on the ground.</blockquote><p>This is an understatement. The smell is in fact quite complex, and redolent of just about any foul-smelling substance or object you can think of. Perhaps the only worse smell I've smelled was produced by a small cyst on someone's back that, umm, exploded. I'll hide the identity of the afflicted, since I'm married to her. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sedaris">incomparable David Sedaris</a> describes <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/041129fa_fact1?041129fa_fact1">the smell of a popped cyst</a> thusly:<br /><blockquote>The stench... was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like—not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way.</blockquote><p>The smell of ginkgo berries is better, but not much.<p>I've been obsessed with plants since the summer before I started high school, and I knew in theory of the smell of ginkgoes, though I hadn't experienced it firsthand. This was, I thought, because ginkgoes are dioecious -- there are separate male and female plants. (A more famous dioecious plant is Cannabis sativa, the females of which being the ones that are of recreational use.) There were ginkgoes aplenty in the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in -- ginkgoes are famous for their ability to thrive in harsh urban environments. Yet it was not until I was in college that I smelled ginkgoes in the fall -- there was a row of them next to the library. Studying became even more of a chore now that it involved running an arboreal gauntlet. Yet each fall an elderly woman, presumably originally from East Asia (she actually wore a conical hat) would brave the stench and gather the berries, which are eaten in many East Asian cuisines.<p>I was shocked, then, when I lived for a year between college and graduate school in the neighborhood I grew up in and found that in the fall the plentiful ginkgoes, or more accurately half of them, would produce copious and malodorous berries. What had changed? I can only assume that they were planted recently enough that they hadn't yet reached maturity when I was growing up. After all, I can't imagine that they were commonly planted in American cities a generation or two ago.<p>I quite like my current neighborhood in New York, but it is rank with ginkgoes. There is in fact not a single route I can take to campus that does not involve walking over patches of sidewalk piled with stinking ginkgo berries. Which is my current excuse for not going to the library.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1162670324404974722006-11-04T13:22:00.000-05:002006-11-13T18:58:39.812-05:00Before the election is over...... and now that the furor has died down about Macacagate, I'll contribute my belated opinion on the origin of the term "macaca."<br /><br />Or rather, what I'm sure it isn't. When I first heard about this scandal, I was told that it was a Tunisian French slur against native Tunisians. I bought this explanation. But then it turned out<br /><br />1) Okay, that term is actually "macaque," pronounced basically the same way as the English word. Furthermore,<br /><br />2) It was used in the Belgian Congo against Congolese natives (and perhaps North African immigrants to Belgium).<br /><br />A fair amount of smushy thinking is involved to make the Belgian colonial slur into the likely etymon of "macaca." The steps, as I see them, go like this:<br /><br />1) So "macaque" is a kind of monkey, the latin name of which is Macaca. And<br /><br />2) French Tunisia, Belgian Congo -- it's all Francophone colonies in Africa, after all.<br /><br />But these are both stretches, and are only plausible to someone who really wants to how that George Allen used a known epithet. The problems are obvious - Tunisia and the Congo are nowhere near each other, and though they may speak French in Belgium (at least in parts of it), Belgium ain't France. So how, in short, would a francophone Tunisian crypto-Jew learn a Belgian slur against Congolese natives, and then transmit it to her son as the Latin name of the monkey from which the slur may come?<br /><br />This bothers me not because I like Allen. In fact it bothers me because I do suspect him of being a barely closeted racist, and I think that this specious etymology 1) weakens the case against Allen with its leaps of logic 2) hides the real story, which I think is far worse.<br /><br />I take Allen at his word when he says that he "just made up" the term on the spot (you can watch him claim this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRfP3vj8Gl8">here</a>). This, to me, does not excuse it -- if anything, it suggests that S. R. Siddarth's South Asian ancestry made him so ridiculous to a crowd of rural Virginians that Allen could make up a vaguely "primitive" sounding name for him, one that wouldn't seem out of place coming out of Johnny Weissmuller's mouth. This, to me, is much more plausible. And much more offensive.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1156624009142900082006-08-26T16:17:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:39.677-05:00Here's an email I got today, from Leila Riley. I don't know who she is either.<br /><br /><blockquote> I assure you, Oriane, she is really quite nice; an excellent woman,said Mme.<br />They are Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and Lieutenant-ColonelPicquart. There; he is a Dreyfusard, theres not the least doubt of it,thought Bloch. Yes, hes a Belgian, bynationality, he went on. We must curb the professional agitatorsand prevent them from raising their heads again. Thats probably whythey didnt elect me again.<br />Obviously, that todemand a new trial is to force an open door. Ilearned there to value, more than anything, logic.<br />I have no doubt she is, but I feel no need to assure myself of it.<br />There; he is a Dreyfusard, theres not the least doubt of it,thought Bloch.<br />Then she turned, overflowing with a restored vitality, to M.<br />In any case, if this man Dreyfus is innocent, the Duchess broke in,he hasnt done much to prove it. Yes, hes a Belgian, bynationality, he went on. What can you expect, my dear, its got emon the raw, those fellows; theyre all over it. Picquart might move heaven and earth at thesubsequent hearings; he made a complete fiasco.<br />Fortunately for yourself and your compatriots you are notlike the author of that absurdity. What idiotic, raving letters hewrites from that island. The truth, indeed, as to all these matters Bloch could notdoubt that M. You expect him tocome out with The Learned Sisters, like Lamartine or Jean-BaptisteRousseau. The Government will acceptall your suggestions.<br />Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable.<br />Who had been,in this instance, the inferior from whom M.<br />He is so busy; he has so much to do, pleaded Mme.<br />But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, thatone does not recognise it as beauty. I went to see Marie-Aynard a couple of days ago.<br />Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable.<br />There; he is a Dreyfusard, theres not the least doubt of it,thought Bloch. As to that, there can be no question whatever.<br />You know, he went on, why they cant produce the proofs ofDreyfuss guilt.<br />No, it is probablythat little wench of his that has put him on his high horse.<br />They are Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and Lieutenant-ColonelPicquart.<br />Im sureyoure in the same boat, Argencourt. Its all very well, one ofthem having a fondness for my nephew, I cannot carry family feelingquite.<br />Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable. And not only the laws of imagination, but thoseof speech. You know, he went on, why they cant produce the proofs ofDreyfuss guilt.<br /></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>It's Proust, dontcha know (sort of). Spam is so surreal that I almost don't mind receiving it. Almost.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1155078146451126132006-08-08T17:31:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:39.560-05:00Interesting TimesI've been brung down recently by the news, but I'm starting to feel better. In order to help you and me on that road to recovery I'll try and refocus our attention from troubling events onto superficial linguistic phenomena surrounding said troubling events.<br /><br />1) The Spelling of Hezbollah<br /><br />At the beginning of this war the press seemed to briefly go in for "Hizbullah," but changed their minds after a week or so.<br /><br />2) The Pronunciation of Hezbollah<br /><br />Israeli style - /<span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">χizba'la/or American style - /hezb</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">'o</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">l</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">ə/? The jury's still out. This is a tricky one - where do you put the stress? How do you approximate that difficult Arabic pharyngeal consonant? Which English vowels are the best approximations, and do you base them on the vowels of Standard Arabic, Lebanese Arabic or </span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">Persian</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">? Fortunately, one can always fall back on convention. What I've dubbed 'American style' is how I say it. You're free to say it however you want - just make sure you will be understood, and that you're aware that the real choice here is between sounding pretentious and sounding ignorant. Me, I pick ignorant.<br /><br />3) Katyusha Rockets<br /><br />The first conversation I had in a language that wasn't English was about the word 'Katyusha' - back in the spring of 1996 I chatted with my French professor after class about how we found the onomatopoetic quality of the word strangely amusing.<br /><br />Anyways, as Americans we are virtually compelled by the 'sha' at the end of the word to put the stress on the penultimate syllable - foreign seeming and other new words that end in /a/ have to have penultimate stress in English, unless they end in something that looks like a suffix whose stress is farther back, like /ica/. I'm sure someone out there has described this phenomenon, and better than I can.<br /><br />'Katyusha' is borrowed from Russian; it originated as a nickname for WWII-era soviet rockets, and is in fact a diminutive of the name "Yekaterina." Russian has stress patterns that are counterintuitive to English speakers, and has given us a number of words whose stress we've had to move to make them passable English words -- Stolichnaya, babushka, and others that I can't think of. My fledgling Russian instincts lead me to want to stress 'Katyusha' on the first syllable, but apparently in this case I should actually trust my anglophone instincts -- the Russian nickname Katyusha does indeed have stress on the penultimate syllable.<br /><br />A further interesting factor is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yod_coalescence#Yod-dropping">yod-dropping</a>, namely that after certain consonants, including /t/, most Americans cannot have an upglide before a long [u:]. Thus, for instance, Ted Stevens characterizes the internet as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtOoQFa5ug8">a series of /tu:bz/</a>, not /tju:bz/ or /tIubz/. Similarly, the 'tyu' part of 'Katyusha' sometimes comes out 'Katoosha.' In fact,<br /><br />4) Lebanon<br /><br />I've started noticing that some Americans are adopting the British pronunciation, wherein the last syllable is fully reduced to /</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">ə/. I'm not sure why this is happening, and perhaps it is nothing new, but it's new to me.<br /><br />5) World War 3<br /><br />I'm sure I'm not the only one to remark on this rather grim nickname for the ongoing conflict, but what I find striking about it is its staying power -- people are still using it, but I thought it would only last a week or so.</span><span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA"><br /><br />This reminds me of another phenomenon that interests me: the naming of ongoing events. I'll write about that later.<br /></span>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1153068564411202112006-07-16T11:40:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:39.373-05:00Ancient Yiddish ProverbOnce again I will steal an idea from Language log, where there has been talk (or type, I suppose) lately about the provenance of various purported <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003345.html">ancient</a> <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003346.html">Chinese</a> <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003349.html">sayings</a>. If you hadn't figured it out yet, their provenance is, in a word, dubious.<br /><br />I wasn't surprised. I try to keep tabs on who's blogging about Yiddish and what they're saying. Mostly, I find lists of how to say "I love you" in a jillion languages (usually the Yiddish is garbled but recognizable), as well as "Yiddish sayings." Here's some I've found:<br /><blockquote>If you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.<br /><br />If you want to give God a good laugh, tell Him your plans.<br /><br />If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep.<br /><br />The eyes are the mirror of the soul.<br /><br />To assume is to be deceived.<br /><br />There is no heart more whole than a broken heart.<br /><br />Love is like butter: it goes well with bread.<br /><br />If you play with a cat, you must not mind her scratch.<br /><br />When you get scalded from hot food, you blow when you're served even cold.<br /></blockquote><br />Some of these may in fact be Yiddish sayings - one is clearly a fanciful amplification of one - but I'm fairly sure that most of these are as kosher as smoked oysters. Which aren't kosher. My point here is not to marvel at the amount of misinformation in the world, a state of affairs I have contributed to plenty myself, but rather to point out that Yiddish, like Chinese, has become a coat hook on which to hang pithy, gnomic sayings. I've always felt that if you truly love a subject matter, you hate to see it fetishized, but part of me is relieved that Yiddish has gone from being thought of as funny to being thought of as wise. And part of me is disappointed.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1152732031904274292006-07-12T14:22:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:38.652-05:00Gotta Love That Glottal StopSome themes I've touched on before that I will attempt to bring together in this post:<br /><br />1. <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/dont-believe-ype.html">British pop song</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/06/trudgill-on-pop-song-pronunciation.html">pronunciation</a><br />2. The astonishing ability of musicians to be <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/12/british-hits.html">huge in England</a> and practically unknown in America<br />3. <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/11/best-of-both-worlds.html">Good</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/01/music-out-there-daniel-johnston-and.html">music</a> you <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/11/my-new-old-hero.html">may</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/billy-preston-god.html">not</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-ricchini-and-muses.html">know</a><br /><br />Here goes. Ahem...<br /><br />One of the most popular musicians in England right now is <a href="http://www.corinnebaileyrae.net/">Corinne Bailey Rae</a>. In a month or so she will be popular in America too (her album just came out in the states a few weeks ago), though she probably won't have the same meteoric rise that she did in England, where her debut album -- umm -- debuted -- at #1 back in February. The hit single from this album is "Put Your Records On," and it's fantastic. You can hear it <a href="http://www.myspace.com/corinnebaileyrae">here</a>. It's retro but not derivative, has a great melody and smart production. I fear it's popularity may wind up killing it, but at least it won't languish in obscurity.<br /><br />I'd been led to believe she writes her own music, but a little research suggests she's just the lyricist. Oh well. When will people learn that writing the lyrics to a song doesn't make you a songwriter? I went through the same disappointment with Norah Jones and Macy Gray. In a way it's sad that artists like Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera don't at least get some critical respect for writing their own material, which, whether you like their music or not, bespeaks of much deeper musicality than merely having a good voice. Female R&B artists seem especially snubbed in this regard.<br /><br />So on to pronunciation. Bailey Rae is from Leeds in Yorkshire, and like fellow overnight sensation Yorkshiremen (Yorkshirepeople?) Arctic Monkeys, she opts out of employing the generic American-British singing pronunciation I've written about before, using features instead of her own dialect. One of these struck me as odd -- she replaces some [t]s with a glottal stop ("three li?le birds", "go?a love that afro hairdo"), a feature I always thought of as limited to the London area. In fact, this feature is found in Leeds and Manchester as well, at least according to<a href="http://www.essex.ac.uk/speech/teaching-01/474/English.html"> one website</a>. I wonder if this feature is found independently in these cities, or whether it spread as a marker of urban working classness.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1152194397207596462006-07-06T09:33:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:38.524-05:00Geez...I sure am prolific. At not posting. I've been out of town working on a very exciting project, the details of which I'll share when the project is complete. "And if that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansas."<br /><br />There's been a bit of contention lately at Language Log over Geoff Pullum's discovery - and condemnation of - what he dubs <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003312.html">linguifying</a>: <b>to take that claim and construct from it an entirely different claim that makes reference to the words or other linguistic items used to talk about those things, and then use the latter claim in a context where the former would be appropriate.</b> Most of his examples have involved claims like "the words 'hard' and 'worker' have never been used in the same sentence to describe me" or "'musical' and '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs">The Shaggs</a>' have never been used in the same sentence." What irks Geoff, and not without reason, is that these claims are usually absurd beyond the degree to which they're meant to be absurd. For instance, if I were to say "'musical' and 'The Shaggs' have never been used in the same sentence" to mean "The Shaggs are not musical" - well, you see where I'm going with this.<br /><br />Part of Geoff's claim is that this is a new phenomenon, and he asked for examples from before 1987. Mark Liberman <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003325.html">took him up on this</a>, but broadened it to include sentences like "'The Shaggs' and 'musical' should not be uttered in the same breath." Of course, this allows him to find much older examples. And this brings me to my topic.<br /><br />There is a sort of professional translationese when it comes to published translations from Yiddish into English - conventions of how to render common bits of Yiddish into English. One of these involves the now-archaic seeming phrase about uttering x and y in the same phrase. It's used to translate the slippery Yiddish expletive "lehavdl," which literally means 'to distinguish,' and in practice is thrown in when making an unseemly comparison, i.e. between Begin and Rabin, lox and bacon, people and animals, Jewish things and non-Jewish things, etc. I have no problem with this convention, and can't think of a better way to translate 'lehavdl,' really.<br /><br />But other such Yiddish translationisms grate on my nerves somewhat. For instance, the word 'heymish,' meaning home-like and thus comfortable and familiar, is sometimes rendered 'homely.' Yes, I know 'homely' can mean just that in British English. That doesn't excuse it. These are usually Americans, who ought to know better.<br /><br />A strange bit of translationese is using the English phrase "neither here nor there" to render the Yiddish phrase "nisht ahin, nisht aher," which literally means "neither thither nor hither" and figuratively means "in between," which is a far cry from the sense of "neither here nor there" that I'm familiar with, that is 'unimportant.'<br /><br />But my least favorite translationism is 'just so.' Anytime I see this I know that it is an attempt at translating 'glat azoy/stam azoy,' which means 'just 'cause,' not 'just so.' This is a calque of the common slavic phrase that in Russian is 'proste tak.' The Yiddish calque of this was in turn calqued into Israeli Hebrew as 'stam kaḥa.' Funny how that works. <br /><br />I'm left wondering, then, if this happens with all translation, i.e. that little conventions develop that aren't always accurate. Since Yiddish and English are the only languages I read (and I don't read either language that well) I can't generalize beyond what I've presented.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1151352644603831492006-06-26T16:08:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:38.401-05:00Caption Contest #56<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/A11631.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/A11631.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>"We're brain surgeons, not rocket scientists."<br /></div>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1151250877206430202006-06-25T10:34:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:38.262-05:00How I Spent My VacationWell, now I'm back from a week up in the Rockies, where my wife's family had a reunion. I was able to hear and compare various dialects on this trip, which led me to the following observations:<br /><br />1. When you've been living in New York, the rhoticity of pretty much anywhere west of the Hudson starts to sound a little weird.<br /><br />2. I got to compare speakers from the eastern and western extremities of the South/ Southern Midland border (from Oklahoma City and eastern Maryland, respectively). The Oklahoman sounded, for lack of a better word, twangy - I think this is due to a more advanced Southern Vowel Shift on her part. The Marylander, on the other hand, had the classic Mid-Atlantic fronted long /o/.<br /><br />3. At one point I listened to three Inland Northern speakers talking - they were from southwest Michigan, Northern Illinois, and Chicago. Though I wouldn't swear to it, I believe that if I hadn't known who was from which place, but I had known that there was one speaker from each place, I would have known who was from where. And if you understood that beast of a sentence you deserve a prize.<br /><br />I figured the best thing to read while traveling would be a book about traveling by a fun writer, so I chose Mark Twain's <span style="font-style: italic;">Innocents Abroad</span>. I'm back home and not done with it yet - it's long and I'm a slow reader (which makes grad school ever so fun), but I like it a lot, though parts of it are either too staid or too over the top, and other parts are fairly offensive by contemporary standards. Oh well - despite his bigoted asides, he clearly believed in the common humanity of, umm, humanity.<br /><br />I am particularly interested in attempts by writers to relate and locate America and Europe conceptually (this is my area of research), and Twain's portrait of Europe can be summarized thusly:<br /><br />1. They don't speak English very well over there.<br />2. They don't use soap, either.<br />3. The buildings might have been nice once, but now they're old and falling apart.<br />4. Catholicism is silly and superstitious.<br />5. European governments are corrupt and oppressive, and have always been so.<br /><br />I'll reserve judgement on #4 for fear of repeating the <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/04/been-while.html">Scientology controversy</a>, but I'll say that the rest of these points are all much less true nowadays than they were then.<br /><br />Overall, though, this is an extremely fun read, and parts of it rank among the funniest things I've read. My favorite part so far is a description if the elaborate ways Twain and his friends amuse themselves by pestering their tour guides. In Rome, for instance, they decide to ask about everything they're shown if Michelangelo designed it, including the forum and an Egyptian obelisk. In Genoa they pretend never to have heard of Christopher Colombus:<br /><blockquote>"Pleasant name--is--is he dead?"<br />"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"<br />"What did he die of?"<br />"I do not know!--I can not tell."<br />"Small-pox, think?"<br />"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"<br />"Measles, likely?"<br />"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."<br /></blockquote>This "is--is he dead?" routine is so good that they repeat it when shown a mummy, and then with various statues. It is only with great restraint that they keep from doing it in the catacombs.<br /><br />I'm reading a facsimile edition, which has some quirky spelling that I like: 'staid' instead of 'stayed,' for instance. I also learned from this book that the expression "tricked out" is at least a hundred years older than I would have guessed.<br /><br />A footnote about the name Mark Twain. Or rather, about the pen-name of the Yiddish Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem. There is a shibboleth of sorts in Yiddish studies, whereby those who refer to Sholem Aleichem as Aleichem are cast down as dilletantes. (My field is a minefield of such shibboleths.) The explanation is this: 'Sholem aleichem' is a phrase - a formal greeting. Thus it doesn't make sense to refer to him as 'Aleichem.'<br /><br />Okay, fine. But the same could be said for Mark Twain. Indeed, both pen-names are similar in that they are two-word phrases, the first word of which is also a common first name. Sholem Aleichem's real first name was in fact Sholem. If the appeal to logic that is purported to explain why you shouldn't call Sholem Aleichem 'Aleichem' is valid, then it should apply equally to Twain -- which it doesn't.<br /><br />I'm generally dubious about pre- and proscriptions in language that are based in logic. Does this mean that I think Yiddish scholars should start calling Sholem Aleichem 'Aleichem?' No - you can't call him this, for the simple reason that he isn't called that. It's just a convention, and those who call him 'Aleichem' reveal their ignorance of this convention, and thus their status as outsiders.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1150492742446017612006-06-16T16:50:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:38.112-05:00Facilities<a href="http://balashon.blogspot.com/">Balashon</a> has an <a href="http://balashon.blogspot.com/2006/06/sherutim.html">interesting post about the various terms used historically in Hebrew for 'bathroom'</a>. The pattern he traces is of cyclical euphemization; every word for 'bathroom' eventually became taboo and a euphemism was substituted, which eventually became a neutral term, and then a vulgar one, and wound up being replaced.<br /><br />English is equally squeamish about words for this - we discarded the term 'toilet' in the sense of bathroom, even though 'toilet' was originally a euphemism itself, because the term became associated with the crucial apparatus in the room rather than the room itself. In my Midwestern dialect of English, moreover, even 'bathroom' is considered slightly vulgar, and in polite company 'washroom' is usually substituted (but not 'restroom,' which can only refer to a public facility - a washroom can be in someone's house). My hunch is that 'bathroom' became taboo when the euphemism 'going to the bathroom' became detached from the room itself - my father has an example sentence in his first book about a dog going to the bathroom in the kitchen. Ah, Generative Semantics - if only all scholarship was so uninhibited!Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1150400463827713472006-06-15T14:48:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.957-05:00Carmen et errorSince so many folks have written to me asking what I think of the most recent re-design of the $10 bill, I'll indulge them by answering with a quotation from Catullus: <span style="font-style: italic;">odi et amo</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">carmen</span> LXXXV)- I love it and I hate it.<br /><br />I love it mostly because I think it looks spiffy. If you haven't seen it, here's what it looks like:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/2005.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/2005.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>It looks like money, right? In fact, it looks more like money than the 2000 redesign did. But, more importantly, now when my European friends (and I include Canadians in this category) mention in their litany of examples of American barbarity the fact that all our bills (or "notes," as they call them) are the same color, I can now proudly respond, "Nuh-uh!"<br /><br />What, then, could my objection possibly be? Well, I'll tell you. I've always loved $10 bills because they used to have some funky looking old cars on the back:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/1929.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/1929.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>And here's a detail of the most prominent car:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/car.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/320/car.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Though many claim that this is a Ford Model T, it isn't; in fact, it isn't any real car, but rather a succesful attempt to make a generic-looking late-twenties car. After all, the Treasury Department isn't in the business of endorsing car companies.<br /><br />I liked this car a lot, because it must have seemed bold and contemporary-looking in 1929 when it was designed. Then, over the years, it took on a quaint charm, until the 2000 redesign did away with it. I tried to protest by boycotting money, but then I got hungry. When I saw the new redesign a few months ago (wasn't expecting that!) I first thought I accidentally got foreign currency. Then I quickly realized it had been redesigned, and checked the reverse to see if my car was back. It wasn't, damnit.<br /><br />Here are some unrelated thoughts I had over the past week, none of which developed into something post-worthy:<br /><br />1. The new <a href="http://www.myspace.com/reginaspektor">Regina Spektor</a> album, "Begin to Hope," which came out this week, is fantastic. Go buy it and find out for yourself. It's a little less consistent than her last album, "Soviet Kitsch," but although the lows are lower, the highs are higher. The production is a bit weird, with heavy use of silly-sounding synthesized strings. This is surprising, since the producer, David Kahne, produced the best albums by Fishbone, the band I was obsessed with in high school. Indeed, I think his production was key to their sound; their later albums, which he didn't produce, are markedly inferior.<br /><br />2. After years of trying and failing, I'm starting to like Leonard Cohen. Since I'be been thinking so much about singing pronunciation lately, I noticed two things:<br />a) In the chorus of "So Long, Marianne," he rhymes 'Marianne' and 'began' with 'again.' In my American pronunciation, this is a not too jarring half-rhyme. However, as a Canadian, he naturally pronounces 'again' to rhyme with 'gain.' You can hear him struggling not to pronounce it this way, but when the word crops up in the verse he pronounces it the Canadian way.<br />b) In "One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong" he pronounces the word "prescription" as "perscription," which is, incidentally, how I pronounce it. Both these examples are interesting to me because I'm working on a theory that, in contrast to the standardized mid-Atlantic popular singing pronunciation scheme I've been <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/dont-believe-ype.html">posting</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/06/trudgill-on-pop-song-pronunciation.html">about</a>, cerebral folk-rockers in the mid sixties opted for a pronunciation scheme that more closely resembled generic Northern colloquial speech. More on this later, maybe.<br /><br />3. After the fascinating exchange in the comments section of my <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/06/intrusive-intrusive-r.html">last post</a>, I'm tempted first of all to post less often and see what other interesting things crop up, and I'm inspired once again to link to this <a href="http://www.homestarrunner.com/cantsayjob.html">cute flash animation</a> that involves intrusive intrusive /r/ in an otherwise decent imitation of a Chicago-like dialect. For the record, if <a href="http://www.homestarrunner.com/main12.html">Homestar Runner</a> winds up taking over your life, don't say I didn't warn you.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1149796645532174972006-06-08T15:47:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.859-05:00Intrusive intrusive /r/In the summertime we'd drive my grandfather from Hallandale, Florida to Chicago, and as we'd pass through Tennessee he'd invariably remark, "Chattanooger. That's how the Bostonians say it." They don't, but he's certainly not the only one who thinks they do. The actual phenomenon underlying this belief is known technically as 'intrusive /r/.' When words ending in certain vowels (non-high ones) are followed by words beginning with vowels, people with this feature insert an /r/. So a Bostonian wouldn't just call Chattanooga 'Chattanooger,' but he or she certainly might say "Chattanoog[er] is in Tennessee." Or, to draw an example from my favorite corpus - Beatles lyrics - John Lennon sings "I saw[r] a film today, oh boy."<br /><br />Two questions arise: who does this, and why? In answering one we will answer the other.<br /><br />First off, as you undoubtedly know, some dialects of English are non-rhotic - that is, they drop the /r/ sound when it occurs after vowels - but not before them. A consequence of this is that the dropped /r/s come back when they are immediately before a word starting with a vowel. Thus in "Let It Be" Paul McCartney sings "In my hou<span style="font-weight: bold;">r</span> of da(r)kness" and "The<span style="font-weight: bold;">r</span>e is still a light that shines on me." So intrusive /r/ happens when a word sounds like it has a dropped /r/ at the end but doesn't really, and the phantom /r/ appears precisely where a dropped /r/ would reappear, before a vowel.<br /><br />Do all English speakers who drop /r/s have intrusive /r/? In a word, no. The key phrase in the paragraph above is "when a word sounds like it has a dropped /r/ at the end but doesn't. See, in some /r/ dropping dialects (such as African American, or the dwindling /r/ dropping white Southern dialects) the dropped /r/ alters the preceding vowel. In these dialects, then, 'manna' and 'manner' don't sound the same, so the confusion that gives rise to intrusive /r/ isn't present, and as a result there is no intrusive /r/.<br /><br />All this is very complicated, and it's no wonder, then, that my grandfather had trouble mimicking it. Though <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/06/trudgill-on-pop-song-pronunciation.html">Peter Trudgill's examples of people misusing intrusive /r/ in British pop songs</a> may be problematic, the phenomenon, which I will dub 'intrusive intrusive /r/' is a very real one, and the point Trudgill is trying to make - namely, that people aren't as good as they think they are at miimcking other dialects - is entirely valid.<br /><br />In the comments to my <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/06/trudgill-on-pop-song-pronunciation.html">last post</a> the question arose why a British professer would pronounce the name Echa as 'Eker.' After all, don't non-rhotic Brits have intrusive /r/? Shouldn't he therefore know how to use it. I would suggest two possible explanations:<br /><br />1. He was mocking rhotic American dialects, but misanalyzing them and overgeneralizing. More likely, though, is the explanation suggested by the fact that<br /><br />2. In British English intrusive /r/ is stigmatized, and this professor spoke a fairly posh dialect. I suspect, then, that intrusive /r/ is as foreign to him as was to my grandfather, and he too misanalyzed the phenomenon, and, attempting to employ it mockingly, misused it.<br /><br />On an unrelated note, I want to acknowledge the sad fact that Billy Preston died on Monday. Honor his memory by reading my <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/11/my-new-old-hero.html">two</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/billy-preston-god.html">posts</a> about him.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1149440751702490562006-06-04T10:49:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.734-05:00Trudgill on Pop Song PronunciationWhen I <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/dont-believe-ype.html">last wrote</a> about pronunciation in pop music, Ben Zimmer directed me to Peter Trudgill's article on the subject. After months of not reading this article... well, I read it. It's very good. In fact, the book I found it in, his <span style="font-style: italic;">On Dialect</span>, is very good, and surprisingly accessible for a layman like me, and it will surely be fodder for a number of posts.<br /><br />Trudgill's thesis is twofold: first, that over the course of the sixties British groups went from emulating "American" pronunciation - not dropping post-vocalic /r/s, monophthongizing /aj/ to /a:/, frequently using /ae/- to not doing so. Secondly, he shows that the advent of punk brought an increase in markedly British, and particularly working-class Cockney, features.<br /><br />In the broad outlines I agree with Trudgill. His data is pretty remarkable - he has a graph showing the Beatles' use of postvocalic /r/ steadily declining throughout their careers. Remember, though, that Americans themselves tend not to use postvocalic /r/ when they sing (outside of country music). My feeling is that the de-Americanization of British singing pronunciation in the sixties can be described as the emergence of a sort of trans-Atlantic standard singing pronunciation, or perhaps a growing awareness on the part of British singers that if they wanted to sing like Americans, then they shouldn't out-American Americans by using post-vocalic /r/s.<br /><br />The main quibble I have with this article has to do with Trudgill's assertion (which figures throughout the book) that in an attempt to Americanize their pronunciation British singers hyper-corrected their rhotacization, inserting "intrusive" /r/s even where those with intrusive /r/s don't really have them. That this is the case is undoubtedly, umm... the case. But two of the three examples he provides are problematic. The first is the Beatles' version of the old chestnut "Till There Was You" on their second album, "With The Beatles" (1963). In their version, Paul McCartney sings "There were birds in the sky/ but I never <span style="font-weight: bold;">sawr</span> them winging." Trudgill thinks that this proves that McCartney wanted to sound American but misanalyzed when it is us crazy Americans have /r/s. I think that the underlying point is entirely plausible, but I'm sure in this instance that McCartney was just trying to be goofy and self-mocking so that no one could tease him for singing a moldy oldie like "Till There Was You."<br /><br />Another example Trudgill provides is from the Kinks 1966 song "Sunny Afternoon," where Londoner Ray Davies sings "My girlfriend's run off with my car/ and gone back to her <span style="font-weight: bold;">mar </span>and <span style="font-weight: bold;">par</span>." Except he doesn't. I listened to the key moment repeatedly and heard neither "mar"(which would be a typical and authentic example of "intrusive" /r/) nor "par", which is par-ticularly striking because he does sing "car" with a pronounced /r/. Were he to sing "par," it would strike me as a clever and funny sort of stretch of a rhyme, not a misanalysis of American rhoticity.<br /><br />Trudgill's third example, Cliff Richard's 1961 "Bachelor Boy," is a solid and incontrovertible example; "a bachelor" becomes something that is so rhotacized that to me sounds like "her bachelor" or "your bachelor." Haven't heard of Cliff Richard? I hadn't either, but then in one of those weird coincidences that either supports or disproves my belief in the fundamental absurdity of the universe, my favorite music journalist, Sasha Frere-Jones, mentioned him in <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060605on_onlineonly01">an article in this week's New Yorker</a>. In this article, an intriguing analysis of the role of British pop music in America, Frere-Jones claims that British musicians who get famous here tend to "lack identifiably English accents." This may be true, but the lack of accent is largely a symmetric one.<br /><br />As for Cliff Richards, Frere-Jones calls him "England's answer to Elvis Presley." That I'd never heard of him underscores the surprising insularity of American pop music, which is sort of the point of his article. Frere-Jones has a <a href="http://www.sashafrerejones.com/">fascinating, albeit perplexing blog</a> that is definitely worth checking out.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1149173223478023282006-06-01T10:34:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.602-05:00Gheuf & LowthI've been uninspired lately, so instead of making a feeble attempt to be clever or interesting, I'll direct you to something that is:<br /><br />In a <a href="http://gheuf.blogspot.com/2006/04/prescriptive-grammar-and-much-maligned.html">series</a> of <a href="http://gheuf.blogspot.com/2006/05/bishop-lowth-part-ii-stranded.html">posts</a>, <a href="http://gheuf.blogspot.com/">Gheuf</a> explores the writings of Bishop Lowth and in the process debunks the myths that Lowth a) invented the prescriptivist claptrap about split infinitives and stranded prepositions and such, and b) that he did so (which he didn't) out of a perverse or ignorant desire to make English conform to the rules of Latin grammar. It's interesting stuff, but don't take my word for it -- read it for yourself.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1148841142318452072006-05-28T13:47:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.454-05:00A Native South SiderIf I were to tell you there was a flower that has only ever been seen growing on the South Side of Chicago, would you believe me?<br /><br />It's true. The plant, Thismia americana, is a tiny little thing, about a quarter of an inch tall, and it looks like this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/b_w_thismia.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/b_w_thismia.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />It blooms in late summer in the wet prairies on the south shore of Lake Calumet. Or at least it used to - the only place where it was seen is now the site of a Ford Plant, and Thismia americana hasn't been seen since 1916.<br /><br />Just about everything about this plant is remarkable. It was discovered in 1912 by Norma Pfeiffer, a graduate student in botany at the University of Chicago, who went on to become the University's youngest PhD (or so I read - I can't vouch for factuality of that claim, and am slightly suspicious of it). The plant itself is parasitic, lacks chlorophyll, and is a member of a plant family that is closely related to orchids and is generally tropical.<br /><br />In the years since its disappearance Thismia americana has become the holy grail of Chicago-area botany. For a while there were annual searches for it in the remaining areas of similar habitat in the marshy lowlands south of Lake Michigan along the Illinois-Indiana boundary. I took part in one such search; in high school I was a pretty active botanist. Needless to say, the plant remains unrediscovered.<br /><br />I hope, of course, that Thismia still exists and gets rediscovered, but I further hope that when it does, it will be found within city limits on the South Side.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1148576959448704262006-05-25T11:47:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.327-05:00I Still Don't Get ItIn my <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/05/i-dont-get-it.html">last substantive post</a> I pondered the various uses of 'have got'/'have gotten', and mentioned that, in general, 'have gotten' is standard only in North America, and then only for certain meanings. I failed to mention, however, that a few American editors and style guides call for always replacing 'gotten' with 'got', among them the <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker</span>. I have been a devoted <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker</span> reader since college, but I still haven't gotten used to this feature, or got used to it. For instance, in this weeks issue Rita Katz, a self-employed spy (really - <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060529fa_fact">read the article</a>) is quoted as saying<br /><blockquote>I would never have got interested in the politics of this part of the world if it weren’t for [my father's] execution<br /><br /></blockquote>I am certain that she must have said 'gotten', which the editors automatically changed to 'got.' Something about the resulting sentence, however, doesn't ring true, though I'm not sure why this example is so much more jarring for me than all the other times the New Yorker uses 'have got' in a distinctly un-American way. So I'll perform the Positive Anymore signature move of making up a fact based on nothing more than my faulty intuition.<br /><br />I think that there is something distinctly American about the syntax Katz (who, incidentally, is Iraqi born and raised in Israel) employs, which is incompatible with 'have got' in the sense of 'have become.' I don't know precisely what is distinctly American, and I'm eager as always to be contradicted, disproven, insulted... well, maybe not insulted.<br /><br />In my last post on this topic I mentioned that some Americans use past participles for the simple past with some verbs and others use the simple past as a past participle with some verbs. I'll post more on this later, but I bring it up now because I want to go out on a limb and say that even those Americans who use the simple past as a past participle would not use 'have got' to mean 'have become.'<br /><br />Who has two thumbs and no data to support his claims? (<span style="font-style: italic;">gesturing at self with</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> thumbs</span>) This guy.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1148412399292349822006-05-23T15:16:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.175-05:00Caption Contest #52<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/A11544_alt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/A11544_alt.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />"If it wasn't for the park I wouldn't be able to stand living in Manhattan."<br /></div>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1148055056943210482006-05-19T11:42:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:37.018-05:00I Don't Get ItI've been thinking a lot lately about the verb 'to get,' and I have a few disjointed thoughts about it that I'll try to string together.<br /><br />The first fact I'll mention is a fairly well-known one, namely that the in Standard North American English the past participle of 'to get' is 'gotten,' whereas in Standard English of Everywhere Else (SEEE -- you know, for Anglophone areas on islands of the coast of Europe, and various areas in the Southern Hemisphere, plus a few other scattered places) the past participle is "got," as in "Things have got worse," which, to American ears, or at least to the ears on the sides of my American head, this sounds slightly uneducated, since there is a widespread but stigmatized tendency to use the participle for the simple past for some verbs, and the simple past for the participle for other verbs, which is how my brain interprets such sentences. But wait - don't Americans sometimes use 'got' as a participle? Indeed we do:<br /><br />1. I've got a small apartment.<br />2. I've got to get a bigger apartment.<br /><br />In short, for different meanings of the word 'get', Americans, and I suppose all Anglophones who say 'gotten', use different past participles. Thus:<br /><br />have gotten: 1. To have received. 2. To have become.<br />have got: 1. To own. 2. To need to.<br /><br />This is weird, no? Firstly, this is sort of a weird conglomeration of meanings, but heck, most languages I've seen sometimes lump weird meanings together. But weirder still, as you may have noticed, is that those instances where Americans do use 'got' as a participle are really only past participles in form, not meaning. Really, they are just sort of a unique periphrastic construction of which, as far as I can tell, there are no other examples. When else do we use have + participle and not mean some sort of past tense thing?<br /><br />So while we're talking about this second case, where 'got' is a pseudo-participle, and where those who otherwise say "have gotten" say "have got," I'll mention a weird consequence of this not being a true past participle.<br /><br />In most kinds of English you can't really drop the auxiliary 'have' in the so-called 'perfect' tense. This is because so often the form of the pp. and of the simple past are identical, so the only way to distinguish them is with the 'have.' But think about 'got' in the sense of 'to have.' Myself, I could certainly say "I got a small apartment,' at least in non-formal situations, although I speak fairly colloquially, more colloquially than you would maybe expect from a grad student. But think about 'got' meaning 'to have to': "I gotta get a bigger apartment'. Though this is markedly colloquial, I don't think I would be surprised to hear this sentence from any American speaker. So in the first instance, the 'have' can be dropped by fairly colloquial speakers, whereas in the second instance it is normally dropped. It should be noted, though, that it is only 'have' that can be dropped, not 'has.' "He gotta get a bigger apartment" is permissible only in dialects with copula deletion, i.e. African American Vernacular. I suspect, though, that down the road this will become standard, andwhen it does a new modal verb 'got' will be born, joining 'must', its non third-person singular inflecting, no infintive having, erstwhile past tense kin.Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1147974059691208232006-05-18T13:17:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:36.838-05:00Low Back Pt. 2Oregonian: So I was just talking to Dawn...<br />Chicagoan: Wait -- who's Don?<br /><br />The Oregonian was my long-suffering wife, and the Chicagoan was her long-suffering supervisor. Incidentally, this selfsame supervisor has already made an appearance on these <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/in-news.html">very</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/hinsdale-wheaton-isogloss-bundle.html">pages</a> as the native of Wheaton (an outer suburb of Chicago) who frequently uses positive anymore in her speech. The other day I remarked to her that her use of this construction was, well, remarkable, and she told me that it is actually an affectation for her -- she heard someone use positive anymore at some point in her childhood (she forgets who and when), was impressed by it, and decided to adopt it.<br /><br />How 'bout that?Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1147879374020457952006-05-17T11:21:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:36.669-05:00Caption Contest #51<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/A11528.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/A11528.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />"And how many of these 'Lost Boys' did you see there?"<br /></div>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1147542833862893122006-05-13T12:43:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:36.555-05:00New Names For The Cot/Caught MergerSo <a href="http://argotnaut.com/">Argotnaut</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/04/been-while.html">gave over</a> <a href="http://frinkenstein.com/">Frinkenstein's</a> <a href="http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2006/03/hinsdale-wheaton-isogloss-bundle.html">suggestion</a> "hottie/haughty." This got me thinking about other minimal pairs collapsed by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_back_vowel_merger">low-back merger</a>. Soon I had a large and unwieldy list, so I decided to offer some of the pairs I like the most, since I think we all agree that the name "cot/caught" must go. In my opinion none are as good as hottie/haughty, but they are still worth listing, if only to give me something amusing to post about. Here they are:<br /><br />Otto/auto<br />Gotti/gaudy<br />bobble/bauble<br />cod/cawed<br />lager/logger<br />pod/pawed<br />yon/yawn<br />cock/caulk<br /><br />I hesitated before adding the last one, just because I fear that as a result people will get to this blog by searching for... well, something they won't find here. Speaking of strange things people reach this blog searching for, I've had three (I think) visitors who googled 'should I grow a beard' - a weird thing to google, and a weirder thing for me to be on the first page of results for, IMHO. AFAIK. ROFL? pWn3d? I'll stop now.<br /><br />Speaking of caulk, I spent a summer working for the physical plant of my college in Portland, Oregon, during which time I was struck by how funny my co-workers found the word "caulk," which seemed juvenile to me, but now I realize that if I had the low-back merger like they did I would have found it funny too. Not that it isn't juvenile.<br /><br />So my northwesterner wife has the lager/logger merger - that seems like an appropriate way to describe it in the Pacific Northwest - but I've found that it's only partial. I realized, for instance that she says "awesome" the way I do, not /ah/some, as I expected, even though she insists she 'can't say' "haughty" the way I do. So I asked her about this, and she says that she's 'saying the w,' which makes sense. I tried out cod/cawed on her, but it was merged, though, interestingly enough, 'caw' came out /<span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA">kɔ</span>/. Is it possible that there is a historical explanation for this? I don't know enough to guess, though usually that doesn't stop me.<span title="Pronunciation in IPA" class="IPA"></span>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17874090.post-1147298619894247162006-05-10T13:55:00.000-04:002006-11-13T18:58:36.231-05:00Historic Preservation<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/maher.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/maher.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />When I first got interested in architecture I was something of an extremist when it came to preservation; any old structure that got demolished broke my heart. I think that this was due to the fact that I lived in Portland, Oregon, a city that, like many cities in the west, has a relatively small number of old structures. I remember when an unremarkable late nineteenth century brick warehouse across the street from my apartment was demolished how I felt like it was almost a criminal act. Over the years I've gotten less rabid, but it still breaks my heart to read stories like <a href="http://www.nationaltrust.org/11most/kenilworth.html">this one</a> about the demolition of historic homes in Kenilworth, Illinois.<br /><br />Kenilworth contains the greatest concentration of houses by George Maher, the most distinctive of the architects associated with the Prairie School. Maher's signature was what he called "motif-rhythm" - using simple geometric shapes, usually segmental arches and poppies, to create thematic unity in a building. Here are some examples of his<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/garrett12-7-7s.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/garrett12-7-7s.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> work:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Armchair, c. 1912<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/rath1.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/rath1.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/rath2.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/rath2.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a>The Rath House, 1907<br />Chicago<br /><br /></div> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/schultz.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/schultz.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Schultz House, 1907<br />Winnetka IL<br /><br />My childhood home was in fact a Maher-designed apartment building from 1908, and those segmental arches sure look homey to me. That chair would have looked great in our apartment, but, like with most Prairie School buildings, the interior was gutted in the 1950s, and all the custom furniture and most of the decoration (stained glass, stenciling, mosaic fireplace) vanished.<br /><br />That was depressing. If you need something to cheer you up, read this <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4152447.stm">story about a tortoise and a hippo who are friends</a>.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/hippo.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/320/hippo.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/2stngwrd.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/400/2stngwrd.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3331/1734/1600/rath2.gif"> </a>Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733601180382760718noreply@blogger.com1